Signs of the Martialocalypse

Just one month ago I predicted that the MMA community would be infiltrated and economically undermined by the Kumite Point Fighting ("Karate in the Olympics,") which would result the "martialocalypse" (or the end of our current MMA-induced golden age of martial arts.) This is a still reportedly taken from footage outside of a UFC branded gym in Quezon City about 48 hours ago:

To fully appreciate how alarming this actually is, understand there are 3 very different types of Karate, based on their sparring practices:

1. The best kind is called Knock Down Karate, notorious for being bare-knuckle and not allowing punches to the face, but otherwise being more or less like Muay Thai with a Gi... with less grappling and more high kicks...
2. The next kind is called "Full Contact Karate" (once occasionally referred to as "American Kickboxing," though that term is now inappropriately misleading to use,) this was boxing with only kicks above the belt allowed. I strongly doubt the value of this martial art to martial arts consumers, but you spar or you don't, and they definitely spar. They are decent at what they do, which is punches and high kicks, even though their kicking over all is missing the most important kicks of all, low kicks. Some full contact karate fighters have had more than decent footwork as well.
3. Then there is the very bad type of Karate, which trains to fight in "Kumite Point Fighting". In this type of fighting, they stop and start over every time someone is perceived to have executed a good technique... usually with only very light contact allowed. The end result is a lame game of tag that has nothing to do with fighting... some see it as a helpful drill for beginners, but most who practice this form do it instead of any real sparring training, and I see it as a plague that almost killed off martial arts in the 80's.

The type of Karate in the Olympics is the last kind, Kumite Point Fighting. How could the UFC/MMA fall victim to this atrocity? Well there already was mixed striking and grappling combat sports (what we now call MMA) before the UFC, the most famous called "Pancrase" at the time. Here is the Pancrase fighter's experience from the first few UFCs:

To hear him tell it, you would think the early UFCs were an advertisement to sell BJJ lessons. Sore loser, right? Probably not, check out Full Contact Karate legend Bill Wallace's recollections of the same events as a ringside commentator:

 Stylistically Pancrase is nearly the opposite of Full Contact Karate, and these two have exactly zero motivation to agree with each other on these accounts. Your takeaway here is this: originally, the most famous MMA venue of all, UFC, was specifically designed to sell BJJ lessons.

The second thing you have to realize, is that us Muay Thai and Sanda guys were saying things like "cool story bro, you pull that crap on us and the bottom of our foot is the last thing you will ever see." When one of the most respected fighters from our clique was finally allowed to participate, he cleaned house in the UFC:

And from then on until now, BJJ has had to share the MMA spotlight with Muay Thai. I know of fully 3 cases in the last 5 years in the Seattle Area where BJJ institutions attempted to sabotage the teaching of Muay Thai.

This creates a "bad romance" between Kumite Point Fighting and BJJ. Potentially the two are a match made in hell:

1. BJJ needs striking to look bad for self defense. Kumite Point Fighting is a tragedy when it comes to self defense value, and BJJ instructors can use it as an example of how it is so easy to close the distance with a striker that striking itself is not a reliable strategy to defend yourself, because after all, "most fights end up on the ground", when your striking experience is the one year it took you to get your Karate For Kids black belt.
2. BJJ fighters sometimes see themselves as closing the distance quickly, so that they are likely to only get hit by one strike on their way in to a take down. Kumite Point Fighting is only concerned with that one strike, it sort of matches the BJJ stand up game plan.
3. BJJ was in a Brazilian cultural context, which is generally rejects blind obedience to authority. In today's world with ever inflating BJJ tuition and increasing competition from other martial arts, they need their followers to have a different mentality in order to come up with a car payment level of tuition every month and never question most BJJ schools very limited striking and footwork. The styles of Karate that are most represented in Kumite Point Fighting were specifically recreated from previous martial arts, in order to spread Japanese Imperialist values - blind obedience to authority.

The UFC/BJJ economic powerhouse has a perverse incentive to see Kumite Point Fighting succeed. This is likely to catch up with them in the long run: almost anyone can get a black belt in Karate-tag quickly, and then point their new students to show-off long-stance MMA fighters who beat even-one-fighter-with-any-BJJ-rank-whatsoever, and thus claim that Kumite Point Fighting beats BJJ in the UFC all the time.