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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3275 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 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've finished Al-Ghazali's Prophetic Ethics, the rather slim 20th volume of his Revival of the Religious Sciences. Most of it is a recounting of Hadith, and somewhat threadbare, since the previous 9 books had apparently dealt with the issues presented in detail. The best parts are all when Al-Ghazali speaks in his own voice, which happens rarely near the end. I suspect I'll be pouring over this one occasionally neverthless, looking for lessons to be drawn from its structure and focus.

Finished Ivan and Phoebe which I kind of stalled out on. The ending, last two pages annoyed me. It was fine up until that point, maybe even would recommend it for my wife's reading group as it could have some interesting "feminist" incites but that ending...

Asked an LLM to pitch me something super fun and it suggested Kings of the Wyld. And I am reading it at a good pace (for me), but I'm 30% of the way through and it's kind of meh. I was told it was funny, but the humor just isn't landing for me. It's got progressive stuff but not too progressive... Like one of the band is gay, but there are no women and no they/them (screw you American Hippo - one of the very few books I haven't finished).

Minor spoiler: I guess it's supposed to be funny the old fogies were always hapless bad asses - and still can be - but they're going to get embarrassed by the same group of chicks multiple times in the same way... ha ha ha... I guess it's a way to keep them from getting too powerful too fast as they always lose their money...

Also a character gets to destroy something really valuable because it makes him emotional and no one cares.

Book 2 of The Expanse. Probably a third of the way through.

There’s a certain predictability to the side characters, where you can kind of sum them up in one phrase. Distraught biologist father. Traumatized but vengeful marine. Unassuming career bureaucrat.

By taking certain character beats and setting details for granted, it implies what I want to label a conservative worldview. Of course the bureaucrats hold all the real power. Of course they push the authentic men and women, the soldiers and pilots, around like chess pieces, then get surprised when they act out. Of course the unassuming grandma among them is the most effective, and of course she blames her male colleagues for letting testosterone rule their decisions. There’s a single paragraph about how the fertility crisis didn’t survive contact with universal basic income. This is kinda plot relevant but also reveals a lot about the author.

Maybe I’m just calling it conservative because it reminds me of Tom Clancy. People show up, perform their story-function, and leave. Sometimes they’ll expound a bit of background. If they’re heroic, they’ll be demonstrably skilled at their area of expertise, and they’ll probably get to show moral or technical superiority over an outsider. If villainous, they’re played completely differently. Still competent in a scary way, only failing if a protagonist is around.

I can’t exactly say this is a bad thing. I kept rolling my eyes for the first few chapters, but by this point, I’m committed. Axiomatic worldbuilding is good. Leaning on tropes makes the story run smoothly. Above all, the Expanse benefits from the strength of its main cast, who embody the space-opera traditions.

Good fun. 7/10 so far. We’ll see if it holds up.

Expanse was my go to example of how you can do diversity and even girl power (not quite as consistent as they should have been but that was probably asking too much) in a way that makes since in contrast to the forced diversity in Wheel of Time which had some built plot to actually explore diversity if they show runners were just patient.

Yeah, it's interesting, the authors are very much redditors but within that worldview they're sort of small-c conservative of it. I will say characterization gets much better as the books go on (I hear Books 3/4 are rough in that respect, some unfortunate teething pains with bad POV characters, I skipped them since I was coming from the show). I've made this argument here before, but it's a rare case of the show being better than the books in the early seasons, since the writers had time to go back and write what they would have written if they knew where the story was going, plus polishing up some rough patches.

I recently encountered this not-a-review about Crichton.

The cognitive load of most Micheal Crichton sentences are almost exactly the same. Everything is what it is. It runs through your mind like smooth directly-stated ticker tape. That's why you can read it almost five times faster than Nabokov. It's designed to be read that way. To be clear.

I suspect that the same is true for what I was calling “conservatism.” Tropes, even Boomer or GenX tropes, reduce the narrative friction. We readers get to model Avarasala or Bobbie with minimal cognitive overhead. Very practical, very effective for a thriller, since we want to move from plot point to plot point.

Re-re-re-reading the Sienkiewicz Trilogy. I don't know how he does it, but those books should be the gold standard for epic historical adventure novels.

Also reading Angel Down. And man, this is some cringey tryhard nonsense so far.

Edit: Finished Angel down. And yep, it was cringey tryhard nonsense to the bitter end, at which it also revealed itself to be a vehicle for the usual woke moralizing.

I'm intrigued. Tell me more about this trilogy.

It has also inspired 3 movies.

I'm on vacation, so no keyboard, only the phone. I'll keep it brief, which will fail to do the epic scope of the novels justice.

It's about noble officers in the various mid- and late 17th century wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, written by a Pole at a time when there was no independent Poland. It's stylized, and exaggerates both fictional and historical personages to paint a greater-than-life picture of heroic struggle by all sides. Even the nominal villains are always multidimensional, and have comprehensible motivations, even if some flaws in their character drive them to wrongdoing. The heroes are perfectly virtuous in most ways, but also have flaws enough. And notably, they are virtuous in the ways expected of 17th century Polish aristocrats fighting existential wars in the remote borderlands of the Ukraine, i.e., they are arrogant, quarrelsome, cruel, duplicitous, violent and without a shred of conscience so long as their opponents give them the slightest cause. And so are the villains, of course - the lines between the two are very blurry, and the narration is explicit about this, even when it takes sides.

And the books take their time. Narrative arcs breathe, they recur, variations are explored and used to highlight character development or failure to develop, characters are given scene upon scene to exhibit themselves, and there seems to be no need to cater to short attention spans, epic events are given suitable build-up and space to play out. Travelling takes time, and we get plenty of scenes of military life in the wilderness.

I could write more, but I am scared of fatfingering my phone and accidentally obliterating this comment. Feel free to repeat the question next week.

What particular lessons do you take from al-Ghazali? Are there any highlights worth sharing?

Al-Ghazali was the first time that I actually felt like I understood some of the appeal of Islam.

One of the reasons for that has nothing to do with the books: I actually never knew about hadith (ie. recordings of what people have seen or heard from their Prophet), and it never occured to me that the often harsh tone taken in the Quran (which is narrated from the words of the angel Gabriel) might not necessarily reflect on Muhammad's actual disposition. One wonders if the reason why Muhammad preached at all was because he was terrified of the visions of the fire that he was shown, and he couldn't stand by and do nothing while others quietly walked towards such horrors. A large portion of Al-Ghazali's texts is just hadith and commentary on that, which gave me a very different view of Islam.

Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly. At least the Islam of his time taught that everything that happens is God's will, ie. that free will is not a thing, and the justification for punishing those who can do nothing otherwise is that God can do what he wills with his own possessions. Even if God chose to be completely unjust to all human beings, that would be his right. But the mercy of God can be seen in the way that he does not do this. We can see here the meaning of the saying of Muhammad "Surely, of the excellence of a person's Islam is that he leaves what does not concern him." When another person wrongs you, the origin of the wrong is actually God, and the purpose of the wrong is to test you, to see what you will do. Everything thereby becomes subsumed in a dialectical relationship with God:

...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. (#1)

It helps a lot that Al-Ghazali clearly possessed a highly intelligent mind. I find that the Quran is not as eloquent or sophisticated as other well-known religious texts, though perhaps it comes off better in Arabic. But it becomes clear through Al-Ghazali's treatment that the meaning of that scripture really is something that has intellectual substance. I have not read these books with a systematic intent to study them, so I've only learned through a kind of osmosis the habits and ways of thinking that are either implicit or explicit in the Islamic tradition. There is an idea of seeing what is plain, of moderation. And it is full of gems. Some of the quotes from Al-Ghazali himself (not hadith) that I bothered to copy down are:

A man who destroys himself seeking the well-being of others lacks intelligence. (#1)

For He who sent down the affliction sent down the remedy, provided instructions for its application, and provided the means to practice it. It is therefore forbidden to expose oneself to devastation by neglecting it. (#1)

Desire, partisanship, and hatred for his rivals and opponents overwhelm his heart and prevent him from seeing the truth, to the point that if he were asked, “Would you like God to remove the veil for you and show you firsthand that your rival is in the right?” he would refuse this in fear that his rival would rejoice in his defeat. This is the fatal disease that spreads through the land and the people. It is a kind of corruption caused by those who engage in partisan debate. (#2)

There are also deeper issues of Al-Ghazali's thought which I do not yet understand, like his connection to the Sufis and his emphasis on the heart, or his thoughts on what occupations are a communal duty, which fascinate me, but I'm not yet qualified to speak on. I, at least, have found it worth my time.

Beyond that, there is a clearer sense of the whole picture that can be gleamed. The example that comes to mind is in Principles of the Creed (book 2), where the theological differences between Islam and, say, Christianity become apparent very quickly.

One of the interesting tensions in Islam, it seems to me, especially as compared to Christianity, is that Islam tends to emphasise firstly that everything is absolutely foreknown and determined by God, and secondly that also human free choice is absolutely vital. Compared to Christianity, Islam has a much stronger teaching on predestination, but also claims to uphold free will to a greater degree. On the face of it this seems like a contradiction.

The latter is probably easier to grapple with. Christianity says that human freedom or human will is in some way blunted or damaged. The Fall happened and so we are either unable to independently choose good, or our ability to choose good is in some way constrained. As such the believer is wholly dependent on the grace of God. While Islam agrees that the believer is always wholly dependent on God (as all things are, at all times, for only God is self-sufficient), within that overall framework, it is much more confident about the ability of people to freely choose the good. Islam assumes from first principles that God would not set before us any task that we are not capable of accomplishing. God asks nothing of us that we cannot do. To do otherwise would be unjust of him.

Christianity tends to say that God asks of us more than we can do. Jesus commands his followers "be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). Throughout the gospels Jesus is constantly asking people to do the unreasonable or the extreme, like sell all their possessions, or die with him. He says that if the disciples truly had faith they would be able to ask a mountain to move, and it would. It seems as though, for Jesus, even the very best that a human can do is not enough. The usual interpretation of this is that Jesus wants to challenge people beyond their own capacities so that they realise they radical dependence on God - that they come to understand their own finitude, and therefore are able to wholeheartedly cast themselves upon God's mercy.

Through Islamic eyes, this is unjust. God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do. Christianity comes to this conclusion in past as a response to the failure of the Law - Paul spends a long time agonising over the fact (as he sees it) that the Law failed to produce righteousness. Islam, however, is much more positive about the Law, and in fact tends to see Christianity as a retrogression, a kind of civilisational backwards step in abandoning the rigour of divine Law. (Judaism is in principle correct about the Law and its value, but it goes wrong firstly by applying it to only a select people, rather than everyone, and secondly by getting muddled up about some details.) You can see that Islam is thus, in a sense, much more optimistic about human will and the possibility of human righteousness than Christianity.

However, this optimism about free will occurs in front of the backdrop of God's absolute sovereignty. Reconciling God's authorship of all creation with human free will is going to be reminiscent of Calvinist debates - but that might be a discussion for a bit later.

This rings true with what I've read from al-Ghazali. God created both the problem and the solution, and each individual's task is to act in proportion to his own ability while increasing his ability to act. Islam is said to be the straight path, which doesn't put undue burdens on people, yet also provides comprehensive guidance such that there is no excuse for failing to uphold one's obligations. Hence, one who exceeds bounds is not just ignorant but also silly, because he cannot see what is in front of him, and goes in search of many schemes. This seems (to me) to lends itself to a sense that the view of sin or lapse of self-control which the West often holds, that it is a difficult and even unsolvable problem, that it requires much sophistication to overcome and even then one will stray, is inimical to the Islamic mind.

It's true that many Muslims use the term "free will," but I think al-Ghazali is right that the original view places a heavier emphasis on God's will. There is a constant refrain in the Quran that goes like this: "[81:27] This is a message for all people; [28] for those who wish to take the straight path. [29] But you will only wish to do so by the will of God, the Lord of all people." There are passages in the Bible which are similar, I suppose, like God hardening Pharaoh's heart, or some statements of Paul about the elect, but something about this seems more central to Islam.

Wiki tells me that "those who assert free-will are called Qadariyya, while those who reject free-will are called Jabriyya." Personally I'm more interested in the bite-the-bullet methodology of al-Ghazali (unless I'm misinterpreting him, which I might be), because consistency of thought can often yield impressive results even if one stands on disputed ground, and I suspect that he's closer to their Prophet's original intention that those who emphasize personal responsibility.

The Mu'tazilites denied predestination, I believe, but they ceased to exist a long time ago.

To make a very broad generalisation again, I think the three Abrahamic faiths all have a different 'main character', in a sense. For Jews the main character is a specific people - the story is about the Jewish people and their collective relationship with God. For Christians the main character is often an individual person - it is about your relationship with God. For Muslims the main character is all people - it's about humanity's relationship with God. Anecdotally when I have spoken to Muslims, by far the main criticism they make of Judaism is that it is particularist, focused on a single people and distinguishing between peoples, and by far the main criticism they make of Christianity is that it compromises the absolute oneness of God.

Anyway, in that broader context, it is perhaps understandable that free will is not as important in Islam, and Muslims are less inclined to go to lengths to rescue the principle. Islam is, in a sense, the most theocentric of the Abrahamic religions. Islam is about God, and it is comparatively less interested in anthropology. (Since Christianity's most basic claim is that God became man, Christianity must wrestle directly with the meaning of both 'God' and 'man'.) The human fades into the background before the absolute majesty of God.

If I think about the most beloved verses of the Qur'an, they're all about God. 1:1 is regularly cited; the Throne Verse is immensely popular as well. It is about the majesty of God. By contrast the most beloved verse of the Christian Bible is, what, John 3:16? It is about Jesus - about fathers and sons and salvation. It's also about what God has done rather than about who God is. I think there is a significant difference of emphasis between the traditions, even though Christians would surely agree that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and Muslims would surely agree that God deeply loves the world and has compassion towards humanity.

One of the interesting tensions in Islam, it seems to me, especially as compared to Christianity, is that Islam tends to emphasise firstly that everything is absolutely foreknown and determined by God, and secondly that also human free choice is absolutely vital.

Funny; that's actually how I understand Christianity itself to be, including the concept that "God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do". (Which I always found a bit of a fortune cookie when used that way; if you assume this is true, then whatever happens to a man on Earth is by definition what he could bear.)

The Fall happened and so we are either unable to independently choose good, or our ability to choose good is in some way constrained. As such the believer is wholly dependent on the grace of God.

The latter is kind of Christianity 3:16 101. I agree that lots of Christians never really make it past that part, which is why doing things like writing the law on one's heart is a meaningless statement, for the answer it gives would always be wrong. Why even tell us to put on the armor of God when no man could even begin to don it? Why imply that one might even expect to understand what the Lord's will is? How could we even have been created to do good works, and how could they have been prepared in advance for us to do them?

Islam, however, is much more positive about the Law, and in fact tends to see Christianity as a retrogression, a kind of civilisational backwards step in abandoning the rigour of divine Law.

In your opinion, what is Islam's relationship with that law?

Paul spends a long time agonising over the fact (as he sees it) that the Law failed to produce righteousness

I'm honestly not even sure how surprised anyone should actually be about that (unless this is in the context that it sucks that you can't just follow the law if you're already doing what, in spirit, it requires). How could a law be expected to produce the behavior of judging one's own heart in its observers? Stereotypically, Judaism is kind of the epitome of tricking God doing everything that the law requires while ignoring its meaning perfectly, which if the Bible is to be believed was as true in Jesus' day as it is today (like that eruv wire strung around the Promised Land of... Manhattan). I don't think Islam is nearly as famous for that.

Then again, of course, maybe the huge list of "tricks" generated is part of the point, since an observer ultimately has to make a judgement call about what thing falls within what category, and it is perhaps the act of continually doing that which imparts life/generates the righteousness. Which is perhaps why those laws could ever be condensed down into 2 sentences in the first place.

Throughout the gospels Jesus is constantly asking people to do the unreasonable or the extreme, like sell all their possessions, or die with him.

I always find it odd that, provided we assume Jesus is God, that these things are considered unreasonable or extreme. It would certainly be extreme for any non-God individuals, but 'the entity that is in charge of life even after death is standing in front of you asking a question that involve having to do that' seems to me to be a bit of an extreme circumstance itself.

Funny; that's actually how I understand Christianity itself to be, including the concept that "God does not torment people by requiring of them more than they can do".

There are definitely passages in the Bible that point in that direction. Jesus famously says "my yoke is easy and my burden is light", and 1 Cor 10:13 reads, "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it."

Even so I think there is a tension here in Christianity. God does not test you beyond your strength, but at the same time, it is impossible for you to achieve true righteousness under your own power. Everyone is a sinner.

The latter is kind of Christianity 3:16 101. I agree that lots of Christians never really make it past that part, which is why doing things like writing the law on one's heart is a meaningless statement, for the answer it gives would always be wrong. Why even tell us to put on the armor of God when no man could even begin to don it? Why imply that one might even expect to understand what the Lord's will is? How could we even have been created to do good works, and how could they have been prepared in advance for us to do them?

Certainly it would be a gross misunderstanding of Christianity to say that, because true righteousness is impossible to achieve unaided, we therefore need not strive for it. That would obviously be a perverse position, and as all the passages you've just alluded to indicate, Christians are exhorted to constantly strive for righteousness.

In your opinion, what is Islam's relationship with that law?

Islam is fairly straightforward, I think. In most matters like this, I find Islam tends to be more straightforward and common-sense than Christianity.

Depending on your perspective, this is either because Islam has the simple clarity of God's true and final revelation, whereas Christianity is such an incoherent, hacked-together set of false assumptions that it requires endless paradoxes and epicycles just to fit together; or it's because Islam is a simplistic creed inadequate to either life or God, whereas the paradoxes of Christianity speak to its deeper truth.

Anyway, Islam is simple. The divine Law is true, obligatory, and binding on all people. It is Sharia. The Law as it is understood in Judaism is a kind of distorted funhouse mirror of Sharia. Ancient believers like Abraham were Muslims and followed Sharia correctly, but at some point their descendants got confused, mixed up records, and so their Law, through a decent approximation of the true Law, nonetheless requires correction. Fortunately God has provided that correction. The next step is obvious - all Jews (and for that matter all people full stop) should become Muslims.

I find that the Quran is not as eloquent or sophisticated as other well-known religious texts, though perhaps it comes off better in Arabic.

I always suspected that grand foundational religious (and other) texts bend what is even considered good and beautiful around themselves to a nontrivial degree. If that is true, it would make sense that the Quran, which is hardly used in translation, would not be well-received in English.

As a relevant datum, perhaps, the Russian Bible translations, which I grew up with, do evoke in me qualia of beauty and eloquence, while any English and German ones just seem lame and stilted. I doubt Russian Bible translators were particularly more skilled (though some argument could be made for the Russian language being far better equipped to preserve rhetorical choices in Greek source texts - as a fairly well-known example, Russian gets to punt on the decision of how to deal with the Greek epiousion of "daily bread" fame entirely by simply calquing the Greek morpheme for morpheme), so the relevant difference probably comes down to whether you were bombarded with the assertion that this is what prose with gravitas looks like at a formative age.

(On the other hand, while my Arabic is pretty minimal, having perhaps peaked at what Europeans would call A1 level long ago, I did get the sense that the Quran in the Arabic original is at least very lyrical, in the sense of using the grammatical affordances of the language in a clever way, and more simply sounding beautiful when read out loud.)

I find the Qur'an is often more attractive when sung or recited in the manner of a poem. Certainly as far as religious texts go, it reads almost uniquely badly. However, famously there is a whole small genre of recitation of the Qur'an among devout Muslims, and even as a non-speaker of Arabic, I recognise the beauty of this. I don't know how much it's unique to the specific text of the Qur'an - Christian hymns in Arabic sound beautiful to me as well - but I can at least entertain the possibility that Arabic speakers are right when they tell me that the language of the Qur'an is beautiful, in its original language, and when proclaimed properly.

I am more experienced with the Bible, of course, and I'd say it varies. There are passages that, in Hebrew or Greek, stand out to me as particularly beautiful, or even individual phrases that, for me, have the character of a refreshing wind across my soul. Often they do not have this quality in translation in English - though that may simply be because of over-exposure to the translations. But there are also undoubtedly better or worse translations into other languages as well. I'll never forget once knowing someone who grew up with the equivalent of those excitable, contemporary Bible translations aimed at teenagers, who bounced off the Bible and found it tawdry, and then seeing their reaction upon first reading a more mature translation. The way the light came into their eyes as suddenly the words of Jesus lost that cheap feeling, and instead struck home, was a privilege to witness.

My sense is that the Quran verses are optimised for a certain hypnotic quality, which synergises with the default mode of delivery, and I don't sense that much of it in the Christian Arabic examples you link (though incidentally I remember getting some of it from some Coptic ones I heard before). One good example of this is al-Ahzab 35, which not only is very persistent in repeating the gender parallelism that just can't be made to sound smooth in English (the truth-tellers and the truth-telleresses... the endurers and the endureresses...) but also has some obvious structure around how it orders the words for the qualities it lists (similar words next to each other, structural deviations around ones that break the pattern by being longer).

Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.

Yes, translations of 33:35 don't convey the rhythm that well. Consider:

Surely ˹for˺ Muslim men and women, believing men and women, devout men and women, truthful men and women, patient men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, men and women who guard their chastity, and men and women who remember Allah often—for ˹all of˺ them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

Surely, Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women, devout men and devout women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, and the men who give Sadaqah (charity) and the women who give Sadaqah, and the men who fast and the women who fast, and the men who guard their private parts (against evil acts) and the women who guard (theirs), and the men who remember Allah much and the women who remember (Him) - for them, Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

For men and women who are devoted to God- believing men and women, obedient men and women, truthful men and women, steadfast men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, chaste men and women, men and women who remember God often- God has prepared forgiveness and a rich reward.

Lo! men who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere (in righteousness) and women who persevere, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember Allah much and women who remember - Allah hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.

None of it flows that well, whereas Arabic fortunately expresses all this with suffixes - -in for men and -at for women, so transliterated from Arabic you get:

'inn ٱlmuslimin waٱlmuslimat waٱlmuminin waٱlmuminat waٱlqanitin waٱlqanitat waٱlssadiqin waٱlssadiqat waٱlssabirin waٱlssabirat waٱlkhashiein waٱlkhashieat waٱlmutasaddiqin waٱlmutasaddiqat waٱlssayimin waٱlssayimat waٱlhafizin furujahum waٱlhafizat waٱldhdhakirin ٱlllah kathiranۭa waٱldhdhakirat 'aeadd ٱlllah lahum mmaghfiratanۭ wa'ajran eazimanۭa

And this is just one example. There is a lot, both in terms of aural quality and in terms of meaning, that works well in Arabic, or in other Semitic languages, but does not come across well in English. One that comes up a lot is comparatives and superlatives. Arabic expresses degree by modifying the vowels that connect the root elements, rather than by adding a new word. English translations have to come up with awkward phrases like, to use the example of 1:1, "the most compassionate, the most merciful", or "the all compassionate, the everlastingly merciful", or "the supremely beneficent, the greatest in mercy", and it loses the elegance of the original.

This is not to say that I think that Arabic is uniquely well-suited to expressing God's word or anything - I am not a Muslim and I do not subscribe to the doctrine of i'jaz. This is a problem with all translation, and there are things that can be expressed very beautifully in English but which are very difficult to translate into Arabic. Nonetheless, for me as a non-Arabic-speaking observer, it is still useful to learn just enough to be able to see what it is that people have in mind when they talk about how the Qur'an is so much more attractive in the original language.

Which English Bible translations do you like? I found that I'm neither a fan of the "plain language" ones like the NIV, nor the KJV which strikes me as choosing pomp over clarity with such determination that some sentences become borderline nonsensical.

UBS Greek New Testament. Git gud. :P

Nah, to be serious, I go back and forth a bit. The translation I use the most as a default is the NRSV, which generally strikes a good balance between readability and formality or dignity, but there are certainly places where I think the NRSV mistranslates, or just has a bad style. In places I think the Jerusalem Bible or NJB have quite nice turns of phrase as well.

I’ve read al-Ghazali here and there, and the KCA was based on an original formulation al-Ghazali laid out in the medieval era, which later Christian philosophers revived.

On the point about the Hadith - most of the Hadith are very repetitive and you can find the same identical sayings that are practically 95% similar, stated and overstated throughout the multiple volumes in Bukhari and Muslim. You can buy truncated and condensed versions off Amazon that remove the duplications, as I’ve found them easier to read without getting bored by it.

It is also worth bearing in mind that most hadith collectors were both obsessive and pedantic and therefore included every hadith they had heard that had a reasonable chance of being authentic, including those that were just minor variations of others. This means that if you read any given large hadith collection, it is likely that modern scholars would dispute some of them, or argue over their plausibility and likely context. Al-Bukhari or Imam Muslim did try to filter out unreliable hadith, but their judgements were not infallible. Authentic hadith are authoritative for Muslims, in theory, but the word 'authentic' leaves a lot of room to dispute.

Yeah. I’m not fully equipped to elaborate on their scholarly methodology for determining authenticity at the time Islamic scholars went around collecting Muhammad’s statements, but I think it follows a simple chain logic from tradition and how many times the statement is repeated. I have full English-Arabic collections of the Hadith and these sets are distinguished by the scholarly views of their authenticity. Sahih Al-Bukhari is considered the most authoritative, followed by Sahih Muslim, then you’ve got the less reliable sets like Sunan Dawud.

My mom wrote a book. Its narrative non-fiction. About one of our ancestors that lived during the civil war and was one of the founders of the DAR. Told through a series of letters that she wrote and that people wrote to her. Very depressing. People die a lot, and the war was horrific.

I'm trying to read it and give feedback as an early editor.

Has your mum had anything professionally published before?

Academic papers, but not a book. She has a friend in the DAR that has professionally published before and was giving her some advice.

A Feast for Crows. Favorite ASOIAF book hands down. Don't mind the plot slowdown as much as some others, and although I clearly recognize that it is an inferior book to ASOS, I really enjoy the deeper interiority we get with the characters and the general theme of the book (what happens to a kingdom country when all the competent people are gone).

Also reading Los girasoles ciegos (the blind sunflowers) which was a gift from my Spanish friend. Definitely a challenge for my Spanish, but also enjoying it.

I was under the impression that among ASOIAF snobs, AFFC is considered the better book, but is liked less because it follows PoV characters most of the fandom doesn't care about. Meanwhile ASOS is considered a bit sloppy by George's standards because he wrote the whole thing relatively quickly and was just throwing stuff out there. Less attention to detail.

AFFC and perhaps to an even greater extent ADWD are much better written, at least at a prose level than the first three books. Much better dialogue, much more beautiful descriptions, much more interiority for all of our characters. The problem with both books is that they don't advance the plot very much and they completely explode the number of POV characters. Which would be fine is GRRM was willing to just Wheel of Time it and write 14 books, but he clearly isn't, so here we stand.

I remember liking A Feast for Crows, and not being able to finish A Dance with Dragons. I think that may be just a product of my own biases, though. For my money the 'good part' of A Song of Ice and Fire is the Westerosi feudal backstabbing, whereas all the side plots are generally bad. I do not care about Essos, Daenerys, Targaryens, or dragons. All of that is boring. The Night's Watch and the Others are... good, actually, but should be a different series. There is no need for them here. I think the biggest criticism I have of A Feast for Crows is that I think it's the one that introduces most of the Greyjoy characters, and I'm sorry, we do not need this massive excursus about Cthulhu-worshipping Vikings. Are they a cool idea, in the abstract? Yes. They're certainly better than anything featuring Essos or the Targaryens. But - focus, GRRM! Focus!

I think aSoIaF is, for me, a good example of one of those works where the author does not understand the appeal of his own writing.

Then again, judging from those TV shows they keep making, apparently there is somebody out there who likes the incest dragons...

Dance used to be my favorite book in the series. Last reread I could not stomach most of it. I think the Mereenese Blot (Adam Feldman) does a good job at unpacking the themes, and there is a lot of good stuff there. It's just not engaging in the way that the King's Landing stuff is. The North Plotline in that book is pretty good, but again it's because as you say, that George is focused on plotting and backstabbing.

Well, the things that worked best for me in the series were generally either individual character work, or the entertainingly convoluted web of treachery. The most popular characters in Ice and Fire are the ones that lean into both, right? Tyrion stands out. But even past that, if I think about characters I liked or chapters I looked forward to, there's Davos, Jaime, Brienne, or even to an extent Sansa. Cersei getting chapters for the first time was also appealing; really, all of the core Lannister trio are great. I liked characters with strong convictions and complicated personal loyalties who get mixed up in or who have front row seats to leaders making difficult decisions under uncertain circumstances. Jon and Sam had some of this as well, though as I said, in general I think the Night's Watch sections, though good, deserve their own separate novel and don't complement the rest of Ice and Fire.

Meanwhile I tended to get bogged down in or just want to skip past the Bran or Daenerys chapters, or even a lot of the Arya chapters, because they are not connected to most of the political action. All the vague mysticism and prophecy is not what GRRM does well, and Essos in general suffers from firstly being a land of absurd racial caricatures, and secondly being completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the action of the story. I just do not care about the Targaryens.

That was the last one I liked, looking back every plotline in A Dance of Dragons went in a way that grew less and less interesting, except Arya's. I watched the show to the bitter end hoping for Cleganebowl to salvage something. I had far more fun with the CKII mod where I could pick a far removed time and tell my own stories.

Perdido Street Station and I'm about to drop it 120 pages in unless someone convinces me not to

Endless fucking of a race of beings with bug heads for no reason isn't doing it for you?

I kind of wish I'd dropped it. It tries to come together into something to make the last few hundred pages worth it, but that something is just more misery.

that something is just more misery

Well, that's Miéville for you. If we're talking about pure prose style, he's a very good writer, but he's unrelentingly grim (deeply imbued with socialist politics hence everything is oppression and only class consciousness can save us now). Good writing can only save so much of a world view that is unrelentingly ugly.

It’s funny. I’d heard that his other books, especially Iron Council, were absurdly socialist, but I didn’t get that from PSS at all. Class consciousness didn’t seem like it would have helped anybody. The best-laid plans of birds and men never survive contact with cryptids.

PSS is somewhat socialist, mostly in the descriptions of the New Crobuzon government, though in current political environment it comes off as more "Epstein class" left/right conspiracy tinged populism than "actual" socialism. The Scar is only fleetingly and barely socialist. Iron Council is very socialist. Out of the other books I've read, Kraken and City & The City are at most barely socialist (and also considerably less grim than the Bas-Lag books), and October (which is great) is obviously extremely socialist.

I haven't been able to read much of his work since the unrelenting grim ugliness just turns me off, but it's funny that often the worldbuilding gets away from him and the story demonstrates that The People's Communist Socialist Collective Of True Comrades Democratically And Representatively Deciding Shit isn't really much use to anyone and would be pretty ineffectual if it ever took power.

And meanwhile the cryptids, as you say 😁

It's full of good fantasy/sci-fi ideas and even though it's a bit ra-ra-workers-of-the-world-unite, it's well-presented/justified. You can skip everything else by that (obnoxious commie) author, but PSS is worth having read.

What I try to do these days when judging the worldview or ideology of a story is, rather than evaluating it on how much I agree with that ideology or not, I evaluate on how good a case the story makes for its ideology in the context of its own world.

I've read the series at a time when I had more tolerance for crappy writing, and thought The Scar was by far the most interesting of the bunch.

ra-ra-workers-of-the-world-unite

What would be the opposite of this?

There's also The Sword of Truth. The author is a big fan of Ayn Rand.

Wizard's First Rule is a strong contender for worst book I've ever read. Hopefully he gets better with time.

Spoiler alert: in my view, it really didn't.

Standard fantasy. One ubermensch, possibly Chosen by fate or the gods, who will unite the fractured polities and just do things.

Ayn Rand?

Really gotta read Atlas Shrugged. Tried The Fountainhead when I was like 19 and while I remember a lot from it, and even fondly, it kinda put me off Rand for a long time.

I'll straight up rec Atlas Shrugged. One of my favorite books. If it helps, think of it like a fantasy novel where the premise is "Capitalism is 100% correct both morally and practically", and then instead of the usual 95% action mixed with 5% crappy "What is Evil?", AS is 5%/95% the other way around. Same with the protagonists; they're not realistic people, they're hash functions defining her philosophy. Tremendous technical accomplishment, even if you disagree with the validity of the premises.

I also straight up enjoyed the writing. I bought it with the explicit intention of writing a critique and found myself enthralled. I want to say it's very Russian, but I don't actually have a broad enough experience base to make the claim with certainty.

You really gotta read Atlas Shrugged, but not if the reason is that you want to fix being put-off from Rand. I haven't voted for a non-Libertarian for President since 2000, and I still couldn't make it through Atlas Shrugged without wanting to write various rebuttals in the margins to some of the endless monologues and endless-monologues.

But although I wasn't a fan of how she wrote her protagonists there, her antagonists were perfect. I don't think I've gone a year since without running across at least one new politician or pundit who could be justly described as "an Ayn Rand villain".

I finished Hail Mary Project after having abandoned it some time ago. I still hated the prose but it's out (the movie) on Netflix and my sons and I can probably watch it and I wanted to have read the book. I could barely get through it due to the writing style, which clearly must be entertaining or funny for a lot of people but made me wish I was better at speed reading. The "Oh crud" type exclamations and the general sense of humor of the protagonist (and by implication, author) grated. What's that Stephen King analogy? "Like biting on tinfoil."

From the same friend I am now reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's okay so far but in a way that is making me realize the distance in our habits and tastes. He's a big gamer and reader of sci fi. I haven't really played a game since I quit Warcraft a decade or more ago and have only read a dozen or so sci fi books, most of those long ago. Unfortunately the narrative voice so far is somewhat similar to the protagonist in Wier's Weir's book.

I think this is a common problem with first-person narratives, at least for myself. I find a character with what I consider to be annoying quirks a lot more annoying when they are also the narrator. I feel that the third person narration puts a little more distance between myself and even the protagonist, so I don't feel the same way I do when someone is saying cringeworthy stuff to me in a real life conversation.

I liked The Martian for what it was - a web novel released chapter by chapter that got picked up by a major publisher. I appreciated starting with a possibly absurd premise and then logically going step by step over the challenges caused by that absurd premise in a way that mostly coheres to our current understanding of science. The voice of the narrator didn't matter as much, the puzzle was fun and seeing the math explained at a popular level was nice. I think I'd give it to a high schooler about to go into AP Physics to get them psyched up.

Project Hail Mary is kind of in the same vein, but without the advantages of being a first novel. It might help introduce a teenager to basic evolutionary concepts, the suspense was decent, there was legitimate pathos with the main character only acting brave because he thought he was the kind of person to volunteer for a suicidal mission and then remembered that he wasn't a volunteer after all. In that sense it was a better novel than The Martian but that wasn't enough to make it a good novel. The movie is a better movie even though I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax - the book-over did it with the explanations, the movie under-did it in exchange for some nicer visuals.

I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax

Problem(s) plural ... I think. It's hard to give a movie a fair watch after reading the book, because you just naturally fill in the blanks yourself, so maybe I'm underestimating what the average movie-only audience would have picked up from the film alone.

"They screwed up the taumoeba in a way that is a mild inconvenience for Grace and utterly incapacitating for Rocky" felt like it might have had a bit of a Diabolus Ex Machina feel in the movie to anyone who hadn't already read the book's detailed explanation, and I'm betting that's the problem you're referring to, but IMHO that's not the biggest problem at the climax.

In the big problem at the climax, it felt like they took away a lot of the Diabolus-level dilemma, changing Grace's perceived cost of saving Rocky from "I will run out of food supply" to "I will just have to go to Erid instead of Earth". I get that they didn't want to change the heart of the ending, and that they did want to remove the "me-burgers", and I don't see any way to remove the resolution of the food issue without just removing the food issue entirely. But keeping a silly me-burger joke in the epilogue would have been so worth it. "Grace was a coward who wouldn't die to save Earth yet now will starve to death to save his friend" was an awesome character arc and a devastating choice for him to make. "Grace obviously goes to save his closest friend after he makes sure everyone else will be okay" hardly even felt like a dilemma.

Hoping I'm being unfair about that - did they discuss the food supply issue in the movie and I just missed it?

It's minor but my biggest annoyance was that Eridian weren't immediately putting together a massive mission to earth. I realize it was meant to be a plot point that Ryland wasn't in a hurry to go back to earth and it would have altered that plot point. But it just seemed glaringly obvious to me that the Eridian would have been putting a huge mission, arguably a aid mission, to earth as fast as possible. Wither they're long life span it makes sense to get get relations and trade going, even without a desire to help the planet of the man who saved their civilization.

Nope, neither of those dilemmas were fully explained by the movie. My husband hadn't read the book and so I asked him about what he thought of the movie and he said he liked it until the end, where he was like, "I'm sure if I rewatch I'll catch what happened with Rocky's space ship, but right now I have no clue."

Towards the beginning he asks the computer how much fuel it has but I don't remember food really coming up as a constraint.

The film is a much better film than the book is a book, I agree that the prose is a bit Smug 2012 Redditor.

Both of those are major memes on /r/bookscirclejerk for, I'm assuming, a pretty good reason

Maybe he listens to audio books. Both hmp and DCC have very good audiobooks.

Very possible. He gave me a big hardcover and knows I don't dig audiobooks.

About halfway through The Age of Diagnosis.

I went into the chapters on "long Covid" and autism pretty much knowing what to expect, and I wasn't disappointed. But I was genuinely surprised to hear that cancer screenings exhibit no net increase on all-cause mortality.

But I was genuinely surprised to hear that cancer screenings exhibit no net increase on all-cause mortality.

Zero chance this is the case.

While it's true you can find some research for some screening that aligns with this, anyone broadly making this claim without excessive qualification of the claim should be assumed to be a crank.

Ex: PMCID: PMC4412262

The claim in the book is heavily qualified, I was hastily summarising.

I'd consider it something of an info hazard, it's really hard to get people to adhere to screening guidelines and the most effective one is the one people bail out on the most (colonoscopy).

Especially in a place like this filled with grumpy skeptics..... you'll get some people who will use it as an excuse.

Link

The overall observed decline in CRC [colorectal cancer] mortality was 26% for 1975–2000. The model predicted that, with only changes in risk factors, CRC mortality would have decreased by 9%, explaining 35% of the observed mortality decline. Screening was estimated to have decreased mortality by another 14%, explaining 53% of the mortality reduction, while treatment added another 3% decline, explaining the final 12% of the observed decline in CRC mortality.

These modeling results strongly suggest that approximately 50% of the decline in CRC incidence and mortality between1975 and 2000 could be due to CRC screening. We have now used a similar analysis for the time period up to 2010 and again estimated that CRC screening likely accounts for about 50% of the reduction in CRC mortality over the more recent period.

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