sean

Yeah, Democrats are really bad at politics. I sometimes can't help but believe it's half deliberate. I think they'd rather see Trump reelected than even consider "socialism". Not a bad video. It seems to weirdly ignore important reasons Biden polls so well though, e.g., wheelbarrows full of corporate money and flagrantly preferential media air time. There's not much Sanders, or anyone, can do to compete with that. I do believe a Biden nomination will 100% hand us another four years of our wonderful rotting pumpkin brain. And it will probably be just as bewildering to all these focus group chart statistic nerds as it was in 2016. "But the numbers assured us the super creepy guy would win!!?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Really I'm just waiting for Sanders and Warren to assemble into a cool Voltron mecha or something and fight this thing together. 😆 Sean

Thanks! I've edited my OP, incorporating suggestions, including retaining separate Daoist and "general". Sean

No, my idea was that topics in any subforum not retained under new “Discussions On The Way” that are now part of current Daoist or General Discussion would get folded into main DOTW. Ahh does current search suck? I’ve been meaning to build a custom search engine for this site for ever. Sean

🤔 Call Me Maybe? Cash Money Millionaire? Christ de Maison en Maison? Cats Majestic Malaise? How many guesses do I get? 😜 Sean

The level of planet-destroying power the U.S. now wields adds orders of magnitude to the devastation possible. I think that's part of Chomsky's point there. Also I think the Republican party is the modern pinnacle of sophistication at laundering their agenda into less overtly broadcasted "grand schemes." So the widespread suffering and death that's a direct result of their policies is more insidious. 💯 Far worse than Trump! 😬 Sean

I agree, I think Trump is more like Erdogan. Good article I read recently by the way: "The Era of People Like You Is Over": How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals. It's the reflexive misapprehension that because two things present as an apparent duality, that the truth must, intuitively be somewhere in the middle. The fallacy is clear in an example like: A: Slavery is good, actually. B: No, slavery is bad. But it's less obvious when discussing political agendas where one "side", while perhaps correct twice a day like a broken clock happens to be, is actually quite ideologically rotten to the core. I think bothsidesism is particularly rampant in the U.S. where it's deliberately exacerbated by the media to maintain a spectacle for financial gain. I do find bothsidesism kind of funny-sad, but I agree this was poor form. I apologize. In fact, on reflection afterwards I realized — while this was not my conscious intention and I do use the same language with men, the phrase "pearl clutching" has a gendered connotation that might have added an inadvertent, additional layer of acidity. I'll try to do better. 🙇 Beautiful inquiry. Sean

Sure thing. Done. I should probably come up with some kind of "content warning" guideline at some point. Sean

Wow. What a flashback. Crazy old RON. Screaming at us in all caps. ** Pours out some beer ** Not trying to assume, I apologize. Honestly rene, I'm sincerely all for respectful dialogue, maybe to a fault in ordinary circumstances. But I've become a bit live and let die with right-wingers on the internet specifically. Happy to have a civil chat with pretty much anyone in real life. But my online visage has grown rather full of piss and vinegar toward what I see as an escalating pattern of organized, aggressive ignorance. Waxing into an old curmudgeon in these old Appalachian mountains perhaps. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ❤️ Sean

I get that there's indignation in this topic that's unpleasant and we have started to veer into some brimstone ranting. It's only been about a week though, and for some it's the first time they've been able to express themselves without being brigaded for years. I would just ask that those of us on the fence with where this is all going be patient with your "captain" 😂 There will be some turbulence as I figure out how to even navigate this ship anymore. 🙏❤️ Sean

I find the condescending pearl clutching of committed bothsidesism on the internet funny? Sean

Yeah. I was being cheeky with my Ahoy meme earlier in this thread. But I think what you're getting at here is closer to the truth and a more productive inquiry. Sean

I was ready to buy him around round? 👀 He's not wrong. And I think anger, while difficult to presence sometimes, is a pretty rational response to the current state of things. Refusing to douse or spiritually bypass natural "heart rage", might even lead us to explore how to funnel this energy coherently and compassionately into beneficial change. Sean

A few random thoughts. I think part of the difficulty in succinctly defining these political terms, e.g., capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. is that they are just really enormous concepts that intersect and interact with disparate philosophies, religions, economic theories, world histories, mythologies, etc. One crucial concept worth investigating though is definitely around ownership of the "means of production." I don't have time to nitpick that Atlantic article bit by bit. I will agree though, that, yes, Sander is completely not a socialist in the classic sense. Which is why he's a compromise to the right for a vast number of U.S. leftists, myself included. I'm also fine with how the term "socialism" has become rather imprecise, mostly because I see this vagueness helping create a "big tent" that gateway drugs libs who e.g., agree with universal healthcare into deeper socialist praxis. 👹 The U.S. left has been emaciated to the point of nonexistence for at least forty years. Another side note, my understanding is that the distinction between socialism and communism, e.g., that socialism is transitional toward full communism is Leninist, not Marxist, in origin. To Marx, and other revolutionary thinkers of his time, socialism and communism were roughly synonymous. I'm just mentioning this as an aside, it's not all that important to this discussion, and I'm not against a Marxist-Leninist analysis. How to transition from a society organized entirely in favor of a savagely wealthy and powerful 1%? Oof. Yeah. That's the money question. It's obscenely unlikely the 1% will ever give up this position peacefully. Demonstrably quite the contrary. Hence revolutionary politics. ✊ A core disagreement between anarchists and communists is how necessary the maintenance of a robust state is, post-revolution. Simplifying broadly, but communists find it naive to think we won't need at least a few generations of consolidated state authority to defend against class enemies — a kind of dictatorship but of, by, and for the actual working class. Anarchists are deeply skeptical of state power entirely. They believe that socialist participation in the state, regardless if done through democratic election or revolutionary seizure, etc., it all always and inherently transforms its victims into oppressors. 😳 Some heavy shit and hard to ignore this arguably prescient critique. I appreciate both perspectives. I think the dialectic between them is essential as we evolve our "leftist maps" into the present-day struggle; hence why I loosely identify as anarcho-communist. Rewilding, the anarchist current, is ... pretty wild. I've met some rewilders. At the AnPrim extreme I feel they have really bad, antisocial takes. But I'm a biased computer nerd that would be dead in the forest without my machined, coke-bottle glasses. 🤓 I fear it abandons important technological advances and doesn't really have practical ideas for how to compassionately take care of our current human population. Sean

By first do you mean, on initial roll out or before being available to actual citizens? I think part of the complexity of undocumented immigration in the U.S. is that, while right-wing populist rhetoric often postures against it to rally a working class base, the capitalist class massively profits from cheap labor that they can mistreat and fire with impunity. I think it's unfair to deny these people care while we transition to less byzantine pathways to citizenship, and stronger labor protections. Sean

I think you're ignoring the long, predictable, and cyclic history of capitalist economy failures (including the U.S.) and the often untold mass suffering and death in those histories. Capitalism is not some nice, fiscally conservative Dad coming in to balance the budget. It's predatory, structurally funnels money upward, dependent on cheap/slave labor, propped up by its own more insidious forms of authoritarianism and even fascism, and is itself inherently unstable. Sean

I think The Dao Bums is a pretty accurate title. 😆 We've always been rather ragtag hobos and don't take ourselves too seriously. I remember my (now departed 😢) teacher Liu Ming once telling me that — unlike e.g. Christian faith where, say, merely reading the Bible and believing in Jesus is often enough to self-identify as Christian, historically the only people who would have said "I'm a Daoist" would have been bona fide Daoist priests who studied exclusively under a lineaged teacher, full time for many years in the work-equivalent of earning at least one medical degree. So I suspect most of us are probably rather doomed to mishmash Daoism from a canonical perspective. Sean

Looks like Ohio shooter was a self-identified lefty on Twitter. I'm sure this will will immediately be spun into "bothsidesism". I also worry it's going directly into the canon of Trump admin's "Antifa bill". I do think there are crucial differences between these shootings though. The El Paso shooter published a manifesto with explicitly right-wing political ideology mirroring things said by Trump, Fox News, Breitbart, etc. There was also clear, far-right celebration of the attack e.g. on 8Chan and even Twitter. Conversely there's nothing in the left-leaning hodgepodge the Ohio shooter seemingly subscribe to that would have done anything other than condemn these attacks and certainly nothing to motivate them. There are also exactly zero leftists that find these attacks anything other than 100% wrong and disgusting. Sure, leftists will joke about punching Nazis, or, at the extreme even killing fascists to protect innocent lives. Maybe you find those things problematic, that's a legit conversation. But absolutely nowhere will you find "go on a shooting spree killing your sister, her boyfriend and other random, innocent people of color in public". This was not an ideologically leftist attack. If this were a leftist, say, shooting at ICE officers ripping children from their parents I think there would be a pertinent conversation about left-wing extremism. If this shooter were actively involved in actual leftist circles, I can see how we'd need to have a conversation around the failure of those spaces for not identifying a violent individual. Otherwise I think the bothsidesism in this case conflates motive and ideology. My two cents. Sean

Not to worry, this forum will always remain nonsectarian. Personally, I deeply enjoy teachings across religious traditions, including Christianity and Islam. 🥰 Sean

It's been less than one week. There's now a handful of topics not entirely dominated by far-right brigades. I disagree. Leftist maps desperately need to continue evolving. But I think right-wing political philosophy is generally fundamentally regressive and wrong, ideologically, and that the solution isn't a watered down compromise. I don't believe being bipartisan is somehow "more Daoist" or "more spiritual". I find it "New Agey" at best, and often a form of incredibly oblivious spiritual bypassing. This isn't a political 101 education forum. The solution I've chosen is to ask committed right-wingers to leave and ban when they're unwilling to halt their incessant antisocial rhetoric. The primary intention of this forum is not to "stop the right wing", convert them or "save" them. (Not to say that's not a noble cause. Though, in my experience, I think it's much better attempted offline.) But what passes for "radical left" by Trump supporters, thanks to decades of state media propaganda, is actually center-right messaging from neoliberal corporatists, e.g. Obama, Hillary. (Who, by the way, I do think talk down to Trump supporters without offering any actual leftist solutions.) So I don't believe the way forward is further compromising and watering down coherent leftist solutions to widespread inequality, human suffering and death. Ironically I've found that when talking to Trump supporters in person, policy positions universally considered waay too far-left resonate more strongly than shitty centrist talking points, e.g. end all exorbitant foreign wars, take care of our citizens (and vets!) by giving everyone free healthcare — including high quality mental healthcare, free college, 90-100% tax on personal income over "n" million, sovereign wealth funds, job guarantee, etc. "If it's not accessible to the poor, then it's neither revolutionary nor is it radical." Sean

Just a hunch. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sean

I've split the mass shooting discussion to: Sean

(Bolded for emphasis). Well said. I'm no Daoist general or anything, but FWIW I'm not relishing this. Quite the opposite. This is cumbersome labor and something I've avoided and tried to imagine alternatives to for years. Also, my felt sense is not that I'm banning human beings, or treating people with antisocial ideas as if they're discardable in real life. I'm halting the language of memetic bigotry from spreading uncontested in one online space. Sean

Oh cool! Wrong/Left: Kicking the most vulgar excesses of a fundamentally antisocial political philosophy off a single online discussion forum. Right: Some other approach. I'm glad we need not be concerned with resolving this meta-duality either. Thank you jianzhi Sengcan. 😜 Also: A literalist notion of the word "left". Sean

This perspective here, that a literal department of a government could ever be anything other than reliably political is pretty fascinating by way of its foreignness to me. We must have very different connotations of "political". 🤔 Sean

Hundreds of moons ago, in my late teens and early twenties, I tinkered with "ceremonial magick" a bit, mostly within the Golden Dawn tradition. "Folk magic" (although I don't think I was aware of this term) was always appealing but I could never find a good shaman and Wicca seemed dubious. Lately I've been feeling drawn back into the weirdness. 👹 I've been surprised and delighted at how texts on "folk magic" seem to have evolved since I last poked around in this space. Or maybe I was just looking in the wrong places. I recently read The Chaos Protocols, which is more chaos than folk but it was good and it also literally caught fire one evening from a stick of incense nearby. A hole burned through the center almost exactly to the page I was on. Spooky and surely a sign for an Aries Fire Dragon to proceed. 😆 Last week I finished A Deed Without a Name, a grounded overview of "Traditional Witchcraft" from a scholar and practicing witch. I enjoyed it enough that I ordered Standing and Not Falling by the same author. Beautiful. I'm also concurrently reading Ancestral Medicine, which is superb. My "witchy read next" list expands and shuffles, mostly with Traditional Witchcraft, Appalachian Folk Magic and Hoodoo titles floating to the top. Good shit. This current feels alive. Anyway, nothing more profound to say. It's been so long since I've shared anything personal here. I've actually grown bashful on my own forum. 😊 Sean