[bunderbunder]

Alarm bells go off in my head whenever the demonstration of an extraordinary martial arts skill is being done by a master and his student. Maybe the most egregious example of how this sort of dynamic can work out is George Dillman and his "no touch knockouts". It's easy enough to find amusing YouTube videos showing how that worked out when someone roped him into trying to demonstrate the technique on someone who wasn't a student of his.

Anyway, it's usually not nearly that spectacular, but the same basic dynamic has historically pervaded many martial arts. Participants in one style typically only practice and spar with each other, and the "more advanced" techniques might only be demonstrated using advanced students who wouldn't get to be that advanced in the first place without being heavily bought into the whole thing, so you can get some almost cult-like dynamics coming into play.

[livueta]

Reminds me of this guy, who got a ton of blowback for calling out fake martial arts masters, goading them into fights and humiliating them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Xiaodong

> Xu started a dispute with Wei on social media, beginning with a demand that Wei provide evidence of his abilities, and culminating in a bare-knuckle fight in a basement in Chengdu in 2017, where Xu won convincingly in less than 20 seconds.

[ksaj]

Mentalist Derren Brown also did an episode where he took advantage of students of this kind of teaching, by using their "brainwashed" instincts against them to demonstrate he had the same powers as their sensei, even though he had no martial arts training.