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This is a tangential point, I think, but I don't think of self defense this way. I see violence in self defense as justified not because of some sort of reciprocity around someone marking themselves as an enemy combatant when they initiate violence on you, but rather because some form of violence is almost always the minimal force necessary to prevent (further) damage on you when someone is enacting violence on you.
This is one reason why, even if the whole 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-logic of Kirk enacting "violence" on oppressed minorities or whatever were accepted, I fully reject that that would justify physical violence against him. Presuming that everything every one of Kirk's haters are 100% true about their characterization of Kirk's words, physical violence is still several orders of magnitude greater than the minimum force necessary to prevent the government from enacting the violence that Kirk's words would eventually cause many months and years down the line.
There is definitely a lot to be said about proportionality in defense.
If someone pokes you in the chest with their finger, even with anger, you should probably (read: DEFINITELY) not shoot them.
They shove you, you should probably not punch their lights out.
But either of those acts is "Proof via demonstration" that they do not respect your bodily autonomy, and consider it fair to physically engage in violence.
That's what makes it 'justifiable' to return the same to them, as far as I'm concerned.
"minimal force necessary" works as a limiting factor, but I don't know that it works as a justification in and of itself.
So what do you do if they're (physically) much stronger than you? It's similar to the issue the US military faced in trying to determine force composition and strength at the dawn of the atomic age... there was a lot of talk about what might be obsolete in a total war scenario, but realized they needed something between "do nothing" and "nukes".
I'm pretty scrawny. If someone bulky shoves me, sure, it doesn't rise to a level where I can shoot them in retaliation. But I also can't just shove them back, even though they have declared physically engaging in violence acceptable! They, effectively, have full impunity to push me around as they see fit (up to a limit), short of someone else larger stepping in, even if my ultimate capacity for violence via a gun is far greater than theirs.
Robert E. Howard had the truth of it, in many ways:
Be far, far more vicious (gouge eyes out, rip at their genitals, crush small bones. Use hard parts of your body against small, soft parts of theirs.)
Or buy a gun. Train with it. Know what the self-defense laws of your state say about deadly force.
Being smaller, the stakes are inherently higher for you, which gives you both the REASON to be more vicious, and in many jurisdictions, the legal justification for employing deadly force.
Find and make friends with larger people. Doesn't have to be a full Master/Blaster relationship, but if you produce some sort of value for the mannerbund, expect them to come to your aid if physical violence is called for.
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