forgiveness of sin (deror) in the old testament meant a debt cancellation (jubilee), this was abolished by the pharisees, jesus tried to return debt cancellation and was persecuted for it.if you look at the early history of islam, zakat was quite literally an introduction of the debt jubilee into a usurious society filled with debt slavery that had accumulated too much debt to fully function, this is why the theme of forgiveness is so prominent.now how exactly did zakat function in the earliest generations of islam? everyone nowadays believes zakat is some form of personal charity you give to some random bum or your mosque and thats it.in reality, it was originally collected (this is why zakat is annual) and distributed to free muslims from debt slavery, with duty being eventually being completed when every indebted muslim had reached the nisab (something like a starting capital) of 85-90 grams of gold (10.000 usd today), giving the community financial autonomy and financial freedom to fight for its cause.this is actually a lot more extreme than the biblical debt jubilee, which was every 7 years or so, and only erased the debt, meaning you were simply left with no money to spend.when you realize this shift in perception, its clear why muslims nowadays are so unsuccessful compared to their pious predecessors.
How soon after the death of Muhammad do you believe zakat began to be misappropriated to the luxury of the state/priestly class
>>24989258the decay started slowly.at first it was the groups of early muslims that took care of it, this made it antifragile.when abu bakr made zakat statuatory, and redistributed it through intermediaries, it was still pretty similar.when uthman created a system for zakat that was more similar to a state-tax or tribute, people stopped being directly engaged with it, which caused lots of corruption, and made people more ignorant of its purpose, one of many of uthman's blunders.the meaning finally became fully shrouded under umar ibn abdulaziz, who while being good-intentioned, made zakat an individual duty, which completely obscured its original purpose, and left us with the "zakat" we know today.
How embarrasing that we have lost such practices nowadays. Truly we live in a rotten, degenerate world.
>>24989430It's a shame that not a single Islamic country cares about financial autonomy. Even Iran mostly uses the system to keep it's clergy in leisure rather than actually being autonomous.I know the Ismailis focus heavily on this form of zakat but they don't really have a state. Perhaps Yemen and Oman do but they have other reasons why they are broke.
>>24989240Zakutt
So the One is absolutely simple yet has the power to overflow itself and generate the Indefinite Dyad/Nous, just because? This power doesn't violate it's absolute simplicity? And then the Forms of the Nous don't formally exist in the One, but somehow eminently. They begin to exist formally and distinct when the Nous reflects back on the One, but the Nous is ultimately perceiving and reflecting back the Forms that exist eminently in the One. This seems like a cop out to me. Nothing comes from nothing, but Plotinus wants the One to have all the forms yet free of the consequences that his axioms would imply (ie multiplicity, which is bad and evil). Aristotle was more honest to say that God/the One is thinking. Even if this introduces some kind of multiplicity, Plotinus thinks he gets to avoid that by having the Forms exist, but not really, in the One.
>>24986804Proclus was a more thorough metaphysician than Plotinus and his answers presents clear attempts at addressing most of the issues even if some of his responses merely regulate some of the tensions without ultimately dissolving them. Plotinus was a better mystic than Proclus though and was closer to the truth than Proclus on the question of the undescended soul. Pseudo-Dionysus's metaphysics is actually more consistent viz. these issues that OP raises than both Aristotle and Proclus despite owning much to Proclus. There are Islamic and Indian thinkers that mog all these guys though at the end of the day.
>>24987619Yeah you didn't answer any of my questions.
>>24989471>There are Islamic and Indian thinkers that mog all these guys though at the end of the day.Like who?
Is Catholic theology just window dressing on Plotinus?
>>24986804https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8
Alone Once More EditionStubbed >>24982319>What is /wng/ — Web Novel General?A general for readers and authors involved or interested in the growing phenomenon of 'web novels', serialized English fiction posted to websites such as: Royal Road, Webnovel, Scribblehub, Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, Spacebattles, HFY, various personal author websites, and more>Why read web novels?Not for prose or tight editing or deep themes, frankly. As a whole, web novels are infamous for content sprawl and pacing issues. If you enjoy having millions of words to sink your teeth into to get to know the world and characters, though, you may be interested. Keeping up with other readers on a weekly basis to discuss the story's events unfolding is another perk, in the same way discussing an ongoing TV show might be.>Why write web novels?Ease of access & potential for Patreon earnings. Many successful authors gain an audience on their website of choice and funnel their readers into a Patreon. See graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing for an idea of what some are earning.Also, once an author has earned a fanbase, transitioning into an Amazon self-publishing career is several orders of magnitude easier than starting 'dry'.>/wng/ authors.Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>24988665There's nothing wrong with starting your story in a diner. But the webnovel scene is a place where readers want new chapters every day and they want wish fulfillment right now. It's not a place to be writing clouds like white elephants. You need to shove fidget spinners in your readers face and scream WHATS UP GAMERS ITS YA BOY, ANON, HERE WITH ANOTHER CHAPTER OF THIS TOTALLY CRAZY STORY! SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON! Now you are the Edgar Allen Poe of how your story gets up and goes, but if people are saying it's boring as hell, then maybe it's boring as hell. >>24989084>asked AI to fix it:/
>>24989375>>>24989084>>asked AI to fix it>:/I'm the one the "fix" was aimed at. I never used AI, and don't even get grammar checks with it. That said, while it was a crazy weird thing it produced, it had a germ of something neat to it. LIke brain storming. His AI experiment, gave me a future idea for a way to start a diff story that was guaranteed to be quick, action filled, but mysterious. I hated what it made, but it gave a great original idea.
>>24986649This year, I will become an active reader.What light novels do people here read?
>>24989576Judging by what keeps getting posted here for critique, none
That's weird. I finally found my info and managed to reset my password on RR. I was pretty happy to get back, finally. I only had one book posted there, but still. Nothing. My account is there, but its like my book vanished into thin air. No notifications, no emails,no private messages... nothing. This ever happen to anyone? Book had zero sex in it, cover art was rated G.
I've never personally found any argument against suicide that really convinces me. The more philosophy I read, the more many common objections seem based on instinct or emotion rather than careful reasoning. When people call suicide "murder" or "unnatural" they often ignore that a right to life should also include the right to give it up, and that nature itself isn't a moral authority. If it were, we wouldn't use medicine to prevent or delay natural deaths. The claim that suicide is selfish also feels very one-sided. It can just as easily be seen as selfish to expect someone to keep living with unbearable mental or physical suffering simply so others don't have to feel grief. None of us chose to be born, and being stuck in a life that has become intolerable is a tragedy, not a moral failure. I think society has a strong optimism bias that makes people assume life is better than it really is for everyone. When someone experiences life mainly as a heavy burden, ending their life can be a rational way to take back control over something they never chose.
>>24983004???
>>24976419Easy. I don't want to die
>>24986159Do you live in a country without trains?
why dont people just do shotgun to head, the most effective methoddont be retarded, and actually aim for your brain and its literally foolproofif your not american and cant get a gun, what reason do you have to commit suicide?
>>24987725This is a rational post. I should get a shotgun and do it cleanly. Messily, but you know
You do have a basic understanding of how human language works, don't you?
trivium chads > anti-grammar linguistics cuckshttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLNnqqvK2yDEFVdM_5wV4Od8kV2GaSo7jz
>>24988943We do not post our diary entries here clown.
>>24988998You have no clue what a premise and a conclusion are.>only insofar as your lot can continue to shame people into not propagating it, because linguists are descriptivists and descriptivism is cuckoldry which will fold to usage.Very confused writing. Literally making two contradictory claims at once. As I said, you can't even make up your mind what it is you are asserting, let alone make actual arguments for your claims. Read https://www.juristpanel.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Rulebook-for-Arguments_compressed.pdf as your first book ever in critical thinking/logic, and then keep reading critical thinking/logic/trivium books.https://youtu.be/vgqpuQ4QnlE
>>24989026I mean, nta, but >>24987848 becomes clear if you assume that by 'descriptivism' he means 'prescriptivism'. And I can't but delight in the irony of correcting him on this front, given the point he's making (if I'm understanding him correctly, though perhaps I'm not).
>>24989026>You have no clue what a premise and a conclusion are.I do, in fact, actually.>Very confused writing.There is nothing confused nor confusing about it.>Literally making two contradictory claims at once.There are no contradictions in what I wrote.>As I said, you can't even make up your mind what it is you are assertingNo, you are simply too stupid to understand what I am asserting.>let alone make actual arguments for your claimsI wrote what I wrote how I intended to write it. Anything more is a (You) problem.>Read https://www.juristpanel.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Rulebook-for-Arguments_compressed.pdfNo.>as your first book ever in critical thinking/logicSounds like no matter how many such books *you* read, *you* will never understand those concepts yourself.Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
McCarthy published his first novel at the age of 32, while he was working in an auto parts plant outside Chicago. From the beginning of his writing career, McCarthy placed disturbing tales of bloodthirsty violence at the center of his efforts.The Orchard Keeper (1965) deals with the aftermath of the strangling murder of a hitchhiker and focuses on the theme of vengeance. Outer Dark (1968) involves a baby born out of an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister and draws its title from the Gospel of Matthew, “The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God (1973), tells the story of a homeless man who becomes a serial killer and necrophiliac, storing his victims’ bodies in a cave.McCarthy’s presentation of violence is often gratuitous and not developed from the standpoint of critiquing the social conditions that give rise to criminality and conflict. To the extent he criticizes society, it is from the point of view of presenting humanity as a whole as inherently violent. Describing the homicidal main character in Child of God, McCarthy once said in an interview, “There are people like him all around us,” as if to say: this is more or less what mankind truly amounts to.In another passage in Child of God, McCarthy describes all of humanity as driven by violent, anti-social impulses: “See him,” he writes of the killer-protagonist. “You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it.”McCarthy’s novels of the 1980s and early 1990s maintained these themes, even as the setting moves from the hardscrabble towns of Appalachia to the beautiful, barren landscapes of the American Southwest.Blood Meridian, written in 1985, is McCarthy’s semi-historical account of the Glanton Gang, a gang of Texas slaveholders who carried out horrific massacres of the Native peoples of the Southwest in the late 1840s at the behest of Mexican and American authorities and claimed bounties on indigenous scalps.McCarthy’s selection of the Glanton Gang for subject matter is one-sided and superficial. He writes of the Glanton Gang not to draw attention to the reactionary character of Texan independence and its connections to slavery, or to the US invasion of Mexico, but to present American history as nothing but a long string of senselessly violent, even sociopathic acts. The late 1840s were not only a period of pro-slavery slaughter, they were also marked by the emergence of a popular movement fighting for the abolition of slavery and witnessed heroic sacrifices in the struggle to free the slaves.
>>24988353>this is a deeply false conceptionasserted with no argument
>>24988352I read this guys book blood meridian because the anons here keep shilling him and honestly it was embarrassing, I'm not supposed to feel so obviously superior to an author I'm reading. I could appreciate his use of language to get at his visual effects but the style was so contrived and derivative of Hemingway and Faulkner, it seemed redundant. This might have been okay if there was any substance to the book but he seemed to put all his faith in the style, the Judge's philosophy is not chilling or compelling but merely idiotic and he could only have worked as a comic character, which he had potential to be but McCarthy just wanted us to be mystified by the stylistic violence. If I'm interested in that I would rather just watch beheadings and then read more refined authors. Bloom said this was the best book by any living American, better that Pynchon, Delillo, Roth (which doesn't mean bloom thought he was overall superior). Is this true? I'm not even opposed to that judgement, it just goes to show how largely worthless 20th century literature has been, no wonder the woke blue haired feminists or whatever have been allowed to take over.
>>24989196His best stuff is from 21st century. Get on the Stella Marris train early.
>>24989466No, I've read enough of Mr. McCarthy. I don't need to waste my time with another of his books. He quite convinced me of his faults with this one.
>>24989490Yeah but all his 20thc stuff is overhyped garbage, his best Blood Meridian style story is NCFOM, Passenger and Stella Marris are his dying magnum opus. Maybe in the future, at least remember that someone who disliked the same books as you also loved something from Mccarthy later on.
/vp/chad here. I am requesting a book or series that functions as deeply immersive literary cinema: symbolically rich, highly intellectual, and steeped in an understanding of the world, humanity, and reality that feels unprecedented. The characters and plot must be riveting, with little to no fluff. While I am patient with length, the narrative must remain engaging for readers of all ages. If the prose is boring or excessively flowery, I will abandon it immediately.The work must be eternally relevant; a text that unlocks a whole new meaning upon a second reading, and continues to evolve each time it is revisited over the next fifteen years. It should be meta—not through Fourth Wall breaks, but by eerily mirroring current society and the reader’s personal life, as if it were tailored specifically for me in both the present and the future. It should not be confined to a particular genre, but rather transcend the notion of genre entirely to tell the story that needs to be told.
You are not going to find a work that is "highly intellectual" and "appealing to all ages" because kids are not literate enough to appreciate intellectual literature anymore. Remember Lewis Carroll might have written children's literature but he said children love Shakespeare so it was another time
>>24989538Oh The Places You'll Go. Now fuck off.
>>24989538She has some nice DSLs
What do you read when you’re going through a really bad anxiety episode / panic attack / paranoia spiral?
>>24987965Exercise. Its about the only thing that helps that's not drugs.
>>24987965Definitely not that Clark Ashton Smith story where a guy makes a time machine and ends up stuck in the timeless, actionless white void of ideal forms in pre-creation.
>>24988493Yeah masturbation is always a reliable way to calm down
>>24987965Depends how irrational the cause. If it's from paranoia about irrational stuff, I will go and try to do some intense exercise, which usually helps. It's very easy to overlook physiological causes of anxiety
>>24989339Yeah same. The issue is sometimes it's hard to remember just how effective it is when your in the midst of feeling quite anxious.
I've been reading nothing but depressing books lately and I want to destress a little. Any recommendations? I've been thinking Wordsworth, Rabelais or Chaucer.
>The dispensers of mass information have once again discovered science fiction. They do it every seven or eight years. The last time was with 2001. The only trouble is, they've discovered 1939 science fiction. Mindless shoot-'em-up and hardware. Paeans of praise to the grommet and spanner. And that means more of the same, just the way it happened in the wake of 2001. It means that thought-provoking sf, the kind written by Gene Wolfe and Kate Wilhelm and James Tiptree, Jr. and Michael Moorcock, has no value. It means that an entire genre of fiction for our time, material that informs and educates and entertains, will be bypassed in favor of more cops&robbers in outer space, more cowboys&indians on Tatooine.>Goodbye, science fiction, hello sci-fi. That's pronounced skiffy.
>>24984234In an alternate universe where there is a BotNS cinematic universe Ellison's I, Robot film adaptation is probably a thing.
Ellison was a spiritual N-word. Very argumentative and aggressive man.
>>24988275Niggers aren't argumentative.
>>24981045This faggot spent decades viciously defending his buddy and fellow tribe member Edward Kramer from allegations of child molestation. He was then strangely silent when, after almost 15 fucking years of delaying tactics, Kramer was finally tried and convicted on multiple counts.
>>24981045>>24981717>>24983710Harlan Ellison praises Sydney Newman and Neil Gaiman. Hm, what do these three men all have in common?
We get it, this gaylord main character and his pen pals are very bored with their life made of parties, hard drugs and gay sex, now can the narrator drop the pop references and make the plot go forward? I'm at page 100 btw
>>24988441The first 100 pages take their time but the second half is pretty good
>>24988452I don't like to read about fat people like BET having gay sex.
>>24988441Maybe it'd make more sense if you had ever been a junkie for a significant amount of time. I thought the novel was great and rang true even though im a poorfag I knew exactly where this book was coming from
>>24989010Perhaps junkie of the stimulant variety
>>24988495What do you want, a bullfighting scene? Stick to comics.
why do you read books?
>>24987596Trans women already fight in combat sports.
>>24984936Typical modern woman
>>24986329nah I’d rather get pussy. Have sex, you actual incel
>>24982409>masculine, uneducated men are abusive patriarchs>effeminate, well-read men are performative betasWhy are women so insistent on demolishing any possible avenue for a man to feel fulfilled in their identity? What’s left for us to be when everything is labelled as either exploitative or disingenuous?
>>24989572You realize people just do this to each other right? It has nothing to do with them being women.
the fourth blackfyre rebellion editionASOIAF wiki: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_PageBlog: https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/Old blog: https://grrm.livejournal.com/So Spake Martin (interviews): https://westeros.org/citadel/ssm/Book search: https://asearchoficeandfire.com/SSM search: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=006888510641072775866:vm4n1jrzsdyGeneral search: http://searcherr.work/TWOW samples: https://archive.org/details/411440566-the-winds-of-winter-released-chaptersold: >>24949686
Quaithe is Ashara Dayne, it fits
>>24988242actually its Danaerys the Dreamer
I liked that theory that the point of the House with the Red Door alludes to Varys/fAegon accusing Dany of being a Blackfyre once the option of marriage is off the table.But I really don't think it works because "I have dragons" is the biggest fuck you to all arguments
>>24989309Black or red, a dragon is still a dragon.
>>24989389and in the end it matters not because Robert caved in Rhaegar's skull and claimed the throne because his grandma was a targ.
I just read The Dancing Girl of Izu and it was very soulful. Has /lit/ read any Japanese books or short stories recently?
>>24987634are you calling me a faggot, anon
>>24986909Its poetry not short stories but ink dark moon was very good
>>24988160It's a genuine classic.
>>24987670reading it now and it's already pretty kino>"The two dogs Jappy and Poo (we call him Poo because he is such a poor little thing) came running over. I had them both sit in front of me, but I only petted Jappy. Jappy's pale fur gleamed. Poo was dirty. As I was petting Jappy, I was perfectly aware of Poo next to him, who looked like he was about to start whining. I was also aware that Poo was crippled. I hate how sad Poo is. I can't stand how poor and pathetic he is, and because of that I am cruel to him. Poo looks like a stray dog, so there is no teling when he might get nabbed and killed. With his leg like that, he would be too slow to run away. Hurry, Poo, go on up into the mountains! No one's going to take care of you, so you may as well die. I'm the kind of girl who will say or do unspeakable things, not just to Poo, but to anyone. I annoy and provoke people. I really am a horrid girl."based
>>24986909The Japanese literature I want to read is basically non-existent in English. It's a shame because Japanese are really good at talking about other cultures in insane amounts of detail.
ITT we write a story together, three words at a time. I'll begin. >It all started
This time's different,
I tell myself.
Call me Ishmael
OP is a
the way I
