I wasn’t necessarily thinking the law would protect the person who did this, but pondering if the existence of that legal framework does not create the impression that this is acceptable, even though it isn’t and that’s not what the law is.

And also, i do understand this isn’t applied everywhere in the US, but to me I see the US as a country. As a foreigner it’s probably very unlikely I’m going to refer to it as the law from Connecticut or whatever. I just know this law exists in the US and to be fair I’m not really that interested in knowing specifically where and the nuances of state to state legislation.

But nevertheless i thank you for clarifying the difference between Stand your ground and Castle doctrine and reminding me that it’s not a national thing.

This is why stand your ground laws can’t realistically exist in places that aren’t sparsely populated. Because someone will read “defend your property and life with force if necessary” as “act as a raging lunatic and attempt to shoot anyone who comes at the door because it’s legal to do so if you claim you were defending your property, even though there was no indication of actual imminent danger to property or people”.

In my country we don’t have stand your ground laws. You can only defend yourself in case of an attack, but not drive away a thief. You’re supposed to run and call the police, but I keep wondering if a legal framework like the US where you weren’t legally punished for attacking a thief in your house wouldn’t be fairer but then there’s news like this.

It does when you’re watching. I have sys monitor widgets with rainmeter on my PC and whenever I’m watching something, it cpu is at least 5 or so degrees hotter and there’s 5 mb + network activity on the upload. You can check yourself on system monitor.

It might sound like a pretty obvious thing, but have you tried changing the tools into the “Tabbed ribbon” that office uses instead of the classic old 90s organization scheme in options ?

I have come to notice that when people who don’t really work with computers very well, in particular boomers, say that they can’t stand LibreOffice, they mean they don’t like the layout of the tools, because they can’t find anything they need. I suppose they just got used to where everything is with modern office.

Just change it and see if she will like it better. Usually solves it for the boomers i help. Nothing is holding LibreOffice back more than their default layout scheme. They really don’t know their target audience’s pain points AT ALL. Just goes to show why you need to study your users using the product without being explained anything.

I don’t get why their default is a layout that has been outdated for 24 years. Nostalgia or what? Only really old people who used computers in the 90s a lot will intuitively find it useful.

The survey fatigue is real. Everyone keeps begging for reviews nowadays. Even random things like public parking.

I grow resentment at any business begging for reviews. Hire a consultant and third party to auction your service, I’m not doing it for free anymore. Specially because they don’t even read the comments you write or reply. It’s just nonsense an intern will put into an end of quarter ppt for some average mediocre manager.

Honestly i always found it cruel to own a bird as a pet. Birds are meant to fly. All bird owners just either keep their birds in a cage or chained up all the time. They never get to fly their whole lives, or they’d fly away. Imagine being born with your upper limbs with the purpose of flying and never doing it because someone needs a pet bird.

I envy your ability to be able to focus so specifically on what you’re looking to hear, but yes. Not all men is part of the message. Not the whole message, but definitely a part of it.

I honestly don’t care about the opinion in the snippet. It’s not meaningful the amount of people not using reusable bags because it’s seen as gay. They exist, but they’re not statistically meaningful at all. It’s irrelevant.

Plus anyone who says new research has been published and makes a statement without publishing such research is not to be taken seriously. I found the study they were talking about, Gender Bending and Gender Conformity: The Social Consequences of Engaging in Feminine and Masculine Pro-Environmental Behaviors. Basically this conclusion was reached on a self assessment study, based on 150 people reading six short stories of “a day in the live of” and some online written questionnaire. I’ll leave you to it to determine how seriously you think this study demonstrates the aforementioned conclusion.

I’m talking specifically about the bigotry behind the meme. Trying to pigeonhole people with a false equivalency like that.

Let me fix that for you, the overwhelming majority of straight men in medieval/renaissance times in Europe (judging from the ethnicity of the painting and the blue fleur de lis pattern) were agricultural peasants, who dressed in mostly filthy tunics/coifs and if they were lucky, boots, and ate hard bread and vegetables, very rarely meat.

Some of them were a little better off and wore armor.

The 1% ultra wealthy dressed like in the picture. So I’m deducing what this picture calls straight actually means very wealthy. Some of the very wealthy were famously gay too so it doesn’t actually make sense.

It comes off as bigoted because the author seems like he really wanted to make a generalization against straight people, when actually, it’s a minority of people who have this attitude, certainly not representative of straight sexuality, or even men in general. i guess it isn’t bigotry when it’s against a non minority group, right op ?

Your own internalized bigotry missed the opportunity to make a good point about not using bigotry to prevent oneself from doing their part for climate change. This us vs them mentality is exactly the reason why climate change is a divisive issue and you’re contributing to that divisiveness.

The military industrial complex can’t profit from peace. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a gold mine.

Deleted.

We’re billions of people on the planet. Most jobs don’t even pay enough to feed a couple of people. I believe that there is an oversaturation of people on the planet and this has caused a devaluation of their labor.

Europe would have remained feudal for quite a longer time if the population collapse caused by the black plague hadn’t happened and caused the demographic changes that it did. Without the plague, peasant labor would be plentiful and the status quo would not have changed. However, with the population reduction, the class in power had to concede to enough changes that brought about the Reinassance and the Industrial era quickly after.

In the Bronze age, without the climate changes that brought about cold and dry conditions and triggered the fall of the city states ruled by an oppressive theocratic class, humans would have still been tied to those stifling conditions for longer and wouldn’t have brought about the classical era.

With the onset of AI and advanced robotics, population collapse will allow people to see their labor valued adequately, instead of just more and more people in the workforce working more hours and getting paid less and less, doing meaningless busy work jobs to pay for things that they don’t need or enjoy, like crypto, gambling or online cam girls. A controlled collapse by fertility is not only non threatening, it is also desirable and the most acceptable way to cull numbers a bit. We need this, otherwise, the base of the pyramid will only get wider while the top will only get slimmer. Tragedy breeds suffering, but also change and we NEED change. The problem is the transition, but after the transition, we’ll be in a better place as a society and we will bring about change.

Seems to me this is more like the equation that maximizes happiness for people who don’t have the mentioned things.

Plenty of people have food, money and sex, rightfully obtained from their perception, yet are still very unhappy, even suicidal. This is what you think you need. It’s not even necessarily what you need.

It is much older than the bible from an entirely different culture, which had little contact with Abrahamic religion cultures. Buddha’s words weren’t even written for hundreds of years, so by your own statement, you’re comparing the body of works that were written centuries after Buddha’s teachings with something that was just beginning to be written centuries later. Additionally, on the original comment you specifically referred to Jesus. As far as I’m aware, Jesus is only featured in the new testament, so you’re comparing two things that are a thousand years apart. I’m not saying one thing influenced other, but if it did, there’s only one way this could have gone down.

English is your native language, I’m not going to explain the meaning “missing the forest for the trees”. I don’t need to know your profession. You know why what i said wasn’t a strawman ? Because it wasn’t even about you. I did not specifically speak once about you in my statement. I explained why those people can be happy without the things i mentioned, in the context of western luxuries and poverty. You were not a part of it, i did not say it was you, i did not allude to a characterization of your person. You inserted yourself in it and then claimed strawman of your own volition. I’m sorry but that’s just not how rhetoric works.

So you ignore the entirety of the Bible and only bring up the new testament, even though Christianity itself endorses the Bible as canon law and doesn’t exist without it ? There are clear mentions of God’s law on how to rule a government throughout the entirety of the bible. Are we supposed to ignore that ? I guess that does track in regards to Christianity.

The crusades were called upon based on canon law that to enter the kindom of heaven, to kill enemies of Christ was seen as basically the golden ticket, which is why the Crusading armies did it. They didn’t do it for France, for Rome, for the Pope or Papal states. They did it in the name of Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. I’m not the one selectively ignoring things here, my dear non insurance, Honda driving gentleman (or lady, or other).

No people’s ever took up arms and said “I shall kill these people in the name of Siddhartha Gautama”. No monk ever called for action saying “If you wish to escape Samsara and attain Nirvana, pick up arms and kill these people in the name of Siddhartha Gautama.” Or “I know while killing these people, Siddhartha Gautama will be with me”. Going to war in the name of Buddhism would be complete nonsense, which is why nobody ever did it. I cannot make this any clearer than it is already.

Well then i have nothing else to explain to you. You asked for me to explain, so i did. You say everything is crap and clearly miss the forest for the trees. I never said asians don’t eat well, the point wasn’t about your specific car and job, Buddhism is older than the bible (like way, way, way older) and you still try to apply metrics to spiritual self development.

You’re either not ready to understand or I’m not the one with the ability to explain Buddhism to your specific person. Either way, I’m not forcing Buddhism on you, nor i have any intentions to convert you. My point is merely that governmental rule is not covered by Buddhist teachings. What Myanmar and Tibet do are not Buddhism because Buddhism has zero guidelines about governance of a country. Buddhism is about self development. Buddhism calls for the exact opposite of genocide and there is no inconsistency about this. That is all.

1. And 2. You once again misunderstood the fact that Buddhism is not a system of government. It is a religion that is more akin to a philosophy. It is impossible to follow the Buddhist religion and cause terrors, because Buddhism is centered around compassion and acceptance. Buddhism never set any guidelines to create a system of government, in fact, governments are in themselves anti thetical to what Buddhism is meant to accomplish. Buddhists were, since times immemorial, monks who lived out of charity. Buddha explains how ownership creates suffering, for everything you own, you have to obtain, then you have to defend. Buddha himself was a ruler who gave up ruling. So whatever Buddhist “kings” did was beyond Buddhism.

3 . Buddhism has no problem. Buddhism measures success in joy and lack of suffering. You measure success in material possessions. Those people living in poverty live happier than you living in abject luxury, for if they lose everything, they will still lose nothing. To me it seems pretty successful. To understand why they are happy, even though they don’t have a perfectly insulated and heated home, a Tesla car, they don’t eat Ribeye every week and make 100k a year while working on their corporate insurance job, is a journey that you yourself will have to take to understand. I can understand that being a western citizen and always measuring things in profits can make this journey quite confusing, but Buddha himself was the wealthiest man of his kingdom and his teachings show us that he was no more special than any of us.

Eastern religions, like Taoism and Buddhism, teach that in this life, taking more than what you need is pointless. When you die, you take nothing. It’s like buying a street legal car with the engine of a Ferrari. If everyone has the same amount to spend on a car, why spend it on an engine that is more than you need for the task ? Instead, followers of these religions spend their time not in obtaining more wealth that will be irrelevant once they die, but in developing themselves, mentally and spiritually, which is what they believe is what you take with you once you die.

You are correct. Buddhism is indeed more akin to a philosophy to find meaning in life and to act in a way that minimizes suffering to yourself and others through compassion.

Although there is a lot of mythology regarding reincarnation and energies, but the old nature of Buddhism makes it so not everything is clear crystal whether it was stated by Buddha or not. Moreover, like Hinduism, a lot of things explained by the Buddha were metaphors that explain processes that are hard to explain unless you have a clear understanding of science that didn’t exist back when Buddhism was founded, or were analogies to better explain them. Stuff like the cosmic wheel, energies, that sort of thing.

Additionally, many myths were created around the image of Buddha that were embellishments added at a later date, not just to the teachings, but to the man himself. You could say that if some Buddhist believes in something that it is part of Buddhism, but Buddhism is a personal journey that each person must take themselves and see. The Buddha always said that each one of us must take that journey and learn the things he learned himself. He is no prophet, nor god, but a man who understood part of the rules of the universe and that each person could too. This is why Buddhist teachings take the form of koans. Small, confusing tales meant to make you think deeply upon certain characteristics of the universe, to help you reach the same conclusions as he did by yourself. “If two hands make a clapping sound, what is the sound of one hand ?” This is one such koan, what does it teach you about life, society and the universe? It’s not quick and easy. You’re supposed to sit and think about it. Even if i tell you what i think it means, you’ll only understand my perspective on it based on my life experiences. Your lesson might take a different explanation than mine based on your own life, which is why koans have no universal solution. They’re meant to replicate thought patterns and realizations that are bespoke to each intelligent being. No one can spoonfeed you Buddhism. It requires agency, thought and doubt.

This is why the Dalai Lama said that if science proves Buddhism wrong, Buddhism adopts the scientific explanations. Buddha was a man that came across some fundamental insights into being happy. Sooner or later these insights will be discovered and proven by science, much like the benefits of meditation were, and will be explained in scientific terms. Meditation helps you focus and being at peace because it reduces the activity in the Default Mode Network of the brain. Buddha could not explain the default mode network. He probably didn’t know what those words even meant. But he knew that “Meditation brings wisdom. Lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well that leads you forward and what holds you back.”

I can understand the weariness of some people about religion. I can understand the distrust about Buddhism. Yet i can appreciate that everyone has their own internal journey and doubting Buddhism is an integral part of it. I too began by thinking Buddhism made no sense, until it did. Because of this exact reason, there are no heretics in Buddhism.

I don’t understand how this pertains to Buddhism. Myanmar, a brutal authoritarian country ruled by a military autocratic junta is committing atrocities against its population, both Buddhist and Muslim.

Unlike Abrahamic religions, there is not a single part of Buddha’s teachings nor a single school of Buddhism that would condone this. Myanmar happens to be a Buddhist country, whose government acts this way. The bible, the q’ran and the tora all incite violence on some sort of people, be it gays, polytheists, infidels, apostates, you name it, but not a single word in Buddhism ever speaks in favor of violence.

Seems like a stretch to peg this on Buddhism. If Myanmar was not Buddhist, they would act the exact same way. This is more a Myanmar thing, rather than a Buddhist thing. This is like ascribing Nazi crimes to Christianity because Germans happened to be Christians during Nazi rule. The crimes derive from governmental nationalism operation, not from religious teachings. The bible god may have said that gays deserve to die, but did not say Jews deserve to be killed. Crusades and the inquisition are Christian crimes, Nazism is an ideology crime, same as Myanmar nationalism.

If you knew anything about Buddhism, you would know that violence goes against everything Buddhists believe. There is no justified violence in Buddhism. There is no right justification to be violent in Buddhism. Being violent is proof you do not understand Buddhism in any way. I challenge anyone to bring me proof of any teachings of Buddha that condones what is happening in Myanmar. Literally any verse, any koan, any quote, anything at all. Anything that shows that Buddhism encouraged Myanmar to act this way. If someone who calls themselves Buddhist goes around murdering people, even though in all history of Buddhism, never once violence was called for in any teachings, can you honestly say it is Buddhism that is flawed here ? Can you be intellectually honest and still say Buddhism incited Myanmar to commit genocide ?