Drat this working for a living all to heck.

You will recall that nearly a year ago I was struggling to come to terms with the "Freedom" Convoy and Putin's Savage invasion of Ukraine. I had just read The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, and in this post here:
https://agoodwinsmith.dreamwidth.org/243770.html
I said the following:
"I have always seen one major flaw/weakness/achillies heel for the consensus seekers: Someone who prioritizes winning by violence will always strike first, fast, and hard, doing as much damage as possible, because the point for them is *winning*."

I was reminded of all this by this article:
https://grantpiperwriting.medium.com/the-largest-city-ever-destroyed-49d8c0b75e8b
Which details how a huge prosperous city was wiped out once, and then utterly obliterated on the second go.

I don't know whether they were consensus-seekers, but it does seem that they were not able/prepared to fight, and their estimation that the aggressors merely wanted their stuff was a fatal miscalculation. The aggressors didn't want the stuff so much as they wanted all the stuff-havers to die and die sorry.

Giving the aggressors the benefit of the doubt was more than just mistaken.

I then stumbled across this story:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/16/albuquerque-shootings-suspect-arrested/
where a losing republican arranged for drive-by shootings of democrat officials' homes.

I mean - I'm back in that boggle territory, where I just don't believe anyone could do this.

And this made me think about popular theories about how to deal with bullies - "stand up to them". Hah. As anyone who has been bullied knows, this never works. Bullies run in packs - they will gang up on the victim.

So, since people who love violence and who venerate heroic ideologies are not interested in consensus but rather death for their victims, I think those of us who want to be consensus-seekers in female-valuing societies have to stop offering the benefit of the doubt. Never give an inch; no meeting in the middle.

Wafflers will want to ask "how can we know that someone will do something egregious before they do it?" And I say - they will have already stated their beliefs about other things that can easily be extrapolated.

I think part of the consensus-seekers' toolkit now needs to include that people need to earn their place at the consensus-seeker table. *Also* - I think the consensus-seekers' toolkit needs to include the willingness to viciously prevent first strikes.

I appreciate that the practical application of this is going to be fraught and complicated. But as a stance to start from, I think it is worth the effort.

In my schema of female-forward consensus-seekers and male-forward hero-reverers I have always seen one major flaw/weakness/achillies heel for the consensus seekers: Someone who prioritizes winning by violence will always strike first, fast, and hard, doing as much damage as possible, because the point for them is *winning*.

Someone who values consensus is always a sitting duck because they assume their opponent will do them the courtesy of presenting their points in a logical measured oration, so while they sit with their hands in their laps, patiently listening, their opponent is busy lopping off their head.

Also, the hero-revering group thinks the consensus-seeking group is stupid beyond belief because they just sit there. They wait. They use their mouths when they should be using their hands. So the hero-revering group just gets on with using their hands and the words aren’t even static.

The idea of minding one’s business over here, leaving the violent ones to themselves over there never works because there hasn’t been anything yet that has kept out seriously determined violence.

The problem is that foregoing deliberation and debate in order to stick a sword in someone first means that the consensus-seeker must give up their words – which is rather a large oblation of identity to jump to from a sitting start.

Is there any way to remain a consensus-seeker without abandoning one’s belief in consensus-seeking with all, including those who seek to destroy the consensus-seekers, and then just succumbing to the delight of stabbing them repeatedly with a lethal object?