UK Cop jailed for murder

I think the main thing that is vexing people is not that a police officer is a murderer and rapist. It's that his colleagues, all serving police officers, knew he was so dodgy around women that he was nick-named "the rapist", he was suspected of behaving inappropriately and yet nothing happened.
Either the "bro-code" or the thin blue line prevented action being taken and that smacks of larger institutional problems both in "male" culture and police culture.
The warning signs were there but they were ignored or brushed under the carpet.

 

Along the lines of the picture in the OP, something I've recently become more aware of is how many people use the laughing reaction on Facebook on posts about someone being sexually assaulted or similar. For example, a news site posted that Emily Ratajkowski had said she was inappropriately touched by someone - when I read the post there was over a thousand reactions, of which over a third were "haha". I wasn't going to subject myself to the comments but howay, if someone said they'd been assaulted and a bunch of people laughed offline they'd end up at least missing teeth. Unfortunately though everyone knows that the worst thing that'll happen online is you might get an account banned so there's no real consequence for being a <self censored...>

 

So do I, but having heard similar things from people in my family who really should know better I unfortunately doubt it.

 

Do any of you hang around groups of women and hear what they talk about?

Do you guys know how women in general feel about Dean and Sam Winchester?

This sort of attitude being focused on around the meme definitely has its equivalent in the female population. I'm not trying to divert from the issue or turn this around to be a problem about women. I don't think the source for the toxic behavior is identified appropriately. I think biology, like higher testosterone that is strongly associated with higher aggression and physical strength, greatly color how that toxic behavior is expressed or can manifest. The solution may not be on the male end of its expression, it may be on how to fix it on the female end. It's difficult to not want to find hardline solutions to violent problems which are statistically skewed towards men being the culprit, and because of the severity physical violence can have. I generally believe that's why we think of what men do where domestic abuse is concerned is largely worse than what women can do to men psychologically in those same kinds of relationships. I find that argument hard to disagree with. However, I think focusing on something like the meme, and deconstructing the meme itself to be a problem, can lead to a whole lot more issues than the behavior that we want to curb here.

I find the meme funny. I know a lot of people, men and women, who would find the meme funny. None of those people think it's ok to rape and kill people. The person who takes a meme like this, and takes it to its conclusion of raping and killing somebody or being profoundly influenced by it I think is largely non-existent. I think there are a lot of other issues involved that are more important to try and identify if we're going to find real solutions.

We are some terrible, nasty, gutter creatures no matter how great and noble we may think we are. It doesn't matter if we want to pretend behind codes of conduct, ToS, or religion. The majority of us are capable of being unfathomable monsters if you just take our food away. There needs to be more acknowledgement of that, not pretending it doesn't exist and trying to shove noble causes or beliefs on top of it like puritan fanatics of any religion would want. That's like wrapping a new clean bandage over the old one. It might look good, but reality is going to fester underneath.

Who, what, why, when, and where is sexual objectification appropriate, and to what degree? Is there an association between people who use memes like this, communities they're interested in, kinds of relationships they have with others (superficial or meaningful?), etc. and people who are rapists? And real associations, not political/ideological ones. HELP US OH ALGORITHM. If there are associations, can they be broken to improve the quality of life for the individual on the fast track to being a rapist? When, where, and what or who is the right person to intervene? Can this even be addressed without implementing some crazy invasive policies? Can any of us be trusted with the information since we're all such terrible people (and we are, we're terrible to each other, even the best of us)? Are any of us capable of having good judgment on situations like this due to our emotional investments?

I think figuring out answers to that can go a long way in curtailing events like these, or that lead up to situations like this. The more we try to tell people "you shouldn't think like this!" the more they think they're bad people because they have thoughts like that. It's very real that people convince themselves they're bad people so they should just do whatever they want, and then do. Creating more of those people is a lot worse in my opinion. "Thou shalt not sexually objectify anything" is an impossible goal for most humans.

As far as what somebody can do NOW to help the issue? I think talking about it like this is good. Inviting people to talk about it who have vastly different opinions and trying to find a medium for expression in which "we don't hurt or cause others to suffer greatly" is the central idea everyone agrees on. The guy thinking this meme is ok in general, and not specific humor for a specific, mature audience, is also probably suffering from having no friends or support networks worth bragging about, and is succumbing to whatever pop culture is feeding him. That's not an excuse for the action. Once the action is committed, you've altered or snuffed out somebody's life and that's permanent. We must hold people accountable for that. How do we prevent the situation from even occurring in the first place? And how do we avoid solutions that cause other problems?

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "fix it on the female end".

I also think you are making a huge unsubstantiated assumption by presuming that how humans behave in severe crisis is somehow our default or "natural" state, rather than an abnormal reaction to extreme stress. If we want to talk about "natural" behaviour then scarcity and war were far less common for an overwhelming majority of the time humans have been around. You can bring out much of the same behaviour with a crack addiction, but I don't hear people calling that natural. I think the evidence points to these extreme selfish and violent behaviours being a reaction to stimuli rather than a baseline state waiting for certain social inhibitions to be removed.

I also think you're wrong that social censure doesn't work. I've seen it work over my lifetime, let alone over the past couple of hundred years. Laws and social norms change behaviour, behaviour changes thought, and so on in a feedback loop. The world has changed a lot, for the better, for many people over the 41 years I've been alive, due to the barmy, loony left, political correctness brigade. The liberal lamestream media had a big role in these societal gains, too: tackling and mainstreaming topics of homosexuality, HIV and AIDS, race, rape and so on in soap operas and film. This cultural stuff has a real effect on society, and so can THE ALGORITHM.

Lastly, I don't think anyone would argue that women can sexually objectify others, but the vast majority of men do not feel that they could be in physical danger from predatory women at any point if they let their guard down in the wrong circumstances. Almost every woman I've known well enough to talk about this stuff with has either a horror story or close escape to tell, on top of a lifetime of low level harassment. That is a different world to the one most men experience.

 

The whole thread is condemning men displaying a certain behavior, that is being summarized as being a core issue for rape and murder. It is being singled out as a male only problem. I'm saying that both men and women display this crude behavior, that on the male end when expressed it tends to result in life altering, immediate, physical violence which causes us to focus on solutions that come from a spot of hate, fear, and resentment which often have heavy handed actions that can create more problems. If some of these people are your family and friends as some have mentioned, you might want to reconsider your understanding of the situation to make sure you're dang right in condemning them before you burn those bridges. "On the female end" means maybe also including women's sexual behavior in conjunction with males that we think are causing the issues here, then maybe the solution to curbing the behavior in men is figuring out how to curb the behavior in women first. I'm not saying we change our vitriol and anger towards rapists and murders that are men. I'm saying we also add that women are pretty horrendous too, but are different biologically and have to approach things differently. I guess I'm trying to say that understanding women more may help us understand men better.



To your second point:

Everything on this planet is trying to survive. Everything on this planet feeds off of other life. Everything on this planet has survival mechanisms which I'll go ahead and say it built right into any living existence's DNA (literally). That is the default. Just because you haven't lived in what is a reality for most of the rest of the world and other living creatures, does not mean it isn't. If food doesn't do it for you, let me come rape and kill your family in front of you, or throw acid in your wife's face and see how you react in the moment. I think this also applies to ideas, ways of thinking, and culture/social development in general. People find disdain for intangible things because they threaten what they perceive as their well-being, either in the internal or external world. Living things that are able to strengthen their own survival by working together more often than not have had the most evolutionary success. I don't think this is the only way to look at the world. I think there are many "truths" about how we are and who we are, and I think they all exist together. We are on a Martial Arts Forum where we talk about things in a threat/nonthreat way however, so I'm going to go ahead and say this is a red herring that will distract from something talking about things in a constructive way. You're also trying to narrow my argument down to just war and scarcity. A male can feel like he's going to fail in society if he isn't having sex with females. Some even shoot schools up over it.

I'm not for social censure enforced by .gov. I'm all for somebody getting slapped in the face for grabbing somebody's butt as they walked by. I also think the algorithms being used can certainly help us. The problem is that they're being used by people who aren't trying to help everyone. They're trying to make money, or push their views (whatever political side, don't really care which it is they can all sod off). I don't care to talk about politics and political groups in this conversation, as it's not needed and it's just going to get everyone worked up and I'm just going to be lumped into the alt-right crap or trumpism crap once again ::eye roll:: I acknowledge and respect that your views of social censor are absolutely valid and may be the final solution. I am opposed to it being the best solution, and am offering up a different perspective that might lead to a different solution.

As to your conclusion:

First time I was sexually harassed was in a McDonalds playground when I was 6-8. A little girl around the same age and her sister kept crab walking towards me through the tunnels telling me to put my head between their legs and do things I didn't understand at the time. I was with my little brother, didn't know what to do, and I remember pretending we were playing war and crawling through the tunnels to get away from the bad guys. Tried to tell my pops about it but I didn't even really know what had occurred until years later. I just knew something bad happened. As an adult I'm terrified at what that girl probably had done to her or was exposed to growing up to even know these things at such a young age.

I remember my sister and her friends pinning me down and kissing me or putting me into awkward situations trying to get me to kiss a girl when I was really young. It was very uncomfortable, and it caused quite a bit of difficulty in forming relationships with women early on.

Around 16 years of age is when I started martial arts and serious weight lifting. That's also when groping, touching, and having girls ask me to protect them if a guy was mean to them started happening. I didn't like the attention. I didn't like randomly having my genitals grabbed in the lunch line. How do you think a bunch of teenagers or college kids are going to react towards a young man who chastises women for giving him the kind of attention they are desperately trying to get? It might be better now, but back then I would have been ostracized even more than I was already. Being cut from the group or being unable to be a part of the group can be worse than the idea of dying for many. I certainly felt no control over the situation. I had to keep lifting weights though because that gave me respect and the ability to defend myself in other areas of my life that were more important.

If you want to count my time in the military, good lord. I think we all just generally accept we're all sexually assaulting each other at some point and to just go with it unless it's something especially vile. For example when I got into the main military force after basic training, a guy had been hazed via having a spoonful of peanut butter inserted into his back end. That's a big no, obviously. Butt grabs, tea bags, groin grabs, flicks, and smacks, seeing two straight guys play "homosexual chicken" on a ship to the point that they are both in small bed rack naked, spooning, etc, these are normal events and often don't lead to anything significant. I'm pretty sure the "homosexual chicken" guys are married now, still waiting for one of them to chicken out. They literally will remove a group of infantry Marines from an area if there will be female Marines around (when I was in). They KNOW that the psychological things they do to prepare you for war are not good for society and healthy relationship building. It would have done me a lot better if they would admit that and not expect you to be a saint while encouraging the more violent, base human behaviors. If you're not entirely aware of what they are doing to you, you can't counteract it.

College while boxing I was actively hostile in my body language towards people to keep them away from me. Both men and women, but especially women. And even then it didn't always work. I still had to make efforts to stay away from certain women in classes to avoid being felt up in some way.

I have had major issues with sexuality, love, and forming relationships. Some of that comes from how I was taught about sexuality from women who are displaying the same sort of attitude we're talking about in this thread. I have gotten better with it, but by the time I was 18 you could be a beautiful woman just trying to give me an affectionate touch on the hand to show empathy and I would involuntarily snatch it away.

People in my life I've shared this with find my perspective different from their assumptions about me. Maybe I am just odd but I've lived long enough to know I'm not unique and that other people, a lot of people, will have shared similar experiences. I know what it's like to feel helpless when I'm strong enough to use force to sway an issue in my favor. I know what it's like to be groped and touched and have comments made when I didn't want it. I know what it's like to be shamed publicly by people I care about or depended on. I know what it's like to be violated through the use of force, although not being raped. It has certainly colored my perspective on the world. I can't imagine the difficulties of dealing with rape, because I know the difficulties of dealing with lesser things of a similar nature.

Most of these events I've been remembering due to doing some deep dives in areas regarding my own trauma due to current events involving Afghanistan, and the political state of my country currently. What I've had to learn through therapy to manage my PTSD is that events in my life that have been traumatic to me, I simply put in a box and forget about it. When I'm trying to work on myself, or a major trigger comes along, a lot of unexpected things can come flooding back. Essentially what is happening is when I start focusing on a traumatic event in the military, memories with similar emotional associations become invasive in the form of "flash back." Only now that I'm older and I've had extensive experience in adjusting how I see the world, I now have the skills to work on the emotions and correct behaviors. Most of the things I'm sharing are certainly from my perspective and experiences and may not be a solution to a dang thing. I'm just trying to share what I've been through and offer a different perspective that I think may be helpful. It unfortunately involves acknowledging we're pretty terrible creatures. It involves forgiving and accepting an individual who we're assuming is turning out to be a rapist in order to curb their view to a more healthy outlook that reduces the suffering of everyone in the long run.

All that said, some people just need to be removed. How we do that is a different topic.

I was the young man you guys are alluding to at the start of the thread at one point in my life. I wasn't that young man because I wanted to be. I had no guidance or direction, and the feedback I was getting from both men and women was not healthy. If I HAD turned into the kind of person capable of something like rape, I can see different points of my life where intervention or a kind word certainly would have assisted. Intervention did sort of happen at different points, but some were in the form of shame and others through violence, and rarely were they associated with the actual problem I needed help with. It shoved me deeper into a hole, and further away from healthier ways of thinking. Luckily the internet was around and I found MAP, a forum that helped expose me to a lot of different ideas. Some of them have been very helpful for me in my life, some of them not so much. The good has far outweighed the bad though, and I think that's because people here genuinely want to avoid living in a hellscape of a world. That involves wanting to put good in the world and to help others so we don't revert back to our base instincts to survive.

One of MAPs most popular thread is the Martial Arts Babes thread is it not? That thread is in the same light as this meme. How many of you posting here now took part in that thread?

 

That's the point.

Not everyone in the world is at that point yet. Not every child, or even 40 year old man has been exposed to different ways of thinking, or even the opportunity to think differently.

I was asking for empathy, I wasn't giving condemnation. "Cast the first stone" and all. We're all smart enough now to know the rapist and the murderer often isn't born a rapist or murderer, and we all have some kind of part in helping make a person into that, no matter how infinitesimally small. How do we stop the rapist or murderer from becoming that in the first place? How do we not ruin a person so much they become this?

We're talking about using shame from the get-go when we were all part of the same group of people not too long ago. I wasn't around for the discussion on that thread, and the growth thereafter was I? I don't remember it. I do remember being a young man looking at martial arts babes though! Ya'll just decide what point in the timeline you get to be responsible for things on the site that may have influenced people in a negative way? Get off the high horse and allow others a chance before you smack them down with a heavy handed approach like shame. If it's ignored, then you smack them down.

Good solutions require thinking. I'm not overthinking it. I'm putting things in perspective.

 

I'm gonna' check out after these last posts. I've been dealing with a lot of things in my personal life and I'm letting responses from people affect me in ways that I'm not sure are intended. I do not have the self-esteem or mental fortitude at this time to continue this kind of discussion.

Like, after I posted I got ready to leave to work on my property, then I saw Simon's post and responded then left. I hit traffic, got super emotional and then had to come back home to calm down. I legitimately deal with a disability that makes managing emotions difficult, and harder yet when I'm going through difficult things. We're talking panic attacks, auditory and very rarely visual hallucinations here, not just "I got angry or sad." My emotional reactions are not in sync with reality currently. Hopefully nobody thinks I'm just being a drama queen : /. I'm just trying to express how interacting with others online can hinder my real life and that I'm not chickening out of the discussion. I just have to actually get things done in my real life and now I'm going to be set back a couple hours because I have to get myself together. Somebody could probably tell me my hair looks bad on the street and after I told them to sod off I would probably cry around the corner. It's me not being responsible in the situations and conversations I place myself currently.

Best to everyone. Hope there are some decent solutions to the issues being discussed that everyone can find applicable in their own lives.

 

[EDIT: This was posted before I saw your reply, so don't worry about replying to it, or come back to it in a week/month/year/decade if you want. Take care of yourself (like, really be nice to yourself).]

First, let me thank you for your long and thoughtful reply. I really do appreciate it.

I've not seen violence and desperation at the levels you have, but I did also think that this was how humans spent most of their time evolving, because that is the generally held narrative. It didn't threaten my view of myself or humanity, it gave me hope that ethical progress was as much a part of us as technological progress. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't back up this popular belief of savage man becoming civilised. The closest living people to pre-agrarian hunter gatherers are generally peaceful and egalitarian, and don't face scarcity unless industry encroaches on them. The diversity of their DNA also points to a lack of war and famine that produces genetic bottlenecks in more "advanced" societies. You contradict yourself in this point when you say in your next post that we are all smart enough to know that people aren't born murderers or rapists. It seems as if the concept of surplus is where things took a turn for the worse in terms of human behaviour, because as soon as you have property and surplus, you incentivize greed, selfishness and the constant battle for expansion and growth. This is a much bigger threat to any cuddly notion of humanity I might like to have, because it shows a great cost to the undeniable benefits also brought about through human progress and innovation.

As for biological drives; I've been to places where it is socially acceptable for a middle aged man to grab a pubescent girl and feel her up. In the same way you'd check the ripeness of a fruit. How come that isn't socially acceptable where I live anymore? Why don't they show the black and white minstrel show on TV nowadays? Why aren't effeminate men the butt of jokes implying that they might be gay on sitcoms anymore? It's because of changing social attitudes, and it wasn't because everyone decided one day not to be sexually abusive, racist or homophobic. Societal change is led by a vanguard, seen as killjoy do-gooders until one day everyone looks back and says "I can't believe that used to be on TV!" or "how did people just put up with that kind of behaviour, I never would!".

A grown man groping a 14 year old girl in the street would be frowned upon now. That man would be subject to public shame. Taboos and shame regulate behaviour a lot. If someone is genuinely struggling with that, then sure, give them empathy and try to work it out with them. But for the majority of people they won't even question it, they will think and act in line with cultural norms.

You say you don't like the idea of governments engaging in that, but that's exactly what laws are. We elect representatives to legislate for behaviour. I agree that it being left up to the profit motive of social media platforms is not desirable, to say the least, so how do we combat that without government? Because the media we consume does shape the values of society.

As for your experiences of sexual harassment, I'm happy to say I'm wrong on that. Maybe I'm lucky in that when some similar things have happened to me, they did not affect my sense of self, agency or safety. When I was in school, no attractive girl could walk past a scaffold without workmen shouting what sexual acts they would like to perform on them. That never happened to the boys. Although my dad was an electrical engineer and he would not look forward to changing into his boiler suit at a factory with a female workforce, so I know that harassment can go in either direction, depending on the power dynamic.

Oh, and I would never call you alt-right, Trumpian or whatever. I know you are too self-sufficient, capable and resourceful to need labels like that to cling to.

 

Look, real talk, ya'll need to start quote posting me and responding to different points I make. If anything just do it for me because I have memory issues and it makes it really hard to follow when people keep saying things that seem very out of left field when compared to what I wrote. I know my posts are long, but stuff like this requires in depth discussion. If you don't think it requires in depth discussion, then why respond to me at all? I do not deal well with people who think they can tell me in simple terms what to or to not think, even if I like them. It's pretty insulting.

I've read @aaradia , @David Harrison and @Simon 's responses to me now, and most of the responses read like you guys picked one thing that was inflammatory to you that you think is associated with some other common argument, and wrote a whole response off of it not noticing I wasn't saying that at all. None of these responses seem to be addressing what I'm trying to convey. I haven't disagreed with anyone, just that sweeping, narrow resolutions like shaming people without understanding the root causes of the issue (different causes require a different approach) isn't the best idea and there may be other ways of going about it.

I mean hell, it feels like @Simon was looking out for somebody to mention the MAP thread so he could shut it down as quick as possible. I got up to get dressed and by the time I got back he had already posted that response. Really don't think he read the whole thing.

Also I didn't defend a rape joke @aaradia , I said there's correct context for objectifying people sexually, and it doesn't cause problems with mature audiences. I did not say anything that would be in defense of a rape joke on MAP, and I'm not going to tolerate being associate with garbage like that. Clearly MAP is not the place for that. I'm sorry that the event had as profound an impact on you. MAP isn't the place for that sort of thing. Your reaction is entirely appropriate. I wouldn't defend this meme from the OP on this website either. I was dumbfounded when I clicked on the page, but then I saw it was the MAP authorities posting it and you guys control the agenda so there ya' go. Maybe you guys opened a can of worms you didn't realize you were getting into?

I literally work with mental health clinics bi-weekly, and get regular medical help involving a lot of psychology and some evolutionary understanding is required to apply it. I've applied the knowledge I've gotten and went from being confined to a 750 sq ft apartment unable to walk outside for over a year and a half, to being able to function on my own and if I wanted to volunteer personal information here people would probably be pretty amazed at what I've been up to. I've also helped quite a few people out with their mental health, some of them women. I'm going to go ahead and rely on how I view the world from my experiences and what I've learned.

If ya'll don't want to look in the mirror and acknowledge the monster you are along with the good you have in you, that's on ya'll. That's not something I got from Jordan Peterson @David Harrison and @Dead_pool , it's something I learned from a super far left leaning psychiatrist in the past who is up to date on current practices before I even knew who ol' JP was. Acknowledgment of that is key in self discovery, development, and healing.

I think we're reaallllyyyy falling short in the ability to communicate here based on reactionary assumptions due to emotional investment.

 

Rape and murder are done with intent. Rape often for control and then pleasure, murder usually control, but also often for pleasure. There's very few animals that are raping and murdering in that context, and certainly not in the way humans do. It's usually in a biological context where the fight/flight mechanism is triggering or the overwhelming urge to breed is occurring. If you put a woman in a room with a feral man, and he rapes her, how accountable is he? How accountable are the dogs at the dog park? The street cats?

When are people accountable? Should some be more accountable than others? When they are able to understand what is right or wrong by their societies' standards, and more and more by their status in society we are drawing lines. The real answer is we don't know and we're doing our best with the limited information we currently have. That's why laws and science and philosophy are always changing, and we keep trying to progress our understanding. I think the ability to communicate and develop/reprogram ourselves for "the better" (highly disputed what that is) is evolutionary, and right now we're the most advanced on the planet. It does require other people to activate though apparently based on observations of feral people that I've been exposed to. I would have to dip my toe into my agnostic beliefs to explain my position further.

I've had chai boys paraded around in front of me and been unable to kill the person parading the children around because of the need to respect cultural values. Not all cultures and ways of life are equal. Some people need to die.

All your examples are pieces of culture that we've removed because we've learned about our psychology, and what really benefits us or hurts us. It is removal from our baser instincts. The rougher things get, the more people rely on their baser instincts though, and the intellectual interpretation of how to manipulate those base instincts I think is a major indicator on a person's personal development and experiences. Also many of those examples weren't just .gov implemented. I am ALWAYS going to hate people or groups of people who want to tell me what to do. That's my default, and there's a whole lot of trauma behind it : D. Again I get that it is helpful. I even think fed.gov pulled troops out the south way too quick after the civil war. I'm always going to question and be against it being the first option. I'm very much of the opinion that it's us at the individual level who need to start stepping up and doing something.

Wow man. "I'm happy" are not two words you should be using after somebody makes themselves vulnerable sharing stories of sexual harassment. I don't know if you realize it, but I shared that I can't even have somebody I would WANT to touch me brush up against me without me involuntarily yanking myself back. Now imagine a woman doing that when a man touches her who relayed the same experiences I did. Would you tell her that you're happy to be wrong? How about "oh, my bad, I made the wrong assumption." What are we happy about here?

One of the reasons I got into martial arts and weight lifting was so I could be strong enough to not have to worry about autonomy over my own body and well-being. It wasn't something I picked up as a hobby. It then became a way of life, until I couldn't maintain it due to injury, and it's slowly becoming a part again. I engage in this stuff to keep myself and those I love safe because of how much abuse I've went through that I thought was normal in my past, and to not let myself be taken advantage of by people who would use me to do others harm (especially when it's for their own greed).

One of the reasons I end up necroing threads here on MAP is because I need to do deep dives into my past to see how I reasoned things. It helps me with self discovery/development with my mental health practices. When I realize at 33, "oh, I react such and such way because this was done to me, or I did this to myself, or I did this to another person" and I can look back at prior posts on MAP that correlate with the time period of the memory and behaviors I'm working on adjusting, I can avoid building a false narrative because there's written proof of an immature, very confused young man posting and NOW I can see the insecurities and shortcomings. I can see why I thought things were a certain way. I also know what caused me to change for the better. Identifying what caused me to do something bad doesn't absolve me of the responsibility for what I did. It allows me to take the correct amount of responsibility for it.

 

To the first bolded

I do not believe I said the bolded. I explicitly say we shouldn't condone the behavior, but that the solution to curbing it may be found in identifying the same sort of behavior and its manifestation in women, and then applying it to men. I mentioned this because of the heavy focus on men only in the thread, but men's opinions are influenced heavily by women as well. My commentary remains the same if you want to add in transgender, no gender, both gender, or whatever. There's a certain behavior that is born from multiple different situations, and I think we need to look at different angles to the problem of human behavior in general, how it manifests across the sexes, and then from THAT understanding we can maybe find more solutions.

To the second bolded

You're right I do.

My entire life right now is geared towards trying to create and put good into the world and trying to help others, because the people who I let lead me before (religious leaders, parents, coaches, voters and the obama administration, as well as the Marine Corps under his leadership) really showed me the way to freaking not do things while they helped screwed me up.

Speaking on responsibility:

Here's a difficult situation that I think may help you understand where I'm coming from better. I have PTSD and the main trigger is not having a sense of control over myself. During a period of time in my first marriage, I was also suffering from a concussive brain injury from explosive overpressure, and was unaware of both of these. In my past marriage there was domestic abuse. We would get into some pretty big arguments about things. There were times I knew I was losing my temper too much, and tried to walk away to cool down. She would not let me. She would stand in my way. Push me. Put her hands in my face, and scream at me. One time she even followed me down five flights of stairs and wouldn't let me drive out of the parking lot to leave. I never struck my ex wife, but there were a few times where I had thrown her onto the bed or pinned her down and yelled at her to stay away from me.

Everything about what she would do, and everything about my mental health from full blown panic attack trigger events to the screaming feeling like it's splitting my skull open from sensory overload, was set against me for that situation.

Do I think it was ok to have thrown my ex wife on the bed or pinned her down and yelled at her? Hell no. Absolutely not. My ability to tolerate somebody screaming in my face and not letting me get away is still so low I would probably try to move them physically to remain safe, so I don't involve myself with people like that. When I was dating again, the first sign of this kind of behavior was the end of that relationship. I have to be responsible for my disabilities and shortcomings, as well as how trained I am psychologically and physically to survive. I honestly feel I'm extra responsible in some areas.

I do not have the ability to handle people exhibiting certain common behaviors , and my reaction towards behaviors like that I literally have little control over because I can't even think. I go back to base instincts, and mine is more "fight" than flight. There's no "becoming a better person" where I can take being screamed at in the face and blocked in. What my ex did to me in this light wasn't good for me, it caused me to react a certain way, but that doesn't absolve me of the responsibility. I have more responsibility in this situation because I'm the male, I was stronger, and the repercussions to my actions are heavier. How do I hold myself responsible? I avoid people with this behavior so I don't do horrendous things myself. If I see this behavior in others I tend to try and say something.

What else can I do here? What responsibility would you have me take? The only valid action I see is to not keep doing it, and to share my experience so others might be able to take something from it to help them out and prevent them from going down the same path. If I can help a guy with PTSD/mTBI not end up in a situation where he becomes a domestic abuser, then that's a win, right?

Or does somebody need to flay me alive for justice?

 

You're not having a discussion with me. You're reacting to things that have hurt you emotionally in the past, and associating what I say with it. I'm not engaging in this anymore because it's not going to be good for either of us.