Ryan > Recent Status Updates

I will never forgive the theatre kids for turning this into a m*sical

I cant put into words how beautiful this book is. Its the best poetry you’ll ever read but its written in prose.

This is the best book ive ever read in my life

“Thus the social power becomes the private power of private persons. Ancient society therefore denounced [money] as tending to destroy the economic and moral order. Modern society, which already in its infancy had pulled Pluto by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life.” Go off, Marx

Shoutout Gondor

All this guy ever talks about is money

Smeagol as the personification of temptation is just so good. I love that Tolkein writes him as child-like. Ultimately temptation is just a part of ourselves that has not yet passed on from our childhood into maturity and thus come under our conscious control. Smeagol is such a beautiful representation of that.

The way Tolkein writes Smeagol is amazing. You genuinely do pity him. You can tell deep down theres a part of him that wants to be loved, that wants community and connection; theres a part of him that is genuinely a good person, loyal and caring. But Gollum and his desire for the ring just have this complete hold over him thats completely corrupted him. Fantastic writing 10/10

Im starting to think this Mordor place is NOT where the good guys live

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