freecounterpoint: No Mas

Thursday, October 19, 2006

No Mas

"So I would just end up trying to say the same-old same-old, but in different ways. Meanwhile, none of us are getting any younger. Carpe Diem"

If the Very Bad Muslim is out of oil, is it any wonder this kufr peasant is Tankless in Gaza? This weekend will lay out the words of Pepita the Inscrutable, as oft requested. Then a short enough statement about this jaundiced eye's view of things. Then I take a few years hiatus from conversing on the Fall of the West. I'll keep up with things epiphenomenal on FCP, but if all goes well will not awake sometime before 2010 to the burning world .

10 comments:

Tecumseh said...: Then I take a few years hiatus from conversing on the Fall of the West.

Hey, man, are you serious? What else is there to talk about, well, besides a few peccadilos?; 10/19/2006 12:14 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: I will try to see what can be seen when looking at the periphery of things.......there will always be time later, near the end of things, to pull a Raimundo Lullo. Besides, if there is hope in the great long run, it is in taking seriously the preservation of the understanding and memory of this West about to be destroyed. Think Pappus preserving huge swathes of Greek mathematics and science that would otherwise have been utterly lost. Ok, I could prove to be an Idiot of the genre, Simplicius say, but gotta try, AI....And yet, besides, this is assuming Islam Militant will let me slumber awhile, and not get all carbombie in the local neighborhood.; 10/19/2006 7:16 PM
Tecumseh said...: Who is Raimundo Lullo?

As for the preservation project, this sounds like a noble task But how to do it? Remember the Alexandria library (one of those 7 Wonders down the memory hole)? Didn't help to have all those books there when the time for fire came...; 10/19/2006 8:59 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Raimundo Lullo, in English, is Raymond Lull [philosopher/mathematician], best known for his "Ars Combinatoria". He lived a very long time for the medieval era, somewhere into the 80's, I think. According to the accounts we have of his death, when he felt too old, too tired of life, he persuaded the captain of a Catalonian merchant vessel to let him off on a small rowboat some distance off of the coast of what is now Tangiers. He made it to the coast, and as he waded ashore began preaching the gospel to the local [no doubt astonished] Mohmies [this is where Pepe would segue in with "Sweet Baby Jaysus"]. For which troubles he was promptly mobbed and stoned to death.
Now, as for the Library of Alexandria, we've learnt at least three things from that, I hope.
The first is, that if you see the Jihadist coming, get that stuff out of there, or at least into hiding [the Alexandrians perhaps had no reason to suspect that their new enemy was something unseen before. The Byzantines did, and in their last decades, the signs being omenous, many manuscripts were finally allowed to be copied by Western Europeans, or even taken as is. It is here that the near complete record of Archimedes and Apollonius, for instance, finally made it to the scholars of the Renaissance].
The second is Never, absolutely Never, rely on one , or just a few, libraries. Make multiple copies, and scatter them widely, in place and amongst varieties of men. Reduces the odds dramatically of their being erased totally from history.
The third is translate these into as many of the most widely spoken languages as possible. Although Rome had the Greek world embedded in its empire for many hundreds of years, there was very little translation of mathematical/scientific work into Latin [very different from philosophy, history, etc..], so these texts were confined to the narrow band of scholarship running along cities of the eastern mediterranean. When Islam struck hard and fast, the narrow geographical distribution meant much was lost without "backup" elsewhere.
So, if we've learnt our lesson, it won't be so easy for Islam to extirpate the past....
As for relying on Islamic civilization to preserve what it has conquered, the track record is very very lousy, to put it mildly. In the early era, the "Golden Age" after the first century of conquerings, the established caliphates, a small elite of the warrior and religious ruling over largely kufr populations, and before the codification of the Quran and the Haditha/Sunna compilations, there was much active translation and incorporation of Greek, "Babylonian", and later Hindu science into Islam. So that which had survived the initial bouts of scholar cleavings and book burnings [yes, some things had been hidden] now had a chance to be translated into Arabic and spread through the few centers of the Ummah which supported the "Houses of Wisdom" and other centers of scholarship. But when the "purity" of the Message had been arrived at, and the incompatability with it of this restored pagan learning been decided on, so then disappeared Houses of Wisdom, their allied translations and publications, and the right of nonMuslims to engage in learning with Believers. This is also the era the pressure to convert became much more forceful......And since then it has been almost nothing significant in science and mathematics out of Islam, and when it has, has been precisely in those places where Islam still must significantly engage with the world of the Kufr.
The exceptions to this in Islam? Engineering, Chemical processes, and Architecture, largely related to the building of religious edifices and to weapons and machines of war. Medicine [mostly in the context of an imperial court]. And, inherited from the Greeks, but dovetailing nicely with uses celestial observation, Mecca-directing and calendars, Optics [geometric] and Astronomy [Ptolemaic]. So, in the longer run, the Imams gotta find a use for a science or it will become a peripheral, or dead, thing.
As for "nobility", AI, there ain't nothing noble in trying to save human memory from extinction. It is pure, unadulterated, desperation.; 10/19/2006 11:24 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: Make multiple copies, and scatter them widely, in place and amongst varieties of men. Reduces the odds dramatically of their being erased totally from history.

AA, as JJ and I once offered, you can store your growing history of mathematics library with JJ or myself?

Maybe we could convert those massive abandoned ICBM underground Dakota missile silos into libraries.; 10/20/2006 9:09 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...: I was also thinking about the Beowulf manuscript, an Old English/Scandinavian poetic story of pagan origin(that's one strike against Islam) finally transcribed from Oral to written history by a Christian (that's the second strike against Islam). The sucker was nearly torched (by accident) by those damned Anglo-Saxon doggs in 1731.; 10/20/2006 1:51 PM
Mr roT said...: This weekend will lay out the words of Pepita the Inscrutable, as oft requested.
ick!; 10/20/2006 3:55 PM
Tecumseh said...: Good historical context, AA -- well, good in the sense of scholarship, not in the sense of bitter memories. But one needs to learn from the past (duhhh....). And the prescription of scattering libraries, perhaps even in underground Dakota abandoned silos, sounds like something to look into.

By the way, any of you guys read Il nome della rosa? There seems to be a lesson or two in there...; 10/20/2006 4:56 PM
Mr roT said...: You mean an echo?; 10/20/2006 5:34 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: AI, don't forget to remind me that we'll have to start a library of Western films to store in the abandoned missile silos too. Here's a review of the film, a snippet of history about how monks liked to frolic with the local peasant girls.; 10/20/2006 5:35 PM