First off, this is the post where SoCo can really bag on me for hassling him for being mean.
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Originally Posted by
Smoking Gun
The Asian 'grandmaster ' system is a Chinese confucian parochial hang over, that has more in common with foot binding, communism, polygamy, drowning unwanted female babies, and making capsules from human foetuses.
Communism? And are you talking about placentas? WTF?
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enlightened Bruce, who introduced 'gong fu', famously rebuked that 'traditional styles look good, but simply don't work', and basically trashed everything that he learnt from Asia and built a style around Western boxing, wrestling, kick boxing and modern strength training. In the West traditional Chinese martial arts were as quickly discredited as much as they had become popularised. They are totally unscientific and illogical systems, founded by narcissistic megalomaniacs that want to pretend that they are the spiritual vanguard of all combative arts.
Founded by? I'm not sure I should even expect a citation.
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But more to the point, why would you want to learn combat arts from a culture (China) that has proven itself incapable and unwilling to fight wars (like world war 2)
Um, you are aware that the Chinese that took over the country were fighting the Japanese before the U.S., and more than the Chinese that the U.S. considered its allies? And that this was the reason many Chinese at the time didn't believe in the GMD? You weren't. Oh dear, you seemed to know so much about this.
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in the way that sections of the West has done?
Sections of the West?
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It's simply not in the Chinese dna for men to voluntarily sacrifice their lives in war for freedom
Mostly, the only wars that can legitimately be claimed, a century after their time, for freedom, are rebellions.
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or to have any success. Look at the history of the Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, Xiong nu, and virtually every other nomadic tribal culture, that invaded, subjugated and conquered the Chinese despite being technologically and numerically inferior.
Wow, in a few millennium, the Chinese were defeated a few times, but maintained the exact same cultural and largely continuous political system? Wow, what utter failure! Not to mention that between those times, the Imperial state was keeping those same nomads under control. Not to mention that, in the periods where the Manchus and Mongols took China, the mongols and the Manchus were technologically superior as far as advances in tactics and strategy, organization and training of armies, than the Chinese of the time, but could not rule China any differently than it had been ruled before. There are few civilizations to maintain that kind of continuity over that long a time, and most of those are long gone.
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Despite what the posers on this forum say, it wasn't MMA that destroyed Chinese Martial arts, it was boxing.
Most of the westerners that brought kung fu to the states or popularized it had fairly extensive experience in boxing. Do you get paid by the assumption?
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Most MMA fights are dreadful, and the basic combat skills are diminutive and non existent. A good boxer would beat the hell out of a 'mma' fighter, as would a good thai boxer, and western wrestler.
The second most vital experience one can gain from martial artists is the awareness that martial arts is full of egotistical morons who join a school to make themselves skilled, but instead stay with it to feel special and tell everyone else why they are wrong. The first most vital experience is recognizing the value of the martial artists who don't fall into that trap. Thanks for your vital and excellent help with the second.
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I reject any claims of 'martial arts' having anything to do with war, as you don't know what really ticks people to go there to begin with.
Excellent first post. I especially like your ending with a refusal to engage any actual sources or ideas about the development of these arts. Books are for the debbil.