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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3466676" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure I can.  I can just look at who got trounced and why.  I can discount martial arts from Achaemenian Persia in favor of say, those practiced in Macedonian Greece and I don't feel particularly racist or culturist in doing so because warfare is something concrete above my biases.  If I'm dead at the end of it and Conan now owns my wife and possessions, you have fairly good evidence that my martial process isn't quite up to Conan's.With the exception of Muay-Thai, none of those are notably Eastern.  Ju-jitsu in its modern form is less than 100 years old, and as you note it was the Brazillian style most influenced by western grappling that ended up contributing the most.  Muay-Thai is interesting to me in that it represents exactly the sort of way I'd expect a successful martial art to develop, and its culture and history contrasts sharply to the sorts of martial arts that took hold in America during the first wave of eastern martial arts.  Rather, it looks alot less like a peasant means of self-defense, ritual atheletics, or temple mysticism, and has a history much more like Western sport arts like boxing, wrestling, and so forth.It's interesting that you bring up something like Sambo and Judo, which are themselves not only modern in derivation, and Westernize, but also martial arts which are themselves deliberately created mixed-martial arts.  But, let me return to your original quote once again and hit it from another even more ironic direction.Discounting martial-arts from any other region is exactly the attitude of the practicioners, and ultimately the root problem, in the classical Chinese and Japanese martial arts that so fascinate the Katana fan-boys.  If I'm somewhat exagerrating the superiority of martial arts from every other region of the world over those of Japan and China, I'm only doing so to prove the point that contrary to popular culture in the US, those classical Chinese and Japanese martial arts are neither particularly unique nor necessarily admirable as martial arts, successful, and more highly developed than comparable traditions elsewhere.Yeah, I've heard the excuses.  Early MMA competitions had far fewer constraints, and incidently were even better and more conclusive proofs of my point.  People who practiced what fanboys in the US (or Japan for that matter) thought of a 'martial arts' before the MMA competitions got there butts kicked, proving many of the things I'd always heard all along.  If hooking and gouging and chokeholds and so forth were allowed and MMA was a death sport, the result still wouldn't look like a martial arts film or a Shaolin demonstration of fighting technique.In other words, it is far more Westernized in its philosophy than the martial arts Bruce Lee was raised on.  Jeet Kune Do is one of the few serious 'Do's out there that might actually teach you something about self-defence, but it is also a deliberately created modern MMA whose striking techniques and training methods for the most part look alot like Western boxing. That is certainly part of it, but the problem goes back long before the arts got to the US - as Bruce Lee recognized.</blockquote>

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