Okay, I'm back at my computer, so I can reply more fully. This may take a while, because you keep jumping between attacks. When I reply to one, you point at the other and say, "What about that, though?" So, I reply to that one, and you point back at the other, and say, "Yeah, but what does that have to do with the other thing?"
So, I'll try to hit the major points all at once for you.
Firstly, Nihon Goshin Aikido is not the same as the art simply titled "Aikido" (Aikido is both a single art and a designation of a group of arts, so it gets confusing). I've explained this before in threads you participated in, so you should be aware of this. So, any time you bring up something that's a common perception of Aikido - whether accurate or not - is rarely going to be relevant to NGA. There are no common perceptions of NGA - we're a relative unknown in the MA world, existing mostly in the eastern seabord of the US, with some outliers in 3 other states, I think.
Next, you keep coming back to an approach to training for the principle of aiki and the movement related to that principle. I understand your basic objection to it, but you make two major errors in your argument:
- You keep ignoring that we all - yep, even those training for MMA - sometimes "pretend" as attackers. We feed drills with exactly the situation the drill calls for. Some - yes, some, but I'll get to that later - of the drills for practicing aiki use a specific kind of attack. It involves over-commitment of the weight forward, to train not adding muscle in an aiki flow (I can address why that is if you want, but won't here - it would take us off the topic at hand). This overcommitment is most likely to happen in one of 4 scenarios: drunk, madder than hell, untrained/uncoordinated, or have been drawn into it. The last one is what we work toward, but can't be initially trained - you need the movement before you can do that. So, the drills use movement based upon an actual overcommitment that actually happens. But nobody does it during training unless they screw up, so your suggestion that we should just wait for it to happen in training, and then use that to teach is beyond silly.
- You keep taking that one part of our training, and acting like it's all we do. You make that assumption despite the fact that we - you and I - have actually discussed some of the other things we do. You just keep acting like all we do is wait for someone to overcommit, or we're screwed. And, yet, you know that's not the case the same way you know we use that overcommitment - I've told you.
Thirdly, you bring up the problem of failure of one response as if it's a failure of the art. Okay, so this is really a continuation of the previous one, but I needed a new paragraph to keep things organized. We let things fail. That's part of the flow of our movement (part of what we're working on with that aiki flow). If I get resistance to an arm bar, I know what that resistance is leading me to, and I let them fail right into the next technique. That principle applies across what we do - across the way I teach. If there's not a good grappling answer available, we'll beat them. We have options across a wide range - actually, not dissimilar to the range MMA works with (striking, takedowns, groundwork), though we take a softer flow to it and don't usually train it with the same intensity.
Okay, now to the one you seem to have gotten lost in the middle of: that aiki can be stopped by someone who understands it. That's not as odd as you think. Remember, it's not the entirety of what we do (I covered that above). I'm not great at Judo, but I can take away hip and shoulder throws absolutely unless they are simply strong enough to haul me against my will. That's not a flaw in Judo, that I can stymie those. If I'm absolutely stymieing those, I'm very open to something like osoto gari. That's not much different from NGA's situation when aiki is taken away. We have other tools to use. The issue is that aiki - when your opponent knows that's what you train, and has any understanding of it - can almost remove opportunities absolutely. I say almost, because they'll sometimes - really rarely - still make the mistake of overcommitment. But it's far more common among the untrained, angry, and those who don't know what we're about to do. I've verified that last one regularly with new students coming in. They make that mistake more when they walk in the door (even if they have prior training) than they do 6 months or a year later. Avoiding that mistake is part of our training. So, while you see it as a problem that it isn't available against each other, it's actually a result of training. It would be odd, wouldn't it, if a Judoka was as easy to throw as a Karateka?
Lastly (at least I think - I'm losing track of your jumping back and forth), you keep jumping back and forth. Pick one and let's discuss it awhile if you want to get somewhere. You usually have some good points to make, and I appreciate you being willing to push a point, but for jimminy sake, push one, rather than batting two of them back and forth as if they are the same thing.
