@deinol Oh, I'm positive they're not "actual Buddhists". Most westerners who claim to be Buddhist aren't actual Buddhists, see. This dudebro is just a rather extreme example of it. On the other extreme I saw someone claiming to be a Buddhist. Who uses Tarot cards. And is a Witch. And...
Now far be it that I, of all people, would denounce syncretic beliefs, but Holy Hell at least BE HONEST ABOUT IT!? Don't claim to follow a tradition if you're doing Chinese Restaurant Menu-style spirituality.
@deinol That particular site is choosing one from the anti-semitism column, one from the NLP column, one from the American "patriot" thug column, one from the "paranoid git" column, one from the ...
You can have my ad blocker of choice when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. But yesterday I found two more plug-ins that make YouTube tolerable again.
SponsorBlock uses crowd-sourced information on videos that skips over sponsor segments so you don't get annoying "..and talking of bad segues, here's a product!..." bits in the middle of otherwise-interesting broadcasts.
DeArrow removes clickbait on Youtube titles and thumbnails, again by crowd-sourcing.
And this doesn't even get into the bizarre whining tone of the opinion piece. (I think it's an opinion piece. It's hard to distinguish intended news from intended opinion pieces these days.)
Isn't it amazing that the ten greatest love stories of, and I quote, "all time", happened to all fall within about a 200 year span and in the circle of European culture?
Go to a university campus in the literature department. Ask professors to name the 10 greatest love stories of all times. You'll be shocked at how little non-European representation there is.
And this is people who teach the subject!
I'm not a scholar by any means. I'm not even particularly interested in tales of romance. I'm pretty sure I'd outdo most of the literature profs I had inflicted on me in University, however, in this test.
@juergen_hubert And don't get me started on folklore. Any folklore most people cite is bowdlerized pabulum with the most obvious and common stories recycled and regurgitated while brilliant stories buried deep in original tellings are invisible. German folklore. Finnish folklore. Russian folklore. Persian folklore. Chinese folklore. Japanese folklore. Folklore from all over Africa (it is amazingly diverse!).
All whitewashed and bowdlerized when it isn't erased outright.
TALKING HEAD: In China today, the communist government demonstrated its evil again as it sent armed and armoured police and vehicles against peacefully protesting students nationwide.
frantic hissing from off-screen
TH: What's that?
frantic hissing continues
TH: Oh.
short pause
TH: In the USA today, student rioters have forced universities nationwide to bring in heavily armed police and even the National Guard to restore order in the face of illegal occupations of public spaces.
(P.S. I just want to point out that the protests in Hong Kong—protests in which subway tunnels were blockaded around blind curves and where in one case an old man was set on fire for disagreeing with the protesters—were quelled by police who were not armed with assault rifles, who did not use armoured cars, and who did not place snipers on rooftops.
All y'all in the USA are currently showing worse optics than MOTHERFUCKING CHINA! A literal police state!)
There is a breed of (usually-)American "leftist" that is really getting on my nerves: the (almost-invariably) white (almost-always) male pseudo-intellectual for whom the issues discussed are just an interesting mental exercise where they have no skin in the game.
Having zero at stake, they can come up with all kinds of seriously horrific "solutions" that throw actual living, breathing human beings under the bus because they're just data points.
Phones, even when "turned off" are still active and can still do things. The fact that modern phones don't have removable batteries is so that the surveillance state (whether formal or capitalists) will always have an in on you.
@Miyagiyoda I think it's actually a different conspiracy. Apple (the first major one to make batteries effectively impossible to replace, IIRC) wants people to buy a new iPhone when their batteries fade, not merely a new battery.
It just happens that phones with irreplaceable batteries can't have their batteries removed, keeping them alive even when people think they're dead.
Apparently this half-century old piece of almost quaint rock opera coverage of the Easter story is so disturbing it needs a trigger warning.
Let me know what you guessed in replies if you don't mind. I can think of several musical theatre productions that might warrant a trigger warning, but JCS wasn't anywhere near on the radar!