There are nasty people in any art (and the TMAs are certainly not exempt; the heat that's been generated in the CMA and KMA fora, for example, with associated name-calling and whatnot, has been pretty intense at times, and people have been banned as a result, and the same is true in any number of other of our TMA sections). But my impression is that most people do their own thing and don't have either the inclination or energy to bash other people or arts.
It's very important to make sure that you don't confuse trolls using references to MMAs as a convenient weapon to go after other MAs with people who actually do MMAs. The first group of people will say
anything to get the effect they're trying for, because their purposes are fundamentally destructive; they don't care how they succeed in disrupting a thread, and they'll use whatever means are at hand.
Look, for example, at the way posters who appear to have a trollish agenda have sometimes used RBSD as a stick to beat the TMAs with, mocking the use of kata and dojo gestures of courtesy and so on. The fact is, some of the biggest people in serious RBSD, people like Iain Abernethy, Peter Consterdine, Geoff Thompson and other prominent and very active members of the British Combat Association are quite high ranking TMAists (Peter Consterdine, e.g., is an eighth dan Shotokan karateka who has been an English International; at the same time, he's considered one of the leading close personal protection specialists in England and did a
ten year stint as a club doorman and security manage in Manchester nightclubs... enough said! Similarly with Geoff Thompson and many of the others.) They are some of the leading `experimental' investigators of the combat content of the TMAs, and are
also the leading edge of `alive', realistic training under maximally noncompliant conditions. So is there an inherent conflict between TMAs and RBSD? Not a chance, clearly; but you don't have to look far to find people raving on about how the only way to train for street survival is RBSD, that TMAs are just live-action role playing in strange pajamas, and all the other troll drivel we've gotten so tired of. A lot of the biggest MMA-will-clean-TMA's-clock yobs on the internet probably have little or no experience in the MMAs, just as you're likely to find the noisiest RBSD fanboys basing their shrill nonsense solely on what they've read about this kind of training.
People who are really serious about something tend to focus on their own problems in mastering the skills involved, I've noticed. A serious student of MMA is very unlikely to have the time, energy and incentive to form negative judgments about the TMAs—it's too much bloody hard work just getting their own act together, eh?
