Yeah líng 零 is pretty annoying as a learner of the language.
The top character is yŭ 雨 which means rain. Confusingly, this is the semantic component - the part that contains the meaning of the character. Explained below.
The bottom character líng 令 means order/command as a noun and verb. This doesn't add meaning, it is the phonetic component: basically a pronunciation cue.
It originally meant "light rain"/"falling in drops, like rain", actually. It began being used to mean "fragments" or "leftover part", then as "remainder" in the mathematical sense. Then, eventually, to mean 0. Another form of líng is 霝 which means raindrops. It has 3 kŏu 口 ("mouth") characters on the bottom to visually represent drops.
So, like a lot of Chinese characters, it really only makes sense when you understand the etymology - and even then it's kind of a stretch
Meant by whom? The people who do things like this have different, personal motives. They aren't doing it to spread ideology, they're doing it to address specific ideological needs in irrational ways.
Yeah - reducing things to material components isn't absurd and doesn't destroy subjective meaning.
Like, I don't believe in free will, but that doesn't mean I don't find life meaningful - it's just a fact about how the world works. I still perceive choice, I perceive meaning - it's a subjective and phenomenological matter, not an objective/material one.
Like when something good happens to them: god is rewarding me for being so good
When somehting bad happens to them: god is testing me and will reward me later for being so good
When something bad happens to someone they don't like: god is punishing them for being so bad
Or like how they pray to god for individual favors. Like "dear god even though I didnt study please let me do well on this test" as though god should care and give them special treatment for... nothing. Yet they claim to value hard work, god only gives you what you can handle, are generally fatalistic, etc.
Pure pacifism relies on an idealized view of humanity's capacity for change.
Something like "by allowing me and my family to maybe be killed, we are helping to create a more peaceful world that will change people like my killer into a peaceful person. Who knows, in the instant before they murder us, maybe they will have a change of heart"
I think there's an extent to which showing others kindness can help to change others' behavior, but it's really taking it to a ridiculous extreme if you apply it to like... your family being massacred by a really bad person/people. By that point, they're too far gone and you should really do what you need to do.
Yeah fair point. Pretty much exactly like that. Though, I think that with so many republicans being rural and poor, their feet are disproportionately shot despite them doing the shooting.
Dicks out