wv wrote:

So, i was, masked, in the big-box-grocery-store, pushing my clanky cart, looking for my corporate-food. Clanking along in the corporate-soup-aisle, searching for progresso-lentil-soup.
(I add corporate-black-bean-spicy-hummus, and corporate-hot-sauce to it)

Turning the corner, I see a Vision. Plain-as-day, in a blinding-bright, blue-and-yellow jersey. A tall young man, wearing a big jersey — no.99.

Astonishment. Breathtaking.

It was like….that moment in ‘The Natural’ when Robert Redford looks into the stands and sees the shining-light-woman. Except this was in the corporate-box-store, in the corporate-soup-aisle.

I mean, this never happens in Motown, WV. This…never….happens. A human in a fucking Rams Jersey.

So, i practically levitated. I cried out, “Aaron Donald! He’s my man! Yes!”
(I dont even know what that means. It just erupted out of me.)

And this ram-vision smiled at me (like Jesus) and said, “Yeah, man.”

So much more to say, of course — I closed this distance toward him — and then I saw. The mother-fucker had no mask. NO mask.

So, i turned and wheeled away.

A pandemic ram-vision. What to make of it all. I dont know.

w
v

;>)

You got too close to Glenn Close.

As your neighbor to the east, I’ve run into the maskless all too often. For a bit there, I often made the mistake of getting mad and telling them to put on their freakin masks, and why. Luckily, no fisticuffs ensued. But after my many recent eye surgeries, and reading so many stories of these things escalating into shootings (and murder), I thought it best to try a different approach. Speed up my hunter-gathering efforts in said stores and exit quickly stage left.

But it still pisses me off. All the science (and common sense) tells us that if America had bought into wearing masks, the official count of deaths (165K or so) would have been a tiny fraction of what it is today. It would have been more in line with South Korea’s (300?), if not New Zealand’s (22).

Which kinda sorta forms a bridge to your comments and quotes in the other thread. As Sartre said, Hell is other people.

wv wrote:

Havent heard from him in too long a time.

And Fast Eddy, where’s Fast Eddy?

w
v

Fast Eddy? I remember him. And Team Builder too. And Ramble On. Give or take a year or two, I think I started posting on Rams boards (that made their way to the Original Herd, one way or another) back in 1995.

And it all ended cuz I spoke out about the blatant conservative bias of the mods, especially when it came to the subject of Kaepernick’s kneeling.

Wonder if things have changed there recently, now that a majority of America supports what he did.

Which leads me to this riff/sidebar:

I often think about the conservative record overall on issues, going back decades. Objectively speaking, it’s always been horrendously, dangerously, historically wrong. In no particular order: on economics, inequality, the environment, science, evolution, civil rights, voting rights, workers’ rights, education, guns, health care . . . and now, the pandemic.

Given that record, why does the media insist on grading “the right” on a curve, year after year after year? Why does it — and I’m talking about the MSM — go out of its way to try to be “balanced” when “the right” has so clearly aligned itself with the flat-earth side on every issue?

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Written by the author of The Evolution of God, which I also loved, it’s basically a very intelligent pitch for a kind of secular Buddhism, with mindfulness meditation at its heart. Wright is an evolutionary psychologist, and gets scienzy (at times) in the service of the Buddhist Way, showing how it fits with natural selection, and can offset the “environmental mismatches” our evolution has created. Where it becomes relevant to the above discussion is via psychological studies regarding how easily we humans are led, misled, our opinions (re)shaped, altered, via (at times) very simple suggestions. And that’s all of us. We all are subject to this, to conditioned responses, etc.

(Wright asserts that strong meditation practices can help us break free of that conditioning to one degree or another).

Capitalist marketing weaponized/weaponizes all of the above to a degree we’ve never seen before, and the right does capitalist marketing far, far better than the left. It’s not even close.

But we’re all “naturally” susceptible to this, for these illusions and delusions, cuz they once helped us stay alive/spread our genes into the next generation. Passing on our genes is our Prime Directive, as biological units. Wright contends that the secular Buddhist Way can help us get beyond that Prime Directive, rebel against it if need be, and it often is needed, given those increasing environmental mismatches.

=================

Well i basically agree with all that.

Cept i would qualify it with somethin along the lines of…I suspect that once Corporate-Capitalism has damaged a human brain so utterly that it has, say, turned them into a Neo-Nazi, or NeoCon or whatever– I am not sure any form of ‘meditation’ could save them. Ya know. Too much capitalist-damage at that point. They might just meditate and become even more focused assholes.

I just dont believe everyone can always come back to the light. Take, Zooey for example…

w
v

That makes sense. But Wright doesn’t really get into the politics stuff, per se, beyond talking about our increasing tribalism and how this is gonna get us all killed, one way or another, if we don’t wake up. Climate change, wars, etc. But it’s not his main angle in the book, and, unless I already forgot the section, which is more than possible, he doesn’t talk about meditation “saving” the already lost. I’m pretty sure his take is preventative, rather than post-darkside coversion.

I think you’d like it, WV. And he’s really pretty humble about the whole thing. I think his meditation sessions and retreats must have had that effect. A really different “tone” to the book than The Evolution of God.

. . .

Haven’t looked at any of the videos here, but he mentioned this site in the book:

https://bloggingheads.tv/programs/current/wrightshow

Just remembered this study from the book:

Wine experts were given different wines to taste and rate, or so they thought. They had different price tags. Ninety dollar bottles and ten dollar bottles. Guess which ones they thought were better.

It was the same exact wine.

If people can be manipulated by something that simple, of course they can be manipulated into believing conspiracy theories, especially by demagogues who know how to push all the right buttons.

wv wrote:

I dunno. But i think about the ‘why’ of ‘it’ ALL the fucking time. I dont see a lot of good articles on the ‘why’. The articles are usually mainstream neoliberal smear-job articles. They always end up saying “whats wrong with these crazy people” instead of “whats wrong with the system that lied to people so much and for so long, that the people went crazy.”

w
v

I just finished reading an excellent book which may not seem relevant to this topic, but it is:

Written by the author of The Evolution of God, which I also loved, it’s basically a very intelligent pitch for a kind of secular Buddhism, with mindfulness meditation at its heart. Wright is an evolutionary psychologist, and gets scienzy (at times) in the service of the Buddhist Way, showing how it fits with natural selection, and can offset the “environmental mismatches” our evolution has created. Where it becomes relevant to the above discussion is via psychological studies regarding how easily we humans are led, misled, our opinions (re)shaped, altered, via (at times) very simple suggestions. And that’s all of us. We all are subject to this, to conditioned responses, etc.

(Wright asserts that strong meditation practices can help us break free of that conditioning to one degree or another).

Capitalist marketing weaponized/weaponizes all of the above to a degree we’ve never seen before, and the right does capitalist marketing far, far better than the left. It’s not even close.

But we’re all “naturally” susceptible to this, for these illusions and delusions, cuz they once helped us stay alive/spread our genes into the next generation. Passing on our genes is our Prime Directive, as biological units. Wright contends that the secular Buddhist Way can help us get beyond that Prime Directive, rebel against it if need be, and it often is needed, given those increasing environmental mismatches.

Exit polls in 2016 all but confirmed the polling prior to those polls. I wish the media would stop saying that the polling was all wrong four years ago. It wasn’t. It was basically just fine. It fairly accurately predicted the Clinton victory that actually happened in the popular vote, and the Clinton victory that actually happened in the swing states, if not for the massive voter purging there — see Greg Palast.

If the US were not the hegemon, if it were some “third world” nation instead, our elections would have been monitored internationally and confirmed as “rigged” by the GOP and Trump. No question about that, in my view. And he and they are doing it again for 2020, but on a much, much larger (and more violent) scale, given Trump’s power now.

Of course, Republican Comey, dropping the (bogus) announcement, with 10 days to go, that Clinton was under (bogus) investigation again — for emails!! — hurt the accuracy of the polling a bit . . . but she still should have won even the EC.

(Of course, he never told Americans that Trump was also under investigation. Logically, if he had, the 11th hour announcement about Clinton would have been pretty much a wash).

I can’t stand the Clintons, but I think it’s abundantly clear that if she had won, instead of Trump, we would have done most of the right things to get control of Covid-19, and our death-count would have been a few thousand, rather than 152,000 and counting. For that alone, it would have been worth electing a “corporatist Dem” over the monster Trump.

Zooey wrote:

Yeah…there is literally nothing to stop the boogaloo boys and all the neo-nazis from just going into protests and throwing people into vans and driving off. We’ve seen pretty clearly this summer that the actual cops are totally down with white supremacists. What would stop them from doing this?

This worries me too.

Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, said the same thing. He also mentioned how we’ve known for a long, long time that the vast majority of “domestic terrorism” comes from right-wing militias, et al, Nearly 99% of it. There is zero evidence that “antifa” has ever committed any of it.

But the current administration has done nothing about the far right. Has in fact stoked it for political gain. Is stoking it now, as we speak. And their supposed rationale for sending in federal jack boots is to put down “the radical left.”

That’s going to be the theme song Election Day, too. And beyond. Whether or not Trump loses, he’s gonna keep this stuff going. Our sociopath in chief wants blood on the streets so he can avoid jail himself — or so he likely believes. He wants to create this violence, so the right-wing echo chamber will televise it, lie about it, scream to the heavens about it. And if they don’t get the footage they want, they’ll just use old footage from elsewhere, like the Ukraine (2014), which they’re currently doing on FB.

Folks, we’re in truly dark times, and “the left” needs to focus entirely, IMO, on legally, non-violently destroying Trump, all of his enablers and the entire right. No mercy. No prisoners. Non-violently, legally.

Mounting Evidence Suggests Coronavirus is Airborne—but Health Advice Has Not Caught Up After months of denying the importance of aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the World Health Organization is reconsidering its stance​ By Dyani Lewis, Nature magazine on July 8, 2020

This is why “Social Distancing” is never enough, especially inside. But outside too — to a lesser degree. Airborne transmission means if you keep your distance from others, but you’re moving through a room, and folks aren’t wearing masks, the virus is there, in the air folks walk through. Some of them will become infected.

Even outside, there’s a danger, though it’s reduced. But if you’re, say, walking along a path, and someone is coming the other way, and no one is wearing a mask? You both pass into each other’s aerosols, etc. etc.

Social distancing alone won’t cut it.