The Life and Opinions of Nathan Atlasforum, Gentleman (AMA)

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We're doing this again? Have at me.

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It's not really that controversial an opinion.

Kill Bill: why we must take Shakespeare out of the classroom

 Here's an op-ed discussing why Shakespeare is outdated and taught incorrectly anyways.

"Shakespeare is outdated" is absolutely not what this op-ed is saying. It's impossible for any remotely decent art to become "outdated" anyway; it just moves from being primarily of relevance to the HIP and NOW to being primarily of relevance to cultural history, a subject that rightists hate and have always hated.

Beyond the generality of this claim, isn’t it at least counter to stereotype? One finds rightists in every country depicted as overly interested in preserving the country’s glorious history and accomplishments, including cultural accomplishments, even if those were really not so great; while leftists are depicted as disinterested in what the country has already accomplished and more interested in highlighting flaws, or highlighting how the country might gain from borrowing foreign practices.

(These are extreme generalities to be sure; I think in the US at least the right is authentically interested in the society they want to create to the exclusion of whatever came before it, but this feels like an outlier applying to few countries or places which are not the 1990s-and-later United States.)

I have idiosyncratic "me" reasons for applying this claim more generally but I don't really feel like going down that rabbit hole at the moment so I'll concede the point for now.

Not sure if you feel like going down this rabbit hole now, but I'm curious as to what your idiosyncratic reasons are for applying this claim more generally.

The short answer is that I'm using "rightist" as a snarl term that doesn't really mean the same thing as "conservative" or "right-of-center" or even "right-wing," but I think you deserve a somewhat more elaborated and nuanced answer, so:

Cultural and social history, as a field and even as an area of layman's interest, has a bottom-up/"people's history of [subject X]" ethos that I think is genuinely difficult to square with the political right's ethos of supporting hierarchical social relationships unless they're proven beyond all doubt to be socially pathological. (I know you don't see your own views this way, which is why we have that whole bit about you being a wild woke utopian and me being a stodgy agrarian reactionary.) It's not that an interest in past social mores and a commitment to right-wing politics can't coexist, but I think people on the political right who are genuinely invested in cultural history are engaging in at least some amount of doublethink--or, more charitably, dialectic--when it comes to what aspects of the past they care about and admire. Even to write a halfway decent history of, say, Victorian women's fashion, to name an aspect of social history interest in which is perceived as conservative-coded (at least for straight people), you have to spend a lot of time on people, places, and things that were traditionally beneath the notice of the ruling business and political classes.

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1. Favorite Christian Democratic party/parties, past and/or present?

I've memed myself into an unironic-in-an-ironic way affection for la balena bianca. Kuyper's old CHRISTIAN HISTORICAL UNION in the Netherlands has an amazing name, but I don't know much else about it and I don't really like most of what I do know about it. (ETA: I was mistaken about whether Kuyper was in the CHRISTIAN HISTORICAL UNION or the ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY PARTY. The CHU is the one whose name I enjoy.) In general I think Christian democracy is a tradition that produces better political thought than it does actual governance.

2. Favorite Social Democratic/Socialist party/parties, past and/or present?

I know this is a normie answer but the UK's Labour Party, despite its tendencies towards ropey policy culs-de-sac and hilarious factional politics, has achieved some genuinely incredible things over the course of its existence, and I have a lot of admiration for it. I also consider it an honorary Christian democratic party in the limited sense that it owes a lot ideologically and culturally to bleeding-heart nineteenth-century Methodism (an interesting genetic link with the early GOP).

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During what historical time period of both the Democrats and Republicans would you consider each party to be at their most Virgin part of their history and also their most Chad?

Tough to say. This doesn't just correlate with party strength--Gilded Age Redeemers were not chads, and the dead-ender New Deal coalition opponents of Reaganism were not virgins--but it doesn't really correlate with the quality of the party's ideology or policy either--Reagan himself was not a virgin, and Biden, whom I like on most policy levels, is not really legible in this dichotomy at all. Overall I'd say the Democratic Party was at its most virgin in the 1850s and in the early 1920s and its most chad in the mid-1930s, and the Republican Party was at its most chad in the 1860s (obviously) and its most virgin throughout the FDR-Truman ventennio, even when it was doing well electorally.

What's up with New England? I've never been to your region and am fascinated by its unfortunately-probably-now-dead stereotypes, like Soufies and WASPs.

Huge question. The most consistent cultural traits are things like moralism, brusqueness, and an unusually high degree of emphasis on formal education by historical US standards, which are absolutely still with us today. The weather is unfortunately getting worse, and the traditional food isn't much to write home about, but I still favor it over any other region of this great land.

Also, what's up with Noah Kahan? And are his fans called Kahanists?

I don't know, but if they're not then they should be.

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On first thought "Labour is an honorary Christian democratic party" sounds like a violently Nathan posf, but on further reflection I am surprised I have never seen Al use exactly the same words in the same order. (I agree with the rest of the post entirely except that the ARP obviously had a much more fun name than the CHU.)

1. Which part of Japan is most (culturally, politically, etc.) similar to Southern Italy?

This has varied historically. The traditional answer for many hundreds of years would have been the southwestern peripheries of Kyushu and Shikoku, which had a similar political relationship to the rest of Japan (plenty of de facto local autonomy, little or no money...) and even some of the same traditional stereotypes about mindsets and behaviors (male homosexuality, brigandage, clannishness), but these were the parts of Japan that led the Meiji Restoration and later became quite prosperous and economically connected to mainland Asia, so I would say that now the closest equivalent to the Mezzogiorno would be Tohoku. Relatively remote, still fairly rural, very old population even by the standards of the country as a whole, political tendencies towards idiosyncratic independents or the economically heterodox right. The southern coastline of Shikoku and the northern coastline of the western tip of Honshu, however, are still areas that have some of these traits as well.

2. How do you think the Japanese electoral map would look like if the country had found itself with a "normal" party system and two sides with roughly equal strength?

I think Japan is the sort of country that would have relatively intact class voting due to the lack of major culture war cleavages (or rather the unusual nature of the culture war cleavages it does have), with some regional divides as well. There would be a broad east-west divide with Tohoku, Hokkaido, and much of Kanto to the left of everything else (you see this in the real 2009 map), an urban-rural divide (with the possible exception of Osaka) but one much weaker than in lots of other countries these days, and probably the pronounced tendencies towards the left that already do exist in places like Okinawa that are "nonstandard" culturally.

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What's your favorite thread (at least of the ones that you can remember)?

Like, on the forum, of all time? Any thread The Professor posted in was golden. The thread about whether black people can be racist that was unanimous until bronz of all people trotted out the "prejudice+power" talking point is a more recent standout.

Why did you become a Catholic and can you convince me I still should become one?

The deepest and most honest answer I can give to this is that my decision-making at the time had a lot to do with idiosyncracies of my relationships with my deceased grandparents, so no I cannot, unless your family history has a bunch of odd similarities with mine. What I will say is that if any belief system or current of thought interests you then you shouldn't entirely close yourself off to it, at least intellectually or hypothetically.

Opinion of Francis Xavier?

Fascinating person. Since he's a canonized saint I'm bound to believe he's in heaven, but that's true of a lot of people. I tend to think well of him personally too but there's obviously a ton to criticize with any Early Modern missionary.

If you look at his life and Ignatius Loyola's you see some really endearing human traits emerge. Both were from Basque nobility but Ignatius's family "just" had a manor out in the boonies, whereas Francis's father was the prime minister of Navarre. Francis was raised bilingual in Basque and something called Navarro-Aragonese, which was already endangered during his lifetime and is considered moribund or extinct now; it was somewhere between Catalan, Occitan, and Castilian. Ignatius was raised speaking only Basque and apparently struggled with languages; he never attained fluency in anything else and his prose style in the various Romance languages he picked up as an adult is apparently godawful. He's thought to have traded on a contemporary reputation of Basques as a martial race to get support for the Jesuit order (which to this day has a military-inspired organizational structure and internal terminology), and he may have put Francis in charge of the Asian missions in part because he was so much better at languages. (Ignatius only ever left Europe once, for a brief pilgrimage to Jerusalem.) Such distinct, familiar personalities!

Favorite piece of fiction you've read recently?

I had a great time with Konbini ningen by Murata Sayaka. It's available in English as Convenience Store Woman and the translation is fine except for the title; in Japanese the second word means human, not woman, and whoever decided to ghettoize the book as chick lit in English should be keelhauled.

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Politically (whether it's political or personal-political) what one 'thing' have you got absolutely wrong and what one thing have you nailed dead on, in the past few years.

In the past few years?

Dead right: support for Ukraine and grudging back-burnering of my pacifist instincts in favor of something slightly more Niebuhrian (ugh, I still hate to say it out loud, but it is what it is).
Dead wrong: I was a little too suspicious of Phil Scott and not nearly suspicious enough of Maura Healey. Diversity win! The governor who keeps line-item-vetoing support services for disabled children is a lesbian now!

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What are your thoughts on the regional boundaries of New England? You sometimes hear people talk about Eastern Upstate as being basically New England, does that ring true with your experience?

In some ways, yeah. The traditional agricultural land use patterns--size of farm fields, general distance between small towns, etc.--change pretty dramatically into something more more Midwestern-adjacent (or at least more Pennsylvania-ish), but it happens after the Hudson, not after the Taconics. On the other hand the local political culture changes almost immediately at the state line (except in some places like Torie's "Birkenstock Belt" bits of Columbia County and, formerly, some of the areas along Lake Champlain), and of course "non-New England" is creeping eastward in the south just as "New England" bleeds westward in the north. There are also, of course, ways in which areas as far as Michigan or even Iowa still have discernible cultural connections to New England because of their settlement histories.

What, in your opinion, are the most beautiful segments of literature which you've read? (not thinking books, more like paragraphs or short poems).

This is a big enough question that I've held off answering this post for days now because of it, but here are the first three that come to mind:

From Beatrix Potter's "The Tailor of Gloucester":

But it is in the old story that all the beasts can talk, in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning (though there are very few folk that can hear them, or know what it is that they say).

A poem by Christina Rossetti:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

From Kamo no Chōmei's "Hōjōki"; Donald Keene's translation:

This is what my temporary hut is like. I shall now attempt to describe its surroundings. To the south there is a bamboo pipe which empties water into the rock pool I have laid. The woods come close to my house, and it is thus a simple matter for me to gather brushwood. The mountain is named Toyama. Creeping vines block the trails and the valleys are overgrown, but to the west is a clearing, and my surroundings thus do not leave me without spiritual comfort.— In the spring I see waves of wistaria like purple clouds, bright in the west. In the summer I hear the cuckoo call, promising to guide me on the road of death. In the autumn the voice of the evening insects fills my ears with a sound of lamentation for this cracked husk of a world. In winter I look with deep emotion on the snow, piling up and melting away like sins and hindrances to salvation.

When I do not feel like reciting the nembutsu — and cannot put my heart into reading the Sutras, no one will keep me from resting or being lazy, and there is no friend who will feel ashamed of me. Even though I make no special attempt to observe the discipline of silence, living alone automatically makes me refrain from the sins of speech; and though I do not necessarily try to obey the precepts, here where there are no temptations what should induce me to break them?

Basil Bunting, of whom Al will almost certainly have heard even if nobody else reading this thread will have, has a poem closely paraphrasing the Hōjōki where he renders the last part "There’s a Lent of commandments kept where there’s no way to break them," which I'd like in the service booklet for my funeral when I die.

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How would you have felt if you were present at HolyName's Furnace Fest set? (Previously touched on here.)

(note especially the beginning and 16:49.)

And for the record, the frontman of this band is the guy who wrote "I don't worship a concept, I follow a King."

Overstimulated, but also sort of fascinated as a sociological matter to experience this side of American Christian culture.

Also, regarding an earlier answer, I was mistaken in thinking that the Mezziogorno had a higher median age than other parts of Italy, but the other points of my analysis stand.

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この日本の都道府県は一番好きですか?

青森県は私の第一です。個人的な懐かしさと寒冷地にある田舎の美的特質のおかげで、深く感動します。

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On which issues have you become more of a Moderate Hero in recent years?

Two of the hottest-button issues today, abortion and Israel/Palestine, in different ways:

Abortion: I am about as genuinely convinced as can be that abortion is always a moral evil, but over the years I've gone from personally-opposed-but to conventionally "pro-life" to someone who's agnostic on the subject as a matter of legal theory and tends to oppose what non-Atlas-red states are doing on the issue because of how poorly designed and cruel all these policies are. I don't favor making it a state goal to actively expand access in places whose abortion laws are already lax, either. In both cases this moderate heroism comes from a recognition that Kantian norms simply aren't all there is to how someone in a difficult situation should be treated in practical terms; I'm older, I know more people who've actually had abortions than I used to, I've met and in some cases become friends with people who've done plenty of other repellent things that I don't think they should go to prison for--yet I retain all my old suspicions about what the maximalist pro-choice position implies about statecraft and law as moral undertakings.

Israel/Palestine: I am blackpilled on both of these countries' abilities to produce constructive, peace-minded, non-ethnoreligious-supremacist governments absent major changes in their material conditions or the mindsets of their populations or both. There are compelling reasons to assign more fault to either side--Palestine tends to be more intransigent about (increasingly sh**tty, which could be interpreted a number of ways) peace proposals and more liable to break ceasefires, Israel as the enormously more powerful party and one that supposedly holds itself to liberal-democratic norms on most things should also be held to higher standards, etc. We've all heard the arguments, and most of them make at least some sense, so I don't really see the point of attempting to identify good guys and bad guys beyond saying that my sheer knee-jerk emotional sympathies lie more with Israel.

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Where would you draw the line between Upstate and Downstate NY?

You seem to have skipped this by mistake.

Thanks for the reminder and sorry I still took a while to get to this.

I'd put a soft "someone from the City could be forgiven for thinking of this as Upstate" line at the northern boundaries of Westchester and Rockland Counties, a soft "someone from Watertown or Plattsburgh could be forgiven for thinking of this as Downstate" line maybe halfway between Albany and Kingston, and a hard "this actually is Upstate/this actually is Downstate" line around Poughkeepsie. The bulk of the Catskills would be on the Downstate side of the second line but the Upstate side of the first and third.

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If you could invent anything you wanted and it would just work, what would you invent?

A time machine so I can test my suspicion that there are both future times and past times I'd much prefer to 2hell24.

Opinion of this video?

so true bestie

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How is lyfe?

And a follow-up: Ever read Book of the New Sun?

1. Going okay. Currently on a solo road trip to DC to visit some friends/see the cherry blossoms/go to the Freer Gallery/shoot my shot with AOC (kidding. I follow her personal Instagram and she doesn't seem to be my type personality-wise); I'm poasting this from a hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre. Got chewed out by my boss at work today, but nothing that was a huge deal; substantively and structurally my work is going well. Health is okay, although I've been in a depressive funk and some of my friends are getting concerned. I'm going to want to address that. My birthday is April 8 and I'll be driving as far up into Vermont as I can to see the eclipse.
2. Years and years and years ago. It's great. I should reread it one of these days.

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Who's the last band/musical artist you've seen live and when?

Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera for my thirtieth birthday, slightly after this time last year. There's been stuff since then that I would have liked to have made it to, but I haven't been able to. If that doesn't count, Regina Spektor, a few weeks earlier than that.

ETA: I forgot I actually have been to community opera/musical productions a couple of times since then. John Frederick Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley "opera" (it's taking the piss; think Gilbert and Sullvian but a hundred and fifty years earlier) was the most recent, in December 2023.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Who's the last band/musical artist you've seen live and when?

Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera for my thirtieth birthday, slightly after this time last year. There's been stuff since then that I would have liked to have made it to, but I haven't been able to. If that doesn't count, Regina Spektor, a few weeks earlier than that.

ETA: I forgot I actually have been to community opera/musical productions a couple of times since then. John Frederick Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley "opera" (it's taking the piss; think Gilbert and Sullvian but a hundred and fifty years earlier) was the most recent, in December 2023.

Do you think you'd prefer the stuff my mom regularly goes to to what I go to? https://bismarckmandansymphony.org

Like she went to this last weekend, while I went to a punk show: https://bismarckmandansymphony.org/events/CelticCadences

She gets free tickets through her work, but I bet she'll keep going even after she retires.

There's probably a lot more overlap between her taste and mine than between yours and mine, yes, although the overlap between yours and mine isn't zero, and Celtic Cadences in particular looks a bit too kitschy for me.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Where would you draw the line between Upstate and Downstate NY?

You seem to have skipped this by mistake.

Thanks for the reminder and sorry I still took a while to get to this.

I'd put a soft "someone from the City could be forgiven for thinking of this as Upstate" line at the northern boundaries of Westchester and Rockland Counties, a soft "someone from Watertown or Plattsburgh could be forgiven for thinking of this as Downstate" line maybe halfway between Albany and Kingston, and a hard "this actually is Upstate/this actually is Downstate" line around Poughkeepsie. The bulk of the Catskills would be on the Downstate side of the second line but the Upstate side of the first and third.

Nonsense.  Upstate begins at 14th Street.

ok pauline kael

While I'm returning to this topic, I will say that, although I generally dislike using highways for this purpose, I-84 is not a terrible demarcation line. There's even an argument to be made for I-287 from a City-biased standpoint, despite that being an even more restrictive definition of Upstate than the first of the ones I gave before; people do say things like "X [has/hasn't] been [north/south] of the Tappan Zee in [amount of time]" fairly often.

I'll try to get to some of the unanswered questions here soon; in the meantime, feel free to ask more.

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この広告の考えは？

ゴルフは、酷い社会悪ですよ。 それ以外に強い意見なし。

Who's the last band/musical artist you've seen live and when?

Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera for my thirtieth birthday, slightly after this time last year. There's been stuff since then that I would have liked to have made it to, but I haven't been able to. If that doesn't count, Regina Spektor, a few weeks earlier than that.

ETA: I forgot I actually have been to community opera/musical productions a couple of times since then. John Frederick Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley "opera" (it's taking the piss; think Gilbert and Sullvian but a hundred and fifty years earlier) was the most recent, in December 2023.

Do you think you'd prefer the stuff my mom regularly goes to to what I go to? https://bismarckmandansymphony.org

Like she went to this last weekend, while I went to a punk show: https://bismarckmandansymphony.org/events/CelticCadences

She gets free tickets through her work, but I bet she'll keep going even after she retires.

There's probably a lot more overlap between her taste and mine than between yours and mine, yes, although the overlap between yours and mine isn't zero, and Celtic Cadences in particular looks a bit too kitschy for me.

On that note, opinion of this band that I saw Tuesday? (This was filmed less than a mile from me.)

Or for that matter, my favorite Furnace Fest song of last year?

(see 2:20 for the part that had a lot of people in tears, and some people doing that Pentecostal/charismatic hand raising thing.)

You know, this isn't bad. I still wouldn't seek it out, but I think having known you for over a decade (!) is finally making me start to "get it" with some of this stuff.

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I asked this elsewhere but you seem to have missed or forgotten about it, so I will repeat here where it's more likely to catch your attention: could you give me a detailed description of the forms that religious politics (especially religious conservatism) and social-theological disputes take in Buddhist societies?

This is a big enough question that it will take me a while to get to in full, but thanks for asking! I'm going to enjoy answering it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How is lyfe?

And a follow-up: Ever read Book of the New Sun?

1. Going okay. Currently on a solo road trip to DC to visit some friends/see the cherry blossoms/go to the Freer Gallery/shoot my shot with AOC (kidding. I follow her personal Instagram and she doesn't seem to be my type personality-wise); I'm poasting this from a hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre. Got chewed out by my boss at work today, but nothing that was a huge deal; substantively and structurally my work is going well. Health is okay, although I've been in a depressive funk and some of my friends are getting concerned. I'm going to want to address that. My birthday is April 8 and I'll be driving as far up into Vermont as I can to see the eclipse.

Glad to hear it. How're you handling the approach of Death's icy claw?

You mean getting older? Fine so far. Thirty-one is really not actually old. I am a little bit worried about my career prospects, romantic prospects, and hairline, but none of that is that new.

2. Years and years and years ago. It's great. I should reread it one of these days.

I'm on  a second(?) reread and am finding that I'm becoming a bit captivated by Wolfe even if the only other work of his that I've read a good chunk of--The Wizard--I don't quite "get". The circularity in the narrative and time travel aspects of BotNS are completely lost on me and this leads to an unsatisfying ending, but the way Wolfe drops us into a wholly alien (and yet, it turns out, more familiar than we'd think at first glance) landscape with most relevant exposition hidden in passing references makes me endlessly fascinated by the world of the New Sun.

I was driving through the southwest the past few days (currently in Colorado) and have decided that it's time Leibowitz got a reread. (Talk about Catholic science fiction... I also need to reread the first few Dunes soon)

Since you asked this several weeks ago, have you gotten around to that Leibowitz reread yet? If so, what did you make of it?

Is your humanism prior to your Christianity or is your Christianity prior to your humanism? Not in terms of time, necessarily, but in how you conceive of yourself as a person, which "comes first", ie forms the logical basis for the other? In other words, if you were to explain Life According to Nathan, would your humanism derive from Christianity, or your Christianity from humanism?

(That is, if you consider yourself a humanist at all. Based on your breadth of knowledge and the genuine decency you exude on here, I certainly would, and I find that a very imitable thing.)

1. Thanks for the compliment!
2. My Christianity is prior to my humanism, assuming I understand what you mean by "humanism" properly, but I'm not altogether sure I see them as separate enough for that to matter.

Also, if you came out on the other side of the Agonies of Youth, that uncomfortable awareness of being young and lost and at sea that I feel so characterizes my life these days, do you recall a moment in your life when *it* all seemed to start making some sense? A moment when you began to Figure Things Out and such?

I'd say COVID was my impetus for doing a lot of that work; living with my parents but working full-time from home really helped me put into perspective the relative priorities I wanted to give work, family, friends, religious and civic commitments, personal projects, etc. going forward, and while I didn't figure everything out then, it made me a lot more confident in my ability to eventually. I was twenty-seven at that point and, as I said to Cath earlier in this post, I'm thirty-one now.

Still working on Battista's very good, very complicated question about Buddhist politics!

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Actually legitimately curious...would you refuse to listen to a band that tweeted something like this?

https://twitter.com/mannequinpussy/status/1382381828410118146?t=exiomPMVHFlZ50XG...

This band is known for leftist politics often expressed in an edgelordy manner (if that wasn't obvious from the name) but the vocalist has said that despite completely abandoning Catholicism after being raised in it she does believe in God but has no trust at all in organized religion and institutions. But this is pretty blatant and I wonder how many would be really offended (not many in their fan base of course considering how few Catholics actually listen to them.)

Kind of random to bring it up but was reminded of such by comparing her to Bryan from Knocked Loose who is basically the same and clarified that some of their lyrics mistaken as anti-Christian are not....but are unquestionably anti-Catholicism.

Dostoyevsky says similarly harsh stuff about Catholicism in The Idiot and that's one of my favorite novels, so no, I wouldn't refuse to listen to them. I might not spend money on them or see them live, though.

I asked this elsewhere but you seem to have missed or forgotten about it, so I will repeat here where it's more likely to catch your attention: could you give me a detailed description of the forms that religious politics (especially religious conservatism) and social-theological disputes take in Buddhist societies?

This is a big enough question that it will take me a while to get to in full, but thanks for asking! I'm going to enjoy answering it.

So, breaking it down by region/country:

• In Southeast Asia, Buddhist institutions (mostly Theravada) tend to be "religious conservatives" in a surprisingly straightforward and legible way; they skew anti-gay and anti-abortion, are intimately tied up with secular hierarchies and power structures like the Thai monarchy and the ethnonationalist freaks in charge in Burma, etc. Vietnam is a partial exception here because of its colonial history and the resulting elite Catholic population, which means that, prior to 1975, the Church filled the "religious bastion of the Establishment" role instead. Vietnam is also a Mahayana rather than Theravada country.
• In Sri Lanka, the dynamic is similar to that in Southeast Asia, but Sri Lankan Buddhism is more pluralistic and more influenced by Buddhist Modernism, to the point that the Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Ranjith, supports retaining Buddhism as the state religion because the Buddhist establishment is seen as a protector of other religious groups.
• Bhutan is a quasi-theocratic Vajrayana Buddhist monarchy whose government is so religiously influenced that it sets completely different economic targets from the rest of the world that are derived deductively from Buddhist moral theology. It's not as nasty as what we see somewhere like Burma, but there's still a distinct supremacist/ascendancy attitude towards the country's Hindu minority.
• Tibet and Mongolia were traditionally similar to Bhutan in these respects, but because of their recent histories of communist rule, Vajrayana Buddhism in those countries has a somewhat ersatz-feeling human rights focus that we also catch glimpses of in Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
• Japan, one of the Mahayana countries par excellence but with Vajrayana denominations also present, runs the gamut from the expressly Nichiren-affiliated Komeito--a rather acquisitive, self-dealing conservative party currently strongly allied with the LDP, although this wasn't always the case--to various #populist currents, both left-wing and right-wing, derived from or influenced by the Pure Land tradition. The sort of "socon" Buddhism we see in Southeast Asia is much, much weaker in Japan, and has been for a fascinatingly long time; a relatively lax approach to things like sex goes back at least as far as the Tokugawa and possibly a lot further.
• China and Taiwan have similarly diverse and polymorphous Buddhist political histories to Japan, but Buddhism was traditionally a little bit further outside the secular power structure than it was in Japan, mostly because of the presence of Confucianism and in some cases Taoism as much easier go-to legitimating ideologies. Buddhism was intermittently persecuted in China even before modern times. However, Chinese Buddhist politics does have some of the moral conservatism or traditionalism that Japanese Buddhist politics largely lacks.
• Korea has a similar history to China in this respect, with the added wrinkle of the recent very strong Christian presence (fun fact: the curious "anti-authoritarian but pointedly orthodox" character of Korean Christianity comes from many Korean people perceiving religious liberalism as characteristic of Japanese Christianity).
• The Malay cultural sphere has Buddhist minorities with the sort of generally left-liberal (for these countries) skew that we tend to associate with religious minorities in most of the world, at least in terms of voting behavior.

You said detailed description; this is not nearly as detailed as I'd like to be able to be about this fascinating subject. But I've already left you hanging for the better part of two months and did not want to take even longer. I hope it's interesting to you nonetheless.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This may be outside of your areas of interest, but what are your thoughts on recent Buddhist convert communities? How do they compare to the religion in traditionally Buddhist areas? I'm thinking in particular of New Age movements towards Buddhism in the west and Dalit Buddhism.

I think kind of poorly of Western Buddhism. It tends to be radically stripped down in terms of both belief and ritual, because of its interest in presenting itself as a uniquely "rational" religion, something that you can see in the expressed views of figures like D.T. Suzuki or even the current Dalai Lama who articulate or articulated Buddhism quite differently to Asian audiences. It's a hypertrophied version of the same "get rid of all the interesting or pretty stuff; FACTS FULL IN THE FACE!!" impulse we see in boilerplate Evangelicalism and Salafism, although it expresses itself differently on the political level and it's less dangerous since it's not actually taking over any Western societies. What I will say for it is that it tends to inspire fairly good political and interpersonal attitudes. For a while I had a relatively positive view of the Shambhala movement because it avoids a lot of this, but this was before I was familiar with Shambhala's history of nonstop sexual and financial scandals.

There's a story that I love about how Western Zen practitioners who go to study in temples in Japan are often shocked and appalled to find that, rather than a constant focus on meditation, most of what they get taught is minutiae of parish administration and legal compliance. I've been familiar with this phenomenon for long enough that I was writing about it on the forum at least as early as 2018.

Dalit Buddhism shares some of these characteristics but I still think very favorably of it in India's political context. I also know less about it, though.

What are some Ideas (TM) that you are toying with at the moment?

Inculturation, Christian socialism, New England regionalism, consistent life ethic, the evil eye, necessity (in the common law sense) rather than freedom as a key consideration in moral culpability--the usual, in other words, but with a greater degree of focus on indigenous isuses than in the past due to my career trajectory.

How has your understanding of the Divine changed over the course of your life?

This is another big question that I'll get back to when I can.

このサイトは正確に見えますか?

そう思い。京都府と青森県に関することはたくさん見覚えます。

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What part of NY are you at now?

I live in the suburbs of Albany, just before it starts dropping off to countryside. Kind of a nice area, although I'm getting a bit sick of the suburban/exurban stroad traffic and the distance from my aging parents.

Are you from NY?  If so, where?

No, I had never lived here before 2021, when I moved in with a close friend after eighteen months almost never leaving my parents' house (lest anyone think that I'm unmindful of how badly the pandemic and the lockdowns affected people psychologically...). I was born in Western Massachusetts, which is where the bulk of my family has lived since coming to America about a century ago, and had a semi-itinerant childhood in various parts of Vermont and New Jersey. I lived in Western Mass again from my late teens onward, with a short stint in the Boston area for my master's degree. I consider "home" the area around the MA-VT-NH border tripoint. I don't think I could handle living outside the Northeast for longer than a few months at a time.

I was conceived in Sacramento, of all places, but the circumstances of that and why it came about are pretty personal.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I reread Leibowitz rather quickly. I really enjoyed it, though it reinforced my half-remembered viewpoint that the book is primarily known for its first portion. That said, I liked the second portion much more than I expected, as it displayed the interplay between faith, science, and the state in a quasi-medieval/early modern setting. The imperial scientist (his title was "thon", though I don't remember his name) was a rather sympathetic caricature of the secular scientist who was never prepared to interact with peoples of faith who also have intellects--unfortunately, this attitude appears more and more common today, though maybe I'm biased.

The status of the "old Jew" character--who I think is clearly Lazarus--and the growth on the woman's neck that flowers into bloom as a creature without Original Sin are still a mystery to me, though. Perhaps I should know a bit more about doomsday prophecy.

One of my main reasons, which I think I already mentioned, for going back to Leibowitz, was the desire to consume science fiction in a declined/decaying future. With the Fallout TV show and my recent semi-reread of Book of the New Sun, the topic's been on my mind a lot. To that end, and in an attempt to transition to reading "serious" literature, I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. (Incidentally, another Catholic)

Thon Taddeo is his name if memory serves.

I like the stuff with Rachel because it's such good payoff for the way the Pope's Children are portrayed for the first 90% of the novel. You keep wondering why you're supposed to side with the people who so insistently want to protect these orclike caricatures, and then in those last scenes it hits you.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

一番好き漢字ですか？

例えば、道や帰や森や馬や華(花の旧字体)が当に好きです。