User talk:Nishidani/Archive 30

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Nishidani. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

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Archive 34

https://www1.undp.org/content/dam/papp/docs/Publications/UNDP-papp-reserach-bedouinsoPt.pdf If you haven't seen it, might help, idk.Selfstudier (talk) 11:27, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Grumbling (opinion) from the opposition:) Selfstudier (talk) 15:59, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for these. Have yo9u got access to Frantzman/Kark and Pappé?Nishidani (talk) 16:03, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

I mailed you.Selfstudier (talk) 16:16, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Once I have a score of strong sources in, I'll rewrite the whole article.Nishidani (talk) 16:26, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Arab Jahalin:from the Nakba to the Wall Background, not sure how usable it is.Selfstudier (talk) 19:46, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Bedouin Rights under Occupation International Humanitarian Law and Indigenous Rights for Palestinian Bedouin in the West Bank November 2015 (NRC)Selfstudier (talk) 19:52, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

One more The Palestinian Bedouin of Barriyat Jerusalem Survey Report of 21 Bedouin Community Sites in the East Periphery of Jerusalem; Khan el Ahmar, Sahel el Ahmar, Tal’et ed Damm and an Nabi Mousa Areas 2015Selfstudier (talk) 19:56, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

You said you didn't mind people tinkering with your formatting so I did, I thought it looked better, less like a wall of text. OK, you switched it back, I will leave well alone in future. :) Selfstudier (talk) 13:52, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't even notice. When I reviewed the thread I thought I'd fucked up. Feel free to tinker with anything I post as you see fit. You have better eyes, and I am disattentive about such things, and need a slap over the wrist, or a nick on the jugular, as often as not.Nishidani (talk) 13:59, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

That's all fine and dandy, but I can't find secondary coverage on him--a common problem with journalists/critics like him. He's clearly notable, just from the LRB and NYT links alone. Drmies (talk) 18:20, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I worried about that addition over a beer in my local pub. There's no secondary coverage, but in a sense that is a sign of high seriousness. His work stands on its own merits and doesn't need boosting. He just goes about his work, with meticulous scruple for wide background reading, and cuts to the chase with an elegiac sobriety. In a field where one is compelled to read so much newspaper to-and-froing, he, like Nathan Thrall, always comes up as a relief. Perhaps I should elide the qualification.Nishidani (talk) 20:43, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani. Thanks for your reply at the AFD, you comment read to me as somewhat pointed but you explanation makes me see that is was just poorly read. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 21:42, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. No problem. Sorry if I sounded pointy. Nishidani (talk) 22:28, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Anti-Palestinianism Selfstudier (talk) 16:21, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi, Would you care to translate the Guérin-stuff on Reineh? Please just add whatever of what he wrote you find relevant; no hurry...cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:26, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the expansion. Yeah, sure, no probs, except the usual one of extracting the digit.Nishidani (talk) 10:34, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, the Reineh article now qualifies as a DYK; do you have any preferences wrt "hook"? I was thinking of that the economy was so good in the Mamluk era, that the population could afford imported pottery from Syria and Italy? Or that it had about 150 families in 1596, in early Ottoman time? Perhaps the Mamluk one, as the source for that is available online? Huldra (talk) 22:52, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Hmm. You're the expert. I have zero experience of DYKs, but the importation of pottery from Italy tickles my curiosity. I'll have a relook but don't expect anything intelligently informed. Go for it! Nishidani (talk) 10:02, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Ok, I am nominated it here: Template:Did you know nominations/Reineh. If you could copy-edit the Reineh article, I would be much obliged; both language, grammar and spelling, Huldra (talk) 22:55, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

"malversation" Selfstudier (talk) 19:15, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

PS If you haven't seen itSelfstudier (talk) 19:21, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

"Unity Intifada" is a thing, who knew? Selfstudier (talk) 22:50, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Goodness. That sounds like an unlikely girl's name,Unity Intifada. Hitler arranged to house her in a comfortable apartment in Munich, which she took possession of while the Jewish owners, dispossessed, wept in the kitchen. It paid to be a raucous anti-Semite, realestate wise in those days. Just as it pays now to be a hyperZionist in cramped Brooklyn: aliyah can get you a nice patch of real estate cost free, except to the dispossessed, with a nice view of Jerusalem from the West Bank.Nishidani (talk) 13:20, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

The New York Times has finally gotten round to telling us how (12:30 seconds into an otherwise boring documentary), when you immigrate to Israel from places like Brazil or the US, you can have a great time shooting people after induction into the IDF. Like shooting some Hebronite Palestinian in the testicles with a rubber bullet, because, at a 'safe' distance, he was standing around with the wrong flag on his shoulders. A real buddy-forging high fives experience. At 14:00 minutes in Baruch Marzel is reported as handing out coupons for a free pizza at the Jewish pizza joint near the Cave of the Patriarchs valid for any incoming IDF soldier who manages to shoot a Palestinian. Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

This is probably a cypher for the same tactics used over several wars for bombing 'Hamas' sites in Gaza. The technology is the same, the moronic criteria used by the boofheads who run these programs idem. The ultra-modernity of our new stoned age.Nishidani (talk) 10:45, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Someone just created Category:Right-wing politics in Palestine, which includes Category:Far-right politics in Palestine, which includes Category:Islamism in the State of Palestine. It seems to me that only the last of these three has the right to exist and that anyway the right/far-right classification has no support in the relevant articles. Whatya think? Zero^talk 07:03, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Those two new cats are instances of taxonomic pussyfooting and should be struck, or is that stroked, out. As you note, we shouldn't form abstract classifications that impose interpretations on phenomena that are not corroborated by the articles that cover them. Anthropologically it is a case of Orientalism, the two terms of 'right-wing' and 'far right' being extruded from Western political narratives and thrust onto a discursive universe which employs different concepts: here, extremist varieties of Islam. It's news to me that there are 'politics' in Palestine: what we take to be politics is bustling hamula arrangements to edge into the troughs where the gravy train of foreign aid pours its gruel of largesse, as one elbows aside the overwhelming majority. Are there leftwings in Israeli politics? Nope, only articles describing residues of Meretz and the Communist party as leftwingers, or leftwhingers.Nishidani (talk) 10:13, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Just so as to see Category:Right-wing politics in Palestine Selfstudier (talk) 12:05, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

That was helpful. I removed all instances from articles. So the cat is empty. This reminds me of Borgesian fables on, among many other meanings, the arbitrariness of taxonomic categories such as The Library of Babel, whose taxonomic resources consisted in all books with 410 pages.Nishidani (talk) 13:03, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

In the Hamas article, it was classified as "far right" even before I created the category. And Hamas is clearly classified as Far-right in many books. I live in Northeast Asia and am not a Westerner.--Storm598 (talk) 00:54, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

I never think this category is Orientalism. Hamas is classified as "Far-right" in many media and books, and even the Islamism they advocate stands for a clear right-wing ideology. In South Korea, Hamas is never Orientalism because it is recognized as a "Far-right" group. It's not just a Western perspective that they're far-right. Of course, if it is public opinion that the category is inappropriate, I will accept it. However, the Hamas article has a category called "far-right in Asia" for a long time. We don't think we should remove the category without Talk.--Storm598 (talk) 01:00, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

I changed my mind. We can delete the "Far-right politics palestine" category. Certainly, I think this category is likely to be abstractly accepted. However, I think the "Far-right politcs in Asia" category should be maintained in the Hamas article.--Storm598 (talk) 03:14, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

In what way does the political ideology and social praxis of Hamas overlap with what in the West we call 'far-right'? I've read something like a dozen books on Hamas and its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, and am not familiar with this characterization. Hamas is an Islamic movement and should not be read in Eurocentric or Asiacentric terms. As for categories, many of them are unhelpful. I don't look at them unless someone alerts the page to a problem, which they did here.Nishidani (talk) 12:33, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

They are especially unhelpful when it comes to Category:Palestine. "Catted" is right, hah. Selfstudier (talk) 13:09, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Isabel Kershner, 'A New Israeli Wonderland, Where You Can Almost Forget Where You Are,' New York Times 25 December 2021 Sigh Selfstudier (talk) 16:17, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Distractions. Busy day. But. Crassness it is. Or as Susan Sontag would have called it camp, the appropriate word for a middle class colonial remaking of an ancient and distinctive landscape, so the homogenization of a global world thrusts itself, Hulkily bristling with industrial muscle, even into desert recesses, and kids from Brooklyn, Glasgow, Guangdong, or Perth can avoid the distress of discomforts to their ‘normalcy’ by finding all the indispensable modcons of the suburbs they grew up in even in a taskingly exotic eco-niche. Bruce Chatwin in his memorable travelogue through Patagonia, appropriately cites in a similar context the papers of a sailor, Charley, who several decades ago, even then, was complaining of ‘the desecration of beautiful scenery by advertising fiends’ (p.212). The landscape of Palestine was intricately narrated through 12,000 Arabic toponyms. Soon its rewriting, following universal practice, will map a hundred + colonies where you can eat and play and watch TV just like one does in New York, and unless some young genius like Joubert Yantén Gómez comes along, the landscape read in the wisdom of thousands of years of close use and perception will die off as its language dies out. Darwin thought the Indians of that area, in their frozen landscape, could barely grumble past a mumbled patter of hoots, as one would expect from indigenes. One missionary did sit down to record one of its languages (Yámana) in the 1880s, and the manuscript contained 32,000 words, not exhaustive. That’s gone down the tube, and with it the imaginative genius that could describe a clinical state of depression as the form of a crustacean that had lost its shell and left it vulnerable in the transitional season. I walked through Gaza before Sharon bulldozed it, but that’s little consolation. Nothing unique. Kippa’s real estate asphalted a Bora ritual site which for thousands of years had an intricate astronomical-religious symbolism and legendary narrative. Some high flying moron at Rio Tinto blasted with explosives Juukan Gorge and part of its 46,000 year old rock paintings. Schumpeter’s oxymoronic catchword schöpferische Zerstörung is the final word in this globalised rampage of camp, a word I only understood as something like boiling a billy in a eucalypt island grove in bushland, with wombats barging into one's tent at 2am, or snakes slithering along one's sleeping bag in Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre National Park. Time for a beer at the local. Nishidani (talk) 18:20, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Buon anno (and hny anyone else out there :) Selfstudier (talk) 19:42, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

It's 10:30 pm here and next year is still a hypothesis (given the count.down clock). The expression of hope in the augury is appreciated of course, one that I join you in extending to any other of the three or four readers of this page. Cheers. Back to Wuthering Heights, which is a change from Zinoviev's Yawning Heights (the latter being more perceptive about 'next year' and the year after that etc.:)Nishidani (talk) 21:41, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

— Maile (talk) 12:03, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Moved over from Mount Hebron article talk-page. May Zeus forbid? That means me. My eldest nephew as a child, fatherless, altered 'zio' to 'Zeus', calling me thus. I've been reading about the particular groups in the settlements in the Hebron hills for nearly 2 decades. Not only in my book, those at Maon, to cite one notorious case, indulge in sociopathic behavior according to sources (let's forget the German convert there: relatively harmless. Read David Dean Shulman's Dark Hope (2007) for acts of cruelty he called instances of 'absolute evil' (a phrase whose resonance every Jewish reader will, somewhat uneasily, recall), like sowing poisoned pellets over the hills where Palestinian herders graze their skeletal flocks, to kill them off, and collaterally the mountain gazelles there died off, along with several other indigenous species of fauna. That pastoral culture is itself a fascinating microworld anthropologists would love to study in detail. Indeed many Israelis state (an impression I had decades ago, that it appears to conserve something like an authentic fossil ecoculture not dissimilar to that which must have lain behind the Canaanite/Israelite pastoral societies dimly glimpsed in the Bible, and therefore of primary heuristic importance. Not something to be railroaded, shunted and throttled off from the landscape as incompatible with Israeli concepts of efficient ethnocratic landscape redesign for people who like to live as comfortably with every modcom out there as cousins in Switzerland South Africa (Susya) or the US enjoy. The religious informed settler draws motivation from the Bible, which has similar stories. Of course the religious settler will rewrite the landscape, and erase its historical heritage and inhabitants, in terms of their reading of the Bible, and find warrant there for merciless destruction in the name of an ideal. Their history concerns 900-500 BC., as canonized in that mythistorical masterpiece, and coincidentally, the trace of that archaeologically interests you as well, who have however a secular outlook and far broader interests. So to place them and their narrative priorities of 'redeeming' what was there 2-3000 years ago, above the history of dispossession over the last century - a mere blip in the longue durée, is a matter of choice. But contemporary scholarship doesn't need to follow that bifurcation of what is interesting (our history) and what is of negligible concern (74 years of struggling to maintain a foothold on land that has 2,000 years of a Christian and Arab tradition).It fascinates Israeli and diaspora scholarship - newspapers, well one can wipe one's arse on them, but what the best report of history will end up, decades down the road, in that tradition of care for reality's complexities, the beauty and brilliant achievements of Israel's reengineering of that part of the world, and the savagery of the cost suffered by those who are there, but programmatically excluded from the brave new world of their neighbours as the roadmap of the Book of Joshua is followed. Most Australians have no awareness or interest in aborigines, neither do Americans or Canadians, so even in this, the kind of sensibility that decent Israelis have, insouciance as they get on with their lives in, basically, their world is more than understandable. But people like myself or Selfstudier are fascinated by the last one hundred years - it is an extraordinary field of study also for the outsider who, like myself, cannot fit that mentality into Jewish tradition without a sense of abiding ineludible tension. It has an historical thickness no records of the past of that land have conveyed and is 'fair game' for articles. So, really, I think neither you nor Selfstudier should get het up over these differences. I didn't go and remove those sections for a simple reason. At Barasana I made a similar set of headings for future work, that long remained, and stay, empty. One passing reader wiped them out, with good reason. I restored them saying I fully intended to fill in the section details. I have the two key anthropological volumes on their small world at hand, but in my first reading forgot to annotate (which would allow me to quickly fill out the glaring holes), and need to find the leisure to reread closely those 600 pages to fulfill my promise. They are still on that Barasana page, but, if someone came along and removed them, I wouldn't blame them. It would be a reasoning elision, given my sloth or, as I age, lack of time under pressure of so many other things I pursue in my reading. Cheers, mate.Nishidani (talk) 20:21, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

'Been there, done that' means, for instance, that I went to interview people there without fully knowing what lies beneath the surface, and some proved to be Hamas and Kach supporters or members whose comments still give me shivers, along with a simple car mechanic whose house was attacked by settlers with Molotov cocktails, or a gentle old lady coming from Switzerland who didn't have one extremist bone in her body–at least none I could make out. I know a lot of reasonable and apparently reasonable arguments both sides can bring up, which take years and decades of reading and thinking to fully understand as what they imply in terms of worldview and upbringing, beyond the fashionable knee jerk reactions of "that's so medieval", "that's so moving", or "they're both making sense". The current "political correctness" is a very poor and twisted yardstick for understanding any of it, and X or Y, people I share a general tendency of thinking with, being horrified by a statement or deed coming from any of the actors, doesn't automatically make me join them. A Palestinian friend was once present when a film about the mass execution of Jewish POWs at Kfar Etzion was screened. Somebody asked him what he thinks about it - he smiled and said "Jews have their stories, we have ours". You need a lot of time and effort to grasp the reality behind that sentence. I was introduced to the area by Bassem Eid, who now calls the Sheikh Jerrah issue an administrative tenancy problem (which I disagree with), and who on the other hand made me understand a lot about the harassment of Palestinians by settlers at a time when none of it made the international news. So I know, first-hand, and don't like simplifications. I also fully understood that without knowing the history of the place, starting with the geography that dictates the patterns of settlement and activity, one cannot lead a discussion; express an emotional reaction, yes, but not sustain a meaningful discussion.

My friend, your dates ("Their history concerns 900-500 BC") are very partial. Talk to the settlers (and not only!), and you'll get much, much more. If they're religiously motivated, which is the norm, they might concentrate more on the Monarchy, maybe, but by no means only on it. Ethnic history is, as you say, a slippery slope, but that aside: Israelite settlement began in the 12th century BCE, 300 years before your starting point, and later Jewish majority in Judaea only ended with the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt, over 600 years after your end point, with fluctuating regional differences. Susya's synagogue was in use until sometime in the Early Muslim period, at least 500 years after Bar Kochba. It adds up to more than a millennium more than your dates would imply. I don't know about this area, but in Jerusalem and Haifa the First Crusade (1099) bumped into large and well-rooted Jewish communities. The Jewish pre-Zionist connection to Hebron is indisputable, after 1478 Jews came from Spain, Karaites lived in the city, Jews even came from Eastern Europe and it became one of the Four Holy Cities in Judaism (which is a term not older than the 16th century). The pull of what people understand as identity is stronger than one might nowadays admit. One can very correctly point out that there are strong differences, beyond continuity, between Israelites, post-Exilic Jews, and the fragmentation can go on; but that's to a large degree academic in matters of self-definition. A religious Christian or Muslim wouldn't see there any more of a difference than a practicing Jew does. A law professor from Darmstadt, who has made quite a contribution to Germany's federal legislation, once told me as a matter of obvious truth that "a Jew is someone who identifies as such". And this was his conclusion after a long life in which he combined elements of at least three national or ethnic identities, and of constant high-level intellectual activity. The value of the "mythistorical masterpiece" you so wonderfully named, in the view of many, is that it contains a lot of geography, history, a calendar organically grown out of an agricultural cycle specific strictly to one geographical area and nowhere else, and so forth, which makes it an anchor in geographical terms. Further, a very large part of the exegesis and theological expansion of Jewish religion deals with specific matters of law in the agricultural communities of that place (terrace agriculture for instance, very specific to Judea). So far more grounded than the commonly discussed matters of faith and metaphysics. Also, much like Islam, Judaism is "the law", the law for everything, guiding daily life, and its geographical and tribal roots are overly obvious. It's not a religion like the one allowing to "give to [the] Caesar what is Caesar's", and certainly not in the Western, post-Enlightenment acception of a private matter for each single individual. Much of the power, and of the danger coming from such religions from a liberal and democratic point of view, lies precisely in this aspect, but that's just a comment.

Another point the settlers make (and which in my opinion can actually go both ways), is that in smaller towns and villages of the South Hebron Hills one can still see the groove left by the mezuzah on old stone houses, in places now 100% Muslim. I could never check, nor figure out what centuries they're talking about (typical for the mythical time perception shared by traditionalists of every shade, btw; the good old faith-filled times vs the crooked godless present), but if so, we're at the point where one can say: so these people are the families who either never left, or returned at some point as Jews, and then converted, which only gives them more indigeneity rights. And so on. But this is all connected to knowing how settlement evolved there, who lived where, when, and how - so history, physical and human geography, ethnography and the like. Splitting an article in two in order to avoid conflicts is cutting the roots away under the flower, so that it looks nicer in the vase. But it dies on you after a few days or hours.

I consider all of what I wrote now to be commonplace, but far more often than not, vociferous wannabe participants in the discussion, from the highest political offices down to... anyone, don't seem to have went through this ABC of the issue.

Now I see where the "edit conflict" came from (had to re-post the above). Funny to see that Wiki calls an overlap "a conflict", when there's plenty of conflict to be had. Arminden (talk) 15:54, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

I feel guilty. Your thoughts deserve more of my time than I've had available for online tasks these last days. I can only spare indeed a few moments tonight. I hope I can do more justice to your remarks tomorrow, fingers crossed, touch wood (yes, my palm grazed my skull as soon as I wrote that). I'll start from another remark at Susya where our differences are riven, and apparently, in mortal combat.

When I research settler crime, I don't need ancient synagogues.

That illuminated something I've thought about for 2 decades. I was long a student of mindsets, ideologies, etc. in cultural practices primarily. In personal terms that was a reflex of a self-dissatisfaction. I wished to grow out of the self I had, and grow into one less conditioned by the arbitrary circumstances of random enculturation and socialization. What had long disconcerted me from the beginning was how people cannot see nonsense: read Al Franken's book on Rush Limbaugh: it contains a a long litany of quotes from major political figures of that time which, in a different social context, would be clinically assessed as sociopathic, delusional and urge institutional care or commitment. Yet it now informs the 'natural' outlook of one half of the voting population of the largest democracy on earth (no vindication of Democrats in this, torn as their elite is between appeasing that constituency and the adversative minorities of particularistic interests).

The first half of the 20th century abounded in this: In the 60s I couldn't imagine how any 'normal' person could ever listen to those spitting rants by an ugly little moustached failure of an ignoble little fellow without instantly turning off the radio, or leaving the cinema. Yet he persuaded a highly advanced nation of extraordinary advanced cultural achievements to tramp with him towards total war and genocide. It was one of the core puzzles of adolescent reading.(This puzzled dear George Steiner till his death - Germany, its thought and poetry. was an intrinsic passionately beloved part of who he was. Coming to terms with that forced him to radically dissent from the idea of Israel. It in no way compromised his profound sense of being Jewish. I'm not original. I came from a province in a backward complacent continent, was formed under the umbrella of Catholicism, and have acquired only a middling hand on the European world. But from the day George Gellie, my Sophocles tutor, advised me to read Steiner, I've been hooked, despite reservations over many particular specifics of interpretation) So the second point was, even highly intelligent, good fathers and mothers, sensitive to nature, aficionados of Goethe, could in fact do so. Many believed, in totalitarian regimes, enough to speak of a popular consensus, but, I realized, opportunism played an important role. When Mussolini ranted before a marshaled crowd of Romans in Piazza Venezia, it was ritual for all to snap out a fascist salute. I've heard that many whispered, esp if flanked by trusted friends, 'La merda è arrivata fin qua'. I.e. an outstretched hand raised to eye level was a bullshit barometer. (We're up to here in shit).

More experience, and more sophisticated reading beginning in the 80s, made me grasp that what seems to us, in liberal democracies, inconceivable mass credulity when the régime is fascist, communist, nazist, totalitarian, in fact exists, in a soft almost invisible form, in our otherwise comfortable, libertarian societies if one looks at the total context. Franken indeed documents the first waves of what was to become normative. Deliberate deception, conspiracy-mongering, mendacity as a tool for 'engineering'(a Soviet term) souls/minds by fiddling with everyday anxieties, playing on ressentiment (Nietzsche, Max Scheler etc.), and in particular manipulating the infantile side of our desire for justice to mould a socialized form of ethnic mass-vindication against 'them', were standardized as legitimate forms of political rhetoric (canonized in GOPAC). Bullshit might be bullshit, but, in the right constituencies it could swing votes dramatically and earn a popular consensus. Indeed, eventually, as we all know, the canny liar himself, the elites themselves, begin to believe their own concocted mindset and a new mindset assumes the form of a powerful cultural outlook. 'There's a fascist in all of us,' as a not too successful psychoanalyst once wrote. Thus an end to complacency.

I came late to the I/P area (though my attitudes underwent a radical seachange in 1982, watching events in Lebanon). I could grasp easily the intense emotional forces that made the ideology (for it belongs to that category, the last still on its legs) so persuasive. The ideas, the whole incoherent shambles of rickety premises, never made me loose sleep. The facts are obvious: the immense tide of talking over, around, or through the facts something else. Again, deliberate deception, conspiracy-mongering (critics are an anti-Semitic mob), mendacity as a tool. So the old question reemerged. How can people, highly intelligent, superbly sensitive to history's deviancy and torments to their loss, acutely attuned to the insinuating prejudices that can lie tacit beneath the speech even of friends, people raised in one of the traditions I felt deeply attracted to, fall for that nonsense as it compounded itself year in year out in a crescendo of mishmashed clichés and special pleading. Well, the Japanese, the Americans, the Chinese, and many other peoples subscribe to Exceptionalism but in centers of higher learning it gets little traction. It's out there, in the political and popular cultures. We, we tell ourselves know it's goofy blarney with a political consensus-making function and in our streets it hasn't until recently crystalized into mob violence. So, let sleeping dogs lie.

But, no, not quite: rather, disquiet. Far too many gifted people not only out there, but even in centers of higher learning, subscribed to nonsensical statements that won't stand more than a few seconds' of logical analysis or historical contextualization. It is not that they lie: those that over time forged the toolkit of hasbara often did, but the mindset hammered out through endless repetition became the thews and sinews of a new identity meshed over the loyalties of a traditional ingroup cultural tradition. Zionism is perhaps the most tediously puerile ideology I've encountered. (On the other hand, as a strategy to accomplish an improbable, on the inceptive odds, an almost impossible task, it must surely rank as one of the most brilliant tactical achievements in history). Conceptually it is vacuous, emotionally it is, for most within the fold, overpowering. When one's thinking is overpowered, sensitivities regarding the real world survive only by rigorous compartmentalization. What, if it befall members of one's own ingroup, would spur massive anxiety and defensive solidarity, if it befalls an outgroup, doesn't 'signify', or, if it raises a slight stirring of conscience because one's own group is responsible for the harm, is dismissed as 'well, shit happens.' In logical terms, all general propositions in judgment disappear, to be replaced by an evaluative ethnomoral criterion: outrage if a universal principle is violated to our harm, indifference if it is violated regarding the outgroup. That's why I came to the idea that Zionist thinking patterns were a threat to Jews, and Judaism. Indeed, a primer of anti-Semitism. It's getting late, and this is only a rushed preliminary to what I wanted to say directly in response to your first post. So to return to that quote I caught today and ignored on that talk page.

When I research settler crime, I don't need ancient synagogues.

That my dear friend, told me that your intense curiosity, and assiduous reading, appears to work, understandably within the stressed reality of your country, or rather, appears to survive, by a neat empiricist's compartmentalization. Break down everything into distinct topical headings, so that one can, say, read with fascination archaeological log books, admire the architecture of a synagogue, say, evoke the specific milieu of its worshippers in its cultural and ecological context, and come back refreshed. All the rest, well, as with Susya, there's that irrefutable violence of dispossession, but that goes under a different topic heading, not interesting really because, obvious and yet tedious in the way it is so relentlessly covered in newspapers often by activists who know little more of history than the griefs of, say, Palestinians. Sure, if one's stirred to look into it, one desires some specific article or book which handles that detached from related matters like historic traditions, the geography of an area, the architecture of towns, etc.

Like Shulman, however, I was raised in an interdisciplinary world of scholarship. The analysis of Susya's synagogic ruins lies at the heart of why the assault on the inhabitants there is so intense. Your thuggish violence there cannot be understood without the synagogue as motivator. Israeli law also must be considered: almost uniquely, there, it is stymied, because strictly read their documents of title require in Israeli law recognition of their right to residence there. Then again the sociocultural anthropology of their world comes to the fore, because of the different way Israeli law and Zionist practice, defines key concepts like residence: it must be permanent and continuous to achieve legal warranty (for non-Jews), so a number of Zionist ethnographers documented transhumancy in order to disinvalidate their rights; i.e. one cannot recount or narrate Susya by splits, compartmentalization. But in Zionist terms, cleaving off one bit from another, the archaeology, the synagogue, the early history, modern settlement, native practices and the extraordinary venomous nature of the violence officially sanctioned and abetted and informally thrown their way is the only way to remain culturally comfortable. One reads the new settlement, one reads about the synagogue, and one abbreviates, downplays, even thrusts the 'dirty side' that reflects poorly on 'us' mostly onto a special page no tourist visiting Susya need read, so that the thrill of encountering Israel's heritage is not contaminated by the ugly core of, certainly there, violence that was the precondition sine qua non for the new, cleansed landscape.

I write this, with some self-reproof. You are, I know from many things, deeply sensitive, extremely well-read, and intensely sedulous in digging up material to fill in what gaps exist in your knowledge. But, thinking about how Palestinians perceive their side of a shared reality disturbs the equanimity of an empiricist cast of mind tuned to the exploration of 'culture'. And thus, as is the praxis there, one compartmentalizes. You can wipe this out with no objection from me, simply by reverting the above. Best wishes Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Re the first post exchange, my ref to (My friend, your dates ("Their history concerns 900-500 BC") . .) referred to the core compositional period of most of the 'charter' stories of the Tanakh, to which modern settler religious groups appeal. Of course proto-'Israelitic' settlement goes back earlier. And I don't think a Jewish majority, and that in Judea, ended with Bar Kochba: Probably, this tipped into a minority beginning a century or so later, as climate and economic crises made emigration towards the major centres of diasporic life a sensible option. It was the Byzantines who destroyed large scale Jewish and Samaritan populations (and it is one of the extraordinary flaws in generalist narratives that confuse the two as though they were all Jews). I must have breakfast abroad.Nishidani (talk) 09:40, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Given arguments about who has the right to the land based on whose ancestors were there first, I think there's an irony in the fact that the oldest modern human remains outside Africa, dated to about 50,000 years ago, were found in Palestine.[1][2] Due to the advent of modern DNA testing, we now know that much of the world's population carries Neanderthal ancestry. The Neanderthals are thought to have lived in Eurasia, including Palestine, from about 400,000 years ago.[3]     ←   ZScarpia   10:28, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

(Laboriously avoiding making a set of obvious jokes regarding the behavior of both sides, analogies would be injurious to our Neanderthal side of the genome) I never think of that because it has no relevance. However I might read 1896-1948 here, Israel was established, its legality determined by the law of nations, and therefore, not to accept that as, within its boundaries, a natural part of the world state system is proof of prejudice. I share Walter Laqueur's view: in 1948 Zionism had fulfilled its function, and was no longer pertinent. So, in regards to the WB and Gaza, which is all that interests me here, we are talking about the fossilized super-efficient dysfunctionalism of an occupying power going beyond its remit, and thereby, not securing a normal life for Israelis as Jews with a state of their own but rather, by refusing resolutely to drive an acceptable peace agreement (78/22)*, is making insecurity an integral part of being a Jewish Israeli, indeed an additional cementing factor for a new Jewish identity Zionism has created, at least for another three decades, a contradiction of Herzl's vision. Nishidani (talk) 12:17, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

*Nathan Thrall is correct. The logic of the past century of negotiations clearly indicates that there can be no solution via a negotiation between unequal parts where one side has all cards, and only something to lose by a deal. It can only be imposed by an external congeries of powers, which of course will not happen.Nishidani (talk) 12:22, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

But what are Israel's proper boundaries? And is it in breach of commitments by, for instance, discriminating on the grounds of ethnicity/nationality, creating more refugees rather than allowing the return of any of the previous ones and unilaterally changing the status of Jerusalem?     ←   ZScarpia   13:16, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Those internationally recognized by the armistice agreement of 1949. Everything in EJerusalem is illegal. As to the refugee problem, the answer is to pressure neighbouring governments to make them full citizens, and direct aid to improving their camps and education intensively, and allow dispersed families to cross borders in visits, under UN supervision by neutral powers, but nothing like this will happen. When you have a massive problem that won't go away, you can only act by determined practical work on the ground for specific problems. If there were a dozen people with the pull and practical problem solving know-how like Fred Cuny and Gino Strada, a huge amount of festering misery could be fixed on a shoestring budget. But yeah, some think it's better politics to keep an open sore suppurating, it makes the victims look bad and beyond compassion (ahem, the pseud's corner revisionist Christianity in Marvin Olasky's weird book The Tragedy of American Compassion, 1992) Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

The "Auschwitz borders"?[[4][5][6]     ←   ZScarpia   18:54, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Nah. Only read the first link with the usual gaseous exhalations from an airhead writing for a two-bit mag. Informed Middle Eastern observers' gives the game away. No one thought like that until Abba Eban drew on his notable rhetorical powers at the UN to clarify that there was no going back to the 1949 borders which, until 1967, made Israel's right unchallengeable and beyond cantankerous dispute. That wasn't a prediction, of course, but a deeply informed familiarity with Zionism's maximalist territorial ambitions. Eban was a secularist. Around the same time he stated what indeed the cabinet was mulling in detail, Yeshayahu Leibowitz made a prediction of the consequences that has proved to be true. Though profoundly religious, he had not assumed the mantle of prophecy. His training was scientific and philosophical, and, for anyone with that background and a deep ethical outlook, his conclusions were not radical but grounded in lucid, objective analysis. In 1967 Israel's decision not to step back would draw it into the behaviour characteristic of a secret police state (e.g. East Germany), transforming it into a classical utterly 'normal' violent colonial power, adding later, that its corruption would make 'Judeo Nazis' of those serving in the IDF. Eban played the Holocaust card to get the usual lachrymose traction for support for Lebensraum, and successfully. He didn't reason except to find the right kind of memorable phrase and fluid patter to persuade mugwumps. Leibotwitz used the same card, indirectly, to challenge Lebensraum. We all draw different conclusions from the same history. Leibowitz though, was basically correct. Ebba was, as one would expect from people trained primarily in several languages (myself) a waffler. Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

I gathered courage for a couple of days before finally reading your analysis, which actually went a very different way than expected. It is your reply to my much more general, if chaotic questions with implied answers from the old, already archived discussion, rather than to the particular topic of Susiya and the occupation. It's finally, finally the discussion I've wanted to have for decades, and nobody seemed either willing, or capable, intellectually or emotionally, to have. I can't thank you enough for it. And for cutting to the chase and staying on the subject. But now I'll take a bit of time to put my own thoughts together - and deal with real life a little bit. Have a great day! Arminden (talk) 08:44, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

I've just sat down to tackle an elegy I sketched yesterday, but I'll suspend that. What I analysed was one sentence from the Susya page, sorry for the riff, bordering on NPA. I did that because the larger general post you wrote, and which we shifted here, demanded more time than I had available these last few days. Looks like I might more free time have this week, but I dislike gnawing at a bone, particular when it belongs, not to a dog, but a friend whose virtual company I enjoy. (That's my residual conscience upbraiding my 'on the spectrum' side). Nishidani (talk) 11:54, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Feels like an eternity away. Horrible things are still happening with few taking notice of the ongoing evil (not on the first page of anything, anyway), not even the pre-67 roots can be agreed on by people who're generally on the same side of the global barricades, and it already feels like yesterday's problem, likely to be wiped away by the next great East Mediterranean tsunami before the end of this century, literally or otherwise. Yet another historical match ending in stalemate, with aging players trying original moves the very year when the board got one of its most obvious cracks. I'm longing for Weihnachtsplätzchen, at least one for each letter in the word. Hope you're well and doing handstands in the local pub - or is it a trattoria? How on earth could I misread what you wrote believing that you're the one with the hernia? Hope Neil is well by now and keeping you company. Good night Nishi-san! Arminden (talk) 22:47, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

History. Hyster(i)a. I just read the above after mulling a point made by Richard Overy in his magisterial Blood and Ruins, during my morning walk: in the Imperial chessmatch at Versailles, Germany's late imitation of the French and British colonial outremer empire model was checkmated by confiscating its overseas colonies and denying its aspirations to be a maritime sea power (aside from bankrupting it by extortionate, vindictive and short-sighted reparations). The three elements had of course the collateral damage of redirecting Germany's imperial mimicry towards the East, perhaps that too was part of the Allies' collective 'shrewdness' - for the Russian Revolution was a threat, and Germany, thrown that way, would meet it head-on, and relieve the imperial masters with the relatively lighter task of controlling the 'benighted' and unarmed natives across the world, inexpensively (only 1,000 British administrators were required to rule over 350 million Indians etc.) Of course the Balfour gambit was thought of as a minor pawn in that 'great game' - and with the usual folly exposed by unintended consequences -that minor move turned out to be a massive strategic headache draining pre-war British imperial forces, with 20,000 troops, police and officials deployed to put down a provincial Revolt where it was least expected, in just a tiny, relatively underpopulated and resourceless patch of earth. The pawn had changed colours and was to prove decisive in checkmating its own king or chessmaster. Two egregious examples of what the late lamented orientalist Chalmers Johnson theorized as blowback.

I think the best summation of its (il)logic was made by the Russian novelist and logician Alexander Zinoviev in his masterly satire The Yawning Heights. I recall using it a couple of times somewhere here years ago, but it can't run to cliché by repetition:-

'(a characteristic example of the fact that in our country, as distinct from others, contradictions do not grow into antagonisms but are resolved through being overtaken by events.'A. Zinoviev, The Yawning Heights, Bodley Head 1979 p.28

That is the neatest skewering of the optimistic expectancy of amelioration in dialectical materialism on the spit of realism that I have ever come across. He was wrong to particularize this as peculiar to his own Sovietized world, a common fault in analyses of mentalities. It has an obvious ontological valency. In our own minor nook of I/P discussion and dispute, the message, I'm sure you'll agree, hits home with unnerving poignancy, with the cautionary outrider that 'antagonisms' in that quote refers to 'structural contradictions' in a given social reality.

Yesterday, while making tea and exploiting the otiose gap of dithering in the kitchen, I switched on the TV to catch the headlines, and fumbling the remote control, discovered accidently that another channel was broadcasting The 25th Hour, the Anthony Quinn/Virna Lisi version of Gheorghiu's famous novel, which unlike you (I'm sure), I haven't read. I broke a rule about not wasting the daylight with TV, and rewatched it, for the third time, as fresh as my first viewing when it came on screen in 1967. It was thoroughly panned when it came out, and I remain an anomalous viewer in thinking it a minor masterpiece because of the way it deconstructs the jussling claims of numerous identity fixations. A simple Roumanian peasant is arrested as a Jew so his wife can be courted by a local thug, lives as a goy among Jews in a labour camp, and helped by them to escape to Hungary where his role as a kind of Shabbos goy ends, since the Jewish committee cannot organize papers for a non-Jew, however much his Jewish friends plead for his expatriation to the safety of the US. Then he is morphed, when arrested by Hungarians who, when they twig he isn't Jewish, redefine him, like all other detained clandestine transients there, as a Hungarian volunteering to work for Germany. When dispatched there, he is eventually picked out as a perfect Aryan when a racial theorist/buffoon in the SS catches sight of him in a factory, and takes him as a perfect example of a Transylvanian enclave remnant (his second guess puts Quinn in your native Brașov!) of an ancient pure Germano-Aryan stock. He is summarily drafted into the SS as a poster-soldier in propaganda for this exemplary Aryan species. At war's end, as an SS trooper, he saves his fleeing camp comrades but, when they reach the American army, is arrested as a Nazi and put on trial in Nuremburg. Thanks to his lawyer (Michael Redgrave) he is finally sent to rejoin his wife, since raped by Soviet troops, and with a child born to her and her Russian rapist. Even then, he is not free to return to himself, and the only thing that counts, reunion with his traumatised family. No. He must smile for the international press, photographed for the world at large for the image of a happy ending. The smile turns to pained perplexity, a scene requoted several times in later, more grandiose films - Robert De Niro in the last frame of Once Upon a Time in America and Tom Hanks in the final scene of Cast Away. Whatever its technical failings (lack of a masterly scriptwriter and director) it surely must figure as a seminal document for theorists of identity.

Weihnachtsplätzchen? I bought several boxes of Pandoro and Panettone, as a prophylactic against being surprised by people who might have turned up with the usual Christmastide gifts, by having something in reserve to reciprocate. While calculating how many I needed to give to office secretaries and doctors and dentists, I found two still stacked in a corner from last year. I was sure they must have grown mouldy and couldn't be given as presents. On opening one, it was as fresh as if it had been baked yesterday. So, I'm stuck with having to munch my way through the two over the festive season - more a chore to keep my place tidy than a convivial sweet. The only sweet I miss is Christmas pudding, baked in November, aromatic with brandy and hung, thick with thruppences and sixpences, for two months. If I have another year, I must try and make one.

That was a very perceptive reading of a fault line in Yehoshua's oeuvre, which was interesting for what it said about his thematic borders and their (un)witting permeability rather than for his somewhat predictable views on the I/P reality. Novelists should be on the cutting edge of issues like that, but there's far more insight in a diaspora scholar like Daniel Boyarin, to name just one of many, than one gets from these anguished and confused public declarations for the home town.

(Neither trattoria nor pub. A coffee/aperitif shop that serves lunch, which I started patronizing when lockdown set in -noting the widow and her girls sitting flustered and anxious day in day out as no one dropped by: places like that pay €2,000 in monthly rent, which means a huge turnover in coffee sales alone is required before they can see their way to earning a crust. Everybody had the wind up with hundreds dying of Covid every day, and so the joint languished in silent abandon on an empty street which only I seemed to stroll. The day before, an elderly politician quipped that people like himself with the benefit of a pension should show some social solidarity for the struggling class of small business people by spending a bit more, the most intelligent remark I'd heard in otherwise endlessly tedious discussions about vaccines etc. There's zero scope for changing the world, but little gestures can help to make our minor worlds slightly easier for all.)

Here's to your satisfying the cravings of a sweet-tooth over this break. Must be places there that cater to a Roumanian and German palate? Have a great festive season and New Year. Best Nishidani (talk) 13:01, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

It was a truly festive, sweet Weihnachtsschmaus to read your posting. I am far, far away from where I might have been in terms of reading and wider, let alone deeper knowledge, and I'm always happy to be invited to such a feast disguised as fast-food. Take full advantage of what the season has to offer, schmaltz and flying houses & cribs aside (this grey & cold time of the year I wouldn't like to imagine you in Loreto or at Santa Maria Maggiore). All my very best wishes, Arminden (talk) 17:36, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Here's a Chrismas present then, on the theme of Loreto.

194 Er viaggio de Loreto Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Terni 9/10/1831

Ito che ffui co tté a la Nunziatella,

Aggnéde a vvisità la Santacasa,

Pe strufinà ne la sagra scudella

Sta coroncina d’ossi de scerasa.

De fēdĕ è cche per aria sii rimasa,

Ma ggnisuno c’è ddegno de vedella;

E un anno ’na Reggina ficcanasa

Ce perze l’occhi: si cche ccosa bella!

Be’, llí a Mmaria Santissima, in ner mentre

Disse: E cciancìlla Dommine, er Ziggnore

Je mannò ne la panza er fruttusventre.

Eh? Cche ttibbi de casa in cuella Cchiesa!

Oh vva’ cche sse trovassi un muratore,

Da fanne un’antra pe cquant’oro pesa!

Australian dialect version:-

194 Loredo trip

At the Church a the Nuns'elation, on our recen’ trip

I snuck off ta pay a visit ta the Holy Home,

So I cud get ta rub me ros’ry’s cherry pips

In the sacred soupbowl, Christ’s very own.

It’s an ardacle a faith it’s suspendèd in air,

Tho nowun’z wirthy enuf ta see the site;

Wun year a nosey parker uva a queen wen’ there

Ta check it, an was blinded: serves her bluddy rite!

Well, just at the moment when the Most Blessèd Mary,

Was sayen: “Ansiller Dom’ni”. The Lord rite then

Slipt the ‘froot uva the womb” inside uv’a belly.

Huh? Wodda tremendus house that Church’s got, ay!

Try’n find a brikkie’s layb’rah that’d be willen

Ta bild its likes. He’d ask f’rit’s weight in gold, I’d say.

• Annunciation =Nun's elation. Roman dialect often distorts Latin or sacred names comically.
• nosy parker =stickybeak)
• brikkie's laybura = A building labourer who lays bricks.

This will look incomprehensible given our prejudices about dialect. Not everyone's cup of tea, but rea d in sequence these 2179 sonnets evoking popular Roman superstitions and folklore are considered by the most sophisticated critics as one of the masterpieces, if unreadable, of world literature. Alas, attempts to convey it in other dialects go over generally like a lead balloon:) Cheers Nishidani (talk) 23:08, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

That serves me bluddy rite, mate! To unwittingly provoke you on Italian topics. But you sure didn't need to slap me with that glossary, a couple of my neurons did survive my WP servitude and the many different plagues die uns plagen. Anyhow, you're the kind who wouldn't contradict Andrei Pleşu when he said that nobody knows any language, you just constantly learn it. Cheers from a lead balloonist, Arminden (talk) 23:29, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

At the risk of being tedious, but succumbing to a masochistic vice for thoroughness :)

I didn’t post a Belli reference to Santa Maria Maggiore. You were alluding to snow, and it was possible you had in mind the town in Piedmont. But, there’s also a myth associating the church in Rome of that name with snow, as one can see from one of the earlier names for it, Our Lady of the Snows (Sancta Maria ad Nives), and also called in the old dialect of the city La Madonna de la bbasilica libbreriana I after Pope Liberius. Perplexed, I slept on it. Anyway, Bell did write two sonnets about the Roman basilica of that name. The circumstances were as follows. In 1835, Pope Gregorio XVI had the image of the Virgin Mary, falsely attributed to St. Luke, and long considered to have apotropaic value in warding off threats to the health of Romans,- transported from the Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore to the Vatican. On the day, 8 September, a huge throng of clerical swells, the crème of the crème of the Roman prelacy, decked out in their finest clerical raiment, turned up to be noted at the mystical portage, as if by the associative rub-off of each individual presence with the transit of the Madonna, they might accrue some laurels later in the expected miracle of a redemptive prophylaxis against the cholera onslaught. Wasn’t to be, the event in full swing, was rained out under a hectic deluge of three thunderous cloudbursts, which saw their collective cantorial solemnity washed away, as they all scattered higgledipiggledy for cover. Belli immediately threw off a sonnet, recasting the solemn fiasco in the idiom of an illiterate local’s perspective

1632 La Madonna de la bbasilica libbreriana 1

Che ppriscissione! Oh ddio, stateve quieti

ch’io vorze annacce pe li mi’ peccati!

Vennero tre ddiluvî scatenati

da intontí li padriarchi e li profeti.

Li preti nun pareveno ppiú ppreti,

li frati nun pareveno ppiú ffrati,

ma ppanni stesi, purcini abbaggnati,

trippette, scolabbrodi, sottasceti...

Li vedevi cantanno lettaníe,

chi in cotta, chi in pianeta, chi in piviale

scappà ppe li portoni e ll’osterie.

Inzomma, ggente mia, fu una faccenna

che inzino la Madonna e ’r Cardinale

doverno fà la sparizzion de Vienna. 11 Settembre 1835

1632 Our Lady in the Librarian Basilica I.

Wodda pracission! Ah God, shuddup. C’m off it,

I wannèd ta join in ta get remission frum me sins!

Three downpours thrashed down n’ came fludden in

That ud’ve stunned the old patriarchs n profets.

The priests stopt looken like priests, I tell ya wot!

An the munks wurnt like munks no more, but akin

Ta wet duds just hung ta dry or fledglens drenched to the skin,

Like leftovers frum tripe, colenders or pickles in a pot. . .

Ya cud see’em singen litternies, looken trim

With surplusses an chasoobles, or under a cope,

As off like a flash they ran in’a doorways an inns.

In brief, I tell ya folks, the scene was so real

That even Our Lady an the Card’nal risked getten soakt

An ’ad ta shoot thru, like elopen luvvers taken to their heels. 26/4/2001

• Surplusses =surplices (sorry for the presumption of an unneeded gloss for the proficient!)
  

La Madonna de la bbasilica libbreriana II

Uhm, la ggiornata er Papa nu la trova

pe ffiní ll’antra1 mezza priscissione.

Che tte pare? Ggià er tempo sciariprova

cor zolito tempaccio bbuggiarone.

Vado vedenno che sta gran funzione

finirà ccom’er pranzo d’un par d’ova,

e ’r zagro quadro resterà a ppiggione

indov’abbita mó, a la Cchiesa-nova.

La spasseggiata de sto quadro nero

me pare er viaggio de la tartaruca,

che ppe ttre mmijja sce vò un mese intiero.

Oh ppovera Madonna de san Luca!

Lei a Ssan Pietro nun ce va davero

si er Papa nun prepara una filuca. 13 settembre 1835

In the downpour the icon of St Luke had to be rushed to a nearby church, to await finer weather for the passage to the Vatican (the other half of the procession), to carry it across the Tiber. As they wait, another local chips in with his thoughts.

1633 Our Lady a the Librarian Basilica 2

Hhmm, the Pope still can’ fix on a date

Ta pud an end ta the uther harf a the prescishun.

Woddya reckun? Looks like we’re in f’r anuther seshun

A the usual filthy weather, a bugger of a fate.

It’s dawnen on me slowly that this richual show

Ull end up like dinen on short rashuns, a coupla googs,

An the saycrud pikcha’ull be payen rent fa good

Down in New Church, where it’s in digs fa the mo’.

This black pikcha’s been out on a jornt f’ra while.

Bud it strikes me as the sorda trip ya get frum a tordus

Ut needs at least wun full munth ta do three mile.

Ah, the poor Madonna a St. Luke, ya godda pidy’a!

No way she’s gunna make it ta St. Peeder’s unless

The Pope rigs out a felucca ta ferry’a. 26/4/2001

I’ve often regretted not taking the time to learn Yiddish, but having Roman and Australian dialects, like it robust treasure houses with great comic and imaginative power in their lexical richness, is some conpensation. There a worse ways of passing a solitary Christmas than hauling out from archived labours from 2 decades back my 4500 page edition and translation of all of his rowdy laughing mocking sonnets and flicking back through its crackerjack Bakhtinesque carnival of skits on the foibles of humanity, chuckling by an warm hearthfire as a well-fed cat interrogates its master, or is that slave, with quizzing eyes. So much of human reality slips through the nets as we trawl for the big picture, which is nothing but a blinding abstractionNishidani (talk) 16:36, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

ps. Throwing doggerel your way after you cited that acute remark from Andrei Pleşu that nobody knows any language, you just constantly learn it, and thinking of your polyphonic ear, I think the best way to apologize is to cite this obscure gem] (on what growing up loving language entails). That off my conscience I can let the vintage Brunello digest my lasagna.Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Whoops the link is to a deprecated site. Bizarre. Well, I'll type it

Invocation by James McAuley.

Radiant Muse, my childhood's nurse,

Who gave my wondering mouth to taste

The fragrant honeycomb of verse;

And later smilingly embraced

My boyhood, ripening its crude

Harsh vigour in your solitude:

Compose the mingling thoughts that crowd

Upon me to a lucid line;

Teach me at last to speak aloud

In words that are no longer mine;

For at your touch, discreet, profound,

Ten thousand years softly resound.

I do not now revolt, or quarrel

With the paths you make me tread,

But choose the honeycomb and laurel

And walk with patience towards the dead;

Expecting, where my rest is stayed,

A welcome in that windless shade. Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

That tortus poem really got me laughing, how the hell did I miss it along with your last posting here? Anyway, to that Belli guy nothing is holy, and good on him! What a shame that you couldn't take your own prescription "zwischen den Jahren", as it seems from the McAuley poem you regaled me with. Stoicism is great only when other, better ways out are slow in coming.

Me on the other hand, I'm afraid I'll end up getting on our friend David's nerves. But when my thinking organ gets constipated on something, it takes over the reins and gets me into a Kagemusha-style charge, which only manages to finish me off in the end, no matter what else happens along the way. But it's already too late for that admission.

It just struck me that every Romanian Orthodox archbishop must be addressed with "Înaltpreasfinţite", lit. 'Highly Over-Sanctified', while the pope must do with Your Holiness. There's only a step from there to "er Papa nu la trova", be it the date or something else. Which makes me ask: does the "coupla googs" play on more than short rations? Anyway, Tutu made do with the nickname Arch, one step away from Archie-boy, but I bet nobody ever dared to take that step. Mary Robinson remembered how he made everyone shriek with laughter, and while everyone's guard was down he attacked with a statement full of meaning. Quite a trick. People as smart as him make you think how much of the public persona is real. His Palestine comments made quite a few trolls fume like poorly plastered charcoal kilns. (See, I'm not fully wasting WP's storage capacity on unrelated blabber!)

May it be a good start into something new, this year heavy with well-balanced twos and a single useless naught hiding between them! Arminden (talk) 22:57, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

I see you've been busy on the Tantura talk-page. For a change, when I see what's happening right now I become less interested in history. I can't but always remember one comment: forget about the patient, the bed is ill. Arminden (talk) 23:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Working on a laptop in the local bar, both yesterday and just now, both long replies got wiped out, through interruptions - once group I frequent consists of pensioners who are tech wizards on everything in houses that requires fixing: flush toilet floaters, calcified shower nozzles, loose wiring in motor-mower plugs, and I drop everything to listen to them and learn dozens of handyman whizzes or wheezes - or was lost pressing a wrong key as I signed off. Must do that all again in the safer less distracting environment back home. But thanks indeed for the boutade:'forget about the patient, the bed is ill.' Hadn't heard that, and it is brilliant. It had me foraging in the umbrage of memories for a less luminous crack I once made in discussing with young Bolter the way settlements inflect Zionism with an ineludible and ineradicable structural crisis :'a country makes its own bed and must lie in it.' It was only while writing out the cliché, deployed in the context of nation states, that the pun implicit in it was stirred (diplomats nbotoriously being people who in the Elizabethan phrase 'lie abroad for their country'.)

Today's not quite the right day for writing, with the thick resonances of public memory rumbling beneath the keytapping. But I will try to get back to you. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 13:48, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-labeled-a-traitor-she-fled-israel-now-she-wants-to-deconstruct-zionism-1.10572707 Selfstudier (talk) 18:01, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Not impressed. If you are dedicated to human rights you should never allow your activism, whatever the stresses, to become a personal problem. All that counts are the people who need material help, compared to whose plight one's own existential grief is piddling .If you can't take the heat in the kitchen, bat the breeze alone in an outdoor barbeque on a patio with a nice cool garden prospect. Nishidani (talk) 16:01, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

パスピエ — I can't guess the meaning of this. Since it is katakana it could be English or (from the context) French, but what is it? A clue might be "Debussy". Ta. Zero^talk 11:56, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%91%E3%82%B9%E3%83%94%E3%82%A8 Shrike (talk) 11:58, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Shrike. In my ignorance I forgot my dances. Zero^talk 12:15, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that Shrike. Bejayzus, Zero, I’d hardly stepped inside home, after an exhausting day both racing members of the Rome Porsche Club through the mountains and examining a specimen of the tarentola (worth collecting as house guests because they knock off a couple of hundred mozzies in a night in summer), then noshing on a splendid dish of local polenta at a quiet little townlet with only 130 winter residents, when I found the computer moaning something about Japanese passepieds, which after luncheon beers, as my residually functional neuronal networks screamed 'nap!', I misread as pisspots. Well, you’re a numbers man. I command or commend you to get up and dance the measure to this accompaniment at 18:31 secs in), while I, fagged out by the excursion and brain teasers, punch a few zeds.:) Nishidani (talk) 15:44, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Khazars. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

1. Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Asking to stop with unhelpful edits. Golden's transcription is no longer in use and misleads the reader as the current consensus transcription doesn't is wrong assumption because Chinese transliteration isn't "consensus", because "��shǐnà" "Yǐpíshèkuì" doesn't even appears on the sources, but with various spellings. Thus keep on WP:COMMONNAME. Beshogur (talk) 13:49, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

This is an example of the pot calling the kettle black. You started an edit war by not even addressing the talk page to remove longstanding text, and persisting to do so when challenged. The above is meaningless because the common name is given, and accompanied by a gloss. It is standard in Western scholarship, when citing early western works that use the Wade-Giles​ adopted by Golden, for example, to regularize it according to the more common modern systems of Romanization. Old Turkish phonological reconstructions, as with the Khazars, are intimately associated with the early Chinese phonetic transcriptions. So they are quite appropriate, apart from the aesthetic pleasure and prompting power for younger readers who will kick on to work in the field.Nishidani (talk) 15:53, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Would you care to take a look at the Victor Guérin translations on Maaroub and Deir Kifa?

"which brush invades from all sides" doesn't sound right to me, alas, that was what translate.bing.com gave me :/ Cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:43, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

"which brush invades from all sides" is fine English. Google has "which are invaded by brush on all sides" which is also fine. I'll leave it to Nish to say whether these match the French. Zero^talk 04:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Brushing up on French, I'll scrub the Deir Kifa text:) 'Scrub' and 'brush' lend themselves to ambiguity because both words refer to a type of undergrowth, and to what I've been doing this morning, scrubbing floors and brushing/combing my balding pate. There's a natural analogy between landscape and cleaning because types of broom (cytisus scoparia) are harvested for sweeping.Nishidani (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Finally found the passage that the French text reminded me of.

'The same creeping gorse which struggles over the stony ground. Ivy and other clinging plants embrace a circle of white stones, which like giant sentinels of a senate of nature, break off their deliberations the instant an intruder's step is heard.' Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, (1933) 2017 p.17.Nishidani (talk) 13:51, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Ok, thanks, to both of you! Cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:21, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Russian attack on Kharkhiv kills Holocaust survivor-96 The Guardian 21 March 2022 Tragic news that also poses one with a linguiistic conundrum.Nishidani (talk) 22:26, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. Where do you see a linguistic conundrum? Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:33, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Our article reads, reflecting English usage,'The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.' The Ukrainian gentleman who survived the death camps only to be murdered now was not Jewish. On the Italian sister article, the word olocausto is defined as what occurred to all groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and not just Jews (aside from having a shockingly stupid reference to a supposed 'group barbeque'.Nishidani (talk) 09:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

In other words, of the roughly 17-18 million people murdered for their ethnicity by Nazi and their 'kind', one-third were Jewish. If you count, for example, slavic people massacred en masse on racial grounds, you get a similar figure, roughly 5-6 million. We have no generic term for the implementation of a general policy of racial extermination for this period, and holocaust is reserved for its execution as regards people of Jewish ethnicity only. I thought of this while examining the reaction in Israel top Zelensky's speech, and was reminded of it by the Guardian article which, unusually, breaks the linguistic convention by treating a Slavic person in the death camps as a Holocaust survivor. He was, in the general sense outlined above, but usage, always partisan, militates against mixing the two groups: Jews and non-Jews murdered on the grounds of their race. Nishidani (talk) 11:51, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

The first sentence of the native title section of Yindjibarndi people, which you added, doesn't quite make sense. There seems to be some words missing but I'm not quite sure what you wanted to say there. If you got some time, could you please fix it up? Calistemon (talk) 23:18, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. If you or anyone else notes absolute crappy sentences like that, or any other defect, on any of those pages I wrote on aborigines, don't ask me for permission. Just remove it. I don't own them.Nishidani (talk) 11:51, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

So you agree that State of Palestine should be in this cat but Israel not? Just checking. Selfstudier (talk) 17:38, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

User talk:Place Clichy Discussion ongoing here. Selfstudier (talk) 17:41, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm very wary of (wiki) cats also from a native dislike of any form of discursive stereotyping, with its false equivalences between states where the 'limitation' ranges from isolates to fully fledged members of the international community in all known institutional forms. All I think of while reading Place Clichy is Henry Miller's memoir of life in that area of Paris, distracting. I won't get into an argument over it. I'm on too short a time leash:)Nishidani (talk) 17:55, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I have to admit that it is easy to see cats as geeky, at a minimum. Slicing one cake this way and that way perhaps has some merit now and again for certain things but I cannot readily see the advantage of doing so when it is the entirety of WP. If all the energy expended on cats was instead expended on the articles, the lists, the templates (3 cuts of the cake already), then I am almost sure that WP would be better off for that. Ah well.Selfstudier (talk) 18:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Look at this one  :) SoP has just been added for the flag and for the coat of arms, I haven't looked at the other ones yet. Selfstudier (talk) 19:50, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Which article does this belong in? Zero^talk 00:57, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

We don't (yet, hint hint) have a sub-article of Israeli occupation of the West Bank for Israeli surveillance and spatial control of Palestinians, would include things like that and this, and this and this and this to plant an idea in some better editor than myself. nableezy - 03:02, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Hmmm . .You fuckin scoundrels. To borrow a saying beloved by my indefatigable mother, 'no rest for the wicked', ay!Nishidani (talk) 15:03, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

I also need to address how you grossly misrepresent sources, massively select oriented sources, and that, systematically without providing contradictory sources. Very often selecting specific quotes, that are then oriented and added in a text filled with critical stances. For neutrality I need dialecticism, or at least coherence in that mash-up. That was not part of my edit, which was essentially about intellectual honesty when you quote or present sources.--Vanlister (talk) 02:12, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

• So far you haven't 'addressed' anything.
• Now you declare you 'also' have to address 'how (I) grossly mispresent sources'.

Very interesting. A notification of an urgent existential need you feel. Well, now I know your state of mind, I look forward to seeing concrete documentation of how I 'misrepresent sources'. In the meantime, please try to write comprehensible English, because

• 'massively select oriented sources' is close to gibberish. What has 'massively' to do with 'select'? What is an 'oriented source', one that went 'east'?
• What is a 'contradictory source'. One that purveys a view differing from preexisting source or one that contradicts itself?
• What does 'select a specific quote mean, as opposed to simply choosing one quote rather than another? All elicited quotes are 'specific' by virtue of their having been 'selected'.
• How does one 'orient' a quotation?
• Why is buttressing a text with illustrative quotes from the given source a problem for a text that you say already adopts a ‘critical stance’?
• Can you distinguish ‘facts’ from ‘critical stances’. We do, as per policy.
• The grandiose ‘For neutrality I need dialecticism’ sent this wordmaven, for one, scrambling for the dictionaries, where I discovered that ‘dialecticism’ is an American neologism meaning primarily ‘the use of dialect’. But I see it also apparently has circulation in some philosophical schools where it is used to mean:

that the world consists of opposite but not necessarily opposing ideas or concepts which, when put together, either negate each other or synthesize into a whole (e. g. man + woman = a couple; right wing + left wing = government).’

I guess that means that a page on a half century of military occupation should strive for a neutrality defined as a point by point balancing of Palestinian claims of land theft or torture or the denial of civil rights, or nightly raids on private homes where children are bailed up, by detailed excurses by the occupying power as to why the land is expropriated, why people are regularly tortured, or why they have no right to have civil rights, so that the facts of one party (the Palestinians) are ‘negated’ by the ‘critical stances’ of the occupying power? In other word, the facts of violence must be ‘explained’ as necessary in an Israeli POV. Well, we do actually provide many reasons justifying these practices of abuse. They don’t ‘negate’ the facts, they gloss them with the Israeli justifications.

• You need ‘coherence in that mash-up.’ Mash-up is not a synonym for ‘mishmash’: it means an eclectic mix of images and sounds for video entertainment. But probably you mean the article is an incoherent hash of text without rhythm or reason. If that is your impression, document it. For several years no one has contested its sequential cogency and thematic orderliness .
• ’intellectual honesty’? One source statement’s accuracy has been questioned in several years of scrutiny, and when verified adjusted.

All the indications here are that with 750 edits, you are inexperienced, but eager to attack this article, of the 6 million we have. Well, instead of dotting user pages with generic complaints, set forth your putative evidence, on the relevant talkpage. And do so in comprehensible English.Nishidani (talk) 10:12, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't care about select or selected, the thing is you put your views in the text. You will definitely write that Israel deny all your allegations, and put the POV of that party. Also, you can't just pick and choose quotes and orient sources to make a point. I will write less gobrish whenever I will.--Vanlister (talk) 21:56, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

'I will write less gobrish whenever I will.'

Construal.

'Generally I write gibberish, but here from time to time, I will elect to tone the crap grammar down, as my mood at any one time suggests to me.'

Implication.

There's no need to read or respond to your edits or remarks. Kindly desist from this page. Nishidani (talk) 08:06, 31 March 2022 (UTC)

Note to self. Sandstein's advice still holds.

I struggle with one language. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/multilingual-hyperpolyglot-brain-languages/?itid=hp-more-top-stories Zero^talk 15:16, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Interesting. Reminded me of Sallam the Interpreter, of Khazar fame, who is said to have interpreted between 30 languages. The most phenomenal linguist I've read about was Kenneth Hale, who could get along in over 50, delivered a talk inj Norwegian after reading a teach-yourself Norwegian grammar overnight on a planetrip to that country, and astonished his friends in Australia when they observed him, scarcely after 30 minutes sitting with aborigines on the pavement in a new town, conversing with them in one of the new languages he encountered there on his arrival. Sergei Starostin must have been able to work with a similar range of languages, but seemed to memorize them from books rather than by auditory osmosis. Cut down in his prime, Starostin apparently mastered the contents of a Gilyak dictionary in a single night for a bet.

Of course, while fascinating, the problem always remains: trying to say something fresh, original and intelligent in one's mother tongue, as opposed to chatting fluently in dozens. Hale for one certainly could, bless his memory. Now that our Danny has passed on, Australia has only, as far as I know Alexandra Aikhenvald with this level of linguistic facility. Nishidani (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm dubious about claims like this, I think they are overly sensationalised. One might learn vocabulary and grammar from a book, but isn't the same as learning the language. It reminds me of the Turing test for when a machine can really converse like a human. Fluency for me means that a native speaker can't tell that the polyglot isn't a native speaker. Zero^talk 07:10, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Fluency for me means that a native speaker can't tell that the polyglot isn't a native speaker

Sorry chief, will commit seppuku on request if my contrariness on this offends the deity, but that is patently wrong. Polyglottism has nothing to do intrinsically with a perfect accent. Magisterial English writers like Nabokov or Joseph Conrad wrote with an elegance and grammatical nicety that few native writers have achieved, and yet they spoke with decided accents. The opening of Lolita (alert, this is an ancient piece of my original research) has a beautiful description of the pedophile Humbert Humbert reciting lushly the name, Lolita, he coins for his nymphet Dolores Haze.

'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, My soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue making a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

A close phonological analysis will reveal that the way the 't' is pronounced reflects a Russian/French articulation of that consonant, not the Spanish or English 't' one might expect from the narrator's profile (ignoring for the mo' the labile status of two 'l' sounds in sequentially distinguished palatal positions). In other words, it's a slip that got past the guard of the foreigner but the otherwise super linguistically attuned author's attention Etc. Must go out to shop.

I see we have a List of polyglots, much of which is WP:OR confusing people who can handle several languages with this quite distinct kind of linguist.Nishidani (talk) 08:00, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Nah, you can't escape by recourse to accent. Accents are about speech, not about language. In the Turing test, the secret machine-or-human doesn't give away their identity by speaking in a natural human voice or like Siri. Similarly, in my language fluency test, some way to exclude accent as a clue will be employed. Zero^talk 08:11, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Accents are about speech, not about language

I can hear Saussure loitering in the background, with a ghastly smile. In tonal languages, you can write out, transcribed, numerous phrases that are identical grammatically but can bear different meanings, according to 'accent', if ya know wod I mean, guv. Ask for a writing brush (毛筆: máobĭ) in Chinese and get the accent wrong, and someone might think you are propositioning them for a 'hairy snatch' (毛屄:máobī) But I must duck out again to do some banking.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Let me illustrate. I was telling my mate Karl Kampmark (former lecturer at James Cook Uni) about the odd experience I was having in ordering cigarettes at the time (Japan 1975). 'Uh, a pack of Seven Stars cigarettes, please.' The persons in the various tobacco booths would reach aside to pick the required brand for me, and then turning and raising their heads, would suddenly stutter with shock 'No spik Engrish', withdrawing the packet. I.e. as long as they didn't see me, they heard my remark as perfect Japanese, but as soon as they caught sight of me, a foreigner, they burked and mentally cancelled out their instinctive understanding, replacing it with a common code which went, in those days,'no foreigners can master our impossible language.' Karl replied with an anecdote of his own. ('d seen people weep when he spoke Japanese, for its elegance and learning. He was a very accomplished linguist, fluent in several languages) He was walking in the backblocks of northern Japan up a mountain to visit a shrine one hot summer morning. Halfway up, a farmer, descending to the village with a burden of wood on his shoulders, greeted him, a salutation Karl of course returned. After a few hours, he went back down, and came across the old man, who was going up back to his woodsman's hut. They passed, with a friendly nod each way, and then, the old man stopped and called back. 'Excuse my rudeness but. . .what area of Japan do you come from?' Karl replied: 'Actually I happen to be Danish. You know, it's that small country just east of Germany.' 'Oh, really! I hope you have a pleasant journey. It's perfect weather for travelling about' etc. The point was that, relatively uneducated this old gentleman had none of the metropolitan prejudices of a good schooling. He saw a chap with an unusual face, who, on being greeted, replied fluently, and that meant the person must be Japanese, but not one who looked like all the other Japanese he had encountered. So, he thought, Karl must be some Japanese from way down south.

The point is that language use differs from person to person. We might all speak 'English', but every single person has an individual thumbprint that marks his grasp and usage of a shared 'mother tongue' as subtly different. 'Language' is an abstraction. The grammars we write never reflect spoken realities, or evince a descriptive exactitude for what 'native speakers' do or may say. As Sir Ernest Gowers once put it:'There are few rules that could not be illustrated as freely in the breach as in the observance'. Ultimately, it is one's accent which determines whether native speakers accept you as a scion of their mother tongue, not grammar, and it is the pitch-perfect phonological mimicry of these polyglots, rather than the content of their 'speech acts', which suggests 'native' fluency.Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Now having settled into the day's routine without multiple task-ditherings, I realize I am talking somewhat at cross-poiposes with what you asserted. Apologies. But, bref, no machine programme could detect infallibly 'native fluency' as you define it.Nishidani (talk) 12:54, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Please read [[wp:npa] and wp:minor, commenting on users, and not what they say is never a minor edit. Slatersteven (talk) 17:04, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

Look up the idiom: teaching granny to suck eggs.Nishidani (talk) 18:38, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

In an atmosphere of terror attacks, the last restraints holding the army back are cast off. Who didn’t they kill? The toll included a 17-year-old boy in Kafr Dan; a 34-year-old lawyer at the entrance to Tul Karm University; a 14-year-old boy in Husan, two days after they killed a half-blind widow with six children in the same village. Seventeen dead Palestinians in two weeks, all of them said to be terrorists but most of whom were not deserving of death. The media reported only briefly, if at all, and always with the trappings of the propaganda-style information dictated by the security services, at least some of which consists of lies, convenient lies for every Israeli’s ears. The blind widow was trying to stab someone, and, damn it, when no knife was found on her, not even a sling, the explanation was that she may have been trying to commit suicide. The lawyer bringing his nephew to school had participated in clashes; the dead boy had thrown a Molotov cocktail; even the crippled and cancer-stricken youth who can hardly stand was arrested by soldiers, after allegedly throwing lethal stones with his emaciated arms, which can barely lift a shoe. Israelis bought all of this blindly, perhaps enthusiastically, since anything is permitted when it comes to Palestinian lives. Gideon Levy, 17 Palestinians Have Been Killed in the Past Two Weeks. That's Not Terrorism? Haaretz 17 April 2022 Nishidani (talk) 15:10, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Precious

Five years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:15, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Did you miss Zionism as settler colonialism :) (Buidhe is on a roll) Selfstudier (talk) 15:47, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

The arrival of such accomplished and productive historians in the I/P area is one of the consolations of retirement.Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

There is online, a copy of "The Jewish labour movement in Palestine: its aims and achievements", published in 1928 by Verbandsbüro Poale-Zion, which is at pains to contrast Zionist settler colonialism with the normal, imperial, version, settler colonialism being seen as a "good thing", representing progress, at the time.     ←   ZScarpia   15:12, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Noted this; it seems like "our old friend" has moved on from hating Israel/Palestine editors to hating transgenders. (Actually; I had a little bird indicating that to me months ago). Frankly, I hope he ends locked up a looooong time, Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:01, 24 April 2022 (UTC) Also on CNN Nypost, and lots of others. Hmmm, soon notable for a BLP ;/ (Nope; I am not starting it!) Huldra (talk) 22:09, 24 April 2022 (UTC) And search for "Wikipedia" on this page, Huldra (talk) 22:15, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Reading the FBI report, I immediately thought: なるほど。やっぱり儂が想像したように引き籠もりだ。Poor bugger. The best years of one's life spent closeted and ranting with fidgety fingers on a keyboard. He's not notable: no one in that vast tribe that confuse a computer screen with the world, and views that jar with one's clichéd worldview, as a clear and present danger (that ridiculous phrase has an interesting history), deserves wiki notice: that is best left to a clinician's files in some obscure backwater. That's punishment enough. Nishidani (talk) 10:02, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

The Daily Beast has a pretty colourful article about it, which mentions harassment on Wikipedia.     ←   ZScarpia   14:57, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Pardon my flippant remark about a BLP; of course I don't advocate one. I agree that he needs treatment; alas, it is difficult to treat people who don't believe there is anything wrong with them. I also note how other "venues" reacted to his remarks, like Merriam-Webster shutting down an office for days. It seems that his Wikipedia "history" only taught him that he could get away with literally anything. It seems as if it was only when he went beyond Wikipeda that people reacted. Not exactly a good advertisement for Wikimedia T&S, to say the least. Huldra (talk) 23:42, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Can you set your comment on the Al-Aqsa RM in the right alignment and place, please? It looks very odd where it is. Salud! Selfstudier (talk) 15:53, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Ignore that, Nableezy fixed it:) Selfstudier (talk) 17:20, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Toe cracked when a 13 kilo basalt rock landed on it after tumbling two feet. 8.30 am here after 8 hours overnight in a distant hospital and having to walk several miles at an ungodly hour to work out how to get home, I need some shuteye.Nishidani (talk) 06:20, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Bet that hurts like blazes. Vino and a snooze, be right as rain. Selfstudier (talk) 21:48, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Two days ago, the National Seed Bank of the Ukraine was blown to smithereens. Perhaps some great mind among the Great replacement theorists inspiring contemporary Russian ideological fantasies thought that thus they'd strike a blow against the threat of genetic modifications of nature (mother Russia) It contained 162,000 seed types, many unique. Nishidani (talk) 16:38, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Apparently it was the "planting for seed sale" which was bombed, while the conserved material "are secured under a bunker and the main institution has not been affected", according to this, cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:47, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't read Twitter so thanks very much for that, H., which is a great re-leaf. I heard that on an Italian Tv channel which has 12 hours coverage a day, with correspondents all over the Ukraine and a few in Russia (and which translates the Russian Channel One evening debates: quite extraordinary stuff - we endlessly argue about the Azov battalion, while, there, key journalists talk of 'Ukrainian satanism' and the need to extirpate it root and branch, in language that is eerily evocative of Goebbels. Perhaps we need an article on that topic, come to think of it: messianic apocalyptic end-of-world manichaesm in Russian religio-political discourse, what one commentator called 'satanodicy'). So, while citing it, I was dissatisfied with the lack of specific detail. Generalities are the domain of spin, from whatever source. Der Teufel steckt im Detail or as Aby Warburg preferred to put it, Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail. Grazie. Nishidani (talk) 11:12, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Timothy Snyder, ['We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,' New York Times 19 May 2022. Uh, finally the obvious, this time by an accomplished authority on Eastern European history. Nishidani (talk) 14:19, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Your most recent edit at Temple Mount, who was it a reply to, me? :) Selfstudier (talk) 14:44, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Wodda careless old fuckwit(less) I've become. Clarified. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 15:23, 1 June 2022 (UTC).

Nah, I thought that was what you intended, I aligned the :'s, no sweat. Selfstudier (talk) 15:26, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

... exists for a reason – a good reason, in fact. It's bad enough that you once started changing the existing references to a different format without any prior discussion; that you choose to edit-war when your mistaken change is reverted is ... well, incomprehensible to me. You've been here for a while, you surely know all this. Please self-revert forthwith. Thank you, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:41, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I see you have been editing that page. For two years it has two tags heading it. {{Disputed|date=January 2020}}{{Lead too short|date=January 2020}} What have you done to fix the page so that those notifications no longer apply? When I glanced at it, my impression, which I am documenting on the talk page and to which you have not deigned to comment on to any significant extent, was that it was rife with poor sourcing, inaccuracies, with over a dozen serious flaws. Your editing there shows no awareness of this. It maintains significant amounts of material that are not worthy of an encyclopedic article.

I expressed a willingness to roll up my sleeves and work the page from top to bottom, to wikify it and bring it up to a minimum standard of respectable information. I can do this because I happen to know the classical languages, which you admit you do not, which are drawn on for over half of the text.

Your response is (a) not to engage with my comments on the talk page (b) engage in mechanical reverts to the shambles of an article that pre-existed my intervention.

The citational forms used on the earlier article are not uniform. Unless you are ready to do the necessary overhaul demanded by this flawed article, the sensible thing would be to hold off unIil someone like myself does the thorough review it obviously requires. A little patience and the glaring errors still abundantly visible there will be removed. At that point, by all means you can rewrite in to the one single reference system you prefer if you dislike the one I am using.

In the meantime, I'd appreciate your responding directly to the numerous points I am making about the primitive, erratic state of the text as it exists. Otherwise my impression would be that you cannot recognize the problems, which are obvious to any editor familiar with those classical sources

To engage me thus would be collaborative. It is not collaborative to ignore the talk page and keep reverting to your preferred sentences while the rest of text remains an amateurish hash. If you likewise undertake to do a thorough revision, then of course, I'll step aside. Nishidani (talk) 20:36, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I think you generally should make a note on the talk page suggesting that a citation style be adopted first, but I also think citing CITEVAR for a page that has no established citation style, with the references going from citation templates to {{r}} templates, to just unnamed ref tags to be a little over the top. But yes, you should check with the talk page and suggest such and such be converted before doing so imo. nableezy - 21:32, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Citing WP:CITEVAR to block on technical grounds an editor introducing one single and respectable citational style (best use here), in order to conserve a text which is a hodgepodge of different citational annotations, is irrational. That I didn't notify the page, well, WP:IAR for the punctilious. Unless someone undertakes to wikify the page and bring it up to snuff, which, looking at the edit history for the last two years, no one appears to be willing to do, I'll proceed with my approach, which, as is known, is extremely intolerant of non-academic/non-specialist sources. We need less rule-obsessive nitpicking and more programmatic Sitzfleisch.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

But thats the point of CITEVAR, if you want to establish a citation style by modifying existing citations you need to get an agreement on the talk page. I dont think you should have reverted when you were reverted. You can say IAR for your edit, but when its challenged you need to go back to the talk page and not just revert again. You might even get an agreement on the talk page if you tried. nableezy - 01:10, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

In a talk delivered in May 2022 in Tel Aviv, Eric Alterman stated that he would leave bequests to Jewish Peace groups out of his will and fund only serious scholarship on the history of Judaism, adding, according to Philip Weiss, that, 'Judaism is itself in crisis because its only content is pro-Israelism. . .Israel has lost American Jews and liberals because it has no “content” to offer besides stale Everyone-hates-the-Jews propaganda that is meaningless to young Jews.' Philip Weiss, 'Young Jews are ‘walking away from Judaism’ because its only content is ‘pro-Israelism’,' Mondoweiss 20 June 2022 Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Your kind words are much about appreciated and help me keep going as it gets harder. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 17:50, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Doug, if my words might be of help, I'd be willing to drop a backhoe's bucket your way every day, and I write that snubbing my instinctive wariness about brown-nosing blandishments. I can't remember a false step in 16 years of interaction, and that includes a suspension or two you handed out my way! My very best wishes (by the way I still owe you an article on Sheba, and take the occasion to apologize for not coming through on that so far.) Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:30, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Associated Press, Palestinian Authority routinely tortures detainees, says rights group,' The Guardian 1 July 2022

Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip systematically torture critics in detention, a practice that could amount to crimes against humanity, an international rights group has said.

Human Rights Watch/Lawyers for Justice, Joint Submission by Human Rights Watch and Lawyers for Justice to the Committee Against Torture on Palestine 74th Session, July 12-29, 2022,' Human Rights Watch 30 June 2022 Nishidani (talk) 14:49, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

[7] Doug Weller talk 12:48, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Howdy. It might be best if you indent your posts, properly. So that it doesn't look like you're responding to yourself or the wrong editor :) GoodDay (talk) 15:46, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. I am not particularly bright, certainly with these matters, but the problems on the ANI page were caused by continuous edit conflicts, as I had to try to respond to just one remark, or move a post to its correct position. Things got confusing as the conversation was growing too quickly for my slow mind.Nishidani (talk) 16:01, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Informative, thoughtful and insightful talks by John Mearsheimer:

1. The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis. "The war in Ukraine is a multi-dimensional disaster, which is likely to get much worse in the foreseeable future." (2 hours 7 minutes), posted in June 2022. Here is transcript of the talk (the video also contains a Q & A session after the talk, but this Q&A is not included in the transcript).

2. How to make (the war in Ukraine) end (21 minutes), posted in May 2022.

3. Insights on how to end the war (99 minutes), posted in March 2022. Mearsheimer: "If the Ukrainians are smart, they would divorce themselves from the U.S. and try to work out a Modus vivendi with Russia."

4. Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? (74 minutes). From Aug. 2015, still highly relevant and pertinent today. It seems practically all of Mearsheimer's key predictions from almost 7 years ago about the Ukraine, Russia, China and the US have come to fruition.

5. Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (85 minutes). "Mearsheimer provides the first systematic analysis of lying as a tool of statecraft."

The pup and kitten send their love to their granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 09:32, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks indeed. It's always great to have an opportunity to read, or listen to, anything by Mearsheimer. It can't be a coincidence that recent events and observing a dopey edit at Prometheus Unbound prodded me to finally consider redoing that page, which is about a figure being punished by the cosmic forces of authority for having allowed mankind access to the Tekhnai of civilization. Now of course, man is doing the same to nature, while suffering a slow Promethean strangulation by the latent internal dynamics of the system of ordure he put in the place of the old order. I expect I won't be surprised by M's analyses: the bad side of growing old is being compelled to mutter:'of course' as one disaster after another kicks in, informing the conjunctural chaos of the last decades. There's little consolation in being right, and no room for self-flattery. One doesn't have to be a genius to see the obvious, as Andersen's fable teaches us. You just have to see things as children do, as the imperial procession walks naked in our midst. A pat for the pup, and a caress for the kitten.Best Nishidani (talk) 10:06, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts Nish.

Here are further highly informative, thoughtful and expertly researched deep insights (51 minutes) about Ukraine, Russia and China, by Gerald Horne and Paul Jay. This conversation between Horne and Jay addresses some of the key issues you alluded to above, including providing insights into the very complex and multilayered historical, social and economic context of the relationship between the West, Russia and China. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:52, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

I still hope to get back to you on this, once I've done copyediting a somewhat intricate paper a friend has written on the reception of Kant's theories about Aristotle's 'rhapsodical' categories during the 19th century. Unlike the world ((a) Peter Beinart, America must be consistent. It cannot pick and choose when to follow international law, The Guardian 10 March 2022),(b) (2) Peter Beinart, 'Justifications for Destroying a People:The arguments Russia’s government deploys to dehumanize Ukrainians are strikingly similar to the ones Israel’s government uses to dehumanize Palestinians,' Jewish Currents 8 March 2022) this sort of stuff is refreshingly, compellingly logical, proof that somewhere out there among the exemplars of homo sapiens insipiens, sapient mutants - the sapient sutlers of the Word, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, -survive. Best Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Beinart's second piece essentially states (the obvious) that anyone supportive of Israel's behavior towards Palestinians over the past 55 years is obliged logically to support Russia's obliteration of Ukrainian sovereignty and identity. Of course, discursive coherence is the last thing one can expect these days. Nishidani (talk) 16:43, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the links to Beinart's work. Indeed, over the last two weeks or so, in the context of Ukraine vs. Russia, very few - far too few - people have discussed the issue of the Israeli government's decades of violent apartheid against Palestinians, including e.g. Max Blumenthal, Jonathan Cook, Abby Martin, Caitlin Johnstone, Chris Hedges and Lee Camp, mostly on Twitter and, to an even lesser extent, on other social media e.g. YouTube.

(However, with every passing day, most of the Western corporations that own the social media platforms appear to be increasingly restricting access to, or even deleting, postings that disagree with the Western dominant mainstream daily Two Minutes of Hate against Russia, with Vladimir Putin portrayed in the Western mainstream mass media as the Emmanuel Goldstein du jour; for example, YouTube is now blocking the RT-affiliated channels, including the last 8 years of Lee Camp's work and big portions of Abby Martin's work.)

Additionally, on a very rare occasion over the last two weeks, a cultural, socio-economic, academic or political leader has called out the double standards on Ukraine vs Russia and Palestine vs Israel, for example see this short video featuring Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:16, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Y'all probably saw Mondo's article but here anyway for it's pointers to other sources as well. Selfstudier (talk) 11:50, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

The I/P analogy is obvious, but I don't think it should dominate criticism, since larger historical forces bear down here - all the knots of the last century are gathering on the combteeth, as the Italians say- but I am surprised Israel would arbitrate on this in Jerusalem. (Technically Putin would lose face, which would be political suicide, if Russia signed a ceasefire in Jerusalem because that would be tantamount in law to explicitly recognizing the legitimacy of their cosigning antagonist, the Ukrainian government- precisely what Putin denies.) Zionism is basically an expression of the Slavic world,- its thrust goes wholly against the grain of what occurred in Western Europe in the last seventy years - and any realistic negotiation ending the war - if peace is to be restored will compel Ukraine's leaders to accept humiliating concessions. And if Zelenskyy signs, the 'stab in the back' meme of Nazism will stir Ukrainian nationalists to cite his 'Jewishness' for the destruction of the Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity, and thereby revive the rooted antisemitic history of that area. Of course, some 'heads' may think that in turn will empty the Ukraine of its Jewish communities who will relocate to Israel's advantage to the safety of that country. Empires like the USA, Russia and China don't rule by law: that is just a tool in the kit to be cited when enemies are unruly, and ignored in one's own deliberations, which are rigorously dominated by great power rivalries' (mis)calculations. I'd much prefer people (re)read Piketty's great book on the internal logic of our system (which Russia's kleptocratic entrepreneurial elite mirrors in a caricatural distorting mirror), but it's tasking. Perhaps Victor Grossman's 'Russia and Ukraine: Notes From Berlin,' CounterPunch 11 March, 2022, gives a succinct overview of the larger hypocrisies. Nishidani (talk) 21:36, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the great insights Nish (and thanks for the important link Selfstudier). Yes, the works of Thomas Piketty and Victor Grossman are very helpful.

In addition, I also recommend the work of Alfred W. McCoy and Michael Klare, both of whom have published several highly thoughtful and informative books. They both have also written many insightful and powerful essays for TomDispatch over the last 12 years. Their most recent essays are: 'Michael Klare, The Geopolitics of Hell,' (March 6, 2022) and 'Alfred McCoy, War on an Endangered Planet' (March 10, 2022). Ijon Tichy (talk) 05:35, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

I think this is the best source exposing Western hypocrisy over Ukraine: http://opiniojuris.org/2022/03/17/hamster-in-a-wheel-international-law-crisis-exceptionalism-whataboutery-speaking-truth-to-power-and-sociopathic-racist-gaslighting/ (t · c) buidhe 04:10, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, Buidhe, for this, esp. because it led me to his paper, Ralph Wilde, Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House: International Law and Palestinian Liberation Palestine Yearbook of international law 22 (2019–20 20) 3–74, a meticulous analysis of the law on the status of the self-defense argument used by occupying powers, reading which is one of the reasons why I’m late in getting back to you. The I/P conflict has always been for me the canary in the mineshaft for postwar history: w hatever emerges there, the precedents established – to which a status of exceptionality is accorded because of the ostensibly peculiar requirements of Israel – in theory will make for a blowback wave of impacts on the postwar Western institutional and geopolitical order, making its intrinsic contradictions even more explicit and stressed than they have been for that small minority of scholars who note the obvious. Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias will, in short, return from his silence and get the upper hand over Socrates. What Russia is achieving in Ukraine, was long achieved by Israel since 1967, with massive Western complicity and therefore the outrage is profoundly hypocritical, racist. Conflict in far-flung borderlands always has the imperial party assuming different rules apply there, and those ‘lapses’ into barbarism abroad then, eventually, form precedents that come home to roost in the heartland:the US in the Philippines (the ‘taming of the tribal West’ being the background), Germany with the Herero, Turkey with the Armenians, the Soviet Union with the Holodomor (semantically that is not too different from the meaning of Porajmos , the Nazi genocide of Rom and Sinti, still not recognized though the same term ‘final solution’ for Jews was used as early as 1938 for ‘gypsies’ (endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage) at least half of whom were murdered) etc. The justified outrage at theRape of Belgium still has to be read in the light of Leopold’s Atrocities in the Congo Free State . Plus ça change, the more mankind is shortchanged. Some two bit ‘orientalist’ based in Japan speaking on Italian television last night cited a pseudo- proverb ostensibly from the canon of classical Chinese that ran: ‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.’ The point was the seismic shift in the old order looks bad, but to those who will survive to dwell in the new world emerging out of the transformations, something of beauty will emerge. People get paid to make moronic cracks like that. But, back to the garden (feeling guilty as spiders scramble out of clumps of weed where they were happily ensconced before some Godzilla like myself barged in to use the soil for a different purpose). I’m as usual, preaching to the choir.Nishidani (talk) 12:45, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Here are some interesting insights on how the US and NATO now have a golden opportunity to drastically reduce the power and influence of the fascists - especially the Nazis - in Ukrainian society as well as in NATO countries. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:14, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

There are all sorts of elements one can focus on in an extremely complex conflict like this. This appears a bit like the postwar hasbara associating the PLO with antisemitism via Hajj Amin Huseyni. He's done some homework, but a movement that got 2.5% of the vote in the most recent elections, has a battle strength of about 1,000 men (no doubt now significantly decimated at Mariupol), putatively financed by a Jewish Ukrainian entrepreneur, fighting on the side of a Jewish president, with no parliamentary representation, coopting 5% of its militants from ethnic Russians etc., etc., doesn't easy quite so easily with the undoubtedly Nazi record documented 8 years ago. They're against 'queers'? So is Putin with the endorsement of the Russian orthodox church . They engage in ethnic cleansing? idem Putin. They believe in an ethnic cosmology? So does Putin, and his putative ideologist. They are extremists committed to violence to impose themselves? Idem Putin. They hire the scum of foreign extremists to arm their cause? So does Russia sending in Islamic Chechens commanded by a mafia thug to fight the rumoured Azov contingent in Mariupol, and probably rape their way through the survivors etc. Such 'Nazis' are everywhere, well represented in the counsels of many mainstream states. Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

I think you are making many valid points Nishidani. I do not disagree with you on any of the issues you raised. But note that, for example, Ukrainian Neo Nazis have renamed many streets over the last 8 yrs, with the most egregious example being the road leading to the massacre memorial site of Babi Yar, that was renamed in honor of Stepan Bandera in 2014. (Bandera and his followers were heavily involved in the massacres of many Jews and Polish civilians.) And other streets in Ukraine have been renamed for various WW2 nationalists, racists, antisemites etc. And Russia isn’t erecting statues of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t issuing stamps memorializing Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t naming streets after Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Russia isn’t building museums for Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Ukraine is. Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:09, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

In short, what we are exploring is well known, if off the mainstream record: the West's hypocrisy and precedent-setting. Chomsky has been documenting that for 50 years. One is still obliged to see what's going on in other empires. Timothy Snyder is an historian of Eastern Europe to be reckoned with and in a book written 4 years ago, which I haven't yet read, he makes a cogent argument for Putin's regime as 'fascist' citing figures like Ivan Ilyin (explicity admired by Putin), and also Lev Gumilyov of Khazar notoriety. Though the present era is eerily like the 1930s, the ideological picture is one of extreme fluidity and confusion, with left and right pilfering from their respective archives, so such brandnames are to be handled with care, even if the probabilities are that mankind will have to face the same disorders on a larger scale.Nishidani (talk) 17:58, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

Vijay Prashad provides additional deep insights about the socio-economic and geo-political struggle between China, the US, Europe and Russia:

• Ukraine a Pawn in a Larger Struggle - Vijay Prashad pt 1 (31 March 2022)
• Russian Chauvinism and an American Global Monroe Doctrine - Vijay Prashad pt 2 (4 April 2022)

Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:15, 31 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks.Just a point about 'Western' coverage. In Italy since day 1, there has been, I guess almost 24/7 coverage of the conflict, with several mainstream channels providing several to ten hours a day of reportage, using journalists (not embedded) in a dozen of the cities under siege in direct contact, analysts of the highest calibre, and the various talking heads of national television. From the beginning the 'Russian' perspective has been present. This is of course in good part a consequence of intense commercial competition for audiences' attention. Everything, down to frame by frame analysis of footage to evaluate whether Lavrov or Kiev's claims hold, is aired. That said, historical background included, no one is doubting the obvious: that Russia has resorted to the same techniques it, like the US in Falluja, the Serbs in Sarajevo, Israel in Gaza, the techniques it used to wipe out Chechen resistance in the late 1990s for its own imperial interests, and that the Ukrainian resistance is legitimate. Nishidani (talk) 08:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

It is good that the Italian media provides a balanced coverage. But in the US, discussion is extremely limited by the mainstream media's maintenance of a single, exclusive viewpoint: the official talking-points of the US gubmint. The Russian perspective - including legitimate Russian grievances - has been banned in the mainstream media in the US; Russia has been effectively canceled in the US, and the Russian leadership - and by extension the Russian people - are largely dehumanized. This is, of course, not too different from how the mainstream media in Israel habitually, automatically and instinctively dehumanizes the Palestinian people.

(However, fortunately the US has a thriving alternative media, where the Russian perspective is provided daily, and debated freely and openly. Regretfully, relatively few people in the US pay attention to the alternative media.)

I agree that Ukrainian resistance is legitimate. But the Ukrainian leadership had many opportunities over the last two decades to avoid an eventual war with Russia. Several scholars such as Mearsheimer and Prashad, among others, over the last 10-20 years have warned repeatedly that the Ukrainian gubmint must change course to prevent an almost-certain eventual war between itself and Russia, a war in which the US government, and the Ukrainian government i.e. Ukrainian oligarchy, will ruthlessly and greedily use the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder against Russia. ("The Americans are fighting the Russians to the last Ukrainian.") [Yes, I am aware that Russia, just like the Ukraine, is an oligarchy. So are the US and Israel, in fact most 'significant' countries on the planet are some type of oligarchy/ plutocracy/ kleptocracy to varying degrees.]

These scholars also provided specific, reasonable, not-very-painful compromises the Ukrainian government could take to prevent the war and save thousands of lives and needless pain and suffering for millions more. Of course, this thoughtful and insightful advice and warnings were ignored by the Ukrainian leadership.

Yes, I agree that Russia resorted to the same nasty techniques as those in the examples of conflicts you mentioned. In addition to the examples you provided, another relevant example is the brutal, vicious, relentless attacks by the Ukrainian gubmint against the people in the Donbas region, especially over the last 8 years, in which roughly about 14 thousand people were killed, mostly on the side of the separatists.

The bottom line: after this war is over, the only winners will be the oligarchs everywhere on the planet, including Ukrainian, Russian, European, Asian, North American, South American, Arab, Israeli, etc. oligarchs/ plutocrats/ kleptocrats, while the mass of the people globally are going to gain nothing from this conflict.

Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:44, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

apropos this, it is mistitled. Mearsheimer offers no hints as to how the war might end. He simply states that diplomatic negotiations between Russia and the US should aim to cede Crimea to Russia, in exchange for reincorporation of Luhansk and Donetz (in fact an expanded Donbass) into Ukrainian sovereignty. That is extremely vague, almost pointless: how that could be arranged is obscure, and the last suggestion is wishful thinking. The present Russian elite has chosen the Zionist option: invade a country, ignore the fuss; wait 50 years and with the passing of time, it will just de facto be accepted as ‘ours’. Russia has a thousand-year history of patiently, stoically, living through its failures, without reforming the conditions that produce its ongoing dedevelopmental inertia.

His geopolitical outline is correct in so far as he outlines fatal Nato mistakes and those of the usual bozos in American policy-making bodies. It's like watching a bystander comment on what's wrong with Wyatt Earp with unerring insight, while ignoring the Clanton brothers due to lack of familiarity with their background. He sounds almost totally ignorant of the details of Russian history, wholly out of touch with the resurrection of ethnic nationalism as an ideological component in Europe and Eastern Europe through to Russia, and of the motivations that arise out of its circumstances as, economically, a third-world country (with a GNP inferior to that of Texas or Italy, and investment in health care less than a 10th of Italy’s) with a bigpower mentality and massive nuclear armaments. And worse still, a public so dirt-ignorant that it can listen with alacrity, nightly, on prime time television to fuckwits that describe an aspiration to autonomy in a neighbouring country as proof of ‘satanism’, Nazism, or the homosexualization of the world. So, when he says Putin would restore Luhansk and Donetz, or the expanded Donbass to Ukraine as autonomous regions, to Ukrainian sovereignty, he is daydreaming. Given the way events have turned out, with the humiliation, so far, of Russia’s vaunted military power, and the massive attrition of its young soldiers, he could never ‘rationally’ accept any outcome except the bankable one of having permanently secured those territories to ‘mother Russia’. No rational actor in major geopolitical contentions, having won on the ground (which Russia will do) would feel obliged to do anything other than secure the loots and humiliate the vanquished.

There is no solution. The Ukraine has no option but to play into the attritional strategy, which will leave it comprehensively fucked, - it will continue to suffer a vindictive Curtis LeMay carpetbombing back to the stone-age, where it will continue to dream of joining the EU, a bit like a black ghetto asking to be redefined as an outlying part of Manhatten. Even in the best scenario, Zelensky, if he did what all analysts other than the starry-eyed say is inevitable, cede territory and allow Russia to trample on international law, would ipso facto, be washed up as someone who sold out, who stabbed the nation in the back, the target of the growing constituency of Ukrainian irredentist nationalists.

Putin’s gambit was rational: a developing Ukraine was a threat to the stability of the age-old Russian system of a vast and relatively impoverished population ruled over by a kleptocratic, somewhat 'modernish'-looking elite, which has vindicated its internal tyranny by stoking populist nationalism, blustering about its international prestige as a great power. To challenge the Western order,-a natural temptation for any other world-power - one needs a stranglehold on the key resource bases: oil, gas and grain. He had the first two, and with the Ukraine, is effectively securing the third. The logical step to render even what remains of the Ukraine a basket-case, would be to seal the maritime outlet from Mariupol to Odessa. That is difficult, only half accomplished and to complete the encirclement,- as far as Transnistria, a long term intention, -perhaps recourse to tactical nuclear weapons will be thought necessary. This is all the unfortunate consequence of Nato, the EU, and Russia riding roughshod over Mearsheimer’s advice back in the 90s to allow Ukraine to retain its nuclear arsenal.

Well, best to get back to tending my vegetable patch. Bees are rarer despite ample borage; once unsighted orange tips now make themselves known; and fireflies morsecode in luminescent flashes across the evenscape a full three weeks before they were due.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

@Ijon Tichy. As you will have intuited, I disagree with Mearsheimer and, I might add, Chomsky on this. Everything reminds me of the events starting with the Spanish Civil War and I've found myself turning back to reread Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Many 'leftist' readers have often been disconcerted by Slavoj Žižek's writings. I too. But I find myself in substantial agreement with his op ed in the Guardian on Ukraine.

Slavoj Žižek, Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine,' The Guardian 21 June 2022. No need to reply (Sorry to disappoint on this score). Best Nishidani (talk) 13:57, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

I sat down at my computer and started to write a long, detailed response to the piece by Zizek. I was going to offer a point-by-point rebuttal for every argument made by Zizek. I was going to start with the fact that his arguments do not present the proper context - for example, the war in Ukraine did not start back in Feb. of this year, in fact the Ukrainian gov't has been brutally and viciously shelling, bombing and attacking its own Russia-affiliated citizens in the Donbas for the last 8 years - and the Ukrainian gov't has continued to kill people in the Donbas practically every day since the Russian invasion. I was going to write about the larger geo-political regional and global context over the last 30 years and the importance of the deep involvement of the US empire in the region, as well as the role of Russia and the Ukraine in the competition between the US and China for global dominance, as articulated above by Mearsheimer, Gerald Horne, Chomsky, and many world-class scholars writing in e.g. TomDispatch, CounterPunch, etc. I was going to write about how Ukraine is one of the worst oligarchies/ kleptocracies/ plutocracies on the planet (yes, I know Russia, the US, Israel and the Arab states are also), and the pervasive, deep corruption in Ukraine including social, economic and political corruption. I was going to mention (again) the widespread admiration and adulation for nazis, nazi-collaborators, racists and antisemites in Ukrainian society.

But then I discovered that an author I greatly respect, Ron Jacobs, has already written a partial rebuttal to Zizek's article, and considering that Jacobs is a much better writer than myself, I'll just provide a link to Jacob's piece, which will free-up my time to grab some breakfast and take my sweet little dog and cat for a walk: Slavoj Zizek Does His Christopher Hitchens Impression. (Referring to Hitchen's apparent Islamophobia and Hitchen's enthusiastic, vocal, persistent advocacy for the US violent invasion of Iraq and bloody, nasty, prolonged war on the Iraqi people).

BTW, you may also be interested in: The Guardian Churns Out Embarrassingly Awful Empire Propaganda, by another one of my favorite independent/ non-mainstream journalists, Caitlin Johnston.

Last but not least, the pup and kitten say hi to their beloved granpa Nishidani. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:20, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

What occurred in 2014 in Donbas was, technically, a civil war which broke out between Russian-backed secessionists and the legitimate Ukrainian government. The enabling power was extraterritorial, with Russia engaging in a proxy war, identical to what would be the case were Austria to furnish arms, instructors and 'volunteer' ex-servicemen to German-speaking secessionisrt groups in northern Italy. Both sides - the sovereign authority and the secessionists -bombed, killed and behaved with criminal abandon. The casualties on both sides are roughly par. One can only grasp the logic of events by drawing up a close chronology: post hoc ergo propter hoc. Any generalization in favour of one narrative flies in the face of the complex details of that particular war.

I know Rob Jacobs is a good egg, solid for comments on many contemporary issues, but, he is way out of his depth with both Žižek and the Ukrainian dilemma, which Jürgen Habermas described as a Scylla-Charbydis dark passage between 'two evils – a defeat of Ukraine or the escalation of a limited conflict into a third world war.' In any case, what one has is, geopolitically, multiple Western actors who, each representing national calculations while struggling to defend a supranational political entity, the EU, bound by legal, moral and rational choices, pitted against an autocratic empire that has decided to play Russian roulette with history, where no known legal, moral or rational codes condition their engagement in ‘the Great Game’. It is, apart from the undisguised fascist thrust of its ethnocidal rhetoric of self-justification for endeavouring to wipe out the political, cultural and historical identity of over 40 million people (on the example of China's success in destroying the Uyghur), pure poker, bluff, upping the stakes endlessly, while making everyone else at the table aware that, whatever the lay of each player’s card-hand, the bluffer does have his holstered gun at the ready, if anyone insists that you can’t keep endlessly upping the ante but must answer the call to put your cards on the table (negotiations). How do you negotiate with a state which subscribes to an ideology that the post-modern world has dispensed with truth?^[1]

I generally agree with Chomsky that a negotiated settlement must be the uppermost priority. But Chomsky's analysis is too America-centric. He says that US policy is pitched to hamper that and use Ukraine to exhaust Russia, and that Zelenskyy’s known position is the royal road to a compromise. Putin has rejected that several times. Lavrov today repeated their view that negotiations must be premised on the acceptance of Russian terms and demands, i.e., capitulation. C's analysis ignores the realities of European responses: from Macron (France is widely known to be the one European power whose total autonomy at this level of decision-making is such that it is not subject to US pressure), to Draghi and Scholtz, every attempt to bring Russia to the table has failed, with an invariable ‘Nyet. Not yet.’ Coping with a huge refugee influx, it has not provided, like the US, any massive military aid apart from essentially symbolic military assistance (in comparative terms). The two powers doing most of that are imperial or ex-imperial powers (US and Britain) All Europe has done of weight is to back severe sanctions that wittingly will cause blowback, with more grief to their economies than to Russia. It is immensely significant however that European countries that have always studiously avoided an entangling commitment to NATO, and lie close to the Russian Federation, have, independently read the Ukrainian invasion as one which, if not seriously confronted by countermeasures, will have deeper historical ramifications in terms of future threats, on their own countries. You cannot attribute that radical change of perception to US armtwisting. From Sweden to Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, this is not about the Ukraine, but about having, if the Ukraine capitulates, a triumphant Russia even closer to their borders, with a longterm confidence that US-style violence pays.

I agree with everything he says about the way what Russia is doing is exactly what, historically, the US has done.^[2] But if you employ that mirror logic, the inference must be that we not endorse a Russian-dictated resolution any more than one would have endorsed US- dictated ‘ resolutions’ in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or, closer to home, Israel/Palestine. The negotiations on the I/P roadmap have effectively allowed the invading power to totally absorb its defeated adversary and, from there, to systematically destabilize all states save Jordan and thuggish Egypt in its near and distant neighbourhood, uncannily like the Yinon Plan hoped for. Russia won’t negotiate (why should it?) unless if finds itself in serious difficulty, militarily rather than economically (its population is used to poverty. Object and they will screw you even more). In any case, given the remarkable success of its action in threatening to cripple European economies (it is inevitable gas will be shut off for the winter), in technical terms, for the moment, Putin’s gamble is paying a very significant geopolitical dividend in the short term, giving him no strong grounds for altering his inflexibility.

Under Putin, the Russian Federation has, quite intelligently in terms of a certain imperial vision of a restored ‘Great Russia’, sought to make the EU, and particularly its historical centre, bar France, which has retained its nuclear power plants, dependent on Russia for its core resources (i) gas (2) oil (c) food (d) and minerals. For a long time, under Merkel, German calculations were that Russia could be ‘domesticated’ by making their two economies so intricately meshed that, eventually, Russian economic blackmail – as the US, for its own reasons warned (it too is an able practitioner of economic blackmail), - would become increasingly improbable, rationally self-defeating. Détente was feasible in so far as the West’s interlocutor remained a lucid actor with intelligible imperial/national interests (as was true with the late Soviet régime). It began to show itself dysfunctional with Putin’s unpredictability which, of course, is not peculiar to him. Bush’s invasion of Iraq showed the same tendency at work in the Western alliance – totally irrational and doomed to immolate itself through the iron logic of what we call, after Wundt, the heterogensis of ends, or, more familiarly after Merton, the law of unintended consequences. Of course, the actors who set off these effects are politicians with a vision, but near to zero knowledge of historical realities and the probable side-effects of what they think are rational choices. You will always find two diverse constituencies of experts weighing in at such moments: analysts who have a fair and often deep awareness of the collateral risks, and advise caution, and the ideologues quite aware of the chaos and damaging side-effects of these Rubicon-crossing bets, but consider those devastating outcomes only a 'problem' for the affected countries whose weakening will benefit US interests. The ideologues usually win out.

Most of the analyses you mention are grounded in US/Russian superpolitics, and the pragmatics of ‘realism’ by parties outside Europe, and the Ukraine. Apart from Putin’s direct intervention in the election of Trump, this is all very distant, and, whatever the outcome, won’t substantially inflect the quality (or lack of it) of average lives. This is not true of those caught up, sandwiched between the two superpowers, the various nations of Europe, whose core foundational countries’ populations have had their eirenic postwar complacencies shaken to the roots– their sense that the bellicose or brutal thrusts of these two empires are essentially the idiocy of ‘beyond’, alien to what we are about, aside from their endless niggling at European unity, their wrestling for a role as cultural or political dominus over that wedge which is the historic heartland of the ‘West’. Europe, though an ally, has so far beaten the US on every issue of quality of life, longevity, public infrastructure, education, and internal peace (though much of that is fraying as the ideology of American ‘rationalist’ economics and the financialization of the world baits politicians, so far, as in Britain, with disastrous success ).

As to Russia, civilly, culturally, it was viewed as a basket case, despite its endless meddling under the table, a playground for its predatory financial shysters whose cosying up to elites from Italy, Germany and Great Britain had, as is obvious now, a geostrategic dimension, a place where direct support and financing of rising Christian-conservative right-wing ultranationalist parties was engineered to break the hegemony of the traditional left/right party structure, and drive a wedge between EU countries to play one off against the other and undermine the momentum of the EU’s consolidation as an independent global power. In rhetorical terms, much of the disinformation efforts concentrate on repeating the idea that Nato is a major problem for Europe (whereas Nato has traditionally been a rather cheap European scam to get US protection without paying the economic, as opposed to policy, dues, serious membership would require). Impressively, Russia tried to stage a coup in the Montenegrin elections in 2016, co-opted Orban in Hungary, the Lega in Italy, and that enormous anomaly, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, which held dual allegiances to the Russian-sponsored rightwing parties of Europe, and to Steve Bannon’s Republican Trumpist ideologues. Go figure). The Baltic states, some with a quarter of their population Russian, are particularly fragile in this regard, and subject to endless sectarian manipulation by Russia. Virtually every European intelligence service over the last few decades has monitored and duly reported to Parliaments, ongoing Russian attempts, by influence, resource-supply threats, social-media manipulation, political bribery/blackmail, cyberwarfare and traditional spying to mould pro-Russian policies or orientate public opinion. From an observation point like Italy, this has been very obvious for a decade, and give rise to numerous scandals.

Newspapers like CounterPunch tells us in great detail about US meddling. That kind of information is all too obvious, I have no difficulty with it. Coverage of Russian interference, 80% of the known external pressures on European policy formation (the other 20% being Chinese) are off the radar of public attention, at least untill recently, with the Ukrainian event. Again, all this is to be expected by superpowers, but critical diffidence has traditionally, in the cultural sphere, focused on the US/Nato axis. If you want to assess what the Ukraine moment actually is about, all the major geopolitical powers have to be included in one’s judgment, rather than approach it with a reductionist, Manichaean ‘it’s- either- the-US- or- Russia’ perspective, as all of your analysts do. There is a tertium quid: the dynamics of the EU project, which has slowly struggled (perhaps illusorily) to secure an independent worldview for decades against both of these superpowers. To adopt a metaphor from one of Žižek’s best books, one must in this fraught discourse, where pressures to fall back on a standard set of default positions are intense, seek a parallax perspective. ’the apparent displacement of an object(the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight’. Slavoj Žižek , The Parallax View, MIT Press 2006 p.17

What you say of Ukraine exceptionalizes it when its corruption, oligarchies, flawed laws and rightwing ideologies are normative for that western area, (Byelorussia, Moldavia, Transnistria etc) and all states under Russia’s southern flank. Singling it out is wrongheaded. The one distinctive difference the Ukraine has shown, since 2004 at least – almost two decades – is the emergence of a fairly vibrant metropolitan ‘liberal’ culture among the younger generation, that, through news outlets, social media, and public demonstrations, has consistently asserted a powerful desire that the future of their country be patterned after a European democratic model, not an-ex Soviet Russian style zenophobic, ethnocentric, kleptocratic state where the primary thrust of politics excludes most of the population from articulate representation and prospects of socio-economic improvement. In part this was a natural outcome of the breakdown of the Soviet order, and the parliamentarization of easterrn bloc countries, and economic logic. In the Ukraine’s case, the impact of over a half a million Ukrainians managing to gain work in European countries has, by feedback to their homelands, and repatriated earnings to support extended families, has meant, by a multiplier effect, that Ukrainian society began to grasp how more promising prospects were in the West, than those available in Russia where indeed, a much larger expatriate population lives.

The result, among the younger generation, was the rise and diffusion of a westernised youth culture, impatient with the stagnation of their past, and its heavily russified torpor. You see this in the early months on the battlefield: the Ukrainian grunts were mostly adept at using smartphone technology, whereas their young Russian adversaries didn’t have that, or were forbidden to use it. You see it in the truckloads of commonplace domestic hardware – televisions, washing machines, even toilets, ripped out of houses in invaded townships and villages, to be sent home, where such quality products were hard to come by. One of the real fears of the Russian plutocratic order was that in their near neighbourhood, something like a viable independent civil society and economy might be slowly forming, precisely of the kind Russian politics fears within its own national borders. A possible exemplary model on its doorstep, readily visible to those Russians who travel to the Ukraine, or to the huge number of Russians who have relatives there.

What all observers do agree on, Russian and Western alike, is that the massive Ukrainian resistance, and its ‘heroic’ ethos, were totally unexpected. The idea of popular resistance is a powerful institutionally celebrated cultural memory in many western countries, but generations have entrusted the idea of defense and the residue of the ancient ‘heroic’ ethos, as Habermas notes, to professional armies (Israel of course still maintains the ‘heroic’ ethos, mainly because the army is the reserve vehicle for consoilidating national identity there). It used to be reflex on the left to back any invaded country's resistance movement. That is now out of fashion, as one bows to 'realism' and accepts capitulation as the best guarantor of civilian lives. Boh!

Of course, in saying this, I am not suggesting that the West be sucke(re)d into Ukraine’s (understandable) hyperbolic rhetoric with its public fantasies insisting on an ultramontane request the West blindly leap into its cause and risk its own civilisation to ensure the restoration of that distant country’s borders. Those borders aren’t the concern: it is an ineludible concern that, if the Ukraine were to capitulate, - for negotiations, at this moment in time, of the kind suggested mean capitulation, given that there is, in the public record, no evidence Russia under Putin will stop short of his imperial design there- Ukraine’s future will be that of a banana/ borsch (an Ukrainian dish) pseudo ‘republic’, a dull pawn under the tutelage, via puppet stooges, of its big brother to the east, with a renewed nomenclature of the usual kleptocratic party mobsters, playing second string in Russia’s resource-based longterm geopolitical blackmail strategy. Once more (Israel being another case) the tenuous legitimacy of an international order based on law will be undermined, an autocracy consolidated, the use of economic blackmail endorsed, a recourse to war vindicated, and therefore propaideutic for future scenarios of the same kind. All for what? To stop a fledgling modernity in a fragile border society from showing a dictatorial regime that democracy can produce the social goods kleptocracy wants for its own restricted coteries (I say this fully aware of the same trend in the West). Every time in Russia, some loosening of its archaic feudal polis/mindset has occurred, things of extraordinary, universal value have flourished, if briefly.

You know, reading Žižek, that he has read all of the intricately difficult sources closely, and drawn his own conclusions. To read the wikibio, it is clear that the editors are familiar with the gossip, but not with his work, or the manifold of its philosophical groundings. Jacobs wrote a quickie review based on insinuation and dislike, scarcely stopping to think, which is, like him or not (and his Lacanianism always finds me wary), something Žižek causes his readers to do.

Well, I should have spent these two hours cutting more wood foraged from trees in my vicinity for the stove I use to heat my house and cook with over winter. I only use gas for a morning shower. I’d better hie to the rubbidy-dub to mull out more ways of cutting back dependence on external sources. I already have daily water consumption in this drought-stricken place down to about 120 litres, which covers also watering my vegetable garden. There’s surely more room for further survivalist tricks, if one must survive, which, well, who gives a rodent’s rectum for that, these dazed days, except for the consideration that a lot of animals, even the sparrows nesting outside my window, rely on quietly placed basins of water, hedgehogs nuzzle into food left for them at night, cats dutifully sit, waiting for their daily snacks at regular hours. A caressing pat to your’s. Best Nishidani (talk) 17:09, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed, thoughtful analysis. Regretfully, I disagree with most (not all) of your analysis. However, I am traveling right now to visit my sister residing in the wilderness of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains, so it will be some time before I am able to write a long(er) response. In the meantime, you may be interested in the following in-depth, insightful analysis:

• A more recent talk by John Mearsheimer: The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis. "The war in Ukraine is a multi-dimensional disaster, which is likely to get much worse in the foreseeable future." (video, 2 hours 7 minutes), posted in June 2022. A transcript of the talk (the video also contains an interesting Q&A session after the talk, but this Q&A is not included in the transcript).
• A lemming leading the lemmings: Slavoj Zizek and the collapse of the anti-war left. "The left has sunk a long way since the Iraq war. The renowned public intellectual Slavoj Zizek is the latest recruit to the war hawk camp over Ukraine." By Jonathan Cook, an investigative journalist who, as you know, has written extensively about the Israeli government's terror and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.
• ‘Not a Justification but a Provocation’: Chomsky on the Root Causes of the Russia Ukraine War, by Ramzy Baroud, another great journalist who writes extensively on Israel's horrific, brutal oppression of the Palestinians.
• Moon of Alabama - Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned.
• #GTGraphic: (Arbitrarily transforming Ukraine) from a "corrupt nation" to the "beacon of democracy", all it takes is a word game by Western media.

Thanks for sharing details of your personal daily life. Very interesting. I enjoy reading your descriptions of your daily routines, including your kind, compassionate interactions with domestic animals and wildlife, as well as your work in your garden(s) and nearby forest.

As always, the pup and kitten send their love to you. Ijon Tichy (talk) 07:20, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

Well, hope my canine and feline grandkids enjoy the trip with you. Wilderness is the right place to be these days. Italians rigorously drive with their windows shut, in cold or hot weather (preferring to switch on the 'egg conditioner' and physically I have always a reflex desire to wind the window on my side down, whatever the weather, and put my elbow out and enjoy the breeze, always remembering how our 'Rex', a splendid mongrel, for 15 years would hop into the Valiant, and sit on someone's lap, and nose the air, lapping up the breeze, as we went anywhere from a short drive to a 1,000 km trip. No need to reply, or waste time better spent with one's sibling, but of dozens of unsaid things, one or two need to be remarked on.

Mearsheimer is often incomprehensibly naïve in his reading of the documentary record in this case. He takes Putin at his (ostensible) word for the various statements that there is no such thing as the Ukrainian people, and that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one and the same The most extraordinary thing for an analyst of the realist school of his standing and abilities is that here, uniquely among his colleagues, he takes a politician’s public speeches at face value. Goodness, no geopolitical analyst I know of thinks public statements sum up what really motivates a president or dictator or average politician’s decisions. Effectively Mearsheimer asserts that Putin does not lie, misrepresent, or camouflage his thinking when going on the public record. What an amazing man Putin must be, unique in political history. Mearsheimer’s fatal weakness is his inability to go beyond phrases in a bare statement to read them for nuance and context, I.e.,

there is significant evidence that Putin recognized Ukraine as an independent country. In his July 12, 2021, article about Russian-Ukrainian relations, which proponents of the conventional wisdom often point to as evidence of his imperial ambitions, he tells the Ukrainian people, “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome!”

But of course, all that statements means, grammatically, is that Putin believes the existing state of Ukraine ( as recognized by the Russian Federation in the 1990s, and underwritten by the only referendum ever conducted by the countries that were successor states within the Soviet Union) does not properly exist. Ukrainians ‘want to establish a state,’(not the existing one which, it is implied, is not 'their own') means that for Putin at that time, the one they live in doesn’t exist. Putin said he has no objections if Ukrainians decide (at that point in time) to construct some state called Ukraine in the future. Putin’s statement emphatically does not ‘recognize Ukraine as an independent country’. It recognizes only a right by Ukrainians to establish a state they will call Ukraine, which will be, 'their own', implying they haven’t yet done so.

This is confirmed by his second quote from the same speech:-

“And what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to decide.” It is hard to reconcile these statements with the claim that he wants to incorporate Ukraine within a greater Russia.

Not at all, rubbish. Note the future tense. It would be perfectly legitimate to take that language as indicating that several months before the invasion, Putin thought that while the Russian Federation would move into the Ukraine, some pieces of it would remain outside of its reach – wars always lead to a negotiated settlement – and that territory would be some kind of rump stateThe way Russia is hammering the arse out of it, it will be a rump steak whose Ukrainians would have his personal blessing to make of it what they will. The expostulative exclamation mark (!), in such a reading, sounds thoroughly ironic, both a condescending piece of denial of the reality of an existing state, and a mocking innuendo that, some time in the future, once the illusion of an ‘Ukraine’ is dispelled, they can by all means pick up the bits and try and (re)construct some semblance of this putative Ukraine.

He reiterated that same point for a third time on February 24th, when he announced that Russia would invade Ukraine. In particular, he declared that “It is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory” and made it clear that he respected Ukrainian sovereignty, but only up to a point: “Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine.” In essence, Putin was not interested in making Ukraine a part of Russia; he was interested in making sure it did not become a “springboard“ for Western aggression against Russia, a subject I will say more about shortly.

In 'Today's Ukraine', that 'today' is a dead giveaway that, pace Mearsheimer, Putin is thinking of changing the borders. That can be read as asserting that the ‘special operation’ was not an invasion of Ukraine, not an occupation of ‘Ukrainian’ territory but the assertion of Russian sovereignty in the ‘New Russia’ formed by the two secessionist republics of Donetz and Luhansk, which the Duma in a resolution ratified on February 15 (9 days earlier) asked Putin to recognize as in dependent states. This itself was farcical since Putin asked the Duma to do precisely this, so that he could then ‘ratify’ it as if there were some institutional negotations between Putin, an independent Donetz/Luhansk, and the Russian parliament. Putin clearly indicated that Russia would be operating in an area which, in his view, was not a sovereign Ukraine.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 30 June 2022 (UTC).

All of that said, and I could elaborate, I still agree with every word written by John Menadue on his blog, and recently carried by CounterPunch. On that we are on common ground. I just think that I could write an equally detailed arraignment of Russia or for that matter China, who have arguably learnt strong lessons from US 'leadership'. At this point, I can only reflect that since 38,543 species are now endangered as a result of our ecocide, up 120% in just 15 years, we ought add man to the list, and consider that, whatever the result, nature will survive even if we don't. Indeed it will probably thrive. Nishidani (talk) 14:52, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Avoiding hagiography. The discussion is about the topic Robert Fisk. Thank you. Nutez (talk) 11:22, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

The following sanction now applies to you:

blocked for one month

You have been sanctioned https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1101752349 and others

This sanction is imposed in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator under the authority of the Arbitration Committee's decision at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Palestine-Israel articles#Final decision and, if applicable, the procedure described at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions. This sanction has been recorded in the log of sanctions. If the sanction includes a ban, please read the banning policy to ensure you understand what this means. If you do not comply with this sanction, you may be blocked for an extended period, by way of enforcement of this sanction—and you may also be made subject to further sanctions.

You may appeal this sanction using the process described here. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything of the above is unclear to you.  Dennis Brown - 2¢ 12:22, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Alternatively, I could have just indef topic banned you from the area, but felt a block might be a better solution. You've been blocked and topic banned many times in this area, so there is no excuse for this type of behavior, you are well aware of the risks. You can appeal at WP:AE by having someone copy/paste your appeal from your talk page. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 12:22, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

What exactly are you blocking him for? For making a comparison that noted scholars make regularly? For offending somebody who isnt aware how common that comparison is made? nableezy - 12:28, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

That was quick. Selfstudier (talk) 12:52, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

There is a forming consensus that my actions were a mistake, so I have unblocked, and will remove AE log entries on this matter. I need to go back and review to fully understand the mistake, but I trust the opinions of the people complaining enough to take it at their word and reverse now rather than forcing an appeal. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 13:25, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Dennis, no harm done. You can even restore your sanction if you see fit, after renewed scrutiny. I had an edit conflict here, but will post what I wrote just for the record below. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 13:34, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Petty, indeed purposive pettifogging . Levivich has a long history of niggling at my occasional language talk page to fish for an AE complaint. This is the latest step. What I said, see my response above, is very much a reflection of what many Jewish observers have written. Norman Finkelstein, the world’s acknowledged foremost historian of Israel’s conflict with Gaza, in his Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, University of California Press (nota bene) in 2018, argues this in that book. For those unfamiliar with it see this The Israeli journalist writing for the mainstream Haaretz, Amira Hass, concurs. It’s not an extremist interpretation. Peter Beinart a moderate, important voice in the mainstream American-Jewish conversation, documented with outraged detail why Gaza is a prison house of Israel’s making, in the mainstream American Jewish magazine The Forward. It’s actually worse than such camps since in 6 years Israeli bombing of that penned-in population has, he notes, destroyed or damaged 240,000 homes there. A Gaza child with hearing problems can’t even get batteries for their hearing aid without an Israeli import permission. I'm not asking people to share this view, or consider it a fact, but simply to recognize that the point has been repeatedly made by all sorts of neutral bodies. There is nothing inflammatory in calling a spade a spade as that is frequently defined by an eminent array of voices, from the world of scholarship, religion and the Jewish commentariat in Israel and the diaspora. To express shock, or take this personally, as Levivich seems to do, is to play the faux naif from personal dislike in pretending one has never heard so many authoritative writers draw that analogy. I don’t use talk pages much these last years: they, and tiffs like this are an absurd distraction from actually writing articles like this or this. Less hanging round forums and kibitzing, and more roll-up-the-sleeves article composition is the only remedy, Levivich. What Dennis is saying is that I must not repeat on a talk page any remark, thoroughly accepted by many authorative sources in the public domain, which reflects negatively on Israel. Political correctness has invaded wikipedia. Ah well, I’m due to take a plane shortly to Dublin, and then Normandy, and need to clear up a lot of things beforehand, so that and a month of travelling without computer access is fine by me. As usual, I won’t appeal sanctions, however arbitrary or outrageous they might seem. On principle. Nishidani (talk) 13:34, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

If the Guinness doesn't fix ye right up, then the vino surely will :) Selfstudier (talk) 13:45, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Wine in Dublin's 'fair city, where the maids are so pretty'? I'd probably whine only as I dine and earbash my siblings, eliciting their usual 'our brother's on the spectrum ' crossglances:)Nishidani (talk) 13:58, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Just by way of an update, Josep Borrell in El Pais today (Google translation) "Resolving the situation of the people trapped in that open-air prison that is Gaza is not in the hands of the EU. It is a scandalous situation, a shame, but it is not in our hands to solve it. The international community should find a solution for the crowded people, without electricity, almost without drinking water. We are often criticized for having double standards. But international politics is largely the administration of double standards. We do not face all problems with the same criteria. There is no solution to the conflict in the Middle East without a very strong commitment on the part of the United States. And after trying unsuccessfully so many times in the past, right now there isn't. Although none of this is of any consolation to the people who live there." Selfstudier (talk) 11:46, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that update (Claudi Pérez, Luis Doncel, 'Josep Borrell: “Los europeos debemos estar dispuestos a pagar un precio por apoyar a Ucrania y mantener la unidad”,' El Pais 11 August 2022)

Unfortunately I couldn't access the full article, but did scroll through the 191 comments, and observed that only you and one other reader thought his remark about the Gaza prison/concentration camp worthy of note. Since he recognizes that the USA is the only one that could end it, he realizes that it will persist. I'm reminded of Mario Vargas Llosa's recent novel Tiempos recios where the desire for cheap bananas on American tables led, by an intricate train of events, to the American destabilization of not only Guatemala in 1954, but the whole of Central and South America, another example of the farcical logic driving history, which Steven Pinker in his equally recent book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters fails to grasp. It's not us, the great unwashed, whose lack of logical pertinacity in many mundane aspects of life is examined, who screw up, but the governing elites and their Yale/Harvardgrad-thick sink-tanks who are supposed to exhibit rational behavior instead of game-theory second-guessing and 'preventive' operations that produce precisely the phenomena their paranoic inventors imagined might happen if they didn't act. (Probably, with fifteen notable comparisons of Gaza to a prison camp, one is almost, if not yet, at a critical mass that might spill over into an article on the metaphor, as the Bantustan analogy did).Nishidani (talk) 13:31, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I think I read somewhere that the common reading of Shake-spear is something like someone dangerous not to be trifled with, like if you trespass on a farmer's land and he jabs/shakes his spear at you. But it could, and funny-man Shakespeare knew this, be used for someone exposing himself, like metafurically. In which case the Shakespeare coat of arms has been waving its cod-dangle in our faces for a few centuries. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:56, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

There's no doubt that huffy keep-off-our-effin turf exists, with its highbrow sneer of killing with silence comments by non-anglos who don't fear to tread there. I've broken another wiki rule by tickling your excellent note, if only to avoid the preening orthographic orthodoxy for writing 'metaphor' slightly more 'correctly' by the equally solecystic metafurically. You'll remember that fur in Latin as in our 'furtive' evokes theft. At that one could (cod) add that our wagging Will was a case of a cock-robben/rubbin), or better still, as the effects of coffee in the local bar suggest in the interim, a Willy wagtail, a bird I think of as a breakfast familiar, since downunder, the species would always turn up to pick the kitchen window clean as one pulled the nosebag on to browse on a dish of eggs and bacon.:) Best Nishidani (talk) 08:26, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the literal lol, I guess it is unlikely Shakespeare manscaped. Reminds me of Cinderella's pantoufle de vair which has been suggested to have an adult-humor meaning. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:15, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that too. Fairy tales, or as the Romans called them, anilia, remain among the greatest products of the human imagination. It's very difficult for the individual writer to top the laconic distillations of 10,000 years of folk-reworkings of any one of the five basic story plots we have as a species-gift. Shakespeare managed it, nonetheless. Children's literature is, rightly read, strictly for adults.Nishidani (talk) 09:45, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Here's a great sketch on the meaning of words:[8]. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:23, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Ping @Xover, incase you want to add to this particular salon. It was spun off from Talk:Shakespeare_authorship_question#Safa_Khulusi_and_the_Arab_Shakespeare/Shaykh_Zubayr. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:44, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Manscaping before the advent of safety razors was an activity reserved strictly for the manliest of men, after which the assertive gyrations of one's staffe may justly be said to be sans droict no matter how argent its steel once was. But, yes, the surname is certainly suggestive in its myriad variants. For example, perhaps "Shag-sper" was a mere base Freudian slip despite all the "orthography was not yet fixed"-protestations of the really rather prudish intelligentsia? Has MacDonald P. Jackson really done enough work on identifying cryptic abbreviations in the works? The internal evidence is rather overwhelmingly in favour of our boy Will being quite the playah. Of course, one may also reasonably question who was shaking who in the relationship. (thank you, thank you. I'll be here all day) Xover (talk) 12:43, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, Xover, that tops the calembourcake we’ve dished up here, and the cherry of cheer madcapping it refreshed a broiling afternoon by inadvertently turning my day into another of those delightful cases of coincidence I can’t seem to shake off, having just finished last night at 2.30, as the melatonin failed to kick in, John Banville's Snow, which has his anti-archetypical ‘dick’ St John Strafford tackle a case of a pedophile priest whose murder was rounded off by castration. Thanks indeed for the reminder about the Bobbit tale/tail. In late adolescence, I invented a family game called spotting the fati nomen (nomen est omen), to mark examples of people in the news whose name predicts their eventual profession or values (Daisy Green as an ecologist, Woody Fender as a bushfire fighter etc.etc.). When the Bobbit news broke, it was added to the list, because of course his fate was inscribed in his family name, bob’s rarer meaning being of course to ‘dock’, cut short. Richard Cock, I recall, is a common name some who wear it find a tedious invitation to the obvious lame joke about Dick Cocks. One RC, apocryphallically, was so upset he had his name changed to Roger Cock, a hasty, unwitting move that only led to more merciless boutades. Shagspère couldn’t have been missed by our Will, who anticipated in aural practice Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious by 4 centuries. When once sledged with the usual witlessly abusive phrase ‘get a life’ by the kind of youngsters who manage their thinking with about 500 words, my first instinct was to reply: 'I have. I’ve read Shakespeare.' Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

To quote a related sitcom, "Buggery is a crime where the prosecutor doesn't have to produce witnesses, there seldom being any except for the perpetrators. And one of them is looking the wrong way." WP has an article about Dick's cock, btw. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:34, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

You may like this article: WHOSE DICK IS THAT ON THE WIKIPEDIA ‘PENIS’ PAGE? Discussed at User_talk:Gråbergs_Gråa_Sång/Archive_7#Interesting_WP(P)_archeology. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:10, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

I tend to get bored with what I have, as opposed to what I lack. That is why I admire Constance Quéniaux's snatch, or let's rather borrow a Narnia term from C. S. Lewis, her twat, or even more nicely in Ozslang 'Tassie'.Nishidani (talk) 21:38, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani; been a while. I was reading Gaza Strip and made the mistake of reading Talk:Gaza Strip. I'm asking you remove the part of your comment from earlier this week where you referred to Gaza as "a concentration camp of Israel's making" so that it is not stored in the archives forever. Aside from forum/soapbox, etc., it might cause some readers to question the neutrality of the editors editing the article. Probably some of the insults of WINEP should be removed, too, but I'd be happy with just removing the part about Israel making a concentration camp. Thanks, Levivich 04:34, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Virtually all editors, esp. in conflict articles, have strong personal takes. That goes for me, as it does for you. No amount of shuffling equivocation should disguise this obvious fact. Indeed, I think it important to occasionally show what is hidden, so that editors/readers know where one is coming from, rather than play the game of pretend. And like you I am well aware that in article composition, this must be suspended as one seeks to clew to neutral language. The POV still subsists of course, in the choice of RS, quite often. A good editor’s neutrality is secured by his retention of well-sourced material that contrasts with his own POV, and indeed, by erasing on sight, as I did yesterday, material by people who rant or post poor material from dumb sources to vent their rage, in that case, against Israel. Or, as I have often had to do, edit in material that is highly critical of some Palestinian movement because I happen to note it, accept the source is of high quality, and the fact or opinion important enough to be mentioned. I did this in revising the Hamas article. I regard Matthew Levitt’s 2006 as utterly skewedby a distortive agenda for a decided political purpose. But his credentials are impeccable, he is reliably published, and an undisputably key source. So I used his data even though it sounds very rubbery at times because that is our obligation. I have yet to see any editor, in 16 years, with a POV opposed to mine, treat articles with the same sedulous care for quality sources whose POV they would privately disdain.

As to my remark, everything I wrote there was written with several sources in mind that state these things as facts, or as widely shared interpretations/opinions by authoritative witnesses, specifically in that case the Vatican’s then top diplomat Cardinal Renato Martino’ s assertion back in 2012 that it was a concentration camp.

Other terms are available, David Cameron, who has partial Jewish roots, thought ‘prison camp’ was ‘warranted’ as a precise descriptor, back in 2010. Human Rights Watch’s regional expert defined it as an ‘open-air prison’ as recently as June 2022. Amnesty International also called recently it the World's Largest Open-Air Prison’]. So why neutral observers readily recognize the obvious that it is a prison camp, you don’t challenge that, but my preference for the equally objective term ‘concentration camp’, i.e. a place where people are penned up and in by a foreign power and whose basic human rights are thereby suspended. ‘Concentration camp’ is not Holocaust abuse, as I think you take it. It dates back to the 1870s for Spanish use of them in Cuba, through the the US adoption of that technique in the Philippines, and the Engtlish herding of Boers in the early 20th century. It is still alive and up in China, Burma, northern India and in the Gaza Strip. As our article on the topic writes:

The term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" is used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law

So of the several descriptions of what being in Gaza amounts to, you don’t deny that they drink toxic water (because of the blockade and systematic bombing damage) or have 10% of their children, of the 86% whose families can’t find sufficient nourishment for them, stunted, or that those whose cancer is life-threatening regularly undergo interrogations by the Shin Bet to get them to reveal details about their neighbours for Israel’s data base, in exchange for the hospital cure Israel, as an occupying power, is formally obligated to provide. No, that is all meticulously documented. You just dislike my choice of a term which, historically, has been widely used for such conditions, but which also recurs in WW2 documentation of what Nazis also did with so many of their captive populations. I can’t see the point of this niggling desire to erase from the record, simply because 'Israel' is included.

I happened to write in response to a suggestion we cite an invidious POLL published by the hyper pro-Israeli The Washington Institute for Near East Policy which says that people inside that cramped and starved prison/concentration camp would prefer to live in Israel. Of course they would prefer the freedom of their wellfed prison guards’ private lives across the border - kibbutz swimming pools are visible from water-starved Gaza's delapidated high-rise apartment blocks - when off duty to languishing in crushed famine. The pointy results of that poll struck me as obscene in their obtusity, and a note to that effect did no harm, I suggest, to the editor who somewhat lamely took that partisan nonsense seriously. There is noi soapboxing there, but a synthesis of several facts and opinions that are universally recognizable as part of the I/P discursive world which all aspiring editors should be familiar with. I will continue to consider Israel as not 'exceptional' to the normal run of history. Sensitivity to language, and insensitivity to what language denotes, the reality out there, strikes me as peculiar. Nishidani (talk) 11:43, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

I've posted at WP:ANI. Levivich 12:09, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

And you were answered there. I've exercised restraint - it could easily have degenerated in a recriminative counterclaim, easy to substantiate, but I at least am determined to persist in my policy of refusing to use ANI/AE or any other venue as a means of compromising the wiki careers of those whose views I disagree with, particularly when the editors in question have undoubted merits. Please reflect a little on these occasional forays against Shabazz, Huldra, ZScarpia and myself within their respective page contexts. Thank you.Nishidani (talk) 11:50, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Honestly, I found the indignation to be dumbfounding. Same with the well I actually think Israel is an apartheid state bit. Given the previously stated view that it is POV pushing to say as much in article space. But as Ive told you before, when you say something that some random admin passerby, who may or may not be completely aware of all the sources that invariable back up what you write, might take as inflammatory you give the people who have for over a decade now tried to boot you from this website an opportunity to do so. I think this was one of the weaker attempts, given how widely Gaza has been compared to a concentration camp, but I can understand an admin taking a report and thinking "concentration camp -> Nazis -> Nishidani's block log -> bye bye". Obviously that chain is faulty from the start (like how has nobody ever heard of Xinjiang internment camps being described as concentration camps to think this is a word specific to the Nazis?), but it makes sense in the moment. Sort of like way back in the day with Ashley and pulling the finger out. That made sense in the moment too, even if it was obviously a faulty set of assumptions that got an admin to make that block. There are editors that cannot fuck with you on the content. So the only way they get their way in removing what you document is by removing you. Please, stop giving them even the hint of an opportunity. nableezy - 16:25, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate your advice on this, now as in the past. The problem is, my mind doesn't work like that, in the sense that I find it very trying to knuckle my thought processes down to the style recommended by wiki to avoid the appearance of partisanship. If I write thinking of predators in the wings ready to snap at this or that phrasing, and drill myself to the eminently respectable wikibureaucratese so many others master like an additional foreign language, I find the result both tedious and personally nocuous - I stop thinking of a dozen pertinent things read and retained in my memory while addressing a problem, and dwell on the hundred-headed Cerberus spectres looking opportunistically over my shoulder for a chance to bite, and start chucking dull words as soporific cakes to ease my transit through a hellish article. Since I'm in my seventies, all inimical spirits need do is exercise some patience and nature will take the place of AE, with no fuss, and one can finally pop that champagne cork gathering dust in the cellars of animosity these 16 years. After all, though I have never look at my log record, most incidents relate to the toxic times 2006-2017, and most were dismissed (An exasperated 'oh, for fuck's sake!' was damning evidence then. To judge from the report just ended, one can tell someone to fuck off with impunity at ANI these days, and perhaps that is a move in the right direction). Since then such contretemps have been very rare, and this is unrelated to any lexical self-castration or stylistic self-reinvention on my part. And if, somewhere down the line, some malevolence out there manages to convince third parties that one talk page remark or phrase warrants putting an otherwise innocuous content-editor against the wall for summary execution for putative damage to the 'community', stiff cheddar. It may be salutary. I could read even more without that sense that some of what I learn is worth sharing, something that at times takes up more time than seems worthwhile. If that kind of massively trivial imbalance in judgment were to come to roost round here, I wouldn't care to waste what time I have in rebooting a still promiscuously alert mind so that it paid sedulous lip-service to a anally puritanical culture that established in its core rulebook a version of Bentham's panopticon where those who fail the minutely calibrated politics of etiquette correctness are corralled for an incarcerated silence. What would be the point, or net gain? My ear and eye, perhaps I deceive myself, but nonetheless, twig or sense a lot of implicit violence even in the most innocuously cleansed, vacuumed voices (as I can overhear a subtle tenor of good will in hostile remarks that escape an interlocutor who might challenge me). The whole history of literature is premised on precisely becoming sensitive to this: the resonance of 'attitude', 'sniffiness', 'putdowns' and the like in the most polite forms of customary address. Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

And of course, that's not a bid for tolerance of my breaching the standards. No. As I told Dennis, if I get a sanction, I don't challenge it. And feel no umbrage against any administrator who might think I required one. That's the way the cookie might crumble, and I take it on the chin, and do the time in wiki ' porridge' others think my due. I don't need Wikipedia to get through the day.Nishidani (talk) 17:19, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I knew you wouldnt challenge it, thats why I did it for you. You may not need Wikipedia, but Wikipedia certainly needs you. nableezy - 17:29, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

And I thank you, and in your debt, for that, recently and in the past. However, on reflection, my failure to fit in does, if rarely, still cause other editors to waste their in valuable time (Neil is another) cleaning up after me, and in that sense, my attitude above is unconscionable. If it happens again, there's no need to run to my defense. Sometimes, one should just let things take their course, if only out of experimental curiosity. Keep that in mind. Best Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh youve wasted far more of Neil's time than you have ever done with mine. But we got a solid citation style in use in a number of articles out of it so not a total waste. nableezy - 17:42, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Nah, Nishi doesn't waste any of my time, quite the opposite. I hate getting time-sucked by long arguments, so most of the time it's a great relief just to leave it to our host. He's much better at it than I am. Plus I have a beautiful little girl who is well trained in cleaning up messes. --NSH001 (talk) 06:55, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

"And of course, that's not a bid for tolerance of my breaching the standards." It's best that any standards being set aren't double ones. I doubt I'm the only editor relieved to see an attempt to impose a partisan interpretation of what's acceptable failing.     ←   ZScarpia   16:20, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Embarrassing for someone, not entirely clear who, though. Trump peace plan - The Trump administration clarified that no such green light for annexation had been given;^[1] Trump later explained that "I got angry and I stopped it because that was really going too far".^[2] Probably more to do with Kushner's new book if I know anything. Selfstudier (talk) 12:36, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

As the review states:'just 493 pages of pure boredom.' Dwight Garner in the NYTs likewise writes that:'Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.' What else would you expect from someone who was admitted to Harvard only after his daddy pledged $2.5 million to the college.' History is often made by such dickheads, but is written by people who generally have interesting minds. He's a powerful nobody, and I don't know why anyone would shovel through that gunk when one could hear three operas in the time it takes to do so.Nishidani (talk) 15:52, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

FYI, as I am not allowed to make the edit. In the change you made to After Saturday comes Sunday: the word extermination is spelt incorrectly. Regards Pngeditor (talk) 12:43, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that courteous note. Fixed. Nishidani (talk) 12:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I was reading this edit, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Samaritans&oldid=1104723594 and wondered if in the explanation you meant to say should NOT dominate, rather than should dominate. I was interested in the advice and wanted to make sure I had understood it. Are you saying that modern genetic studies are to be preferred as sources? Regards

(→‎Origins: As with most genetic articles on wiki, old papers 2002,2004,2008 though prominent, should dominate. They have historical value but results at the cutting edge are constantly refining, changing and revising early and partial (sometimes) partisan conclusions. There are many methodological flaws also in the early 'stuff' which is prominent here in the genetics section, where Oefner et al are not mentioned) Pngeditor (talk) 15:06, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Genetic papers are not a reliable source for history. But since we have genetics sections, we summarize what they state regarding correlations or dissonances between their results and those of historical accounts. The use of genetics to underpin, or corroborate traditional identity narratives is an abiding flaw in Wikipedia articles that harvest them. They are generally a complete mess, an incoherent compost heap that either summarizes year in year out relevant genetic papers partially, simplifying them, or string them haplessly as editors drop 'stuff in'. At Samaritans the latest (2013) paper is ignored though it challenges the results of earlier research which is paraphrased in detail (I assume because it lends support for the biblical/Talmudic story).

Thirdly, population genetics is a fast developing field, with differing results, in nuance or basics, over the last 20 years. At a theoretical level, serious challenges are made to some of its hitherto leading assumptions, which generate the often uniform results we have. Many cite dated books on the history of this or that ethnos for 'facts' which, in terms of historiography, are actually theories. So we have to handle them very, very, carefully. Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

How do you mean exactly, the governorates with the settlement council jurisdiction overlaid? Selfstudier (talk) 22:26, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

The jurisdiction is a bit tricky since Israel pays little attention to their own rules (which I roughly translate as grab whatever you can whenever you can and however you can and even if you can't, grab it anyway). You could read https://peacenow.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/Jurisdiction2007.pdf, its a little old but the game is the same. Selfstudier (talk) 22:40, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the link.It's past the witching hour, so I'll read it tomorrow, on the assumption I will wake up:) Rafferty's rules come to mind. I was just thinking graphics are needed now that no one reads anything more than Twitter soundbites, and I see ADS everywhere I turn (almost. A new barmaid the other day asked me what I was reading, and I said 'Rilke', and she said she loved the poetry of Paul Celan. 'That's rewarding,' I thought, unlike working one's arse off for 4 euros an hour). A coincidence again, since I had John Felstiner's book open on my kitchen table for two days.Nishidani (talk) 22:50, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Palestinian NGOs outlawed by Israel Selfstudier (talk) 13:50, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Fanks! That saves me 10 minutes plastering the CIA report (Isaac Scher, 'CIA unable to corroborate Israel’s ‘terror’ label for Palestinian rights groups,' The Guardian 22 August 2022) on a dozen articles, a report which in layman's terms obviously means that they consider this McCarthyist nonsense coming out of Israel the usual bullshit (which never hits the fan). Everyone in the know knows it is a frame-up. but you can't touch the sacred heifer except on the Temple Mount, as I was reminded the other day when some Democratic Party candidate, a young woman, happened to note on her Twitter account Israel's problems with apartheid, raucous calls were made for cancelling her from the electoral list, and a dozen newspapers splattered shouting headlines about anti-Semitism in the left communist world putatively existing in the Italian Democratic Party, a centrist right party like its US model. The funny thing is this is coming from people with a fascist background. Back to the Samaritans, some of whom, by some vague repute, happened to be humane to their enemies.Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

.) Selfstudier (talk) 13:24, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Hit by Covid while travelling around Neolithic sites, and of course pubcrawling at night, in Ireland. Guinness is the best medicine. It dragged on until a stay in Normandy, so the last week in Versailles had me quaffing to keep up with the family standards.Nishidani (talk) 14:14, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

It appears that your work has formed the basis of both the Arabic and the Hebrew entries. Hebrew actually rejected deletion, but renamed it to Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria. But your work, at least in large part, all the same. nableezy - 23:06, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Shouldn't the Hebrew article be entitled, neutrally, 'Israeli misrule in the West Bank /Judea and Samaria'? I think it's about time I or someone converted the essay I wrote for Arbcom on the top of this page be wikified for an article:The renaming of the West Bank as Judea and Samaria.Nishidani (talk) 08:31, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani. You added a reference to Penkower 1985 to Anti-Zionism, but no such work is defined in the article. Could you let me know what work this is and I'll create a cite for it. Also have you thought about turn on no target errors? You can see the details here Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 17:52, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm already causing you particularly, and some many others historically, much bother in my slipshod drafting, for which, my apologies. I've been repeatedly tutored on how to pull my finger out on things like no target errors. I dutifully read these things, retain them for a few seconds, and then, after reading an article or book, can't remember the technical stuff, even if I retain the scholarly material fresh in my mind. Dunno why. I must be a cognitive racist, dumping anything into the short memory bin while suckling tenderly at the mammary bosom of dryasdust scholarship. I really appreciate this kind of care for the proprieties of minutiae. Keep up the great work. Time to hit the fartsack Nishidani (talk) 22:09, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Never a problem, as I've said to others Wikipedia has a lot of wikignomes to correct these things. People who can write actual articles are in shorter supply. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 22:50, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Same for "Jacobson 2013". Going to ping @NSH001: as well, since I don't know who added this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I'd take Neil to AE and try to get him permabanned, except for the fact that (a) I'm so disreputable there, being permabanned by Sandstein from ever again venturing a statement there, that I'd probably get a WP:Boomerang flying my way, and no amount of bullroarer-waving à la Crocodile Dundee could ward off my subsequent rapture ex ufficio into the wrong end of the wiki afterwhirled and (b) he'd get off the rap by arguing that not he, but his wee gofer sheila, which the rest of us call a bot, is responsible, and cannot be hung drawn and quartered at arbitration for guilt by association.

Hmnm. Six am here, in the dazed aftermath of 5 hours with my mind spent wrapt and webbed in the languourous toils of dreamshot snoozing means I can't get my thoughts into the natural order of vertical reflection. So I'll have to deconstruct the above. My complaint at AE would have been that the velocipede efficiency of Neil's bot has eroded my earlier sense of pernickety responsibility for checking what I edit in. As I wade through upwards of 1,500 pages, and digest the tohu bohu of substance to form that neat stool of content I aspire to 'deposit' on a page as an edit, I have been lulled by the fussy clean-up nurselet that is N's bot, into not inspecting the result (this anal-ogy with traditional toilet-training will be grasped only by people raised 70 years ago). 'I gotta keep reading. N's sheila will clean up, and wipe the messy minutiae of my orthographical or mark-up flaws clean'. N's bottish reliability, quasi infallibility, has wrought a devastating blow to my, what would Heidegger have called it? Ah, yes, to my sensitivities re Sorge, care. It's made me careless - that old teutonic waffler would have murmured sorgenlos. It's all his fault if in editing à toutes jambes, like, Headbomb, miswriting 'Jacoibson' for the lectio recta (phew!) 'Jacobson', I didn't stop to check the page for orthographical fidelity, trusting complacently in N's Sheila, hovering in the wings of that virtuous world out there, that she would bussle in forthwith with her nerdy broom and virtual vacuum to sweep away such errata. Bref, it's N's fault for not ushering in his digital gofer within seconds of each edit I make to scour and scrub and make the resultant edit so spick and span that other attentive editors like yourselves wouldn't notice the, um, fuck-ups and save yourselves the onerous trouble of sadsacking my negligences. Jeezus, 'bout time I showered, shaved, etc., and had a morning walk, to get what's left of this senile mind of mine back to functioning in the real world.Nishidani (talk) 06:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Headbomb, that was an easy one to fix (merely had to check that the source had "Jacobson" and not (a typo) "Jacobsoin"). AD is right, Nishi's work is very valuable; I and my mythical little girl look after the technical stuff so that Nishi can concentrate on what he's good at (writing articles). My little girl is sometimes, if there's no possible ambiguity, capable of fixing no-target errors automatically, if not she'll mark the offending short cite with a red question mark, or I will do it myself if it's easy. So any reader can easily see it without having to install one of the scripts mentioned in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. There isn't the remotest chance that Nishi can be persuaded to obey the instructions in the category's page at that link. --NSH001 (talk) 05:50, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Bejayzus, what are you doing, getting up so early, at this ungodly hour? Don't reply. A vague reminiscence of a tag from the latinate theology drummed in before I gained a foothold into the age of reason reminds me of the quality of ubiquitas that defines the deity.Nishidani (talk) 06:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Drat, edit conflict, I'd written a long response re name sorting (de Jong) and stupidly forgot to save it before trying to post it. All lost, well it'll have to wait. I'll save the gruesome details of why I'm up so early for my talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 07:03, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Argh, sorry to hear or rather imagine, that, N. Do n't waste your valuable time writing out the details I've why I'm wrong re de Jong, at least wikiwise. I defer to experts, and you are no doubt right. Hang on. I don't quite defer to experts generally, outside of Wikipedia. In the present article, reading so much conceptually bungled garbage in what, even from experts, looks to me like a slanging match, or shadow boxing with ham-fisted gloves, I keep murmuring to myself. These people have never taken on board Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, a sine qua non if one hopes to grapple with things like anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, let alone our present world, whose basso ostinato of structural violence she so presciently anticipated near 60 years ago, while writing in the comfortable/complacent milieu of a thriving post-war America. So don't waste time. Look after yourself. Now for that long-delayed trot abroad. Best Nishidani (talk) 07:50, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I'll accept the backhander. Mea culpa, mea culpa, me a Mexican cowboy. I just can't stiffen my will, grit my teeth, to give the flick pass (rhyming slang) to books and articles, so I might spend 30 seconds on 'technical stuff' (what's a category's page?). The sin of recalcitrant obduracy, or is that a pleonasm? Better hit the street (and never come back no more, no more, no more, Nish, I know what people are thinking when they read this). Somewhere some kms off, there's a bar that serves Vesuvian-hot cappuccinos that scalds/scolds my tolutiloquent fixations on the thetorics of aristophantasizing (Νεφελοκοκκυγία/cloudcuckooland and thereby jolts me back onto my mental feet, firm on textual terra firma.Nishidani (talk) 06:58, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Think that merits a page start to add to your list tbh. nableezy - 17:43, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

I know I've mentioned that at the IOWB article and on West Bank Springs, but what's the give? A stand-alone article on Olive Trees in the I/P conflict? It's too painful at the mo', all the olive trees around me, mine included, have been got at by the musca oleae fruit fly. Ah, time to soak my sorrows in a late sundowner pint at the pub.Nishidani (talk) 17:52, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

As a sub-article to the settler violence one. Would have a ton to work from, background in Olive production in Palestine, to the attacks on both the trees and the farmers, and now on the European observers. The justifications for ignoring the religious prohibitions. Just a thought. nableezy - 17:57, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Ir's a good idea, but I have to weigh up priorities. Writing for wiki means hours, sometimes days or weeks, off seriously interesting things. Most of this I/P stuff is boringly obvious - the interest lies in the fact that the massively attested truths of history in all its complexities, shouted out by the huckstering liars or philosophically witless penpushers who fudge up the just-so stories that inform our mainstream sources, somehow can get a murmur in this place. Were it not for that, the sheer tedium of suspending say, the reading of a serious book, to get the job done wouldn't be worth the candle, in personal terms. If you stretch every statement made on the rack of propositional analysis, little passes muster as worthy of attention.Nishidani (talk) 21:48, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

the panicky reactions to any mention of the topic, with their fall-back shouting about 'anti-semitism' and 'anti-Israeli-ism' are just political bullshit, when not, perhaps more insidiously, an abuse of science that approaches the material with ideological, and often racial, preconceptions about what constitutes 'Jewishness'. .... Puerile, read the article's history of the concept. Anyone can prove anything by sweeping fringe lunatic sites from Telegraph and Twitter playing to minor constituencies (10,000 more or less) of paranoid conspiracy theorists Are you referring to the ADL as a sweeping lunatic fringe site? Andre🚐 21:26, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

If that is an example of how you read (already evidenced in the thread you cite that from) it is pointless answering, because had you read what I wrote carefully, you would have never even posed such a hairbrained query.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I must confess there is quite a copious amount of WP:TEXTWALLing so it's a difficult conversation to follow. I withdraw the question. Andre🚐 22:05, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

It may help - I like to go to bed with a good conscience - to consult an English grammar book in order to remind yourself of the functional difference in 'sweeping' between its respective uses in 'by sweeping fringe lunatic sites' (instrumental) and your rephrasing of this as 'a sweeping lunatic fringe site'(adjectival). Nishidani (talk) 22:20, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Could you please let me know which lunatic fringe sites you were talking about because I still do not understand? Andre🚐 22:21, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

You should understand, because you provided the link. Listen. Nothing personal, but you simply do not appear to weigh words carefully, or recall precisely points made by your interlocutor. (Y our latest remark still harps on an Ashkenazi-ME connection despite the fact that I spoke of an asserted Ashkenazi-Israel/Palestinian connection. You simply did not, once more, remember that I wrote three times that the Ashkenazi-ME connection, whether it be 3 or 60%) is not in question). That whole thread is a case example of persistent sidestepping and disattention, as one single theme is repeated ad nauseam by a kind of biblical reference to sacred texts that have ascertained the truth, while contradicting, or disagreeing among, themselves. Science is something under perpetual revision, particular a young science like paleo- and population genetics, and fortunately, no consensus, exists: the data are too complex, the methodologies often questionable, the political reverberations always in the wings, and the conceptual implications ignored. Let's leave it at that. Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I am happy to leave it, I will simply point out WP:RSPADL. Andre🚐 00:00, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Good grief. What on earth got it into your head to imagine that what I wrote signaled some apparent unawareness of the general RS standing of the Anti-Defamation League? Don't answer.Nishidani (talk) 17:30, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

I am hereby warning you to please abide by WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL. If you are aware that the ADL is reliable, why did you call it lunatic fringe? Andre🚐 17:38, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

To repeat. Your 'reading' of my statements borders on the illiterate, based on a failure to grasp elementary English grammar, which led you to make the absurd inference above. I nowhere stated the ADL is lunatic fringe. Stop annoying this page with your own bizarre incapacity to construe or parse what an interlocutor writes. It gives the impression of someone spoiling for a fight which I am not going to sucked into.Nishidani (talk) 20:41, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Hereby warning him? Maybe when somebody says dont answer on their own talk page you should hereby be warned to follow WP:NOBAN which says repeatedly posting on a user's page after being asked not to, without good reason, may be seen as harassment or similar kind of disruptive behavior. Nishidani has answered your question. You disagree. Cool story. But since he asked you to move on, move on. nableezy - 18:21, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh, and for the record, four of the editors in the ADL RFC were socks of banned users, making that RFC decidedly shaky ground to stand on for an RSP entry. Ill bring that up elsewhere though. nableezy - 18:26, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Among other things, the ADL is a active part of the United States' Israel lobby, which deploys hasbara, and smears individuals who aren't supportive enough of Israel.[9][10][11][12] Do you think that might be why the ADL was found to be "generally", rather than unconditionally, reliable? Under what circumstances do you think the conditional reliability kicks in? Given that activist organisations are not usually regarded as reliable and websites opposing Zionism have been found to be unreliable on grounds of "bias", do you think that a double standard might have been in play?     ←   ZScarpia   20:08, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Nishidani, I'd intended, but not got round to, reponding to the comment Andre left on my user talkpage. The upshot of my comment would have been to agree with your position that criticism of the Khazar Hypothesis is best centralised in the article on that topic, particularly given that the sources being used appeared not to be of great quality, the ADL ones being a blog piece and a sloppily written definition, the Haaretz article cited also being sloppily written. I've just been looking at the Shlomo Sand article. With regard to the Khazar Hypothesis, I notice that the article gives the misleading impression that Sand claims that Ashkenazi Jews are descended solely from Khazars, cited to a Haaretz article which also gives that false impression. The WP article dedicated to "The Invention of the Jewish People" book is more accurate. I was going to leave a comment on the talkpage of the Shlomo Sand article, but since it concerns the Khazar Hypothesis, which has recently been up for discussion, I thought I'd leave one here first.     ←   ZScarpia   13:11, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Khazar studies are quite intense, and updates by scholars are frequent. None of them are focused on what is obsessive in newspaper reportage, namely the Khazar-Jews+anti-Semitism stuff. We can note some of this, and have, on the Khazar page but basically episodic blips rehashing what is already documented there, be it from the ADL or anyone else, are not noteworthy, a disturbance indeed to the fascinating scholarship on that people and empire which should be the singular focus of editors. Far too many editors barge into technical articles just because they happen to read something in such passing reports or newspapers, particularly if it treats ethnic hostilities and prejudices. Scholarship gives some of us the horn, but the norm is that synaptic tumescence is imore generally triggered by the more emotive nature of scandal-mongering. Nishidani (talk) 13:33, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani. You've added "Hughes 2010", which isn't defined in the article, did you mean "Hughes 2019" (e.g. Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939)? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 16:52, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank God for people like you. I'll fix it immediately.Nishidani (talk) 16:57, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

The plaintive complainant in a plain tiff. Brilliant! Despite my exhaustion this morning, that woke me up. Thanks for the laugh.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:16, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, Bbb. This compliment, coming from one of the great 'legal' line-call experts we have on wiki, made my day. I hesitated to drop that quip, but went ahead thinking I'd get a rap over the knuckles for being frivolous, but what the heck. Comic quibbling is a private antidote against bickering, when not a way of rewiring/rewriting tedious patches of conflictual arguments to stave off potential boredom and get through one's dutiful parsing. Dr Johnson lamented it as a compulsive vice in Shakespeare, and its onirically zesty omipresence in Finnegans Wake grates on many a Joycean scholar. It has a moral value as a reminder of the need for some levity when there is a risk of losing a sense of proportion, at least for oddballs like myself who bask in the light of that tradition, but can be disruptive when high stakes over reputations are in play. My best best wishes for the up-and-coming New Year.Nishidani (talk) 17:05, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

That's stunningly cute, beautiful, Bish. And the same to you multiplied by 100 (Grumbling as he shambles off to find out if there's a pub in the village still open this eve, muttering through gritted dentures, 'Aw, fuggit, Bish would just nark away and stir the philologist nerve in me by the misspelling in the section header, which of course should be 'Happy New Error'). My very best (is that perhaps 'beast' misspelled?) as always :)Nishidani (talk) 17:47, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

— Moops ^⋠T⋡ 05:29, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

(1) On the 30th December the UN General Assembly resolved to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to render an Advisory Opinion on the legality of Israel’s 55-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. The money allocated for the ICJ Advisory Opinion was an unbudgeted $255,000, which works out as 1/12000th of its annual expenditures.

(2) 231 Palestinian ‘terrorists’ were successfully liquidated over 2022 - the best result since 2005,- thinning the demographic threat, since roughly 30% were children. A profile of their hate-filled, antisemitic individual lives is available here Nishidani (talk) 11:53, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

please check email. Zero^talk 11:53, 20 January 2023 (UTC)