People practice martial arts for any of a number of reasons. It can be good exercise. It can be a sport. It can be a defensive or offensive combat technique. It can be some sort of spiritual thing.

That latter one is the one that’s most difficult to quantify, of course. But for the most part… who cares? Someone wants to wear their jammies and dance real slow while getting in touch with the Mysteries Of The Universe, hey, great, whatever. There are worse ideas. I suppose. But when the spiritual notions cross over into the more practical applications, that’s when it can become seriously silly. Take, for instance, the martial artists who believe (or at least profess to believe) that they can knock out another person without touching them. Yes, good old fashioned Jedi mind tricks. Now, if you could actually knock a person unconscious just with magical mind powers… the practical applications and implications of that would be profound. Not only self defense, but offense. Imagine if you could mug someone without touching them. Political debates would become entertaining as hell as the candidates try to force-blast each other off the stage. And then the technique would be taught to medical and police personnel: someone is drugged, psycho or injured, or just plain uncooperative… with a glance and a dramatic hand gesture, you could put ’em into a stupor. It would be fabulously useful.

And these martial artists who claim to be able to knock people unconscious without touching them have the videos to back up their claims, with many and sundry students being shown going goofy when their “master” throws Chi Balls at them. That proves it’s real, right? Well… as it turns out, there is an armor against magic. Who would have guessed?

And this:

And this:

What is the armor that works against magical martial arts? Skepticsm. Simply put, if you don’t believe in it, it doesn’t affect you. (Alternative explanation: it doesn’t actually work on anybody; the students shown being knocked for a loop are just play acting. A shocking hypothesis, I admit.)

But perhaps the message to take away isn’t that disbelief renders you immune… it’s that belief renders you vulnerable. Because there is another form of “no touch knockout” that is regularly demonstrated, with apparently equivalent or even more dramatic success. Take a look at this little music video, a mashup of “no touch knockouts” using both “eastern martial arts” and “televangelists:”

On a certain level, if people want to believe in this sort of woo… well, fine, whatever. It’s a free country. But it’s the *promotion* of this sort of woo that’s problematic. If you think you can defend yourself with magical nonsense, the person most likely to suffer is… you. But if you try to convince other people that they can defend themselves with magic, then you are imperiling them, just as surely as if you were convincing them to not get vaccinated.

The televangelists are a slightly different situation. They are not, so far as I’m aware, trying to teach you how to harness this magical ability for your own ends; they are simply using it as a way to impress you at their power. Still, it’s the same level of ethics, and, really, in both cases, be it “chi masters” or televangelists, their goal is much the same: to gain power over the believer and to extract money from them.

But as the videos show, there is a defense against these dark arts: simply don’t buy their BS.