Credentialed public health "experts" are just like martial arts styles, fakes and frauds that cannot face real questions that challenge base assumptions.
This was a good read, I highly recommend it.
Some great quotes:
it took team reality 3 months to go from “never looked at this before” to basic parity with public health and in 3 more, it had overrun the discipline.
And later:
the “experts” have had a REALLY bad 2 years. their credentials and lazy appeals to authority did not stand up to the arena. and they stopped wanting to talk to us at all and adopted epithets like “denier” and stances like “the science is settled.”
Where have we seen that language used before?
Oh yea, climate science. Funny, isn't it, how the credentialed always do the same thing when the amateurs pull their fancy pants down to their ankles?
Is he wrong though? Are you claiming that someone who masters a set of moves from one style wouldn't be defeated by someone who knows all those same moves (perhaps with less finesse and precision) and also deploys a lot of other moves from other styles? Or are you arguing that he's wrong when he says MMA picked up all the useful techniques, and there's some hidden power that a real karate master has that MMA can never duplicate?
It still doesn't discredit his point about established authority in academia.
The secret to being 'realistically' good at any martial arts is pressure testing. (And how it's taught, but let's not get caught up in the weeds.)
MMA does alot of pressure testing, because it involves alot of young men wanting to beat the absolute shit out of one another and not caring about the long-term consequences of thier bodies.
Karate used to do alot of pressure testing, until the higher ups in various organizations realized that the ones doing said pressure testing were the high-ranking masters(because you have to be just a little bit off to get that high of a rank), that traumatic brain injuries are no fucking joke(seriously, watch some of the old Karate videos from the 70s and 80s - the only difference between them an MMA is one isn't half naked in a cage), and they'd really rather have all these Masters teaching and not beating the shit out of one another. Hence the development of point sparring in competition.
Point sparring is why Karate gets criticized so much, and to be fair, they do have a point. A local dojo of mine trains almost exclusively for competition, and a fair number of the tactics they use wouldn't... really work IRL.
Then again, traumatic brain injuries are not your friend, and even with point sparring, there's a reason why any competition is going to have a full doctor on hand.
I'm going to give MMA around 10 years at most before it gets dialed back alot when the current crop of competitors are basically hobbling around like old men due to all the damage they've done to thier bodies.
Also, there are a few MMA who's schooling was based on Karate. So. It's all how you apply it.
There's been a definite black belt inflation over time, not helped by the normal American habit of basically grabbing the black belt and saying 'I'm done' and then bragging about it years later.
It's always interesting to listen to my Sensei and all the older guys in the dojo make critiques of current trends of passing/failing for black belts.
There's also the problem that different karate styles have different rules for sparring. I forgot which style in particular is the one that doesn't allow for head-punches in sparring... but kicking them in the head is perfectly fine? And this is one of the primarily Japanese styles, keep in mind - either Shito-ryu or Goju-ryu, I forget which.
Bringing this back to OP's article, this is one of the issues with comparing various combat styles - they all have different rules of what's allowed. You throw someone unfamiliar with the rules into a ring that benefits their opponent and declare their style 'fake' when they don't instantly win? C'mon.