(reposted due to flip)

I don't know anything about underground bare knuckle boxing during that period but there's still an underground scene in America today - that's what made Kimbo Slice famous. There's also some good documentaries on the underground bare-knuckle and unlicensed gloved boxing scene in Britain, one called "Knuckle" and another whose name I can't recall at the moment but contains footage (and interviews) with notorious brawler Lenny McLean, whose work can be viewed here.

When I was in Thailand I saw bare-knuckle boxing near the Burmese border. The combatants, Burmese refugees I think, were 10-12 years old. The girls I was traveling with were crying while watching. Half of the spectators were monks. I thought it was pretty cool.

Were they just boxing Western-style or were they doing Muay-Thai?

Speaking of torture, and movies, anyone seen Zero Dark Thirty? I found it a fairly well shot, but poorly cast procedural that was rescued to some degree by its subject matter, and ended in thirty minutes of some of the most exciting moviemaking I've seen in years. I also found Bigelow's tacit approval of torture a moral failing.

The New Yorker has a good review of the film in that light:

“Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.’s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Lincoln”; by contrast, the director of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html#ixzz2LmpVvKnN

Tennis is a beautiful sport (well, when women play it. The mens' game lost me 20 years ago), but I was a brute force/speed tennis player when I was in my 20s and had no game at all when my speed went, and fat women in their 40s could run me off the court by spanking the ball from one line to another. I'm amazed that a player as lowly ranked as Braash could go easy with the Williamses and still win. Those are two very strong, fast women.

Seriously, though, isn't it a step back for our culture to send women into battle? That's a barbaric thing to do. Sending men into battle is barbaric enough. On the other hand, looking at it purely politically, maybe if women can be sent into combat, the government will use the military less cavalierly. I can't imagine that there won't be a great deal more backlash if women start getting killed in wars and "police actions" than when men do.

I think you're seriously underestimating the absolute callousness of people who don't want to be bothered with moral issues, especially as long as the sacrifices will be made by women at the margins, and as long as their lives aren't seriously disturbed.

I also can't imagine Bush and Cheney being detered from invading Iraq if women had been serving. I can't recall anyone anywhere thinking or writing the war was an inch more or less moral after women in the US armed forces started getting killed.

But, yeah, it's a step backward, any time we add new kinds of killers and victims to the war pool.

By the way, why are women and men getting killed "more barbaric" than just men getting killed? I'm not seeing that.