/lit/ - Literature

Even if I make it I'll always be jealous of the power that music has over people, the ability to invoke emotions so potent in only 3 - 5 minutes is unreal.

>May it be - Enya

Simenon, Dirty Snow

Hubert Selby, The Demon

Maupassant, Bel Ami

I might finally finish The Fellowship of the Ring this weekend (I've been reading it for 9 months)

>>20656259
Only read words with capital letters and speedread through everything else. Your eyes will instinctively over time process the words you speedread through like logograms.

Books you genuinely enjoy and agree with the author on will be more successful with this method than the books you don't like.

>>20647401
I definitely find it sus that Palamas developed an entire theology - his tortured essence/energies "distinction" (which he variously argued was and was not an actual distinction) - just to make sense of an alleged (prelest?) mystical phenomenon (the hesychast monks). It is rather like Luther developing an entire theology out of his "Tower Experience" moment of mystic revelation -- even though that theology required him to effectively (if not in actual fact) dispose of the Epistle of James, which rather tends to condemn the orthodoxy of said theology.

Literally not a single book has been recommended ITT.

> Jump from capital letter to capital letter.
> Skim through everything else

“A handful” of something is almost never a few of them, it’s almost always either a lot of them or none at all
>a handful of pebbles
Thats a lot of pebbles
>a handful of cars
That’s either no cars, or just a small piece of one car
>a handful of songs
That doesn’t even make physical sense. Why do people use handful in this way, it never made sense

>check reading log
>Back to February - the majority of the books are disagreeable - comments include "rubbish, drivel, garbage, madness, boring, sophist, slog, meh". Only one instance of "based"

Why do we read what we hate?

>>20399158
Literally is no point in discussing anything such as physics, chemistry, biology or under unless they're changed their metaphysics. The metaphysics that has to be comprehended Heraclitus' river. Just as it is impossible to step into the same river twice, it is impossible to be born into the same "Platonically real" species twice. Modern biology is nominalism.

Theology, grandmother of Bolshevism.

Feuerbach says to find meaning in a phrase, look in its concrete subject as opposed to the abstract predicate.
"Classless society". Abstract predicate classless, society subject (because there is no apparent current classlessness, but there arguably is a society). 'Classlessness' is contained within 'society'.
An abstract predicate is indistinguishable from Being (read Aquinas AND Feuerbach), the highest ideal.
We speculate from experience: "Society is Being without Family nor Friends." (Because what else is 'society' if not the political organisation beyond the blood family, beyond common friendship?)
"Society is Being without Family nor Friends". Whereas the common theist is able to instinctively comprehend Aquinas' Analogy of Being even without Aquinas himself and thereby become content through relating the natural order within their life (Family and Friends), the sociologist, stripped from the Form of Fatherhood and the Form of Sonhood, feels no Spirit because their appears no Family nor Friends for them (c.f. the Holy Family and the 12 Apostles).
Therefore the Sociologist, to approach Truth, Beauty and Goodness, cannot approach it as a common believer from within daily life. He must approach it in a surrogate activity. With no agency in his life, he must imagine himself at the helm of Plato's Ship of State, as the Philosopher-King himself, as if he has seen the Sun or at worst, think he IS the Sun (i.e. Solipsism). To affirm his own little "I am", he must pretend to be "I AM". From there, his purely pneumatological being (i.e. Hegel) is affirmed by data, statistics, economics, politics, geopolitics, secular religious studies and metrics in all sorts of birds 'eye view ways.

The realest thing to the sociologist is society. Being is Society.

Syllogistically:

> Without Friends nor Family is Society. (The beloved Good of all the friendless and those with mangled fathers).
> Being is without Friends nor Family.
> Being is Society.

How the fuck do reactionaries measure "decay"? It clearly isn't a quantitative measurement in-itself and decay is no apparent substance. You can't measure it with a ruler, a compass, a watch, a scale, a chromometer or even otherwise mathematically. Is "decay" just some metaphysical abstraction of disregard for tradition? Metaphysically projecting that Others have more power against those traditionally with power?

The three measurements of the HDI are GDP per capita, literacy and life expectancy. Inequality-adjusted HDI also measures inequality. Literally wtf is "decay"? Is it the alienation of traditional family values from your subjective Being? Is decay a society being too "open".

Even if I suspend materialism for a moment and follow Berkeley, "decay" isn't even an ideal mathematical quantity. No unit for decay.

Is it literally just the disappearance of fatherhood norms? If so I do not lose much because unfortunately the only father I ever knew was a mentally ill dysfunctional one, so I lose nothing from positivistically saying that Being is more linked to HDI, GDP, Literacy, Life-expectancy than any norm of fatherhood. No need for reactionary romanticism and idealism.

Where is this "decay" substance?

>girl asks zodiac sign
>say gemini
>it's apparently a "bad one"
Wtf bros?

It is not practical to speak of a "matter-independent reality" so why is it practical to speak of a "mind-independent reality"?

(As distinguished from solipsism, we speculate there is one "mind" which all humans share in, just as there is one material cosmos.)

>>20245997
>Fuck off

What other forums or communities about books do you recommend? I'm interested in fantasy and non fiction.

What's the (academic) philosophical response to all the strides made in science over the past 40 years? Have any thinkers written extensively on the philosophical implications of quantum, string theory etc, or tried to use them as basis for their system of thought?

>>20152354
I'm right . Fuck off with replying to my post if you don't address the question

>>20139274
Well anon, considering the original tweet says "most foreigners" and you decided to make it all about model minority asians, conveniently ignoring the much larger population of lastinks. This should've been your strongest point, as the average American has much more in common with those stinky home depot beaners than they do with west coast asian wannabe WASPs! Unfortunately, you don't understand that "integration" does not mean "excelling", but your blinding racial prejudices may one day be lifted to reveal coherence to you.

Is it retarded or based

A little bit of introspection.

>Around 2000, Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, who hated anime, added an anime forum to Something Awful (SA), naming it Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse (ADTRW)
> As one SA user who later migrated to the chans wrote, SA "was also home to [a] wide collection of other losers, the third or fourth saddest of which was was the ADTRW crew."
>Young kids were able to grind through tables of equations but then stood listlessly at recess, not comprehending play, asking their teachers what they were supposed to do with themselves. Various studies showed how many of the kids harbored sociopathic thoughts, focused on destroying the system that oppressed them. "In the fifth and sixth grades, when students are near the age of serious test taking, the desires became sinister. One boy said he would "drop atomic bombs all over the world." Another wanted to beat his father. This is what one sixth-grade boy wrote: "I would go to a bank and rob it. I would burn all the money I stole. I want to cut apart a human body with a kitchen knife. I want to set fire to a house. I want to run over about 300 people with a car. If I could do all these, I would have no regrets before dying.""
> A long time ago, if somebody said they really wanted to fuck a pillow with anime on it, if they went out in public and said that, they would be laughed at. There would be some element of shame. They would keep that inside and say, "Well, I want to fuck a pillow with anime on it but I can't tell anybody." But then the internet came along and they could get on a webring or whatever it was back in the day. Go to rec/all/fuckanimepillow or whatever. Then other people would say "I want to fuck anime pillows, too." You had this community of people who were very intent on fucking anime pillows. The typical person does not want to fuck a pillow with anime on it. This, of course, was back when fucking anime pillows was fresh and new.

...Why?

Debate time! Who is the "prophet" that is spoken of in Deuteronomy 18:

>15 The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet[d] like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet.
>19 Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet[h] shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable. 20 But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak—that prophet shall die.” 21 You may say to yourself, “How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?” 22 If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it.

I've heard fellow Christians claim that the above prophet is Jesus (Yeshua). But when I read this in context of Numbers-Deuteronomy-Joshua, it sure seems like Deut 18 is a reference to Joshua (i.e. the "other Yeshua")

What really strikes me about these passages is that God is telling the Jews how to identify false prophets: You are supposed to ask them for a sign, and if that sign comes true then they are from God.

Why, then, does Jesus REFUSE to give the Jews such a sign whenever they ask for one? Except for the few times Jesus mentions the "sign of Jonah." (Jonah was a reluctant prophet who started out being in open rebellion against God, so...). Anyway, why does Jesus insult any Jew who asks for a sign? They are supposed to be wary of false prophets; they are literally just doing what God instructed them to do. What gives?

Why do so many writers get acclaim for writing literally about themselves? Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Charles Bukowski, they just make up narrators who are obviously supposed to be them and then make millions of dollars writing about how much sex their fictional selves have.

> every single word that has ever existed is packed with so many layers of connotation and denotation you have to individually read entire texts on them and go through every philosopher and poet in every language to resolve the différance.

Fuck the Logos.