SirPalomides

I could probably talk endlessly on this thread but I'll just list some of my favorites- The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories of Fritz Leiber Clark Ashton Smith, especially his decadent Xothique tales/ prose poems Angela Carter's short stories, especially The Bloody Chamber collection Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, and the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath Lord Dunsany stories and his novel The King of Elfland's Daughter Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun Robert E Howard's Conan stories Short stories of Nikolai Gogol The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov And, if fairy tales and folklore count, I could list lots more stuff. My single favorite probably being Padraic Colum's Irish fairy tale novel The King of Ireland's Son

I know they are in translation because my brother read some of it when we were kids and he kept saying how great it was. He mentioned something about aliens in white submarines... does that ring a bell?

I really don't, I just saw Come and See a few years ago, when it was playing at a special art house theater near me. Apart from that I've seen a little Tarkovsky and Eisenstein and maybe one or two other things.

Empire Strikes Back meets... Come and See?

Huh?

I find Dong Zhongshu's rain magick to be really interesting. The ritual is quite massive, as fits something conducted by the state- massive dragons, colored differently according to season, are constructed; various classes of people are assigned dances to perform; a tunnel leading from the altar to the nearest body of water is dug out, as well as a pool to put frogs in. He calls for female shamans to lead to the rain prayers, which is interesting as Confucianism historically often has a relationship with shamanism ranging from ambivalence to hostility.

To complement Walker's 2016 explanation above, in translations of Confucian texts I see 浊 rendered as "turbid." Turbid qi is necessary for the physical formation but if one has too much turbid qi it can darken one's original nature and prevent one from achieving virtue. Humans are distinguished from other animals in being endowed with a greater amount of pure qi to balance the necessary turbid qi. From Zhang Zai: The Great Vacuity is clear. Being clear, it cannot be obstructed. Not being obstructed, it is therefore spirit. The opposite of clearness is turbidity. Turbidity leads to obstruction. And obstruction leads to physical form. When material force (qi) is clear, it penetrates; and when it is turbid, it obstructs.

The term “Taiji” originates in the Yijing. It was Zhou Dunyi, who briefly taught the Cheng brothers, who elaborated on the concept in his explanation of the Taiji diagram (which probably came from Daoism). Other Neo-Confucian philosophers like Zhang Zai had differing conceptions of the Taiji. Calling Taiji “prime mover” is a probably inappropriate imposition of an Aristotelian concept that doesn’t quite fit with any of the Confucian cosmologies that I’ve seen.

Knowing very little about this issue, I wonder what practical consequences this might have.

I'm mostly a fan of Tulsi Gabbard. Her stance on the Syria war was a brave and quite lonely one to take. It led to her being branded a Russian agent by establishment liberals, which seems to be par for the course for anyone questioning US foreign policy orthodoxy nowadays. I think she would be a smart VP choice for Biden but that will never happen.

About that 2 centimeter shift: "We've Moved the Needle" But Far More Work to Do, Say Progressives as Biden-Sanders Panels Unveil Policy Blueprint Of course a platform is only meaningful if there is intent and capability to actually try and implement it.

All I'm saying is, if CA firearms sales skyrocketed by 900%* in March as part of some coordinated effort to do ???, in connection with BLM protests, we should be seeing the attempted ??? happen pretty soon, if not already. That doesn't seem likely to me but I guess we'll see. *citation needed

It's mainly small affinity groups, but some well-known ones include the Socialist Rifle Association. Friends of mine have been part of local leftist/ anarchist gun clubs going back to the 00's. Some BLM protests have seen a marked presence of armed supporters in open-carry states (many of whom could use some pointers on gun safety). CA is the most populous state in the US, no? Go outside the Bay Area or LA area and it's not hard to find very right-wing people. So I imagine that accounts for a large part of it. Maybe it's George Soros preparing his antifa army for the final Marxist takeover.

Again, all I'm talking about is self-defense. Not escalating violence, but recognizing that the violence is already here, in potential and kinetic forms, and that in many situations being law-abiding and unarmed isn't going to save you. Non-violence has tactical application in some instances but it is not the cure-all some hoped it would be. Of course people shouldn't go strutting around and picking fights- that just gets people killed with nothing to show for it. If some hothead with Che Guevara fantasies shows up at your affinity group, politely turn them down. Anyway, back to specific policy proposals- free college. I'm reading this article from Current Affairs which gives a good overview of the struggles for public education and how free college was widely seen as a next step until derailed by a variety of factors: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/whats-new-about-free-college

If you want to make a thread about me, start it. Otherwise stick to the problems of US politics. Citing my alleged hypocrisy with reference to a separate topic makes the argument about me. Much as I love talking about myself, not what this thread is for. I note that I mentioned the need for armed self-defense of leftists “where necessary” and not as a panacea or substitute for the hard work of organizing. It is not a strategy or a program. By itself it is meaningless. But, again citing the long record of the American state in systematically attacking even slightly effective leftist movements (including the non-violent ones) and employing right-wing proxies with plausible deniability, it is beyond naive to deny that it will be needed. “It can’t happen here” is the perpetual mantra of victims of eight-wing violence around the world. This has nothing to do with vilifying groups of people (pace Solzhenitsyn) but of recognizing the reality of a system propped up on extreme violence and willing to use more to preserve itself even against moderate reform. The apparent ascendancy of BLM is due to the growing recognition and anger at how police lynch black people using flimsy legal pretexts (or none at all) and that they are bulwarks of white supremacy. Telling American leftists to just call the police in case of trouble in that context just sounds surreal.

What a curious attempt to derail the thread into an ad hominem attack

As Stokely Carmichael said, "In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.'

The left in the US (not the liberals, the left) is weak, fractured, and ineffectual, hence no need for severe repression. You can thank COINTELPRO and the Reagan reaction for some of that. That will change if the left becomes organized and effective, at which point the need to defend against the state and allied paramilitaries will be real. That's when the old COINTELPRO methods get dusted off and revamped. That's not paranoia, that's the teaching of history. I am glad to see some American leftist groups are training with arms.

This is probably not the painting you saw but your description reminds me of this one by Gustave Dore:

The police and right-wing paramilitaries overlap, if not in personnel then at least in ideological commitment. They are not trustworthy. It was the police and FBI who systematically targeted black leadership in the 60's and 70's for murder and incarceration, infiltrating and destroying leftist movements. They are not friends. An unarmed left is ripe for slaughter, as shown in Indonesia 1965 and many other examples around the world.

I think universal healthcare and some expansion of the social safety net are bare minimum reforms for the US to become a livable place for many people. In other countries, in the face of labor and other leftist movements, the ruling class saw such concessions as acceptable to stave off deeper social unrest and buy time for capital. Because the US left is so weak, such concessions are unlikely to happen soon. A strong grassroots left is essential. And they need to be organized and, where necessary, armed for self-defense. Right-wing militias may look stupid and incompetent but they can be put to deadly use in the right circumstances. In the matter of foreign policy, the phased withdrawal of US troops from their myriad placements abroad and deep cuts to "defense" spending are necessary, with well-planned provisions for the reintegration of demobilized soldiers to civilian life.

What led you to think that you had to give up art to pursue a deeper understanding of religion?

The problem of evil is an intractable problem that every religion and philosophy has had to address. I am confident though that we can settle it definitively in this thread Some explanations are more helpful than others but I have yet to see one that is airtight. The one I find most useful is the Platonic understanding of evil as having no substance of its own- it is just a privation or distortion of the good. All evil events and acts are ultimately misdirected attempts to reach the good, pulled astray by ignorance, weakness, etc.

From a Christian perspective, there is the work of prayer and ascesis to purify the heart- the actual organ being taken as the seat of the soul. I suppose one might try to say this is equivalent to the middle dan tian but that seems stretching things a bit. I think Taomeow is right to be suspicious of this kind of talk.

The mighty Ennio Morricone has left us