I re-read my posts, because nothing I have said lines up with what you are claiming I said. Allow me to bold the relevant portion you missed:
I see how this can be read two ways, possibly. My statement had the emphasis on COMPARED. For example, “I am superman in terms of strength compared to my 5 year old niece” does not mean I think I am superman. My sentence was more a statement of how bad American men are at fighting in almost 95% of street fighting videos where they display not even basic fighting skills. emphasized BASIC skills numerous times and have not once made claims about how awesome Russians are at streetfighting like you are all claiming I did.
I’m starting to question your reading ability, since I already stated that I get this impression mainly from videos, and I even listed a few videos demonstrating what I am talking about, and even debunked a video you posted demonstrating what you erroneously thought was a Russian streetfight (which I notice you conveniently did not acknowlege being wrong in any way).
You seem to be making a distinction without a difference to my apparently dyslexic read, but fine, let me play back what it appears you think -
The typical “experienced” American streetfighter/bar tough can take on a SEAL and have a 50 50 chance of coming out on top but that same person will make the “typical” Slavic “streetfighter” which you define as not people who are getting into big fights on the street but something else, look like amateur MMA. So typical Slavic fighter, who just knows the basics, is MMA level compared to the typical experienced American streetfighter, who in turn can stand up to a SEAL. Your basis for this confident assessment of what happens in the real world is a selection of internet videos posted to youtube. Your knowledge of Russian culture and the sport of “Russian Fist Fighting” and what is that ancient tradition versus what we see (at least the second of the links) is a bunch of idiots getting into a brawl on a busy street corner with pedestrians and cars going by is to be deferred to because after all, you’ve watched things on youtube!
If accounts on the Web and in pro wrassler biographies are to be believed, bar toughs didn’t fare too well against old time wrasslers like Harley Race. Of course “pretend” fighting every night would make unlikely one of these guys would blow up quickly. This doesn’t speak to the fighting skills of the average guy, but it does make me think that barroom brawlers often aren’t as tough as they think.
your confusion probably stems from mixing two conversations, bar fighter/experienced streetfighter vs SEAL, and average American vs Average Russian. The experienced streetfighter from the SEAL hypothetical, is not the same as the typical YT video of inept Americans who cannot throw basic punches properly. Does that help you?
I’ve seen a few, was involved in one that must have been more than 50 people fighting, although I just had to club a guy a few times, he was kicking a friend’s head in, literally. I managed to get my friend off the floor and into the bathroom to wash the blood off his face. There were bottles, glasses, chairs and tables flying around, guys fighting with bits of glass sticking out of their heads, the whole place erupted after a girl (young woman) started hitting a friend of mine (also a young woman), their boyfriends joined in, then their boyfriends’ friends, then everyone. The place was a huge room, converted into a bar, so could fit maybe 100 or more.
Three police vans and two police cars turned up. They had to be busy as fights were breaking out after they’d gone in to stop another one in a different part of the pub. It took about an hour to get everyone to calm down. Vodka was going for £1.50 a triple that night.
That time 90% of people got involved, even the women. It was nuts.
Other times it’s been a few people in or just outside a pub, sometimes strangers and sometimes trying to settle a feud. I was in Blockbusters in Keighley (a big rugby town and the most violent place in the UK, per capita), around 12:30pm on a Saturday, and a few guys fell out of a pub and started brawling, in between the shoppers with their kids in tow. That was quite surreal. I lived in a nearby village called Silsden and there, Saturday night, outside The Bridge Public House, people would get drunk and try to settle their differences; feuds that were sometimes years old, between families. Sometimes things would escalate and dozens of people would get involved, nights out in Keighley were strange if you didn’t see a brawl.
I lived in Epsom and regularly saw pub fights there, fortunately people never used glasses, knives or any weapons except their fists and feet. It was a regular enough occurrence to not merit mentioning the next day.
I didn’t get involved with any fights, after I’d trained in Su Yu Kai. It was always cool leaving the gym after a good session, and going out for a drink with other karate or kickboxing friends is pretty cool.
Oh, there was this one time I was a an ex-girlfriend’s family ‘do’ in a big pub garden. They were very cockney, fiercely working class, but decent. We’d all been drinking for a few hours, when a fight breaks out the other side of the area. There’s one guy, tall and with a long reach, in the centre, throwing punches like a semi-pro, and every guy who goes in to tackle him is knocked to the ground with one punch. After he ran out of guys to hit (I think he floored 5 or 6), he walked out, past us. Apparently I pushed my g/f back so hard she hit her head on the wall, as I got into a defensive stance. I knew what I was going to do, if needs be, which is not try to throw a punch at him! A sharp kick to the groin and then try to get in, under his arms, to elbow him in the face or the heel of my palm to his nose, but the guy either didn’t see me or wanted out by that point.
On the other corner (well, at the other end of the bar) we have rogerbox
Now, before you scream that I misquoted you, I plead guilty, I’m deliberately taking only bites out of context for this quote to demonstrate my point.
The full quote is
You are making this huge deal that people are claiming seals are unarmed supermen, when in fact, no one has made that comparison.
(There are a few who have been sort of the they are super killers, but not any of the ones you are actually debating.)
Doesn’t it seem a tad bit ironic that you are objecting so strenuously to the use of seals as a measurement of an outer edge of fighters, compared to the average, when you utilize hyperbole in your arguments? Claiming that the average Russian street fighter is on the amateur MMA level is silly and then getting in extremely technical arguments which only you can follow does not help your cause.
Compared to the average guy, the difference among betting into a fight with a pro boxer, a MMA, a Seal or anyone is the NFL (except for maybe the field goal kicker) is indistinguishable in a fight, to the average guy. It might as well be superman.
You haven’t made a good case for what the average Russian street fighter is. The level of the “average” Russian street fighter probably is higher than the average US one, as everyone but Astro agrees, that’s not a high hurdle.
However, your entire argument seems to be that because you explicitly used the magic word “compared,” your hyperbole is permitted while anyone else who uses “compared” implicitly is wrong. That seems to be a strange hill to die on.
That fight probably broke out for a “reason”, and the folks fighting him had some personal conflict with something he said or whatever. He wasn’t any more interested in fighting you than you were in fighting him. He just wanted out of there in one piece. Sure, you couldn’t know that for certain, and definitely makes sense to maneuver your girlfriend clear and assume a defensive position in case, but I doubt he was going around punching everyone he saw just because he could.
That’s why I asked the question in the first place. Very occasionally people get hurt for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but as DSeid points out, those numbers are pretty small.
I thing this fight may be over except for the shouting, but I have to thank whoever brought up Starbucks-sucking suburbanites. I’m totally stealing that.
My analogy of being superman to the little girl had nothing to do with the SEALs, it was about the Russians and Americans. If trying to criticize me and make corny jokes, shouldn’t you try to read the thread and follow the discussion?
Not really, since I didn’t say they were on the amateur MMA level, and in repeated threads fighting in general has shown to be a huge blind spot for the SDMB posting body, since the threads are typically filled with old-fashioned BS.
It might be indistinguishable to you, but I thought this forum was about fighting ignorance? I’d definitely bet that a lot of people making jokes about me and arguing against me on this thread probably are not as knowlegeable about fighting and martial arts as I am, but blather on anyway. (I have already shown that what was presented as a “Russian Streetfight” was nothing of the sort for example). As far as I know I’m also the only Russian martial artist on the SDMB.
True. But that is very hard to do and would be very time intensive to watch tons of videos and post tons of links, and then I would be accused of cherry picking anyway. Go to sherdog or the underground forums and ask some of the most serious enthusiasts of fighting in our era who is the better fighter, and I guarantee overwhelmingly those guys will say the average Russian streetfighter is better. It’s common knowlege in the martial arts community, as well as being common sense because Russia is an economically disadvantaged country compared to the US. The fact that you guys got so offended by my non-controversial statement means you are either ignorant or you are Americans whose manhood feels besmirched or something, because getting in a tizzy over something non-controversial and obvious doesn’t make much sense.
No everyone doesn’t agree, since I keep getting called on that statement. Obviously.
I only care that people’s misreading of my phrasing, gives my phrase a meaning that I did not mean: I did not mean that average streetfights in Russia display amateur MMA ability. You guys pigpiled on that, when I said “COMPARED TO AMERICANS”. I actually don’t know what hyperbole you say I don’t permit in others, if I have mis-read someone’s intent, feel free to correct me.
I’ll grant you there is some maybe deliberate misrepresentation of your remarks to point out inconsistencies, but this is what bothers me.
What the hell is a “Russian streetfighter” if not a crowd of Russians fighting in a street? If you can briefly answer that in some meaningful way, you will go a long way toward shoring up your credibility.
A streetfight by my reckoning, is two or more people who are fighting out of anger, with the intention to hurt as much as possible with no rules agreed upon. Russian fist fighting is a traditional sport in which large groups engage in fistcuffs with rules, and the point is not to render an opponent unconscious, but to experience comeraderie, and to display and build toughness. It is literally boxing in groups and goes back hundreds of years. In similar traditions, Russians would jacket wrestle in fields, and sometimes people would get seriously hurt, but that is not the main point, and that doesn’t make it a streetfight.
Traditional Russian fistfighting takes place in open fields, though.
Look, youtube videos (often staged events and obviously highly selected) are not much evidence of what actually occurs in the real world, let alone what is “typical” or “average” (… and studying “Russian martial arts” is of no value whatsoever to knowing what happens in Russian bars and in street fights.) The reality is that you have NO more real knowledge about real fights in Slavic countries than I do (which is very very little indeed). Your confidence that watching a bunch of youtube videos and studying martial arts including “Russian martial arts” gives you some knowledge of what actually is “typical” there is … let’s just call it “misplaced.” It is essentially someone watching some old kung fu movies and studies some Asian martial arts believing that they now know about the skill level of the typical man who gets into fights in Hong Kong.
That said, one of the two links I offered up, while not in a field, might actually be some version of that sport*, but the other clearly shows a brawl breaking out on a busy street corner, not any organized traditional event of two groups boxing. And a sloppy affair it is. Also poor evidence of what “typically” happens though.
My “confusion” is not my confusion. You state A>B (American streetfighter beats a SEAL … and anyone who thinks otherwise is a SEAL fan boy who is claiming that SEAL are comic book superheros) and then later state C>>A (Russian streetfighter looks like MMA level compared to American streetfighter). You state C (Russian streetfighter)=just knowing the basics.
You do know how these basic math statements work?
You ARE then stating that C>>A, that the Russian who just knows the basics looks like at least MMA level compared to SEALs, spluttering that you said the statements in different posts notwithstanding.
It’s really very very silly.
*Not sure what it says about typical Russians who fight that groups of people selected for an interest in the sport of “Russian fistfighting” don’t seem to know how to throw a punch though.
I’ve already corrected you on this, but you refuse to read. Just because an American is in a video of a fight, doesn’t mean he’s experienced at it-indeed most Americans in fights on video look like it is their first time. So it is ABC and D and your mathematical proof does not apply to the discussion because you are claiming “experienced American streetfighter” and “guys on youtube fighting”, which is not the same group. Most of the terrible YT fighters are inexperienced and that is why they would not beat a SEAL, or anybody else.
And if you can’t see the diference between watching a lot of street fight videos to learn about what happens in street fights and watching kung fu movies, I think you’d do better “contributing” to another thread. One is choreographed and irellevant, and one is what actually happens. In real life.
Something that I have often found amusing is how effective a good offense can be even when no real skill is involved. I have seen on more than one occassion a relatively tall guy, in good shape with a good reach beat the hell out of much more experienced fighters simply by going in and throwing a barage of punches as fast as he can throw them. We were always taught as kids that a good offense is the best defense.
No one has said anything about an American “in a video of a fight” any more than that anyone has claimed SEALs are supermen. The only video comment has been your making a judgement of the average Russian based on what you have seen on YouTube videos … amusingly however you fail to comprehend that just because a Russian is in a video of a fight, doesn’t mean he’s typical … indeed the odds are he is not. Amazingly not every country has every doofus carrying a smart phone around all the time ready to take a video of everything (Russia’s smart phone ownership rate is roughly 1/2 of ours, for example, and other Slavic countries are down below 1/3rd).
On here at least we agree! Not much being gained here.