Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]

The first thing to note is that Buddhism is a broad term that contains a lot of different belief systems. It is also plagued by poor translations of terms that don’t translate well into English, especially without looking meanings of the original terms.

Imo, your friend has distorted and misrepresented Buddhist teachings in order to justify not changing their behavior regarding meat-eating.

I’d challenge the use of the term “deserved” altogether, and I’d say “caused” might be a more accurate interpretation. Karma is not about an intelligent, all-powerful being passing judgement and smacking you down. It’s sometimes referred to as “the law of cause and effect.” It’s described as a function of the universe, the same way that physical laws makes objects fall to the ground when dropped. The exact way in which this works is up to interpretation. More secular-minded Buddhists might point to logical and observable consequences to explain it, while more spiritually-minded ones might argue that it’s more of an invisible, unexplainable force that carries over between lifetimes.

To use an example: a child that is fed a hamburger by their parents does not have knowledge of the animal’s suffering that was required to make it, nor do they have agency to control their diet or to prevent the animal from being harmed. But, an animal is still harmed through the process. The intent and agency of the actor are not important in the same way that it doesn’t matter if a ball on top of a slope is pushed or knocked over. It would only really matter if you’re dealing in terms of judgement.

It is not your responsibility to enforce karma on others. Karma isn’t a positive or negative force, and just because something happens that doesn’t make it good or fair or deserved. Rather, the idea is to navigate the world in such a way that you minimize undesirable consequences. Buddhist precepts are a list of guidelines that are intend to do just that, the precept about nonviolence being the first. The idea is: “Bad things seem to happen a lot when people go around killing living beings so it’s probably better to not do that, generally speaking.”

You are correct that your friend’s interpretation and worldview is a mess of contradictions that could just as easily be used to justify harm to humans, and that they’re blatantly violating the first precept. But I would argue that they’re not accurately representing Buddhist teachings, and their views shouldn’t be held as representative of the belief system, though admittedly, like I said there are a lot of different traditions and beliefs.

My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started “self-medicating” with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he’d see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn’t and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she’s in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he’d accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he’d accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.

My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he’d check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.

It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody’s house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn’t know if he’d live or die and didn’t care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he’s doing better now.

What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that’s when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother’s face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?

And it’s all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn’t even happening. People don’t even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can’t get care, they sure as shit don’t care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It’s absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.

I was raised Catholic and left it at a young age and spent a lot of time uprooting the brainworms so I don’t think there’s much left. However, whenever I can’t find something I really need and start getting stressed, I’ll still recite, “Dear St. Anthony, please come around, my X has been lost and cannot be found.” It’s a useful way to calm down and focus instead of freaking out and panicking.

Other than that, I still retain a lot of the theology I learned in high school, and I can still sometimes get a little opinionated about various things even though I have no dog in the fight.

Years ago I tried my hand gambling on politics on PredictIt, and I didn’t lose all that much, but there were a couple bets I lost that seemed like sure things. Mostly the lesson I learned is that talk is cheap and there’s no real consequences for people saying one thing and doing the other.

For example, in the 2016 election, there was a market on whether no-name Carly Fiona would qualify for the CNN debate, and by the rules they set she didn’t qualify, but there hadn’t been as many polls in the right timeframe as had been expected. Still, they released a statement days before the debate, saying “rules are rules,” so I took a bet at like 90% odds thinking it was completely safe - then they let her in at the last minute and I lost big. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I think I lost a fair bit on a market about Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un, which was a pretty chaotic market. The most chaotic market I ever saw, which I avoided and wanted no part of, was whether Bernie would win Iowa in 2020, and watching it closely in real time made it very obvious that some really shady stuff was going on. Probably the most I ever lost was Biden winning the 2020 primary, which is about when I got out of it.

I would not recommend gambling like that because if you have money on the line there’s an incentive to be glued to the news in a way that can be really unhealthy. Honestly the stress was worse than the money I lost. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, the fees will get you, also it’s generally more about predicting what the market will think so you can profit off the swings, and personally I think it’s kind of a distasteful way to engage in politics. At the same time, it can be a learning experience - it definitely got me in the habit of asking “And what consequences will this person face if they’re lying off their ass?” every time I see a headline about someone saying something, and of not paying as much attention to statements in general.

Tfw you’re hanging out in a cell getting ready to testify against a bunch of super-powerful people, in a prison that’s prevented every attempted suicide in decades, after having made repeated statements that you have absolutely no intention of killing yourself, and then suddenly both the guards leave to go take a nap, and at that exact time, you notice that the multiple cameras watching your cell all randomly glitch off at the same time, so at that moment you decide to kill yourself using a method that’s indistinguishable from being murdered

I thought that there was one guy named Michael J—son who used his fame as an NBA star to launch a career as pop singer, radically changing his appearance in the process. I don’t think I realized they were different people until high school.

That’s completely wrong lol. Nowhere is there an assumption that birthdays are randomized each time, you just don’t understand the math.

I’m sure it’s not the worst but I felt like the adaptation of Watership Down changed the tone/message compared to the book. Now granted the infamous violence is present in the book (though seeing it is more visceral than reading about it). But in the book there’s a nice story at the end where Hazel is injured (iirc) and is taken in by a little girl and her parents who take care of him while he recovers before releasing him back to the wild (which only adds to his legend, of course).

Removing this bit, the only positive interaction with a human, makes the message feel more like, “Humans are bastards and inherently anethma to the natural world, which is also a brutal war of all against all even down to the cutest softest creatures.” It just makes you feel bad, whereas the book might make you feel bad at times but it also offers an example of what you can do right. It’s kind of a pet peeve when a work with environmentalist themes falls into that line of “Humans are the problem and there’s nothing you can do but feel bad about it.”

Correct.

Oh so the definition of being white varies now? People are dermofluid or something? “I’m white skinned but I’m not white.”

The definition of being white, like all definitions, can indeed vary based on time and place, yes. Whether someone is white “enough” to be included in the category of “white people” is not an objective fact and will change from culture to culture, from time to time, and even from one individual perspective to the next.

Racial categories in Europe were more complex than they generally are today, especially in America. It’s difficult to maintain distinctions in race between different European nationalities when everyone’s immigrating to the same place and having kids together, so over time these subtle distinctions have dropped off somewhat in favor of the simpler categories of “white” and “non-white.” But some of these distinctions still remain, for instance, many people who identify as “white nationalists” or even “white supremacists” also hate Jews, including Jewish people with white skin. Hitler’s infamous 14 words declare that a future must be secured “for our white children,” yet clearly he did not consider white-skinned Jewish people to be included in that definition.

As absurd as it may be to say that someone can have white skin but not be considered white, it can happen. The reason it doesn’t make sense is because race is, to a large degree, something that is socially constructed and nonsensical.

While the comparison to Pooh originates from a meme in China, many of us would argue that the comparison in general has racist connotations especially when used in the West, and that that image is a perfect illustration of why we think that.

We’d also say that the Pooh story has been exaggerated pretty wildly, along with many redditor memes about China. Rumors can get out of control sometimes, especially when people get dismissed for fact-checking and accused of being bots or paid agents, and so on. Winnie the Pooh isn’t banned in China, as some might believe, and it’s pretty easy to verify that by looking at the website for Shanghai Disneyland or searching “Pooh” on any Chinese platform such as baidu.com or weibo.cn.

My reservation was specifically that the MeanwhileOnGrad comm has a charicature of Xi Jinping where his skin is colorized to be yellow. I think that turning an Asian person’s skin yellow as a charicature is racist, and I felt that allowing that on a comm reflected poorly on the instance. I don’t mind that people hold different views from us (as many on lemm.ee and lemmy.ml do), but we don’t tolerate racism or bigotry. Despite that, I did vote to federate, in part because it’s such a small comm.

Modlog says “inappropriate name.”

We don’t share selfies on Hexbear due to privacy and safety concerns.

Hope you like us!

that the Jews conducted a genocide of the slavs during the societ union

That sounds absolutely wild, I’ve never heard anything like that

No, although we are skeptical about certain claims of genocide. There’s a big difference between denying well-documented genocides like the Holocaust, vs being skeptical when a source starts making claims without evidence. Generally I like to think we do a decent job of investigating sources and considering multiple perspectives from around the world. You’re welcome to ask about any specific cases.

I’m gonna be upfront because you seem like someone who would respect that, so here are some of our positions that might get labelled that way:

• Many of the more egregious claims about Chinese Uighurs can be traced back to one guy, Adrian Zenz, who used some very questionable methodology to arrive at his claims. We’ll push back against any claims that rely only on his word, and some people call this genocide denial, but we don’t believe in taking dubious evidence as credible just to avoid being accused of that.

• During the war in Ukraine, Russia has transported war orphans to families in Russia, which some people have labelled as genocide because they’ll be raised culturally Russian instead of culturally Ukrainian. I don’t think the term is appropriate, because imo getting orphans to safety is the priority over preserving culture. Opinions about the war differ, and the whole situation is very fucked, but every war produces orphans and not every war is a genocide.

• We’re critical of Double Genocide Theory, the idea that Soviet actions in WWII constituted a genocide on the same level of the Holocaust, a theory which has been criticized by many Jewish historians as trivializing the Holocaust. That doesn’t mean Soviet actions are above criticism, but we don’t like when people equate them with the Nazis.

I think that covers the main things people criticize us for. Like I said you’re welcome to pick our brains and judge for yourself what you think of us. We don’t have any animosity against any ethnic group and racism is not tolerated.

By the way:

A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy’s banner, because it contains “fuck tankies”, arguing that tankies is a slur.

This is blatantly false. Our mod did not “demand” that they remove the banner, they asked politely, not expecting much to come of it, and absolutely nobody ever called “tankie” a slur. What actually happened is that after Moss posted this message to make fun of it, she used a word derived from “liberal” and “r----d,” and when someone criticized it she removed their comment, with modlog listing the reason as “imagine being this braindead.” When we pushed back on it, Ada scolded her about it but did not remove her as a mod. Since our mods and community had been making changes to better accommodate blahaj (they didn’t mention that we stayed out of their second thread once they actually requested that, or that the lemm.ee admin gave us permission to comment on their thread), we decided at that point that the effort wasn’t worth it.

Come to Hexbear! We love our trans and neurodivergent comrades, we’re super political all the time, and we have way thicker skin

Yeah, it is a general criticism that can apply to a lot of thought experiments. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the problem, it’s just that I also enjoy critiquing it.

I believe most people’s initial response to the original problem is to pull, but far fewer people will push the fat man, and this is framed as highlighting a contradiction in people’s beliefs. In reality, it shows that if you create an unrealistic scenario, it trips up people’s intuitions. One reason people’s intuitions tell them not to push the fat man is because their moral intuition is outweighed by their physical intuition. We all know that pushing a guy off a bridge won’t actually stop a trolley (and even if it would, we can’t know that), so if we start to consider doing something like that, our brains say, “No stop it idiot don’t do that.” But it’s not telling us anything about morality, it’s just telling us “that’s not how physics works, dummy.”

Our intuitions are grounded in a world where physical and scientific laws apply and where we can never have perfect knowledge of future events, and the further you break from that, the less useful they are. But if the idea with the trolley problem is to help us identify what (if any) consistent logical precepts we can apply that match our moral intuitions, then we need to have simple, straight-forward questions. The original trolley problem is a little contrived, but doesn’t break from reality nearly as hard as variations like the fat man. That means that the intuitive response to the original problem is more trustworthy and reliable, compared to whatever we feel about the more contrived ones.

Imo pulling the lever is the correct answer, and whenever I see a variation that tries to contradict that, I look for ways that that variation breaks from reality in ways that would trip up my intuition. So in this case my intuition tells me not to convict, in “contradiction” of saying I’d pull the lever, but that’s because my intuition hasn’t internalized all the assumptions about magical psychic foreknowledge and stuff. When I consider the problem with all those assumptions, then I say, “Oh well in that case it’s just like the trolley problem so pull,” and in some cases that answer might make me come across as a psycho, but that’s only because the hypothetical doesn’t allow me to consider the full effects, risks, and ramifications that the action would have in the real world.

So that’s my full solution to the problem. I studied physics in uni so sometimes I might be a bit too inclined to find a final objective answer to a problem that’s supposed to be open-ended lol

As usual with variations of the trolley problem, there’s a lot of hidden assumptions baked into the question to oversimplify a more complex question, which leads to weird results.

For example, I’m given perfect knowledge of a lot of future events. I know that the crowd will riot if I don’t convict, and I know that any attempt made by myself or anyone else to reason with them will fail. I also know that people won’t riot over convicting an innocent person. There are all sorts of social consequences that could result from my decision, people gaining or losing faith in the system, an effect on my own career and ability to make future decisons, setting a precedent of expanding state power, the possibility that closing the case would let the actual perpetrator run free and cause more problems, etc.

If you ask me to make all the assumptions necessary to frame in the same way as the original trolley problem, then my answer has to be the same (lose one to save five), but those assumptions cause the hypothetical to be utterly divorced from reality. The real answer is not to convict because you’re not a psychic.

If you are too attached to abstract ideas of “Good,” to the point of standing on principle even if it means defeat, then you may get defeated and replaced by someone worse, and things may be much worse for everyone if you did whatever was necessary to win.

However, if you are too attached to the evil approach, then you may become too caught up in self-indulgent antihero fantasies and lose sight of what actually works. For example, no actionable information was acquired through the use of torture during the War on Terror. Movies and TV shows almost always depict it working because that self-indulgent antihero fantasy sells, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Violating international law could also (depending on the rest of the factions in this hypothetical) cause diplomatic repercussions such as sanctions or even another faction joining the war on the other side. Evil doesn’t always get away unpunished.

Every faction, (as well as every person), has a variety of different approaches that they could apply, and what determines which of these approaches work and don’t work is the system in which they exist and their position in it. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.”