whatihear
18d ago
Saudi is a great ally in terms of projecting power and influence in the region. They mostly don’t have internal insurgents we need to help them with and they project power externally against our enemies in the region. Ok top of that, they don’t make everyone else around them incandescent with rage at us for supporting their right to continue drawing breath, which is rather nice.
whatihear
19d ago
That’s not been my experience. I’m actually pretty shocked you’ve never encountered a tiny male Blackbelt who can beat up guys a lot heavier than him with ease. The toughest instructor at the first gym I went to was 130 pounds and would thrash everyone, 230 pound blue belts included. I personally am not that good, but I’m a little on the lighter side and will fight relatively evenly with guys 40 pounds heavier and at similar experience levels all the time. There are similar guys at most gyms though not always to that level. MMA training usually doesn’t bring people much past purple belt level bjj skill (I’ve heard I don’t train mma), so if you are doing striking as well there is a chance you’re just not encountering as many full grappling specialists.
Finding women with that level of skill is a lot less common, so it’s not that surprising if you have never met one. I’ve had to move around a lot which has exposed me to a lot of gyms and I only encountered one with women at that level.
In terms of advice to give to women, I completely agree with you. Getting to that level requires talent and sustained effort over years. If you’re not going to seriously pursue becoming at least semi-pro there is no way you should plan to be able to beat men in fights, and even then it has to be s a specific scenario. Thinking you can beat a man is almost always delusional, and if you can do it you’ll know because you’ll have done it a lot in the years and years of practice it took to do there. Non freaks of nature should just buy a gun.
whatihear
22d ago
If you think that’s the situation, you are mistaken. In college about five guys from the varsity football team came to the mma club to try out grappling. All of them were physical specimens, and when I rolled with them it would just be me submitting them every 30 seconds to a minute for the whole round. I just recently submitted a competitive college wrestler in practice (after getting thoroughly beaten positionally of course). I’m not a bad submission grappler and I’m not a 40 year old out of shape dad who just picked it up recently. I’m not a great one either, but I know my way around on the mat.
Bjj is just not something where strength matters nearly as much as untrained people think it does. There is enormous skill depth, on the level of chess or go. Given that it is something you can get good at by knowing things and making rapid decisions, it should not be surprising that some women are able to get good. Every gym has a 16 or 20 year old scrawny kid who has a great guard game and plays a good spidery high tempo defense against guys half again his weight. A athletic woman who lifts will have pretty much the same level of physicality as those kids, and if it’s not surprising when they hit triangles and heel hooks on everyone there is no reason to think a woman couldn’t either. Women’s minds are just as good at knowing things as men’s are (maybe modulo stuff at the tails which does not matter here).
whatihear
22d ago
The dude doesn’t have to be fat. I would consider myself a decent submission grappler and I’m not fat, but I will lose to this kind of woman.
I would say this is interesting, because it informs how realistic things like Hollywood movies with a female action star are. A tiny woman kicking the shit out of a bunch of dudes: pretty unrealistic. A tiny woman hitting a picturesque flying triangle, actually a little more possible (well maybe not because flying triangles don’t really work, but that’s what passes for grappling in movies). It’s a proof by contradiction that “no woman can beat a man” is false, which seems to be the position that some people are defending.
whatihear
23d ago
If you think you can win by just dropping all your weight one someone, it’s obvious you’ve never done submission grappling in a serious way. If someone with 50 pounds on me just drops their weight on me without any sort of skill behind it, I’ll be choking them in 30 seconds.
Takedowns are harder given a weight difference because wrestling is harder to do across weight classes than submission grappling is. I’m less confident that a very experienced woman could beat a dude who outweighs her and has a moderate amount of experience from the feet.
whatihear
23d ago
Bjj is what I’m thinking of. Of all the options, it is probably the best at letting skill overcome weight differences. A 120 pound woman needs a specific style to beat a 170 pound man (extremely high tempo position switches and constant attacks), but there are women who have that level of skill out there. It is very hard, and they essentially have to be at the level of high level competitors to be able to beat male hobbyists who outweigh them, but I have experienced it and watched it.
whatihear
24d ago
Unfortunately, Gracie combatives is taking over like a plague, bringing the mcdojo effect even to bjj.
whatihear
24d ago
I assume you mean at the highest levels of the sport. Female black belts can absolutely wreck even fairly experienced dudes with 50 pounds on them when it comes to grappling (not as effortlessly as a male black belt their size would, but still).
whatihear
28d ago
Part of that is just seniority. The line employees of space companies are the same multicultural mix of high caste emegrees or their children, hard working 2nd gen Asians, and whites that you’ll find elsewhere in tech. Citizenship requirements for aerospace do make the industry whiter, but the guys designing frontier chips can absolutely program FPGAs for space.
Well they are the leaders of the “not Iran or Israel” diplomatic block, so they seem to have influence among the Arabs that want to build functioning societies and not be psycho. They waged a bombing campaign against the houthies about as effective as ours (not at all), which is something. It’s true that they don’t seem nearly as military competent and muscular as the Israelis or Iranians, but they are at least enough of a regional military power that Iran factors them in to their hegemony plans.
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