71 Comments

I will repeat what I said above about how Westerners think they know what Buddhism (or Islam) "really" are based on 19th century Western imperialist misreadings of cultures they wanted to assimilate and dominate.

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Any IDEOLOGY. Official atheism counts (as in Albania).

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Noam Chomsky and too many other leftists when it came to Cambodia or Bosnia. :(

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And Kouroush aka Cyrus let the Jews go back to Israel.

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Me too. My parents' church took in a large Karen refugee population from Myanmar, and we have all learned a lot about Aung San Suu Kyi in the process. I am simply sickened by her being co-opted like this, whether it's by her own choice or whether she is frightened of the military.

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There was a Jewish fellow who said 2000 years ago "by their fruits shall ye know them". My father in law is a backwards-assed Pentecostalist Young Earth Creationist, but his common decency overcame that and he accepted his daughter marrying a woman. Conversely, I've met quite a few atheist liberals who are plain assholes.

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Hmmm? No, that'd be the British Empire with the Balfour Declaration, 1917. It was all peace between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land before then (everyone hated the Ottomans).

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Babby kittehs!!! Thanks!

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I once volunteered with a community organization and worked with immigrant families. One was from Burma. I should've asked them what sorts of things they experienced there.

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I recommend retroactively giving it to Helen Keller, who spent her life fighting for social justice.

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It wasn't until I saw Spike Lee's Inside Man that I knew how to pronounce Enver Hoxha.

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Jesus christ. Another line that could've come straight from Donald Trump, from a NYT editorial I hadn't read before writing this:

There are credible allegations of soldiers looting, killing unarmed people and raping women. The government denies this. U Aung Win, the chairman of a Rakhine State investigation into the Oct. 9 attack, said soldiers would not rape Rohingya women because they “are very dirty.”

And the women who accused Trump of grabbing them weren't his type, either.

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(For those interested, it's HOE-jah)

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

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Trump is the id of the world's worst men made manifest.

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Buddhism is inherently non-egalitarian. It has that whole caste system for example. You don't have to be kind to the lower classes, because they must have done something bad in a previous life to deserve their fate. Sort of Calvinism on steroids. At least they got the whole attachment-to-material-things idea right.

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So much for Buddhist enlightenment. All religions are shit.

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