One of the really notable things about war is that it’s so rare (if you aren’t the US military or else actively engaged in some ongoing conflict), and the rate of people dying and having to be replaced with brand new people is so high, that almost all the time it’s being done for real life-or-death stakes by people who are learning on the job as they go and have no real experience in what they are doing.
A lot of things about military decisions and events don’t completely make sense why they happened the way they do, until you imagine a whole airline being run by people most of whom it’s their first week on the job, and then you say oh okay I get it now; that’s why that happened that way.
Perun (youtuber) sums it up- for many militaries there is no organisational experience in actual conflict, outside the pomp and ceremony it's hard to tell what substance exists
More than once, the anti-immigrant people have succeeded a little too much, and actually gotten all the immigrants away from a given community / given state, and it's created a big catastrophe for the economy and there was a ton of pushback until they made the immigration policy back less strict again (usually, by looking the other way on the hiring side exactly as you pointed out, but still being strict on the coming-into-the-country side, since trying to enforce that side is a lot less effective and basically just accomplishes short-term cruelty without doing much in the long term to stop people from coming in the country).
Im curious what you mean by "plays possum". Because if it doesn't have a battery backup it wont work very well unplugged. Been looking at cameras for the house lately, and have yet to find one that flips over and sticks its legs in the air when unplugged.
I've trained Wu style for a while and there wasn't any mysticism in the school I was in. We also did a lot of application and sparring, including sparring with other martial arts schools. I think the core principles of the principles of the art are sound, and it can work as an effective fighting style.
That said, I find it really depends on how it is taught. A lot of schools just focus on doing the forms, and they don't bother with application. It's fine if you're doing it to develop body awareness, balance, and so on. However, I don't think it's possible to learn to apply a fighting style without actually doing sparring.
Stories about masters single handedly pushing 10 people using the power of chi are just tall tales in my experience. You can get a lot of power by learning to get the most out of body mechanics, but at the end of the day there's no magic and it's just physics.
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