For years now this mantra has served as a magical cover-all for so many forms of laziness and impracticality in training methods on behalf of some of our worst posters here. It's a rhetorical disclaimer many have used--whored, I daresay--to excuse otherwise inexcusably awful performances by people who should know better, and oftentimes do.
If you've figured out by now I'm referring specifically to Pizdoff, treat yourself to some of the ice cream I stole from him in the recent Toronto Throwdown thread, where I attacked him for his atrocious performance in his grappling videos. But the problem doesn't begin and end with him, because as several people in that thread fairly asked, "Why do you care?"
I care because in the five or so years I've been training BJJ, I've had the honor of training with dozens, maybe even a hundred people, some of which were phenomenally talented, some of which were bad but learning, some of which outright sucked. I never had any problems training with any of these people so long as they trained hard and did their best.
But the people I really hated rolling with, the only ones who I genuinely thought were wasting my time, were the ones who just said "I suck" and left it at that. These were the people with relentlessly self-defeating attitudes that arose not from caring and becoming discouraged, but from not caring and becoming discouraged. These were the people who'd come in once a month, prattle on about MMA fights and instructionals, sometimes exchange vague catchphrases like "I need to something something my hips", and then sit out after minutes of rolling.
They weren't uneducated. They weren't innocent or naive. They were lazy. And they almost always were e-people.
In the fight against Bullshido, a lot of us here tend to grant way, way too much leeway for those who aren't doing anything glaringly wrong. A lot of posters here refuse to bat an eyebrow unless the person in question is selling ketamine-laced blackbelts to the seven year olds with whom he'ssharing his psychic powers. This is useless. Any person of average intelligence can see the bullshit here. The true danger is going to come from more innocuous, less obvious sources, and to be able to fight bullshit in the martial arts we have to endeavor to be as educated as possible. And education, in this case, doesn't come from compulsively reading news articles on MMA being legalized and subsequently banned in Alaska, or memorizing Matt Thornton speeches, or being willing to call school owners and conduct softball interviews. It comes from ingrained, personal experience and that can only come from hard, consistent training.
And here's the key issue: If you say "I suck", do something about it. Don't hide under it like an umbrella for three, four, five years. When people use rhetorical shields to defend themselves from what ultimately boils down to laziness--and it is laziness--they're perpetuating a form of Bullshido as dangerous as any other. They perpetuate the idea that half-assed training is acceptable, so long as you're not claiming to be able to shoot chi bolts or whatever lame strawman you'd prefer to use. And that's as bad as any other type of bullshit.
If you've figured out by now I'm referring specifically to Pizdoff, treat yourself to some of the ice cream I stole from him in the recent Toronto Throwdown thread, where I attacked him for his atrocious performance in his grappling videos. But the problem doesn't begin and end with him, because as several people in that thread fairly asked, "Why do you care?"
I care because in the five or so years I've been training BJJ, I've had the honor of training with dozens, maybe even a hundred people, some of which were phenomenally talented, some of which were bad but learning, some of which outright sucked. I never had any problems training with any of these people so long as they trained hard and did their best.
But the people I really hated rolling with, the only ones who I genuinely thought were wasting my time, were the ones who just said "I suck" and left it at that. These were the people with relentlessly self-defeating attitudes that arose not from caring and becoming discouraged, but from not caring and becoming discouraged. These were the people who'd come in once a month, prattle on about MMA fights and instructionals, sometimes exchange vague catchphrases like "I need to something something my hips", and then sit out after minutes of rolling.
They weren't uneducated. They weren't innocent or naive. They were lazy. And they almost always were e-people.
In the fight against Bullshido, a lot of us here tend to grant way, way too much leeway for those who aren't doing anything glaringly wrong. A lot of posters here refuse to bat an eyebrow unless the person in question is selling ketamine-laced blackbelts to the seven year olds with whom he'ssharing his psychic powers. This is useless. Any person of average intelligence can see the bullshit here. The true danger is going to come from more innocuous, less obvious sources, and to be able to fight bullshit in the martial arts we have to endeavor to be as educated as possible. And education, in this case, doesn't come from compulsively reading news articles on MMA being legalized and subsequently banned in Alaska, or memorizing Matt Thornton speeches, or being willing to call school owners and conduct softball interviews. It comes from ingrained, personal experience and that can only come from hard, consistent training.
And here's the key issue: If you say "I suck", do something about it. Don't hide under it like an umbrella for three, four, five years. When people use rhetorical shields to defend themselves from what ultimately boils down to laziness--and it is laziness--they're perpetuating a form of Bullshido as dangerous as any other. They perpetuate the idea that half-assed training is acceptable, so long as you're not claiming to be able to shoot chi bolts or whatever lame strawman you'd prefer to use. And that's as bad as any other type of bullshit.
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