solarbird | 45 years apart

solarbird

Burning Draft Cards, February 24, 1966

Burning Credit Cards, October 15, 2011

Current Mood: fuck yeah

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

llachglin.livejournal.com

Without Wall Street there wouldn't have been a US-Vietnam war either. Cold War ideology plus corporate interest was the driving motivation. The US didn't want to lose control of SE Asian resources or trade across the Pacific in general.

From:

st-rev.livejournal.com

Unless you want to argue that Wall Street is responsible for every major conflict going back to the Civil War, I don't see your point. And if you do want to argue that, I don't want to talk to you.

From:

turil.livejournal.com

The current banking system is much more subtle with their manipulation and anti-social behavior than Hitler. Sick leaders have learned to be much more sophisticated with their tactics, because there are enough people who are paying attention and will point out the more gross inhumane actions (torture, for example, is still something the US does, they just have to do it more quietly and less often and do it to specific people who they can convince most of the public are "evil", as opposed to entire cultures). Obviously, also, more people in the US seem to be free to at least to try to escape, and do have more physical freedom to move around the country legally, so the repression happens in more emotional, intellectual, and spiritual ways, than physical.

Also, and I don't know how true it was, I have heard that banking (or more precisely, the idea of creating debt) was one of the core elements that made both the US revolutionary war and the US civil war happen. External powers loaning each side money to fund the war was done as a way to gain favors later on.

From:

st-rev.livejournal.com

Banking, as a natural nexus of power concentration, is involved in most historic encounters of the post-Enlightenment. Assigning banking definitive agency in all those events is a pretty reliable sign of a very unpleasant and unstable individual.

Nothing ever happens for one reason, and nobody has reliable control of anything. ETA: I see that you're some flavor of Buddhist; I'm basically talking about interpenetration here.

Edited Date: 2011-10-17 05:48 pm (UTC)

From:

turil.livejournal.com

So speculating about money-making intentions of people who are publicly known as hoarders is "a sign of a very unpleasant and unstable individual"? Interesting. I suppose that's reasonable if you consider people looking for psychological explanations of historical events as being unpleasant to you. And if you think contemplating things is being unstable then that's ok too. Being unstable is better than being stuck in only one way of thinking. :-)

And I totally agree that nothing ever happens for just one reason. The funders of war certainly don't ever cause the war. But their intentions and actions are still certainly important to pay attention to, especially when it comes to deciding whether or not to encourage (enable) them. (I'm not technically a Buddhist, but I do study some Buddhist practitioners and scholars. I don't know what interpenetration means, though. But I do know that one of the main messages of Buddhism is to NOT help others increase their negative Karma. And in this case, giving more money to those who hoard money and then spend at least some of it supporting wars would be enabling the hoarders to hoard more and to, indirectly, support more war.)

From:

turil.livejournal.com

I think I would have been better off saying:

So speculating about the not-so-healthy intentions of bankers is "a sign of a very unpleasant and unstable individual"?

From:

st-rev.livejournal.com

It's when you decide that the bankers are the real puppetmasters and nations rise and fall at their whim. From there it's usually a very short trip to blaming the Jews.

Bankers are one powerful faction among many.

From:

turil.livejournal.com

It's only a "short trip to blaming the Jews" if you're an idiot. :-)

The bankers might indeed be some of the puppet masters, and might even be the most influential ones when it comes to global politics. I don't know (and I don't really care, either, since my goal is to solve everyone's problems at once in one fell educational swoop, rather than attacking individual problems with band aids). But it's certainly reasonable to be aware enough to look for the personal intentions and actions that are negative in the world.

People who hoard anything, including money, are sick, and so bankers, pretty much by definition need help. And yes, so do many, many, many other people. In fact most of us need help, because most of us are suffering from some kind of illness that gets in the way of contributing the most awesome stuff to the world.

From:

st-rev.livejournal.com

I don't think it's fair to call bankers hoarders, since their entire business relies on handing money out to other people. At any given time, the amount of money and other liquid assets a bank is sitting on is dwarfed by the amount of money lent out to others.

The most problematic aspects of the finance industry seem to me to be grounded in how they employ the power they gain in the transactions.

From:

st-rev.livejournal.com

Interpenetration is one translation of pratītyasamutpāda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratītyasamutpāda), also translated as "dependent arising", related to the metaphor of Indra's Net. Roughly: all 'things' in reality are mutually entangled in a web of cause and effect; no one thing stands in a privileged position relative to everything else. In this context, it means there's no God, no governor, and no secret masters.

From:

turil.livejournal.com

I agree, everything does effect everything else. But there is a point to Buddhism, which is that positive change can happen (alleviation of suffering), and it can be done with a combination of Right awareness and Right actions. Yes?

Also, this doesn't seem to mean that there is "no God" only that the idea of "God" would have to include everything codependently. :-)