When asked about a potential Zuckerberg-Musk MMA fight in the actual Roman Colosseum, Marc Andreessen said, “I think that’s all great,” and then explained why:
I was also asked whether I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting, and I said, enthusiastically, yes. And I further recommended to the audience that they have their children trained in MMA, as my wife and I are. Kids as young as 8 and maybe even younger are totally capable of learning both the striking and grappling dimensions of the sport. MMA teaches not just combat skills — and it does teach those — but also discipline, emotional control, respect, and a deep sense of responsibility.
The message to kids is not, this is how you beat people up. The message is, this is how you protect yourself — and as important, this is how you protect your family, your friends, your community. You use these combat skills in the service of others — you never start a fight, but when someone is threatening someone you love, or even an innocent bystander, this is how you end a fight.
To a lot of people, this sounds like a message out of time. Surely in the modern world, one would never need to protect oneself or one’s family with actual interpersonal physical violence?
I would love for that to be the case, but unfortunately, the world is evolving in such a way where that is becoming less true every day. Many of the biggest and most important cities in the United States have decided they don’t need law enforcement, and street level violence is on the rise, as anyone in those cities with functional eyes can see. People get attacked in the street, or in carjackings and home invasions, daily, in plain sight, and little to nothing happens. It’s terrible, but it’s true.
And so, yes, if there aren’t going to be police to protect you and your loved ones from real world violent assault, there is a practical need to know applied self defense. And hand-to-hand fighting — MMA — is the core self defense skill.
Another benefit of MMA training, he continues, is physical fitness:
We all know our culture is in the grip of an obesity crisis — according to the CDC, “Obesity in the United States now affects 100.1 million (41.9%) adults and 14.7 million (19.7%) children.” This is a terrible situation that curses people to shorter and unhappier lives. President John F Kennedy saw this coming in his time (!):
We are underexercised as a nation. The remedy, in my judgment, lies in one direction. That is in developing programs for broad participation in exercise by all of our young men and women, all of our boys and girls. The sad fact is that our national sport is not playing at all, but watching. We have become more and more, not a nation of athletes but a nation of spectators. There are more important goals than winning contests — and that is to improve on a broad level the health and vitality of all our people.
We did not listen to him in the decades that followed, but we can now. MMA training is likely the best path for widespread gains in physical fitness, particularly for children. MMA training itself is both effective exercise and motivates one to improve one’s strength and endurance. And not just in the abstract, as a pointless hamster wheel process, but for a purpose — to win fights.
Finally, consider the combination of physical fitness and the ability to defend one’s loves. The result is self-respect — not the self-respect of armchair therapy and wishful thinking, but real self-respect, the earned realization that one is strong and useful and of merit, and of value. Skilled fighters carry themselves differently, and this is why.
Is this the first sprouting of a new and improved American warrior class, or just the latest reincarnation of bread and circus? Only time will tell…
America has a warrior class already, and hereditary at that. These types just getting with the program.
The program: be ready to defend yourself again.
The benefits of a now much more dangerous world [that I wouldn't make safe again if I could]: You’ll be men again or die.
Strictly speaking, American\ doesn’t have a warrior class; she has a soldier class.
American military men don’t have a tradition of dueling or of public games. When billionaires, no matter how nouveau riche and gauche, become advocates of this sort of thing, it represents a watershed moment.
Fights of honor are no laughing matter, even funny ones.
This is the phase where ruling elites make fools of themselves imitating the warriors for a reflection of their street cred.
So as I understand your argument, Jim, wars and fighting wars make not the warriors, public games and dueling make the warrior, and the warrior class. Because if it’s not entertainment, it’s not real. Because if it’s not Reality TV, it’s not Real.
Well, we’re real, whether we are soldiers or warriors.
I guess all the family ties and generations of warriors, that the police, military and veterans are the same people and same families [80% of new recruits] maketh not a warrior class, dissipate fools with inherited titles make a warrior class.
BTW the word Warrior has the stodgy old farts round DOD much worried for years, they want to go back to soldiers not warriors too, mind you they should have thought of that before all the wars.
If it makes the old farts nervous it warms my heart. That makes me a bad soldier. But much closer to warrior.
It may be uncharitable to say that fighting men in America are gelded; but it’s not unfair to say either.
Priests and Warriors are always competing to rule over society. In civilized countries, the ruling class is a little something of both. In America, Priests have always had the upper hand. ‘Civilian leadership’ of military affairs is always a dead giveaway of priestly domination. And it goes without saying they never miss an opportunity to denigrate the status of their ‘fellows’. The harvard empire invented PTSD by telling (its) fighting men that their actions are shameful and worthless and that they should feel bad about fighting, instead of glorious and worthy and that they should feel good about fighting.
You could see the same pattern in countries under marxist occupation as well. They were always more concerned about being overthrown by their own military than by any foreign invasion. Hence every unit having its own chaplain/inquisitor monitoring it in secondary shadow chains of command.
VXXC:
When I contemplate a cage fight between Zuck and Musk, egged on [cough] by Andreessen, in the literal Colosseum, the most immediate comparison is to dueling, but dueling was a private activity carried out in secret; the tempting comparison, especially in the symbolic shadow of the Colosseum, is to gladiatorial contests, but gladiators were highly stigmatized, segregated slaves; most apt, probably, is to medieval English knights in tournament and joust and other hastilude, who fought for joy and glory and prize and booty.
The American soldiery (today known, exclusively, as “special forces”) are exceedingly competent at flexing the long arm of the United States at forever war, but institutionally and individually have no flair for the spectacular, no larger-than-life personalities, no coherent theology, and no political will.
Pseudo-Chrysostom’s deranged micro-rant typically misses the mark, because he fails to apprehend the nature of the “priests” over whom his conniptions continually erupt unabated. How fortunate for him that as he desperately strikes at shadows I now come to him with the sperm whale-oil lamp of Illumination held high: they’re lawyers, retard—every nook and cranny of the States and the United States is occupied by, every substantial decision in America is made by, lawyers.
The judges even wear weird black robes. I wonder if they make a habit of performing any arcane religious rites before congregations of the public.
You can’t be this dense, so I can only assume your disingenuity is purposeful, as expected of your defective moral character. Lawyer is a priestly profession par excellence. The very expression of a modern whigish priesthood.
Courtroom drama, priestly fantasy, priestly version of dueling. Replacing warrior versions of dueling, natch.
The movie ‘A Few Good Men’, classic illustration of this dynamic. The antipathy the Theocracy has for its janissaries runs deep.
Psych. An independent military would in consequence of possession of a coherent theology likewise have arcane religious rites. Your contrived priest-warrior distinction is simply an overregular classification of the clever and the strong. If we can learn anything from human evolution, it’s that brains consistently dominate brawn. Each turn of the unbreakable wheel of the history of civilization resembles precisely this: smart mobile barbarians swoop in from the highlands to prey upon and rule over dumb settled folk…several generations’ worth of drunken mixing and enstupification…their descendants (degenerate and much reduced) now swooped in upon and subjugated by a new race (possibly the very same race) of barbarians. Woe to the dark and dim.
By the way, the lawyerly title is literally ESQUIRE.
Do you really think it a coincidence that lawyers occupy precisely the same social niche as knights once occupied? if so, I have a bridge to sell you.
It isn’t in London and it isn’t falling down, or your money back.
You correctly repeat my own point that a superior man is a paladin. However, you fall into the classic blunder of mistaking the clouds of flies that inevitably flock around nominally intellectual spheres, as actually being intellectual. That those who speak about the power of brains, actually have brains. You bought the bridge at full price and no money down.
Intelligence is power; and the problem with wordcels is not that they are intelligent, it is that they are stupid. Capacity as a human dictionary is only loosely related with intelligence. This is why ChatGPT can replace wordcells easily, while it still can’t so much as clean my house and fold my laundry. It, like the wordcel, has little to no actual capacity for conception of reality as such.
What is a warrior? a man who bears a sword. What is a priest? a man who bears a word.
A statement that a bureaucrat is not priestly, is aliken to a statement that a bandit is not warlike.
Certainly, they are degenerate; certainly, one may find little recommendable comparison between them and more ‘canonical’ examples of the species; certainly, one may emmend a situation via physical removal of such kinds ere they are ever encountered; even so, such kinds are never the less participants in similar forms, if not similar substance.
Believe would you a man, declaiming he ‘god is dead’, that he cannot be a priest? that he cannot be using priestly methods? that he cannot be forming priestly organizations? Such naivety! You have eyes, yet cannot see Mount Tai!
“What is a warrior? a man who bears a sword.”
I can live with this…
The rest seems to be sort of a family spat of sorts.
As far as the American warrior caste not having coherent theology, well it’s more we had one called the Republic and the Constitution we swore to uphold, and then the priests betrayed us all.
Like the rest of America we’ll find our souls are now quite mad. That’s what happened to Islam you know, the Sunni lost the Caliphate in 1924 in another spasm of modernity and they went quite mad.
The Colonels you see are sound in their minds but their souls are mad. So is America.
If you like that part, you’ll love the return of real democracy, the Demos you see know now they’ve been robbed, no more fig leaf of elections. Just the priests shriveled memberships.
The Demos shall return howling for their due and no money nor words nor anything but justice will do. Justice shall run red in the gutters and the streams into the Oceans, why the very Atlantic will turn red.
Truly it’s something to see the first time the pack tastes blood, they want MORE. Of course they do and by God, Gaia and our god Nihil let them have it !
Pseud:
I would offer a reply to you could I find a coherent point on which to hang it. Alas, it appears to be, if not randomly generated, then at least in response to some other user prompt than mine.
In reality, words mean what they say, the pyramidal debtor-creditor structure of civilization is essentially unchanging, and the esquires ride gallantly into the field with their right honorable masters to subdue the miserable masses of unruly peasant debtors.
Most innocent bystanders to this farce likely think that I’m just kidding around or something, but little do they know that, in addition to lawyers being titled Esquire, in the legal order of the United Kingdom (of which the United State’s legal order is firstborn son) High Court judges are given knighthoods and titled Knights Bachelor,[1] their superiors (appellate judges) are titled Lord Justice,[2] and their superiors (supreme-court judges) are granted peership (if they are not already peers) and titled Lord, followed by a surname, territorial designation, or a combination of both, for life.[3]
In Pseud’s off-point la-la-land, this is all just one huge coincidence. In reality, it isn’t: paper cuts more deeply than any sword, the study of law is the study of private war, and lawyers are the true warriors of society.
God, I am so good at this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Court_judge_(England_and_Wales)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Appeal_(England_and_Wales)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Kingdom
P.S. If only you knew about tenure and good behavior…
“lawyers are the true warriors of society”
[…]
Convolutional networks have rendered robotic wordcels like you obsolete. The emailjobs class is dead, and your continued stay on this plane of existence is now surplus to requirements.
I’m not a lawyer, I’m an anticapitalistcapitalist and poster’s poster.
Remember back when we established that you were a wagey (probably a mid engineer) and I literally begged you to quit? The email-job-haver cries out as he strikes.
It’s a feminine personality trait, presumably inculcated by your having spent endless droning years implicitly topped by HR.
Many such cases.
My poetic aspersions as to how oestrogenic the preceeding statement was were heinously censored by our host, so you missed most of the context of the comment.
In simple terms, you are the kind of man who accepts the reproductive members of other men inside your anus. This fact is demonstrated by your ability to utter statements like “lawyers are the true warriors of society” which fairly take the cake as far as gayest arrangements of words that can ever possibly be uttered in english.
In that case, feel free to drop by your ex-wife’s lawyer’s office, slap the soft-handed man who stripped you of your common-law chattels, and return to your McCastle unmolested.
Is the man fixing the engines a pilot? Is the man flying the plane a mechanic? Is the man serving chow for both either?
They’re all connected, so does that mean they’re all the same thing? Or that one is interchangeable with any other?
Have you ever ridden into the desert on a chill cloudless night, laced your fingers behind your head and lain back and gazed deeply into the infinite black sea of silvery shimmering stars, and truly pondered the rules of evidence?
What is evidence to a man playing word games? Through the magic of definitional shuffling, one can enjoy the benefit of nothing being applicable and anything being applicable as convenient.
Qui vult decipi, decipiatur: Let him who wishes to be deceived, be deceived.