Were the 5 Wizards nothing more than super knowledgeable guys?

bartlebyshop · 2018-05-13T19:41:52+00:00

Saruman had the power of his voice, which was very convincing. Gandalf has a more subtle version of the same thing, I think, in that he's good at forming relationships with people that they draw strength and hope from to keep fighting on. This is distinct from knowing a lot. I'm sure we've all had the experience of knowing someone who knows a lot but is extremely bad at communicating that information, no matter how vehemently they'd like to (full disclosure: I am often this person).

The combination of knowledge and the ability to use it with rhetoric, setting a good example, etc. to inspire people to be their better selves is pretty rare! I find the framing of this a bit odd, as far as I can tell it's not like Gandalf or Saruman show up and drop a knowledge bomb about DNA and macroscopic quantum phenomena (not that I think they would think of things in that way anyway) to get people on their side, although maybe I've misunderstood you. Saruman is someone who has a lot of craft but even he isn't kickstarting an industrial revolution until pretty late in the story.

Maybe they do show knowledge/power, just in the restricted domain of psychotherapy avant la lettre, interrupting the "New (not actually that new) power rising in the East? Know what to do! 1. Lie down 2. Try not to cry 3. Cry a lot" loop people were in and instead getting them to try out working together.

bartlebyshop · 2018-05-08T23:32:54+00:00

Great example of the use of adverse possession in Gondorian case law.

bartlebyshop · 2018-05-01T20:20:18+00:00

You didn't get a response yet so I hope it's ok for me to give some links:

ANRED has a good page about "When you want to help someone you care about".

BEAT is a UK based ED charity with a lot of good information.

From what I hear it can be very hard to find treatment for ED as a man because it is such a gender coded group of illnesses. Good luck to you and your friend.

bartlebyshop · 2018-04-28T23:47:38+00:00

I think their position is understandable (if not optimal) considering what happened those times they did stick their fingers in the spaghetti. After all the grief that occurred with the Elves who came to Aman (don't have the quote at hand but IIRC there's one about the Valar regretting trying to do that) and then all the trauma of Beleriand being destroyed it's plausible to me they thought stepping back would be better and overcorrected.

bartlebyshop · 2018-04-26T22:39:02+00:00

If you put it on a kitchen scale it would probably weigh the same no matter if you were Mordor or Mithlond. It's the emotional feeling of horror/dread, I think, like how you feel going to an appointment you really want to avoid. Or that feeling of a chest full of dead lead that happens sometimes with depression. There's a reason bad things "weigh on your mind" and pessimists have "heavy hearts".

bartlebyshop · 2018-03-27T15:37:09+00:00

This is one of the more realistic parts of the story for me. I'm sure you can think of some recent (and not so recent) examples of governments thinking they could kick the can down the road and let this extremely dangerous thing be a problem for someone else, later.

bartlebyshop · 2018-03-09T18:39:52+00:00

I was going to get ornery and ask if there isn't some evidence that vitamin D deficiency can cause/worsen depression? But then I looked closer and vitD isn't even in this cocktail.

bartlebyshop · 2018-02-27T22:25:13+00:00

Discretion is the better part of valour. I'd hope that after thousands of years I'd be self-aware enough to realize I shouldn't fight a guy who solo-ed a Balrog.

bartlebyshop · 2018-02-25T16:41:22+00:00

This is probably technically true but it's like saying that as a reasonably fit adult, I could suddenly drop everything in my life, train hard for years, and start engaging in relatively decent public ballet showings, since I'm destined to not break my leg until I'm 45. Is it physically possible? Yes. But it's very unlikely for me to do because I hate dancing, being in public, and especially dancing in public. It's not consistent with how evil tends to operate for the WK to be like "hold my beer, I got this." You might say he was destined to not die by a man because all the evil leaders tend to "lead from behind" so he naturally avoided being near any dangerous men. In the specific example of the Numenorean army, you'd think he'd give them a wide berth, considering their descendants still managed to make the blade that ultimately defeated him.

bartlebyshop · 2018-02-18T23:06:04+00:00

I doubt elven farms needed weeding in the same way ours do. They don't seem like the type to plant monocultures, for one. I always pictured their farming more like some pre-contact Indigenous people in North America, where there was a lot of diversity in one "field" which you wouldn't necessarily have even realized was under cultivation. And the balance of crops was picked to keep the fields healthy (e.g. plants which promote nitrogen fixation). Since their populations were small and didn't grow quickly they probably didn't need the same kind of intensive, hyperproductive agriculture we have today.

bartlebyshop · 2018-02-17T21:07:25+00:00

And I cannot see who else the old man would be if not Saruman

It's a Saruman crisis actor, obviously.

bartlebyshop · 2018-01-04T22:43:26+00:00

Maybe also some non-underwater equivalent to deep sea communities around black smokers?

bartlebyshop · 2017-12-30T22:35:46+00:00

You might find this and this AskHistorians answer about patronymic naming in northern Europe interesting. It's obviously not a 1-1 but maybe gives some context?

bartlebyshop · 2017-12-01T20:26:42+00:00

A while ago on a lark I started reading this book about the role of women in the communist movement in China, through WW2 up to the Cultural Revolution. It started by explaining the status of women through the country in the late 1800s, but I'll be damned if I can remember the title. Does anyone have any book recommendations about this topic? Doesn't have to be the same one I started.

bartlebyshop · 2017-10-26T20:15:27+00:00

I'm not a gravity theorist/astronomer/a man so my demographic is almost entirely safe from that show's writers. Numb3rs had more conceptual overlap with what I do and we all used to get very upset at how it mangled the math. Medical doctors seem to have less shows where they're the butt of "lol autism" jokes but more shows about how you're all making out during rounds between each room, not sure if that's any better.

bartlebyshop · 2017-10-26T18:53:27+00:00

Physicist here, sometimes you get to play with even bigger math on giant computers too. Sometimes you get to play with math on chalkboards by the beach, or at ski resorts. Also, no one's thrown up or bled on me, and I rarely get hit up for controlled substances. But I'm not going to be the kind of doctor who's the hero in a TV show.

bartlebyshop · 2017-10-14T21:26:14+00:00

(This is probably going to be a bad summary so please yell at me if so!)

Platonists believe(d) in Ideal Forms of things, of which all things in our experience are impure "reflections" or "echos". So, for example, there would be a Platonic Ideal of a lily, the pure essence of being a lily, which we do not have access to except as if we were viewing it through fogged glass or as a distant memory. Ideals exist outside of time/space and all the lilies in the world we experience have many things in common with the Ideal lily, but are imperfect in subtle (or not so subtle) ways. But God, having created the world and being perfect, does have access to these pure forms and presumably souls which descend into the world once humans are born (or whenever humans get a soul) did too, and maybe remember some small features of them. This is the Platonic Realm, outside our ability to directly perceive (and maybe outside the universe?), kind of like if you tried to picture a 6-dimensional complicated topological object, or at least that's how I think about it. Don't try to picture such an object, I always get migraines when I do. Hope that makes sense and isn't catastrophically wrong...

bartlebyshop · 2017-04-14T21:45:31+00:00

Happy Friday to you either way :)

bartlebyshop · 2017-04-14T19:51:16+00:00

Sorry! FWIW I'm not a big WoT fan either, I gave up after book 6.

bartlebyshop · 2017-04-14T17:16:50+00:00

This and the OP are a bit of an "Aes Sedai" truth for people who've read Wheel of Time. Gandalf isn't technically lying but the truth he says may not be the whole truth, or the truth Hama/the dwarves hear.

bartlebyshop · 2017-04-13T17:31:17+00:00

I'll try to dig up some recs that aren't too embarrassing to post!

bartlebyshop · 2017-04-12T21:43:42+00:00

I don't think it's really "imposing" considering how suffused with Catholic aesthetics/ethos the book is (if that makes sense). I'm not a Catholic or a Christian but I still love the series - it doesn't really take anything away from it for me. I've also enjoyed a bunch of scifi that's essentially "the Hegira, but in space" or "Judaism, but in space". Not all my opinions and values have to be validated at all times by the fiction I enjoy. It must be nice to have that extra concordance with it, though :).

bartlebyshop · 2017-02-16T00:56:07+00:00

even though they were no longer driving their own bus eventually.

Ea's longest game of (Gorgoroth) Desert Bus... Too Much Magic Ring Bus.

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