With no UFC event this weekend, the questions get philosophical and/or rhetorical on every topic from fighter safety to title fights and Reebok gear. It’s a wild ride, and it’s only just beginning.

To ask a question of your own in next week’s Twitter Mailbag, tweet it out to @BenFowlkesMMA.

You know, with no UFC event this weekend I was looking forward to a fun, light-hearted edition of the TMB, one in which maybe we’d discuss walkout songs and nicknames and which fighters would play which characters in an MMA-themed “Scooby-Doo” episode (Sage Northcutt is Fred and Roxanne Modafferi is Velma, obviously). Then you had to hit me with Thomas Hobbes first thing in the morning.

Fine. Have it your way. [sips coffee][rolls up sleeves][prepares to discuss the social contract] Away we go.

For the moment, I’m going to set apart the first part of your question in order to answer the second part. Can we still care (or claim to care) about stuff like fighter health, safety, financial security, etc., when the very nature of this sport seems inherently opposed to all those things?

But I don’t see this as a conflict so much as a necessity. Which is to say, it is because of the destructive and exploitative nature of this sport that we are obligated to care about all those things. Caring about them ought to be the emotional price we pay for our interest in a sport that revolves around this specific brand of human trauma.

If they were tennis players, we wouldn’t have to worry about it. So you poured your passion and energy and youth into this sport, and maybe it didn’t treat you so great, but so what? Maybe your elbow hurts and your knees are banged up, but you can still get a job at a country club whenever you decide that life as a pro isn’t so great anymore. Boo-hoo.

The risks and the costs for fighters are so much greater. And to even get into this sport to begin with you have to demonstrate a willingness to ignore all that, which makes it even more imperative that someone out there is at least thinking about what you’re doing to yourself.

We can’t make this sport totally safe and still retain its core essence, so at least we should make sure that fighters are getting a fair exchange when they sacrifice their health for this. We can also stop some of the more egregious abuses with reasonable regulation, which is one of the bigger stories over the last two decades of MMA’s development.

Which brings us to the first part of your question. That Hobbes quote? That’s about human life in a “state of nature.” In other words, that’s how primitive humans lived, way back before civilized societies, and we should be glad we don’t do it that way anymore.

So just because MMA is a certain way, that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. We may not be able to fix the “brutish” part of this life, but something could definitely be done about the “poor” part. It just might mean less snow in promoters’ driveways come Christmas.

I agree with your conclusion but not your methods. A lack of title fights doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about oversaturation. It’s possible to simply have a bunch of champions who are all simultaneously injured or resting or awaiting compelling contenders, which could lead to a lull in title fights even if there aren’t too many events.

But, yeah, there are too many UFC events. That results in too much filler. And that in turn results in an ongoing, low-grade indifference to much of the UFC’s product. People tune out, and don’t always tune back in for the big ones. It’s the difference between producing capital letter Events and just churning out content. And pulling more interim belts out of the supply closet won’t solve it.

I don’t know, I think it’s just that the bad are often more noticeable than the good. They’re louder, more obnoxious with their badness, which is one of the things that makes them bad in the first place.

But I’m constantly surprised by how many smart, thoughtful, engaged fight fans I encounter on Twitter or through my podcast. It’s easier to overlook them at times because they’re making nuanced, salient points instead of shouting “wooo!” at the top of their lungs, but they’re there. It’s just that you have to mute a whole bunch of idiots in order to properly hear them.

First of all, can we please stop throwing around phrases like “shouldn’t even be in the UFC,” since that whole concept clearly has no place in the post-CM Punk era? Second, can we maybe resist the impulse to form too many broad conclusions based on someone’s sixth pro fight?

I guess it depends how hyped you were on Mackenzie Dern before her debut at UFC 222, but I didn’t see anything from her that was terribly inconsistent with her MMA experience level. She went out there and tried to do what she wasn’t so great at, then committed too late to exploiting her one glaring advantage.

Those are mistakes, but they’re fixable. And before we get too down on her for only winning via split-decision, let’s also remind ourselves that she had a handicap in the form of Adalaide Byrd sitting cageside.

Thank you for presenting me with this hypothetical, if only because it made me deliriously happy to be reminded that I am not Colby Covington’s teammate or manager or employer right now, and therefore I don’t actually have to worry about the answer to this question.

Covington’s got a tiger by the tail right now. He can’t back down from the aggressively obnoxious persona he’s crafted for himself. He can’t even content himself with maintaining current obnoxiousness levels. He has to keep ramping it up, which is difficult, especially since people already seem sick of it.

But if I’m responsible for getting the most out of Covington’s career, the most important thing I’m focusing on right now is target selection. If my guy isn’t getting a title shot, then I at least want him in a match-up that works with his schtick. Don’t offer me some All-American nice guy, because Covington can’t work with that. He’ll end up trying too hard and people will get even sicker of him.

Instead, give me someone like Kamaru Usman. Give me Rafael dos Anjos, if he’s not up for the belt next. Give me Mike Perry, even. Just don’t make me do the welterweight version of when Chael Sonnen had to fight Brian Stann, because then people might realize my guy is not as fun when he has to just shut up and win.

I see your point, but I doubt many up-and-comers think that way. I suspect that they see Frankie Edgar’s $195,000 payout and think that they’d trade places with him in a heartbeat if they could. They’re not factoring in everything he had to do to get to that point, or even the odds against them doing it too.

It’s kind of like how, when you’re making $20,000 a year, the person making $40,000 seems like they’re rich. It’s only once you get there yourself that you realize it’s actually not that much money – especially if you had to bleed for years to get it.

It’s a good question in the broad sense – how long should fighting keep caring about you once you’ve stopped caring about fighting – but those are two very different situations.

Ronda Rousey has made a major career move, and it’s very likely that she’ll never come back. (Though my money is on a Brock Lesnar-esque one-off return at some point in the future, but only if the UFC offers her an opponent who’s lucrative and easy enough).

The only reasons for MMA sites to follow her WWE exploits are: 1) because people will click on those stories, and 2) because if it looks like it’s not going well, maybe it increases the odds of a concern.

I don’t have to tell you that 1 is a much bigger consideration than 2, for most sites.

Conor McGregor, on the other hand, has not yet fully moved out of this MMA world. In fact, he says he’s willing to step in whenever, even just to save a card on short notice. We might rightly wonder he’s just selling wolf tickets (in addition to chicken sandwiches), but we can’t act like he doesn’t still matter in MMA, which means his extracurriculars might matter as well.

Really, though, the answer is simple. You already know what it is. When will MMA sites stop doing those stories? When people stop clicking on them. One thing the new media age has over the old one is data. Tons and tons of data. We know what people are reading, for how long, and how they got here. That’s both a blessing and a curse, I’m afraid.

OK, even though this felt largely like a rhetorical question, out of curiosity I went searching for some UFC fight kits, just to see what the availability was like.

You know what I found? If you want gear for McGregor, Rousey, Paige VanZant, or Yair Rodriguez, Reebok has got you covered. Anything beyond that, you’d better really be willing to look hard.

For starters, I kept it real simple and just Googled ‘UFC Reebok.’ That took me to the UFC section of Reebok’s online store, which at first glance seemed like the right place. Right away I see Stipe Miocic, Francis Ngannou, Rose Namajunas, Joanna Jedrzejczyk – I even see “UFC Legacy Series” shirts, including one for Ray Borg.

But when I tried to find specific fighter kits, that’s where it gets tough. For instance, click on “Shop Men’s Jerseys” and you’re taken to a page with a total of four T-shirts –three of them McGregor shirts. Even more amazing, click on “Shop Women’s Jerseys,” which is a tab with a picture of Namajunas, and you get a page with one item – a McGregor shirt in a slightly different cut.

So fine, I go up to the search bar and type “Rose Namajunas.” Sorry, that’s a 404 error. Couldn’t find that page. OK, now I’m starting to feel frustrated, but I go back to Google and just type “Rose Namajunas Fight Kit.” Success! I get redirected to a page on the UFC online store with three different options (including one that may or may not feature some form of the German flag).

But what about if I want to buy a shirt from someone who’s not a current or even former champ? What if I want my royalty money to go to some contender I’m all excited about?

So I go to the “Fighters” tab on the UFC store. There I’m given far more options than Reebok gave me (about 50 names, including Bruce Lee and Chuck Liddell), but they don’t all have T-shirts. Although, if you’re looking for a life-sized Matt Hughes cardboard cutout, this is your spot.

Still, maybe what I want is a Darren Till fight kit. Is that so much to ask? He’s a somebody. He must have a fight kit. But when I type “Darren Till” into the UFC store search bar, all I get are commemorative plaques from his last fight.

Fine, back to Google. “Darren Till fight kit,” please, for the love of god. And success again! At the Australian version of the UFC’s store I actually find some. The “walkout” jerseys will run you a cool $99, so, pass. But hey, there are some shirts specific to Till for a more modest $49.99. And it looks like someone took all of four minutes to design it. Cool.

So to answer your question, yeah man, I don’t know. These shirts are out there, apparently. They’re just waiting for someone patient and wealthy enough to come along. Not sure that’s a recipe for huge royalty checks for rank-and-file fighters, though. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.