Today, we recognize this post as our 100th since the first on August 1, 2018. It’s our Diamond Anniversary.
At the start then and above we present our organizational video, “What is Praxis Circle?” We have advanced much organizationally over the last two years, though we still have some distance to travel to reach our Phase One goals. We should mention we’ve resumed interviewing Expert Contributors, some who will be introduced this year. We plan to interview more before yearend, when we’ll offer a short organizational report. We will resume a full operational schedule in 2021.
Most important in this post, however, we’d like to thank our existing Members, those who have signed up by giving us their email address. We especially appreciate those who regularly interact with comments, ideas, feedback, and other contributions.
We love these conversations and will be hosting many more.
In the future, more Members will become stars with a permanent place on our website as Member Contributors. While the COVID, C-19, or CCP Virus situation paused Member interviews in 2020, we will resume them soon and look very forward to that.
Importantly, we are well into the process of defining Member Benefits. Currently, they include free book gifts, access to free Worldview Classes (Zoom-based) with other Members (groups up to 12 that Members create on their own or that we randomly establish), and access to some of our Expert Contributors. We will build out all of this fully in 2021, while sponsoring events and hosting a live event of our own, we hope.
Since so many of our recent posts are on the heavy side, we believe it’s time in Members’ Corner today to recognize the extensive content on the lighter side – humorous content – received from Members.
To be direct, many of you out there are clearly following us carefully, no doubt, enjoying our spell-binding insights, but also waiting for any opening whatsoever you can exploit. When these opportunities do occur, like a jungle cat, you pounce and demonstrate no mercy. While we have experienced many more such instances than we would like, we will offer below only three such examples of Member misbehavior.
As a result of our July 1 Circling post earlier this year, Hellboy II: “No Binaries” is Binary, we awoke our own Hellboy Member. He dared to challenge our premise that “No Binaries is Binary” and that this insight is an effective defense of our nation’s highly destructive cancel culture relativism. Hellboy accomplished this by sending us the video presented below (and we should note with no comment whatsoever – typical Hellboy behavior).
In the video Diego goes to the doctor, the Doctor offers Diego a series of binary “yes or no” questions that are analytically pure, yet impossible to answer in a simple, binary way. Diego understands this well; he wants to please the Doctor by following his analytical calculus. Regrettably, though, earthly praxis and the truth of Diego’s practical experience and reason continuously pull him back down into this world from his desired realm of peaceful, Godly bliss.
We can all sympathize with Diego because everyone’s been right there with him.
Reinforcing power-laden, utilitarian, ends justify the means, licensed-to-kill, postmodernist dogma, the upshot of Diego’s counseling session is that Diego’s problem – too much drink – transforms itself over and over again into his only apparent solution, checkmating the Doctor’s pure, binary analysis at every turn.
Of course, it does. Damn it, life!! It’s always something. Woe to those who choose reason over feelings. Curses, foiled again.
We here in the PC HQ can only vow that Hellboy Member will be answering to Q himself soon enough, when he will show him the meaning of Woke. Until then, we raise a glass on a Friday (Thank God!) in honor of Diego and the misguided, overly binary Doctor.
The next Member contribution presented below is more of an enjoyable counterfactual to a thematic undercurrent that we had not even been in touch with than a challenged, analytical claim. In other words, this extremely perceptive Member added 1 + 1 + 1 and concluded the sum equaled 3.
In a stroke of Freudian genius, she noted the presentation of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers video in Swing Dance Tango, the inherent sexual tension in Who’s Zoomin Who? featuring the key scene from Reds and Aretha Franklin’s gold record, and the presentation in House on a Rock of Michael Jordan’s classic shot over the legendary Georgetown defense, locking up the 1982 NCAA Championship.
Her question? “Are some of you at Praxis Circle sensitive to the issue of whether Caucasian men can dance, jump, perform, etc., etc.?”
And yet, she was kind enough to see it from our point of view and go on to answer her own question. She accomplished that with the classic black and white video clip shown below from 1965 of dancing Soviet Cossacks. She also felt this would fit the theme of our Five Part Tribute to Expert Contributor Dr. Samuel Baron, a PC Expert on Marxism. We know Dr. Baron would have loved this video, and our Member knows how much we love Russian history. (After the band leader’s most congenial introduction, you can skip to 1:50 and go as far as you like. This is what General Patton had to put up with in Berlin during the victory celebration.)
So, our answer to the question of whether Europeans, etc., can run, dance, jump, and play like the rest of the world’s adult children?
Well, yes of course they can if they’re not taller than 5’4”, weigh less than 140 pounds, and drink sufficient quantities of beer (Western European) or vodka (Eastern European) before going on stage.
Wine drinkers, though brilliant, not so much.
Our last Member entry involves an instance of simply serving up some more content from a favorite movie featured twice already (one here) to make a point that refers to some of our later content. We posed a Trivia Question recently in our House on a Rock series where our answer was the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 BC) in Rome, involving the soon to be Emperor Constantine versus the losing Roman General Maxentius. (As an aside, the interest level in Constantine’s reign indicated that more posts on Europe’s pre-modern founder might be in order. The emperor-hero turned saint was clearly the right person at the right time.)
In offering the Trivia Question’s answer we linked to a video (see link to left) that showed the battle’s reenactment. Well, we didn’t promise a 20th Century Fox blockbuster!
This rather insolent Member responded by saying that the reenactment’s quality reminded him of a scene from a movie we had presented before, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The video he submitted is shown below.
Our feeling is most men can never get enough of this “knight in shining armor” stuff, and that they would gladly turn back the clock to days of yore, when men were silent but purposeful, and women were just as wonderful as always.
We would like to end our 100th post with another video that an esteemed Member brought to our attention just yesterday. Last time we put a bookend on a serious blog series with a post about the need to refocus education in America toward what’s important.
We believe the video below says, as well as any, where we should place our allegiance in this world outside our local circle of family and friends. The privilege of living in America has been provided to most of us, and we should never forget all those who came before us. Gratitude, forgiveness, and love is what makes the world go round.
Lastly, we will pledge over the next 100 posts to continue to try to keep it inside the ACC, when possible. So, for today, Go Hokies!
