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Old 10-20-2011, 12:40 PM   #1504
Alberto_Italiano
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 296
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Re: Aikido does not work at all in a fight.

Quote:
Gerardo Torres wrote: View Post
Alberto, no offense but you keep coming back passing "final judgement" on the subject, and yet your posts suggest that you have no idea what aiki is, and have yet to encounter it. So you're in no position to say that "aikido (the way of aiki) doesn't work in... whatever". That would be like me going to a physics forum and start proclaiming that Superstring Theory (...snip...)

Aikido is Ueshiba's art and he used aiki -- a martial ability -- to prove himself and that aiki and therefore aikido worked in a martial context. After him others have done the same. The status quo doesn't matter. The fact there was one, or a few or more who knew aiki and could show its martial viability is enough to consider the matter (different from reaching a final conclusion) of aiki as a valid martial avenue.

I'm not saying that some of your suggested curricular changes are to be entirely dismissed, only that there are certain things you need to know and train first, before you go down the path you suggest, otherwise you're going to steer aikidoka farther down the wrong path (they'll never learn aiki, the basic skill that fuels aikido).

Because there are people who have no idea what aiki is and yet insist on passing judgement on what aikido (the way of aiki) can or cannot do? Maintaining this impassable position will guarantee a thread's longevity.
Whoever may be genuinely interested in aiki, would never dare say he knows what aiki is. It's an implied gentlement's agreement for me.

Yet as a matter of fact, the fact we have no canonical definition of it so that immediate consensus about it can be won, opens the concept of aiki to broad speculation.

But if you place aiki among the most refined achievements of aikido, as I assume it ought to be placed, then you should not consider it as something that can be acquired cheaply or as something that may be granted to anybody.

Given that assumption, whoever plans to discover aiki would never say: i now know with finality what aiki is.
In your reasoning, Torres, you are replacing my alleged intention to be final about this thread, with your alleged intention of being final about what aiki is.
But swapping tits for tats won't help Aikido to solve the resons that make this accusation (of being martially ineffective) flung at it so often, so frequently, so insistently.

Speaking of this immaterial, unnamed aiki as if it were the true tao which cannot be named or explained, as the reason because a certain type of aikido is totally ineffective against brutality, is only another way to keep the accusation come: because it won't cease of being flung simply because we place a phantom along its path, with the hope that it may fend it off with its spectral weapons.

The accusation is thrown at aikido from a ground and a world that is made like this: show me your aiki by defeating this ruthlessly violent challenge.
As long as you won't meet the challenge, the quest won't be won, the accusation will keep coming, and aiki will keep being considered an excuse for covering up martial incompetency (not saying you are not competent Torres, don't read me wrong here! I am just reproducing the reasoning behind this accusation - a reasoning that has its part of valid rationality and truth).

Last edited by Alberto_Italiano : 10-20-2011 at 12:45 PM.
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