Leo Gura

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Posts posted by Leo Gura

  1. Posted

    25 minutes ago, Davino said:

    I have the intuition that if you keep pushing there's gonna be a breakthrough in your understanding and a precipitation of insights into your mind as politics, psychology and spirituality interconnect into a macro understanding of human nature.

    Yup. That happened for me last year. I still have yet to release videos about it. I'm giving you guys some previews via the blog.

  4. Posted · Edited by Leo Gura

    26 minutes ago, Xonas Pitfall said:

    The Left needs to be more politically oriented and ruthless

    Of course the left is less ruthless. That's why the left is better than the right.

    Making the left more ruthless just to win and grab power is exactly what makes the right so disgusting, corrupt, and evil.

    It's like saying: Actualized.org is not popular enough. It needs to be more like Islam or Scientology to outcompete them.

    The right is like herding sheep, the left is like herding cats.

  6. Posted · Edited by Leo Gura

    1 hour ago, Novac08 said:

    @Leo Gura

    I keep circling back to the same snag: if every time a leader grabs all the levers we call it “conservative,” the word ends up meaning nothing but “authoritarian.”

    It would be a mistake to perfectly equate conservative with authoritarian.

    Conservative also requires preservation of traditional identity.

    Yes, there can be leftist authoritarianism. A good example of that is the atheism of Communism.

    We don't want to make the mistake of saying that by definition no true leftist can be bad or wrong. That is the no-true-scotsman fallacy.

    Quote

    What drops out of view is the everyday motive to keep fragile inheritances alive. Spend an afternoon in parts of Andalusia, a Mexican pueblo mágico, Kyoto’s old streets, or Istanbul’s historic quarters and you can feel the beauty and wisdom of tradition: not just the buildings, but the recipes, dances, dialects, poems, music, church liturgies—even the traditional understandings of family and gender that knit a place together. When those start disappearing, many people defend them not because they crave domination but because life without them feels thin.

    You are right that there is more to preservation of tradition than merely domination. Tradition is laced with evil but it is never 100% evil.

    Quote

    You collect old African masks. Even if you can’t trace each one to its exact workshop, you sense they carry something old andmeaningful. If a government plan bulldozed every mask-maker’s stall for a generic food court, I doubt you’d shrug. 

    Well, masks are an apolitical tradition.

    Much of tradition is apolitical. Fireworks on New Years is apolitical.

    You have to look specifically at traditions that affect distribution of power, like forcing women to wear burkas.

    Quote

    Out of curiosity, can you point to a movement that stayed egalitarian, liberal, and genuinely self-sacrificing all the way through? 

    Perhaps American Civil Rights movement under MLK Jr.

    Perhaps Gandhi's Indian independence movement.

    Certain religous traditions or orders. Maybe Jainism or Buddhism. Although they still have some hierarchy and can be quite conservative.

    The US founding fathers and the US Constitution.

    Perhaps Sadguru's Isha Foundation.

    No political movement is perfect. There is always corruption.

  10. Posted · Edited by Leo Gura

    21 minutes ago, Novac08 said:

    Curious where you land on this.

    A second axis has its utility. I don't want to reduce reality to any single-axis model.

    But the 2-axis model sometimes obscures that Nazis/Hitler was fundamentally conservative.

    Regarding Stalin and Mao, the issue there is complicated. The issue is that leftist ideals can be worn as wolves in sheeps clothing.

    There is a deep asymmetry between embodiment of left vs right. It's much easier to embody the right because it purely serves survival whereas left ideals are utopian. Therefore, many power-hungry people can cloak themselves in leftist ideals without the ability to embody it. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ghaddafi, and pretty much all 20th century leftist revolutionaries used leftist ideals to grab power but then since those ideals were totally beyond the development level of their societies, they turned into classic power hierarchies. The key is that power was never actually shared, it was brutally consolidated -- which is actually a conservative way of governance. When left ideals fails conservative reality rules.

    What matters is not the words they say but whether they actually share power with the weak. If power is not shared then it's just bullshit and effectively conservative.

    Stalin can say he was a leftist, but he didn't have the development level to be actually be a leftist.

    Being a true leftist is way harder than being a rightie. That's the rub that right-wingers do not understand.

    When shit hits the fan everyone acts like a selfish animal, no matter how left their ideals are. Being truly left requires surrendering yourself, which only sages can do.

    So the load in my view is not carried by one axis but also by distingushing ideological rhetoric from developmental embodiment.

    There is the selfish vs selfless axis which transcends politics.

  11. Posted · Edited by Leo Gura

    On 6/1/2025 at 4:52 PM, Raze said:

    The settlements are just doing what was original done to create israel, but at a slower pace. Settlers themselves argue this. 

    It's not quite the same since Israel's base land was designated by international treaty and UN resolution.

    Settlements violate international treaties and laws.

    But I understand what you meant.

  14. Posted

    18 hours ago, Ajay0 said:

    Indian women even in the beaches wear full body covering swim suits. There is a lot of emphasis in India on looking respectable and decent to ensure dignity and authority , probably due to social conditioning.

    It is an interesting observation that the less dignified the society (more rapists around) the more women must be "decent" (cover up).

  23. Posted

    23 minutes ago, Wilhelm44 said:

    And you said that would lead to WW3. So if the tech oligarchy dont do the UBI thing, wouldn't they be committing suicide ?

    Well, the whole doomer argument basically assumes that mankind is greedy enough to commit suicide.

    How true is that? Hard to say.

    I don't know how this whole AI thing will play out. Could be great, could be hell.

  24. Posted · Edited by Leo Gura

    7 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

    The problem in Palestine is that if an intelligent leader emerges capable of devising clever and useful strategies that open the door to the creation of a Palestinian state,

    Israel will assassinate him.

    This is such a serious and stubborn problem in this whole situation. Any peaceful but serious political leader who rises up in Palestine will be targetted by Israel precisely because peace threatens the Zionist project.

    The hardcore Zionists prefer radical Palestinian leaders so they have a reason to keep bombing and expanding settlements. A peaceful leader is dangerous to the settlement project.