wonderingwanderer
@wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
Wherever I wander I wonder whether I’ll ever find a place to call home…
- Comment on Anon tries being social 18 hours ago:
Unfortunately a lot of people don’t seem to want to de-radicalize young men. They’ll say stuff like “Why should we? They deserve to be miserable.”
It kinda misunderstands the nature of radicalization, and how vulnerabilities and exploits manifest. It can even take on a tinge of victim-blaming, retroactively justifying mistreatment based on their reaction to it
- Comment on Buddha orders a pizza: "Make me One with Everything" 19 hours ago:
Why are all buddhist stories like this?
Anon has apparently never read a buddhist story
- Comment on Buddha orders a pizza: "Make me One with Everything" 19 hours ago:
Those koans were stories written by Mumon. They weren’t all based entirely on real events. Maybe Nansen gave a dharma talk where he said he would kill the cat, but to actually kill it would go against the precepts. Highly doubtful that actually happened.
The point of the koan isn’t surface level though, and if you expect to be able to extract a lesson from a koan by one simple reading, then you’re approaching koans wrong.
Mumon’s commentaries might help guide your understanding, and perhaps secondary scholarship like a translator’s notes or whatever. But unless you’re viewing it from inside the tradition, it’s likely to seem obscure/perplexing.
But unless you already understand what he means by “say a word of Zen,” and why Joshu placing a sandal on his head was taken as an acceptable answer, then this story will elude you no matter how you look at it.
- Comment on Buddha orders a pizza: "Make me One with Everything" 19 hours ago:
You haven’t read much Abhidharma if “comprehensible” is how you would describe Theravada.
Not saying anything is wrong with Theravada. Entire cultures are built on its principles. But it takes a surface-level glance to think of it as something simple and easy to understand.
Zen though, most of the teachings are about pedagogical methods rather than doctrine. That’s why it sounds weird to westerners who think of “religion” as dusty old books and priests who tell you what to do/think.
Zen teachings literally tell you “Don’t cling to fixed ideas. Don’t seek answers from some external authority figure.” Everything they teach is about guiding you to internalize those things. It’s about showing, not telling.
So expecting it to “make sense” in the lens of “just let me read a book that will tell me what to believe” is already starting from the wrong foot.
- Comment on Buddha orders a pizza: "Make me One with Everything" 19 hours ago:
You wouldn’t get it…
- Comment on New voting machines fix your vote if you accidentally select the wrong candidate. 20 hours ago:
Oh god, I was relieved when it saw it was a shitpost, then I saw the link in the description 😩 fuck these fascists, man…
- Comment on Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Is Obsessed With Union-Bashing 2 days ago:
That jackass did it for extra time off apparently.
He… didn’t think that maybe the union could help him get that…?
- Comment on Boy Dinner 3 days ago:
It should be legal everywhere. It’s only dangerous in refined form. Nobody would snort pure caffeine cause you would literally just die. But in its natural concentration it’s not that harmful and can even have beneficial effects in moderation. Coca leaves are the same way honestly.
- Comment on Goteem 4 days ago:
Yeah, they work for the government so they’re allowed to bypass the firewall. You’re not really making a point here.
- Comment on As of today, I have stopped using Reddit entirely. 5 days ago:
Hamsters for one. Opae Ula, Wallsted Method, ecosphere, other sort of niche hobbyist/petcare topics
- Comment on Goteem 5 days ago:
Then people there could say “That’s not what it’s like here at all” and suddenly propaganda debunked.
.mls absolutely depend on the epistemic bubble to create a void of knowledge that they can fill with their BS. Anything that says anything bad about the PRC is “western propaganda.” All their sources are PRC propaganda, but since it’s non-western they claim that makes it valid.
- Comment on Banana for scale 5 days ago:
a murmur rises from the deep…
“you’re welcome”
- Comment on Banana for scale 5 days ago:
Why don’t they use 1024^th^s? Gotta commit to the bit if you wanna be taken seriously.
- Comment on Banana for scale 5 days ago:
That’s easy, 14 5/32
(Yes, I did it in my head. Yes, I am chaos)
- Comment on Sure, why not 1 week ago:
That toucan beak is an asset, my friend. Use it!
- Comment on I Hate It When That happens 1 week ago:
Land foul on the grass
And the players tried for a forward pass
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast.
You were close though…
- Comment on It’s gonna run so good 1 week ago:
🤪
- Comment on Console market craters as Xbox sales crash 33% to the lowest since launch 25 years ago, PS5 sales drop 25% 1 week ago:
Gee, I wonder why!
- Comment on It’s gonna run so good 1 week ago:
You can use adhesive cable management tubes to stick to the wall and they’ll hold the cables in place and look a little neater. I think Ikea sells them but you can likely find them anywhere that has that kind of stuff
- Comment on In the deep freeze 1 week ago:
“Have fun with us, Dave. You must.”
As they flash a menacing smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes…
- Comment on Wealth inequality will destroy America. 1 week ago:
That changes nothing about what I said.
At least make a modicum of effort to base your commentary in reality.
You should take your own advice…
- Comment on Wealth inequality will destroy America. 1 week ago:
Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what’s good for them
- Comment on Wealth inequality will destroy America. 1 week ago:
There is an “upper middle class.”
If you point to the average doctor or lawyer, and tell poor people “those guys are working class, same as you,” half of them are going to tell you to get bent. Cause when they see them with their mcmansions that somebody else cleans, and their giant lawns that somebody else mows, and driving their mercedes and corvettes, the average poor person is not going to believe you when you tell them they’re the same class.
Maybe if everyone was educated and enlightened you could pull that off, but expecting all or even most people to be like that is idealistic and naïve at best. Perhaps even callous and out-of-touch.
The grain of truth is that we are indeed all “working class,” and that class conflict
isshould be about working class versus owner class; and that the owner class actively pits upper-middle class against middle- and lower-class, and middle-class against lower class.But telling everyone “there’s no such thing as/no distinction between upper-middle, middle, and lower classes” is not the remedy. You need to remind them that even though there is stratification within the working class, we’re all on the same team and need to work together.
Telling them otherwise comes off as gaslighting and is not going to convince the majority of working class people, because it directly contradicts the evidence of their eyes and ears.
And besides, upper-middle class people will hear that and think “so you want to reduce me to poverty just to level the playing field!”, middle-class people will think “so you want to eliminate the middle class and make us all poor?,” and lower-class people will think “so you’re erasing my struggles and pretending I have it just as easy as the middle- and upper-middle classes?”
Denying the reality isn’t helpful. That’s like using “colorblindness” as an argument against racism. We need to acknowledge our differences in order to accept them. Pretending there’s no difference will never work, and only advantages the owner-class attempting to maintain the status quo.
- Comment on Anon listens to the radio 1 week ago:
What do you call a significant other who’s non-binary?
- Comment on The cheap ones leave the best residue 2 weeks ago:
“if he was dishonest he wouldn’t be so open and obvious about how evil he is”
- Comment on At least my dick is minty fresh 2 weeks ago:
You’re apparently uncircumcised and lack the empathetic ability to understand that people with circumcisions often have problems you don’t have to deal with, so kindly fuck off.
- Comment on At least my dick is minty fresh 2 weeks ago:
Hey, go fuck yourself. Stop trying to justify infant genital mutilation. It’s abusive, it’s psychotic, it’s traumatic, and it’s atrocious. That’s all you need to know about it, and no amount of hyperbolic strawmen will change that.
- Comment on The cheap ones leave the best residue 2 weeks ago:
That might backfire when suddenly all the trump supporters at the pump go “Oh, dear leader says it’s a small price, okay then. Can’t believe all those ungrateful libtards are complaining about gas prices!”
- Comment on The bosses don't pay their workers. Workers pay their bosses. 2 weeks ago:
Appropriating the surplus value of labor
- Comment on Palantir CEO Alex Karp has mental breakdown in front of reporters 2 weeks ago:
Oh I agree that it’s pathological. Just doesn’t reach my threshold for “mental breakdown”