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Not strictly martial arts related, but I think I've done a lot of good work on the mental shit that's been impeding me from actually properly getting into DOING it consistently instead of just reading about it, as I've been wanting to do since I tried the local HEMA club just before thanksgiving.

If I can get the financial shit in order, I ought be able to go consistently, and being on disability I could take full advantage of the crazy amount of classes they have for a HEMA club. Not exactly practical but it's the thing I would be most inclined to do most often, for reasons both of my personal interests and the fact that HEMA has probably the most trans-friendly culture of any martial art, at least in the US. And hey, they teach the grappling stuff from the manuscripts and also host a Latosa Escrima class, which seems quite practically-minded even if most of the practice is still done with weapons.

Fingers crossed that by next month I will be able to start doing this shit in a proper committed fashion.

Just because cops are saying it doesn't mean it's not true. There's actual studies on the matter and they've done testing. Drawing a firearm and shooting accurately enough times to consistently disable a human immediately - so at least two shots with handgun calibers - is extremely difficult and cannot be done consistently within that range or closer, and again most self defense starts within or just outside arms reach.

That's a large part of why they themselves teach police basic grappling. Most of them aren't any good at it, but they are still taught it for good reason.

Again, it's a matter of consistency - if you try to draw a firearm when someone has hands on you, they are GOING to attempt to stop or disarm you by grappling you, even if likely in a clumsy untrained way.

Obviously, it's much easier to resist grappling when you yourself know how to grapple. It's a skill, after all.

As said in another comment, I am a trans woman, I am in precisely the same situation.

That doesn't mean what your were suggesting isn't bad advice to give to others - again, if someone put their hands on you then your firearm is going to be extremely difficult to use effectively. Martial arts are genuinely the more suited tool for the situation, strength/size can be overcome - at least momentarily - with technique even when the gap is large, and all you need is to create enough space to either run, draw your weapon, or both.

It's definitely a lot harder for women, but it still very much can be done and knowing how to do it only makes a firearm more effective by increasing the odds that you will actually be able to use it.

I go back and forth on whether that's true, personally, but that's because of my particular circumstances.

For one, I'm already depressed as it is and I doubt prison would improve my misery circumstances. For two, I am a trans woman and I've heard all about v-coding and I'd rather die than be subject to that.

Ideally, however, neither. And that's probably what would happen if I responded to an attack by throwing the guy on the ground and running away really fast.

I'm not saying I endorse the practice, stop acting like the kind of people who do go around picking fights.

While you are correct that even a single punch carries a risk of death - that's why you don't pick fights - it remains a fact that humans have fought each other without death being the intended outcome for literally the entirety of human existence, and that currently in most places the vast majority of humans will never get into a fight where murder is intended.

Because of this, there is a certain etiquette around even self defensive violence that exists in all societies, and the majority almost universally regard pulling a weapon when attacked by an unarmed person to be a socially and legally unacceptable decision, regardless of the actual statistical reality of the risk of death in unarmed combat - unless there's some other mitigating factor like being jumped by a group or being a woman being attacked by a man, at least in theory.

While being thrown in jail for manslaughter is arguably better than being killed, it'd be better for neither to happen - and martial arts allow you to accomplish this.

I note also that you had no response to my assertion of the impractical nature of your advice - this is something police departments have put a lot of effort into analyzing and figuring out, as they're the only demographic of armed individuals who are somewhat regularly in combat with unarmed or melee-armed individuals. They have found that attempting to draw a firearm is useless even within distances as far as 21 feet - and most self defense situations turn violent when the people involved are FAR closer to that, often within or just out of arms reach.

This is ignoring a wide spectrum of social violence where killing people is not the goal of either party and reacting in such a manner in such a situation would thusly get you socially ostracized and probably thrown in jail for manslaughter or equivalent, even in the gun-happy USA.

Besides, attempting to draw a firearm in a hand to hand combat situation is a stupid idea - it's going to be a struggle to actually get an accurate shooting position, and in the mess of desperate grappling that results all that practice shooting is going to be useless and you'll be just as likely to accidentally shoot yourself, a bystander, or someone trying to intervene as the target you intended. Nobody is quick drawing and smoking a guy after being punched, and if you draw FIRST you're rightly getting thrown in jail for murder.

For both social and practical in the moment reasons, this is bad advice - martial arts genuinely excel at this niche because it's socially acceptable to respond with it with attacked by unarmed hands, and it's literally just much more consistently effective at that range than firearms.

My number one piece of advice is that the best martial art is the one you will practice consistently, more or less. Some have better proven track records than others, but almost all of them will give you a firm advantage over the untrained as long as you practice diligently and efficiently.

Unfortunately a lot of martial arts gyms or dojos are chuddy as fuck, so you may have to bounce around a little to find both a style that you actually like, and a group of people who you can at least tolerate and more importantly trust with your body.

With that in mind, these days people seem to regard some combination of Judo+BJJ+Any striking art to be a good combo, as that would cover your bases in terms of unarmed combat - stand-up grappling, ground grappling, and striking. Wouldn't reach you how to deal with weapons, but weapon arts are quite niche and the rest is more important self defense wise.

If you don't wanna invest that much time, which is fair, out of the 3 my uneducated take would probably be Judo - less likely to be chuddy than BJJ and the ability to get people on the ground while remaining upright is theoretically the best thing you can do in a self defense scenario, as it gives you an opening to run.

In terms of injury, 90% of that is gym/dojo culture. If they don't take safety seriously, have a no pain no gain mindset, use too much force in sparring? You're gonna get hurt. The other 10% is how often you're getting struck on the head. Not doing a striking art, this can be mostly avoided by getting really good at falling properly.

Yeah, thankfully this issue is long-since buried, but I've always felt the same way. Left the site for a number of years while they were in charge. I think a lot of the problems the site continues to have in terms of mod/admin culture and issues with declining membership date by the precedents set back then.

I am going to charitably assume that by 'Americans' you are referring to the people who support the anti-Trans riders that have been removed. I would recommend you clarify, as it REALLY looks like you misread the headline or something and are cheering the anti-trans laws being passed.

I assume you must be talking about hallucinations that are supported by delusions, although again I have no real idea why Trump's weird but ultimately easy to explain obsession with Greenland would bring that to mind.

Your experience as a medical carer doesn't give you a sufficient understanding of how these disorders and symptoms work to be throwing around diagnoses of public figures because they did or said something that you personally thought was weird.

Schizophrenia is a deeply stigmatized disorder and the intense stigma and fear of schizophrenic people is a MASSIVE part of what makes the disorder so severe. Connecting behavior like this from Trump to the idea of schizophrenia is both completely baseless from a diagnostic perspective AND is a statement that reinforces the stigma of schizophrenic people as being violent and dangerous in an unhinged sense.

Contributing to hostile stigmas like this does nothing but make the lives of the severely mental ill harder, and is a extremely pervasive form of ableism.

Why exactly do you think has any relation to 'hallucinations' at all?

I do not understand what you're seeing here that calls to mind the idea of him hallucinating.

Nobody on this website is going to give you a good answer because obviously distaste for the idea of objective reality is not a very materialist position and it's a very esoteric philosophical thing in a way a lot of people here tend to not like, insert Marx quote about changing the world etc etc.

I would try to explain the fundamental premise that's usually behind views like this as someone who is adjacent to a lot of this stuff:

The only reality one can ever describe and accept as real is the one that they are subjectively experiencing. This is true - while others may seem to be experiencing the same reality and indeed there is a lot of real reason to think this (we're communicating, aren't we?) those real reasons, to some, especially those who have conceptions of themselves or experiences that are extremely out of the norm, the idea of a shared objective reality start to feel a bit constructed.

There's definitely a Base that is shared, to use language that may be familiar, but what is often ignored is the Superstructure, so to speak. The beliefs and experiences and emotional associations and internal symbology of each discrete individual and each group of people, in particular cultural blocks.

Imagine, for a moment, that you were born a Medieval Serf. You have no modern scientific knowledge, only folk tradition farming techniques and crafts techniques, and this stuff is going to be freely intermixed with various forms of magic that you and everyone around you takes for granted as something that is real and works. Your beliefs about the nature of reality are going to be a Catholic framework with leftover pagan traditions mixed in - this, again, you take for granted as self evidently true, as true to you as the modern secular materialist view of reality is to us now.

This means that even if we pluck this Serf-you to the modern day, even if you see or do the same things as this Serf version of you in the same context , you are going to interpret them in fundamentally different ways because of these fundamental differences in Superstructure - to an external observer you could appear to experience the same exact thing but your actual internal subjective experiences of reality and understanding of what reality is are going to be completely different, so in a very real way you ARE experiencing different realities.

That's obviously a fanciful scenario but a lot of people with significant dissociation or psychotic symptoms (as the prohibitions on kinphobia, pluralphobia et al suggests is the case with this group - no shade intended for the record I actually love to see that as one of those sorts myself.) it really is like this, I myself personally have had experiences that were genuinely shattering to my sense of reality and ever since my Superstructure has been permanently abnormal and thus my reality is Not the same as the majority of the people I interact with.

But really these fundamental differences do exist between every human - in most cases it's just far far less pronounced, but trauma and brain being wired weird can make the difference really stark, as can comparison to how utterly alien the day to day understandings of reality of past humans could be.

I hope that was a satisfactory explanation of the undergridding of that sort of thought.