Terry D wrote:jamesmcdonnell wrote:Terry D wrote:
It is an argument I've won plenty of times, and no offence but I'd fancy my chances against you.
There are violent assaults at certain parts of fights. For instance Danny Williams hammering Skelton in fight I right at the end but the sport is not an inherantly violent act because violent acts such as muggings, rapes and assaults are one-way encounters.
Your last parapgraph is the crux as to why it is not outright violence.
By definition though, is not someone's physical integrity 'violated' by being punched? I am taking a similar semantic route.
Most people's definition of violence differs from your etymological one of the word 'violence.'
Definitions of words are mutable and multi-faceted, the word violence, like most others, has more than one meaning.
I think you are trying to take this argument a bit too far Terrence personally, not having a pop, but trying to insinuate that boxing is not violent, because it is consensual, that is not the definition of violence that the vast majority of English speakers would recognise, and English is not a dead language which sits in the dictionary.
So in that case every woman having sex is 'raped' by the violation of her vagina that takes place? I'm sure you are going to answer 'no', the reason? Because it is consensual. Again with gay sex. It seems to me that it is a painful and violent violation but do you advocate a ban on that? So in your eyes battering a man in the ring in one sense is not as bad as another one?
Most people have a differing definition of 'great', taking it to mean a number of things when the root of great is merely having a large number (which is pretty ironic given the different ideas we have of 'great'). So a great person is a person with a lot of possessions. So the greatest fighter would automatically be the one with the highest number of wins. Or in relative terms the highest win/loss ratio. So Rocky Marciano is the greatest fighter.
As you can see most people have the wrong definition of 'great'. They have the wrong definition of many things. I'm not being an arse but most people do not think about the words they use. As related to 'violate' and directly stemming from 'whence' which for me is moving something from one thing to another, in this case a one-way transference of harm, I take violence as meaning something different.
To go further off-topic, and not to do with the boxing argument directly, there is also the idea of doing violence to conceptual ideas and this is either authentic or inauthentic. Inauthentic is when the idea cannot defend itself. So any critique of metaphysics is violent because the idea in questions has no concrete defence. Or you can what we are doing is inauthentic violence to the idea of boxing because in giving different accounts of it we make it obscure to a person who does not know what boxing is. Authentic conceptual violence is when you engage in a debate with a concept and attack it in a way that enriches it and makes it stronger. In much the way a proper boxer learns from receiving a blow how to avoid receiving that blow again. That is what boxing is about. That is why you don't go into a gym and beat the shit out of someone in sparring without being seen as a prick. It is a mutually beneficial thing.
Not even violence is simple as you can see. Words pass into common usage without being thought about. Even the English dictionary definitions of some words are wrongly taken from the roots. That is why before doing anything you do a genealogy of the word in question.
People who wring their hands over the 'violent' nature of boxing I find odd. Fair enough if that is your son in there but people who sit ringside procrastinating over whether what they are doing is right or wrong are just being more than a little bit too coy. They protest too much in other words.
I'm certainly not coy.
Usually if I am watching boxing, I'm screaming at the top of my voice, 'Go on, drop the right on him.....OOOOooOOOO lovely shot, he's fekked he's fekked....go for it, finish him."
However in quieter moments I stand back and ponder my reaction to watching boxing. The fact is, there is a human fascination towards acts of 'violence' (I inserted the inverted comma to prevent us going into another one about the meaning of the word), in the human world, and the wider animal kingdom.
I shaln't dally on the subject of words, their meaning, their roots and common usage too much, as it is an unwinnable argument, and one which is largely academic.
