Indeed, when the government can take away your ability to earn a living, it is communism.
172 karma · joined June 3, 2020
For stoicism:
- "Enchiridion" of Epictetus. - "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius (my personal favorite that I keep reading over and over). - "Letters from a stoic" from Seneca.
It's not a lot of authors but they're pretty dense and should keep you busy for a long time.
For buddhism, it's a very vast subject, but I'd start with:
- "Siddhartha", this is a novel but will give you an overview on the buddhist system of thoughts. It's also very well written and inspiring.
- "What the Buddha Taught", also an introductory book on buddhist toughts. - Another introductory book is "Buddhism for Beginners".
From there, and based on your interests that you will discover along the way, go into the "suttas" which are the religious texts. You may even want to go to a time before buddhism with the vedas and the Upanishads that have so much to teach us.
There are many schools of buddhism, some closer to what we'd call a religion in the west while others purely philosophical (without any emphasis on a god). Zen buddhism is yet another category, where the teaching is based almost entirely on mediation alone but it's the exception, even if in the west we often think buddhism = meditation, but it's not so.
So, as you can see, it's more a tree than a line and you'll figure it out as you go if it resonnates with you and how deep you want to go.
Enjoy!
The reason imo is it's an age when we start feeling our body is getting old, the feeling of "immortality" of our 20s is gone, we realize the clock is ticking.
Add to that what happens those last 2 years, the isolation, especially if you're single, and so of course it's a hard period for you.
Personally, the way I dealt with it, was through reading everything I could find about philosophy, particularly stoicism and buddhism. It helped me a lot, taught me how those feelings are unavoidable at times, how the mind create that pain and how to make it more easily manageable.
But there's no secret weapon, no magic cure, life is painful at time, and things get better by themselves as long as we don't add to it by feeling guity or thinking "it's not fair". Some realization takes time, so be patient and gentle to yourself, one day at a time.
Good luck friend.
A lockdown at such a scale never happened before covid. Your "counter-fact" is incorrect.
Because it's been the justification from day 1: "not overwhelm hospitals".
And it's you who mentionned "completely novel and exotic government actions", to which I point out that it's already happened with lockdowns.
There's nothing in history that resemble what has happened in those last 2 years, whether you agree or not won't change that fact.
Interesting theory.
That's how everything works, it's called a precedent.
Suppose next year, the government mandate that you lose weight, or stop smoking or run everyday, all that of course for the "greater good". And then the year after that, it requires that you give pills to your children because that makes them "less indisciplined" and so on and so forth.
Stop being so certain and think a little bit. By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
Never heard this one, what does it mean?
Today in the WSJ: CDC Advisers Consider Pfizer Shot for Young Children
How do you go from one to the other here?
Lie: > Vaccine rejection is higher among whites than it is among black and Hispanic Americans
The data: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
Terrestrial tourism has already pretty much destroyed this planet, what long-term good can you foresee here, seriously?
1644 deaths and 28,000 serious adverse events.
On the credibility of the sources for the VAERS database:
"We identified health service employees as the reporter in at least 67% of the reports, while pharmaceutical employees were identified as the reporter in a further 5%. Lay people were identifiable as the reporter in only 28% of the reports."