Might be true, but watch out, though.
Ask some of the same sorts of people who are responsible for this stuff the same question-- ask them for examples of things that they think is going too far-- and you might be surprised with how many of them have an answer, and how sincere they seem.
You may be sort of right that there's no such thing as dirty fighting anymore, but watch out for those standards that you thought don't apply anymore being applied to you, when you don't expect it, or hypocritically.
It may not even be a matter of a court or anybody "official" agreeing with you or not. All the people who you thought were most important or posed the most danger to you-- courts, employers, friends-- may decide it was totally just and appropriate. But then watch out for the other guy's friends and allies deciding somewhere along the line on their own that it was too much, and that they're going to do something about it.
If you can defeat the badguy, but without giving people a lot of reason to think that they're supposed to get revenge, and without giving them an excuse to see you as a monster, you might be doing a lot better.
An example from history that I think may be great on this:
Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars is a great book. You'd think it was written by a knight of the round table. Cover to cover, the book is nothing but details of war campaigns against the Gauls- the French, Swiss, and Dutch- and the Germans. Throughout, Caesar never abandons diplomacy with the non-Romans, even though he has to show that he's sufficiently tough. He constantly tried to keep communication open, constantly tries to give the opportunity to remain friends, constantly tries to be fair and merciful.
After winning the final, biggest, toughest battle of his campaign against Vercingetorix's Gauls, he punishes them by amputating the left hand of every man who fought against him in the battle. But despite that ability to recognize the point at which it was time to get tough, his other method, his way of giving the enemy a chance to be on friendly peaceful terms with him instead, was always there. He didn't skimp on it at all. Even though he could inflict that kind of a tough, mass punishment, once you've looked over his shoulder throughout the entire war, and been given all the facts he provided you, and read his rationales, you don't want to slur him as a crazy dictator, as an insanely cruel conqueror.
In other words, he was a great general, but a big part of why he was able to do it was because he worked carefully and extensively on diplomacy, too. He was a great general was because he was also a great statesman / diplomat, a great gent. He was thinking about what was going to be said, done, and thought off of the battlefield, and he played that side of it as well. He was thinking of the human side of it, was thinking of the future. It's not about doing that just for the sake of being nice, or as a deception. It's about how you induce your enemies not to fight you.
What does it have to do with what we see on the streets?
You may want to match toughness with toughness. And you might be right. But don't get too simple-minded about it. You don't want to have your arms tied, so to speak, by your fairness. But if people can't constantly see that you're civilized and fair, then it might be hard to get that impression back. They might speak ill of you from then on, and raise their children to believe in it.
Just think of how we think of the badguys. We think of them as totally savage and unfair. And we don't think they could ever lead us and take ultimate responsibility in society. We don't think they could do well at it.
We don't want to leave people thinking that we're hypocrites, and that our justice and our words about decency are a sham. We want people to be able to think back on our behavior, and to decide that it's ok to abandon defiance, and to be at peace with us.
All reminds me of the UFC, too. I have a problem with how a lot of those fights end, with the fighters over-enthusiastically chasing the knockout.
I could kind of understand what some of those fighters rationally must be thinking. Things can change in a split-second. The opponent is a very dangerous man, and maybe no one's 100% perfect at judging when someone else is getting knocked out. You're not psychic, God's not whispering in your ear, and you're not looking at an MRI brain scan display as you're punching the other guy in the head. Not only a lot of money, but your own safety and life are on the line. The world is watching, and maybe people are depending on you. There's national pride, and so on, too.
Then other fighters might be chasing the knockout too enthusiastically just out of being vicious.
Whatever the case, I think what I see disregards how dangerous those blows are too much, and it's way too often. They commonly go way beyond what would be a TKO in boxing. If officials and fighters in boxing can see with a pretty good degree of certainty or probability when a fighter is going unconscious or can't defend himself, why can't they see it in the UFC? After all, the same things are on the line in boxing as are in the UFC.
They may just respond again with all I said above about it being a him-or-me thing, about it being the ref's job to end the fight, and about making sure the dangerous opponent is knocked out.
But if these men all have enough care and judgment to work safely on techniques in practice like chokes and submission holds, why couldn't they have enough judgment to be able to tell when someone's getting knocked out?
Answer: They do. They don't have to treat another human being's head like it's a teddy bear-- like it doesn't have a human brain inside it, and it's ok to punch away at it as hard as you can no matter what-- when they're in a prize fight with him.
At my martial arts school, we never would have thought it was ok to indiscriminately over-do things like that, never would have jumped to that conclusion so quickly. And we practiced very dangerous attacks all the time.
Cops and bouncers exercise a lot of restraint all the time. Boxers and wrestlers do. Why can't the majority of UFC guys?
It's maybe not as bad as these knockout game type street attacks, but it's kind of the same thing. Once another guy is no longer capable of defending himself, the potential danger of permanent injury from those punches is a lot worse. It's kind of like sucker punching him. This isn't a person who invaded your country, or harmed your family, or is about to go around beheading noncombatants or anything--- it's just an arranged, sport fight.
