I have been reading a lot, and thinking a lot lately about the unexamined beliefs in the martial arts. I wrote a series of unrelated article for my blog lately which dealt in various ways with the strange cult of the martial arts, and some of the absurdities which are spouted as if it…
Month: May 2011
Critical Thinking and the Martial Arts
There is a tremendous skill lacking in the traditional martial arts. This skill is critical thinking. The lack of critical thinking is what brings people to believe their instructor when he says he knows the touch-of-death, or some other such nonsense. In this article, I am going to examine critical thinking, and how it…
On Qi Power
I wanted to write at length about Qi. Every time that I started, other concerns or cares would stop me (I do have a family and a life outside of martial arts). Eventually, a series of unrelated notes became something more, and then became edited into what is in front of you now. Here…
Subjective Validation and the Martial Arts
In my post on How to become a fake martial arts master, I used one little term a bit incorrectly, and someone called me on it. The term was “subjective validation”, and while I do not feel that I used it terribly wrong, I did not use it in the precise sense, and…
Wallace Smedley 