discussion of philosophy

Ahhhh... free at last from the cultivation, nurturing and support of vegetables (mostly flowers). At almost 2a.m., one can stare at one's keyboard, trying to make sense, and ingest alcoholic beverages to one's heart's content...

So let me start by chewing over something CN posted:


...something my brother in law said.

"If you control all the variables, I think that someone trained in MMA will win more often then a Traditionalist". After some annalisation, it occured to me that if you control all possible variables (as he suggested) the result would be a draw, constantly. That would include training time, intensity, skill level, years of training, opponent under same situations, same situation, same mental state, same luck. The result would be a draw. Agree, disagree, or am I over thinking this?

No, you're not overthinking this. Here's the problem: your BinL doesn't know what he's talking about. Literally: he's voicing an opinion about an outcome which he has no possible way to predict, and making a prediction. Sure, he's entitled to his opinion. But his opinion has no basis. In fact, it's not even clear what it means.

What would it mean to eliminate all variables? It would mean, basically, clone two fighters out of one single fighter, and let them fight it out enough times to eliminate luck and other contingent factors, so that the only difference between them was that one was using Karate(including TKD and TSD)/Wing Chun/Kempo/Hapkido/.... and the other was using the skill set conventionally described as MMA, involving... techs synthesized from a variant of Jujutsu (a TMA) plus various striking (traditional) striking arts. Two points here:

(i) First, as was pointed out in an earlier post, all of these arts are `traditional' and all of them are mixed. Look at karate: a synthesis of Minamoto-era bujitsu (as Iain Abernethy has discussed in his Bunkai-Jutsu book), Chinese martial arts of the `chuan-fa' variety of boxing, Okinawan tui-te joint manipulation/throwing/grappling techniques, and the specifically linear striking principles developed very, very recently—less than 150 years ago!—by Bushi Matsumura. That isn't `mixed'??? That lethal mixture went first to Japan and then to Korea, where it resulted in the Korean striking arts we call Taekwondo/Tansoodo, both of them Korean Shotokan Karate when you eliminate the modifications introduced by the Olympic sport version. Those striking techs (plus the less commonly taught joint attack/grappling/throwing components of the art), combined with Japanese Aikido, and a few other odds and ends, give you Hapkido—as mixed a martial art as you could imagine... the point is, all martial arts are mixed. And all of them, a few generations up the line, become `traditional'. The MA that Matsumura invented in Shuri wasn't traditional; it was unlike anything ever seen before, so far as anyone knows—the combination of linear striking and overwhelming force delivery was essentially unprecedented. So it make no sense, from one point of view, to contrast MMA and TMA...`mixed' and `traditional' are orthogonal, not contradictory, as someone pointed out earlier in this thread. It reminds me of something the great French cynic Tallyrand said: `What is treason? Merely a matter of dates.' What's radical and innovative and what's traditional are just a matter of dates: one will become the other in a hundred years or so. Your BinL is working with a false dichotomy.

(ii) Second: how the hell can he tell what would happen in the clone-vs-clone situation?? Sure, you can have an opinion, but an opinion is worth no more than its basis: if you have no valid basis for that opinion, then your opinion is worthless. Your BinL has absolutely no valid basis for that opinion, because there's no way to provide such a basis. What's his data source—a special apparatus that can view all the different ways the universe might develop in time from any given instant?

The points here are (a) that there is no empirical basis for deciding which of two otherwise identical fighers, one fighting TMA and the other MMA, will win in any particular encounter. Only if you have such a basis can you determine whether the fighter using TMA principles and tactics will defeat his döppelganger using MMA principles and tactics; without such a basis, nothing you say about TMA/MMA carries any weight at all; and (b) it's all nonsense anyway, because there isn't a single tech in MMA that isn't anticipated somewhere in a `TMA' (I've seen somewhere a photo of Iain Abernethy performig a suplex in accord with a kata bunkai from a book by... Gichin Funkakoshi!!).

What's going on in arguments such as the one between you and your BinL doesn't have to do with street combat reality. It has to do with the power and influence of electronic media. He's convinced, because the combat sport labelled MMA has been promoted so heavily; his opinions are really based on that, though he thinks they're based on evidence. But the kind of evidence that would really bear on the case is unavailable in principle since it would require you to have data about the outcomes in a large number of clone vs. clone encounters that have never happened and never will happen.

Let him rave on. It doesn't mean a thing. The question itself is pointless, unresolvable and in the end, I think, basically meaningless. And who can afford to worry about something with those credentials?
 
Exile once again, you have taken a problem I'm finding difficult, and make it make perfect sense! You truelly are wise :)asian:). Though, may I ask why you have such a deep knowldge of TMA? Is it just from books? And if so, what intrested you to reading them? If, that is, you don't mind my asking.
 
As you folks may have noticed, I'm trying to keep the discussion going by imputing random thougts and grippes. With that in mind, lets annalise something my brother in law said.
"If you control all the variables, I think that someone trained in MMA will win more often then a Traditionalist". After some annalisation, it occured to me that if you control all possible variables (as he suggested) the result would be a draw, constantly. That would include training time, intensity, skill level, years of training, opponent under same situations, same situation, same mental state, same luck. The result would be a draw. Agree, disagree, or am I over thinking this?

I'm confused on something here. Is your brother in law comparing a MMAist and TMAist in a ring fight or a street fight? If its a ring fight, then yes of course the variables can be set. Fighters are matched. When I'm walking to my car, I could be attacked by someone taller, shorter or the same height. I can't control that, therefore the variables will not be as controlled as he thinks. :)

Mike
 
The answer to part one is yes. He thinks it wouldn't matter if it's a ring match or street fight. As to the variables, well... he means two guys with the exact same build, height, weight, training intesting and so on, fighting the same guy. I don't really understnad how he could make such a statment. the discussion I'm trying to make is basicly, is there any situation were MMA would be more effective then TMA and the other way around. I really think the entire question is assanine. But, I wanted to see how I could antaganise the discussion into something intresting and impotrent.
 
The answer to part one is yes. He thinks it wouldn't matter if it's a ring match or street fight.

My appologies, but I can't see how he can not see the difference.

As to the variables, well... he means two guys with the exact same build, height, weight, training intesting and so on, fighting the same guy.

Yes, that fits the ring mentaliy. I don't know who my opponent is outside the ring.


I don't really understnad how he could make such a statment.

That makes two of us. :)

the discussion I'm trying to make is basicly, is there any situation were MMA would be more effective then TMA and the other way around.

As I said, it depends on how each person trains. Both have things to offer. :)

Mike
 
mmm... makes sense. I think it's kinda funny how everyone on both sides is basicly agreeing. Makes this much more of a discussion, much less of an argument.
 
may I ask why you have such a deep knowldge of TMA? Is it just from books? And if so, what intrested you to reading them? If, that is, you don't mind my asking.

CN, you're very kind and generous in your estimation of what I've said. Let me break the whole thing into two parts:

(i) first, there's what your brother-in-law says. Now even if I weren't interested in the (T)MAs at all, I'd find his reasoning questionable, for the same reason that I'd find the statement `the King's pawn openings are better for White than the Queen's pawn openings' suspect in connection with chess, or a statement like `Slalom skiers are faster than giant slalom skiers' suspect—because in each such case, there's a problem applying the notion of `X-er (`better/faster/...er') to the terms involved. A chess opening that has survived for a couple of hundred years has weathered enough Darwinian pressure that we can be sure it's as good as you can get in the hands of a competent player. The idea that you could somehow eliminate the variable of individual ability and come to a conclusion that in the abstract, a Q-pawn opening is better than a K-ide opening (or vice versa) would demand an experiment so obviously impossible (cloning many world champions, say—two Gary Kasparovs, two Alexander Alehkines, and so on, and having each clone-pair play a million games with both Q- and K-side openings and seeing which one White won to a statistically significant degree) that it makes no sense to even pose the question. The question about whether the slalom or GS skiers are faster is absurd in a somewhat different way—since the slalomers will be faster on a slalom track than the GS skiers on a slalom track, and likewise for the GS skiers vs. slalomers on a GS course, what does the question actually mean?
So a lot of what I was saying about the MAs is really just guided by the logic of determining what would constitute a demonstration of these various comparisons. Your BinL's statement about TMAs vs. MMAs would require a demonstration combining elements of both the chess opening and ski-event comparisons, and fails for the same reason they do: there is no meaningful way such a question could possibly be give an convincing answer, because such an answer would have to appeal to a set of comparisons which are impossible in the real world.

(ii) So far as TMAs being MMAs a few generations down the line—yes, that view is definitely based on my reading of TMA history. I've been lucking in stumbling across some really good historical work both by MA historians like Dakin Burdick, Stanley Henning, Donn Draeger and a few others who have taken the trouble to try to isolate just what it is we have historical evidence for, on the one hand, and what many of us believe without there being any documentation for but which gets repeated all the time, on the other. I've also encountered some good work by MAists, like Robert Redmond, Iain Abernethy, Simon O'Neil, Bill Burgar and various others, who have tried to trace the roots of their arts' technical content to the practice and theorizing of previous generations, as a way of better understanding the technical content of their respective arts. I haven't done a single bit of original research in this area; I don't have the necessary knowledge of the languages involved, and I don't have the time available to pursue the study of the original documention even if I did. What I do have, though, is a certain standard of evidence even in areas that I have no firsthand research capability in. When I see the kind of exhaustive examination of the available documentation that guys like Burdick and Henning have done in the domain of KMA, and the careful philological study they've undertaken (yielding findings such as the non-equivalence of the modern KMA taekkyon with the takkyon `push the shoulders' mentioned in relatively ancient documents—where the two have been mistakenly identified by promoters of `ancient TKD' or `ancient TSD), I know I'm in safe hands. These guys have the technical knowledge and the scholarly detachment to judge the evidence and make claims no strong than what that evidence supports. I'm also impressed by the fact that the perspectives of these people, and those of the MAists seriously tracing the technical roots of their art, all converge—they wind up on almost exactly the same page, in most cases.

I got interested in this stuff for the same reason the MAists I mentioned did: I believe that only when you understand where the Korean MAs came from will you understand the resourced embedded in the forms and techniques of those arts. I've alway felt that TKD was a variant of karate, for example, in spite of the distance Olympic TKD has travelled from its hard-combat CQ roots; what I didn't have, when I started, was anything to back up that intuition. When I first came across the work of TKDists who were using the historical record as a guide to unlocking the street-effective techniques of TKD, it was like a light coming on in a dark cellar. So then I started reading everything I could get my hands on about the true ancestors of modern striking KMAs, namely, Okinawan karate and its Shotokan/Shudokan descendents, and suddenly the stuff I was doing in TKD made so much more sense. So then I started pursuing this stuff and trying to develop a comprehensive overview of the development of the modern karate-based arts, and where they came from... and what I wrote in my earlier post is just a distillation of a lot of original work that others have done.

I don't know if (i) and (ii) answer your question, CN, but they're the best I can do tonight. Sorry I didn't get to answer you kind post sooner—we were out celebrating my little boy's tenth birthday (ten or not, he's still a little boy!) and we only got in a short while ago...
 
Exile: Now I know why people listen to you so intently and trust your reasonoing without checking up on you, you are very thorough and not afraid to come up with answers you didnt want.
 
Great posts Exile! If more people in the MA community could apply logic and reason and reason like you do, we would have far less political bickering and BS stories.
 
i gotta agree with shaderon on this one
 
That's why he's a Heroic Cynical Curmudgeon.:asian:

From Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary

Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision causes him to see things as they are, not as they should be. Hence the custom of the ancient Scythians of plucking a cynic's eyes out to improve his vision
 
Cirdan, CN, Shads and my fellow OHCC Todd, I appreciate your kind thoughts—very much; if you only knew!—but don't give me too much credit; that impulse to scrutinize things and see them as they really are—which Todd has correctly identified as the essence of the cynic's perspective—is really based on fear. The annals of history are so full of horrifying lessons about what happens when people buy into large-scale fantasies and collective illusions. Genocides, Holocausts, state terrorism, suffocating closed societies... all of them seem me to be what happens when people suspend their critical faculties and accept mystification in place of reality, however unpleasant it is to give up our romantic illusions. I've always felt that skepticism is a crucial brake on the kind of devout belief in meaningless abstractions that can drive people to do really horrible things to each other. But if you're going to take that view—OK, I'm willing to accept anything you can give me some rational reason to accept, but you have to get your facts right and your reasoning straight—then you can't be selective about it , you have to apply it to everything you're involved in. The history of the past century should make us very, very wary about allowing to go unquestioned all these fantasies of a heroic age that a special elite has privileged access to through mysterious ancient lineages.

For some reason, martial arts seem to encourage that kind of mystification. People who should know better, who have all the resources they need to know better, talking about their art the way Pooh-Bah, the archtypical parastic aristocrat in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado—remember him??—does when he says that he can trace his ancestry back to `a primordial protoplasmic atomic globule'. So much emotional intensity invested in these historical mirages... I have some ideas about why people do that, but basically I don't get it.

That's one reason why I feel so much better having you folks as friends, colleagues and conversation partners on MT—you have a way of undercutting, with just a few well-aimed comments and examples, a lot of the unsupported fantasy stories that various posters on this board seem to feel the need to push on us incessantly, and I really appreciate that! :)
icon14.gif
 
To bring this question back up, my brother in law is at it agian. As an update, he has now had two mock "MMA" tournaments on our yard (we know, thankfully they have stopped). Now, after these fights he ended up "teaching" some of the other "fighters". He has also asked me if I have a copy of The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. I don't so he's going to buy his own. These two facts combined makes me fear he might try to start his own "martial art school". Granted, I think he might already.
Now the question, if he opens his own "school" what do you think I should do? Or, if he starts to get ready to do that? Should I sick one of the actual MMAist in my area at him? If he opens his own "school", God only knows what might happen, but I doubt it will be any thing good.
 
He is going start his own MMA school having the extensive experience from two backyard "MMA tournaments" and watching the ufc on tv?

How old is your brother in law anyway?

Should I sick one of the actual MMAist in my area at him?
worth a try...
 
He is going start his own MMA school having the extensive experience from two backyard "MMA tournaments" and watching the ufc on tv?

How old is your brother in law anyway?


worth a try...
He's 19. Before he knew what the UFC was (a year ago) he was into boxing and wrestling. And was in about a gazillion boxing and wrestling matches. He claims he's never lost, now that I'm thinking of it. And he almost always fights someone bigger and stronger.
Cirdan, intrested in haveing a fight? lol
 
The advice I would give a genuine person wanting to open an MMA school would be to compete on some properly organised competitions first to get himself a 'name' as someone who understands competing and the training involved. If people wish to be fighters they will want someone who they have heard of training them. This advice would go equally well for your brother in law! Competing in a legitimate show will either cure him of his illusions or prove he knows what he's talking about! I tend to think the former thugh it may encourage him to take up proper training. By all means pass my email address on to him and tell him I can advise him, I will do that honestly.If he wants to come across here I can find him fights and training facilities. Wolfslair where Bisping trains does residential training!


[email protected]
 
Cirdan, you are always welcome to come over to one of our shows! Jump on the plane or catch the ferry to Newcastle and we'll pick you up, we're only just over half an hour away from there! Norwegian fighters often come over to fight on North East shows, they're very popular here.
 
Thanks for the invitation Tez. :) I`ll let you know if I am heading over in the future. Although I am not really into MMA it would be interesting to see your stuff, especially since I know you`ve done Wado yourself.
 
The advice I would give a genuine person wanting to open an MMA school would be to compete on some properly organised competitions first to get himself a 'name' as someone who understands competing and the training involved. If people wish to be fighters they will want someone who they have heard of training them. This advice would go equally well for your brother in law! Competing in a legitimate show will either cure him of his illusions or prove he knows what he's talking about! I tend to think the former thugh it may encourage him to take up proper training. By all means pass my email address on to him and tell him I can advise him, I will do that honestly.If he wants to come across here I can find him fights and training facilities. Wolfslair where Bisping trains does residential training!


[email protected]

I'm thinking that if he does, I might just cut out the MMA fighter. He might take getting his butt kicked as a compliment, if it's from an MMAist. From a traditionalist (like me) it might get the message through his head. I'll consider giving him your email. I'm not too sure if he'd have to much respect for you (slightly older FEMALE who's British, who knows what he'll think).
Next, a new story. This actually happened just yesterday! I was back from Cuong Nhu class, and was pretty beat. I took a shower, got into my PJ's (it's sparring/Aikido class from 7 - 9 PM). I came out to see Adam, Katrina (my sister), and my mom having a discussion. At the moment Adam and my sis live in an apartment in our basement. They tried to get a ritzy apartment with four of there freinds. That fell out, and they were discussing getting a cheap little house for just the two of them, and maybe one of their freinds. I decided to watch the argument.
At the end my mom went to bed, and Adam started goofing with my sis, and put her into a rear bear hug. I told her to just pick her leg up, and drive it straight into his groin. I was putting some stuff away, so I wasn't really paying attention. He put her into a kind of blood choke, the name eludes me. I told her to put her hand into his arm pit, and pinch.
I was opening a 12 pack of Mr. Pibb, so I didn't notice him sneaking up behind me, and putting ME in a rear bear hug. I ended up with my arms trapped under his. I told him to let or, or I'd have to hurt him. He said ok and squized a little tighter. I tried to kick him the nuts. He had his legs bent in, so I couldn't. I decided against breaking his knee, so I guided him to the living room with it's nice new soft carpet.
I swept him to the ground, and next thing I know, I'm in the bottom position of the mount (like I care too much). I get him into a Chin Na position I learned. All I had to do was was twist my hand, and I'd have torn his bicep. He said "pressure points don't work" I ignored him, and realsied if I continued, he'd have never tapped out. I'd have just torn his bicep, and I'd feel bad about it for the rest of my life.
I ended up almost doing a technique out of one of the Shotokan forms I know. The whole purpose is to do one of two things. 1) Do the whole, grab and gerk on the tescitcle area, or 2) pull his voice box out and show it to him. I'd have done that second one. I stopped myself before I did though. Then he puts me into a blood choke, I could have gotten out of. But I decided if I just tap out, he'll get off me and leave me alone.
My mom comes out just in time to see me tap. Adam starts jumping around like a monkey and gloating, and my first thought is "I should have torn his bicep". He leaves and I walk over to my mom, lean in and say "the only reason he won was because I didn't want to kill him".

What do you think, should I have just hurt him, or did I do the right thing? Maybe I should post this in the horror stories section...
 
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