wayne hansen wrote:My loyalty belongs to the Art not the community
Because most in the community!? don’t care about the Art
Yeah and my art needs practice partners who are actually trying to challenge me using methods I'm less familiar with.
It's not rocket appliances.
They say the art takes four hands to learn but that's just the start, in truth you need 400... 4000.
T. T. Liang said that his art was "making 10,000 friends and not one enemy".
If our loyalty is TO the art, then should our actions serve the spread of useful information about the arts to help guide others towards progress in their practice?
So what is really being served by your declarations?
Do they provide useful information, no.
Do they provide constructive suggestion, no.
Do they put down the alleged skills and knowledge of others with no direct experience to base them on.... yes.
Do they glorify the speaker's own alleged skills and knowledge with no direct evidence to base them on... yes.
The only information your posts like this are spreading is "they suck and I'm better".
Does that serve the art or does it serve the ego?
"Oh but I'm warning them away from bad taiji"
Okay, fair... where is the good stuff? How can a man in the USA in 2024 start a quality kung fu journey in Taijiquan?
Adam Mizner, for better or worse, provides an answer to that question and a path to follow. He has curriculum, delivery, and community. He's like Yang Cheng Fu in that he has built a brand that is arguably what others are measured against, good or bad.
You're more like Yang Shaohou, just being unpleasant and discouraging people from training with you, so your vision of the art is less likely to survive.
But if you refer to your history, you'll find some of the most productive and constructive periods in the development of these and other martial arts, IMA, EMA, chinese, western, American, medieval and modern, is when people with different ideas come together in the spirit of experimentation and learning and sharing information.
The Martial Man model is what works. It's not about ivory silos and development of theoretical situations in isolation, it's about mixing it up, listening to ideas, testing ideas, exposure to different perspectives.
So yeah, serve the art however you feel is best. I'm just saying from here just looks like an old dog barkin from the porch most days when it comes to anybody doing anything contemporary.