Best Of

Information on how to think in the current climate change:

Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.

I also don't feel comfortable with the notion of "should". People, and Buddhists, can do what they want with their lives.

Yes, a Buddhist can technically do whatever they want (and I know I often do), but the real question is whether those choices move us toward liberation and compassion, or deeper into suffering and entanglement.

Bearing in mind that guns were developed for the purpose of killing or maiming, their very existence sits uneasily alongside the Buddhist precept of avoiding harm.

Should a Buddhist own a gun?

I think the answer is clear: No.

But a Buddhist should not do many things, so if one owns a gun, it's not the end of the world.

@RobinH said:
I often hear that pornography is harmful or can be potentially harmful because it can shape the way you see healthy sexual relations in your own life. I think the algorythm does something similar to how we perceive healthy political relations and discussions.

I’d pick out two golden periods of political thought, one which led to the US constitution, which was a time of discourse in letters and papers between learned men, and the second the time after the Second World War, when the United Nations was formed.

There has been a long slide in learned discourse between then and now. Most people who hold forth on political opinions do not have a historical perspective, and have had their heads in the internet bubble chamber for the past ten years.

I saw an interview with the maker of the film Idiocracy not long ago, and he was saying the film was proving to be remarkably prophetic. It’s about an ordinary man who travels into the future, and discovers that most humans have become stupid, and that he is now hailed as a genius who is put forward to rule the country.

The algorythm is a crazy propaganda tool. It also seems so chaotic...

In the sense of, it does not care which rabbit hole you fall through. It just loosens up the selection and tricks you into more and more of these clever punchlines, highly articulated verbosity or just horror shock with intense facts.

I try to feed it good music.