> Given the demographic of Hacker News, I'm honestly beginning to suspect that this is an American mindset.

Please don't take HN threads into national provocations. It makes discussions turn nasty.

Depending on how you measure it, HN's community is about 50% in the U.S.

> Reading the discussion here, I get the feeling that many seem to think that practitioners of Aikido somehow think that it's for fighting.

Okay, I get it, Aikido is not for fighting.

Given this information, however, why do we still call Aikido a _martial_ art? Perhaps we should not grant Aikido such designation?

I've met countless people who thought Aikido was (imagine this) a martial art. In a shocking development, this seems to have something to do with being good in a fight. It has certainly been sold to people as a way of making oneself less vulnerable to unsolicited physical aggression (a skill that has a fair bit in common with the ability to fight, even though these skills are not entirely congruent). I've also met a couple people with fairly serious (i.e. permanent life-changing shoulder injuries) as a direct result of Aikido.

No-one has ever claimed basketball, tennis, or golf makes you better at subduing attackers and for a fact, the techniques practiced in said sports don't seem to have anything to do with that. If you want Aikido to be judged against these sports, or, say, dance forms, this seems reasonable. In this case Aikido is a really shitty sport with no rules, no score, and no fun practiced by basically nobody, or a really lame dance that no-one wants to do.