“We are Forerunners. Guardians of all that exists. The roots of the Galaxy have grown deep under our careful tending. Where there is life, the wisdom of our countless generations has saturated the soil. Our strength is a luminous sun, towards which all intelligence blossoms… And the impervious shelter, beneath which it has prospered.”

Learn the rules – then break the rules

by | Jul 11, 2020 | fitness, Uncategorized | 7 comments

There is an old quote from, I think, martial arts legend Bruce Lee which goes something like this:

“Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick.
After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick.
Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”

There are a lot of Bruce Lee “profundities” that even the chop-socky master himself regarded as silly – you can watch a video of him chuckling slightly about that great line about being like water and formless right after he utters it.

But there is no doubt or question in any real martial artist’s mind that Bruce Lee himself genuinely knew how to fight. He was really good at it and he was constantly trying to evolve his own fighting style, as any true martial artist will do, in order to incorporate and absorb new information, ideas, and techniques.

That is why his original base style of wing chun, which focuses on simultaneous offence and defence but is otherwise still in many ways a “traditional” style of Chinese kung fu, eventually evolved into Bruce Lee’s signature art of jeet kune do.

Most people remember Bruce Lee as merely a chop-socky film actor, and he was very good at that stuff. But people who have seriously studied martial arts know that Bruce Lee was far more than an actor – he really was an incredibly skilled martial artist and fighter. He really knew how to fight. He really was tough and strong.

More importantly, though, like most truly great martial artists, Bruce Lee wanted to keep improving his skills and testing himself. That is why he began to study boxing and eventually got together with the legendary “Judo” Gene LeBell to incorporate grappling and judo and wrestling into his style of fighting.

In other words, he learned the rules of his art and style – and then he learned how to break them.

I’ve been truly privileged to know a few amazing martial artists in my life. I’ve sparred many times with a southpaw double black belt in tae kwon do who runs his own media and advertising agency in NYC who would routinely kick me in the ribs with those lethal spinning back kicks that TKD practitioners are so good at throwing. I’ve sparred with guys who have black belts in both goju ryu karate and Israeli Krav Maga. I’ve learned at the feet of a Grandmaster of Krav Maga whose reputation in the worldwide community of martial artists is extremely high, and who has studied BJJ, judo, aikido, muay thai, and karate for years.

Every single one of these people understood that the rules in martial arts get you only so far.

Eventually, you have to learn how to break the rules and create your own signature style of doing things.

That, by the way, is a vital lesson for life. You have to learn the rules first – and then you have to learn how to break them.

Here’s another great example of a martial artist whose fighting style is completely weird. I’ve written a few times before about a certain Dominick “The Dominator” Cruz, from whose life I have drawn a good deal of personal inspiration during my own times of struggle. If you know anything about fighting, and you watch Dominick fight, he has an extremely awkward way of fighting that is highly entertaining to watch, and really difficult to understand:

Again, anyone who knows how the dynamics of muay thai or boxing or kickboxing work, can immediately see that all of those movements and feints and direction changes and so on, are really difficult to do. Dominick simply breaks all of the rules associated with positioning and footwork and timing.

Why? Because he’s already mastered those rules himself:

And it is precisely because he has mastered those rules that Dominick Cruz is very much a contender in the GOAT conversation, at least as far as his own division is concerned:

The goal in life should be to master the rules of any given task or discipline – and then learn how to break them as efficiently as possible. Those rules are put in place for a very good reason. They offer structure and clarity to those who seek to understand how to become masters of a particular craft. That is very much to the good.

But eventually every true master outgrows the rules of his craft. And that is when true mastery is shown – when the master creates something new from what he was originally taught.

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7 Comments

  1. Johnny

    Here is a Steve Sailer article about a legal case where high caste Indians in Silicon Valley are accused of mistreating low-caste Indians, based on their caste back in India :

    unz.com/isteve/heres/#new_comments

    Sailer himself, and certainly most of his commenters are quite ignorant about India, for they assume all Indians in the West are 'high caste', which stems from their tendency to assume caste, IQ, and 'aryan-ness' are 100% correlated. Even I know better (only 51% of Indians in the US are Hindus, as per Wikipedia).

    But it is nonetheless jarring to see how they bring their third-world ways over here, and how the 80-IQ White Trashionalists are quick to heap the hate on ALL Indians.

    I think you are wrong that the fact that Indians being only 1.3% of the US population will somehow delay their ascension to 'most hated group' status. It seems they are 80% of the way there, if the comments under Steve Sailer's article are any indication (even if those are 80-IQ White Trashionalist incels).

    Reply
    • Didact

      I'm not in much of a position to comment on what Steve says about whether most Indian immigrants to the USA are high-caste and therefore high-IQ, since as far as I'm aware there have been no serious studies done to measure IQ differences between castes in India.

      I will say that, anecdotally speaking, what I have seen of Indians in the USA indicates that the majority of the immigrants who go there and end up in finance or tech or medicine are from the upper castes.

      Caste in India is interesting, from a purely academic perspective, and horrifying from a humanistic one. People from specific castes and specific regions have specific surnames; if you tell me that your surname is Banerjee or Chatterjee or Mukherjee or Ganguly, or one of the many variations thereof (e.g. "Mukhopadhyay" and "Mukherji" are variations of Mukherjee) I can tell with about 90% accuracy that you are a Bengali Brahmin, You can also tell this based on skin colour; generally speaking, lighter skin tones correspond with higher caste.

      You can do exactly the same thing with South Indians too. Tamil Brahmins – the much-lauded "Tam-Brams" who make up a considerable chunk of the high-IQ part of India's Diaspora – go by specific surnames. Names like "Giridharadas" or "Sunderrajan" indicate a high-caste Brahmin from the South.

      And names like "Patel" or "Sharma" can indicate exactly which state a person is from. "Patel" is a very common surname in Gujarat, which not coincidentally is home to one of India's most entrepreneurial subgroups.

      The point of all of this is that you could, in theory, come up with a rough map of IQ and caste correlations based on surnames alone. But I don't think anyone has done anything like that research.

      Sailer himself, and certainly most of his commenters are quite ignorant about India, for they assume all Indians in the West are 'high caste', which stems from their tendency to assume caste, IQ, and 'aryan-ness' are 100% correlated.

      That's not what the article says. The article quotes from a lawsuit which argues that more than 90% of Indian immigrants to the USA are from the upper castes. Moreover, the definition of "upper caste" is not given, at least not in Steve's article directly. Is the lawsuit only targeting Brahmins? Or Brahmins and Kshatriyas? Or Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas?

      But it is nonetheless jarring to see how they bring their third-world ways over here

      It might be jarring but it's hardly surprising. Import lots of Indians and you'll get India. Import lots of Africans and you'll get Africa. Import lots of Scandinavians and you'll get… well, Minnesota, actually.

      It seems they are 80% of the way there, if the comments under Steve Sailer's article are any indication (even if those are 80-IQ White Trashionalist incels).

      That's the very definition of confirmation bias. One set of comments by one blogger in an online forum does not constitute broad-based public opinion.

      Reply
    • Johnny

      Here too :

      unz.com/isteve/a-tournament-man-for-man-scariest-social-justice-jihadis/

      Steve Sailer going all in on perpetuating a narrative that all Indians in the West are 'Brahmins'. Even I know better than that.

      It might be jarring but it's hardly surprising. Import lots of Indians and you'll get India. Import lots of Africans and you'll get Africa.

      Perhaps, but how much of this is genetic, vs. not? The Steve Sailer crowd will say it is 100% nature and 0% nurture, and the behavior of US blacks does not inspire confidence in those who would oppose that view.

      But Indians : are they really just an 82 IQ race, with the ones in America from the top 1% of India? I highly doubt that.

      This is why the Indian question is very complicated. There is no other immigrant group above 1% of the US population where the results of their US diaspora outpaces the performance of the original country, per capita, by that much. Nothing else comes close.

      The WN crowd, which loves simple explanations, tells themselves that Brahmin Caste/IQ/Aryan-ness are all 100% correlated. Thinking people know that is not true, and you have pointed out that IQ-by-Caste studies have not been done. But it is a subject worthy of great study nonetheless.

      In your opinions, is the future of Indians in the US to :
      i) Stay in a high income bracket, as 2nd and 3rd gen people vanish into the white/Jewish upper class?
      ii) Drop down the ranks of income, and eventually settle into a poor income bracket comparable to where people from similar IQ countries (e.g. Mestizo Mexicans) reside?
      iii) Remain economically successful, but say so much anti-white crap that they wear out their welcome, and are eventually unceremoniously kicked out?

      The final fate is one of the three. Which do you think is most likely?

      I think a lot depends on how large of an annual intake of new Indians there is. If it gets clamped down, their numbers may never get high enough for ii) or iii). Hence, i) happens. But with large ongoing intake, ii) or iii) become more likely.

      Reply
    • Didact

      Steve Sailer going all in on perpetuating a narrative that all Indians in the West are 'Brahmins'. Even I know better than that.

      That isn't my impression of the article at all. I think he simply argues that Brahmins are serious players in the Grievance Games. And I think he's right about that. He does not say anything in that article about Indians in America as a general group.

      Perhaps, but how much of this is genetic, vs. not?

      Well, given that there is VERY little genetic mixing among Indians and has not been for, oh, 1,400 years, quite a lot of Indian behaviour is genetic, though it's certainly not 100% – never is for any race. To my mind, there is a significant genetic component to Indian bad behaviour outside of India, but also a large cultural and religious component.

      That long article by Richard Grenier, "The Gandhi Nobody Knows", is worth reading in full. There's a big section about the impact of Hinduism upon the Indian psyche. The results of that impact are not pretty at all. Hinduism ultimately enforces stasis, laxity, and uncleanliness, which Indians who go overseas bring with them. And Indians who have lived overseas and become a bit more "civilised", so to speak, are often quite horrified by what they see when they come back.

      But Indians : are they really just an 82 IQ race, with the ones in America from the top 1% of India? I highly doubt that.

      A significant part of that 82 average IQ comes from malnutrition. When you compare like-for-like between middle-class Indians and middle-class White Americans, the differences largely disappear and average IQ evens out to about 95 or so across all castes and substrates. The size of India's middle class is unknown – it could be as low as 100 million people and as high as 350 million. I tend to go for the lower-end estimate.

      In your opinions, is the future of Indians in the US to :
      i) Stay in a high income bracket, as 2nd and 3rd gen people vanish into the white/Jewish upper class?
      ii) Drop down the ranks of income, and eventually settle into a poor income bracket comparable to where people from similar IQ countries (e.g. Mestizo Mexicans) reside?
      iii) Remain economically successful, but say so much anti-white crap that they wear out their welcome, and are eventually unceremoniously kicked out?

      The final fate is one of the three. Which do you think is most likely?

      They will stay largely economically successful but will remain concentrated in liberal and progressive areas of the USA, like NYFC, Austin, Seattle, Silicon Valley, and SoCal. When the USA really begins to fall apart, most of them will leave. Those that stay will not fare well because they are not oppressed enough.

      When it comes to predictions about Indians becoming more hated than Jews, remember that old maxim from, I think, Tacitus: “If you would know who controls you see who you may not criticise.” (And yes, apparently that was Tacitus, not Voltaire, who first came up with the summation.)

      Right now, criticism of and discrimination against Indians is actually quite permissible in the USA – the case of Mindy Kaling's brother comes to mind. Contrast this with criticism of Blacks, Jews, and gays, and you'll quickly see that Indians are still not powerful enough to have control over the actual institutions yet.

      Reply
    • Didact

      Those that stay will not fare well because they are not oppressed enough.

      This requires clarification.

      When the USA inevitably breaks apart, the coastal and urban areas will be controlled and "governed" on the basis of intersectional privilege. The higher the oppression rating of a given group, the more rights and privileges will be conferred to it.

      Indians don't rank high on the intersectional privilege chart. Therefore they will not be treated particularly well by the progressive Left once that lot attain power.

      That could change. But right now, the small numbers of Indians combined with their very high median income and average wealth, works against them.

      Reply
    • Johnny

      He does not say anything in that article about Indians in America as a general group.

      But that is just it. He says all successful Indians in the US are 'Brahmins'. Remember that he and his commenters conflate the Brahmin Caste, IQ, and 'Aryan-ness' into the same thing, since they are looking for an easy explanation about why Indians succeed in the US, without questioning their cherished HBD beliefs.

      Indians are still not powerful enough to have control over the actual institutions yet.

      You are still assuming they have to become powerful to be hated. Nothing could be further from the truth. The rate at which Indians are being elevated in the media to spew anti-white hate means they will be hated very soon. Whether they are powerful or not is moot. Again, a quick visit to Unz.com, such as the threads I have linked, will prove this. Whether they represent the general population or not, Indians are vastly more hated on at least forums like that than, say, Chinese.

      Reply
    • Didact

      He says all successful Indians in the US are 'Brahmins'.

      Where? I haven't seen a single instance thus far of Steve Sailer saying anything of the sort. His commenters might say that, but he is no more responsible for what his commenters say than I am.

      You are still assuming they have to become powerful to be hated. Nothing could be further from the truth.

      As I said before, ethnic groups need a reason to hate "the other" in order to attack and destroy them. Indians in America aren't guiltless, by any means. They are liberal and consistently vote for dyscivic and stupid policies that are directly detrimental to their White neighbours and to the health of the American nation. But that, in and of itself, is not a sufficient reason to hate them.

      Unlike Blacks, Indians are not responsible for disproportionate amounts of crime. Unlike Jews, Indians are not (yet) responsible for the destruction of nuclear families through dyscivic laws, the promotion of pornography, the lockstep brainwashing of the American public through the media, or any number of other sins. Unlike Hispanics, Indians are not forcing Americans to adopt a new language and customs alien to their own.

      Again, a quick visit to Unz.com, such as the threads I have linked, will prove this

      It will prove nothing beyond the fact that one website is full of people who don't like Indians. I don't have a problem with that. Let them do as they please in their own little corner of teh innarwebz.

      At present, Indians are not the target for White American anger. Blacks and Chinese are, and with great justification in both cases.

      Reply

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