9.91K subscribers
6.9K photos
303 videos
31 files
780 links
0/0 = undefined

A labyrinth of ideas,
A diary of curiosities

Bot: @contactzero_bot
Download Telegram
In other regards, the Protestant Reformation resembled the movements of Ibn Hanbal ابن حنبل and Ibn Taymiyah ابن تيمية—the exact opposite of Sufism. Like those Muslim theologians, Protestant reformers sought to delegitimize all later accretions of doctrine and go back to the original source: the Bible. The Book.

— Destiny Disrupted
Forwarded from FREE
ليش التقدم العلمي صار عند الأوروبيين مو عند المسلمين (رغم أنّ المسلمين حققوا هواي إكتشافات علمية قبل الغرب بقرون)؟
0/0
ليش التقدم العلمي صار عند الأوروبيين مو عند المسلمين (رغم أنّ المسلمين حققوا هواي إكتشافات علمية قبل الغرب بقرون)؟
But here’s the really interesting mystery to think about. Muslim scientists had come right to the threshold of virtually all these discoveries long before the West arrived there. In the tenth century, for example, al-Razi refuted Galen’s theory of four humors as a basis for medical treatment. In the eleventh century, Ibn Sina analyzed motion mathematically, as Newton was to do so fruitfully six centuries later. In the thirteenth century, about three hundred years before Vesalius, Ibn al-Nafis described how blood circulated in the body. Ibn al-Haytham, who died in 1039, discovered the spectrum, described the scientific method, and established quantification and experiment as the basis for scientific exploration: he pretty much pre-Newtoned Newton and pre-Descarted Descartes. Muslims had already elaborated the atomic view of matter, which they took from Indian scientists, and some had elaborated the mechanistic model of the universe, which they had gotten from the Chinese. The momentous thing was not so much the discoveries themselves as the fact that in the West they persisted, they accumulated, and they reinforced one another until they brought about a complete and coherent new way to view and approach the world, the scientific view, which enabled the West’s later explosive advances in technology. Why did all this happen in the West but not in the East?
0/0
Why did all this happen in the West but not in the East?
Possibly because Muslims made their great scientific discoveries just as their social order started crumbling, whereas the West made its great scientific discoveries just as its long-crumbled social order was starting to recover and in the wake of a religious reformation that broke the grip of church dogma on human thought, empowering individuals to speculate freely.
0/0
Possibly because Muslims made their great scientific discoveries just as their social order started crumbling, whereas the West made its great scientific discoveries just as its long-crumbled social order was starting to recover and in the wake of a religious…
الجواب ببساطة زايدة هو أنّ الإكتشافات العلمية وحدها غير كافية لتقدم الحضارة. لازم أكو نظام يدعم هذا التقدم واستمراريته ويحوّل هاي الإكتشافات من صيغتها العلمية النظرية إلى إختراعات عسكرية وإقتصادية جديدة.
المسلمين حققوا هالإكتشافات بنهاية العصر الذهبي الإسلامي وبداية تفكك النظام السياسي والإجتماعي والإقتصادي بالشرق الأوسط، ولهذا إكتشافاتهم ضاعت بسبب عدم إستقرار الحضارة العربية الإسلامية آنذاك. الأوروبيين حققوا تقدم علمي ببداية عصرهم الذهبي، ولهذا حققتلهم تقدم عسكري واقتصادي (لأن جان أكو نظام يشجع تحويلها من صيغتها النظرية للعملية).
0/0
— The Boys
شخصية الفرد اليميني:
Forwarded from The Shire (Tetania)
Cafe in Cartagena, Colombia 1989
Audio
يا طير يا مسافر
At around the same time, in the late 1970s, the first personal computers began to enter engineering, architecture and, of course, finance. The joke then was that to err is human but to mess things up seriously one needs a computer.

— Technofeudalism
Derivatives (finance)
0/0
Derivatives (finance)
Computers allowed financiers to complicate their gambles immensely. Instead of a simple option-to-sell boring old shares to Jill, Jack could now buy much snazzier options called derivatives. For example, he could buy a derivative that was in essence an option-to-buy a bundle containing shares in a variety of different companies plus bits of debts owed by homeowners in Kentucky, German corporations, even the Japanese government. As if that were not complex enough, Jack could also buy a derivative amounting to the option-to-buy a bundle of many such … derivatives that some super-computer would create. By the time these derivatives containing other derivatives had come out of the computer, not even the genius financial ‘engineer’ who created them could understand what was in them. Complexity thus became a great excuse not to delve into the derivatives that one bought. It liberated the Jills and the Jacks from the need to explain to themselves why they were buying them. Once computers had guaranteed that no one could possibly understand what these derivatives were made of, everyone wanted to buy them because … everyone was buying them. And as long as everybody was buying, anyone who could borrow huge amounts of money could become a billionaire (and avoid being branded a coward or a party-pooper or a loser by one’s colleagues) simply by purchasing them. For years, that’s exactly what was happening. Until, in 2008, it wasn’t.

— Technofeudalism
Hobson’s choice
0/0
Hobson’s choice
مَثَل إنكليزي، معناه بالضبط هو "تريد أرنب؟ هاك أرنب. تريد غزال؟ هاك أرنب."

يستخدموه لما المقابل ينطيك الوهم بأنك عندك هواي خيارات وتكدر تختار منها براحتك، بينما بالواقع ما عندك غير خيار واحد تاخذه وتسكت... Like in elections
كانَ عزلُ النساء عن الحياة العامة عادةً إجتماعيةً مستمرةً من مئات السنين في العالَم الإسلامي آنذاك. لكن حتى في زمن العثمانيين، لَم ينتشر هذا الأمرُ في كل المجتمع، إذ لم يكن شائعًا إلا في الطبقات العليا منه. فالمسافِر المارُّ في المناطق الريفية يمكنه أنْ يصادف فلّاحاتٍ يعملن في الحقول أو يَسُقنَ الحيوانات على الطريق. أمّا في المناطق الحضرية، فنساء الطبقات الدنيا كنّ يمارسن أعمالهن في الأسواق العامة أو يتسوّقن حاجيّاتٍ لبيوتهن أو يَبِعن ما صَنَعن بأيديهن. أمّا الطبقة الوسطى، فبعضُ نسائها مَلَكْنَ الأراضي وأدَرْنَ الأعمال وأمَرْنَ العُمّال. لكنّ مشاركة هؤلاء النسوة في الحياة العامة لم تكن إلا دليلًا على مكانةِ رجالهن المتواضعة.

— كتاب 'Destiny Disrupted'
Europeans never invaded Persia, never made concerted war on it. They just came to sell, to buy, to work, to “help.” But there they were when things came apart. And like opportunistic viruses that lurk in the body unnoticed but flourish into illness when the immune system breaks down, the Europeans flowed into whatever cracks opened up in the fragmenting society, growing ever more powerful as the cracks grew wider, until at last they were in command.

Europeans pretty much failed to notice they were taking over Persia; and that’s partly because there was no “they.” Westerners came to Persia from various European countries, and Persians were not the enemy to them but the backdrop. The enemy, for each group of Europeans, was another group of Europeans. The British, the French, the Russians, the Dutch and others kept moving into power vacuums in Persia not so much to conquer Persia as to block other Europeans from conquering Persia.

— Destiny Disrupted
معضلة الأوروبيين وية أفغانستان:
0/0
معضلة الأوروبيين وية أفغانستان:
In 1878, detecting new Russian interest in Afghanistan, the British tried to occupy Kabul again. Once again, however, they miscalculated the difficulties of occupying a mountainous territory inhabited by so many hostile and mutually antagonistic tribes. It wasn’t that the land was hard to “conquer,” as Europeans understood the term conquest. Great Britain easily marched into the capital, put its own compliant nominee on the throne, and appointed an “envoy” to direct him. In most contexts, this would have been conquest. But the British found that bending Afghan leaders to their will did them little good. The leaders they bent simply broke off in their hands and ended up as their dependents, not their tools, while the tribal people they were supposedly the rulers of operated in the hills as leaderless guerillas. The second Anglo-Afghan War took a nasty turn when the British envoy Cavagnari was killed and ruinous urban battles broke out; in the end the British were forced to pull back to India again.

— Destiny Disrupted