Right Reason

An Argument For More Boxing

Why more people should embrace boxing, from The Economist's 1843:

Boxing and canoeing are more energy-sapping, though less accessible. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, 48m Americans pulled on their running shoes in 2015 (the country has a similar proportion of joggers to Australia, with Britain trailing). By contrast, just 5m Americans strapped on a pair of boxing gloves.

Of course, I'd first suggest either Muay Thai or Brazilian jiu-jitsu. However, traditional boxing has certainly been proving itself as a wonderful crucible for learning many of the basic principles of combat sports and of fighting in general, one only need ask Cody Garbrandt or Conor McGregor. 

Meryl Streep's Casual Racism

‘Tis the season for Hollywood awards, which means ‘tis the season for celebrities saying silly things about politics. Today, it is Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes getting the buzz. Mollie Hemingway has a pretty good article at The Federalist critiquing Ms. Streep’s speech. I link to it because it covers areas that I don’t feel necessary to write about.

I do agree that many Hollywood celebrities are “out of touch” and that so many of them wield their influence ham-fistedly when talking about politics. (For example, Leonardo DiCaprio would have been well-advised to not star himself, despite his own passion for the subject, in his documentary with The National Geographic on climate change.) However, I do think that it is a good thing that people who have the opportunities and resources to do so speak out about the things they hold dear. There is something admirable when people do so well and there is something nevertheless human when they do so poorly.

Civil society won’t be improved by removing that fallible human element, so I don't see how ranting about out-of-touch celebrities will do much good. We’re all out of touch in our own ways. That Hollywood celebrities are also should remind us of that and should make us question in what ways we fail to sympathize with our adversaries.

What I found genuinely grievous about Ms. Streep’s speech was the casual racism she displayed:

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

Unfortunately, racism is always obvious. Especially in the modern world we live in, racism tends to be a subtle bias. It seeps into our lives when we think quickly and most significantly when we bifurcate ‘those people’ from who we are.

In the United States, racism is when we shrug at yet another police-shooting in an inner-city slums because that’s where those violent people live or when we want to keep poor children out of select schools lest the children of those people bring down our school’s standards. Ms. Streep commits that tragic error when she bifurcates football and mixed martial arts from the rest of the population.

Rather than sympathizing with ‘those people’ and giving them the respect they deserve, Ms. Streep relies on silly stereotypes. Those sterotypes are also not true. A good fraction of the fighters, say, in the UFC are non-white foreigners. José Aldo, Yoel Romaro, Ronaldo Souza, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Fabricio Werdum, Doo Ho Choi, Edson Barboza, Lyoto Machida, Rafael dos Anjos, Beneil Dariush, Kyoji Horiguchi, Anderson Silva, Amanda Nunes, and Francis Ngannou are all élite non-white foreigners. If we are to consider white foreigners, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Conor McGregor, Michael Bisping, Alexander Gustaffson, and Demian Maia are also among the élite. Turning to non-white Americans, Jon Jones, Demetrius Johnson, Daniel Cormier, Rory MacDonald, Cain Velasquez, Georges St-Pierre and Tyron Woodley also contribute to the amazing diversity mixed martial arts displays.

Whenever the UFC rolls into town, one can expect a show exhibiting the full rainbow, both cultural and genetic, of the human experience.

Maybe if she actually didn't rely on stereotypes, Ms. Streep would understand how martial arts has been enriched over the past generation because of the fact that America does not have a monopoly on martial-arts talent. Instead, she simply casts that duty to sympathize aside and treats of the people involved in terms of stereotypes. She fails to give mixed martial art’s foreign talent the credit they deserve and instead relegates them back-stage, as one would expect in a racist society.

Mixed martial arts is actually a very cosmopolitan sport and a sport largely made possible by the disruptive innovations of non-white foreigners. The entire sport found its genesis in the Gracie clan coming to America and creating a forum to advertise their own discipline, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Without a bunch of brown, poor, Portuguese-speaking martial artists coming to America, mixed martial arts would not have emerged in the ‘90s. To this day, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is the martial art most identifiable with mixed martial arts and the UFC.

One of the beautiful things about mixed martial arts, and of martial arts in general, is that it can be viewed as a pursuit of human excellence, and therefore of virtue. Just last year, the #OscarssoWhite controversy brought criticism upon the Oscar Academy for its all-white set of nominees a second year running. (It seems pertinent to the subject of my ruminations here to point out that Creed and Michael B Johnson were both deserving of at least a nomination.) Those concerns are largely lacking in mixed martial arts. Race did nothing to prevent Tyron Woodley defending his belt against Stephen Thompson at UFC 205 or to prevent Amanda Nunes, who is the UFC’s first LGBT champion, from knocking out Ronda Rousey inside of a round at UFC 206.

 

As Ms. Streep wisely noted: “And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” Hollywood is a place for the arts and, through the arts, Hollywood’s celebrities can enrich our civilization. However, when one of Hollywood’s prima inter pares uses that position to disparage other cultural aspects of that civilization, she becomes, at best, a bully. Unfortunately, in her speech, Ms. Streep became something worse, a racist bully.

MMA in New York: Illiberal Reform

As demonstrated in Thomas Leonard's Illiberal Reformers, the progressive tradition has as much to do with the pretense of knowledge, that is people believing they know better than others, than it has to do with beneficent concern for the poor. Although progressives may speak about how much they love the poor and how much they want to see a more humane society, that they are so often unwilling to respect the free will of those they proclaim to help demonstrates that their struggle originates from as much a selfish desire to remake society in their own image as one will find in any Ayn Rand novel.

The most recent exhibit in that tradition of illiberal reform is New York's ban on mixed martial arts. The state assembly recently voted to overturn the ban, but there are still commentators out there pleading for the governor, who has already signaled his approval of the bill, to veto the bill. Enter Nicole Gelinas' "Say No to Fight Club, New York":  

There is one final reason Mr. Cuomo should veto the bill: Legalizing mixed martial arts would be a stain on the state’s proud progressive heritage. New York was the first state in the union to prohibit drunken driving and to enact seatbelt laws. For more than a century, it has been a national leader in public health and workplace protections.

Is the Empire State no longer an enlightened standard setter but so desperate a laggard that it will allow citizens to suffer repeated concussions because it’s eager for the money and the jobs? The state cannot stop violence as entertainment elsewhere, but the governor can remind the rest of the country that it’s not a New York value.

 

Why stain the progressive heritage of arbitrarily telling people what they can do with their property? Do you want to play football or box? That's alright. Do you want to fight in the cage? That won't happen. 

It would be much more honest and forthright for Ms. Gelinas to simply say that she doesn't like mixed martial arts and that's why she wants it banned. Instead, she has to spout rather fallacious arguments against the sport to conceal the fact that, at the end of the day, what matters is that she doesn't want to see people fighting in the cage, even if they are doing so of their own free will.

There is no evidence that mixed martial arts results in a disproportionate risk of brain trauma compared to others sports that are perfectly legal in New York. Also, much of the brain trauma associated with mixed martial arts is associated with excessive training and hard sparring rather than the bouts themselves, something that banning the sport won't help with. High-school sootball causes handfuls of youth fatalities each year, yet that goes unnoticed.

Mixed martial artists also aren't slaves to the UFC. It just so happens that the UFC is the best game in town so most fighters want, by their own free will, to be counted among its ranks. That a fighter's union would reduce the dangers of the sport is also entirely uncertain. What could reduce the dangers of the sport is for the regulatory bodies that oversee it to do their jobs and to appoint competent referees, but that's a point one never sees in this article.

The author's equivocation between mixed martials arts and heroin and prostitution is also curious. I don't think anyone would call the athletes who play in the Super Bowl  prostitutes, but that's me once again merely wishing for an impartial examination of mixed martial arts. Alas. 

 

At its core, the ban on mixed martial arts is illiberal reform. If there is to be a ban on the sport, the rule of law demands a ban on many other sports, such as football and boxing. However, the main issue is that the ban does not respect people's free will. People should be free to make of their lives what they wish, whether that's inside the cage or outside of it. Mixed martial arts is certainly a curious vocation, but it's a vocation that some people feel called to. I don't see why we wouldn't respect that calling and treat cage fighters as people who are able to responsibly pursue their own happiness. 

Ultimately, the ban is simply about the progressive's preferences and their desire to impose those preferences on other people. Whether fighters actually want to fight is entirely secondary to Ms. Gelinas feeling like she has made the world better.

The Declaration of Independence declared that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Clearly Ms. Gelinas only thinks that those rights apply if someone is pursuing what she believes leads to happiness.

"Fightland": Caveat Emptor

 

 

From Vice Fightland's "Reebok and UFC Sign Six-Year Deal":

Now, whether you like Reebok’s or the UFC’s logos is another question, but at least this means that the need to bring in sponsors who pollute a fighter’s trunks with logos for 'Aunt Tina’s Credit Repair Shop' or 'Middle America’s Auto Insurance' is no longer necessary.

As much as I generally enjoy "Fightland", this article is extremely sleazy. Horrifyingly so. They've got a conflict of interest in that they are at least partially funded by the UFC (Fightland, a joint venture with the UFC...). One simply cannot write a paragraph like that while not disclaiming such a relationship while maintaining any sort of integrity.

Unfortunately, "Vice" is one of the biggest perpetrators of largely portraying themselves as outside journalism while having corporate sponsors coming through the backdoor. Those corporate sponors do allow "Vice" to do things like "Fightland", which deserve to be paid attention to, but it's a good reason to never publish articles like this one.

To paraphrase Jim Sterling, the reporting of "Fightland" is brought to you be the delicious taste of the UFC. Caveat emptor. Moreover, "Fightland" is but one entity.There are strings all over the internet's journalism.

Fighting Across the Animal Kingdom

 

From Jack Slack's "Street Fighting Roos" over at Fightland: 

All joking aside, the martial arts have been influenced by the behavior of animals for thousands of years. From the numerous White Crane and Preying Mantis styles of chuan fa to Roy Jones Jr.'s study of fighting cocks, animal behavior has always had a hand in human strategy.

But more than that, many of the basic principles which govern all fighting are visible in the animal kingdom. Clashing bulls try to shuck their opponents past them in order to take a dominant angle and gore the opponent's flank. Mongooses attempt to draw venomous snakes into lashing out and falling short, in order for the mongoose to comes down on the back of the snake's head while it is recovering from the attempted strike. The relationship between fighting and animals is a fascinating one, and I hope to look at it in detail very soon.

Like human martial artists, a kangaroo has to deal with the same constants of F=ma, and many of the same biological constraints, such as two arms and a need to defend the head. The principles determining the winner of two rams fighting are all often the same principles that determine which of two human fighters will be victorious.

Fighting technique must therefore express some constants across species and across disciplines that can only be appreciated by recognizing how different fighters cope with those constants. The costs and benefits of a square stance can only be genuinely appreciated by understanding why some disciplines, such as Muay Thai, favor that stance, and others, such as boxing, advise against it. It's all constrained problem-solving.

In Review: UFC 175

 

Photo: John Locher, AP/AP

 

UFC 175 was a decent night of fights. Nothing amazing, but the main event made it worthwhile. The all too familiar hobgoblin of mixed-martial arts judging reared its ugly head when two of the judges gave Russell Doane the nod over Marcus Brimage. Uriah Hall showed exceptional fortitude in being able to fight two-and-a-half rounds with a gruesomely broken toe. The bout between Stefan Struve and Matt Mitrione was sadly cancelled during the pay-per-view broadcast. The two noteworthy events were the two championship bouts, and I shall focus on them here.  

 

Ronda Rousey versus Alexis Davis: Moving onto the short-lived co-main event, it only took Ronda Rousey sixteen seconds to batter Alexis Davis into submission. Rousey’s performance showed that often what separates an alright attack into a sublime one is how the fighter is able to concatenate together a combination of different techniques. Besides the judo throw, at no point was I amazed by each of her techniques understood by themselves, what amazed me was the fluidity with which Rousey combined them all together. A right counter to a knee to the midsection to a judo throw bringing the fight to the ground, where she captured Davis’ head and left arm, where Rousey finished the fight.

 

It’s a shame that Rousey is such a dominant fighter in such a weak division because I can’t say that I’m looking forward to her next bout. Plus, fighters like McMann, who fought and loss to Rousey at UFC 170 probably need more time to face competition and to get better at the game before being a title shot. That McMann was given a title fight after only one appearance in the UFC’s women’s bantamweight division is horrible evidence for the soundness of the contenders there. And then feeding a fighter like McMann, still relatively new to the big show, to the utterly dominant champion doesn’t serve to make that division any stronger. In fact, it only makes it weaker. Big upsets like Renan Barão versus TJ Dillashaw do happen, but match making shouldn’t happen with the hope of a big upset; instead, match making should be made with reasonable expectations for the contender’s possible performance. 

Right now, in the women’s bantamweight division, there simply aren’t any contenders who have a reasonable expectation for defeating Ronda Rousey. We can talk all we want about how Cat Zingano is next in line and how she therefore deserves the next shot, but does she actually have a reasonable chance of even giving Rousey some stirring competition? I doubt it, and that’s why I won’t be looking forwards to that bout. 

I don’t tune in to watch crushing defeats and lasting domination, I tune in to watch competitive fights, and hopefully learn a thing or two in the process. When there is a crushing defeat, it’s really only fulfilling if one of the fighters is able to find a chink in his opponent’s game and use that leverage to get the win. Besides that, crushing defeats tend to be predictable and boring, and I must say the same about Rousey’s bouts. Alas, she just doesn’t have the division to complement her talent and hard work. 

 

 

Chris Weidman versus Lyoto Machida: After his two curious victories over Anderson Silva, the question was: “Could Weidman slay a dragon?” As a diehard Machida fan, I was very much looking forward to this bout. In my mind, Weidman had unquestionably beaten Silva in their previous two bouts, but the second match had a definite asterisk to the victory. It certainly wasn’t a fluke. Weidman had spoken before the bout about how he had trained to counter the kicks which Silva had some success with on their first encounter, and a fighter can fracture an opponent’s leg by properly checking a hard kick, which is one reason why checking kicks isn’t simply a means of defending a kick, but of disabling that weapon. Though not a fluke, it certainly was a bit disappointing, and with Weidman having only eleven professional bouts up to that point, I wanted to see Silva give Weidman some adversity. 

 

That never happened, and so I was looking forward to see Machida give Weidman another test. Was I hoping that Machida would win? Of course. Did I think he would? Nope. Weidman had prove himself to be an amazing fighter up to this point, capable of taking on any challenge before him, and he had what Gegard Mousasi didn’t have against Machida: Top-level wrestling. Top-level wrestling can change the parameters of any fight, and, given that Machida is such a good karateka, keeping the fight standing can be a recipe for disaster. So while I would have liked to see Machida defeat Weidman, the reality was that Weidman had the best likelihood of leaving the cage as the champion. 

The two didn’t disappoint me whatsoever. Though Weidman was able to use pressure and grappling in order to disable Machida’s style, Machida was still dangerous throughout the fight, and Machida was able to test Weidman like no one else previously. Though a 4-1 bout, it was competitive throughout, and left me fully satisfied with both fighters. For all those pointing to an enlightening analysis of the bout, I’ll point you to Jack Slack’s “How Weidman Solved the Machida Riddle.” 

At the end of the night, we can all rest assured knowing that the championship belt belongs to a man who can bring honor to it. Though Weidman won’t be able to please all of his critics, there will always be those who would prefer Anderson Silva in his place. Plus, after that performance, Machida is on the short-list for injury replacement fighters for another chance against Weidman. Moreover, if Machida wins his next couple of fights and if Weidman dominates his next couple of fighters, Weidman versus Machida II could very be in the future.   

Jack Slack Once Again on Lyoto Machida

 

Photo: Jason da Silva, USA TODAY Sports

 

In the wait for UFC 157, Jack Slack once again provides an analysis for why Lyoto Machida has been such a dominant fighter both at middle- and light heavyweight in "Weidman versus Machida: The Illusion of Speed." This time he focuses on how Machida is able to create an illusion of speed by his willingness to create collisions between himself and his opponents:

I was lucky enough to watch Machida compete from the front row when he knocked out Mark Munoz at UFC Fight Night: Manchester last year. Machida had stepped in as a late replacement for an injured Michael Bisping and frankly, the crowd seemed more than happy to see him. That's like being told you're being bought McDonalds and ending up at a steakhouse.

What my companions in press row remarked on more than anything else was Machida's speed. Speed in a fight is really a binary relationship—you are either the faster man or the slower man, by how much rarely matters. But what Machida is so masterful at, and what we will be talking about, is creating the illusion of speed.

...

Japanese karate—of which Shotokan is the most popular style—was heavily influenced by Kendo. The idea that one should treat one's hands and feet as swords was taken very seriously, so sparring became about avoiding being touched and diving in to touch first. In karate competition, it often turns into a game of tag, but applying the same principles in regular sparring with people who can box or kickbox will often result in the development of a very unique, elusive style. 

Kendo's focus on getting across the floor quickly, and the fact that many of the university students who helped karate flourish on the Japanese mainland had trained in Kendo, led to the long range, bursting footwork we can spot in karate today. Certainly, karate as it had been practised on Okinawa was a rough style developed from various styles of Chinese martial arts with close in fighting.

Because of this emphasis on not getting hit in modern karate, a greater distance is maintained between the karateka and his opponent (it should be noted that we are not considering Kyokushin variants here). The distance in Japanese is known as the maai or sometimes simply ma. This is easily noticed in Machida's bouts, the distance he maintains is cavernous compared to many other fighters.

Karate in brief, is a game of drawing to counter, or bursting across the floor in one of several methods.

 

Machida is one of my favorite fighters because he doesn't conform to the boxing norm, and instead fully embraces his identity as a kareta. Because of that, some confuse Machida as a back-peddling point fighter, yet he has proven himself to be a fighter who lives and dies by his style, and that's worthy of applause no matter what style it is. Even for someone who doesn't admire karate, Lyoto Machida provides a worthwhile foil for comparing other martial arts like boxing or muay thai because of how often he fails to correspond to the norms of those arts, and yet manages to walk out of the cage victorious. 

Vice Fighland Interviews Yoshizo Machida

 

"The Mentor and the Myth: Yoshizo and Lyoto Machida." A short taste:

Lyoto smiles at my disbelief. I point to the fighter, and ask Yoshizo what advice he’s given his son regarding next week’s Middleweight UFC title bout. Yoshizo laughs. “Just relax. Forget winning and losing. Forget money. His state of mind is better than ever. He used to be worried about the pay, or worried about the travel. But now he is relaxed. That’s when the fear and doubt disappears. When your mind relaxes, your body relaxes, and you can execute the techniques you’ve trained.”

Lyoto concurred. “I no longer think about my opponent. When I enter the Octagon, I am there to complete my techniques. My opponent doesn’t matter. He only provides the canvas.”

On the Origins of the Chin

 

When humans fight hand-to-hand the face is usually the primary target and the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture are the parts of the skull that exhibit the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of basal hominins. These bones are also the most sexually dimorphic parts of the skull in both australopiths and humans. In this review, we suggest that many of the facial features that characterize early hominins evolved to protect the face from injury during fighting with fists. Specifically, the trend towards a more orthognathic face; the bunodont form and expansion of the postcanine teeth; the increased robusticity of the orbit; the increased robusticity of the masticatory system, including the mandibular corpus and condyle, zygoma, and anterior pillars of the maxilla; and the enlarged jaw adductor musculature are traits that may represent protective buttressing of the face.

Source.

Rich Franklin on How to Be a Loser