I thought the question on this thread was concerning if some arts are just flat better than others, so isn't this thread what you're calling a red herring? I'm confused.
Flashlock, read the OP carefully. E.g.:
MJS said:
If someone trains in TKD, is it a given that because they train in that art, they're going to be successfull?
This thread is not intended to be a my art vs. your art.
The original question is, literally, does training in a particular art guarantee that you will be successful against any other practitioner of any other art? I'm saying that the fairly obvious answer is no. And based on the network of arguments I and others have posted, I'm taking the position that there is no way
in principle that arts can be evaluated in a way which abstracts from the performance of individualsĀa position based in part on the fact that not one person on MT, or anywhere else, so far as I can tell, has presented a method for doing so, let alone actually carrying out the experimental work necessary to draw any conclusions.
IRegarding "cold evaluation", WWII H2H combat system vs traditional system has been documented, and I've mentioned the recent material--someone else mentioned combat TKD, mentioning casualties from H2H combat. Also, there are thousands of police reports documenting street fights and knife fights, and what happened. They are mostly untrained people, but you can see how the fight went. A police officer has told me they usually end up on the ground.
And if you ask Drac, or any number of other LEOs who post regularly on this forum, they'll tell you that there's no particular way in which a fight necessarily goes, that statistics like `90% of fights end up on the ground' are anecdotal improvisations at best. The battle of Tra Binh Dong is documented from a variety of firsthand participant-observors, but all it shows is that a
particular group of individuals, trained in a particular art, were lethally effective against a group of assailants. It does not tell you that their art was superior to any other art. Why would any one think that? What distinguished the Korean War Black Tiger commandos and the ROK Marines in the Vietnam war was that they trained specifically for the purpose of killing their antagonists under a variety of battlefield conditions, including the possession of weapons by those antagonists. It was their training, not simply the technical content of the art itself, which enabled them to fatally damage so many of their enemies under very unpleasant CQ combat conditions. From early days, the Korean military emphasized training for this kind of outcome. The form that military TKD took reflects this emphasis. But do you really think that a trainee who spent four years earning a first dan in this particular form of TKD, but was not subject to realistic, dangerous training of the kind the ROK military was, would have performed
remotely as well at Tra Binh Dong?
IWhat's strange (maybe not overly convincing) is you can find case after case of video footage of BJJ defeating every other style, usually in a crushing manner. The striker throws a few kicks, the BJJ guy absorbs them and clinches, down they go, and the striker is submitted within 45 seconds--every time. I have looked (perhaps not hard enough) but I can't seem to find ANY MA crushing BJJ like that. I think people absorb that concept and it does influence the choice on what style they choose (rightly or wrongly).
Look, I
agree with you on thisĀexcept that I don't really find it strange. Take Mas Oyama, who used to stun bulls with fist strikes as a demonstration of the power he could generate. BJJ or not, I would very much not want to have gotten into a fight with someone who could do that. But would Oyama ever have gotten into MMA competition? Very unlikely: in his own domain, he ruled completely, as an icon of Japanese karate in its most unapologetically brutal form. He would have had no interest in the MMA world, he had nothing to prove to anyone. And the best TMAists of the present are in the same situation. I look at someone like Geoff Thompson or Iain AndersonĀthey aren't interested in the particular kind of sport competittion that MMA involves.
A lot of TMAists aren't!!!
As I said in my earlier post, the crucial test would be, some reasonably successful MMAist of, say, the BJJ persuasion up against one of the bloodier-handed veteran of Tra Binh Dong, or one of the surviving silent killers of the Black Tiger assassination missions that made the North Koreans sufficently worried about ROK MAists to murder several of the original Kwan founders during the Korean War. No rules, and to the deathĀessentially the conditions you specified in your post, in fact. But in all such cases, the point is that the people I'm talking about were as effective as they were because they were trained in a particular way. They
practiced for that kind of fighting, night and day; they were the best of the best because of that training. The art itself had to be able to support that kind of killing effectiveness, technically speaking, but unless you trained the way the ROK trained its spec ops and commando units, you would not get anything like the same performance. What is documented, flashlock, is not the effectiveness of any particular art, but the effectiveness of particular
practitioners of that art. Tra Binh Dong is about the 11th ROK Marines. Had they been the same MAists, but trained to use their techs in a fashion comparable to current WTF sparring matches, how likely do you think it would be that the battle at TBD would have gone the way it did?
IEveryone is adding grappling and ground game, or claiming that they had it all the while--but BJJ isn't adding any of their techniques, at least not that I have seen. Why is that?
All I can say is, everything I've read on MT from people who are very au courant with this kind of sport competition suggests that striking techs are playing an increasingly important role in MMA competition, and that many victors in recent tournament competition have won by applications of striking-based attacks of a kind quite different from what BJJ practitioners were winning with in the early years of MMA compeition circuits. If I'm wrong abou this, plenty of others will chime in, for sure! I have to say, I'm not really interested in sport competition...
IWhen I first asked myself these questions, I was trying to dismiss BJJ--I just didn't believe the hype. Obviously, I've been swayed!
Let the neg rep points rain down upon my grateful head!
People on MT don't generally neg rep anyone simply because of a particular position they take or opinion they defend, so far as I can tell. But there are certain ways of presenting and defending your opinion, and there are other ways. If you're having a problem with neg rep, it maybe suggests that there's a problem with how you're talking to the other discussants, more than what you're actually saying. If it doesn't bother you, fine; but in the end, you're probably going to get more people to at least hear you out if you monitor your presentation a bit more carefully than those red dots suggest you've been doing. Just my suggestion; you're free to ignore it, but I really do think you'd have a better chance of getting a fair hearing for your ideas if you tried to avoid doing whatever you've been doing so far in presenting them....
Not saying hapkido: the idea actually has come up in many different cultures over the centuries, but one thing IS for certain: HKD had already covered this ground in Korea before Bruce "invented it" in San Francisco 
). 
