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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1723 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 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.

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So, what are you reading?

I finished al-Ghazali's Banes of the Tongue, which was well worth the read. I can dimly see some aspects of Islam, and in particular the hadith "Beware of the believer's intuition because he sees by the light of God" has caught my eye. There is a sense of leaving uncovered what God has covered and not speaking about what doesn't concern you; in particular, if one is gossiped to, the gossip says more about the gossiper than the one who is spoken about. It has kindled an interest in ways of knowing which might arise from an Islamic mindset.

What is forbidden is supposition [about another's alleged evil ways], and supposition is an expression of what the soul believes is reliable, and the heart inclines toward. God says, O you who have believed, avoid much negative assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin [Q. 49:12]. The reason for its unlawfulness is because the secrets of the hearts are known only to the Knower of the unseen, so it is not for you to believe in another’s wickedness unless it is disclosed to you by observation and cannot be explained away.

The book is quite comprehensive, talking about things like arguments, joking, praising or being praised, and I'm sure to be revisiting this often.

This Inevitable Ruin, the seventh book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I blasted through the first four books but it has been a bit of a slog ever since, despite some fun "high points" in each entry. At this point I feel sufficiently invested, and the high points sufficiently high, to continue through the books when I have time, but very few authors seem to be able to keep up with their younger selves.

I also wonder how the author feels about the fact that his anarcho-communist hero/worldbuilding is literally sustained by Deus ex Machina. I haven't bothered to dig into the fandom so I have no idea whether the author has commented on this, but I assume the readers have! The sci-fi trope of "preach communism but (accidentally?) notice that it's only genuinely sustainable in a world of magically unlimited resources" is one I've been contemplating for decades now, thanks to Star Trek. It feels like such a self-own except that I imagine most readers don't see it that way.

It feels like such a self-own except that I imagine most readers don't see it that way.

Most readers read fantasy as wish-fulfillment, and the wishful thinking that drove them to consuming such media in the first place is usually strong enough to make them think in terms of the ideologically necessary deus ex machina being actually possible in real life. If fully automated luxury communism requires sufficiently advanced technology, then so be it, the technology must advance but until it does we can already get to work on implementing the desirable ideology it will surely enable.

People aren't rational.

If fully automated luxury communism requires sufficiently advanced technology, then so be it, the technology must advance but until it does we can already get to work on implementing the desirable ideology it will surely enable.

This perhaps gets too much into Culture Wars, but I will say, I'm in a camp similar to this, except that I follow "the technology must advance" with "to truly overwhelming and crazy scifi/magic levels, which can only be done in an immensely wealthy and productive society, and only capitalism is known to be even capable of generating such wealth and productivity, which is why capitalism must be maintained as strongly as possible right now." I honestly don't see any other route into a Communist future that is actually desirable (i.e. doesn't equalize everyone at 0).

CW topics are explicitly allowed in Small Question Sunday!

I'm basically with you. I practice something like communism with my family. I think it can probably be successfully done in a collective of many dozens to perhaps even a few hundred humans, but at some point the scale tips and competition for scarce resources has to be managed through something less personal than familial love. Today abundance and prosperity is predominantly the result of trade, which is itself driven by scarcity (no point trading for what I already have). A world with Star Trek replicators and functionally infinite energy would be super cool, but we don't live there now and certainly won't get there by pretending that we do.

According to German leftists, the replicator equivalent we do have is "tax rich people".

"Wait, why are they all leaving?"

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