Tag Archives: China

Was it a year not to step on the toes?

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Was it a year not to step on the toes?

Not a silent but (perhaps) less irritating year

Three years of Corona pandemic came along and except for China not many countries seem still to worry.

In Europe, something very different from a Coronavirus has caught our attention. The danger is that this virus could spread and kill many more people than Corona did.
It is about the Putin virus or Russian disease as Trump might start calling it.

Just as a lot of fake news came our way during the Trump era, a lot of work had to be done in recent years to ‘debunk’ those misleading or deceptive reports.
You might think that here on this site with the name “Stepping toes” would be the ideal place to strip such disseminated falsehoods or lie talk of credibility. People like to sell talking points, and in recent years it seemed to have become a sport to send as many falsehoods into the world as possible. But to counter the many false messages posted on social media, this site was actually not originally planned.

Last year may have reached the pinnacle of fake message spreading. It could not go on any longer. Something had to be done to restore honour to journalism and bring correct messages to the world.

Young people were increasingly reaching for their smartphones with all kinds of apps to follow Facebook and Instagram posts, as if they could get the very best news there. But correct messaging was far from there. Social media won out over the daily and weekly newspapers that lost out, raising the question of whether there was still a possibility of life for serious journalism.
While newspapers were under pressure and many wondered how to survive this resort to social media, blogs also came under fire. Google and WordPress thought no better of changing their systems. At Blogger, it made a lot of bloggers tired of the difficulties in the system and took refuge elsewhere. Thus, I too decided to take refuge in the WordPress that was familiar to me with the old editor, hoping that WordPress would not force everyone to have to use the hideous block editor (introduced in 2018) (because it is really totally impractical for free writing and design).

Converting all the Google sites to the new system took a lot of time, so there have been somewhat fewer articles on my WordPress sites over the last two years, except for this year at my newcomer.

It is for that newcomer that I would like to draw your attention today.

The format of that new WordPress site is not really new, as the newcomer is actually a continuation of the former Blogspot sites “Christadelphian World” and “Our World“. The only difference now is actually a result of an easier form of writing and shaping for publishing or publishing articles. Because this is now much easier than Blogspot, I can now provide more articles at the same time.

As the title for the site, I chose “Some View on the World” or “Enige Kijk op de Wereld” because the site wants to give a view of what is happening in the world, while also giving more clarity on certain facts.
In the first year of its new form, it has been a bit of a search to find a way to leave enough time for my other Christian websites, while still being able to provide a balanced news overview that can be relied upon to be verified reporting and thus present accurate facts to the reader.

I believe I now know roughly how to tackle it for 2023 and hope that with my outline I can attract enough readers to further follow the links provided in the articles as well.

I do hope still to provide a day-to-day events review, and do hope people will find it useful.
I shall continue to try to offer ideas and context and depth, as well as information: a combination of clarity (the facts to help you understand the world) and imagination (the ideas you need to build a better one).

This better world that needs to be worked on is extremely important. We must realise that it is not ‘five to twelve’, but that the hands have long been moving in the wrong direction and that the earth is crying out loudly for support. For far too long, we have neglected the earth and been careless with its resources. Now we have to bear the consequences. Global warming is a fact, although many still do not want to acknowledge it. On “Some View on the World” we do want to pay attention to that earth which we have been given on loan by the Creator. Indeed, it is high time we took our responsibility and took steps to address that climate change.

We don’t particularly want to tread on toes on that “new site”, but we do want to regularly draw attention to those issues that really should get our attention.

In a way, I also hope to have caught your attention and made you warm to go and take a look at that news site (or online newspaper) and (who knows) subscribe there too to be kept informed of new articles.

Be welcome to “Some View on the World”.

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Additional reading

  1. Lots of news demanding attention
  2. Texts, writers, accesibility and willingness
  3. Thoughts tinged with triviality
  4. For those who call the Brussels Airport attacks a fake or a conspiracy of the government
  5. At the closing hours of 2016 #2 Low but also highlights
  6. International Women’s Day 2019
  7. 2021 in review #1 the most startling point
  8. Conspiracy theories in plenty-fold
  9. Entering 2022 still Aiming for a society without exploitation or oppression
  10. Putin speaks plainly – and the West is speechless
  11. Written-down thoughts
  12. Eyes on pages and messages on social media
  13. Gossip and fake news, opposite fact checking and facts presenting
  14. Study Guide: Definition of Journalism
  15. Safeguarding freedom of expression
  16. Identifying Journalism
  17. News that’s fit to print
  18. Newspapers: Dying or Changing
  19. The End of Journalism
  20. Why social media presence matters in journalism
  21. Traditional News Turns into The Journalism We Know Now
  22. The First Great Information War 
  23. Lies for Likes
  24. The Ever-Evolving Industry of Journalism: its Quest to Survive in a Digital World
  25. How to save Journalism in 2022
  26. Mississippi journalists discuss the evolution of daily newspapers
  27. Newspapers: Dying or Changing
  28. Journalism under attack
  29. What do we know about the future of journalism?
  30. Looking for Free Blogs and blogging
  31. WordPress appears to have fallen off its best horse
  32. A Classic Editor versus Block Editor
  33. From old times and sites to new linkings
  34. Joseph Pulitzer’s Retirement Speech & The Traits of Journalism
  35. Change of name
  36. New Name a fact
  37. Newly added pages to Our World
  38. Our World on Blogger coming to its end
  39. My faith and hope
  40. Presenting views from different sources
  41. Weekly World Watch (WWW) looking at a few key developments that have happened during the past week
  42. Invitation to renew connection
  43. Invitation to the news platform that brings a view of the world

Why are we surprised when Buddhists are violent?

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Dan Arnold & Alicia Turner, New York Times, 5 March 2018

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The Nya Thar Lyaung reclining Buddha is an important religious site in the Bago region of Myanmar. Credit, Frank Bienewald/LightRocket, via Getty Images

While history suggests it is naïve to be surprised that Buddhists are as capable of inhuman cruelty as anyone else, such astonishment is nevertheless widespread — a fact that partly reflects the distinctive history of modern Buddhism. By ‘modern Buddhism,’ we mean not simply Buddhism as it happens to exist in the contemporary world but rather the distinctive new form of Buddhism that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this period, Buddhist religious leaders, often living under colonial rule in the historically Buddhist countries of Asia, together with Western enthusiasts who eagerly sought their teachings, collectively produced a newly ecumenical form of Buddhism — one that often indifferently drew from the various Buddhist traditions of countries like China, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Japan and Thailand.

This modern form of Buddhism is distinguished by a novel emphasis on meditation and by a corresponding disregard for rituals, relics, rebirth all the other peculiarly ‘religious’ dimensions of history’s many Buddhist traditions. The widespread embrace of modern Buddhism is reflected in familiar statements insisting that Buddhism is not a religion at all but rather (take your pick) a ‘way of life,’ a ‘philosophy’ or (reflecting recent enthusiasm for all things cognitive-scientific) a ‘mind science.’

Buddhism, in such a view, is not exemplified by practices like Japanese funerary rites, Thai amulet-worship or Tibetan oracular rituals but by the blandly nonreligious mindfulness meditation now becoming more ubiquitous even than yoga. To the extent that such deracinated expressions of Buddhist ideas are accepted as defining what Buddhism is, it can indeed be surprising to learn that the world’s Buddhists have, both in past and present, engaged in violence and destruction.

There is, however, no shortage of historical examples of violence in Buddhist societies. Sri Lanka’s long and tragic civil war (1983-2009), for example, involved a great deal of specifically Buddhist nationalism on the part of a Sinhalese majority resentful of the presence of Tamil Hindus in what the former took to be the last bastion of true Buddhism (the ‘island of dharma’). Political violence in modern Thailand, too, has often been inflected by Buddhist involvement, and there is a growing body of scholarly literature on the martial complicity of Buddhist institutions in World War II-era Japanese nationalism. Even the history of the Dalai Lama’s own sect of Tibetan Buddhism includes events like the razing of rival monasteries, and recent decades have seen a controversy centering on a wrathful protector deity believed by some of the Dalai Lama’s fellow religionists to heap destruction on the false teachers of rival sects.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

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