Goff has been mentioned at least once before here, but I don't recall if I have read much about him before. I have found his views on Wikipedia. A defender of some form of panpsychism, I see.
Well, I do like the way he is trying to find a path forward between religion and scientific materialism.
I was just thinking how I hadn't had a new, interesting thought about Buddhism for a few weeks, Googled the topic, and turned up this good essay at Aeon:
It deals with my long standing concern about Buddhist approaches: while teaching a fairly simple or straight forward moral behaviour code on one level, on another, an emphasis on the source of suffering being desire (and teaching the importance of meditating that away) can surely lead to a kind of passive acceptance of other people's bad behaviour (as well as "natural evil", such as illness), even if it impacts you directly and an non-passive approach may be what is really required. In the essay writer's case, this related to sexual abuse, and she talks about "compassion" teaching in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism and the way it can led to a passive response to wrongdoing.
Here are some extracts:
So perilous is the habit of self-cherishing that Mahāyāna teachers devised radical methods for extricating oneself from it. These moral-psychological therapies require that the practitioner take up dramatically counterintuitive attitudes in order to reveal and unravel the depth of their self-cherishing. Among the most celebrated of these teachers is the 8th-century Indian scholar Śāntideva, whose text the Bodhicaryāvatāra is widely admired and studied as the guide to Mahāyāna ethics. There, among his philosophical expositions of the way of life of the bodhisattva, Śāntideva encourages his reader to reflect upon the fundamental equality of all beings and the indefensibility of pursuing one’s own self-interest on the basis of a dubiously reified ‘I’. He also proposes that one can counteract one’s tendency toward selfishness by taking a pointedly critical perspective toward one’s own shortcomings, including negative emotions such as anger. Rather than directing our anger at the people we believe have done us wrong, Śāntideva advises that we should depersonalise the problems that befall us and chalk them up to the inevitable vicissitudes of a complex and interdependent world. In other words: ‘Them’s the breaks.’
This is a practice that strikes right at the logic that inspires self-cherishing. The thinking goes: if I weren’t so heavily invested in my own selfhood as something intrinsically real, with discrete interests to defend, then I would not experience others’ slights with such a personal charge. This is not to say that I wouldn’t experience them at all – that they wouldn’t be happening or that I wouldn’t notice them – but rather that I would be able to let those misbehaviours slide off me, simply regarding them as the product of innumerable, impersonal causes and conditions rather than targeted attacks on me and my ability to have things always go my way. When someone does this, Śāntideva argues, they become invincible to suffering not by changing others’ behaviour but by cultivating the mental fortitude to withstand life’s provocations with forbearance. Śāntideva suggests a contemplative practice for inculcating this radically diminished sense of self known as ‘exchanging self and other’, in which the practitioner imaginatively ‘exchanges’ their own happiness for others’ suffering. Being willing to give up happiness and take on pain enacts the kind of unbiased, boundless altruism that is the hallmark of the bodhisattva....
Experimenting with reversing habitual responses like defensiveness or selfishness is profound. Relaxing our territoriality and letting go of our need to always be ‘right’ (or at least our need to make sure others know when they are wrong) can have a salutary effect on how we engage with others. But there are also profound problems with this approach.
And the downside:
Some time ago, a friend who works with survivors of sexual violence put a challenging but tactful question to me: what about her clients, whose trauma so often shows itself through self-blame? The majority of sexual assaults occur between people who know each other, often through methods of coercion that falsely lead victims to conclude that they ‘let it happen’ or are in some other respect to blame for the abuse. In cases like these, it is incredibly important to be able to say (and be heard in saying): ‘They were in the wrong. This was not my fault.’
A similar pattern holds, I suspect, for many people who have experienced abuse and certain forms of oppression. The fact is that there is a lot of explicit and implicit social encouragement not to be hard on others, to be accommodating, to get over it – in other words, to internalise the costs of the harm that has been done to them rather than force the awkwardness of asserting a boundary. In cases like these, ‘banishing all blames into the single source’ becomes the emotional labour of ‘taking one for the team’.
Essentially, what my kind critic was telling me was that this ideal of viewing all of our problems and struggles as stemming from self-cherishing was actually a great way for victims of abuse never to be able to heal. Sometimes expressing and holding a boundary – a boundary between self and other, between one’s own needs and theirs, between the workable give and take of harmonious social discourse and occasions that require a hard ‘no’ – can be necessary and even therapeutic. Especially for someone who is already well practised in the habit of taking on the burden of other people’s wrongdoing, the instruction to ‘banish all blames to the single source’ may come all too naturally, re-inscribing their existing trauma rather than helping them heal and grow through it.
All pretty interesting, if you ask me.
The article also links to this other Aeon essay, which I think I noticed before, but never got around to reading: The Problem of Mindfulness. Must read it later.
The news:
Disney’s venture into an immersive, very expensive Star Wars experience is ending.
The company said that its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida, which costs nearly $5,000 per couple for a two-night stay, will take its final voyage on Sept. 28.
It is hard to credit that Disney executives could not work out that most people into role playing games (which essentially was the whole point of staying at this hotel - or at least, the only basis on which the cost could be justified) are not rich. More like college age dudes who haven't started making money yet.
Whenever I see her looking like this:
Exce that Homer may be dumb, but he's not nasty. And he is still married.
The short parody videos of the distinctive looking comedian Alasdair Beckett-King are nearly always good, and I'll show this one as an example. (One joke in the middle of it struck me as very funny).
It's why MAGA types are just not worth engaging with - there is not a sensible brain cell left in their heads.
Update: the fine print, as discussed in the Washington Post story on the Durham report:
When the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued his findings in 2019, Durham took the unusual step of publicly disagreeing with him on a key point — disputing Horowitz’s finding that the decision to open the investigation into Trump’s campaign was justified.
“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,” Durham said at the time.
Yet on Monday, he appeared to back away from that criticism, writing “there is no question that the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” allegations brought to the agency by an Australian diplomat who told them of alarming statements made over drinks by a low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.
Durham’s report suggests he thinks the FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation, rather than a full investigation, based on the Australian’s tip. The report highlights a conversation between two FBI officials at the time who appeared to bemoan the weakness of the new case.
“Damn that’s thin,” wrote one FBI official in early August 2016. “I know,” replied another, “it sucks.”
Durham’s final report comes against a backdrop of two failed prosecutions. Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a dossier of allegations about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — was acquitted in October of lying to the FBI about where he got his information. Durham personally argued much of the government’s case in that trial, in federal court in Alexandria.
Update: I quite liked this column by Paul Waldman about the Durham report. Here's a gift link.
I'm quickly reading some of the huffing and puffing on the Right wing commentary side*, which is full of outrage about how no one is being prosecuted for this, and once again, it's the following familiar story.
They build themselves a house of cards on certain issues by selecting the narrowest range of facts that are spun for partisan, self promotional reasons. (As with, of course, climate change, where they have always been welded to a mere handful of contrarian, ageing scientists and commentators, while ignoring the vast amount of work the mainstream has confirming the mainstream view.) When an issue is somewhat complicated and some discrepancy comes to light, they leap onto it to try to boost it into a narrative that reads "Ha! Your story is now destroyed!". In other words, they con themselves into not being able to see, or acknowledge, a "big picture". Then, when the facts continue to accumulate against them (increasing natural climate disasters, increasing record temperatures, Durham fails at prosecutions) their only reaction is to scream "I don't understand - the nation is about to fall because the people just can't see that I'm right."
Truly, they gaslight themselves via continual hyper-partisan hyperbole of self serving narrative into never being able to see (or admit to) a "big picture" truth, and therefore can't understand why their view isn't having the consequences they want.
* The New York Times has a piece with lots of links to the cites hyperventilating about it. As the writer says:
Mr. Trump had termed the Russia investigation “the crime of the century,” and with no one doing time for that crime, the Durham report could still prove to be Exhibit A in how the American right seems to be living in its own universe — and how Mr. Trump still dictates the parameters of that separate reality.
On his Truth Social website, Mr. Trump said the special prosecutor had concluded that “the FBI should never have launched the Trump-Russia Probe!” In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation.
My only quibble: it's not that the American right "seems to be living its own universe": they undoubtedly do. And they just can't understand when a majority won't join them there, leading them to believe they are being "persecuted".
%20_%20Twitter.png)
Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.
One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.
Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video.
“There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying.
Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”
The worst part (from a corporate response point of view) was this:
Various users have tweeted that they have seen the cat video, with some trying to get Musk’s attention on the issue — some dating back to early May. Clemens said she flagged the video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers. ...
Autocomplete suggestions in search bars are a common feature on many social media platforms, and they can often surface disturbing content. The terms for “dog” and “cat” autocompleted viral animal cruelty videos in Twitter’s search box Thursday, when NBC News contacted the company for comment. Twitter’s press account automatically responded with a poop emoji, the company’s standard response for the last month.
Can't wait for the apparent successor of Twitter (seems like it will be BlueSky?) to kick in fully.
I don't know why, but I have been remembering dreams more often lately, even though with the cooler weather I have been sleeping with less interruption than I usually have in summer.
The levitating/flying dream has made a welcome return. The only thing is, as I explained in two posts way back in 2006, my variation of the dream usually involves great interest in, and satisfaction at, being able to prove it is real (such as by being videoed while off the ground, or having a sufficient number of witnesses that I think that, surely, they must be believed.) My elation in the dream is not just with the pleasant sensation of being able to think my way into the air, but with the intellectual knowledge that this is revolutionary for science and humanity, and people will see it is real.
Of course, that then makes for a somewhat disappointing sensation on waking up into the more mundane world.
Anyhow, on the whole "why do we dream we can fly" issue, I see now that there was an article about that appeared in 2016 in Slate (and Atlas Obscura), and I'm pretty sure I had missed until now.
It would seem that the dream is virtually universal (although I am still pretty sure there are people who claim never to have had it), and an interest in what it means, or what causes it, has been around a long time. Some extracts:
Psychologist Dr. Rainer Schönhammer has compiled scientific flying-dream explanations going back to the early 19th century. Many of the earliest guesses were physiological—1860s German psychologist Karl Scherner thought that the rising and falling of the chest inspired dream flight, while his peer J.E. Purkinje believed that the relaxation inherent in sleep makes dreamers feel like they’re floating. The more Freudian Paul Federn pinned it on nighttime erections, which, author Diedre Barret explains, he “viewed as an overcoming of gravity,” but this theory has since been discounted. More recent theories have focused instead on the brain stem and the inner ear, which controls balance.
Although he doesn’t knock the potential physiological causes of dream-flying, Dr. Michael Schredl, a psychologist with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, is more interested in what such dreams and such distinctions might say about the dreamer. “Flying dreams are a fascinating topic,” Schredl writes in an email. In a series of studies, Schredl has sought to connect the prevalence of flying dreams with particular personality traits or life choices. By compiling dream data gathered since 1956 and performing both broad and deep surveys of his own, he has come to a few zooming conclusions.
First of all—anecdotally at least—”persons with waking-life flying experiences dream more often about flying,” Schredl writes. Hang gliding instructors, for instance, often practice their professions in dreams, only without their equipment. And the fact that the frequency of flying dreams has picked up since the 1950s suggests that more real-life airplane trips equals more somni-flight. This would be consistent with the “continuity hypothesis” of dreams, a somewhat controversial theory that posits that our dream experiences are just weird remixes of our waking ones.
To dig deeper into these hypotheses, Schredl analyzed the 6,000-entry dreambank of one particular anonymous subject, who has kept a diary since 1984. Schredl found that although this subject had more airplane dreams after his first ever real-life transatlantic flight, more creative flying dreams weren’t affected. The subject sometimes flew with the help of a house, a magical juggling ball, or a unicycle, and he did so in order to illicitly cross borders and to impress a girl (“and he succeeded!,” the study makes sure to point out).
Airplane journeys, Schredl writes, may be less important than general happiness. A broader Schredl-helmed study shows that overall, people with more “positive emotional states” while awake tend to get to fly in their sleep, too.
It has just occurred to me while writing this post: did flying dreams have much to do with belief in witchcraft, such that it would have been dangerous in those days for a woman to admit to having a flying dream?
Googling that topic has led me to a 2009 article in Folklore on this very topic: The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible. Those with knowledge of a certain site* might be interested to use this citation to read it: https://doi.org/10.1080/00155870802647833
It turns out that the Spanish Inquisition (as well as other European inquisitors) was (and were) very interested in the question of whether witches really could fly. Seems that for the most part, they were were actually pretty skeptical that there was a physical reality to it.
Interesting!
* Sci-Hub
* My goodness, Diane Feinstein looked as if she's on death's door when she turned up in Washington. She did turn up to her committee, though.
* Amongst the most convoluted commentaries on the Trump CNN "townhall" (that oddly featured a 100% pro Trump audience - not a common feature of the "townhall" format, I thought) is that by Ben Shapiro on Twitter, which starts by saying CNN did Trump a massive favour (true), but then ends on this contorted conspiracy note:
Collins asked zero of the questions Republicans cared about and all the ones Democrats cared about. So, in other words, this was billed as a GOP primary night, and it was just Kaitlin Collins asking questions Democrats have about Trump. Republican voters sensed this. So when Trump took out the kitchen sink and began hammering Collins into the wall with it, they cheered. Republicans will -- ALWAYS AND CORRECTLY -- cheer biased moderators being steamrolled by Republican candidates, no matter what those candidates actually say. Trump wins more favor with Republican voters; Democrats remain offput; independents continue to wonder why we're relitigating 2020. Ridiculous failure by CNN on all fronts -- unless, of course, their goal is to renominate Trump for the ratings and because they think he's most beatable (NOTE: this, by the way, is precisely their goal).
Mind you, a lot of people have said that the event did help him from a Primary point of view, but hurt him in terms of motivating Democrats and Independents (and the rare sensible Republican) to make sure he loses at the actual election. For example:
* Google's Bard does sound as if it will be a significant improvement to Chat GTP:
In a bid to tackle the issue of AI hallucinations – whereby the AI creates a sourced text or information that it claims to be true – Bard will include an annotation on the information sourced elsewhere and provide a link to it.* I'm curious still about what other physicists think of this argument by Sabine:
It's not like I think I am an instant expert on modern land wars in Eastern Europe, or Western Asia?, as so many at the MAGA nutjobs seem to think they are: but it's hard not to conclude as a result of recent news stories that things are not going well for Putin at the moment.
I am therefore somewhat curious as to the amount of copium the conservatives with a culture war hard on for Putin (at the later day Catallaxy blogs, for example) might be huffing at the moment.
Of course, things could turn again, I presume.
Just noticed this on Twitter:
Sure, sure: nothing to see there.
A pretty good point made by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times. I'll gift the piece, and take some key points from it:
Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.
“When it came to guns,” writes Jeffrey Toobin in “Homegrown,” his compelling new book about the Oklahoma City attack, “McVeigh did more than simply advocate for his own right to own and use firearms; he joined an ascendant political crusade, which grew more extreme over the course of his lifetime and beyond.”
Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution....
The reason that America endures a level of gun violence unique among developed countries, and that we can often do little about it, is so many politicians have views on guns that aren’t far afield from McVeigh’s. As Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, has pointed out, it’s become common to hear Republicans echo McVeigh’s insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment, which holds that Americans must be allowed to amass personal arsenals in case they need to overthrow the government. As the MAGA congresswoman Lauren Boebert once put it, the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants.”
The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead. In April, following a school shooting in Nashville, Republicans expelled two young Black Democratic legislators who’d led a gun control protest at the Tennessee Capitol. A few days later, the State Senate passed a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits.
True, the killings in Allen led a committee in the Texas House to pass a bill raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle to 21 from 18, but, as The Times reported, in the unlikely event it passes the full chamber “it would face almost certain rejection by the State Senate, where the hard-right lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, holds powerful control.” Today’s Republican Party can scarcely tolerate anything getting between an eager buyer and a deadly weapon.
It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed. “In the nearly 30 years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the country took an extraordinary journey — from nearly universal horror at the action of a right-wing extremist to wide embrace of a former president (also possibly a future president) who reflected the bomber’s values,” wrote Toobin.
As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.
Update: This is also the first time I had realised that Steyn was back at work, after nearly dying of a couple of heart attacks not so long ago.
I had missed that in February he quit his job at GB News, in a very petulant manner:
In his video today, Steyn claimed that GB News had sent him a new contract while he recovered from his illness. “I was all set to return to GB News,” said Steyn, “but the habitual liar who runs the joint decided that we needed a defibrillator in the studio for me to be able to go back.”
Steyn had more trouble than sourcing a defibrillator though. “He [Frangopoulos] has chosen to change the terms by which we do the show… There’s this new clause, ‘editorial responsibility’.”
The new clause would make Steyn personally liable for any Ofcom fines given out due to the show’s output. As Steyn ranted about the contract, he described Frangopoulos as a “homocidal maniac intent on bringing about a third fatal heart attack”.
This isn't the first time that he has fought with an employer. I get the distinct feeling he does not play well with others.
So Glenn Greenwald, the guy so devoted to attacking abuse of US governmental power that he makes excuses for both Putin and Trump's minions actually trying to overturn democracy (he's a complete crank, in other words), tells us on Twitter that his Brazilian husband has died at the "too early" age of 38. (And yeah, as far as I can tell, his late husband did genuinely work against Right wing forces in Brazil, which makes his partnership with "I'm appearing on Tucker Carlson again" Glenn all the more puzzling.)
But I just thought it a typical sign of the weirdo, topsy turvy world of Right wing politics now that, in the thread following, one of the first messages of condolence is from arch conservative weirdo Rod Dreher:
Before the current inquest and news reports about it, I had never heard of the New Age-y Kambo ceremony, in which people were deliberately made sick by Amazonian frog toxin applied to the skin, and/or drinking ayahuasca.
Sounds an awful way to die, if it goes wrong:
Before his death at a festival where he consumed a psychedelic substance made from boiling plants and had secretions of a frog administered to his skin, Jarrad Antonovich was “gentle, kind, never aggressive, a talented musician”, an inquest has heard.
Antonovich died in October 2021, at the age of 46, while attending the Dreaming Arts festival, a six-day retreat at Arcoora near Kyogle in northern New South Wales.
An inquest into his death, being heard in Lismore, was told that at the festival he had consumed ayahuasca and participated in a “Kambo” ceremony, involving secretions harvested from an Amazonian tree frog. Ayahuasca is a psychedelic substance made from boiling plants that is used in ritualistic ceremonies in the Amazon basin.
Antonovich died from a perforated oesophagus from vomiting, the inquest heard. When paramedics arrived they found him unresponsive and blue in colour, while people continued a healing ceremony nearby.
The inquest heard that ayahuasca had been offered at the festival during sacred spirit music ceremonies run by self-described spiritual guide and healer Lore Solaris. The ceremonies ended at sunrise.
This bit is appalling:
Counsel assisting the crown, Dr Peggy Dwyer, told the court an ambulance was not called until 11.30pm and took an hour to arrive because of the remote location.
The inquest heard that one ambulance officer reported that a female told them to “move away from Jarrad because it was affecting his aura”. Another woman was massaging his feet. No one told them he had consumed Kambo.
The inquest had earlier looked into the death of a woman:
Over several days he heard three medical experts – a toxicologist, a cardiologist and a pathologist – discuss the nature of her death and the likelihood of its relationship to the secretions of an Amazonian frog, which had been applied to burns on her skin during a “Kambo” ceremony moments before she died.
He heard from the woman who applied that frog mucus, a self-described experienced Kambo practitioner. Another woman told the inquest about how she had only just trained Lechner to conduct ceremonies deemed safe by the International Association of Kambo Practitioners (IAKP).
Fortunately:
Kambo was legal in Australia at the time and – until it was banned in October 2021 – relatively easy to obtain.
I don't know - perhaps it's the graphic description given by an eyewitness - but the latest random mass shooting in Texas feels more upsetting than most. Or perhaps it's because it feels genuinely nauseating to hear Republicans - like the God awful Governor Abbott - recite their mantra that nothing can be done, and pretend that gun laws that restrict gun ownership don't reduce gun violence. Is this what it's like to be taken over by robot overlords that have no capacity for changing their programming? Honestly, when half of Florida is underwater in 100 years time, there will still be Republicans saying "but this happened a couple of million years ago, as part of a natural cycle. Don't tell me carbon dioxide has anything to do with it."
I just don't know how politics is meant to cope when people start being too unreasonable to reason with.
In other depressing American news, there's a weird poll described at the Washington Post which claims to find that more people say they would vote for Trump than Biden in the next match up:
When asked who they would support in 2024, 44 percent of voting-age adults say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump while 38 percent would definitely or probably vote for Biden. The remaining 18 percent are either undecided or gave another answer.
There are two things about it, though:
a. I'm pretty sure that such hypothetical polling ("if this is the case, then what you do?") is supposed to be notoriously unreliable; and
b. How does it make any sense that the same poll can show this?:
The poll finds a 56 percent majority of Americans saying he should face criminal charges in investigations of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Similarly, 54 percent support charges against Trump for his role in the events leading up to the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 and, separately, for his handling of classified documents after he left office.
I think Biden approval suffers whenever there is a period where he looks unable to achieve outcomes - currently, with the debt level negotiations, border control issues, and Ukraine looking kinda frozen in conflict. I get that people would prefer a younger politician to be running.
But that Trump still polls at the levels he does - again, it's like dealing with brainwashed robots.
Update: As I was saying, about the unusual degree to which this most recent shooting in Texas seems to be affecting more people as being more intensely tragic than other recent incidents:
There is definitely something "off" about the ABC/Wapo poll that puts total Biden approval at 36%.
%20Home%20_%20Twitter.png)
%20Home%20_%20Twitter.png)