71–80 of 119 posts
While all the damages of the British occupation of Sri Lanka and elsewhere is terrible, I believe banning martial has been common the world over, especially before the modern era. I think various Chinese rulers as well as the Maoist banned some martial arts, Russia banned everything but Sambo in the Soviet era, Capoeira was developed in Brazil as a "secret martial art", martial arts were banned in Okinawan at one poi…
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In this case its super easy - Great Britain, a specific state next to continental Europe. Punishment as such can be done ie financially via direct aid. Building schools and hospitals. You name it. But this would be a direct admission how monstrously they fucked up this world for centuries and that's something no politician will admit, no matter what they think personally. Also, we talk about most of western Europe he…
Problem with this logic is where does it end. Should modern day Italians pay for what Rome did? Turks for Ottomans? Mongols for Genghis Khan and his children’s empire? The Danish/Norwegian Vikings for taking over large parts of the British isles? The Moscow Rus for taking over the land that became Russia? Basically human history is one long bloody path for conquest and sadly rarely do the victors pay for the cruelty…
Whataboutism about ancient civilizations does detract from current topic, Great Britain is the same place as 80 years ago, same government, same everything. Heck, almost the same queen. Same for France for example.
But sure you can try desperately to come up with excuses to avoid any responsibility and enjoy the riches your ancestors stole from poor folks. What do you think most western Europe has been doing for past 70 years?
It gets even better - out of guilt (at least 'officially'), they allow young smart folks from former enslaved colonies to study there with few restrictions compared to rest of population. Of course most will stay and not return. The poor place remains poor, but what do wealthy nations care, economy goes forward and demographic crisis is averted for another few years.
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It's more about linguistic structure than origin of words. Kannada, Telugu & Malayalam, even pre-dravidan-movement Tamil have lot of borrowed sanskrit vocabulary, but they retain structure of Dravidian languages. Also most common words used are also Dravidan origin. For example: Kannada - Naanu, Tamil - Naan, Telugu - Nenu, Malayalam - Njan Etc.. Another small thing unique about Dravidian languages is clusivity, ther…
Yes, but does Sinhala hase the linguistic structure of Dravidian languages or not?
There will be always be some influence and loanwords from neighbouring languages but comparative linguistics can tell origin / family of the language pretty accurately.
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It being a cultural expression is (I think, I'm no expert / armchair, etc) an important motivator for erasure. If missionaries think this cultural expression is pagan or anti-christian, they would have tried to suppress or erase it. And it's well-established that China's cultural revolution erased (and is erasing) culture, see also Tibet and the current erasure of Uyghur culture and identity. They seem to have come t…
Kung Fu is a major tourist attraction for China and part of their cultural heritage, so they're pretty invested in it. There is a Chinese citizen that is a very mediocre MMA fighter who goes around and challenges so called "grand masters" to show how full of BS they are. He's beaten so many without any serious effort that the communist party got upset and downgraded his social credit to where he can no longer fly to…
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There was a famous Greek fighter who competed in the original Olympics who's preferred tactic was to break all the fingers of his opponent first, before finishing them off. It was pretty normal for fighters to lose teeth or suffer broken bones.
This guy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sostratus_of_Sicyon
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Sorry, Bruce Lee and static? What are you even talking about? He's one of the earliest examples of MMA I can think of in how he tried to draw from different martial arts to create jeet kune do, which was not just created for movies. Edit: As a concrete example, he grew up with Wing Chun. But he realized that the static stance was a huge detriment in real fights, so he took the boxing footwork from Ali, which was a lo…
"Bruce Lee's movie fighting style" then, which has little to do with his proper fight training, like Jean Claude van Damme's fight choreography has little to do with his fighting background. Apart from that, I do take issue with the for some reason increasingly popular notion of Bruce Lee's fighthing being some sort of proto-MMA. MMA is not just taking something from various sources and calling it " -fu" or " tang do…
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Not related to the article, but would you be able to comment on why Sinhala is classified as an Indo-European language, rather than as a Dravidian language?
Languages are classified based on relatedness, not geography. Just as you have an Indo-Aryan language, Sinhala, that made it down to Sri Lanka, you also have a Dravidian language, Brahui, that stuck around up in Pakistan.
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Well, MMA is a one-on-one sport, with all that entails. No multiple opponents, no small joint manipulation, no gouging, no biting, no spitting, no striking the neck or back of the head, no kicking the head of a downed opponent.... etc etc. All of which could happen in actual combat and non-sport fighting.
Apart from multiple opponents, those all seem like fairly minor variations on MMA technique in the sense that defending against the legal MMA attacks naturally defends against the illegal ones as well, and similarly the same skills that allow a fighter to land legal attacks would allow them to land illegal ones in a non-sport situation. It seems unlikely an overall inferior MMA fighter could win just by focusing on s…
The effective techniques in MMA are just as defined by the ground rules as any other martial art. Real “anything goes” fighting would be as different from MMA as MMA is from kickboxing.
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Problem with this logic is where does it end. Should modern day Italians pay for what Rome did? Turks for Ottomans? Mongols for Genghis Khan and his children’s empire? The Danish/Norwegian Vikings for taking over large parts of the British isles? The Moscow Rus for taking over the land that became Russia? Basically human history is one long bloody path for conquest and sadly rarely do the victors pay for the cruelty…
Well sure our history is one of pathetic murderous species, with few exceptions. That doesn't make it anyhow being OK with what your/their ancestors did, does it. Whataboutism about ancient civilizations does detract from current topic, Great Britain is the same place as 80 years ago, same government, same everything. Heck, almost the same queen. Same for France for example. But sure you can try desperately to come u…
> The poor place remains poor
Relatively yes but in absolute numbers no (this also applies within individual counties even the rich ones). In most places the poor have been getting richer, live longer and are better educated than ever. Basically being poor 80 years ago was much much worse for the individual than today.
Angampora is a fascinating martial art, but while British colonialism is/was a scourge across the world there's little evidence that they actually banned the martial art. While I generally don't like to use reddit posts as sources, this one[0] is well researched enough and includes its (long list of) sources that I figured it counts. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/kh9gfb/the_brit...
Sri Lankan here. I'm probably going to catch some flak from enthusiasts for this, but what you see in this article is essentially a modern recreation. As far as I know, nothing except the name itself has survived antiquity (if this actually existed, it faded long before Europeans arrived). Enthusiasm in this art form was rekindled due to a fictionalized depiction in a TV show named Dandubasnamaana about 15-20 years a…
i.e. IIRC modern tae kwon do goes no further back than the 20th century, despite some practitioners and nationalists (disclaimer: I'm Korean myself) claiming it goes back hundreds or thousands of years.