"It's just the old tradition! Pure buddhism!" People apparently only need to show a thing in a religious light and deprogrammers will jump in with their support.
Edit: i look now, the two pedo defenders got purged, but in the meantime my apparently very hot take was downvoted:
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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There has to be a term for this kind of willful naivety, cause this is just ridiculous, that old man was not thinking about some fuckin "black-tongued demon" or whatever half-garbled cultural folk nonsense westerners are using to refill their copium reserves
even if the entire post was true, who's to say the entire anecdote wasn't always an excuse to do weird shit to kids? Like, myths serve social functions in reifying existing social relations. Saying "oh buddhists monks just tell children to suck on their tongues sometimes on account of this weird story" misses the important question: Why was this story created in the first place? Who did it serve? Some IDF freak was on twitter yesterday saying IDF soldiers should (CW:SA) circumcise the dead bodies of fallen hamas fighters. (/CW:SA) Well that's in the book of samuel. David does that to fallen "philistines." But WHY is that in the book of samuel??? Who does that narrative serve??? The critique of reactionary traditions is the critique of the social conditions that give rise to them, and the social relations they give rise to. Tibetan Buddhist theocracy has been guilty of slavery and worse.
I would call it chauvinism.
It's the Dalai Lama, not some Tibwtan dude in the country who has never left his home town. He's been other places