Violent Sports, Non-Violence, Vegetarianism and Other Things™

I'm personally a fan of MMA and some other violent sports. I'm also vegetarian (most of the time vegan, exceptions being pastry and cheese when having pizza outside Europe, since there, you can already order 100% vegan with Telepizza and others that is good, walk in a supermarket and buy vegan frozen pizza or vegan cheese and do at home). The reason I mention this is to clear both points from the start. When I was younger I personally was - and still am - against bull-fighting, even other forms of entertainment with animals that relied on hurting them or continuous stress for the amusement of a bunch of people who could be having fun with something else.

Looking back at that time I was being in a way hypocrite because I wasn't vegetarian - and I knew about vegetarianism, through friends taking the same degree as I, and I had seen movies such as earthlings. I also experienced first hand animal killing for the most various reasons (culling natural births, food, disease, poisoning, old age, etc). At the time though my line was that for food it was a necessary evil, it was nourishing, it was even the reason why humans diversified from apes.

On the other hand having a laugh at a confused form of life in clear stress, most times unable to defend itself, in some situations having to fight till dea, is a different thing - this was just a cultural artifact that didn't make any sense anymore.

Nowadays I look at it a bit differently, even though bull-fighting until the death of the bull still doesn't make the cut for me. But for instance the "forcados", that are typical of the portuguese bull-fighting, and are usually amateur, paid much less than the real bull-fighters, and take on a bull by its horns without weapons (even if nowadays the bull has the horns padded to not rip through a human, it will still break your ribs if it lands there on charge) this is something I am totally fine with.

It's a line of "forcados", they are in order and the first is the first to try to hold the bull as it charges and the others either add up to the guy on front or become the front until they get a hold of the charing bull and they can hold down the line by themselves - this is something that is much easier for me today to accept and even admire as an art, as an act of courage - the bull is clearly the one in advantage here and he has a chance to take revenge of all the years he spent impregnating cows and having the best diet he could and perhaps the idiots or not handling him.

When I was growing up there was also at that time talks by people connected to animal rights groups or anti-bull-fighting, that said that the bulls were seldomly drugged, to make them tamer - and this from the point of view of those organising these events and those having to face the bull made sense, but to me and others seemed (and seems to me) so unfair. You already have a sword or you're riding a horse.

Obviously all those things require still enormous courage, skill and guts. Literally, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27520374 shows you that from records (this is only registered official records) you have more than 500 deaths since 1700 in Spain alone, but the number is probably much higher - and is only deaths not other non lethal gorings.

And even if taking the number of killed bulls compared to what the meat industry does, it's probably a drop on the ocean. Plus it has the fact that it's in the interest of these "granaderies" to keep healthy specimens, treat them well, ensure it's medical conditions - so when I compare what one entails and the other... It's hard to say it's a bigger problem than our all-meat diet. On the other hand many are connected directly to the meat industry...

At the same time it isn't needed - we no longer need knights/troops that can horseback-ride, so one of the reasons that was a strong incentive to keep the tradition alive is no longer relevant in the same measure, as we also need less horses trained for those purposes. The symbolic, courageous act can be done with the catching of the bull, as the "forcados" do, although I wonder at what price one would be willing to go in the arena to do it and would people pay. It's also probable that this accompanied a time when eating meat, having festivities was less common, and a reason to do it was exactly that, a respite from the hardships of day to day - everybody parties, has fun, man can show their courage, masculinity and strength in an arena, everybody eats well.

Again while studying and after having participated in anti-bull-fighting demonstrations some friends that had what would be a ranch in the US and did bulls and all that, invited me to one of these celebrations and it's hard to say that the people who were there enjoying were bad people for that, everyone was having fun and a small vacation from every-day life.

But that's different than what we have today. If you look at the meat consumption per capita it's increasing, probably if you lay it over the increase in male population tendencies for dick sucking , they probably increase at the same rate. Due to exaggerated meat eating on both ends. It's the same if you tell me some native tribe in the Artic living in igloos, eats fish and hunts bear. Well, good for them buddy, I've seen videos of the area, hope they don't need to eat themselves or others, right. Eat all damn fish and meat you can put your hands on. But honestly you might consider settling somewhere better suited for humans, like less snow, ice, etc - it's like those tiles in strategy games, it's pretty clear you can't construct, live, or do anything there, they're the limit of the map.

Or if you live in Alaska, or isolated in a cabin in the woods. My parents had a restaurant while growing up and I didn't become vegetarian until I was 31 so I ate meat for a long while, I was faced with information/videos/propaganda for veganism/vegetarianism, I saw it in connections I kept on making but still I didn't change until much later on. When growing up my favourites where meatballs swedish style and spaghetti a la bolognese, for sure (in the restaurant both meats are served in a similar tomate based sauce). I could eat twice a stacked pyramid of pasta and bolognese. It was restaurant quality food everyday. I also loved pizzas although I ended up liking more the italian, thin, modestly covered version - it just melts together much better - those in the restaurant where somehow more filled but still good. Lots of soup, daily soup was always on the menu and plenty of fish too.

I also grew up throughout and was in situations of killing - killing for food, food preparation from the real dead bodies of the animals, pet cullings, etc. I still wouldn't know what to say to pet cullings - if you can't support them it's kinda hard to tell what someone should or not be able to do with their animals, but at the same time perhaps if you want pets that you can't have breeding then you need to sterilize them? I don't know. I was definitively sad as I helped my mom drown out some kitties after we couldn't find no-one else to take the remaining but I at the same time pretty much understood that we couldn't keep all the 7 kitties - If I remember correctly we kept 2 and found homes for other 2.

I also can't really argue against overgrowth, if species are naturally taking over an ecosystem (fish, birds, insects, mammals) then probably it's hard to reject killing those "excedentary" for food (as in the sense that they got to that point by themselves and now represent an actual breakdown of the ecosystem due to overgrowth) but not reject killing them to bring the numbers into manageable range or ecosystem resiliency. I would nonetheless not want to eat insects, nor be forced to, I imagine others wouldn't want to other things.

This is also the way nature seems to balance itself. In fact if you think about it, carnivores can only exist when there's an excess of eatable life, so carnivores don't seem at all to be the "peak" of evolution but instead the trash taking of evolution. Even when you compare the life of an elephant or a whale and you compare it with something like a lion, I mean, elephants will do kilometers off their usual paths to do what can only be thought of a "last goodbye", effectively being very similar to a funerary meeting. The reason why it looks amazing is that they go out of their usual paths meaning they need to have very complex temporal and geographic understandings - they need to know that no only once he's dead he's dead, so they need to do it now, they know how to go off their paths but also BACK, they need to communicate or otherwise be able to feel that one of them have died, and where... It's pretty complex when you start thinking about it.

But all this to say that predators in the way we fantasize are only a thing that comes up when there's enough for them and although predators (mamal's specially) are usually very beautiful and exhibit some amazing capacities and skills, even their social groups are pretty basic when compared to other mammals. When you go out of mammals they don't even look pleasant anymore for the most part. So my question would be do you want to be a lion, that outside of zoos or protected areas never look as beautiful or well-looking as those inside, can still be killed by others, where most of the hunt it's actually the lionesses that do, and you live on a cycle of hunt, get phat, can't hunt, hunger until lean enough to hunt again, catch prey, repeat cycle, or one where some 40 members do kms off track to say goodbye and visit their relatives and acquantainces, and perhaps even join and wage war if the killing was not natural.

Then you have the actual strength of these animals. Whales, Elephants, Bulls, Rhinos, etc. They're all herbivores - it's important to note that as herbivores they have different stomachs from humans, the same as carnivores. The thing here is the biggest beings in the whole earth are herbivores, they don't seem to need meat protein... Once I was watching a video of an UFC Fighter, Johnny Walker, where he's going through the PI and in one of the walls is a saying by Anderson Silva, "if size mattered the elephant would be the king of the jungle". Well brother Silva, it indeed is (when you take humans out of the equation). Lion packs will only attack young, old or diseased elephants. Have you seen what some, not even bulls, just horned mammals get to do with some lions? They manage to gut them. Imagine what a grown elephant can do... They gut rhinos. A better way of saying that is perhaps, that if only size matters then the elephant wouldn't be afraid of the mouse (plus the UFC is probably the wrong place for the original since in fact they use weight classes, so it must matter a bit...).

Anyway, I also grew up with people, sometimes close, that grew a small number of sheep, I've always had dogs, when younger we lived close to a pig farm (yeah there were pretty awful smelling days all around), when young my dad had horses - one died drowned in the tank/pool (2m depth without ramps), we arrived after a weekend out and the horse was trying to keep afloat, while stuck with the rope that was large enough so he could drink from there (it was only cleaned and then chlorinated on beginning of summer). We called the firefighters but we lived out in the woods, and they had to figure out what they could bring to get a horse out of a pool, and they didn't arrive on time to save him. Seemed like a scene from the Never Ending Story, when Atreyu's horse dies,

I've also seen how someone wakes up everyday to take care of the animals, and takes a motherless animal and feeds them through their infancy, never missing a session for weeks, etc. Herding herbivores are also good for "cleaning" up fields, many produce food such as milk (can be converted into cheese and yougurt) and textile such as wool that can be used without killing the animal. But in these cases it's hard to argue against someone who keeps a bunch of chickens, sheep, or whatever and takes eggs to eat, or every year kills a lamb to eat, or would be if they then didn't eat meat every other single day as well - if they kept a pretty vegetarian based diet for most part, then you could argue this as pretty natural, but if they still everyday buy meat/fish/poultry/dairy then that isn't a result of this natural way of life, it's from both sides in this case.

The thing is this type of balanced life, that I don't think any animal itself would not like if offered and able to speak, is not what most vegetarians or vegans talk about because it never works at scale - it's a non-workable model without these giant slaughterhouses. You can see some data, this is US only. https://animalclock.org . And there's no other way if we keep or increase our consumption of meat. All of this has also side-effects that I'm not going to get into.

So the problem from my point of view is not so much the occasional eating of meat it is the addiction and sickness it propagates.

When I become vegetarian at 31 I noticed some things. First, my favourite dish had long stopped being bolognese or meatballs etc. When I was 14 or so through some italian friends my mom started cooking spaghetti sometimes with just tomato sauce through their recipe. Homemade but still just tomato, spices and topped with some delicious cheese (parmesan(o) ideally but many times just some grated cheese which worked quite ok too) , no meat. It had become through time my favourite dish - way before becoming vegetarian and not at all because it was a vegetarian dish I still ate everything else, never gave it a second though. I actually started doing enormous pans, because it takes a bit of doing, preparing and cooking while paying attention so it doesn't stick to the pan and burn, ruining the whole flavour - I did that so I wouldn't have to waste time everyday cooking it and because I was totally fine eating it 7/7 for weeks if needed, so a big pan was food for 4 or 5 days for sure, and you can eat with pasta, or just on top of bread (ideally toasted bread with a bit of olive oil)..

I would just cook 2kg or more of tomatoes (chopped or not), usually 4 ±500g cans. Chopped onion, thinly chopped garlic. Do a "refogado": onion and garlic fried in a generous amount of olive oil until translucent. I always add sugar at this point and brown the onion a bit. Sugar is important even more when using cans of tomatoes, because the tomato in those is more acidic tasting than normal fresh tomatoes - nonetheless I always use sugar and generously (nutella, but added after the tomatoes also works very nice). About canned or natural tomatoes, the thing is peeling the natural ones is annoying, you can freeze them and then taw in hot water to ease the peeling, but the canned ones, if we take care of the acidity, are usually very good too (it also depends on brand, in Portugal, those from the supermarkets chain's own brand, so usually the cheapest, like Continente, Pingo Doce, were pretty good and better than some brands), because they're canned usually when you have lots of ripe tomatoes that you can't sell right away, so one way of funneling those ripe tomatoes is to can them so their shelf-life increases manifold. What this means here is that, in dishes that cook them - like this one - they can arguably be said to be better than most tomatoes you can find out of season in the fresh produce island - that many times look perfect but are quite watery due to fastened maturation, etc. Of course if you have access to a farmers market or in-season ripe tasty tomatoes then it's totally worth the extra work.

Back to the recipe, we were doing the onion/garlic frying in olive oil until lightly brown from the sugar. Afterwards add the chopped tomatoes, put salt to taste, a little wee of grounded hot peppers, stir and cook, paying attention so it to doesn't burn or stick, until there's no "water" left from the tomatoes. Usually you can get the sauce texture to be velvety smooth just by cooking properly for the right time (with natural ripe tomatoes, canned tomatoes depends on the water content) but if not you can add a bit of maizena (corn starch, a good soluble one) to make it thicker and more velvety. Nonetheless, the tomatoes need to cook properly almost to the point where the water is gone, and it's bubbling wildly (use a tall pan, like for soup, or one you can cover and stir). The recipe can also be changed from underneath so its results can vary after cooking, making the cook look silly. Once you're finished you can now adjust salt or sugar, add a tiny bit of basil and top it off with a grated mantle of parmeggiano regiano.

I never really noticed how much I ate this dish and how much I liked it, it was only when I noticed I didn't have to change anything for it (I become vegetarian first, so cheese, eggs and milk were still on the menu, although I wouldn't drink milk itself given the options, but I would eat bakery that certainly was done with milk, the same with eggs, at some point I wouldn't eat eggs by themselves, but would be fine in having pastry that uses eggs or something else). And I was doing it pretty regularly as well. It was then that I noticed that one of my favourite foods ever was totally vegan if I took out the grated cheese. The biggest issue with this dish is really the lack of "protein" because everything else it's my favourite, such a simple thing.

I still did pancakes (milk and eggs) and it's one of the things I can't really make 100% vegan while being 100% as good (not necessarily the same...), but in my view, it's way more important the spread you use - I also haven't tried doing them with proper vegan bakery ingredients - only with trying to create a starch with bananas, or seeds, milk, etc - I got pretty good results but not the real "thing" - I'm sure if using some of those modern vegan variants there wouldn't be any problem.

To cover my protein worries at the time I just used beans (all kinds of beans, lentils, etc), soy/pea protein for home-made smoothy like drinks, and soy textured protein. It's very easy to properly fake grounded beef, pork, chunks of meat, etc that are cooked and served in some kind of generous sauce, just using textured soy flakes and the right condiments. To fake grilled meat is a bit different but ultimately I don't really feel any desire to go back to eating meat and even those, things like sausages are starting to be at a very good level (and mostly using traditional methods with spices, the chinese have been doing great here it seems, not even talking about engineered vegan food where the USA and EU lead, not necessarily genetically modified, just the way of preparing and ingredients are traditional but industrialized, the Japanese also have a bunch of ways to treat the soy bean, in natural processes that create things like soy sauce, varities of tofus and so on, the Indians have entire cuisines that are entirely vegetarian).

But even this "protein lacking" makes no sense, we can't absorb protein - we can only absorb the components that make up a protein, the aminoacids, we have to first destroy the "protein" to be able to digest the aminoacids. So if you eat enough digistible animonacids through a varied group of sources you should be just fine even if no real "protein" is ever on your plate - obviously it's much easier to balance out by eating also protein rich ingredients, it's just to make a point.

It's also important to notice what the industry (and it's funny that we never see those fond of criticizing of government reach, food safety and, true or not, conspiracies, to raise up against the establishment of the agro-food industry) sometimes does with the terms used in media, studies and such.

For instance those studies showing the rate of absorbtion of protein. Those are studies with mice and using uncooked foods - it makes sort of sense in a way, that they're using uncooked foods - to see what nature really "provides" - but at the same time, beans/grains are not expected to be eaten raw at the bean stage, you don't need cooking you just need to sprout them, which is achievable just by a bit of water and proper process - once they sprout all their nutritional value is unlocked without any of the "bad" components in them - a similar approach is achieved by soaking and cooking them - the soaking makes the bean enter the release phase, where it thinks it's going to sprout and so release the chemical defenses overnight - softning during the process - and cooked further for hours or under pressure until the desired consistency is achieved.

And at the same time, although there's a few dishes world-wide that use uncooked meat, they're very few and use other tricks for "sanitizing" the meat. So it's also unfair to use uncooked meet as the basis, because humans don't eat uncooked meat. I doubt even that you would find it tasty or anything.

Otherwise it's like saying that fruits are not to be eaten because at some point they were seeds an unedible (same/similar chemical protections to prevent being eaten), so even when looking at this data, you need to understand what is being tested, how and many times, why - if the study is paid by certain sides you need to understand why, who are the cientists - it's also different if perhaps an NGO with mostly limited funding grants through governemnt partnership a 5000€ grant for a year research project, than if someone already working on the cattle industry, making some comfortable yearly salary and on top of that gets a grant of disclosed (and undisclosed) amounts of money, positions, or market share.

It's also interesting that I never see any of these "carnivore" teachers going on a 1 year spree of just eating uncooked meat. Pig, cow, poultry. One year, you can't eat veggies, you can't eat anything other than the caveman meat diet. Not some stunt eating a bit of liver or something. What a wuss, all that testo injections and the most manly thing he can do is eat a bit of liver on cam while having to take a break every 5min to catch a breath.

I would like to see their new found friends that now call their anus a home. As I said I grew up in a restaurant whenever I wasn't home (which was a bit far from the city), in school, playing or doing what kids do. I remember vividly my parents, but specially my mother which is everything but far from vegetarian, tell me to not eat pork meat that was rosy, this is, badly cooked, inside or outside, to always cut and check if I wasn't in our restaurant or someone's home we knew.

Why, well if you ever saw game meat from a boar you'll understand. It's not very famous because it's many times filled with parasites. Even dogs, and cats, before their digestive systems get properly online, they have a tendency to host intestinal parasites and they have meat digestive systems.

It's the same reason why even though japanese eat all sorts of uncooked fish they for many years didn't do salmon. "No salmonato harigato". Why would they do that? Salmon is one of the most delish fishes there is, and that strong flavour can be used in so many ways to contrast/enhance the sushi that is based in such "simple" ingredients. Yet, historically it seems, salmon is very prone to developing parasites. It's also visible specially with wild salmon (not acquaculture), you can actually see the little white things in the fish meat.

And if you think for instance that although the discovery of scurvy in a technical sense only came later on, it was a known thing, forgotten and rediscovered throughout time, most importantly in close to modern times during the age of exploration. It's said that the Portuguese would plant citric fruit bearing trees across their "fazendas" - most importantly oranges - some places like Turkie call oranges "portakal - and would leave those showing signs of scurvy in outposts. The chinese knew ginger was also good and carried it on their ships as well, the Spanish, the English, when they started traveling and probably many more in their own "ritualised"/cultural forms of knowledge that we'll never hear about.

I knew in fact someone that seemed to have what was the onset of scurvy now that I think about it - because they did in fact say their teeth were feeling loose across all mouth - and this was someone who while not completely against veggies, "couldn't eat rabbit food for his whole life for sure". Gladly he solved it with a full teeth replacement but I now think that probably his digestive issues plus the gum/teeth issues must be somehow related to a heavy-meat diet - on the other hand, this person made is life and lived it the way he wanted to live and is, or was still looking fine for his age.

And this is not to say that just being vegetarian or vegan will prevent you from ever having these diseases that's silly but it seems that there's really no disease for lack of meat, only diseases due to lack of proper nutrition. So if you can live a full healthy life in a strong capable body just with a vegan diet but not with just a carnivore diet, I would seriously think about what I'm convincing others to buy and ideas to have.

Anyway, that's why I think if you're not only touting a carnivore diet, you're on top touting your own supplements and basing it off of those seemingly ill-conceived ideas, then you're technically misleading those who're lending you an ear and so I think that 1 year strict monitored all-uncooked meat as meals would be a necessary authorization stamp.

I say this as someone who has ate lots of different meat, including horse, has eaten frog, and whose country's culinary book has lots of cow, pig, fish and even snails. It's actually the horse meat the first time I properly ate "raw" meat, but even there, carpaccio, the meat is cooked with lemon juice - that's also why the meat slices are so thin.

I can eat, and have, for years on vegetarian plus later on vegan and I've been close to my best form - outside of when I practiced some real sport - even after 40. So I know my side of the deal works so far (not saying it will always work, but I don't see any sign that it shouldn't, logically and empirically so far). I would like to see now a full carnivore eating non-cooked meat for a year to see the real lion and not the hyena wannabe. I also haven't seen any lion, tiger, shark, cook their meal before, seems like a bunch of pussy shenanigans, "oh, let me just cook this deer so the mighty lion can chew on it".

At the same time as I said, I hadn't been vegetarian for 31 years so it's hard to me to tell people they're wrong and making the wrong decisions for themselves, or label them, insult them, categorize them, in ways they aren't particularly deserving of (as in, everyone also does it, why would you single out that person in particular), or feel superior morally now that I think I understood something. It's like when you figure out something you think is important and you go back to your friends and try to make them understand that - I feel many new activists fall on this side, overzelous, extremely aggressive (even if theoretically right, or in situations that are uncalled for, like you're already vegetarian and someone's coming at you like you eating those 2 slices of cheese every day is the same as cutting the throat of all newborns born today).

What right have I to say anything? I saw the videos, I had experience, I knew all those parts, and yet in my mind I said to myself - it's as it should be, in fact, this is the reason why we're no longer apes, etc, etc, etc. And the reason I became vegetarian was because one day I was cooking some pork - I lived in Olaias and used to go to local butcher, and would get every week 2 good beef steaks of a good piece, sometimes some pork; poultry and pork would buy from the supermarket too at times so I don't really remember where I had bought this time but it doesn't really matter...

So I was cooking this like I did dozens and dozens of times probably, cooking the meat with just a bit of olive oil, onions and garlic and I start feeling the smell of like, shit, literally shit. It was weird, I had the window closed, and it seemed, in my mind, I just made a weird connection immediately of the smell coming from the meat, like if the meat had been contaminated by the smell and was now releasing it. Obviously I took a bit of meat out, smelled it, cut it, smelled it. Took another. All smelled fine, but the smell remained in the kitchen for a while. Nonetheless that mental idea, of somehow the meat absorbing something from their surroundings, and that if I now ate it, I would be absorbing those things too, it kinda stuck.

I thought about that for a good while and decided to become vegetarian that night. I didn't really do it I think for any special morality, or empathy, although obviously I cared - I had included in my regular eating vegetarian food before, knowingly and unknowingly - and I did truly like animals - always saw them as having definite personalities, memory, emotions - I grew with dogs, I remember one of our dogs, I think blacky, a belgium' sheppard, standing between me and my brother when we where kids and not allowing our neighbour even an inch closer towards us, but I've also seen them acting like real asses. And I included a few vegetarian things in my diet because I honestly enjoyed them or versions I tried somewhere even if mine would be sometimes far away from those.

Many of the people I meet have never put that into consideration or were even faced with such information, so it's like they truly never answered the same questions.

When it comes to violent sports, and here I'm talking about MMA currently, with some of it also in other practices like kickboxing, muay thai, etc, I feel like the major difference is that the people fighting ultimately make that their decision - many train for life, fought a lot before they even appear in the radars. It's two adults, that have dedicated themselves to the training in mixed martials arts, that go at it. This is a completely different question. It's a conscious choice.

Of course people will talk about the violence and having that as the model, how healthy is that, but the truth is that without places where to express its male energies in a regulated way, and celebrate that, it goes wary in other ways. Obviously there's the eternal question of bullying, not only at a personal level, someone that is, for any combination of reasons, intent on trespassing on your limits because they think they're stronger. You see this from a personal level, to the community level, to the country level, to the empire/alliance level. So it's weird to remove one of the essential ways to hold your values - not necessarily of imposing your will willy nilly over others - from the screen and cultural time.

You also have to account for a natural distribution of things. If evolution requires experimenting with variations and combinations of aspects, even at the DNA level when forming life, then it will be natural that you will have individuals falling out of the spectrum defined as normal - you might have a Dexter, at the same time you might have one almost a-social genius that figures out some weird-ass thing essential to our current progress like some math equation so abstract I can't pass through the first elements without losing the thread. Then you have the combination of natural testesterone that occurrs in males - and no matter what women say it's one of the most important aspects in terms of mating prospects, I don't mean necessarily for definitive relations - and personal history, that can totally affect the outcomes. So it's important to not remove a dignified way of expressing this natural tendency to assert dominance through bare, fair, violence and celebrate it.

Even considering youth with delinquence problems, or violent outbursts, or criminal history, I think that a career in martial arts can be a valid path to solving those problems in a worthy way. Would I say that is better, or teaches better, than perhaps playing football (soccer), I don't know, but I do consider that removing totally violence from society is weird - it just results in a pointed passive-aggressiveness level of interactions that don't feel fulfilling. One-on-one combat sports also have that thing that, they can be quite team based (training, camp, adjacent specialists, helpers, partners, etc) but ultimately they're 1 against 1 inside a combat area, going at it, limited by size categories - it's very equalizing.

But for instance I think that Muay Thai can perhaps try to do the sport Olympic and keep the "real" muay thai (or MMA adapted muay thai) as a path to be followed when you're older and know you really want to fight. Children could practice more protected, even elbow/knee pads, helmets, and focus more on the point based systems, perhaps like taekwondo, karate, etc, as part of the school sports curriculum. This still involves developing technique, speed, etc, but is "softer" on the health hazards. Then if at 14 or so the kid really shows wanting to follow fighting, then he starts training in some more "real" muay thai gyms. From my understanding even current Muay Thai is already watered down from the "original" martial art (had headbutts, strikes now illegal, mma/boxing gloves instead of hand ropes, etc), it's a common path when making a violent sport/art more institutionalised so more people can practice it).

Others that still want to go the Olympic path can also - it's also a show of high skill, you'll fight people preparing for it for life as well, it's less dangerous to the health, but also less glamorous. If you look at sports like rugby, they're also extremely violent and physical, although in different ways. I personally find fighting sports to fill a necessary spot - even if we go back to bull-fighting, and back to gladiators or whatever.

There's also some things even when thinking about traditional sports like Muay Thai that sometimes are not noticed. There's for instance some people saying "well for cardio just running isn't the best so it's better to do other things, and these and that" when referring to the "traditional" morning running routine. But for instance many well-known boxers also ran every day. It's important because it helps developing bone-density on the lower body. If I'm not mistaken it's footballers (soccer) that have the highest bone density in the lower body. Most power boxers plant their feet and rotate their torso. Muay Thai adds kicking, many chin on chin kicks due to checking, knees. So something that if looked like it is kept because "cardio" alone might lead you to say, oh there's better ways but, in this case, it has other "invisible" benefits. You know people care about this because there's even people showing how to harden their chins with the most varied, some crazy, techniques. Just running will do that. Every day (you get the gist), like the thai master is telling you to, in this case.

Now add running in the Kingdom of Thailand is different than in a mild-weathered city, or an air-conditioned gym. You'll start waking up earlier by yourself, at 10am it's grilling. If you do this everyday, then the night in the ring will be tolerable, it's gonna be fresher by itself, and if it starts earlier day you also know how it feels.

It's like Mr. Myagi teaching Daniel-san the cleaning hand gesture (I think it was cleaning?). This doesn't mean we shouldn't analyse things and criticise them where needed but keep an open mind to be corrected - ultimately you can't rely on you alone to reach some knowledge - sometimes it's a connection that you make where yo u don't really have control over, something sparks that connection - it could be random, for sure, but it could also not be.

This doesn't mean that someone that doesn't follow the protocol entirely can't be successful but if that is so they're probably introducing some other elements or personal characteristic that replaces those aspects. It's like Carlos Prates, an upcoming Muay Thai fighter from Brasil, now fighting in the UFC - he shows a kind of life that includes smoking, drinking, partying, etc. But also someone transitioning into another role, that of a dad, provider, etc. But part of his training were some 8 years or so in Thailand, where he had more than 100 fights across small local events to some more regional leagues. He also started fighting in China during that time, due to higher pay and returning to temporary home base in Thailand to keep training, going through all sorts of issues through the process. Now he fights out of the Fighting Nerds in Brasil and is slowly approaching title contention.

And he said that one of the fighters that marked him was a Thai fighter there - he didn't say the name I guess because it could literally be any thai fighter that has done a career in muay thai will have hundreds of fights and many won't look like absolute beasts or anything - that used to spend some of his time just fishing and occasionally lighting one up. Yet this Thai guy beat him twice. And he was like, how can it be, the guy doesn't look his part, just smokes and fishes, yet handed me my ass twice.

Obviously you won't tell people, hey it seems like the secret is smoking and drinking, etc. These people can do this despite those things, not because of those (and I'm a smoker, or have been for most of my life, and tobacco doesn't make any sense as a daily thing, even if I am or can get in 1 month in better shape than most males my age - not of others that practice regularly already but the average lets say that doesn't mean I wouldn't be way better if I just hadn't and didn't smoke).

Anyway, going back to the violence thing, masculinity, vegetarianism. I'm sure you won't find more meat-heads than in something like UFC. One thing that I'm worried though is with the mediatization of fantasy - and nowadays this includes influencers and even less known channels in things like youtube or instagram. With this I'm going to give an extreme example appropriate for the theme of masculinity, violence, veganism, culture, it doesn't mean it applies to everybody in this niche.

Like I said, testosterone is very important for males in terms of attractiveness - specially when it manifests itself physically. That's why big muscles, usually a good hair line, ultimately create that natural reaction of attractiveness for most females and respect/threat for other males, depending on their own size, confidence, personality, context, etc.

When you do some hormonal treatment that increases artificially your muscle size, a woman, biologically, psychologically, interprets that as an unusual high level of testosterone - which is highly desirable - there's no woman that wants another cunt in the relationship except lesbians. Right? Because in nature there's no artificial way of increasing testosterone to the levels required to do that, obviously to your deep brain you're in front of an exceptional physical male sample - although in truth he wouldn't be able to produce those levels unaided.

In the middle of other possibly aggressive males, she wants to know that you can hold your ground - if she or your offspring are threatened she wants you to make it clear that it's secure, she wants you to bring home a bag of money or good life for your and theirs, and also have some domain, she is, when valued her worth, helping in the way it makes more sense, be it taking care of the house, or handling a job, or being the business partner that takes care of the papers, or whatever works, what do I know.

We have laws, a social contract and code, that prevent us from having to select strictly for this trait - physical aggressiveness - in order to have sucessful offspring, but ultimately I think I'm not wrong (but open to female opinions) in saying that women like strong man, mentally and physically, even sexually, specially if they both understand and work together towards something common. They would take that most of the time over someone with no aptitude to say "no", or "sorry we were here first, it's us next", etc, and obviously, ultimately, money is the last type of way of saying "fuck you" when it goes above a certain level it's called "fuck you money" for a reason - although it doesn't mean automatically it earns respect or so, but usually the outcomes yes it earns and by extension others - and it can buy to a certain level security, respect, etc.

Biologically though, a man having extra large muscles, be it due to hormonal treatment or training, immediately triggers this reaction, so it's attrative from a sexual selection point of view, specially when contraception is so easily available. But at the same time, from the point of the offspring, this might not actually be the best option - I'm not saying it isn't, but if for instance the continued usage of such substances would atrophy the size of the balls or the amount of testosterone one can produce naturally, if then the offspring recurs to the same mechanisms you might end up with progeny that is less prone to produce testosterone naturally, or being fertile, even if male. I'm not saying this is what happens but it could also be.

In this case you're receiving the signal that this "specimen" is highly "testoronated", but once you take the hormonal wheels, it kinda falls down below what would even be normal.

You can also see something similar when you analyse the cardio and capability to summon all the muscle mass and tissue one has. Obviously hormonal treatments can increase significantly the strength one has access to, allow longer uninterrupted training and its benefits when your body can withstand it, but even then, there's people with less muscle mass hitting harder than people with more - due to everything from technique to actual muscle activation.

I guess one could think about it as the psycho-physiological system, in the sense that for your muscles to contract, to exert tension, to extend, some sort of electro-biological communication happens between your brain and body in its many systems. So if you grow too fast doing hormonal treatment you obviously will be much stronger, because you also only grow significantly while keeping training, but you won't be using 100% of the muscle mass you just added. There's going to be people with much less muscle mass than you that if trained properly, professional, will have much more "strength" than you. Obviously across time you can build further this strength, but I find interesting that this seemingly "psycho-physical" connection exists in the first place.

If we think about it and if the testimony of some people that suffered such is true, you can have what is called "ghost-limbs", where you no longer have a limb but you still feel like if you did. This seems to also indicate that our minds create complex maps of our body/physical limits and they almost become part of the perceived reality. So in the case we're talking, we're talking of the inverse process, where you have more muscle mass that you could recruit to exert strength but your mind hasn't mapped it properly so you can't "recruit" it, be it for punching, lifting, jumping, whatever.

In both cases it seems to indicate some sort of psycho-bio-physical link.

Perhaps that means that a normal daily meditation routine, even if not for life, for a decent sustained period of time, could help "re-mapping" the psyco-electro-biological part of the equation. If the brain waves synchronization that is said to occur during meditation, monitored electrically, is true, then it could make sense on how such could help being physically sharper - it would even marry much of the culture, folklore associated with the martial masters, eastern tradition - the kung-fu master, the master-monk in the temple, the samurai/ronin that follows/breaks with his master view, etc.

But going back to the point about looking the part but not being the part (low real testosterone production, loss or not of manly perceived characteristics, at risk of heart failure even if looking like a tank) we then have to add that many people can and do manipulate how they look and it's in their interest (in the pure physical/appearance sense), and when working with media in the interest of those employing or partnering with them too, to be the best looking version of themselves.

This goes from simply makeup, dressing clothing choices/brands, to botox, beaty surgery. If you're doing hormonal treatment, botox, hairdresser, nice expensive clothing and accessories, sometimes image advisors, new teeth (I have one replaced and very happy, it's amazing - and no, it go ruined before I became vegetarian) doing everything to look sharp, sure, congrats on the hustle - but if you're touting then some sort of product or diet for looking like that... It's like chicken milkshakes... There's a lot of things that go into looking like that and they all seem quite a bit far up in the reasons compared to "this" thing you're touting...

And again, it's the same thing, if someone did some of these things and is looking like that at 40 or 50, or 30, then your "offspring" won't look like that on average hypothesis at those same ages, they would look like that without having those things done, because they're artificial changes, and understanding this intellectually doesn't mean your innate reaction acknowledges it - that's why statistically beautiful people have lots more success on average... And I'm not condemning, I'm covered in tattoos on my arms and if I had some issue with my body I wasn't happy and given a chance I would prefer to look better than look worse, even more if those things were result of some other sacrifices done to achieve what I had set to achieve. But we still gotta be honest - the looks are great but in the end they don't paint anything about the real current or future health, stamina, or soundness of those choices, even if so far it all looks great.

It's in this sense that it's important to be honest. Because obviously if given the chance do you want to be stronger I would say yes but long-term or with certain side-effects who knows - on the other hand can I not be thankful that some guys somewhere in special ops, forces, whatever are or have been in the front-line and they're these die-hard guys that keep it straight? It would be difficult to not be thankful, even if the reason they did it is because they're dicks and wanted to be the biggest baddest mostest. On the other hand someone who's juiced to the forehead but goes around just acting tough with a bunch of people who didn't sign up for it is silly, specially because you can sign up for some fighting competition and fight people that want to fight too.

And this is basically the thing isn't it? It's a deliberate conscious decision by two adult humans that train to do this. No-one likes to see one-sided beatings, even if unscripted if there's no moral reason why most people would like to see it happening. I think people who like martial arts want to see violence yes, sometimes other themes get involved because they're also part of it, but mostly they want to see whose talk walks in the ring. This is not to say that there isn't fights that might look sketchy, or happenings, or slightly unbalanced talent wise, but ultimately you get to see through many real fights and displays or martial arts.

Sometimes there's what people perceive as karma, there's cockiness that is served humble pie or so it feels but there's also self-belief that looks like cockyness, there's real beatings and show of hearts, technical masteries, style transitions with condecorated fighters from more specialized styles trying to take-on MMA, there's betting and the whole show side of it, the underground, the personas and marketing, etc - but mostly it talks through the very universal language of two humans going into a fight against one another.

So here you have a cage to put it all out. Not on innocent bystanders, or unlucky persons. It's here that you show you're tough - obviously the money distorts it, everyone that fights risks serious injuries and if you're not on the top you're not really making real money when you take into account personal investment (money, time, team/gym/travel/medical) and sacrifices to even get there -. I also don't like seeing fighters get pieced up unless they have something that turns me off. Like Blaydes and Hokit's fight, I loved the fight to be honest, but at some point I was like man someone should throw the towel for Blaydes, brother has his face all fucked up that can't be good - and by what I read somewhere he broke his orbital or something? - like, at that point, it was a spectacle in terms of violence or perceived violence, not gonna lie, but I didn't want to see Blaydes being hit more. Others have happened before too obviously. This doesn't mean I don't want to see hardcore striking that can cause lesions - in the end that's the crowning of the style/training too, what I don't want to see is a guy getting put on for the whole fight, on top of that has a broken orbital, and so on so on.

There's fights like that but also like when Alexa Grasso did that sub on Mayce Barber, that looked like what you would see on a 007 movie of a spy or assassin ringing someone's house doorbell, someone opening a bit the door and them just immediately sliding through somehow, going punch, sits the other down, punch, rear naked choke, both lying on the floor, closes the door with the foot, no one even has time to notice or hear anything. And you would look at the screen and go, "yeah sure, man these script writers in hollywood". That's how slick that all looked, the pruned mexican boxing followed by the fast thinking bjj, looked lethal - and then you had Alexa there standing near Maycee and not celebrating the victory until she showed signs of being fine (not that I think she was in danger afterwards, but I read somewhere that when you get choked/knockedout unconscious you can have that "spurt" where it seems you are back but it's just automatic - afterwards I think she was processing that she had lost for a while, but again, what do I know).

So there's a level of rawness that I think the fan usually likes to see - or perceived rawness, sometimes I guess if you don't know - and I'm not trained in those martial arts just watch a bit - then it's hard to judge if a fight is happening the way it looks, or is a real matter of will and heart or more of hard test, real cash. There's a natural tendency to enjoy more striking than pure grappling and that's because the striking is easier to be memorable and more relatable. It's harder to judge properly grappling and more in MMA.

Like I was watching King Green in the Jaxxon Podcast and he said something that made me go, first this makes sense, then to, yeah this man is talking some truths and actually knows how to string together a thought, what he was saying was that some of the wrestling/grappling things that are allowed in MMA and in his opinion one of the reasons why many people don't like the grappling heavier styles in MMA, are not allowed in wrestling or other grappling styles themselves. Like holding certain positions that in MMA usually are allowed to be kept but in proper grappling/wrestling matches would be called by the referee to be restarted, and in his opinion that is what people talk about and rightfully so when they say that it's boring - because in that discipline, where people train for that, those positions are not allowed more than X seconds, but in MMA where people have to train for everything and many don't come from wrestling background, those same positions are allowed.

The same with jiu-jitsu. If you're going to butt-scut or just try to work the soft-art with the submission in mind, without some agressiveness, it's not only gonna be harder it's also like not taking your opponent and the context seriously. It's obviously ok and even laudable, that one wants to minimize the pure violence through jiu-jitsu and prove that it works, but at the same time, you're in a position to speed up the process and you can't risk getting reverted, or not achieving anything and getting all gassed out in the process.

If you see many jiu-jitsu fighters that transitioned over they have a certain difficulty in applying physical pressure and ground-and-pound to facilitate the submission. If you look at Ridder vs Brendan Allen, de Ridder spent the first whole round controlling Allen on the ground. The commentators said something like Allen didn't event want to train with de Ridder because they could be opponents some day and as the round progressed and near the end I was like, yeah m8 but maybe you should have because you would see the difference in the levels then and prepared better - I didn't have any favourite, I didn't know much about Allen besides having seen him do some bunch of decent fights, and de Ridder also saw a bunch on One including his loss to the Russian guy (trying to go for the 2nd belt) before coming to UFC.

Then we went to round 2. And here things changed significantly, Brendan took him down and immediately elbowed him in the face if I'm not mistaken, and then he just kept on mounting pressure, going from position to ground and pound. The fight had completely changed, and when you compare what Ridder did with his control time and what Allen did, I now was thinking well, Brendan looks to have the much sharper jiu-jitsu and not sure de Ridder even manages, he was probably right not wanting to sparr with de Ridder. In the end de Ridder quit on the stool - its true he had fought like crazy that year since getting into the UFC, that can't be good for no-one, and with that first round he was looking pretty good while fresh, but in the end that was quite the scene.

Other fighter worth mentioning in this is Bia Mesquita, that also shows some slick agressive jiu-jitsu when transitioning towards the search for submission. Obviously, I'm completely a know-nothing when it comes to these, as they would say I don't even know how to write jiu-jitsu, but what I see of similar in their games is that - is that transition towards a more agressive ground game. It makes sense also, it's like you're first showing the threat to then get the submission. You don't need to want to rip off the head of the guy with a elbow, but you want him to submit, and the faster it's done the better it is for everyone.

If I was a trainer I would focus on this, even search for takedowns/first position on the ground that would benefit a bit of ground-and-pound work and open transitions in search of the submission, instead of immediately searching for whatever submission presents itself. Unless it's something like that sub by Grasso. Because otherwise it happens like de Ridder, 5 minutes of boring ground control (I say boring with all respect, after all it's a guy fighting another in a closed cage) to then get smoked next round.

Another thing that also happens when you do this is that the fight immediately increases in possibilities - since being aggressive in these stances is a risk as it opens the aggressor to be reversed, swept, etc. While some wrestling and grappling positions are very assertive they don't really provide any thing other than being in the dominating looking position. You can't produce damage. They might nonetheless exhaust your opponents and that is a strategy too, but when it doesn't work guess what you spent your 15 or 25 minutes of time looking at? It's boring. And it's the same, if they would use aggression or those positions to then advance to an eventual sub, it would look again more dynamic, because that opens breaches for the opponents to stand back up, get out of the lock, etc.

That's why watching fights like from Maurício Ruffy or Alex Pereira are also so entertaining, at least to me, because they look very technical, like in Ruffy against Fiziev, Ruffy didn't really get punched straight in the face and Fiziev if you look some of his fights he always brings it up, yet Ruffy managed a pretty impressive performance. Alex Pereira also with the way it goes, you're always expecting something, like those head kicks with Jiri, or the Jamal Hill fight, or Ankalaev 2. The one he lost I personally think he won or at most a tie and given the situation wouldn't think a tie is worth passing the belt but that's me. And even there, Alex being a late martial artist that did most of his career in Glory Kickboxing, then transitioned to MMA and stuffed all takedown attemps of a former sambo champion... Against Izzy 2, he lost, looked a bit skating, like he was teleported to the over the bell punch of the first fight, but Izzy also did good and had done before too against others.

Then you have Dricus with that weird style that worked pretty fine until he got held down for all rounds basically, by Khamzat, 2 or 3 in crucifix. This one actually could relate to that situation with grappling and wrestling. No one would even suggest that Dricus didn't lose that fight, but from Khamzat's side what we saw was yes, total grappling dominance, but not that much, at least visible, damage. And why? it's either because while the crucifix is a very dominating position it doesn't allow much damage without losing control and the remaining grappling was more positional, or because the martial artist didn't want or know how to execute ground-and-pound, or other reasons.

Then you also have fighters like Jean Silva, that in terms of fights is always enthralling to watch because you know he kinda lives the fight or so it seems. Like the fight with Diego Lopes that he lost was still an amazing fight, if he had kept his cool a bit longer and let the 2nd round slide into the break, he probably would have done it - after having been beaten by Diego on the first round, following an error - throwing a lazy spinning kick, if I'm not mistaken, that Diego used to take him down - again, a good example of aggressive jiu-jitsu, even violent in this case, he elbowed him from above in the guard and opened the side of his head. Yet Jean Silva came into the 2nd and start putting it on him. Or like when he fought Drew Dober. Also an impressive fight, I think he broke his two hands on that fight and you can see throughout how he starts using only elbows and knees, kicks. None of these fights would even be the same without any of the fighters involved, they all brought it, Drew Dober got stopped by the medical team after Silva was pointing and asking for someone to look at it, but he was not backing down even then... The same with Jean and Diego and there's plenty in the UFC archives.

Of course after seeing something like this you kinda go, dude, being that these guys also trained a whole life for this, passing through this multiple times probably, if other sports players are making some real money, for sure some of these guys deserve some too right?

Ultimately this is the fairest physical competition between two individuals. When it comes to women MMA I'm not saying I enjoy all women MMA, I have a kind of innate feeling a woman's place is not there getting punched in the face and because given the same training, size, conditions, etc a man (an individual too) will always be stronger naturally than a woman (an individual too), it doesn't entice me as much, but there seems to be women that want to do it and some that have reasons to do it, plus sometimes you do see things like that finish by Grasso, which has to be on top of all finishes/subs, or other good fights, that kick by Holm, etc, but my main interest is undoubtly the male fights.

Then there's the rules aspect, the juries, marketing, sellability, betting, etc. Even weigh-ins. Is it perhaps a bit of "panem et circenses", surely, at least in part. But does it offer a possible venue for demonstration of such attributes - aggressiveness, physical dominance, body mastery, all applied to a fair judge ruled 1 vs 1 combat situation? I think it does and it's good to have something like that. When people say, well, and what about spending the money on that, aren't there better things to spend the money in? Sure, but you don't hear that with sports that move lots more money and also have public investment at different levels, or other things.

All things considered, if you could choose between having a few man going to fight - in this particular comparison I will say even to death - against other man, by choice, under fair rules, instead of real wars, what would you consider better (not that this could be applied in reality, it's an hypothetical question)? Or if someone were to try to break into your house while your children where sleeping on their rooms, and they threatned and tried to kill you or yours - would you turn the other cheek? Probably not, or you would like that you could take care of it realistically speaking. Even then should we live in a society where we expect this might happen at any time? No, I think, obviously. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't be physically ready, or have a minimum of experience in the military, or have doors with locks, etc.

This is why I personnally don't see any problem with the idea of MMA and its violence - it's raw, unapologetic but consensual - do I think all problems should be solved by violence, not really, most aren't solvable by violence, but while most aren't, there's plenty that are. Do I think it's the safest career and we should be telling all kids this is the future, certainly not, but I don't see much difference from other sports. The biggest issue is really the continued health of those fighting, the cumulative damage - the other sorts of damage, the traumatic events that sometimes happen, it's not fun, but at the same time those do happen in all other non-violent sports too - surfers have died, climbers too, legs broken, etc. But in terms of cumulative brain damage that's slightly different - if you develop "tennis elbow" or so your mental cognitive functioning isn't impacted (still can impact obviously your mental well-being...), if you develop CTE it's a bit more problematic.

But there you see a change even in the training for MMA, there's many more people that go through camps without that so much hard sparring and definitively you can train many needed aspects for a successful career in MMA early on in safer "base" martial arts, be it bjj, judo, karate, muay thai, american wrestling, sambo, boxing. Muay Thai is perhaps that that right now needs some adjustments for being practiced in a safer way. Again, I'm not saying this is more important than getting other aspects of public society better, but it definitively should evolve and be present.

When it comes to animal food on the other hand, I know it's not consensual and it seems that I don't really need it so to me it became at some point a decision too, that I no longer needed any of that.

Would I say the same if I had children... That's difficult to say but I guess I would be ok with feeding them vegetarian at least. There's plenty of people in our culture (and throughout history it seems, going back to Greece and schools of mysteries) and other cultures that have grown since child in vegetarian/vegan houselholds and don't seem to have any problem. At the same time do I really want them to grow without trying it at least? Does it have the same value to be forced or coerced into it than it has coming into it? Not like a "you deserve a medal" but for one's own self. Obviously for a vegan, because the animal is conscious, those philosophical questions don't matter because it's it that still has to go through the process, experience pain, unnatural lives, and ultimately breed and die in unnatural numbers, under unnatural processes, living most of their life in unnatural environments etc. At the same time it's an honest question to ask, if I don't feed those kinds of things to my children will they be healthy, well-adapted, etc enough to do their own thing by themselves.

One of the biggest mind fucks I had was when I was in Thailand and recalled a situation that happened in Bali. I was watching some video about Bali on youtube and I started remembering of things from last time I was there, during covid, for around 2 years. I was learning to surf better and living in a small studio, on a 1st floor, and it was side-by-side with another unit so we had some nice corner stone stairs and then a small shared balcony/path to the entrances. You couldn't really put a table there or something but the handrail in wood was wide enough to put a cup of coffee. I usually when waking up after breakfast would drink a coffee there, just standing, maybe smoking a cigarette, thinking about the day ahead.

The handrail connected to a wooden style-blinder covering the stairs on the corner and went all the way to the other end of the building, a small unit where thehouse-keeper could put stuff and stay for a while. There were always these big-head ants, ambar in color, with the heads a bit darker/redder. Not your regular household ants, all black and tiny, but also not fire-ants. One day I somehow dropped some coffee and didn't clean it immediately, so when I got back there later there were a bunch of these ants drinking from the small drops, that looked like water-holes on that wooden handrail when you lowered yourself to their level.

So I started intentionally leaving drops of sugary drinks, be it the coffee, coca-cola, then started breaking those traditional cookies they have, that are a bit floury, with peanuts and a thin caramelised sesame topping. I would break them in very small pieces/flour and leave them around the handrail, just really some small flakes and drops. And then one day the lady doing the cleaning, one of the house-keepers, knocked on my door and said hi, and then "you have some friends waiting for you here". And I was like, what? Trying to think if I had told someone I met to come over, or something, but no, so maybe it was someone else that already had been there or who I knew, since I didn't have any friends staying in Bali at the time. So I got up from the kitchen/work table and went outside just to find her grinning and pointing to the handrail.

It was all covered in ants. They weren't even doing anything, they were just chilling. They seemed to be having an assembly. We had a laugh and she went to work. This was the part that I remembered because we had a good laugh. But then I remembered how weird the ant thing was and started thinking about it. When I went back I went to grab a bit of the coffee mixture and those cookies and put it there for them. This went on for a few days until I decided to stop putting "food" on the handrail. It was even funny because you could see some ants behaved differently. When I approaced my hand they all could see/sense it, when I approached my finger to them they started making like a small circle as it approached and those on the limit like trying to "stand" up and using their antennae and little arms to try and touch the finger. Some did and then backed, etc, but one or two, would like get in a fighting stance and try to bite/pinch, and they have a midly annoying pinch that I felt there, but not really anything worrying (at least a single, or a couple I would guess) - it felt like they were talking about it and there's that one guy going, "na I don't trust them".

I hadn't thought of anything of this at the time - although by then I was already vegetarian - but now I started thinking, but wait a minute? Sincerely, how da fuck do ants assemble waiting for the delivery of food? The explanation I have been given and pretty much matched my experience with ants, is that some of the hive assumes scouting positions (it's not a choice), when these scouts find worthy things they can eat, depending on the size of the things or if there's more around, they either eat a bit and lug it back or eat a bit and go back to tell the hive - because when a "deposit" of food is found it can't be taken back single-handedly so the ant returns to recruit more workers for the cause, the ant then leaves a trail of chemical compounds - that I imagine the more food she has access to the stronger it will be and since she can eat when she finds a deposit - if it's good, the trail will be too - and then as more workers join they also do this and the stronger the chemical trail the frenzier they go.

This makes sense and as I said matches my experience with ants. But this doesn't really need any understanding of the world, it can operate as a biological automaton in it's functions that are required by evolution itself.

But then I was like, wait a minute, these ants in particular, gathered in a place, waiting, until some food dropped somehow from heaven - and lakes were formed and highly-energetic powdery flakes fell from the sky high, with a giant human hand wtf that is doing all of this, and touching us - said the ants.

So lets think through this. How can a ant decide to gather in a future time, or take action at given intervals in a given time inside a future timeframe? Because they can't leave a trail for the future right? I mean, they could if they could encode the concept of a future time, then perhaps they could use a chemical compound that would make them all go scouting at the same time and just wait there. This does seem a bit far-fetched though, because the issue here is not even the chemical trail, or that being a vehicle of chemical "programming" (not using the word communication deliberately) - it's really the existance of any concept of time that is future.

Because, either way you look at it, the concept of time is always there isn't it? Even if you come to the conclusion that the ants somehow have a chemical mechanism that would trigger such behaviour, doesn't it involve the fact that the ants must - or that condition must - somehow rely on the fact that there is a time-encoding function in their programming? Because otherwise how could they relate the fact I was leaving drops of coffee and cookie with that happening another day in the future, where they just all decided to hang on the handrail out of, otherwise, the blue? We're talking about some 2m of handrail, wide enough to hold a coffee mug, covered in these mid-sized ants (big if compared with city tiny household ones) all just there. Doing nothing productive. It's like if all the roombas in the world just decided one day to visit the charging station on the outskirts of the city, with no programming at all for that after a few were taken there to see it. Well, that's not really a good analogy because the roombas don't all go back to a single hive, but in perplexity, it would be the same.

There's also the issue of communication. Because in the days I was seeing them gathering around the little "gifts", the numbers increased throughout those 4 or so days before, but just enough to fully take on the drops or bits, but never to the point of what they covered in those days they "assembled", it was literally covered in ants. Either they went back, told their workers, or queen or whatever that then programmed them to go out, or wrote it chemically to assemble there in the most unnatural way I could imagine for ants - so somehow, because this relates to a future event, the behaviour exhibited, that is tied to "food"/survival, starts requiring some sort of language to be enconded doesn't it? Not saying in the spoken or written sense of language but an ability to abstract over the reality? Because tell me how tha fuck does a ant think about tomorrow, or tie that with the possibility that they could wait until food somehow arrived? At given daily intervals - because after a while and all food collected they then went back to wherever they lived and only came around the same time next day, and then next, until I stopped leaving crumbs. It's either the matrix, and this was a programmed event that might not even have considered it could trigger this thought, or consciousness runs much deeper than what is apparent.

If I put this in perspective, if an ant exhibits this astonishing behaviour, what can we think about a mammal, an animal, or a human? Knowing what we know about our own heads? The head of those ants was the size of a pin-head at most.

Like I said, I didn't think anything about this at the time - just that it was so curious they did that - only later on did this occur to me and just because I remembered the funny situation when watching a youtube video recorded in Bali.

This is why I say that even having ideas, that sometimes seem so central to our personas, can sometimes be the result of completely random events. And not even the events themselves, because in this case only years later did I have this "interpretation" of what I had experienced. And it's not like I went looking for this idea or did something to build towards it - well apart from perhaps my interest due to vegetarianism/veganism in plant communication and sentience, but otherwise this just somehow ocurred to me, it's like I can't even take credit for it, just write it down.

It's not because of this that I don't want to eat insects though. That would be the same anyway, it's just that it raises some interesting questions either way. But I mean if someone finds a mostly natural way of producing a protein powder that tastes good, is good for your health all-around, now and future, and is sustainable, I wouldn't say no, even if from bugs. Now if it's a chemical cocktail that also takes a lot of processing that wastes a bunch of additional resources, and it's not significantly better than plant based ones, or wastes the same but is worse, then I see no reason to favour that over plant based ones.

Other thing I noticed when I became vegetarian - although I would still eat non-vegan things, many times I would eat vegan just "by chance" of what I had in the pantry or where I was eating - and when I had vegan meals, that usually I could meditate immediately, either full or not. When eating non-vegetarian for sure I couldn't - it would sometimes feel either that the stomach wanted to stop working, or that I just couldn't settle long enough into the meditation. This realization came not far into becoming vegetarian and at the time I remembered that when I took the class to learn TM (at a discounted student rate) that the "guru" said to arrive to the "initiation ceremony" either fasted or just having eaten non-animal/animal derived stuff, which was interesting to think when I noticed that, although at the time I just thought it was some esoteric requirement. I kept a meditation practice but not the TM specific way.

I kept it until today, but for around the first 10 years, almost daily for a good deal of it, obviously with periods doing less than daily, but quite regularly overall. Then I decided to stop for a full year to check if it was a placebo. To be honest, I didn't really see some evident change that was noticeable as the time went on, but then, obviously when the time came, like a year after, I started meditating again, now to see if it really changed anything and a few days in, indeed I started feeling that somehow I had been doing less, that my days were much more just repetitive without doing anything meaningful, feeling less energised, experiencing less things, settling into a contentment that was uncalled for as I hadn't achieved anything meaningful. But that instead of putting me down or something instead energised me.

That's why I still keep it - even if no longer daily, but perhaps I should get back to it - and still stand by the idea that, if you never really dedicate a few weeks to keep a very regular practice of it, then perhaps really try. I had people tell me, "oh but my meditation is when I go cycling in the trails, or running, or when doing drums, whatever, it gets me in the flow, [I know] it's the same thing that you're talking about", but in a way if you think about it, how could it be? I'm not saying those things are not good, I do either walks or runs, no headphones, heat or fresh, and love it, I think they're great to do some deep thinking too, or be in the moment. But if you're doing something, then part of your brain has to be occupied with that, it doesn't matter that it's already a learned pattern, that you do without "thinking", ultimately, your brain has to do the thinking, it has to calculate things, send the impulses to your muscles, coordinate, pay attention to its surroundings, or work several sensory inputs together, etc.

So this can never, from the bio/electrical functioning of your brain/body perspective, be the same as sitting still for a minimum of 20 minutes, where your brain doesn't even, or ends up not even exercising those parts of the brain - because you're still - there's no motor coordination going on, sound can be disruptive if you're not experienced, but usually you can drown pretty much any but the most obnoxious loud sounds, vision is not online, your eyes are closed, you might see things but you need to use your imagination ("3rd eye"), so visual cortex is operating at a different level if at all, then words, you only have your own internal monologue - if you sit in silence for a while you see this podcast/movie unfolding in front of you and it's you that is talking in every scene. If you watch the movie you can figure out what you're in this moment.

If this brings any tangible, useful benefit, or worse, an handicap, for everyday normal life, I don't really know how to answer that, whenever I do it I feel usually better afterwards, sometimes due to feeling angry towards some event and then going to meditate, you still ruminate on it and sometimes even focus on it strongly, but it sort of subdues while sitting and by the end of the meditation it's no longer there or you can work better with that. I personally think that is positive but it also changes how you perceive yourself, others and even the world, at large and small scale.

One thing I find interesting with vegetarianism/veganism is that it kinda "sprouted" naturally across many different cultures. In África you have Ethiopia, where I knew they had plenty of vegetarian food but when I went to look at numbers for this post I found out it was/is because they do their own christian orthodox fasting for 200 days of a year. Later on you have the Rastafari culture too, with ital (I'm not saying the whole rastafari's stance on science and modernity was right, and as such also their stance on ital, but nonetheless it's interesting). Then you have indian traditions, that became Buddhism, Jainism and part of Hinduism itself, then you have also buddhism but in the Sri Lankan (Sinhalese), Chinese, Japanese, South-East Asian, Thai, Vietnamese, South-Korean, contexts, where they have different stances. In the "West" we have, it seems, relevant examples dating back to Greek schools of mysteries (Pythagoras et al), but who knows how far back these ideas go and where else they appeared.

I think it's also a possibility to understand human biology and the digestive track as something that is highly adaptable - which would be extremely necessary in a world that can change very rapidly - imagine a prolonged winter, ice age, flood, shipwreck, that would render most vegetable life dead or inacessible, if you can ultimately digest almost anything then it's much more likely you're able to survive, this includes eating meat, or drink milk after infancy (even if most humans are lacto-intolerant, it seems in the west we drank ourselves out of it, but still there's plenty of lacto-intolerant people in the west - or with problems digesting even if not intolerant - and the benefits of milk in adults seem more like a post rationalization or due to other things we put and do with the milk than anything really sound... even at sometimes having conflicting studies regarding the supposed benefits). Nonetheless it's not conflicting that meat can be a great source of protein but also a catalyst or reason for some other illnesses when consumed above certain thresholds - specially if animal proteins are more prone to trigger cancerous mutations, as again, seems to be the case when compared with plant proteins, but there can also be cofounding factors/lifestyle.

Then you have many related issues that are also known but swept under the rug, there's a lot of misinformation, not sure if deliberate or just dumb. For instance for some time there was this trend that went around the keto/carnivore crowd where they were showing some tribe in Africa that had a diet based on blood and meat and how they didn't have occurrences of cancer, to counter the argument that meat was related to increased cancer incidence across some types (gut/stomach/digestive tract). First you gotta think that maybe these people aren't doing cancer screenings... But then one day, out of curiosity, I went check the average life expectancy for this tribe and it was just a bit above 40 years, 42 if I'm not mistaken, which would be the answer for everything. And then I checked the cancer incidence by age. And it said "More than nine out of 10 cancers are diagnosed in people 45 and older. Those older than 74 make up almost 28% of all new cancer cases.". So above 45 years old is where 90% of the cancers are diagnosed/occur. From 35 to 44 it's 5% incidence, even in our excessively sedentary lives in the West, it seems age plays a huge factor. So obviously if 90% of cancers start manifesting themselves only at 45 years and beyond, then if people on average die at 42 the rate of any cancer will be lower... I never saw videos about the argument again so I guess there's some sort of telekinesis also going around.

This, again, doesn't prove that vegetarianism is right, it just proves the wish of the "other" side to use whatever arguments. Another pretty common is the soy bean plantations. Many point to the number and go, hah, look at what you vegans have to use to maintain your diets, so much soy beans and agricultural land it requires compared to meat, without realizing that more than 70% of it, and a lot of other agricultural outputs and industries, are for the feeding, treatment and maintenance of livestock creatures. So from that soy number you need to realise that +70% is to feed animals. Again this doesn't take into account other externalities. Another one is that if we just hunted we would all be good. Man, it doesn't even take mankind to do it, but whenever man started hunting to sustain themselves they led to the collapse of the hunted populations, so they were either nomadic, or they kept their numbers small enough that in bigger ecosystems they could still survive on hunting.

It's in fact the discovery of agriculture and improvement that allowed us to create a surplus of food consistently that could also be provided to livestock, allowing us to grow them in our rythm. In part with the help of this same livestock to tend the fields, carry things, produce wool and other warm things, milk and by extension cheese, kefir, etc. So while it's tempting to associate some social/societal jumps with meat the real cause seems to be the mastery of the basics of agriculture - remember, predators/carnivores need an healthy numerous pool of "food" to even exist, and here is the same, without the abundance brought by agriculture we would never reach the same densities.

Things like Mongols are pretty much an exception - they didn't have farming and managed to herd large groups of cattle/horses but they were also nomadic while also being heavy dairy consumers - which is pretty strange because most of Asia has been historically lacto-intolerant - but besides the historic period we usually talk about, their power or influence was almost irrelevant to any other than bordering nations.

Because this is already quite extensive I will finish this post, but wanted to just leave you with my personal conclusions. Vegetarianism/veganism, by theory, history and practice (9 years and counting) seems to be totally fine - in fact, it seems to be way healthier in all senses. Because I don't need it and animals demonstrate clear signs of conscious-self, clearly feel pain, and want to avoid death I decided to not eat them - not because of Karma, Judgement Day or because I think an animal has the same rights as a human, it's just I wouldn't like some motherfucker with some unbelievable powers above me just decided it would eat me without needing to, or that I would live my life confined to the same forced existence in a total artificial environment, to go through a bunch of awful shit because someone can't control their mouth.

On the other hand, when it comes to MMA and other violent sports, the fighters (competitors, athletes, etc), assuming normal situations, are there out of their own desire and volition - even if when getting their heads punched they also feel pain, probably don't want to be there - they did want to and also trained for it, it's not someone who isn't related to fighting, or is doing his work or walking down a public street and becomes the target of a violent interaction.

Ultimately people while being so outraged about the violence of MMA then don't have any problem with every-day violence it seems - no police enforcement in many cases, judges letting criminals go out scott free even after repeated criminal acts, some very serious, while on the other hand arresting people for tweet posts (not only in the UK or Germany either). That posture - by media and mouthpieces - seems to also be some sort of "pan et circenses" and there they don't seem to worry about those that have to then live in this conditions constantly.