purpleworm

“Look, I’ve been very spiritual. People don’t know this, but I’ve always been extremely enlightened. Some say I’m the most enlightened person they’ve ever met. Tremendous karma. Tremendous. But I’m hearing—I don’t know if it’s true—but I’m hearing I might not reach Nirvana. Can you believe it? Me! They say I’m still stuck in samsara. Very unfair. Very rigged system.

I was born very high—very high birth, the best birth. People used to say, ‘Sir, with your birth, you’re basically halfway to Buddhahood.’ But apparently that’s not how it works. They say you need compassion. You need wisdom. I’ve got wisdom, okay? I’ve got so much wisdom, it’s unbelievable. But they want humility too. That’s a new one.

I sat under a tree once. Beautiful tree. Ancient. People said, ‘Sir, that’s the Bodhi tree.’ I said, ‘Of course it is. I picked it myself.’ I closed my eyes, waited for the awakening—nothing. No visions, no choirs of celestial beings. Just birds. Loud birds. Very disrespectful.

Now they’re saying I need to dissolve the self. I said, ‘I’ve built a fantastic self. The best self. People love it. Why would I dissolve it?’ So for now, I’m staying in the cycle. But it’s a beautiful cycle. The best cycle. People love it.”

I would give anything to be able to throw a cat without it snagging its claws on anticommunist drivel like when this lady feels the need to characterize "communist newsletters" as completely uninterested in truth and falsehood, only in subversion, and via diagram explains that they are completely outside of the frame of "legitimate disagreement" while the entire American "consensus" is inside of it. Before you say anything, she was using this model as a framework to explain how she thinks things really are, rather than to refute it.

I swear to god it's so inescapable to hear any kind of political commentary from one of these fucking "video essayists" without it at some point devolving into lazy anticommunism.

Edit: The one thing I really appreciate is how she's evidently a big fan of Manufacturing Consent (see the floor shots), which can tell you a whole lot about the reception of that book.

Edit 2: The idealist screed at the end is also annoying, but honestly I can gratefully say those are usually relegated to people such as video essayists who have forgotten what the material world is.

They're just getting ready for hibernation

I think it might be better to reward people for following procedure and, when relevant, responding to crises appropriately. Rewarding people for striking a vein that hadn't been discovered yet seems like a good way to get people to overwork and endanger themselves, because you're basically giving them a slot machine where the input is labor instead of money and it's particularly a concern here because even ethical mining practices still carry substantial danger.

The main issue there seems to be social skills rather than illiteracy as such, which makes sense given the level of atomization our society has reached that has far surpassed even the "extreme" level of atomization we had pre-covid.

Edit: Admittedly, maybe they are also illiterate regarding the structure of arguments (premises -> inference -> conclusion) because they are attacking you for premises that you did not supply despite the other person having just supplied them a few moments ago.

I think that it's possible they have reason not to release it because the information might help Ukraine to identify where the leak is, so instead the RF just uses for for internal benefit. The more that you relay to substantiate something with details, the more that your opposition can narrow down where you got it from (based on where all those details were available), which helps them find whatever fault let you access it.

I passively assume that all these leaks are fake, but I don't really have an argument for it one way or the other.

I know this is fake because he didn't introduce nukes by calling them "the n-word" first. There's no way he wouldn't make it "we're going to show him the bright light of the n-word" or something like that.

Love how Drake is such a good sport about the beef that he makes every effort to prove Kendrick's characterization of him true (except the daughter thing, admittedly).

I'd say this is an evolution of "lolcow" content, because traditionally it's based on an "audience" torturing someone, but here the torturers are part of their act, part of their life and living conditions. This is what the braver channers dreamed of, being able to personally torture someone who calls you a friend and broadcast it to your sick friends and a broader audience for money.

Fundamentally they are both based on cruelty and voyeurism, though

"The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,"

"Why are these museums about historical subjects so stuck in the past rather than focusing on the future?"

My favorite of these is when NPR interviewed a hungry Palestinian man who was in a tent on the rubble of what used to be his house before the IDF bombed it. Without any particular lead-up, like the third question they asked him is if he condemns Hamas.

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-npr-asks-starving-palestinian-living-on-rubble-to-denounce-hamas-co-sign-his-own-ethnic-cleansing

I don't remotely hold it against you, for what it's worth. It was an honest error. Alienation (both from being too online and other factors) along with frustration at the genuinely reactionary elements in American popular sentiment can easily overwhelm a person and lead to false generalizations, and I've done just the same thing myself in the past and still sometimes need to keep myself from doing it again. The main difference between your response and mine is that I'm not sure that I have the courage to directly present an autopsy in response to criticism like you did.

There's no use in moralizing over past mistakes, whether they are your own or others, what matters is doing our best to make sure something we have identified as a mistake is not repeated. Reactionaries usually (not always, but usually) need to astroturf the popularity of their policies, so we must do what we can to expose the illusion of their "popularity" in those cases.