In my first post in this thread I reacted to the OP as a bridging post: a post that wanted to assert something, but also a post that was a reaction to what I said in another about men who use violence in close relations. So I mocked the idea that the OP seemed to be poorly putting forward that since violence in some situations could be brave or necessary and also not based on fear, men getting into the habit of beating up people who they supposedly loved could not be 1) escalating for no good reason and 2) people who could not face what they were actually feeling. The people putting forward such a weakly justified conflation of quite different situations want to reduce all interactions to one thing, and tend not to notice symbiosis, collaboration even across species, even the merging of species: iow all those things that do not fit with their outdated survival of the fittest will to power ‘darwinism’. They also seem not to understand what a social mammal, not in the damaged and ‘cool’ version they hallucinate, is actually like. That is one with a complete limbic system and the ability to empathise, amongst other things. It’s like the two gunboys at Columbine came up with a self-justifying philosophy and then generalized it, looked on wife beaters positively out of this philosophy, and compared their psychology (the wife beaters’ psychology that is) with that of Navy Seals or Cardinal Richileau.
What can one do with people who are not interested in what they are feeling that does not quite fit with their own philosophy? IOW who lack certain basic but utterly criticial intropsective skills, or really, introspective courage.
Violence is not just carried out by afraid pussies and carrying a gun does not mean one is a coward.
However beating up, especially regularly, someone you supposedly love who you are bigger and stronger than shows a need to control yourself and the other person, and apart from the skipped steps, the gun to the knife fight as you put it, that very seeking to control is about fear. Fear of what one is feeling that is not the rage. Fear of what the other person will do and feel IF they consider themselves a free agent.
And one can certainly have empathy for those fears. But if they can’t even admit them and project their teenage and even younger fears and experiences into a metaphysics, can’t consider that there are exceptions and that those other suppressed feelings they have are an opportunity not just a threat, there is little to discuss with them. They think, without noticing it, that their survival depends on not feeling certain things. They just ain’t gonna go there. Never. And it feels like strength, this not knowing what makes them tick. And even though the left is supposed to control Hollywood, that is pussy, guilt driven men, according to them control TV and HOllywood, Hollywood reinforced this idea of what strength looks like over and over and over. And sure there are other movies that do not.
Anyway I saw in those two parts of your post I quoted above that you might be reacting similarly to a similar underlying pattern.