u/oSkillasKope707

It seems that opposition against data center buildouts is met with accusations of "slopulism". From what I understand, the term "slopulism" is typically used by "centrists"(for lack of a better term?) to signal their dislike for populist policies which they argue are usually poorly thought out. One often contested point they bring up is the overblown nature of the water usage. But the question IMO should be: Why are they even needed in the first place? (I believe Ed even raised this question recently in response to the water usage problem.) There is also the embarrassing question about pathetically low job creation. A side note: Data centers may be a misnomer in that they are probably closer to supercomputing clusters rather than traditional data centers for cloud/CDN/etc.

Therefore, I believe this is a new strategy for pro data center propaganda to be cognizant of.

Mods, please remove this post if this is not the right place for this discussion.

This 2026 book by Dr. Schmid is an interesting read! The first sub-chapter mentions the "asceticization of Arabia". It was something that makes a lot of sense since it seems that asceticism was a major theme in the Late Antique world.

Here is an Academia edu link for more info:

https://www.academia.edu/144262241/The\_Ascetic\_Qur\_an\_and\_Its\_Kharijite\_Readers\_Leiden\_Brill\_2026

Reading Ali Akbar's 2019 paper The Zoroastrian Provenance of Some Islamic Eschatological Doctrines, it was interesting to see that there existed Zoroastrian texts instructing people against displaying grief, especially weeping in funerary contexts. A belief apparently held in Zoroastrianism is that crying for the dead would torment the soul of the deceased, and if I'm not mistaken, (obscure?) Islamic tradition has something similar. It should be noted that the Qurʾān makes no clear prohibition against weeping for the dead.

Likewise, we see potential eschatological influences such as the Chinvat Bridge vs the Ṣirāṭ Bridge and an interesting belief that a person's deeds would be personified as either a beautiful woman or an ugly old woman.

So, could there be more examples of pre-Islāmic Persian (maybe just Sassanian?) culture that parallels with Islāmic tradition and maybe aḫlāq?

The Qurʾān extols the lineage of ʿImrān (which included Zechariah who was a priest in the Second Temple) which is likely borrowed from the Hebrew name ʿAmram who is the father of Miryam, Moshe and Aharon. Additionally, the Qurʾān also calls Maryam (Yeshuʿa's mother, not Miryam) "the sister of Aharon", causing some scholars to consider if this implied that Maryam was of priestly lineage, especially considering Qurʾānic narratives mentioning her being under Zechariah's custodianship.

If we turn to pre-Islamic South Arabia, an interesting artifact DJE 23 lists the Mishmarot, which is a list of 24 priestly divisions of Beit HaMikdash. This shows that not too far from Mecca, there existed knowledge about the Israelite priesthood, although admittedly 1-2 centuries before Muḥammad was alive and maybe such knowledge was limited to a small portion of the population.

So it got me wondering if we can find evidence of early Muslims showing knowledge about the Kohanim.

From what I understand, negative views of Paul were widely adopted by later Islamic intelligentsia. He is viewed as an intentional corruptor of Jesus' teachings. I wonder if tropes and narratives found in Toledot Yeshu can be found in some of their anti-Paul polemics.

Zabur is the miniscule script for Ancient South Arabian scripts and it was mainly used to produce documents that were "written"(engraved) on sticks. But I do wonder if they would have bothered to pivot to parchment and/or papyrus and ink later on.

Additionally, do we know how Ethiopia adopted the process of producing codices? Since they were more culturally tied with South Arabia in pre-Islamic times, I wonder if South Arabia would have also come into contact with codices.