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I never said your point was wrong, just badly phrased. I have problems with my kung-fu master analogy on a lot of levels, not the least of which is it conflates magical and martial skill in a way that occurs too often in these sort of discussions. However, as inaccurate and broad a generalisation as it might be, I still think it better than this 'one-year-old baby' metaphor of yours.
To begin with 'kung fu master', 'untrained opponent', 'magician', 'non-magical person' and, indeed, 'one-year-old baby' are all generalisations, stereotypes which do not, necessarily, give us enougb information to make use of. What style of kung fu is our hypothetical martial artist trained in? What style of magic does our hypothetical magus use? These may seem like quibbles, but they are important: some styles of kung fu will be more 'hard', in martial arts parlance, than others, and thus would be more likely to cause injury if used against an untrained opponent ('hard' in this sense meaning more proactive, and emphasising more high-impact attacks, as opposed to 'softer' styles which are more reactive, though this again is a broad generalisation); some styles of magic carry very specific and hindering rules about things like cursing (Wiccans, for example, might well be bound, or feel bound, by the Threefold Law) which would have an impact on how one approached dealing with a non-magical human.
Then there's the question of what constitutes 'untrained'. As (I'm assuming) a reasonably non-violent individual, you probably would find yourself at a loss in dealing with a kung fu expert. Someone who has a high, albeit unschooled, propensity for violence is likely to have less of a problem. Beating people up is not necessarily a skill you need training from Shaolin monks to learn: some people learn it through brute facts of circumstance, and some even seem to just display a natural aptitude for it. Could the same rules apply to conventionally 'non-magical people'? Maybe so: we all know non-magical people who lead 'charmed lives', we've all known people who are bad luck for others; what if those people are, unconsciously, using what we, as magicians, have to learn to consciously manipulate? In a similar way, there could be people who are harder to curse than others; given the kind of stuff you're dealing with when it comes to magic, I think that, at least, is highly likely. A self-mutilating, suicidal depressive is always going to be easier to magically fuck up than a strong, healthy zen Buddhist type, no? If only because there's a much more obvious path for pain to manifest for the depressive. So a broad and, I may say, extremely emotive, generalisation like your 'one-year-old baby' analogy is at best of little heuristic value and, at worst, I think, inflammatory.
Sorry to go on at length, but there is a strong underlying principle behind what you say, with which I broadly (though with reservations) agree; nevertheless I feel that the argument needs to be a lot more focused than it was in the way you expressed it. There is a difference, I feel, between 'non-magical' and 'magically defenceless'.
...frankly theory's not always great in practice.
On that point, at least, we agree. |
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