I'm going to reply to LF's previous post in a way which, I hope, keeps a close connection to the OP so far as the question of `which magazines', and more generally, which parts of the TKD literature, are worth looking into and taking seriously.
There is fairly basic methodological concept which is typically overlooked in many of the articles published by Black Belt and other popular MA mags, but also by the vast majority of work I've seen on KMAs (in marked contrast to what I've seen in the Okinawan/Japanese karate literature, where writers seem to be much more aware of the issue). This concept is standardly labelled burden of proof, and it works like this: in a situation about which nothing is known, no statement has inherently greater plausibility than any other, very roughly speaking. Therefore, a particular claim about that situation—which simultaneously asserts X and denies the truth of mutually exclusive alternatives to X—has no greater claim to believability than a similar claim asserting Y, or Z, or... Hence, in such a situation, no assertion has privileged status. Suppose now that we discover some fact A which is compatible with X, but not Y or Z or etc. The picture changes radically from one where no particular claim has privileged status to one in which X has that status. Hence, someone who wants to promote X over Y, Z, ... needs to come up with one or more facts like A; otherwise, the situation continues to be one in which no particular claim is more likely than any other. This is just a basic constraint on arguments about empirical domains like physics, history, psychology and so on. The point is in asserting X convincingly, you take on a burden of proof, which a fact like A would meet, at least in large part.
Now when claims are made about the history or technique of a particular MA, the general requirement of meeting a burden of proof applies as much as it does anywhere else. The claim that TKD has a 2000—or 1000 or 500 or whatever—year old history is subject to the requirement that there be positive evidence making the likelihood of the claim superior to the alternative, that TKD is no more than 70 or 80 years old, say. One of the frequently repeated bits of evidence intended to meet the burden of proof for the `ancient KMA' assertion has been, for a long time, the Muye Dobu Tong Ji. It's worth pointing out at this point that the MDTJ says almost nothing about empty hand techs—something pointed out in the in-depth scholarly literature on the subject I've cited, but not in the BB magazine article I mentioned nor in virtually any of the KMA texts I've read which allude to it; the sheer fact of this book's existence seems to be taken as sufficient evidence for ancient indigenous empty-handed techs somehow ancestral to those in modern TKD. But let that go, for the moment; the point is, the MDTJ is, as Dakin Burdick observed in his 1997 JAMA article, one of the three pillars of the claim for the roots of modern KMA in a distant antiquity.
What we now have is a body of detailed, linguistically and philologically well-informed critical literature which has shown—by meticulous side-by-side textual examination of both the MDTJ and several other still earlier Asian treatises on combat techniques—that the MDTJ is in essence a literal translation of a Chinese military text written ten generations before the MDTJ appeared. The content thus represents Chinese weapon and their use, Chinese strategic and tactical concepts, and is in effect a presentation in the Korean language of a substantial chunk of Chinese military culture and practice. There is no martial content in the MDTJ which does not appear first—by 250 years!—in the New Book of Effective Discipline. Exhaustive documentation for this claim is provided by the JAMA articles by Burdick, Henning and Androgué that I cited in my previous post. The conclusion which follows—and note, by `conclusion', I mean nothing other than a deduction based on the available evidence—is that the MDTJ, by virtue of it's completely Han military content, has no bearing on the antiquity of modern KMA's origins, and therefore fails to meet the burden of proof for any claims that these origins are ancient.
In order to restore the MDTJ as a source meeting that burden of proof, it would be necessary for supporters of ancient KMA to counter the translations, analyses and documentation of the scholars I've cited, at the same or a superior level of detail. Burdick, Henning and Androgué have amassed an enormous body of evidence on behalf of their assessment of the MDTJ's provenience and content. To meet the burden of proof for the CLAIM that LF makes—that `The existence of this book and its apparent date in history has significance beyond where the text itself came from', insofar as it has any bearing on the question of ancient KMAs—would require a demonstration, at the same level of detail, that a book with completely Chinese content tells us something about the KMAs. If the MDTJ is, as the mass of evidence alluded to substantiates, a manual, written in Korean, consisting of Chinese military techniques taken text-for-text from a Chinese source, then the default inference is that the KMAs of the time consisted of Chinese military techniques, a point discussed in detail in Burdick's article. In other words, the claim that the MDTJ most clearly does support is that, at the time it was written, Korean military techniques were the same as those practiced throughout the vast Han empire 250 years earlier. To try to use the MDTJ to support the existence of an ancient (or even contemporary) native KMA set of traditions, a rather crushing burden of proof therefore needs to be met.
Now, exactly who is doing this `meeting?' LF comments that `I don't want readers who are new to TKD to accept blindly that any reference to this book by experts in support of ancient KMA has been unilaterally dismissed as "unacceptable" by all experts'. Well, who are the experts who have met the burden of proof imposed by Burdick, Henning and Androgué—at this moment, the outstanding Western experts on the history of the KMAs, as attested by the documented published work (which, interestingly, tend to reinforce each other's conclusions, even though so far as I know the three have worked completely independently of each other during their careers)? Who has shown either that their conclusions are incorrect, or that in spite of them, there is still evidence in this literal translation of an older Chinese military manual for ancient Koreran military practices—including empty-hand techniques, which, as noted earlier, have almost no place in the MDTJ (following, of course, the Chinese source of this work), and where they do appear, seem to involve nothing different from chuan fa methods of the time? Where is the work of these alleged dissenting experts? I am familiar with the content of JAMA, and they haven't been publishing there. And I try to keep an eye on the TKD literature, particularly books with any kind of historical coverage; I haven't seen anything in the past 10 years that even remotely addresses the discoveries that Burdick, Henning and Androgué have made, let alone counters them.
If claims such as one that appeared in BB were made instead in Journal of Asian Martial Arts, you can be sure—from the content of JAMA from the time it first started—that there would be massive attention paid to this issue of meeting the burden of proof. The articles of the three scholars I've cited are documented on an almost sentence-by-sentence level of grain; certainly, any substantial claim is supported either by citation of sources or by the author's own up-front presentation of his own translation from the relevant texts. But the BB article contains not a single piece of critically vetted support for the claim, just as LF's claim offers not a single actual piece of scholarship that meets the burden of proof for the subclaim that the MDTJ, in spite of being a translated Chinese document, still tells us something about ancient KMA practice. Instead, we get either no support at all, or else vague claims that other experts possibly disagree, all of it unanchored to a single piece of in-depth counterargumentation—no articles or monographs, no citations, no names, nothing.
The BB style, in which the burden of proof is conspicuously ignored and instead, old misconceptions appear to be endlessly recycled as though they has never been severely undermined during the last decade of peer-reviewed scholarship, is unfortunately the norm in MA magazine publishing (TKD Times has been guilty of the same critical irresponsibility). What makes JAMA immeasurably superior to these other sources, and the reason I suggest it in place of anything else I've seen published in North America, is that the peer-review process requires substantiation of claims by full explanation of reasoning backed by up-front citation of sources. Similar remarks apply MA texts.
And the issue isn't restricted to issues of historical accuracy and well-supported argument. Issues of technical content in the MAs can't really be totally decoupled from issues of history; look at all the arguments for what the optimal bunkai for karate kata (including TKD/TSD hyungs) are. Your view of the history of TKD and that its methods are going to be linked; the article in BB I've been alluding to is a perfect example of that. Invoking the totally undocumented, fantastical picture of Hwarang warriors (about whom we actually know almost nothing) developing high kicks to knock fully `armored', weapon-wielding Koryo warriors off their horses, gives a rather different picture of the role of high kicks than the well-documented history of modern KMA, where it is apparent that these kicks have entered the technical lexicon in response to tournament competitions.
Historical interpretations condition our thinking and expectations about actual practice at many levels, and any magazine or book which presents an extremely dubious legendary fantasy in place of carefully reasoned history is very likely to be unreliable on the technical side—certainly insofar as issues of self-defense are concerned—as well. Caveat emptor, caveat lector.
