Mike, thanks for the response. I liked your breakdown. I figured it was on topic with the OP, as it was looking at the question from the point of view of, "what is self defense?" rather than, "what is MMA?"
The point you brought up about treachery and ruthlessness combined with trainging and conditioning being better than one or the other might also be addressing part of where the debate comes from. MMA type training is a very important piece of self-defense (or maybe not, I haven't been in any fights since training MMA), but situational awareness, swallowing ego, and picking the right time to be nasty (or not nasty, as there's retaliation to consider) is also a very important piece of self defense. If you have one or the other, it's not too hard to think up a scenario in which you won't succesfully defend yourself, but when you combine the two it gives you a much narrower selection of scenarios in which you won't be able to defend yourself.
I'd venture a guess that when people are arguing that MMA is good for self defense they place greater valre on the aspects MMA obviously prepares you for. If they argue MMA isn't good for self defense, they're placing greater emphasis on the aspects that MMA doesn't obviously prepare you for (or they're failing to recognize some of the benefits of MMA training, possibly on account of looking at it from the context of their TMA training, which these days can quite likely be much more technique oriented while MMA comparatively places much more emphasis on attributes).
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