SirPalomides

It looks like Turkey is moving some of its jihadist militias from Syria and Libya into Azerbaijan. This could get real ugly.

Is that the Arthur Golding translation? Quite lovely. Edit: Of course it's not Golding, no rhyming couplings, durr

A translation is now available online of the Neo-Confucian Xin Jing, a short anthology of texts on the subject of cultivating the heart: https://ruistassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Xin-Jing-The-Heart-Scripture.pdf

This seems like a gross overreaction to me, at least based on the what I see in that Mona Lisa thread. Also worth mentioning that welkin was issuing blanket attacks and condemnations to every member of the forum, and then some special venom for people who responded.

In the 17th century some of the Russian church authorities decided that the Russian church practices, and the service books, were too different from the contemporary Greek practice, so they launched a campaign to revise everything to match what the Greeks were doing at the time. That includes the three finger cross. This led to a huge revolt among Russian Christians who believed Russia was the “Third Rome”, the last bastion against heresy, and that even slight changes in ritual signified a spiritual change. Of course it turns out that it was the Greeks who had changed over time and the Russian church had preserved some ancient Byzantine usages. Anyway the schism is a fascinating topic with some very colorful figures.

Werner Herzog did a documentary about Siberian fur trappers, called Happy People. I'd say that the winters looked tough but what scared me more were the clouds of mosquitoes attacking these people and their dogs in the summer.

Of course everyone remembers the greatest Russian political scandal of the 00's, when Gorbachev's Siberian cat went into Medvedev's yard and beat up his Siberian cat Dorofei.

Surely you are aware that Modi has many critics in India not connected to Western media or any Western imperial project. "Trust me, I've been there," is a pretty useless argument with any country, especially one as huge and complex as India. Someone who visits Kerala is likely going to hear some very different opinions of the BJP than if they visited Varanasi.

Have to agree, here- it's hard to look at the deliberately induced famines and massacres in India as anything but a colonial genocide. So what the Brits are really good at is not looking at them at all, and making sure no one else looks at them either.

Modi would never have gotten where he is if he wasn't really, really good at schmoozing and making people who meet him think he's grand. He is, above all else, an extremely skilled and cunning, street-level politician.

Super edgy comment

Hindu chauvinism is just more evil residue of the colonial era, and the legacy of partition, much like how the previously non-sectarian Irish nationalism becoming identified with Catholics played into the British colonialists' hands. Most Arab nationalism, of the early to mid 20th century, was pluralistic/ secular. Looking for a way to keep the middle east divided and backwards, the British and later the Americans eventually settled on supporting the Wahhabi movement. It's a sordid tale of divide and conquer. By the same token they loathed people like Nasser, pan-Arab, secular nationalists.

If there were some kind of switch to turn him on and off that would be great.

Your inference seemed to me to be in bad faith. Also I find your frequent use of exclamation points highly distressing!!

Yet another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from an enlightened being, spurned by the ungrateful, cackling hyenas of TDB.

The trailer for the new Dune film is out today:

Yes, of course, the only reason anyone would post a photo of Clinton with her known associate and sometime surrogate Harvey Weinstein is because they're pizzagate conspiracy theorists. And not because, you know, he was her known associate. I mean, if you like, I could instead talk about other creeps she pals around with:

One very admirable thing about the Cthulhu Mythos, which maybe gets overlooked, is its collaborative character. Lovecraft welcomed and encouraged his various writer-friends (e.g. Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard) to freely borrow from his mythos, add to it, and reshape it. He returned the compliment by including their monsters in his stories (e.g. Smith's Tsatthogua.) So the Cthulhu Mythos is a collective mythos, an open game of creation. Nowadays much of what is questionably termed "popular culture" consists of material trademarked by a handful of massive corporations, jealously and tenaciously policed by "intellectual property" lawyers. Apart from that, there are also more or less rigid ideas of "canon" which ensure countless contibutions, however brilliant, can never rise above the lowly realms of "fanfic". There's no trademark on Cthulhu or Yog Sothoth. There is no canon. Take what you like, leave what you don't, do what you want with it. I think we really need that kind of openness today.

It has long, long been a trend of popularized "green" discourse that you and I, the little people, can solve environmental crises by our individual consumption choices. Recycle, ride a bike to work, buy dolphin-safe tuna, sponsor a patch of rainforest, etc. And while all that stuff can be good, if the vast majority of us did it, it wouldn't be nearly enough. As Taomeow says, this is a way to shift the burden onto the people who, individually or collectively, are the least responsible for the most destructive consequences of our civilization. If we do have real responsibility, it is social, not a matter of atomized individual ethics, but a collective responsibility to organize our society in a radically different way. My sympathies generally lie with the "social ecology" proposed by Murray Bookchin and friends- a decentralized, non-hierarchical, communal society. Ecological problems and social problems are seen as intertwined. Most recently these ideas have been popularized by the majority-Kurd Rojava administration in north Syria, where, simultaneous with defending their communities against ISIS and others, the people have sought to build a democratic, pluralist, feminist society. It's a noble experiment and worthy of study- emulation in some areas, criticism in others.

What exactly is meant by northern and southern here? If by northern you mean Quanzhen, then the idea that it is “pure” from Buddhist influence falls apart pretty quickly.

But at least we get to pick who is eating us. Not everyone has such a privilege.

Now if that little meteor contains a flesh-eating ball of jello, or a weird alien colour that makes everything weird, crazy, or dead, then we might be talking.

When the categories of daojia and daojiao were first applied they really didn't mean anything like what moderns mean by "philosophical" and "religious." And then when you really examine what "philosophical" and "religious" are supposed to mean, they don't make much sense or have much application in Zhou, Han, Tang, etc. intellectual circles. It doesn't really make sense in Western intellectual history either. Can you really say there is a clear distinction between "philosophical" Platonism and "religious" Platonism? I don't think you can. So what we are dealing with is more like a value judgment based on the European Enlightenment and its rationalism. So now we can sort currents of Daoism into the "philosophical" (rational, secular, no weird stuff) and the "religious" (superstition, ignorance, obscurantism). But even with this very narrow, arbitrary definition one would have to ignore or distort a lot of stuff in Laozi and Zhuangzi to fit it into this "philosophical" category. So to summarize, I don't think the "daojia" and "daojiao" distinctions have much meaning outside their original bibliographic use, and I don't think the "philosophical" and "religious" distinction has any use at all. Now if someone finds the ideas contained in the Laozi and Zhuangzi appealing and useful, while being less attracted to the very involved Daoist systems of ritual, alchemy, meditation, divination, etc that's perfectly legitimate. People have been picking aspects of Daoist tradition that appeal to them, while overlooking others, for ages. It's fine as long as you don't start pretending your preferred version of Daoism is somehow purer or more authentic than something else.

A spacecraft on fire On second glance I see what it actually is but I won't give it away