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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3083 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I finally finished Al-Ghazali's The Book of Knowledge. I thought it would be a quasi-religious manual about logic and argument, but it turns out to be a remarkably interesting attempt to consolidate and support the basic opinions of Islam's Prophet and the Companions on the topic of knowledge in comparison to what was deemed knowledge in his time.

...the most satisfied state of mind for the sagacious is to deem yourself alone in the universe with God, in front of you is death, the day of judgment, reckoning, heaven, and the fire; ponder deeply on what will serve you best in that which is before you and abandon all else.

Otherwise I'm attempting Said's The Question of Palestine, for reasons unrelated to my reading on Islam or contemporary events, being more interested in the idea of Othering. I'm still on Bly's Iron John, and some day soon, I hope, I will make progress in The Dawn of Everything.

Like everyone around me... Dungeon Crawler Carl. Started after Christmas on Book 5 now. It's fun, and surprisingly not battling the culture war that much.

Dungeon Crawler Car

I knew it was a comedy series, but this is just ridiculous.

Started Theft of Fire. The setup is futuristic but the underlying sentiment feels extremely US-current red-tribe. Which is not a problem for me except it feels a bit like porn (not in a sexual sense but more in a socio-political sense, if you get my drift). Which I guess isn't a problem for me too, just not exactly what I expected. Will definitely continue.

About a quarter of the way through Deathly Hallows in Italian and loving it. Finished Half Blood Prince two weeks ago and while I love many aspects of that book, the last third is super rushed.

Also starting on Spinoza's Ethics and am reading a Spanish Historical fiction novel called Aquitania about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

I tried reading Alien Clay. Didn't quite finish it; repetitive prose and ideas, some degree of oppression porn, . Felt like Avatar written by an ecologist who is also a labor-of-my-body lets-have-a-commitee-meeting marxist rather than a blue cat native-american fetishist who likes submarines. The creatures were initially interesting, but then the planet becomes an anonymous blob of empathy breaking through the false consciousness, solving the coordination problem, and overthrowing the bootlickers. I think my personal grudges prevented me from enjoying it. TL;DR "What if [bad thing: hiveminds] is actually good?"

I liked Blindsight much more.

I'm making a concerted effort to read the books I picked up at the Library used book sale last summer, which have been sitting in a nice row on my china cabinet for too long. So I've been diving into Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Thoughts so far (his ANC activism has just started):

-- Mandela is an excellent writer. His account of coming out of primitivism and poverty to lawyer and activist is compelling and personal, he manages to balance good humor and honest accounts of oppression. I'd compare it to Angela's Ashes though obviously a bit more serious, where you have accounts of bad experiences that focus on the personal and the human.

-- Mandela's account of his youth reveals a modernizing tension. He grows up in a traditional tribal society, or at least the British-Empire-Sponsored Disneyland version of such, his father was a close courtier of the tribe's chief and when his father died Nelson was raised as a ward of the chief. Then the chief tried to marry Nelson off to another prominent family, in a way that would aid the chief in tribal politics, and Nelson didn't want to marry her so he ran away to Johannesburg. When he got to Joburg he prevailed upon his co-tribals and friends of the chief for hospitality and help getting jobs and connections, though some turned him away or reduced their aid when the chief got in touch others continued to help him. Later on he lost another housing situation when he started dating a girl from another ethnic group, and complained of the prejudice between tribes. This is both philosophically inconsistent, and very sympathetic and human: Nelson admires the close ties of tribal life, and takes advantage of them; but he shirks the obedience to the chief and insular xenophobia that creates those ties.

-- I never realized how late Apartheid was introduced. The 1948 South African elections brought the Nationalist party to power, and only then was the system formalized. While obviously the prior colonial regimes were far from woke and equal, the post-1948 system was a very real reduction in rights for blacks and an even larger reduction in optimism for future rights. Nelson's account before 1948 maps to the British belief that their colonial possessions would slowly assume independence as they assumed civilization: the British would create a civilized local black elite which would assist in ruling over the black majority and slowly assume rights, black rights would expand over time as more blacks were civilized until equality was reached. Then the Afrikaner nationalists took power and took back rights blacks had already been granted, while making clear that blacks would never achieve equality with whites. I wonder to what degree this change reflected the Afrikaner history and ideology of themselves as the oppressed minority conquered by the British? I always thought that Apartheid developed naturally from earlier systems, I didn't realize it was a late-created and harsher system than what came before.

I feel like something that always gets left out of discussions about apartheid is that afrikaaners are not a Northern European ethnicity. They’re a lot more clannish, tribal, and xenophobic than thé Dutchmen they used to be. The British wrote lengthy screeds about how they were impoverished religious fanatics who married their underaged cousins…. A description generally not used for Northern European ethnicities. The simple lack of British universalizing, civilizing impulse is pretty easy to understand there.

Impoverished religious fanatics? You mean, like Pilgrims? I don't know if they married their underage cousins, though. They probably did, it's not like they were spoiled for choice in Plymouth.

"The Afrikaner is never happy if he can see the smoke of another man's fire" was a saying from the period. Another way to put it is that the Afrikaners, as the name suggests, were not European colonists who expected to someday just go home, or jaunt off to another part of their Empire. They'd severed their ties to the metropole, struck out inland, and developed the culture necessary to survive without imperial support (this happened in other places, too, particularly inland regions disconnected from maritime trade - think the Rhodesians, or the French plantation in the director's cut of Apocalypse Now - but Afrikaners did it earlier and in much harsher conditions, so their society changed more).

As to the point about Apartheid coming later than expected, Apartheid was also a reaction to urbanization and migration of black workers to the cities. The old system of a farmer having patriarchal authority over his farmhands and a mining company over its miners, worked fine for a rural economy, but once SA's cities started growing, and hordes of unmarried young men came to work there (with all the problems that has always implied in history even before you get to the racial factor), the National Party decided they needed a system that would work for controlling cities as well as the countryside. The "Swart Gevaar" doesn't really exist before urbanization - rural unrest can always be put down but urban riots get out of control - hence why Apartheid comes later than the colonial systems of control.

It's very clear that the British viewed the Afrikaaners as colonial ethnics in the same way they viewed the Zulu, maybe a step above the blacks but fundamentally a primitive group to be managed through conflict with other such groups.

Wolf Totem

I'd always heard that Chinese literature, translated in English, was generally pretty bad- stilted, awkward phrasing, often on an infantile reading level, rather mediocre and meandering, like the worst of Dickens imitated by a third grader. But this is not like that; the prose reads like an American wrote it originally in the midcentury.

A bit over halfway through Blindsight. Honestly, I can't say I'm loving it. It may be destined for the charity shop.

It's one of my favorite first contact stories. What didn't you like so far?

I think it's mainly a style thing. The narration is so dense with jargon that there are often times when I literally cannot follow what's happening. Maybe this wouldn't be such an issue if I was a bigger sci-fi head.

I'm likewise having trouble keeping track of which character is which, an especially galling failing given that the narration makes such a big point of how different the characters are (both from each other and the human norm). One of the main characters has multiple personalities, but might as well not for all the difference it makes to her voice.

I hated the prose too. Like another commenter said though, it is intentional. If I recall, one jarring word choice was something like the word 'vessel' to refer to a person's physical body -- over and over and over again. My guess is this is meant to characterize the narrator. so, I don't knock off points for it, just to say: I won't be reading it again.

It has some really interesting ideas, but I found the execution underwhelming for the same reasons as you.

I may read too much sci-fi, then, because I was all-in on the jargon.

The audiobook has good delivery with distinct voices for all the characters; Spindel and Cunningham talk quite differently while both being stemlords.

The narration is so dense with jargon that there are often times when I literally cannot follow what's happening.

I think this has to be somewhat intentional, it forces you into the role of the narrator, who also doesn't understand what's happening. I'm only being half ironic. I found this to get better the longer you read. But yes, Blindsight is probably the book benefiting most from a re-read I can think of right now.

I'm likewise having trouble keeping track of which character is which, an especially galling failing given that the narration makes such a big point of how different the characters are

I know what you mean about the multiple personalities, that confused me to no end when it was introduced first. And I agree, three of them are extremely similar (I think their points of distinction are "mother", "child with romantic interest" and "child who uses curse words". But I was fine with that, if I remember correctly they mostly work different parts of the linguist job. The rest of the crew (vampire, STEM-autist, military woman and the narrator) are pretty distinct in my memory and reasonably well done voices. But that's not what Watts excels at anyway. I mostly love Blindsight for his unique ideas, the central premise, his world building, how he structured the story, and - yes - his prose. The last one is up to taste, and there can be no disputes about taste.

Glad to hear I wasn't the only one unimpressed.

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I've been wanting to read this one for a long time but there's a shaggy dog story that boils down to buying this one in paperback ages ago but said paperback turned out to be a misprinted copy, so when it went on sale in the Kindle bookstore, I was all too happy to pick it up.

I read this one recently: I liked it overall. Without spoilers, I thought it interesting that the plot twist, to the extent there is one, struck me as very "of it's time" in how it reflects on the human condition, but in a way that I don't think could be written today because waves at culture war, nor would the conclusion be deemed quite as satisfactory in that light. At the time, it was pretty well received by critics, too: an interesting display of shifting political winds.

I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts, though.

All right, it's been a few days since I finished the book and I gotta agree that Mote wouldn't have ever made it past the editors in modern publishing. That said, I have to say that the book is quite well-written and I can easily see why it's such a classic. Yes, there's zeerust, as there is with all aged works, but the CoDominium being the obvious big one is actually pretty impressive to me. Gotta give Niven and Pournelle props for not getting too into the weeds with the science part of their science fiction there. And the first contact angle of the story is exceptionally well done, with mediator caste of the Moties in particular being a clever way to facilitate communication between species. It pays proper care to the incredibly difficult nature of the task without feeling too hand-wavey to me. I also appreciated the true alien-ness of the Motie world and culture compared to the recognizably human culture of the second empire. All in all, I think it holds up well on the whole, and I'll be keeping my eye out for The Gripping Hand.

Challenge accepted, I'll update when I've finished the book. Glad to hear that you liked it!

I started that this past weekend. Finished chapter 2 tonight. Not a very impressive start, but I'll keep going and see how it develops.

Eh, it's been good enough to hold my attention (currently on chapter 12, and things have developed quickly) but then again, I always say I'm a cheap date when it comes to books and it continues to be true!

Just started The Vorkosigan Saga and I'm loving it so far. Been on my list for a long time and I'm glad I'm finally checking it out. Old sci-fi at its best.

It was an interesting series but one that I myself never got into. It came highly recommended to me, but I read Shards of Honour, Barrayar, and then concluded that not only was it not for me, but I didn't understand the praise for it. To me it read like, well, pulp. Bujold's prose isn't particularly impressive, her worldbuilding is formulaic, and her characters were bland. I filed them away as the sorts of novels you read in airports or on long flights - not good by any reasonable standard, but consistently tolerable, while not asking much of the reader. To this day I don't understand the love for them. I can't even really muster the energy to dislike them. The strongest opinion I have of them is... well, I should put that down-thread.

What are some extremely good novels you would like, then?

I have fond memories going through the saga, it's certainly doing something pretty unique. Just introducing standard sci-fi tech gimmicks, and then really deep explorations of what having technology like that means for society. I also like how it mostly doesn't take easy outs, plenty of hard consequences for the characters to live with. It's pretty well done, even if it's much more classic space opera than modern hard sci-fi.

It's also an interesting time capsule, for me it's the absolute essence of proto-woke. The breath and depth of the progressive thought surprised me several times considering the release dates of the books. She hits most modern culture war foci decades before they became mainstream.

True! So far there's a lot of feminism for sure. But at least it's early stage feminism where she accepts inequality of outcome, and that women shouldn't try to pretend to be men. Not the insanity we have today.

I find this particularly funny because I remember reading Barrayar and feeling that it was... er, basically a pro-life tract? As a book? This greatly offended the liberal-left friends who had recommended it to me, but I think I stand by that judgement.

Barrayar is a book in which the protagonist is a pregnant woman, Cordelia, who chooses not to use an artificial womb because she feels that the biological, bodily experience of pregnancy is of some sort of inherent value, whose child is identified early on as having significant disabilities, and who faces tremendous social pressure to abort the child, or even to give him up for infanticide after birth. She takes great personal risks to keep this child and give birth anyway, because all life is sacred, and ultimately the character most determined to abort the inferior child, count Piotr, is charmed by the child's simple goodness despite his disability.

If I were planning a book from the ground up to make the case for pro-life ethics, I could hardly do much better.

The book is, of course, critical of patriarchal and feudal Barrayar, but its depiction of Beta Colony, the enlightened liberal state, is also harshly critical! I came away from the book feeling that Beta was, if anything, more dystopian than Barrayar. At least Barrayar doesn't issue breeding licenses. I felt that Barrayar came off as something like a defense of natural, traditional parenthood. Barrayar's aristocracy are so concerned with face and honour that they will abort and murder children; Beta is so disconnected from biological life that they sever birth from the mother's body entirely, and they put mandatory state-controlled contraceptive implants in everyone. These are both deeply wrong.

Very much agree. It's extremely lovely that she writes a world in which her politics don't neatly align with either traditionalism as such or extreme sci fi progressivism. I'm having a great time reading it, just finished The Warrior's Apprentice.

Yeah, that's the first major theme, and it always has some presence throughout the series. Next big one after that will be ableism, which also stays present till the end. Then classism, critique of empire and colonialism, mental health, fat acceptance, racism against actual new human sub-species, homosexuality, sexual deviancy, even some quick trans side characters.

But yes, most of it is well done.

See also the Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game (licensed GURPS product, "with character art specifically approved by Lois McMaster Bujold").

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