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?
Yeah, it is a valid criticism, but it's that classic problem of like I've explained these guys think because they've fought a few fake black belts therefore all traditional styles suck. In my club for example we've recognised these weaknesses.
A big weakness that a lot of karate styles have is not that they can't take MMA fighting or anything, they simply don't train for it. It's all basic kumite and kata and they don't look at how to apply these techniques in such situations. This is why when karate people for example try to fight in MMA they often get overwhelmed because they don't know how to deal with grappling techniques and never bothered studying what other people do so it doesn't work. They and also the people fighting them then assume, oh it must be shit, therefore I'll ditch it and go do something else.
The joke is when you practice kata you get all the techniques you need, it's just a matter of knowing how to apply them which even a lot of black belts don't. In my club for example when we started looking at sparring more this way and how other styles would attack a lot of people would probably think we're not even doing 'Shotokan' except we are. It's just a matter of using the right techniques for the right situation.
Great example is a roundhouse punch, it's interesting how it doesn't get explored much in traditional styles but it's one of the most commonly used attacks in a lot of modern fighting. Asked about that, had my mind blown because you can pretty much block it the same way you do a roundhouse kick. All kinds of examples like that, we also learned properly how to deal with short range techniques and grab attempts etc. instantly changed how well we were sparring. I could go on about this stuff for pages but there's all kinds of examples like that out there, the MMA fanbois think they know it all and they're going to be in for a nasty shock if they finally come across traditional styles that start adapting for modern techniques.
Our instructors now are trying to get us to go more freestyle and get us adapt our kata techniques a lot more as well as use combinations a lot faster instead of basic. Tricky, but it helps you understand the style far better than just doing some back and forth tig play by comparison. I should stress, basics are still viable, but they'll only work under certain very specific conditions which is why you need a good breadth of techniques.
By the way, a lot of people don't realise this, but in kata when you learn it properly a lot of them actually have grapple and throw techniques hidden in them. This seems to get lost to time though which is why a lot of karate clubs seem to be about point scoring and only do competition sparring.
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.