Ryan > Recent Status Updates

I think theyre trying to bring something somewhere

The thing i really like about this book is that its an anti-british empire book but it does so on the Empires own terms. One of the theses of the book is that yes the empire had salutary ambitions (spreading democracy and education institutions) but at every possible turn the empire undermined itself by prioritizing abject and total extraction of wealth and resources while categorizing the world into racial hierarchy

Vibes based ethics are the best kind of ethics

Absolute banger oh my goodness. Theres this one poem about aging and death that was so beautiful. Then there was this other part with snow that was great. I like this book

The way Tolkein talks about temptation, power, struggle, sacrifice are all so amazing. I was expecting a good book but its beat my wildest expectations

Getting to read this for class instead of cases makes my brain happy

By moving ourselves away from arguments only about capitalism's unremitting brutality, we see that violence was inherent to liberalism. It resided in liberalism's reformism, its claims to modernity, its promises of freedom, and its notion of the law. … The perennial problem of liberalism and violence [… is] embedded in the nation's contemporary racial issues as well as those of other Western liberal democracies.

Absolute banger

Absolute banger

Math hurts my simple brain

I am indescribably bored

TL;DR: Law schools in the Medieval Islamic Empires were organized as charitable trusts rather than in the Western style of Universities organized as corporations

Gotta love scholarship from the 70s/80s where theres no argument and the author is just listing facts for 300 pages

Pre-modern history is so boring, my Lord. The entire thing is just power struggles and “x ruler had a cousin in y place so be was forced to place z relative as his heir.” Like please, I do not care. This whole book so far has just been war or the balancing of power dynamics within the empire.

Ive finally got to the last third of the book which is actually looking interesting

Very boring

Ali should have been the first caliph

I have finally got to the part where she starts talking about theology. Yes, the first 100 pages are all her describing her methodology. Yes, it was great.

Mr Said was a very intelligent man

It appears that I have been duped into reading literary criticism

“[Orientalism] at one and the same time [works] to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe”

Also, this has made me realize I cant stand the writing style that English as a discipline creates

We’re giving this another attempt

There has been 0 theology so far. Chapter 1 is just dense philosophy of text/reading.

I love it

"To reduce what Islam is, conceptually, to what Islam has been, historically, or is in the process of becoming, would be to fail to recognise its religious quality: the relationship to the divine; the transcendent ele-ment. Indeed, Islamic truth must necessarily transcend Islamic actuality."

In all my reading of dry academic books, I have never come across someone that uses as extensive a vocabulary as this author. Like no way you know what “polysemic” means without googling it; even google thought it was a typo