Moved to a very conservative area in the US relatively recently. Had to go by the police station for some forms new residents need to fill out. Passed about a dozen Trump flags on the way, surprisingly a few Harris signs as well.

Front and center behind the receptionists in the station is a giant thin blue line flag. It’s one thing when some dipshits in the neighborhood have it out, but this is state government property. I hope to never encounter anyone from the station ever again because that was such a disgusting sight after also spending a very stressful 2 hours at the DMV.

I keep getting whiplash between “they’re just humble hard working folks like in King of the Hill” when somebody makes goofy conversations at the grocery store and “I’m surrounded by people who want to murder my friends” when I see their yards.

They gotta recover some mana. It takes a while.

i can do 1) eerectile functionary 2) heat of hte moment love extensions 3) cast away nameless mist (anti virgin spell god) 4) gaydar 5) make you rboyfriend better shoot at boot camp 6) anticonception spell

My time spent sitting in Discord calls or scrolling for hours is significantly lower recently because somewhat ironically, the quality of posts here (outside of bad posting, DOWN with beanis) is higher so it takes less for me to be satisfied and for a while. If not higher quality, less mentally draining or bad vibe generating. Has been good for my mental because I’ve spent more time doing things I actually enjoy.

The Greens haven’t gotten a president but they absolutely do campaign and win at the local level. And PSL isn’t on the ballot everywhere so they’re the next best option. https://www.gpelections.org/greens-in-office/

People were shit talking Bushnell in the original thread when it happened. But I think it can arguably be more effective than fragging folks in the building or something. Obviously, encouraging suicide isn’t good as a standard. The people in charge won’t care either way. But if voters work mostly on vibes, which they often do, this paints a picture of “peaceful person harmed only themselves to protest the government’s evil actions” instead of letting people handwave them away by focusing on them hurting other people instead.

People don’t generally know what Thích Quảng Đức was protesting, but given images of a burning monk, they assume the people who let that happen and that prompted the action are the villains. Of course, there’s tons of people who handwave away people like in the OP as just those with mental illness already prone to suicide. So it could really go either way.

If OP is another Bushnell, I wish they hadn’t died and had lived to continue fighting alongside other comrades, but I respect they care enough about something to go to these lengths because it often feels like nobody cares at all.

I was looking for a specific ebook the other day. Not on private sites, not on public sites, can’t get it through my libraries. Finally checked out book piracy IRC for the first time. Still not there.

I haven’t seen anyone post any evidence that she’s a ‘Putin lover’ other than the one time she sat down at the same table as Putin like 10 years ago for an event. Which is easily countered by pictures of Obama doing that same thing like the last time someone wandered into Hexbear like a week ago. But literally nothing else. She must be the best spy in the world for there to be such a lack of evidence.

Oh, Graphene is great. It’s just that you can only install it in Pixels. There was a recent info leak showing that Graphene was one of the only operating systems aside from newer iPhones that couldn’t be cracked by the fancy new Israeli hacker software that the US government uses. But they’re focused on security, not privacy. So if you’re not concerned about the govt getting your phone, most of the benefits can be replicated by using open source software, a private DNS, etc. Graphene sand boxing apps by default is sometbing that should definitely be a standard though.

As for Pixels, if you look at benchmarks, they are always significantly behind comparably priced and even cheaper phones in every category. You might say ‘oh well thats just benchmarks and doesn’t carry over to every day use’ but they’re still selling people objectively worse hardware for flagship prices. They also have overheating issues and poor cell signal in addition to the overall subpar performance. They’re better than like prepaid phones, but that’s why I said they’re junk.

Yesss, I was searching the thread to see if anyone posted it first. I threw it in the mega last year. It’s my own tradition with my friend group.

I think you may be underestimating the labor required to respond to emails on the part of the business, depending on the task and what information is typically needed. I understand wanting a written record of things, but I get a lot of client emails that turn into ridiculous chains because people can’t follow directions or things are harder to explain in text or a document is missing and it takes another 3 days for them to reply, etc, etc.

I’ve had people schedule meetings with me and those meetings come before I’ve ever even had a chance to see their email because of the volume we get. Then we resolve whatever it is in 5 minutes and don’t have to worry about it anymore. I’ve also had people email me a laundry list of very complex questions that will take much more time to explain in writing and will definitely not be done promptly because I have 5 minutes between other meetings to write out a response to 1 out of 10 questions and it takes me that long to even parse all of what it is they are asking.

There’s definitely situations wheres meetings should have been emails, but at least in my position, there’s equally as many things that should have been a phone call or Zoom meeting or something instead.

EDIT: Ideally, email is for less complex questions or things that can wait a significant length of time (like 1 - 2 weeks in my position), where meetings/phone calls are for more urgent or complex situations. But this definitely isn’t the reality.

That’s a bit that I missed. Maybe it is legitimately a bodily purity thing. That’s still funny though because it means they’re seething over my killer mantis arms in Cyberpunk.

My thought was they were mixing up being transgender with being transhuman. Like they were intrinsically linking the two. Which like I can see some takeaways there, but Human Revolution is 100% an obvious racism allegory that gives you cybersunglasses. I don’t personally remember it having much to say about gender.

Nah, I just meant that there are people who do not conform to the ideal stereotype of a monk, sometimes because they were born into the religion. Which sometimes is fine, like tons of monks have full body tattoos and stuff unrelated to their practice, but sometimes there are people who do things contradictory to the teachings. A monk smoking, riding a motorcycle (not like a motorbike for transport), and with a flashy phone probably isn’t following the teachings to the letter, if at all. There are militant monks warring against other religions right now. That blows some people’s minds because all they get is sanitized images of lotus flowers. Just wanted to point out that Buddhists are people too so romanticizing them, Asian or not, will always lead to disappointment and impossible standards. Just like how Christian’s aren’t always Christ-like. Tons of Buddhists only engage with things on a surface level, even if they’re born into a culture more inclined toward it.

EDIT: Many people’s first introduction is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I haven’t personally read.

Maybe there’s a trans reading of Deus Ex I’m not aware of that is greater than societal acceptance of body modification/choosing one’s physical characteristics but if not this is pretty funny:

“Contains subtly pro-Transhumanism content” like uhh that’s the whole game and is not the same thing

I think I get what you mean. I was trying to avoid orientalizing because there are white Buddhist teachers across the globe who really know their stuff. It’s not a matter of “Asian teacher good” or “Asian religion good”. There are plenty of Vietnamese monks who were born into the religion who smoke and ride motorcycles and buy the latest iPhones. It happens everywhere. But institutionally, because there has been more community and monetary support for Buddhist temples, you get more of the philosophy and less of the ‘meditation-as-productivity-tool’ stuff in non-Western countries.

Westerners just primarily get exposed through very watered down versions of the philosophy from people like Alan Watts and other spiritual hippie types who traveled to India decades ago. And before that, people like the British colonists who threw out any idea they couldn’t recontextualize into a Christian framework. Or modern tech grifters selling their meditation apps.

There’s lots of cool teachings and stories you can interpret literally or metaphorically depending on the situation. Like Manjushri cutting open the Himalayan valleys with a giant flaming sword, the consumption of human ashes as an intentional taboo to shock the mind out of a dualistic concept of reality, Chinese monks burning the books of other monks and essentially telling them to . There’s thousands of years of cosmology that blends with different cultures. And equally as much philosophical work as all of the European philosophers combined.

But with that also comes stuff like the Gelug school burning down other Tibetan monasteries, abuses of power in the sangha, etc. Some more humerous stuff like Buddhists debating Daoists, winning, then writing a follow up called “Laughing at the Dao”. Just regular infighting, violence, and things that plague every other religion.

So its good not to have a romanticized view of Buddhism or any other religion. I personally vibe it much more than anything that relies on a creator god, but as this thread discusses, governance based on religious principles doesn’t usually go so well.

I don’t know the historic background, but I would totally believe this. I learned a little bit of spoken Tibetan while I was there, but the romanized words are not pronounced at all like they’re spelled and pronunciation is difficult in general. It wasn’t necessarily the language itself though, it was more that you have a break in concentration where someone is speaking Tibetan for 2 minutes while you stare at them, then you listen to the translator for 2 minutes and try to write things down, then it’s back to not understanding for another 2 minutes, etc. I imagine it’s a lot more effective when you speak the language. But 2 hours of that a day was really not fun. Still learned a lot though.

The Maoist uprising only occurred within the last 20 years, starting around 1996 and the monarchy was abolished in 2006. There were a lot of concessions made for this to happen and restrictions put on the most militant Maoists to re-integrate them into society and work with them through political processes instead of further violence. They’ve been ruled by a Democratic coalition government for a while that includes a few different communist groups. But they aren’t a wholly socialist country and there’s still elements of monarchism and things like that.

Well, I edited my comment to say the experience also turned me vegan. Since the primary goal is the reduction and elimination of suffering, it only stands to reason this includes animal suffering. I don’t consider myself a Secular Buddhist in that I don’t try to mold the religious teachings I’ve received into a secular framework (and I do not like Stephen Bachelor), but I just go along with some things while not personally believing they are true. Rebirth being the biggest thing, where a lot of Buddhist philosophy falls apart if you remove cosmological components like that, since many things follow from that assumption. But I’m not personally sold.

Buddhists tells a lot of stories about how significantly advanced practitioners can influence their own rebirths by building the mental fortitude (through years/lifetimes of meditation practice) to withstand and navigate the hellish and chaotic experience of their mindstream being ripped from their body at death and scattered/pulled in many different directions to their new life. It’s silly to tell, but essentially, someone told me that my cat could be an enlightened being who is here to teach me patience and compassion for other beings. Do I literally believe that? No. But the idea did make me try to temper some of my impatience with their more destructive behaviors and open my mind to being more compassionate toward other animals in general.

Wikipedia no doubt has a simplified explanation, but in Madhyamaka philosophy, there’s the idea of the “two truths” which is something we delved very heavily into. I don’t know that it has really changed how I interact with the world as much as the former thing though.

I don’t honestly know, it’s not something I tried and it’s not something anyone I know actually did. It is something that is mentioned in texts though. It’s supposed to be a very advanced practice if you do it at all, so not something for newcomers. Primarily for the reason I mentioned of how it can really mess you up if you just go and do it on a whim.