Quote Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit View Post
They are not a homogeneous blob.



...Why?

Also, you're complaining about the Gracies and not Lloyd Irvin, the rapist?

CR
Yeah, I am generalizing about them, but based on whom they have chosen to represent themselves.
And the reason I posted about them is because while everyone recognized that rapists are reprehensible, many people have a very good opinion of the Gracies.

Quote Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube View Post
The Gracies refined a fantastic fighting style. How they've chosen to subsequently sell-out after becoming famous seems irrelevant.

Unless Vuk is one of those crazies who thinks grappling skills are overrated.
It is not irrelevant. They con people out of millions of dollars and endanger people's lives by misrepresenting their product. Seem like an outrageous claim? Let me expand.
First of all, their system is very poorly suited to self-defense and to the military, as it only works well if dealing with one attacker. Most times people are not so lucky. Also, BJJ is less well suited to self-defense or the military than many forms of traditional JJJ, as it was designed specifically for tournaments and challenge fights, and not real, life and death fights.
Even in tournaments wrestling and boxing/kickboxing generally are far more important in securing victory, even amongst great BJJ practitioners like GSP, but that is another matter.
In order to promote their art so that they could get more money, the conned our military into heavily basing its new combatives on GJJ. It is true that our old combatives were too kill oriented and did not have enough restraint techniques, but adopting BJJ and adding a few palm strikes was not the answer to changing combat needs. Hand-to-hand combat is rare in modern conflicts, but happens. Being trained correctly could mean the difference between life and death. You think the Gracies cared that they were endangering people by selling GJJ to the military? Of course not, it was good publicity.

GJJ is ill-suited for civilian life-saving measures for the save reasons as the military. It is far too limited and ground-fighting gets you killed when there are multiple attackers. The Gracies still try to sell their style as well suited for self-defense, and particularly for small men and women.

The truth is that the average violent criminal is a man. Women are on average a lot smaller and less physically capable than men. The average man needs to learn a lot less to defend himself against the average man than the average woman would. As such, a class specifically designed for women should be far more intense as an average woman needs to train harder than an average man to defend against the same opponent.

So what is the Gracie Women Empowered Course? A watered-down version of their main course that targets men. True, women can join a school and learn the same as men, but they market the WE courses as ideal for women and most women will enroll in them instead. Why? If you are going to have something specifically targeting women, it should be far more intense, not the opposite!

So why lie to women and make them think they would have a better chance of surviving by taking an inferior course? Why, because they think it will bring in greater volumes of people, and even though they will send them all away no better off than when they started, they will make more money from them.

They are just a bunch of conmen who make profit from deceiving women and our military.

And no, I don't think grappling skills are overrated. I think ground fighting is overrated. A good counter-grappler can keep from going to the ground most times, even against the best grapplers. Why do you think it is that most times you have a battle or two great grapplers in the UFC the stand up and strike? Because they know it would just be a waste of effort to try to take each other down, and that to achieve a take down would take much more time than they have.
The best fighters are good counter-grapplers who stay on their feet and take their opponents out with strikes. Even Randy Couture (best UFC fighter in the history of the show IMHO) who I honestly think wrestled way too much still mostly knocked his opponents out.