https://t.co/nWSFLFFnte

Thread.

Recently, Harsimrat Kaur @HarsimratBadal_ claimed in parliament that Guru Tegh Bahadur protected the religion of Hindus despite of being a Non-Hindu. And Hindus owe a huge favor to others.

In this thread, I will show that Guru Tegh Bahadur was every inch a Hindu!

Let us begin with some contemporary sources.

Guru Tegh Bahadur visited the holy Triveni at Prayaga in 1662 CE.

This visit is documented in contemporary Bhat Vahi records.

Unlike those unpublished "bhat vahis", this one was published by Sikh historian Madanjit Kaur (1978)

This Bhat Vahi was signed by Guru Tegh Bahadur.

The content of the letter is particularly striking.

Guru Tegh Bahadur calls himself a devotee of Naina Devi.

Note. A devotee of Naina Devi. He does not mention Akal Purakh or Waheguru.

In the record, Guru Tegh Bahadur identifies himself as Sodhi Khatri by Varna and Kaushish by gotra.

This is exactly how the followers of orthodox Hinduism identify themselves to this date!

Further, Guru Tegh Bahadur appoints a brahmin purohit named Bhoj Raj.

He orders Sodhis of his line and all his Sikh followers to obey the aforementioned Brahmin Purohit.

This practice of appointing purohits is just what is referred to by some people as "Brahmanical Hinduism"

1/ Today is #BlackHoleFriday, an annual science outreach event that, by complete coincidence I’m sure, is done on #BlackFriday. You’ll read lots of cool stuff about black holes on the hashtag. Here’s mine.

2/ Black holes are weird. Duh. People like to think of them as something like incredibly dense nuggets of stuff that sucks other stuff in. But they’re not like that.

3/ If you squeeze enough mass into a small enough volume, the gravity gets so intense that it’s impossible to escape them *if you get too close*. From far away, though, gravitationally they more or less act like anything with that much mass.

4/ So if the Sun turns into a black hole we wouldn’t get drawn in. In fact, we’d orbit it almost exactly the same way as we do now, though we’d freeze to death pretty rapidly, which, in the end, would still kinda suck.

5/ Black holes get weird *when you get close*. Anything with mass warps space — we feel that warp as gravity! — but black holes stretch space to its limit.

A distillation of what @naval said on Clubhouse last night:

What you call chaos I call spontaneity.

A regimented life is like a heartbeat that's non-chaotic; it's a system that’s too ordered. It doesn't have any life to it. And real life has lots of ups and downs, some of them very extreme.

I over-plan, but planning is pretty useless. What tends to dominant life are a small number of Black Swan events in both directions, positive and negative.

Expose yourself to asymmetric upside and lots of good options: things that can become massively important for you.

And you want to avoid the asymmetric downside: anything that can end the game, whether it's through financial ruin, or reputational ruin, or physical ruin.

That requires a certain amount of chaos and spontaneity.

If nothing else, 2020 taught the power of optionality.

We think about planning as linear and controlled, but that's not how the world around us works anymore.

The world is dominated by nonlinearities, so understanding options value is far more important.

Pretending that voting for Trump or denying climate change or suggesting the solution to every problem is more guns is a legitimate point of view, worthy of respect is not "how America works." It is how it dies.

People in a free society are entitled to any point of view no matter how obviously wrong or outlandish or destructive provided they do not impose their views on others.

But suggesting that something ignorant or divorced from reality warrants the same kind of treatment in public debate as something based in fact or at least credible is absurd and when done on behalf of a society in public media or academic settings it is self-destructive.

We would not grant media coverage or much bandwidth at all to a group that argued that unicorns exist or that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet views like denying climate change or basing policy decisions on sweeping, obvious lies, are just as unsound.

Somewhere, somehow, judgments must be made. Some behaviors are wrong and must be condemned. Someone must challenge lies and demand facts. Coddling people who embrace idiocies does not help them no matter how loudly they demand to be coddled.