This is not for hurting people

For a long time all sorts of karate and taekwondo schools in America and elsewhere (not to mention more syncretistic or utterly made-up styles) have advertised themselves as for "self-defense only" and not for beating people up. This is a good thing insofar as beating people up is a bad and should not be encouraged, but there's a big problem. Karate and taekwondo and most other martial arts (that term is a big hint) are for beating people up. Yes, they are. The martial arts are techniques of war--designed to injure and kill. And even things like karate that may not descend from battlefield techniques are fighting skills nonetheless, designed to hurt people that don't want to be hurt (whether they want to hurt you is a side issue). So when you're neighborhood karate school tells you that their techniques are "only for self defense", they mean something like this: "We'll teach you how to hurt someone, and then tell you that's not a nice thing to do."

And then along comes aikido, which says "our techniques are not for hurting people," and what does everyone think? They think this is the same kind of thing as karate: a technical curriculum that inflicts real damage, and a philosophical teaching that says not to do this (unless you really need to). Add to this that the founder had a reputation as a more-or-less invincible fighter, and that aikido is known to derive from traditional fighting techniques. So most practitioners wind up with the idea that aikido techniques are nice when you want them to be, and very much not nice if that's what you want.

The problem is that's not true. Most of the available evidence really does seem to suggest that the founder really did design a curriculum that was less violent than its technical precursors. Nor does it seem as though that's just the outward form of techniques that are secretly for killing. And this is borne out by the techniques. Aikido is mostly a way of taking somebody who's put themselves out of balance, and more or less getting out of the way. Or it could be. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to want to practice a sort of Ueshiba-style Aiki-jujutsu.