I usually nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
I agree that martial arts are not the best way to learn how to win a street fight. Yes, you can learn some valuable skills that will help you win a fight, but there are better ways to do that.
The skills someone gets from 4 years of martial arts are valuable in a street fight. However, if that student had instead spent those 4 years in classes specifically designed to teach street fighting skills, they would be much better prepared for a street fight.
Do I think that someone who answers that they themselves–but no one else–ask deserves placement in the :dubious: column? Why yes, I do.
Really, that particular affectation is a sure sign of mendacity. I submit Donald Rumsfeld as the archetype.
The focus of this thread seems to be on the offensive skills. Long ago, when I studied MA (a mix of Tae Kwon Doe and Aikido) the focus was on defensive skills. How do you keep an attacker from landing a solid blow? We learned deflecting and dodging techniques, and participated in demostrations where we were challenged to strike a prepared black belt, and none of us could get a solid hit through.
The most important thing to me if I ever get in a fight (which I never have) would be to stay on my feet. I think martial arts training would help that a lot.
“…some who answers questions…”
Ugh. 
I think this is the essence of the point I am trying to make.
I took martial arts as a kid. I also spent a lot of time learning to spackle over holes I punched in the wall when I got angry. Not every issue can be resolved by KA-ra-te Grasshopper.
The essence of my point was the last part: “. . . have fun becoming a regular at the hospital.” You’ll get good at fighting, but your quality of life will suck.
I prefer the route I’ve taken, where I won’t have crippling injuries by the time I’m middle aged, and I won’t have a string of assaults and lawsuits behind me. My training is effective enough that it’s saved my ass when someone was trying to kill me. If that’s not good enough for you, fine, go do it your way. It’s not my problem unless you try assualting me for one of your training fights.
I’ve been in one contest of fisticuffs in my life, and because of my judo and bjj training, I could have literally killed the big guy without breaking a sweat. Without that training, the little guy getting the shit kicked out of him would have been hospitalized. So, I can’t agree with the notion that martial arts are useless.
Again, as I’ve said over and over on the SDMB, the whole “street” vs. “training” shtick is a load of crap: send Mr. sucker-punching tough guy after a wrestler. I can tell you who will win: the wrestler. “Training” beats “street” when the training is good. When it isn’t, the practitioner is fecked.
The fact is that wrestling is a martial art, and wrestling is amazingly detached from anything close to the real world. Yet, I would rather have a college wrestler behind me than some effin’ biker or psycho sucker puncher.
I’ve relayed the story of Jigoro Kano enough times. He understood what matters.
I don’t think you can automatically say x beats y. If you take two individuals, there are a number of factors that go into determining who has the advantage:
natural physical ability - doing nothing else, how big, strong fast, agile is each fighter
skill and training - a weaker opponent can can beat someone with skill, but at a certain point, raw size and power can just dominate
mental - kind of the “crazy beats big” thing. How much abuse can the guy take?
There are others but it’s the combination of all these things that makes a difference.
Let me give you an example. Freshman year a little 140 lb wrestler and a 220 lb bodybuilder were messing around wrestling. The wrestler was highly skilled but it was like watching someone wrestle a tree. He’d shoot for the guys legs and the unskilled body builder just couldn’t be budged.
If things were automatic, then this thread wouldn’t exist. Yesterday, on break.com, I saw a video of a guy beating the hell out of two slobs, one of whom sucker punched the girl he was with. Sucker punchers: 0 Martial arts: 2.
The fact is this: if we want to talk absolutes, then we must talk absolutes. Wrestling is a martial art far removed from the real world. I’ve never heard of a wrestler losing a fight to a non-wrestler, and that includes a thread on the SDMB asking for examples of such. Therefore, the claim that martial arts is bullshit is a nonstarter.
Now we’re in the position of injecting some more “reality” into the discussion. One thing that is true (as Jigoro Kano would have noted) is that one fights as one trains; if one trains to pull punches, one isn’t going to punch effectively in a fight. Another thing that is true is that being a psycho isn’t going to improve one’s balance or make one’s bones stronger; an O soto gari with the throat as a control point is going to make the occipital lobe and/or the medulla oblongata the first contact point with the ground in a very, very nasty throw. That shit is effin’ crippling; it’s an ogdamn frightening throw.
I recall a recent thread in a similar vein where somebody claimed that his brother was a tough guy because he could sucker punch people. Now, that’s not tough, and there’s no indication that the brother would stand a chance against somebody ready for that bullshit. Indeed, even his approach was designed to get only the clueless: “Look I don’t wan’t any trouble…” then SUCKER PUNCH! Yeah, that shit don’t fly: let that P.O.S. try that nonsense on a student of Geoff Thompson and he won’t stand a chance. Thompson will teach you how to set up a proper sucker punch.
Ambushing people isn’t being tough. If it were, I could wait and run you over with my car and claim victory. Unless one is a soldier at war, ambushing is what sub-human shit bags do to pretend they’re tough.
Comparing street fighting with martial arts is nonsensical at best. It is trivially obvious that given two opponents who differ only in the ability to throw an accurate punch, the accurate puncher is more likely to succeed. It’s stupid to argue otherwise. With the exception of issues such as one fights like one trains*, the rest of the discussion comes down to ad hoc nonsense and non sequiters to make the case against martial arts. Psychos take martial arts, so the psycho vs. martial arts guy scenario is bullshit. Martial artists can sucker punch, so worthless sub-human shitbag sucker puncher vs. martial artist is bullshit. Martial artists have friends, belt buckles, keys, thumbs, elbows, and all sorts of other lethal weapons. Hell, I’ve got a watch band that is specifically designed as a lethal weapon, and I know how to us it. Would it be easier to sucker punch somebody? Fuck yes, and I’ll have my thumb through your eyeball before you know the fight has started. Why? because that’s what I’ve been told to do by my judo instructor, and I sure as shit won’t ignore that if I’m in a bad way.
I’ll rip your ears off; I’ll gouge out your eyes; I’ll set you up for a proper sucker punch; I’ll surprise you with a weapon; I’ll run away and then break both of your girlfriend’s knees; I’ll clench my teeth on your throat and not let up until I feel your carotid artery pumping blood into my mouth. I’ll bite your balls off if I have to, and I won’t feel bad for it. And I can tell you this, unless you catch me with a cowardly ambush, I’ll be in position to do the damage. I’ll be on top. I’ll be in the postion of power, where I can gouge out your eyes but you can’t reach mine. Hell, if I must, I’ll make you learn the hard way what exactly a mercury switch is for.
You got friends? I’ve got friends, too, and while your friends are trying to get past my friends, I’ll be crushing your windpipe with my teeth. That’s how off base the very question of martial arts vs. “street” is: psycho, sucker-punching street boy may be tough, but he doesn’t know how to make a car bomb, and I do. So, does that make my kung fu better than his? Am I tougher because I don’t value human life, I know how to hide a body, and I know how to use a reverse phone book? Am I tougher because I’ll run over his kids with my car and laugh about it? Or because I know what poison hemlock looks like, and I know how to use it “accidently”? And, most importantly, rather than getting sucker punched by him, I’ll make space and then shove a broken bottle in his liver when he’s taking a piss. Does that mean sucker-punch boy ain’t tough any more?
While I’m not going to hint at what is actually true in the above discourse, it should fully illustrate the nonsensical idea of comparing “street” fighting with martial arts. Sucker punching doesn’t make a person tough any more than I might be tough for slipping some wild “herbs” into his spegetti sauce. The two aren’t comparable. As I noted above, given two opponents exactly equal except for, say, the ability to throw a punch, the punch thrower is most likely to win. Of course, if we have two opponents identical except for that one has been taught to not throw punches…well, you can guess the rest.
For all that, the essence of steet fighting is taking people by surprise, ambushing them, sucker punching, and similar dirty tricks. But pulling dirty tricks doesn’t make somebody tough compared to another person, it just makes the attacker a criminal fuck who should be taken out back and shot. Saying that sucker-punch boy is tougher than martial-arts man is as meaningless as saying I’m tougher because I’ll surprise sucker-punch boy with a field-hockey stick to his temple.
The ideas aren’t comparable. It makes no sense to suggest they are.
*Again, learn about the genesis of judo.
Each of us is somewhere on the ranking system unknown to all of us between number one, and number six billion two hundred eighty four million, one hundred and thirty two thousand seventy eight. You don’t know until after the fight who is whom. I knew a man who actually killed a man in hand to hand combat. He was in the army, it was a war, and everyone involved was out of bullets. His opinion on his own skills was, “There is always some guy who can kick your ass. That day, I was the guy.”
It isn’t martial art that is full of shit. It’s martial artists who are full of shit. But only a tiny bit more than everyone else. And some of them are on your personal list of guys who can kick your ass, even if they are full of it. Play nice, make friends. Run away. If you find out none of those are going to work, then don’t try not to get hurt. Try to do the hurting. Winners of fights find out that they were stabbed, or even shot after the fight is over. The looser knows as soon as it happens.
Most of the more vigorous martial arts are good conditioning, and can increase the effectiveness of your ability to run away.
Tris
It’s spelled spaghetti.
Please don’t kill me.
<raises hand>
Mr. Africanus, could you bite out his neck please? I’ve always wanted to see one of those?
Nonsense. My college roomate was a wrestler. I think he wrestled around 145. He also had a habit of being a bit of a troublemaker when he was drinking. Well, he got into a fight with some alumni one night and from the looks of his face, he clearly lost.
The think about wrestling though is that wrestlers train very intensely. More intensely than your basic three nights a week at the dojo guy. I would not want to fuck with any martial artist who trains like high school and colegiate wrestlers train.
The essence of street fighting is to win at all costs so you aren’t the one being driven to the hospital or morgue.
As for the rest of your rant, I’ll assume you are not, in fact, mentally ill so I think you don’t really know if you would do those things until you were put into a position where you had to. Which is part of the problem, IMHO, with non contact martial arts training. I think we are in agreement that one fights how one trains.
As for the “psycho” thing, no, being crazy doesn’t make your bones stronger or anything, but it does make a persona bit more dangerous if they are so intent on hurting you they don’t care if they injure themselves in the process.
So to sum up, martial arts is not bullshit, provided you train properly, with the proper intensity and conditioning over an extended period of time. It is an athletic activity so natural attributes like speed, size and height will factor in as well.
Bingo.
I’ll make this simple: I’ll take a veteran 300 + lbs bouncer over some mosquito-sized superduper, black belt extrordinaire in five oriental disciplines, nine times out if ten. I allow a bat to the back of the bouncer’s head for the one-of.
Oh, and Why Not? Shitty as they’re likely to be, you should give science-fiction novels a shot. Or else set-up a traveling tent, with the feature attraction being your nine year old fighting-phenom taking on all comers.
I’ll place a bet right here just how many times that’s going to happen if you do (assuming you could do it without braking the law): ONCE. I’m a 6’3’, 200lbs. fifty year old has been and would decline the offer though. Just not right beating on kids…have a sixteen year old myself, almost my size though 30 lbs lighter, took karate for five years as youngster (black belt, the whole shebang). We tussle now and again for fun, but when push comes to shove, his greatest skill is saying: “I give Daddy, I give. Promise.” At which point I have him totally pinned and I’m tickling the hell outtta him with my free hand.
'cept we do it all over again…over and over again. Boys will be boys I guess…and I’m still one of them.
Mind you, I fully expect him, at his current development rate to be able to kick my ass about five years down the line. He’ll be be bigger, stronger and savvier, while I’ll just be oldr and weaker.
Way of the wold. That’s all.
I don’t think two (or more) against one is what the OP had in mind.