Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

guernicamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 423 posts

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#261

Post by vkou »

rayiner wrote: post #242
sg47 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have regressed by overturning abortion, enacting subversive election laws and in general destroying the fabric of democracy.

> overturning abortion More accurately, the US Supreme Court returned the situation in the US to the status quo in most advanced countries: regulating abortion as a legislative matter, not a “right.” It did what the EU Court of Human Rights has repeatedly done in declining to recognize a “right” to elective abortions,[1] that can override legislation. A putative right that, 100 years from now, may well be seen alongs…

I doubt that a century from now, eugenics and fundamental body autonomy will be spoken of in the same breath, despite the intervening efforts to conflate the two.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#262

Post by max51 »

nprateem wrote: post #152
emptysongglass wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coworker recently tell me I was culturally appropriating the Buddha (I'm a Buddhist) presumably because I am "from the West". Apart from being one of the most offensive things I've ever been told (before anyone jumps on me for this: I can still observe it as offensive regardless of my attachment to the offense) it confirmed for me that whatever is going on in the US with identity politics has jumped the shark…

I wouldn't get offended. They just don't understand what cultural appropriation is by the sound of things. Their problem, not yours.

>Their problem, not yours.

Until your get a call from HR, the twitter mobs decides to target you, or when that "woke" person gets promoted and starts dictating policies in the office.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#263

Post by vkou »

merlincorey wrote: post #259
markdown wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just liken abortion to eugenics?

The history is that it did start that way and one of the current discussion points is whether or not to allow people to abort children that are found to have genetic abnormalities such as pre-natal screening for Down Syndrome. Oxford Languages defines eugenics as "the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable." Of cours…

Abortion has a millennium-long history that precedes eugenics.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#264

Post by rayiner »

markdown wrote: post #252
rayiner wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overturning abortion More accurately, the US Supreme Court returned the situation in the US to the status quo in most advanced countries: regulating abortion as a legislative matter, not a “right.” It did what the EU Court of Human Rights has repeatedly done in declining to recognize a “right” to elective abortions,[1] that can override legislation. A putative right that, 100 years from now, may well be seen alongs…

Did you just liken abortion to eugenics?

Abortion legalization is an offshoot of the same early 20th century progressive anti-natalism as eugenics. Planned Parenthood was, of course, founded by a eugenicist. In most of the developing world, like my home country of Bangladesh, abortion is still justified primarily to avoid poor women having too many children.

There’s other justifications for it now, of course, but I’m not drawing a novel comparison here. In those hypotheticals of “what do we do that future generations will view as evil” eating meat and elective abortions are probably near the top of the list. (In both cases, I suspect technological and economic change will make us forget why we did it in the first place.)

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#265

Post by EdwardDiego »

pessimizer wrote: post #220
EdwardDiego wrote: post #42

I get a little tired of Western adoption of values or ideas from non-Western cultures being called "appropriation".

Far more people are tired of Westerners blacking up, dressing up in a parody of the people that they colonized and doing a little dance that seems like something a native would do, which is why it's a discussion now.

Right. But how does that apply to Buddhism? Haven't noticed much blackface at the local Buddhist Association.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#266

Post by rayiner »

sg47 wrote: post #256
rayiner wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overturning abortion More accurately, the US Supreme Court returned the situation in the US to the status quo in most advanced countries: regulating abortion as a legislative matter, not a “right.” It did what the EU Court of Human Rights has repeatedly done in declining to recognize a “right” to elective abortions,[1] that can override legislation. A putative right that, 100 years from now, may well be seen alongs…

Should US also offer free healthcare like most advanced countries? Why compare where it's convenient? I'm talking about progress.

Yes we should. We already took major steps in that direction with Obamacare. I hear it’s popular.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#267

Post by burrows »

honkdaddy wrote: post #128
goodpoint wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"majority" and "minority" are not about raw numbers but power dynamics in this context. "colonialism" refers to extracting whatever idea or artifact is seen as valuable from a culture or a land without consent and/or without respecting the moral rights of who invented or made it. Additionally, you can read the wikipedia page. (edited for clarity: different people use majority/minority differently depending on the con…

I’ve heard the power dynamics argument before and admittedly it’s never held much weight for me. There are just too many edge cases for a heuristic like that to make any sense, in my mind. So culturally powerless people may extract from culturally powerful people until what point? If a Ukrainian appropriates a part of Russian culture to be their own, who is the victim here? Recently, being Ukrainian has become a much…

> My personal rule is just not to disrespect people and parts of their culture they find important.

What even is named by the word “disrespect”?

Is disrespecting me just any behavior that I call “disrespectful”?

Seems like bullshit to me.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#268

Post by haswell »

corrral wrote: post #232
odiroot wrote: post #49

I always find it weird how western "promoters" of Buddhism are so gung-ho on the meditation part, pretty much disregarding everything else. Having met quite a few Buddhists (also my partner) who were raised by Buddhist parents, I'm yet to find a single one who meditates at all. That's not even that big of a part of "mindfulness". After reading a monk's book (Essential Chan Buddhism by Guo Jun), I have a feeling it's…

Is there any kind of documentation of how modern religions are experienced by normal practitioners? A book [edit: or, more realistically, a book series] would be great, but some kind of film documentary series seems to me like an even better fit. I've gone looking for that sort of thing in the past and come up empty-handed. I'm thinking interviews and a combo of descriptions or footage of any religious practices or s…

Sam Harris explores a bit of this.

The thing that fascinated me was his exploration of the realness of experience among practitioners and where that experience seems to comes from.

As a child of Christian fundamentalism who ran away as fast as I could, it was eye opening to start to see the basis on which many of these religions were founded, which religion manifesting as a symptom of something deeper within ourselves. Not a mystical or metaphysical deeper, but remnants of tens of thousands of years of evolution and humanity’s wrestling with consciousness and meaning.

As an atheist, I find it fascinating.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#269

Post by merlincorey »

vkou wrote: post #263
merlincorey wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history is that it did start that way and one of the current discussion points is whether or not to allow people to abort children that are found to have genetic abnormalities such as pre-natal screening for Down Syndrome. Oxford Languages defines eugenics as "the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable." Of cours…

Abortion has a millennium-long history that precedes eugenics.

"Recent history" if you would prefer.

They say Sparta practiced eugenics with late-term abortions according to legend though we don't have any physical evidence of this to my quick search. Wikipedia offers this quotation as a source[0]

Haeckel, Ernst (1876). "The History of Creation, vol. I". New York: D. Appleton. p. 170. "Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#270

Post by [deleted] »

vkou wrote: post #251
RicoElectrico wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet such a sketch would cause outrage these days. I remember the times when people whose pastime was to get offended at stuff were ridiculed by most of the society. For all our social progress in this millennium, we regressed in many ways people don't readily notice. This was mostly an American thing in the past; but it spilled into Europe over time.

> I remember the times when people whose pastime was to get offended at stuff were ridiculed by most of the society. Which specific time period are you speaking about? The time period when the existence of gay people (not even speaking about married gay people) was offensive to the point of intolerance? Or perhaps the time period when interracial marriages offended the majority of the United States? Or maybe the time…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN