Are you kidding me? We stopped for gas in Al Fallujah?

- War Dogs

Thats what happened there...

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One can rightly sum up modern and contemporary art in this: “I just like it this way, it shows how I feel.”

It is the age where art has become, as Lukács correctly said, a luxury item for idle parasites. It is the age where the religion of pity has turned suffering into a way of being; hence, its sickness lies in what Pascal Bruckner encapsulated thus: “I suffer so I am.” It is the age of sentimentalism, and the age where in every individual a Romantic lies hidden. Romanticism is a symptom of decline that manifests itself in weak, self-detesting intellect and 'instincts', to paraphrase Spengler slightly. When Romanticism (and sentimentalism) manifests itself, it creates men who are infantile; “men who remain children too long (or forever).”

Modern and contemporary artists lack any sense of intellectual honesty; it is to them “too masculine, too healthy, too sober.” It is the same sentimentality that makes you “impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society” and liberating everything from the past manners of discipline. By saying that they “like it this way,” they are trying so badly to compensate for their lack of artistic talent. To be untalented is the norm today, and to be trained to be worse with time is the zenith of creativity and originality.

A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions

- Marcus Aurelius

قيمةُ كُلِّ امرئٍ ما يُحسِنُه

- علي بن أبي طالب (ع)

Digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine. In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives that Aristotle identifies as crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void, an emptiness, that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored with the help of digital noise.

- Digital Minimalism

Why read books on your to-read list when Haidar summarizes 90% of them?

My pleasure 🌚🍻

Omg…

It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first-century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.

- Digital Minimalism

صار من الأسهل الآن أنْ نملأ الفراغ بين العمل ورعاية العائلة والنوم، عبر تخدير عقولنا باستخدام هواتفنا الذكية وأجهزتنا اللوحية. إلهاءُ أنفسنا عن الأسئلة الوجودية المهمّة ليست بالفكرة الجديدة—قبل اليوتيوب كان لدينا (ولا زال) التلفزيون والإكثار من شرب الكحول لنتهرّب من الأسئلة العميقة والمهمة—لكن ما يميّز تكنولوجيا القرن الـ 21 المتقدّمة التي تقتنص انتباهنا هو أنّها فعّالة جدًا في القيام بهذه المهمّة.

- كتاب Digital Minimalism

Rather than inform ourselves of the crumbling reality we were born into, why not plunge further into one that is shaped just for us