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To extrapolate on my initial question about the reputation of the Promise Keepers organization:
Back in the days I remember reading a succinct definition on one of the Manosphere blogs that used to exist: the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a social rule set where women are no longer accountable to men and men are no longer responsible for women.
As it was also observed on said blog, it’s safe to conclude if you have eyes and ears that society is generally OK with the former and doesn’t even think twice about it but is ambiguous at best about the latter. This ambiguity manifests in various attempts to compel men to claim responsibility for women one way or another**, and is exacerbated when there’s an ever taller mountain of evidence to observe that the brave new world of sexual equality and freedom is failing to materialize in the way normies imagined it would***.
One obvious consequence of this is that anti-feminist public figures appear. They include both men and women from the onset already, but anyone can observe that the only ones getting any positive attention are women, of course. And society is generally structured in a way that a critical mass of women advocating for something is perceived as a sign by men that it’s also safe and even beneficial for them to advocate for it. And since said women are generally promoting some murky concept that can best be described as a new positive masculinity****, you’ll inevitably see men’s groups appearing with the aim of promoting the same concept.
As far as I know, the Promise Keepers was just one of these and not even all of them had a religious profile, and there were/are many outside the US as well. Their common denominator is that they are nebulously pushing a narrative that rejects both radical feminism and rigid old patriarchal norms and endorses a new positive view of masculinity that is designed to appeal to normies, especially women, without antagonizing lipstick feminism (they claim no allegiance with PUAs, for example). As you can imagine, this is largely doomed from the start already for the simple reason that defining masculinity in any form would also necessarily entail defining (and thus restricting) femininity as well, and as you can imagine, that is today a big no-no. As I alluded to above, any message such groups carry is thus destined to be rather murky.
(On a sidenote, I even find the name cringy. “Promise Keepers” implicitly means that other men do not keep their promises, the scoundrels they obviously are. I guess the naming was designed to gain sympathy from single mothers. Then again, maybe I’m just a dick.)
Before I continue I should mention that the organization briefly had a sort of heyday in the ‘90s but has long been defunct in a practical sense, as many of you might have already noticed and commented on (I assume they still exist in the legal sense). That is no coincidence, and I’m sure the main reason is that their leaders made the most obvious rookie mistake there is in politics: when their opposition (in this case, some radical feminist talking heads) denounced them in the press for some made-up reason, they apologized. (Take this with a grain of salt though, as I’ve only read this claim on a long-gone blog.) They thought they need to apologize to some feminist loudmouths, even though their entire public image hinged on being as inoffensive as possible, which clearly renders any idea of publicly apologizing a really bad one (why would you want to give any impression that you need to apologize when you’re a bog standard church org?). Anyway, even if this incident didn’t happen the way I remember it or if it didn’t happen at all, I think the general point still stands: it’s clear that the Promise Keepers were treated with either indifference or scorn and ridicule by the mainstream media, and only found sympathy within their own culture war tribe / wagon fort. This is a general rule of society: a man making any complaints about women, no matter how indirect or mild, is a sign of low status. Or to quote a former Manosphere blogger: a man pointing out the pettiness of petty women is actually seen as a sign of he himself being petty. For further proof just look at what public image fathers’ rights groups and activists have; they are basically lepers.
(end of Part 1, I suppose, as at this point I’m just rambling maybe)
*In reality it went even further than that. It was generally expected of young men to keep socially undesirable men away from their sisters, and it was normal for said sisters to act as matchmakers for their single bothers etc. But that is largely beside the point here.
**Exhortations by Christian preachers and so on for single men to marry single mothers and gamers/slackers to man up, man-shaming in the media in general, the endless denunciations of “deadbeat dads”, the Bradley Amendment, affirmative consent laws, the Duluth model etc. are all examples of this, I’d say
***I guess this included the notion that promiscuous women will be able to live without sexual shame and that “average” women will have casual sex with “average” men because they actually want to have sex for the sake of it; then again, I’m just guessing (I’ll explain the quotations marks if anyone is interested)
****Believe it or not, a handful of sympathetic women did visit these Manosphere sites back when these existed, at least for a while; they generally agreed that while the post-patriarchal age means that women don’t need men in their lives per se, they still generally want [some of] them, and that it should be possible to be a functioning masculine man in a feminist cultural milieu still
Hmm.
Let me suggest for conversation's sake that there's no reason PK failed that isn't explained by the same reasons that every other male-centric organization was either infiltrated or undermined in this period.
My contention is that martials arts might be the sole remaining bastion of pure, healthy masculinity left in Western Society. I become more certain of this every passing year.
All else has been skinsuited or crushed. The UFC is the only sports league left that doesn't even try to cater to women or push LGBT causes, and it revels in its appeal to the dudebro.
So perhaps the failure of PK was they simply had no 'martial' aspect or even any competitive spirits to it to keep men engaged and deter entryism.
How have the martial arts faired over the progressive era in terms of participation and seriousness of effort? I’ve been out of the loop for 15 years. For comparison, we are rapidly losing other skills like painting and drawing.
Minor antecedent, but I was assisting with a 'local' tournament a few weeks ago.
The most annoying issue with working the tables that always happens is the inevitable student who pops up out of nowhere that wants to compete. We basically had to throw together a special bracket at one point where we basically said 'Fuck it, everyone who hasn't competed that WANTS to compete gets thrown in here, and if they don't show up, shame on them'.
So... it seems to be doing pretty damn well.
At the end of the day, martial arts is something you just can't fake. It's really hard to deny not being impressed when two opponents are going at it so hard that the damn tournament mat beneath them is getting shoved around.
Though I'd also say that the attitude of the people in charge helps, as well. Really dedicated martial artists, who've been at this for decades, are just a different breed. It's really interesting to see.
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That strikes me as absurd. Isn't the common worry that we're overproducing artists beyond all economic need? The Internet is full of portfolios, webcomics, and so on. You still have thousands upon thousands if you discount manga-style artists (and I don't think you should if you're worried about technical skills being lost; what they lack is originality, but the archetypal manga style still demands a solid handle on perspective, proportions, etc.). The professional art world is a mess, but that's a small fringe of elitists chasing esoteric radicalism off a cliff like they've been doing for sixty years, and has had no impact on the number of people capable of drawing and painting conventionally beautiful artwork. We have more of those than ever.
I just went to the 97th Grand National Exhibition of the American Artists Professional League, which is an association for artists working in traditional, realistic styles. I would say about 75-80% of the paintings exhibited, particularly landscapes, were in the league that I could expect an internet artist to potentially reach. They're fine, but they're not special. The top stratum of paintings (mostly still lifes and portraits, some more dynamic scenes) were on a truly qualitatively different level. I have seen a lot of internet artists, filtered through imageboards and feeds that select for quality, and nobody is even close. These top-tier paintings were generally in the $2-5k range, so much lower than works painted in traditional styles I've seen for sale in e.g. London, that I can't imagine that all of these artists are in fact rare, innate, generational talents hidden by the zeitgeist (in fact, some of the most technically accomplished ones had pieces of clumsiness in the composition or subject choice that would be harshly criticized in an Old Master); I think they're just high-percentile artistic talent people who studied really hard and figured out some beautiful but realistic ways to paint stuff. And it's this level, the type of true old skill, that's falling away.
Partly, I think that's a function of the internet and economics. People are more willing to pay $5 a month for a stream of anime girls than they are to pay $5k for a physical painting, and these skills have fallen far less in, say, South Africa, where art is cheap but the cost of living for a middle-aged artist is even cheaper. And these skills are inherently meatspace-locked, not just in creating the art but in appreciating it. As I've said before, a physical painting is a totally different experience from an image on a screen. For instance, this was probably my favourite painting in the exhibition, and I would have purchased it instantly if it was for sale. But it looks like shit, honestly, on the website, because the screen loses the illusion of depth that makes the painting so compelling. I looked at that painting for quite some time and my brain couldn't but see it as a 3D object, even if I moved around it (this is the same with impressionism and abstract expressionism, you simply cannot begin to get them without having experienced their depth illusions in person). This is downstream from many things over the last two-three decades but such is life, we live in a society joker.jpg.
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I do not include manga in the classical tradition of drawing or painting. Digital is a different discipline. I’m not at all concerned with the production of artists, but I’m quite concerned with the loss of the discipline itself. People making digital art by and large can not paint in the western tradition. The same holds for the western tradition of music.
The discussion gets more difficult because many manga professionals - notably the aged ones - still work on pencil and paper and only digitize for cleanups.
I agree that digital is a different discipline, but disciplines of pretty much everything at levels is being lost as people find them increasingly unneeded. Draftmanship used to be a core, necessary skill for engineers, which has since been replaced by familiarity with CAD software.
See also: the argument for how reliance on the internet has essentially outsourced knowledge to the smartphone.
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If the results are indistinguishable, would it truly matter? But I don't think even this claim holds water. Plenty of Internet art-kids use ink, paper, paint and canvas. Those who go to art school certainly do. "Traditional art" (Internet-speak for "non-digital", not a statement of style or ethos) is a well-populated tag on any platform where artists congregate. Searching for the most recent post on X to use the tags #TraditionalArt and #Painting, I immediately landed on this.
If.
I have nothing against digital art, but it is decidedly distinct from traditional art.
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I’m sorry but I’ve never understood art beyond the complete ignorance and disinterest of an otherwise ordinary spectator. Abstract expressionism, realism, etc. at least American art; the likes of a Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman.
I’ve always had an affinity for Socialist Realism and Roman or Ionian Greek (classical) art. But even then I just think it’s beautiful. I don’t have the insight or attachment a professional artist or architect would have, I suppose.
In what sense is “art” a mess today? I barely knew what the hell it was for the last two centuries and it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
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That's the reason Martial Arts has been able to resist infiltration, the traditions are strong and they DEMAND seriousness of effort.
You can't easily fake the 'seriousness of the effort' anymore. McDojos are still a thing, but thanks to the rise of MMA, there's an 'objective' measure of what works and what doesn't. "Oh you have trained in an ancient, secret style of martial arts passed down by a tribe of Eskimos for centuries? Cool. Take an amateur MMA fight and let us see how you do."
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is RIDICULOUSLY popular still. I literally drive past FOUR separate BJJ gyms on the way to my gym. Where I train Krav Maga and Boxing, but also offers BJJ.
You CANNOT fake BJJ ability.
So in short, you can't be an entryist in the MMA world without actually getting good at martial arts. And if you get good at martial arts, why would you want to then destroy your own hobby?
Likewise, there's not really any one central organization to infiltrate to overthrow everything. Even if a lefty ascended to the top of, say, the Gracie Family, there's a dozen other competing orgs that will just branch off if you try to turn it into another lefty political org.
And of course, the difference between the sexes cannot be papered over. "Girls are just as good at fighting as boys" blows up instantly when you see that a teenage boy can demolish all but the very-best trained women in a 'serious' sparring session.
So in short, its hard for politics to infect martial arts, you can't fake the skills, and it shows many lefty shibboleths to be flat out lies.
And its fun. So I expect it'll remain 'safe' from infiltration for a long time.
Unfortunately, Gracie combatives is taking over like a plague, bringing the mcdojo effect even to bjj.
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That may be a factor to be sure, but it occurs to me that the big professional sports demand seriousness of effort. And yet we all kinds of Leftist posturing there, perhaps the biggest example being the establishment of the WNBA.
I agree that this is probably a big factor. I think infiltrators look for juicy targets. Organizations with a lot of money and/or social status. So if a sport is fractured, it's much less vulnerable.
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You can try. And fail, hilariously.
There is an ongoing theory that BJJ is fake in the sense it doesn't work against someone unwilling to engage in BJJ with you. Although I think that only counts with regard to the sport aspect.
What that video shows is a guy who knows nothing about BJJ starts off getting trucked by pretty middling BJJ folks. Then he gets trained up by someone pretty good, at BJJ, and then he demonstrates that against an opponent with very low stamina you can win in BJJ by basically ignoring the rules of the sport.
But MMA hasn't embraced BJJ so much because they are idiots, MMA has because 1v1 combat is messy, and BJJ has a lot of techniques that are good at dealing with messy situations. In a standup situation there's no point of it, yes, but most fights don't end when you pass an arbitrary sideline, in fact, that is one of the great things about MMA's realism is the cage shows how fights actually happen, when people are pinned in by obstacles (sometimes a mob if we are being honest). The standup prelude the the ground phase is also common in real fights, but real fights rarely get decided by a nicely placed uppercut or roundhouse. Most of it is suckerpunches, and surviving until a fight is broken up. MMA asks the question as to what you should do if bouncers and beer bottles don't exist and you get in a fight. A big part of that is on the ground, wrestling and BJJ generally are thought to have decent answers.
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I mean, it's probably not that helpful in a boxing match, but this is trivially true. But that's like saying guns are useless in the military because of drones- sometimes different things solve different problems.
Yep, but it is worth asking what problem Jiu Jitsu solves and how common that problem is.
Arguably the way its practiced has so many constraints that in practice it fails if any of those constraints are violated.
If you're fighting a guy who boxes, is not wearing a gi, on a concrete surface, and he may be carrying a weapon, I dunno if its reliable.
Excellent conditioning though.
That said, wrestling (specifically Sambo) seems to dominate everything in a 1 v 1 context.
isnt wrestling similarly confined by sportsmanship? For instance i would imagine most holds would be easier to get out of if gouging the at the grappler's eyes was an allowed strategy or pocket knives were allowed in the sport.
outside of some form of codified decorum the half drunk guy with a gun wins more martial contests than all the other combat disciplines except sober guy with a gun
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The paradox of BJJ is that it is effective self defense because you can practice it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power, but once you are practicing it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power you are practicing increasingly esoteric techniques and positions to defeat other BJJ practitioners practicing at full speed and competitively.
Sure, you don't want to roll around on concrete, but if you're training grappling you are in all likelihood going to be the one making that choice for your opponent.
The aspects of BJJ that are effective for self defense against an untrained opponent are going to be the wrestling aspects with a couple super basic easy submissions thrown in. Throw a guy who doesn't train in grappling in there and he's going to be drowning. But those aspects aren't really trained as much in class, because in class we're mostly trying to beat up each other. My BJJ game if I had to fight someone untrained would be to look for throws or standing armlocks, or more likely just fall back on straight counterpunches. But in competitive BJJ, my A-game is built around bottom half guard, which I would essentially never find myself in during a fight at the Linc.
Sometimes our coach wants to talk about the "self defense" implications of how to pass somebody's De La Riva guard in a streetfight, and I joke that if I get into a bar fight and some guy tries to throw a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "Whoa, no way, I do jiu jitsu too, where do you train bro? Do you know Dan? Because Dan is like my best friend! Oh shit no way let's get a drink, why are we fighting anyway?"
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That's kind of the rub with figuring out how good someone is at real real fighting. You can't practice that without someone at risk of maiming or death.
And a "real" fight is chaotic so there's an irreducible element of chance involved.
The secret to winning fights is mostly "bring more guys, with better discipline."
Add to it that "winning" a fight might well send you to prison. We all live in civilization with cops, prosecutors and judges, and we all know that they salivate at the chance to drop a book on law abiding white person defending himself from criminals (especially law abiding person who is busy online on extremely extreme extremist forum).
This is why serious trainers will tell you: "I am not going to teach you how to "win" fights, I am going to teach you how to get out of fight."
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