Arian > Recent Status Updates

Focuses on the eye pupil as a reliable indicator of mental effort - ‘they dilate substantially when ppl multiply two-digit numbers, and and they dilate more if the problems are hard than if they are easy.’

For openly preaching the message, the Prophet ﷺ and his early converts were persecuted. Narrations of verbal and physical abuse, mockery, and attempted murders are all authenticated.

The Quraish then try to negotiate with the Prophet ﷺ, proposing a compromise: both parties would give up some of their faith. The Prophet ﷺ responded by reciting Surah Al-Kafirun (109)…

This update the Prophet’s ﷺ birth, forty years prior to prophethood, and the early stages in his call to Islam.

An interesting extract on Muhammad’s ﷺ early life; when he was ~12 years old, he met with a Monk, Bahirah, on a trade journey to Syria with his uncle. Upon meeting the Prophet ﷺ he readily recognised him…

We are now in Jugoslovenka!

An interesting extract on the Abyssinian Christians’ attempt to demolish the Ka’bah after an Arab pilgrim smeared excrement on the front wall of the Church that was built to attract the pilgrims to the exclusion of Makkah.

The Quran (105) mentions that God sent against them flocks of birds that pelted them with stones.

The first 62 pages details the aspects of pre-Islamic Arabian society. Notably, the pagan beliefs and practices that were synonymous with the arabs before the Prophet’s ﷺ prophethood.

A brief mention of Judaism’s and Christianity’s presence in the Arabian peninsula.

Took me awhile to get through the prologue; West packs a lot in just 30 pages.

How Luccheni foreshadowed the fascist movement, then manifested by Mussolini who orders a successful assassination attempt on the King of Yugoslavia, believing that ‘with the King’s death the country would fall to pieces and be an easy prey to a foreign invader’

Finally decided to pick up this mammoth of a book.
I am reading the Canons edition, introduction by Geoff Dyer.

Afterword read.

Appendix read.
‘doubleplusgood duckspeaker’ is now in my vocabulary!

End of story. Will reserve my final comment for the review.

I am lost for all words.
The descriptive language used for the interrogation is the best I’ve ever read.

“We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him”

We’re in the endgame :(

“We are the dead”, he said.
“We are the dead”, echoed Julia dutifully.
“You are the dead”, said an iron voice behind them.

Will go over pages 205-245 after I finish.
Emmanuel Goldstein is the strangers prosecutor of 1984.

Read about the inner meaning of the Party’s slogan: ‘War is Peace’.
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.

Can’t wait to read more!

‘WE ARE THE DEAD’

WHAT A LINE.
WHAT A LINE.
WHAT A LINE.

‘It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.’

Strikes interrupted my reading

I want to read more from Julia. Her insight on how sexual privation can be transformed into leader-worship reads so clear to me.

‘Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.’

A love affair between comrades?! I’m rooting for them!

A love affair between comrades?! I’m rooting for them.

Part 1 read! I was just as disappointed as Winston with the old man at the pub.

One more chapter to read before part 2!

Learning more and more about the party.

Chapter 4 focuses on Winston’s work which entails a continuous alternation ‘to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.’

Chapter 5 on Newspeak: a vocabulary that gets smaller every year to narrow the range of thought — to not think at all. This is true Orthodoxy in ‘England Socialism’ (in Oldspeak language).

‘Doublethink’ sure sounds hard to practise.
‘To consciously induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.’

There is so much I want to quote down but am shattered from work today. Onto chapter 3!