"Sixty-five yards, with these instruments? Squirt-guns would be deadlier at fifty. Consider, my friend, you and I are banded together to destroy life, not make it eternal."
- Mark Twain 'A Tramp Abroad'
FormosaNeijia has a really great martial arts blog. Far eclipsing my dumbass Gamespace thing here.
*Tabby shivers uncontrollably*
Recently FNJ posted this:
I find it hard to have respect for people that don't work with some form of resistance. ... Practicing IMA against people that don't do what you do is hard. That's where the real material is found. That's the real meat of the practice. ... I often find that what people do works just as long as the opponent does exactly what is expected of them. So let's just be clear on this: if someone needs the opponent to do what they do in order to make their stuff work, then what they do isn't worth much is it?
I really agree in spirit. It should be as real as it can be. But I always have trouble with borders and boundaries. Because IMA shades off to the left into qi gong, yoga, meditation. And it fades off to the right into combative sports, reality self-defense, professional security work, military/police applications, weapons of all kinds, and finally totally annihilative self-induced Extinction Level Events.
Unlike FNJ, I have trouble drawing the lines. Of course when pushing hands it is silly to call someone out for using too much strength - unless you are his teacher and you are saying that to help him learn. My principle is the only time I ever say "you are using too much strength" is when he is the one getting the worse of the exchange.
But anyway, it seems that every single practice has some kind of rules, though I guess FNJ would say that rules don't rule out resistance. But then what is resistance? We want to compel somebody to accept an outcome that is against their will. Against their will. I wish I understood all this stuff.
I was once pushing hands with a very experienced guy who I had only just met, of a different IMA line, and for some reason he was tense enough that he was easy for me to bounce around. And at one point he said, seriously, "I feel I want to kill you." If we are pushing hands and he pulls a gun and shoots me, then he's doing "something I don't do", right? Or we're boxing and he signals his buddy to cream me with a lead pipe from behind - is that just a stupid, laughable example? It would be surprise resistance though, outside my expectation.
It seems there are always going to be boundaries or everything will just turn to shit. Obvious I guess. So what kind of boundaries allow for "realistic resistance training" while not risking making us into pansies or self-deluded fruitcakes as FNJ may be implying above?
Would the best, simplest, fairest thing be to insist on just basic "weapons equivalence" or "equipment equivalence"? As in: I am for you, sir, tomorrow at dawn. Will you have pistols or sabres? And at how many paces?
But what about inequalities in native inalienable endowments like size, speed, and killer instinct? Hmm but are these really inalienable? I remember a great Kurt Vonnegut story in which he describes a future world where everybody is forcibly equalized by law, pinpointing any special talent. For example, a great speaker must go around with his mouth full of rocks, a beautiful woman has to wear a hideous mask, a strong guy is wrapped in iron and lead collars and bands, and so on.
Well. No good answer.
