Got close to 2k more followers this year. Seems some people find the project of looking at martial arts thru a Leftist lens AND Left politics thru a martial arts lens interesting. There's a difference between a Leftist who happens to do martial arts and a Leftist martial artist.

That's what I'm trying to define. Much of what I've seen is compartmentalized. Call it dialectical or Taoistic, but Left politics should inform your martial arts and martial arts should inform your Left politics. It should by bidirectional, then synthesized into something new.

The thing you don't just hear on your first day of practice but every day is "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." If you have one rigid belief about politics, you will have the same solution for every situation and attack those if they adapted.

A famous pioneer of MMA who came from a traditional Chinese art was asked why he didn't do trapping hands in MMA. He said, "You try that shit when someone is trying to knock your head off at full speed." Did he do it wrong? Or did he do it right by adapting?

Understanding you have to improvise is no-brainer in martial arts. Plans last until you get hit, then you gotta improvise. Yet this is why I differentiate Leftists who do martial arts with Leftist martial artists.

Bc even Leftists who do martial arts can apply this logic in sparring, but then leave it behind when they think about politics, tactics, and outcomes. The belief is, whatever outcome that happened, that must have been the plan. But in MA you know outcomes and plans are different.

Martial arts is much more interested in description. Show me how the move works. Predictions and rigid prescriptions can get your ass kicked. But Left discourse is nearly all prediction and prescription, and causal certainty of what has not yet happened. "This will lead to this."

You also challenge your beliefs, at least in modern martial arts with emphasis on sparring and also mixing and comparing different arts. "What if this sucks? What if this doesn't work? What if I'm wrong" This doubt and humility and stress test is what causes improvement.

Compare that to all the declarative statements even on the Left about each other. Active sentences. "This is why, the reason why," or "this WILL do this". Martial arts and Eastern language is full of passive sentences. "Perhaps", "in the case of," "possibly," "observe," etc.

It's full of reflection. It wants to grow. Compare this to taking a personality test about your political beliefs, taking that as your core values, then stopping there.

You can believe you know a lot while also believing you know nothing. This is the norm on the mats.

I know how to throw but I don't know how to kick and punch. I also know others who know how to throw better than me. I don't know how to combine punches and kicks with throws. I can win in a sprint but not a marathon.

When I apply the logic of MA to the Left, it might be: "I have this political belief that works well in a small group, but I don't know about large groups. I know about systems in peace but not during war...

"My Left politics works great in infinite time, but I don't know about Left politics under a survival time crunch. I don't know how to combine all these ideas together."

This is what I think about. To me, this makes all the sense in the world.