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Martial law
From RationalWiki
- No matter how similar it may look, do not confuse this term with marital law.
- Also not to be confused with Martian law.
Martial Law, short for Martial Arts Law (MAL), is the set of rules that govern how characters in martial arts movies fight. A synopsis:
- No matter how many bad guys are swarming around the good guy, only one baddie can attack the hero at a time
- When the biggest and baddest dude arrives, everyone stops fighting so he can make a grand entrance
- At least 25 bad guys must be defeated for every good guy defeated
[edit] Other uses
Government: When used in conjunction with government, "martial law" generally denotes the set of policies which takes effect when a military force becomes responsible for administration and the enforcement of order within a community. Both foreign and domestic militaries can impose martial law, and the rules of martial law often include curfews, quarantines, increased civil and criminal penalties, and the suppression of free speech. Most of the instigators of martial law defend their actions as necessary to prevent anarchy and violence, but while martial law has undoubtedly been used to forestall such dangers, it has also been used by repressive regimes as a last-ditch defense against revolution or democratization.
Or, to put it less (*ahem*) delicately: Martial law is the end result of a governmental body realizing that its administration is effectively FUBAR. When the citizens of a country realize how badly they've been screwed over since the country's foundation, the government sends in the military to bluntly do the job that it has been trying to inconspicuously accomplish for hundreds of years: taking away people's guns and newspapers and making sure they don't get the nation's flag near any gasoline or open flames. This gives the government enough time to rewrite the constitution while nobody's looking and start the country all over again.
Of course, this snark also overlooks cases in which citizens get upset because the government tries to take away their "right" to oppress their fellow citizens...Reconstruction was a case of martial law that attempted to fix this kind of problem.
