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So this is going viral Dalai Lama apologizes after video asking child to 'suck' his tongue sparks outcry. This was in February, but only today he apologized after it went viral.
One thing that's interesting is major media sites like CNN are hiding the video, presumably because it's 'too inappropriate', yet it was trivially easy to find footage of the Trump Access Hollywood tape leak when that story broke:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/07/donald-trump-women-lewd-comments-origwx-cs.cnn
or nytimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005573743/trump-casts-doubt-on-access-hollywood-video.html
or npr:
https://www.npr.org/2016/10/08/497164654/trump-caught-on-tape-making-lewd-remarks-about-women-in-2005
Other news sites link to a tweet containing the Dalai Lama video.
There are two ways of looking at this: either Dalai Lama knew it was inappropriate but didn't care or did not expect it to viral. Or he actually thought it was harmless.
I feel like the Internet is losing its collective mind about that. It is not even a scissor statement, but everyone is aghast: The Buddhism subreddit has threads about people having a religious crisis. The Twitter hashtag is atheists being giddy taking a religious icon down, wokes grandstanding about abusive childhood trauma, evangelicals gladly attacking a trendy competing religion, rightwingers posting old memes of Biden and trying to smear any Democrat as a pedo if they had a photo together with the Dalai Llama…
I am not saying it is ok or appropriate or that his goofing around wasn’t icky. But sexual predator? A pedophile? I am baffled. My model of the Llama is that of a jester and he is someone who doesn’t have much experience with children. Also he is superold, and old people can be sometimes strange and weird. Doesn’t that suffice in explanation?
My thought when I first heard “suck my tongue” was that this is an idiom or cultural thing that might not be sexual at all. It’s just a very odd thing to say at least in English. I haven’t really gone digging for the videos so I’m not sure, but it sounds so Engrish that I find it hard to take as a sexual thing.
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I have noticed the same thing, and the bored response it has gotten here makes me happy, because yeah he's just a little old loon.
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This was almost my exact reaction. I don't particularly care about the Dalai Llama, aside as an interesting tourist attraction, but...he's like a billion years old. Old people start to lose their mental faculties. He also has been known as a joker AFAIK, and this just seems like an old/senile person trying to be funny with a kid, or gross them out to make them laugh. It comes across as completely inappropriate but...old people are weird, and often crazy. This is an old person behaving crazy. He may have pooped his pants a few seconds later.
I think the people making a comparison to Biden are correct though. It seems wildly hypocritical that this is a "story" and the numerous videos of Biden behaving badly around children aren't/isn't.
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