Arms and the man

Arms and the man

Despite what the man in arms thinks, it is not enough to arm oneself with good intentions. One must also arm oneself with the appropriate tools.

There are many ways to defend yourself while armed. The mere act of having a weapon on you, for example, can cause someone to rethink their aggression before they act out against you. That's because an individual who sees that someone else is carrying a gun or other weapon will know that if he were to attack them that person would be able to defend themselves and retaliate in kind.

Similarly, there are ways of defending oneself without carrying a weapon on them at all—they just happen not be as effective as carrying one. In terms of fighting unarmed, for example, there are many techniques that you can use to defend yourself against an assailant. In a situation where you may not have any weapons with you, these techniques may save your life. However, one drawback of fighting unarmed is that it takes more skill and experience to be effective at fighting without a weapon or a shield. A skilled fighter with a weapon is going to be able to do more damage to someone if he has a dagger in hand than someone who does not have a dagger in hand but has been trained in dagger fighting.

One mistake that some people make when going into battle is thinking that they will be able to fight without necessarily arming themselves properly beforehand. It's not enough to have good intentions. You have to have the weapons or other tools that will allow you to carry out your intentions.

There are many parallels between war and the art of seduction. In both, you are trying to use words and actions to convince someone else to do something that they probably wouldn't do by themselves. This is the art of rhetoric. The weapons of rhetoric are words designed mutually benefit both speaker and listener—words that motivate, persuade, inspire, or otherwise make people want to act in a certain way because of their emotional response rather than because they are logically convinced by what you are saying.

In a way, this is a form of arming oneself. The more you can make yourself seen as an attractive person, the more able you will be to attract the opposite sex (or same sex, if that's your thing).

The opposite of rhetoric is logic. I don't mean the formal rules of logic, but rather logic as it is used in everyday speech: "logic" as used by people who want to convince themselves and other people that something must be true because they cannot otherwise account for the facts that they know to be true. They try to use their knowledge of what has happened in the past and what happens elsewhere as evidence for why it must happen elsewhere too, even though the situations may not be comparable.