What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[Ares Land]

Among Muslims I know or have known, it seems the rule is that you don't know who's going to hell or not anyway. It's God's decision and all that. Not a lot seem very impressed by the whole fire-and-brimstone things, but several are.

It looks like many religions seized on the chance of weaponizing Pascal's wager: after all, what is this slightly weird and illogical thing I ask you to do compared to All Eternity? You get exemples of this in Judaism, Islam and Christianity and of course, Transhumanism (what's Roko's Basilisk except an instance of the same meme?)
Judaism has at least the common decency to make its hell temporary, and with possibilities for appeal.

The idea of hell is, I think, one of strongest arguments against Christianity. You can talk about ethical superiority, but the book still says 'love the weak, feed the hungry, the meek shall inherit the earth oh, and by the way, if you don't believe the one correct thing, you will be submitted to everlasing cruel and unusual punishment.)

[bradrn]

Not that I'm a superfan of Judaism myself, but looking forward to enslaving your enemies strikes me as a good deal more civilized than reveling in visions of them being roasted in hellfire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ji_Y7YEbKY

I’m Jewish, and go to a Hassidic (Chabad/Lubavitch) synagogue, and I have never, ever heard such a sentiment expressed by anyone there. If they believe it at all, it’s not an idea they consider as being particularly important — and this despite a heavy emphasis on Messianism in the Chabad movement. Generally speaking, they care mostly about the same things any other religion does: being a good person, practising the commandments, keeping up with the community etc. (Despite the impression that video may have given you, they certainly don’t go around saying things like ‘Bwa-ha-ha-hãã, today we go enslave all Goyim in America!’. They’re more likely to say, for instance, ‘Hi bradrn, do you by any chance want to lay tefillin with us?’, even though they know I’ll probably say ‘thanks, but I don’t have time just right now’.)

With regards to the video itself, I’d say there’s a couple of things interesting about it. Firstly, it makes it very clear that it’s only the most ultra-Orthodox Jews who at all subscribe to this idea — everyone else finds the idea repugnant. (And ultra-Orthodox Jews, I should note, are not representative of world Jewry at large; they’re widely considered to be, well, a little bit extreme.) The interviewer, for their part, seems to push and push until getting the answer they want, which is certainly not an unbiased way to do things.

Ovadia Yosef said a lot of batshit crazy things. No one's going to admit it. In Orthodox Judaism talking ill of anyone is, if I understand correctly, a very severe transgression of the Law. All the more so if you're talking of the highest authority in Sephardic Judaism.

The second part of this statement is correct: speaking ill of someone (lashon hara in Hebrew) is often considered one of the worst sins you can do¹. I’m not sure the first part is, however; some ultra-Orthodox Jews consider him to be entirely correct; thus repeating his opinions is not ‘speaking ill’ of him at all. (But again, most Jews find such opinions far too extreme…)

Judaism has at least the common decency to make its hell temporary, and with possibilities for appeal.

An interesting thing about Judaism, I find, is that we don’t really have much of an afterlife. I mean, there’s broad agreement that heaven exists, and I’ve heard some vague references to a place where people can get purged of their sins before going to heaven, but beyond that there isn’t really much of anything at all.


___________
¹ There’s a parable I’ve heard once or twice, where a man comes to a rabbi asking for forgiveness for speaking ill of other people. The rabbi asks him to do penance: he must take one of his pillows, and scatter the feathers out into the wind (pillows being made of feathers in those days). The man does so, then comes back to the rabbi. ‘Now gather up all the feathers’, the rabbi asks; the man naturally says this is impossible. ‘It is the same with words’, the rabbi says. ‘Despite your best wishes, you cannot take back the bad things you have said about other people.’

[rotting bones]

Despite the impression that video may have given you, they certainly don’t go around saying things like ‘Bwa-ha-ha-hãã, today we go enslave all Goyim in America!’.

Of course not. Muslims don't usually relish the thought of people going to hell either, as Ares Land mentioned. However, some of them clearly do. My specific point is that this line of thought is present in the Jewish tradition. Would you say no Jews exist who believe their enemies will be enslaved?

And just to be clear: None of this justifies antisemitism, let alone Nazism. I watched this video years ago. And in all the debates about Israel, I haven't posted it even once. Personally, I identify as a philosemite. I like Yiddishkeit. My general point is that all religions suck, and Judaism sucks less than most.

Of course, Jews would probably be more like Islamists if they had been more militarily successful. They are probably modern for the same reason Kurds are modern while being Muslim. However, that's beside the point.

[rotting bones]

It's all coming back to me now. There's a specific reason why Sunnis think Abu Talib is going to hell. Here's what I remember:

Hell is a beast, as in literally an animal led by angels on a chain. Driven by pangs of hunger caused by the fires in its belly, it will devour any soul that satisfies four conditions: 1. They saw the truth. 2. They refused to affirm the truth. 3. They refused to affirm the truth out of arrogance. Eg. A desire for power, not because they were mentally disabled, being tortured or under any extenuating circumstances of that nature. 4. They didn't ask for forgiveness.

The story of Abu Talib is that he was a lifelong witness to Muhammad's miracles. On his deathbed, he was on the point of accepting Islam when a pagan called out, "Will you abandon the religion of your illustrious forefathers?" On hearng this, Abu Talib closed his lips and passed away. If he was on the point of accepting Islam, then 1. he saw the truth. If he chose not to accept Islam, then 2. he refused to affirm the truth. If he refused to accept Islam in memory of his illustrious forefathers, then 3. he refused to affirm the truth out of pride in his noble lineage. If he expired the next instant, then 4. he never asked for forgiveness.

Therefore, he is destined for the belly of the beast in the hereafter. (But in the end, only the Lord knows best, etc. This is the mainstream line of thinking in traditional scholarship. People calling themselves scholars these days are a bunch of lunatics with no human feeling. Their zeal doesn't come from Islamic tradition but from modern stoicism, which has no place in the former.)

[Emily]

not getting involved in whatever's going on up there. i've been

• reading:
  • Under the Perfect Sun, a sort of "people's history" of san diego, written by three authors in three sections: the first writes about the history of the power structure of the city, and how even more so than other cities san diego has had am exceptionally weak municipal government that is compliant to big business and often to just one particularly powerful businessman; the second writes about the struggle from below, from the free speech fight of 1912 to communists organizing mexican and filipino workers in depression-era imperial valley to the civil rights movement to the dockworker strikes in the reagan era; and the third interviews organizers and activists, immigrants and students and workers, and people who wouldn't normally be given the time of day by a newspaper or magazine profiler
  • Bi Any Other Name, the first bisexual nonfiction anthology, published in the early 1990s and basically considered required reading alongside fritz klein's The Bisexual Option (which i still haven't read ); this is my first read-through since i was 19 or 20
  • The Planet Construction Kit, an obscure text by an author shrouded in mystery
  • An Introduction to the Luiseño Language, an introductory textbook to the traditional native language in the region i grew up in, written in the 1970s; the whole thing is typeset on a typewriter for some reason, and one of the translation exercises is a letter from a (presumably fictional) indian involved in the occupation of alcatraz
• watching:
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which i've been watching through with friends (over skype until we can all get vaxxed); i'm digging buffy a lot, and even angel has its charm, though david boreanaz couldn't act his way out of a paper bag
  • the original Dark Shadows, a classic daytime soap from the late 1960s that started out as a gothic drama but pretty quickly brought in things like vampires and phoenixes (as well as ghosts, which they'd hinted at from the beginning); this is a great one to put on in the background while i'm working on hobbies or doing something somewhat mindless (recently i had to go to our party office to paint a banner for a march, so i brought along my laptop and watched/listened to like nine episodes while i was painting
  • a lot of horror movies for some reason; in the past couple of months alone i've watched The Dark and the Wicked (didn't care for it), the original Suspiria (fantastic; also has one of the Dark Shadows actresses in it!), Hellraiser (much smaller of a movie than i expected and also much hornier), Candyman (this was one of those ones i'd see the cover of in the video store as a kid and not even bother because i knew my parents would never let me rent it; tony todd is amazing as always), The Bad Seed (very well done, and a chilling performance from the little girl, but hampered by being a bit too stagebound, and the ending is ruined by the requirements of the hayes code), and The Exorcist (i can't believe i'd never seen the exorcist! although i did read the mad magazine parody in middle school)
• listening to:
  • We Hate Movies, a podcast where they watch a bad movie and then make fun of it; i've been listening through the back archives and am currently caught up to mid-2017
  • The Avalanches' new album We Will Always Love You, which is just fantastic; their debut Since I Love You is my favorite album of all time, and not to sound like a pretentious tool but after their somewhat disappointing followup Wildflower this one feels almost like a return to form
  • lots of 1970s and especially 80s pop from the eastern bloc, because i'm a cartoon; favorites include Verasy (from the byelorussian ssr), Neoton Família (hungary), and Inka (now known by her full name Inka Bause; east germany)
  • Suspense, a show from the golden age of radio, basically a half-hour thriller each week with stars from stage and screen; includes such classics as "the hitch-hiker" (later adapted into a twilight zone episode) and "sorry, wrong number"

can i just say, this was a huge pain in the ass to type and format on my cell phone, and i wish cell phone keyboards had fucking cursor control! give me some damn arrow/home/end keys! come on!

[rotting bones]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP9FWA1_Xrw

I'm playing Baba Is You, one of those "difficult" puzzle games I mentioned earlier. The earlier areas lull you into a false sense of security, but holy moly are the later areas confusing when you first look at them. Somehow, they are still fun.

Among the books I read recently, the Bobiverse series caught my attention.

[xxx]

БЕРЁЗКА ?

[Ares Land]

Le berceau des dominations. Anthropologie de l'inceste. by Dorothée Dussy.
Exactly what it says on the tin, but this was not the sort of abstract discussion on incest taboo you might expect: this is an anthropological study of actual, incest cases in our own societies.
An extremely unpleasant but necessary read. The picture is beyond depressive: to take just a few points, incest is a lot more common than you assume and the victims almost never get any help. Incest is entirely ignored by families; as usual, the perpetrator gets much sympathy and the victim will be blamed if she speaks up. The judicial system isn't entirely useless, but pretty close to it.
It seems that the incest taboo is really here to make sure incests can be perpetuated from generation to generation in secrecy.

Now, I believe the author is being a little too pessimistic. But, I'm afraid, not by much.

Much more pleasant: my eldest daughter is now old enough for Roald Dahl; so we read the BFG, George's Marvellous Medicine and are currently through Fantastic Mister Fox.

Also reading Alastair's Reynolds Aurora Rising and Elysium Fire. I'd mostly avoided Alastair Reynolds till now -- I was put off, I'm afraid, by the 'hard sci-fi' and 'transhuman' labels but I really enjoy the SF / horror/ police procedural mix of these two.

Oh, I still have to finish Piketty's Capital et idéologie though I have to confess it's hardly a riveting read. I'll finish it though -- eventually.

[Vijay]

Anubhavangal (which means 'Experiences'), the autobiography and last novel (in Malayalam) of Purapparambil Chengara Gopalan, better known by his pseudonym Nandanar, before he committed suicide. So far at least, he's only talking about some point in his teenage years. It doesn't seem as sad as I was afraid it would be.

This is the ninth novel I'm reading in Malayalam if you count my grandfather's memoirs (which are partly in English). Maybe next I'll read Khasakkinte Ithihasam (Legends of Khasak) by O. V. Vijayan. At the pace I'm reading Anubhavangal at, at least, I should be able to polish it off in a week. I'm also curious about a novel called Kadalaasupookkal ('Paper Flowers') by Ekalavyan, which I don't think my dad has read yet (he hasn't read Anubhavangal, either).

I'm also starting to wonder just how many novels I've read in other languages I know. I think I've read five in French* (Le petit prince, volume 2 of Les Misérables, Candide, L'enfant noir, and Pierre et Jean, the first because a friend from France gave it to me, the second because we had to pick a book to read for French class once and volume 1 was nowhere to be found, and the last three because they were required reading in my French literature class in high school) and maybe one in Spanish (possibly San Manuel Bueno, mártir in Spanish literature class, also in HS, except I can't remember whether we actually finished reading it or not. Probably not). Surely I've read more than ten in English. Hmm. I've never read any in any other languages (although I'm also reading a novel in Chinese with a parallel English translation).

*Counting only novels I read in full, not counting Paris au XX^e siècle, which I read in part and then lost

[rotting bones]

Reading Goethe The Alchemist. I've read some of Goethe's works in German. I was looking for literary analyses of his writings. I found this instead.

Finished playing Manifold Garden. Playing Exapunks.

[Vijay]

Oh, I see I barely mentioned the novel in Chinese I'm reading. It's 赵氏孤儿, an old legend that was made into the first play to be translated into a European language. In English, the play is called The Orphan of Zhao (but the book I'm reading translates the title to Zhao the Orphan instead. Same thing, in this case!).

[OakTree]

I'm reading Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson, the 4th in his Stormlight Archive series. A coworker gave me the first book in the series and I've been hooked ever since. The only drawbacks are 1) I didn't finish the 3rd book so I'm filling in some gaps by myself and 2) there's an interval of at least 18 months between me reading each book so some of the finer details are lost on me. The cover art and internal illustrations are brilliant, beautiful. The drawings were actually one of the reasons I enjoyed the first book as it felt like a thing to be treasured. It came at the right time as I had been in a slump, looking for something new.

I also enjoy the fact that it's not just a trilogy. I enjoy exploring a world and seeing characters, plot and themes develop over more than just three books with a predictable arc. The other series I really enjoyed was Shadows of the Apt by Adrian Tchaikovsky, still opening up new parts of the world even 6-7 books in. I haven't got into his other series so much as the Echoes of the Fall series seems a poor copy and his science fiction hasn't drawn me in.

I'm new here but hope to contribute a little as and when.

[Raphael]

Welcome here, OakTree!

[Ares Land]

Welcome, OakTree!

And, as the tradition here goes, have some pickles and tea!

[OakTree]

Thanks, Ares Land and Raphael I will dunk some virtual pickles in my tea.

Edit: typo

[Pabappa]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwoCsaJ5w4A

video game music?

the title suggests it could be, .... it seems a bit heavy for the kind of video games i know most about, but then there are games that are *about* music, and you can do anything with them. it might be used in a game called Beat Stomper, no relation to BeatSaber.

[rotting bones]

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Seasons 2 and 3 were the best in Netflix Castlevania.

Edit: My favorite of Andy Weir's works is actually his controversial novel Artemis.

Also, I failed to solve the puzzle game Antichamber. I didn't understand what was going on.

[Raphael]

I've just finished Ze Germans - An expat's guide to living in Germany, by Fadi Gaziri, although I admittedly rushed a bit through the later chapters. Generally accurate. At times, I think he's a bit too harsh on Germany, but then again, I have a much lower opinion of German High Culture than he does, so on that particular matter, I'm harsher on Germany than he is. The only part that strikes me as just outright false is the section on saunas, where he claims that everyone in the country is a lot into visiting public saunas. Um, no, a lot of people, myself included, have never been to a public sauna, and many people still see them very much as a Scandinavian import. I also think he kind of overstates the role of religion in society, which is interesting, given that he seems to have lived mainly in Hamburg and Berlin, neither of which strikes me as a particularly religious city.

And there's one part of the section on dating that strikes me as downright weird:

"When you're on the date, make sure that you listen attentively to everything the other person says. Repeat and paraphrase their stories, but make sure you don't interrupt them at any point. Always wait until they have finished their sentence. Try to mimic their facial expressions with your own."

Err, that's supposed to be advice specifically on dating in Germany? As opposed to, you know, handy rules of thumb for going on dates in many places where dating is a thing? Do people in other countries enjoy it when they're on a date and their date interrupts them all the time and never listens to them?

[alice]

Wagons West: The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails, by Frank McLynn. Gripping stuff.

[Raphael]

I've just finished Battle for the Soul - Inside the Democrats' Campaign to Defeat Trump, by Edward-Isaac Dovere. It's interesting to read a book by an author who's generally sympathetic to Democrats, but isn't shy to criticize them when he thinks it's warranted. All too many political books are just "Rah rah rah Our Team Rules" or "Boooo the other team sucks".