Whenever one of these Atlantic ghouls tries to imitate what they guess Serious Thinking must be, it's like watching Vincent D'Onofrio as the bug in the skin suit
Hunger strikes are not violence against oneself? Civil disobedience is not violence against the state? You know, since we're engaged in bullshit sophistry and all
I stand by what I said during the Kevin Williamson debacle:
The Atlantic exists to give a platform to men who will argue in public, without obviously slavering or gibbering, that women who seek to control their bodies should be hanged, while carefully never publishing demands they should be hung.
This is not what "the middle way" means in Buddhism. The idea that it counsels avoiding radical positions in general, in favor of a kind of centrist moderation, would make the Buddha himself a violator of the middle way, given how self-consciously radical he was, and how radical his ideas were.
Awful lot of people with an awful lot of awfully recently awful thoughts on the subject of suicidal contagion. How far are we from bringing back 'suicide is the cowards way out', a week?
This person, truly an idiot, also would write this same article about someone engaging in a hunger strike or similar more acceptable protest against the Gaza war if it got enough attention and approbation.
This is what they're educated and trained to do. Pretend there is no context and you have no biases or assumptions and just start chaining concepts together in order to rationalise the vibes.
"The middle path" is not ambivalent centrism. It's the in-between of pure asceticism and complete hedonism. Overindulgence and complete abstinence from pleasure are both destructive forces.
The practical application of which is:
Man, they used to have very progressive writers years back. What happened? Noe they're just a consent manufacturing machine like the NYT. All of our publications are gross as fuck now.
I don't think AI created that sentence, but it's remarkable how AI-like it is — maybe because of the unnecessary incrementalism and the way it repeats itself to create the illusion of depth.
FUUUUCK, now I can't even be against lionizing suicide by self-immolation without being grouped with the same people who are fine with the ongoing Palestinian genocide?
This horrifying timeline just keeps finding new ways to be even stupider.
Holy fuck.
The orientalism in the description of this *centuries old* most extreme version on nonviolent (according to the Dalai Lama!) protest is fucking palpable!!
Like holy shit with this orientalist tone policing bull shit!!
I understand not everybody knows every tenet of Buddhism, but five seconds of Googling will tell you that "the Middle Way" does not mean being morally ambivalent about the preventible deaths of innocent people.
Less depressing than this deliberate slur is that there are people who'll believe it.
