‘Articles’ Archives
Understanding Trolling
Since I began my informal hobby as an "Antrollpologist," I've written multiple articles on the topic of trolls and online profiling. I first started arguing online -- and encountering trolls while doing it -- in the old Usenet days, when I used my university's VAX system to access newsgroups like alt.magick and rec.guns. I hate to think just how [...]
Fitness and Self-Defense
It's extremely popular in certain circles to make public declarations of one's devotion to fitness and conditioning. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) enthusiasts in particular tend to engage in these histrionics (as do those scrawny or otherwise out-of-shape Ultimate Fighting Championship groupies who revere and aspire to become MMA exponents). This is by [...]
Sheeple, Grasshoppers, and Ants
For someone like yourself, who spends so much time thinking about, writing about, and preaching about, self defense, nation defense, defense against criminals, defense against hippies, defense against terrorists, defense against immigrants, defense against communists, defense against liberals, rights to defend yourself, rights to be armed, etc., [...]
The Myth of “Pressure Testing”
Much is made, largely on the parts of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) enthusiasts and other practitioners of "martial" sports, of the concept of "pressure testing." The phrase is invoked ad nauseam by those who believe a technique, a system, or a methodology that has not been used with success (or that has not been used at all) in the Ultimate Fighting [...]
The Psychology of the Spectator
There exists, among the population of martial arts devotees and self-defense exponents, a particular, peculiar classification of Internet Troll, previously undocumented but frequently encountered. This is the spectator, a bystander to the martial arts who would be little more than a lurker if not for the fact that he is also given to vociferous [...]
Why the Buddhist Peace Fellowship is Wrong
On a whim, recently, I purchased a copy of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship publication, Turning Wheel. The theme for the issue was "disarmament," which I could not resist exploring. Since the founding of The Martialist it has been my assertion that pacifism is an unworkable, self-destructive, ill-conceived philosophy of false moral equivalence in [...]
Raging Ignorance in Self-Defense
There exists today an epidemic, a crisis, a pervasive and powerfully negative phenomenon in self-defense. That phenomenon is raging ignorance, willful stupidity, and the intentional evasion of reality in the flight from cognitive dissonance. This would be bad, but perhaps slightly better than it is, if not for the fact that those most uninformed [...]
What Type of Guy Are You?
Are you an RBSD guy? Are you a TMA guy? Are you an NHB or MMA guy -- that is, a sportfighter? Are you a boxing guy or a wrestling guy or an ethnic stylist? Are you a CMA guy, an RMA guy, an FMA guy? What kind of guy are you? The alphabet soup of acronyms I've used corresponds to camps within the self-defense and martial sports [...]
Seven Lessons from Miyamoto Musashi
The author finds much wisdom in Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Spheres. Gabe Suarez, whose work in the field of self-defense I quite admire, wrote an article for the May 2004 issue of Black Belt magazine in which he analyzed the five scrolls of Musashi's Book of Five Spheres and discussed their relevance in modern times. My Wing Chun Kung Fu [...]
Going Armed: Understanding Utility and Hoplophobia
I've read some truly stupid things about the martial arts on the Internet. One of these is the opinion, particularly prevalent among foreigners who do not share America's heritage of gun ownership, that self-defense is acceptable – but that armed self-defense is some sort of psychotic obsession practiced and prepared for by slavering, [...]
