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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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