This post came about by accident, two different things coming together:

• I was talking to one of my private students about the Tai Chi Chuan I’m teaching him and he mentioned how he likes the different options it gives him for self-defense: to control an attacker or to break him.
• On the way home, I listened to the Martial Secrets podcast (Lawrence and Kris have some good stuff there, BTW) with Rory Miller. In it, he mentions something about how karate works great for breaking people from up close but sucks for sparring (which for many karate styles, I totally agree with) and controlling people.

To explain what I mean, you need to get your nerd on for a few minutes because we’re going to talk about computers first. You also need to be patient because this is another one of those posts where I have to put several elements on the table before it makes sense.

Let’s begin.

Martial arts as a programming language

There are many computer programming languages but they all have certain elements in common. One of these is a type system. Its use is type safety which has one purpose: Preventing the language (and therefor the system that uses it) from making specific errors called “type errors.”

Wikipedia describes type errors like this: [Read more…]

In my 5th and Washington street fight post, I made a couple comments that seem to have upset people. A reader of my blog contacted me and asked (in a rather unpleasant way) why I was advocating striking a downed opponent as “understandable and the right thing to do”.  He pointed me to this forum thread and said he couldn’t agree more with the posts there.

I went over to the forum and quickly scanned the posts but didn’t have the time to read everything in detail. So forgive me if I missed something. Anyway, the part that seems to have gotten the most negative feedback is when I wrote this:

Before you comment on this post, consider this:

• I totally understand why he punched and kicked the guy after he hit the ground. It’s a normal human reaction and I’m not faulting the boxer for getting carried away by the adrenaline.
• Another aspect is that in some parts of society, you have to make sure the message “Don’t fuck with me.” is clear after you put a guy down.
• Some people you can’t afford to let back up and take another swing at you because you might not survive it.

The law frowns upon these things, but sometimes that’s just how it works.

I would think I’m clear enough here but apparently not, so let me try and explain. But first, let me repeat this from my original post:

The only thing he needed to do to prevent this was to walk away after he put the other guy down.

The fight was already over. He’d won. He could have run away and Mr. 5th-W wouldn’t have been able to keep up. His mission of getting home alive and in one piece would have been successful.

I thought this part makes it clear I feel the boxer didn’t act correctly. For those of you who somehow read something different in what I wrote, let me state it clearly:

The boxer was wrong. He should have gotten away before the first punch was thrown.

I also wrote this in my original post: [Read more…]