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One piece of good news

Abe Foxman has called out the New York Times for blood libel and cancelled his subscription to the newspaper. The only good thing to come out of the recent crisis, so far. Perhaps there is room for this somewhere on wiki. Perhaps Children in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. For details in any case see James North and Philip Weiss, ‘NYT’ puts faces of 60+ slain Palestinian children on front page, at last Mondoweiss 28 May 2021.Nishidani (talk) 16:36, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Butex aequo, it accompanied that with a statement of Israel's position as defined by Dani Dayan, the leader of the settler movement, who in an egregious ritual roleout of clichés and falsehoods, stated that the core of the problem was the region's (read Palestinian) denial of 'Israel's right to exist' when, apart from the fact that Israel has existed for 73 years, all the documentation confirms, the latter are asking that Israel, recognized as such in 1988, stop denying their right to exist. He won't I guess with his busy life have time to read Hegel, but anyone can grasp the essence of his Herr-Knecht dialectic, based on the reciprocity of Anerkenntnis/recognition at a quick glance at the Wikipedia article. Nishidani (talk) 16:51, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Notice of edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you.

This notice was posted many months ago (more than a year), but the original poster neglected to sign and time-stamp the notice, and thus the notice has never been archived. I am now placing a time-stamp here so that this ancient section of the talk page would be finally archived at last. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:40, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for reffing it up

By stubborn habit I stick to my reftoolbar, but in cases like SAQ i should learn to adapt to the environment. Could you recommend a tool or guide so I can attempt to get the hang of this form of referencing? Shapiro 2010, Polo 2020, it's something of an equalizer. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:57, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Actually, Polo has a quite respectable WP-presence. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:40, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

No probs. On that page these can be fixed by other editors in a jiffy. I haven't a clue about a tool or guide. Well, actually, I'm an extremely lazy prick and just do these things mechanically, but I do so knowing there's a genius out there User:NSH001 who regularly cleans up my incontinent editing messes with this format. He's the man to ask, unless his marathon running has him offline! Nishidani (talk) 17:16, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, and also thanks for not reverting on sight. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:35, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't revert serious editors. Talking of fiction, and comic book stuff, perhaps we might note, Emmerich's buffoonish Anonymous. It was stillborn of course, and lies dead in the water after making a Basho-froglike splashlet. Tom, ol' buddy, whaddaya reckon. I wouldn't see that as an advertisement for ringing in donkeys, just the bare historic fact(oid)? Nishidani (talk) 20:43, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

I've never seen that one, but I liked Rhys Ifans in Notting Hill and Elementary. Interesting, in his article, Anonymous isn't mentioned outside "Filmography". Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:58, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Nightcap?

I know of one article I mistakenly edited without having privileges yet, under the impression that if I was not allowed, it would reject my change. My mistake.

As for Elhaik, look again. I mention him because someone made the reference and I was responding. No conspiracy (Or is there...?)

Neither did I go to the Zionism article immediately, nor when I did, did I immediately go for the introductory paragraph.

More to the point, indigeneity is not purely a function of time, but rather of connection to the land. Jewish history, culture, and language are tied to the land. Palestinian Arab culture and language are tied to Arabia. Of course, you can argue that we are seeing the development of a Palestinian Arab indigenous bond to the land right before our eyes.

Maybe so. But that does not take away from the indigenous Jewish ties to the land.

Enjoy your nightcap... UClaudius (talk) 21:57, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

How nice it must be to live in a mentally Manichaean world of simply binary oppositions.

Hasbara

Jewish history, culture, and language are tied to the land.Palestinian Arab culture and language are tied to Arabia.

Historiography and science.

There had been so many conversions over the centuries since the Hasmonean forcibly imposed Judaism on the desert-dwelling, ethnically Arabian Itureans and Idumeans, that it is impossible to differentiate Arabic Jews who had originated as emigrants from pre- or post- Temple destruction Palestine, and the multitudes of erstwhile pagan Arabs who had chosen Judaism rather than Christianity as their monotheistic faith. Recent studies on the DNA of modern Yemeni Jews by the geneticist Barsheva Bonne-Tamir have confirmed their ancestral origin in south-Western Arabian and Bedouin conversions.' Simon Schama The History of the Jews, Vintage Books 2014 vol.1, p.234

Whatever you shouldn't edit in an area where you have, judging from the above, no particular knowledge other than a grazing memory of memes and a certain carelessness with language. When you state that Jews have a connection to the land, Palestinians don't, what do you mean by 'Jews'? Are the Beta Israel, used once to shore up the settler numbers in dangerous outposts like Kiryat Arba or Ofra in the 1980s, or the Inca Jews at Kfar Tapuach or Alon Shvut; or the many non-Jewish 'Russian Jews' (26% lacking orthodox matrilineal descent) you hear talking of an evening in places likes Nof HaGalil; or the Malayayam-speaking Cochin Jews of Ramla, with 3% genetic traces of some indefinite Middle East connection?; Or the San Nicandro Italians who converted and made aliyah to Birya and Safed? Or the Igbo Jews in Tel Aviv? Or the Yemeni Jews, with their very thin genetic links to the Levant, in Silwan? No you mean all these distinctions are abolished by a meme that, contrafactually, claims that if you are Jewish, you have, ipso facto an ancestral connection via marriage and descent to the originative population of that piece of the Southern Levant historically known as Palestine. By this antic logic, since family tradition murmurs that a direct forefather several generations ago married a woman of partial Goan origins, while he was stationed in India, and this putatively accounts for the darker skin occasionally popping up in the otherwise polyphiloprogenitive redhaired white skinned relatives of Irish stock, the woman in the story just might have had some connection to the Bene Israel of the area, and, if so (genetic test) I can start to lay claim to a patch in Israel/Palestine formally owned by, but now expropriated from, Palestinians because my apparent 'Jewish' background would automatically entitle me to a right to the land. Jeezus.

Of course if you click and read those articles, you get a mess of confusing assertions to the contrary, from shaky historical suggestions snipped from the abstracts of genetics articles, and cherrypicked to underwrite the meme. None of them are reliable, most are farcical. You only begin to grasp the provisory reconstructions of history by reading specialist books and articles, which tell a totally different, extremely complex and nuanced set of stories that sit uncomfortably with the silly generalizations on Wikipedia.

The weakness of the contrived parallel between Jews as autochthons of Palestine and indigenous peoples all over the world emerges once one defines the concept of 'indigeneity' as not referring to the actual peoples native to any geographic area, against the historical use of the term. indigena is the Latin calque on the Greek αὐτόχθων. It is an extraordinary piece of linguistic sleight of hand to redefine 'indigenous' so that the word becomes, in this context, an antonym of itself, i.e. rather than mean 'native to an area' it is made to mean, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, 'foreign to the area but a recent immigrant' (who claims on faith that their distant ancestors lived there). If you say in Canada, the United States, Australia or Mexico that you are an 'indigenous Canadian/American/Australian' everybody will take that to mean you have some first nation/Inuit, or Cherokee/Sioux etc., aboriginal forefathers/mothers, or Atzec/Mayan roots. It is everywhere used in contradistinction to those who came there with historical settlement in the wake of the European colonization of the globe. This simple fact does not translate into meaning Jews in Israel are inauthentic, or lack a sense of historic attachment to the land. It means that the hasbara version is just bullshit, and indigeneity chat just that, an attempt to confuse people by terminological equivocation, whose aim is political, to make the Palestinian presence look comparatively weaker than Zionism's ideological claim.Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Caught out

Samuel Osborne, 'Distribution of GCSE textbooks on Israeli-Palestinian conflict paused over ‘dangerously misleading’ claim,' The Independent 2 April 2021. Selfstudier (talk) 15:56, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Aside from the rewriting coming from the same people who brought you the eviction of Jeremy Corbyn and the reformation of the Labour Party, I don't know what the nervousness is about, i.e. the name of the authoress is Hilary Brash. Not much different from the history of textbook manipulation in the US. It will be interesting to see if and how The Guardian covers the breaking news. It does throw some indirect light on why the I/P zone of wiki is so contentious, i.e., riddled by anonymous editors trying to erase from articles the Palestinian side of the story, or characterize it as all terrorism. This should be added to our article: Textbooks in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but I haven't the time or energy after a long day of hard yakka.Nishidani (talk) 18:18, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Mental or physical? Bit o both? Selfstudier (talk) 18:35, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Physical. Mental work is a stimulant, and a far better one than cocaine or amphetamines. For one, you don't end up needing surgery on your nostrils.:) Nishidani (talk) 18:39, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

The report John Chalcraft, James Dickins, Report on the Revisions Made to Two Pearson GCSE Textbooks 16 March 2021 be here. @Selfstudier:. Zero^talk 05:42, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Uh, 'good God!,' there ya go, an Easter egg. I personally find it unnerving to my pagan sensibility, wrentched from the sandpits of childish indoctrination, that whenever I utter a thought expressing a wish to know, out of the ether pops up the required info. It tends to contradict my conviction that an Omniscient Entity has no place in the physical universe. Worse still, the revelation is encrypted by the cypher Zero, another highly theological hint, a null point compact with meaning. And the worst thing is that, illumined by the enlightened quanta of desiderata, one must muffle mumbling 'grazie' because that would sound like a reflex of a prayer of thanksgiving. Still, in the meantime, against wiki rules, I have readjusted the intimation from eternity: after all, there's a precedent for that in the way the bible's babblebubble was composed, ostensibly by IT, egregiously by them/us.Nishidani (talk) 08:43, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to Zero for finding and sharing the original report. A fascinating microcosm of how these manipulations happen across media in all forms.

The best thing Pearson could do with this is to add a new section to their textbooks entitled “media manipulation in the Middle East conflict”, using this situation as a detailed case study. That will really open their students’ eyes.

Onceinawhile (talk) 06:00, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Tchah, still ongoing. Liz Lightfoot, ‘Serious concerns’: UK education row as Israel-Palestine textbooks pulledThe Guardian 8 June 2021 Selfstudier (talk) 09:14, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Extraordinary. Orwellian tampering is now getting the upper hand in his homeland. It is not so much remarkable, as extraordinary in its utterly straight-faced mendacity for the Board of Deputies of British Jews to complain a textbook omits mention of 'the “massive improvement” in the living standards of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli rule.' Okay they don't read Wikipedia, e.g., articles like Israeli occupation of the West Bank, or learned monographs like those of Sara Roy on Israel's policy since the 1980s of dedeveloping the Gaza Strip. But they certainly cannot not recall David Cameron's accusation that Israeli policy had turned the Gaza Strip into a 'prison camp'. It's a bit like saying conditions in Sachsenhausen had improved under Operation Bernhard (for the counterfeiters involved cf. Die Fälscher.

Enough of the bullshit artists. I was tickled pink, or is that 'commo', by seeing you use 'tchah'. To this day I have only heard one other person use it, namely a Brother C . . in 1963 when he found a kid at a desk in front of me secretly browsing a book of bosomy porno photos. The expressive oddity of his outraged 'tchah, son. Tchah!!!' made me giggle (much as I did when hearing Terry-Thomas cry with mock horror:'You're a proper shah!' in many a film. My reaction was duly punished. The teacher slipped down the aisles some minutes later, and, as in an unusual moment, I actually applied myself to studying, he tiptoed back behind me and gave me a hefty whack on the back of my head.Nishidani (talk) 13:59, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Active or not active?

This user claims to no longer be active on Wikipedia, but their edits on the talk page for Eran Elhaik appear as recently as May 13, 2021. This, coupled with the fact that the user was previously marked for deletion (though this was decided against) and permabanned from certain topics, gives me pause as to why they continue to be entertained on this platform. Are you active or not, Nishidani? newmila (talk) 13:28, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

What an interesting day, (yawn suppressed). You, newmila, have 306 edits to Wikipedia, and are suddenly disturbed by a joke on my page. Meanwhile two other newbies try to stir up things:User:SoaringLL (check how they scaled the 500 edit limit - hundreds of spacing -1 edits over multiple obscure pages -it's quite comical, a sure sign of . . . . Now at 858 they've joined the big time) who jumps into reverting out ugly historical facts, thoroughly documented, at West Jerusalem, and then L'Homme Presse, with 169 edits, -'fiercely fascinated' by history - erases text at Amin Al-Husseini, which I mainly wrote, stating it is not in the source used (Mattar 1984), when it is. Experienced editors know what's going on here. Time for tea and another Le Carré novel. He has a lot of tips on how to read apparent mysterious coincidences, aside from the intrinsic merits of his splendid prose.Nishidani (talk) 13:42, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

All of this anxiety following on last week's hullabaloney with Alwaysasn (13 edits) stepping in illicitly to 'fix' the obscure article Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry (which of course your Eran Elhaik contributed to), and suddenly getting backing from someone interested in the Austrian School of Economics, BasedMises (815 ·edits, but blocked from editing on his ostensible field of competence) on a topic they know about because of a report some obscure Qatari journo made the dopey insinuation Jews were Khazars. They didn't read the article, nah, or its sources, groan - that's work. No. But they did manage to get support from regular wikipedians, none of whom show any knowledge of the topic or its source literature, and the number game screwed the lead. That's how it's done. (And yes, that's not to mention the bloke suddenly out of AE porridge and newly active at Beit Alfa)Nishidani (talk) 14:15, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

"Field of expertise: Austrian econ". Don't think you realized the "NNS" userbox, or the fact I have Gregory Mankiw as a main on my page. Also seems you've been blocked several times in your chosen "field of expertise. Why bring me into this? BasedMises_{Mont Pelerin} 14:39, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Learn to read, and also to remember.

I wrote

'someone interested in the Austrian School of Economics, BasedMises.'

On your user page, before you erased the box, you proudly proclaimed your adherence to the Austrian School of Economics. Nothing wrong or to be embarrassed about that. It's normal for people to embrace an ideology, or adhere to some doctrine, unless they are followers of Max Stirner, who caused Karl Marx so much angst.

I have never been blocked in my fields of expertise. Some would say, on reading this, 'and it shows'. Nishidani (talk) 15:03, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, I see why you're so popular! Carry on then, don't let me stop you :) newmila (talk) 14:29, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

No worries. I was being playful. No need to worry about stopping me. That's something death - that dark wikipedian whose only presence here is attested when they intervene to erasing the content-creators fingering the keyboard as they stare at a window on a wiki page and hope to improve it - will look into in duke horse.Nishidani (talk) 15:03, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

And as a nightcap UClaudius just nosing the 500+IP edit barrier, though several times they violated the protocol by editing an IP article before reaching that goal - goes to the Zionism article immediately to establish the indigeneity to Palestine at the time of Herzl's proclamation of that ideology of the 99.75% of Jews who lived and had lived for millennia, in the diaspora. Presumably the 95% of the population who actually lived in Palestine around 1900 as either Muslim or Christian Palestinians, were not indigenous in this unique sense. And, like several of the editors mentioned earlier, UClaudius likewise mentions Eran Elhaik. Just coincidences of course.Nishidani (talk) 21:31, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Please excuse me, Nishidani, for popping my nose into what is not my business, but I could not help but step-out of my reticent mode-of-mind after your last statement. It's true that most Jews lived in "exile" outside the land of Israel (aka Palestine) for more than a millennial diaspora. But what are you trying to insinuate here? In fact, I prefer to see this as a miracle within a miracle that Jews ever returned to their ancestral homeland, after the disorders that plagued the country in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, and after being persecuted in nearly every country in the habitable earth. And, yes, there were others - besides Jews that lived in the country (Grecians, Idumeans who later joined the Jewish religion and are believed to have assimilated into the local Muslim culture in later centuries, Arabians, Phoenicians and Syrians). I have read somewhere that the Arabs of Yatta, Hebron are derived from Jewish ancestry. In any event, I only want to say that we find in Hebrew midrashic literature what we call "a miracle within a miracle," where often God will perform an act that defies human logic, such as when Elisha sweetened the waters by pouring salt into the spring at Jericho, or when Moses in the wilderness sweetened the non-potable waters by putting therein the poisonous branch of a hīrdūf tree (Nerium oleander), or when the poor woman in II Kings 4:1-7 emptied out a cruse of oil into other empty vessels, and they were suddenly filled-up; or when a prophet's wounds were healed strictly by adding thereto a poultice containing that which under ordinary circumstances would have made his wound fester all the more, or when God told Abraham that his sons (not yet born) would inherit the land of Canaan after they had served in bondage for many years (at a time when most enslaved persons could hardly manage their own affairs, let alone the affairs of another country and people). You see, this should not surprise us at all, especially when we have been informed by the prophets of Israel that the scattered nation of Israel will someday return to their own land. By saying this, I do not mean to discredit those who have lived for generations in this country and who are not of the Jewish people. Every person has his place. I have no doubt that the Arabs have helped Jews (by their absence) to retain certain oral traditions and customs. Now call it what you like: poetic license, figment of their imagination, "wishful thinking," self-aggrandizement, or whatever, you cannot deny the fact that something extraordinary has happened in this country and with this people.Davidbena (talk) 23:44, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Nish, this is terrible advice, and you should not do it, but a fuck off is sometimes called for. Or, and this is slightly better advice, just deleting bullshit when it comes up is also sometimes called for. nableezy - 00:58, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

David is a gentleman. We occasionally correspond off line on these issues. So his worried post is understandable, though not appropriate here. He is not an editwarrior, like most. He really does try to study history, and actually reads books, unlike most. I can discuss these issues productively (at least for myself) with another interlocutor, sharp, unfazed by facts, who accepts scholarship, is secular, critical and stimulatingly given to challenging me, but when the language becomes mystical, detached from history as it allows thinking to get absorbed in religious clichés, one must let it drop. Since I have hīrdūf in my garden, I would advise you, David, not to stick to the letter of the law and jiggle leafage or rootstock into a cuppa tea, in memory of Moses in the desert of Shur. The miracle there was not changing bitter artesian water into a drinkable beverage by stirring the brackish wellwater with toxic oleander. It was rather supplying 2.4 million members of the exodus (calculated from the 600,000 men, by extruding the numbers of their families, sutlers and riffraff ( asaphsuph )) who must have tagged along plum in the middle of the Sinai desert. Imagine the length of the line-up for a drink. At a rough calculation, assuming 2 people for every yard, reaching back from the well of Marah would have been a single file exodus mass stretching 680 miles, each awaiting their turn for a sip. That certainly was a miracle, making Jesus’s trick of turning five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish into a banquet for 5,000 look like child’s play, a quarter-baked Harry Houdini whiz act for the hicks who frequented circuses and religious meetings in the mid-West of the kind described by Sinclair Lewis in his novel Elmer Gantry, so splendidly represented by Burt Lancaster in the film of that name.

If you want to sweeten desert waters, take a tip from downunder’s tried and true bushcraft, and, after swinging the brew five times in a billy, briskly swish the teawater with a sprig of eucalypt (less toxic than oleander, in that you can camp by a fire lit from it, unlike the toxic fumes of burnt oleander), from any one of the species described lovingly by Murray Bail in his novel Eucalyptus. You'll find the resulting cineole aroma a fair ersatz for scarce sugar, in that it also represses a smoker’s cough and annoys the mosquitoes that infest those areas. Thinking of which, I've always wanted to write the history of spring waters in Palestine, the best of them violently expropriated from Palestinian villagers because they have no native right to them, being of the wrong ethnicity and have to pay top price for water to Mekorot, which of course pumps the water out of the rich underground acquifers of the West Bank. Belonging to the right ethnos and religion has distinct economic advantages Nishidani (talk) 11:21, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I did not mean David. nableezy - 13:38, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Nishidani, you have a natural gift for writing (like poetry to the ears). We have plenty of these Eucalyptus trees here, in Israel, and I have often lit a fire with their aromatic leaves, which are, indeed, volatile because of their oil-essence. Ahh! Brings back good memories. I've been told that these trees were imported to this country from Australia in order to help dry-up the marshes, which were more plenteous here at the turn of the last century. They also afford good shade in the excruciating heat of summer. As for water in this country, my Moshav is supplied with fresh water that is pumped directly out of the ground (underground aquifer). No thefts here. However, there is a law that stipulates that it is unlawful for a person to build even a cistern in his own house, supplied by rain run-off directed unto it by a conduit leading from one's rooftop, unless he first obtains permission from the government. I, personally, find this impertinent interference by government.Davidbena (talk) 13:29, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Since you mentioned "water rights," the subject - being as critical as it is in drought-ridden areas - has been the topic of discussion and legislation since ancient-most times. In Jewish oral tradition, Joshua (q.v. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 80b—81a) was one of the first who enacted that natural springs were to be used for drinking and laundry by all tribes, although the tribe to which the water course fell had the first rights. Fast-forward three millennia, according to the book, Abu-Rabiʻa, ʻAref (2001). Bedouin Century: Education and Development among the Negev Tribes in the Twentieth Century. New York. p. 54. OCLC 47119256.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link), "in the drought year of 1860, there were in the old city of Jerusalem 950 cisterns. The Muslim population had a 'grant' of one pitcher, later one tin (16 litres), per day for the needy, from the 34 big cisterns of the al-Aqsa. In 1915, Beersheba had at least 15 wells, which supplied about 390,000 gallons of water per day. During the Mandate, the British Government made efforts to secure water supplies by drilling wells, but in every case it was found that where there was ample water it was of high salinity and where fresh water was found the flow was too slight to be of use" (END QUOTE). Among the Bedouins, Abu-Rabiʻa adds (p. 53) that "running water in tribal areas is regarded as the property of the tribe." Out of a total of seven valleys (wadis) in the Negev, the water in all of them was saline, with the exception of two: Hasi and Saba' wadis.Davidbena (talk) 14:21, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes David, that is all very interesting, colourful. But there are two droughts in the area. One is periodic and natural, the other continuous and imposed by Israel's military-administrative fiat to starve Palestinians of water. The standard WHO rule for minimal daily water consumption is 100 litres. Average Israel pro capita consumption is three times that, most of it from West Bank acquifers. The Palestinians are regulated so that they must cope getting by on 75 litres pro capita, though some Bedouin communities have to eke out a living on an average 15 litres, when their water connections to springs, financed by the EEC, are smashed by military bulldozers for theft of 'state resources'. I sketched an outline here, and developed the topic on expropriation of spring waters in a full article, Israeli expropriation of Palestinian springs in the West Bank, which I did so quickly I forgot I'd already done so. Amnesty International calls (2017) the Israeli policy The Occupation of Water. It is blatant criminal behavior by the state, there are no other words for it. You talked of a miracle within a miracle and Moses in the desert. The above is the minor miracle worked by the Durstkünstler or 'thirst artists' in the Kafkian 'Civil' Administration of the West Bank. No need to reply. There is no talking one's way around facts, and shame is best met with silence.Nishidani (talk) 16:24, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I will not comment on this, but it will be interesting to see what was the nature of these natural springs during the Ottoman period (i.e. what communities drew water from these springs), leading-up to the British Mandate, and if anything had changed (as far as regulations are concerned) by the mid 20th century. Just curious. In most countries, the needs of a growing population dictate the policy of water distribution.Davidbena (talk) 20:44, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, the growing population is Israeli, and the Palestinians, under their military jackboot, are the population to be wilted. Someone should write a book on Zionism as a zero-sum ideology. No authority since history began to be written, down through the Ottoman, British Mandatory and Jordanian administrations, ever thought that villagers grazing their sheep, drawing water from streams, or enjoying as kids the pleasures of spring bathing in natural water sources on their village lands had anything but a natural right to enjoy their usufruct. It took the genius of Israel to effect the 'miracle' of decreeing that a millennial and human right was to be abolished for non-Jews. If you couldn't care less for what is going on under your nose, but the historical details interest you, read Wadi Qana, which of course I wrote notwithstanding vigorous efforts by sockpuppets to stop the article from documenting what it documents. One day you really should see Benigni's film, Life is Beautiful with particular attention to the figure of Doctor Lessing played by Horst Buchholz. As tragedy engulfs the Jew (read Palestinian) Lessing maintains contact, and, ignoring what is happening, keeps chatting away because the Jew is good as solving puzzles or coming up with intellectual challenges,- that is all that interests him - but if the spry little fellow carks it, well, stiff cheddar. Someone else will turn up to provide him with more puzzles and their solutions,Nishidani (talk) 22:03, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

My understanding from reading pp. 301-302 here, on Hydrography (Survey of Western Palestine, Palestine Exploration Fund) is that there is plenty of water in the Hebron region.Davidbena (talk) 14:56, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

The West Bank and Gaza are like the proverbial Balkans, of whom some historian complained that they produce too much history for the outside observer to grasp. Two decades ago, water from the Tekoah-Kiryat Arba pipeline sold to settlers (6,000) at roughly 3 shekels per cubic metre and to the Palestinians of Hebron (200,000) at 13 shekels per cubic metre, for example. Typical. A hobby of the IDF is to shoot bullet holes into the rooftanks of Palestinian homes in summer esp. if they engage in protests. The water cache is lost, and, via ultimately an Israeli firm, the owners have to fork out $US125 to replace the damaged tank. The whole ancient pastoral economy of the South Hebron hills is based on cistern storage and springs: the latter are off-limits, and the former, when found, cemented. They must order from a subsupplier dealing with Mekorot to save their flocks from dying of thirst. Nearby a dozen settlements like Carmel boast delightful swimming pools for their Russian, American and Israeli immigrant population. Etc.etc.etc.

But one could write a hundred pages off the top of one's head just on a topic like water access. Yet, it would be a pointless exercise. That real history, going on now, doesn't interest you. What fascinates is the Jewish angle: here, the resources that existed in the old days, back to the Bible, on our land. If one mentions 'water' access 1967-2021, you go and pore over a book written in 1881, and think, 'wow, that place has a lot of water' (subtext: how dumb of those Pallies not to develop efficient infrastructure as our settlers do?) Anyone can google a thousand reports of the massive destruction village per village in the Hebron area since 1967 of anything resembling a capacity to harvest water reserves. Verboten, mein Kind our imaginary Dr Lessing would say, as he shifts the conversation back to the geology of aquifers in historic documentation, away from the uncomfortable water apartheid on the ground, all about him. Mention water and Hebron? Read about the water mafia there in Yadin Yinon's The Only Democracy in the Middle East, 2012 esp.ch.10 pp.83-124. The official view was that Arabs were engaged in theft and the scarcity there even settlers experienced there was due to that hijacking of a Jewish resource. It turned out the whole racket was organized by Jews themselves. Dear David, it's best you do not post here anymore. The conversation is aimless, and I for one do not learn anything from it other than a somewhat depressing confirmation of my theories about cultural scotoma. Nishidani (talk) 17:18, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

So, if you want examples from our day and age, would you give the Government of Israel credit for agreeing to share with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan some 'umpteen'-thousand cubic metres of water flowing in the Jordan River, all for the sake of peace with His Majesty's government?Davidbena (talk) 20:38, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

A lesson on the psychology of semantics, i.e. agree to share. I own something, i.e. a cake. Someone asks for a bit. If I say, 'sure, take a bite', I allow them to share what they have no proper right to. I thereby show my generosity, I exemplify human kindness. What the fuck has noblesse oblige to do with decisions by any party in that area - where 90% of the conflict stems from hardnosed geostrategic calculations concerning who can secure more purchase on the scarce natural water resources access to and use of which has been determined by the high national strategies of war or works of infrastructural diversion of a common resource designed to assert exclusive sovereignty over what, under the Johnston plan, was supposed to be divvied up by negotiated agreements? The Israeli/Syrian conflict is almost totally due to battles to secure or monopolize water.

This has nothing to do with creditable behavior, anymore than Jordan's acceding to Israel's request to extract water from the former's sovereign territory in Wadi Araba and pump most of it back into Israel was motivated by goodwill. That arose as a do ut des agreement back in the '90s, since in exchange Israel agreed to provide Jordan with water further north. Israel's problem is to decide whether to prop up the Hashemite Kingdom - probably doomed to collapse within the decade since sustainable use of its own aquifers would leave a shortfall and deny water to 80% of its population or not, exercising one of two options. Exporting Mediterranean water from Israel's major desalination plants, or cooperating on the Jordanian project, shared by palm-greased morons who run the PNA, to pump water back north as far as the Dead Sea. The former would have the advantage of prodding a neighbouring 'power' into a client state relationship with the dominus, the latter would shore up Jordan through the massive, foreign financed infrastructural works an agreement would enable, and concomitant boosts to tourism etc., offset by the advantages of retarding or stabilizing the almost inevitable deterioration of the Dead Sea. Whatever, hardscrabble Palestinian herders and farmers on the West Bank will continue to be screwed. Please don't persist in shifting the goalposts. This is not a game, and I don't have much time in any case.Nishidani (talk) 07:29, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm enjoying the colloquies here. I find them to be highly literate and well-informed. by the way, I find it a bit odd to realize that I am no longer involved in editing in this topical area, in contrast with my efforts about ten years ago. perhaps I have grown more conciliatory? or maybe just more judicious about where my editing skills are eclipsed by the expertise of others? anyway, thanks for all these great insights here. cheers!! ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 14:47, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Notice of edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Tritomex (talk) 12:48, 14 June 2021 (UTC) Thank you.

Khazar myth (conspirology)

You did something wrong when listing the article for deletion. Please Follow the procedure, otherwise nobody will see your nomination. Lembit Staan (talk)

Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that. I hope some kind passing eye can fix it. It would also be courteous if whoever can fix it thereupon abstains from voting for my proposal, so that my request remains purely technical, without ringing in votes.Nishidani (talk) 07:46, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

What did you do, in the meantime? You gave it a new title, and then removed it to your sandbox, so that the page is no longer a wiki article? If so, fine. But you should have told me that. One doesn't delete sandbox outlines, and the move made me waste time and look foolish (which is not difficult). Nishidani (talk) 07:53, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Mitsui Takatoshi

The article Mitsui Takatoshi has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Unreferenced for over a decade

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Jax 0677 (talk) 21:53, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Please don't rubbish my page with this kind of template crap. If you spot an article I had a hand in, that requires some fixes, just drop a note here. Remember, tagging is facile .anyone can do it. The only problem there was that in haste with other projects, I forgot to add documentation and sources, which anyone could find and read at the drop of a hat.Nishidani (talk) 13:03, 19 June 2021 (UTC).

al-Wehda street

It is my impression that this incident is not fully covered in the IP crisis article, what do you think?

• Bel Trew, Israeli airstrikes wiped out the family of Gaza’s leading doctor. Only his teenage son survived,' The Independant 24 May 2021
• Patrick Kingsley, Iyad Abuheweila and Evan Hill, 'Dreams in the Rubble: An Israeli Airstrike and the 22 Lives Lost,' New York Times 17 June 2021

Selfstudier (talk) 11:13, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

• Bel Trew, ‘Your worst nightmare’: Inside the deadliest night of Israel’s attacks on Gaza,' The Independent 11 June 2021

This contains an excellent map showing the gridline of the successive strikes. Marvellous pinpoint stuff, wiping out two families of the foremost surgeons in Gaza.

• Yumna Patel, Return to al-Wahda street: Palestinians in Gaza mourn lives and dreams lost in latest Israeli offensive Mondoweiss 21 May 2021

I thought of that the day after reports came in. 45 civilian dead amounts to a massacre severalfold over, and it was coldly calculated by the gutless gungho wonders who carefully planned it in their comfortable offices. Interestingly, none of the famous warnings were issued. The most striking comment came from senior Israeli IDF official who went on record as stating that a one militant/1 civilian ratio justified such strikes, indeed showed they were a phenomenal success, i.e., you can kill 45 civilians if the same number of militants are killed in a strike.

“We have really done the most we could in order to minimise collateral damage,” a senior Israeli official told The Independent, adding that the ratio of militant to civilian deaths – which they calculate as one to one – was “phenomenal, as cynical as it sounds”.Trew 11 June 2021

It is also an interesting case because it was part of a tactical plan to hit Gaza's moderate middle and upper class suburb where professionals live. I'm sure we would already have 3 articles on the substance there (2 families liquidated, one for each) and the general strike had that devastation occurred as a result of a Gaza rocket destroying a street in Israel. But we try not to copycat that bad POV-grievance articling habit here. It could well be shaped into an article if, over the next couple of months, or even a year, we get successive mentions in books and articles that single it out for the attention it deserves. I expect B'tselem for one will write up a report on it after it has interviewed and done background verifications of the narratives of survivors. We can perhaps conserve this section to that end: listing new coverage, and, if we can get enough material, say several refs that do not rechurn the same story in the 24/7 instant media spin, sure, we could do what you propose.Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 19 June 2021 (UTC).

Sure, let's wait. I did think it was interesting that it was the NYT coming out with new detail or at least detail I hadn't seen before.Selfstudier (talk) 13:25, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Well the ICC, notwithstanding politicking and the usual procedural footdragging, will have to look into it, and assess Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus's claims. It's news to me that it a violation of the rules of war to have military structures underneath a city. Doesn't anyone remember Churchill's paddock underneath a post office?, not to speak of the huge network of tunnels and bunkers forming underground links to all sorts of government agencies in Washington or HaKirya or the Sammy Ofer Underground Emergency Hospita. I'd like to watch a road construction expert's face as they are told that firing 11 bunkerbusting lazar-guided GBU-31 bombs along a narrow 200-yard stretch of Al Wehda Street, with large apartment blocks rising on all sides, just happened to cause a 'freak event' when three, not one, of the street-adjacent buildings collapsed within shouting distance of each other. The freak event is that more than these three didn't collapse on al-Wehda, but then the Abul Ouf condominium that did was at least a decade older than the others. The surviving son spoke of 4 missiles successively hitting the building in any case. 21 members of the extended Kollaq family in the two other apartment blocks were also taken out.

As to the proposed title, if we do the article it would have to include several events not only on al-Wehda St., since the strikes also (b) took out buildings in the parallel Thawra street (hitting Palestinian ministry buildings and a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic, and (c) Three streets east near Palestine Square, another strike wiped out Gaza's top neurologist Dr Moeen al-Loul, together with his family. There the design was to kill some Hamas chap whose apartment was next to that of Moeen al-Loul's. The casualty ratio, one Hamas militant vs all of al-Loul's family, is no doubt equally 'phenomenal'. But the title would have to probably include the follow-up strike in al-Wedha street the next day as well, when another assault took out the top apartments of another building down the same street, killing Ziad Abu Dayr and his 10 year old niece Rafif. That would by my calculations make close to 50 civilian dead (excluding the injured) in one and a half days in that zone.Nishidani (talk) 14:55, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Dear Nishidani

(Redacted) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elisejosie (talk • contribs) 09:14, 22 June 2021 (UTC) (You will not soon have long to live. So long, anti-Semite.)

First some semantic observations on the brainless use of language. 'Soon' is stupid: for the adverbial qualifier 'soon' entails the statement that I have a long life to live at the moment, in your view, a circumstance which however, hopefully, will change sometime in the not too distant future. How awkward, how unintended, how dumb.

You think you're telling me something I didn't know? Of course the Aristoan 'furor profetico', like all pseudo-prophecies, contains an augury, here 'drop dead', but, with the trite ineptitude of the insensitive, the lack of a feel for language, linguistic tact if you like, you add 'so long', which spoils it for you, while stoking for my pleasure an unexpected laugh. For the implied 'drop dead', the slangy reflex of our Homo Necans driven desire to murder others, is undercut when topped by 'so long' which as Walt Whitman explained to someone disconcerted by his use of the idiom in Leaves of Grass, means 'salutation of departure, greatly used among sailors, sports, & prostitutes—the sense of it is till we meet again—conveying an inference somewhere, some how [sic] they will doubtless so meet—sooner or later.'

I.e., dear loather, in wishing me dead in this way, you inadvertently express a desire to cark it yourself. 'Drop dead' thus becomes self-reflexive - my dying is a precondition of you joining me in the same all-too-human fate. Can you grasp that? But really, the prospect of meeting up with me again in some other dimension is a tad excessive. 'Anti-semite'? Well, if your desire that I die contains a wish to meet up with me as one of the fellow dead when you too fork out a penny to Charon and join my putative afterself ('anusself/or pseudo-self' if you accept the Joycean pun on German), that only signifies that, though you want me dead, you admire me sufficiently to reacquaint yourself with me when I do pass on. The perfect key to such a quixotic psychology is found in, precisely, an anti-Semitic text, The Jew of Malta where Machiavel in the prologue declares:' Admir'd I am of those that hate me most'. All hate betokens an undercurrent of envy, and you'll just have to live with the consequences of the quaint jealousy of your contempt. In my qui et nunc philosophy, hodie vixi is all that matters, and, unlike those who cultivate odium for others my 70 x 365 = 25,650 days have been sufficiently felicitous in existential rewards that a full stop to them is neither here nor there. All parties must end, for duration is boredom.Nishidani (talk) 10:44, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Please don't respond to this stuff because it complicates removal of disruptive material. I removed some nonsense for the community's benefit, not yours, but I really should have removed everything here. In fact, if someone wants to do that, please do, but I've left it for now. Johnuniq (talk) 10:52, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

I've done so. If anybody is interested in seeing what Nishidani was responding to, they're free to check it via the usual methods. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 14:33, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Roman literature is exquisitely detailed about lots of things, but were it not for graffiti, we would know far less about the real world there, what the cute elevations of elegant literature quietly ignored. Since people like that thrive as IPs/meatpuppets/sockpuppets in this area, it is worthwhile saving one or two of the endless tirades that besmirth out labours, and analyse it for the record. I agree that most of the boorish death threats should be elided, automatically, but sometimes as per the above, a memorial kick up the coit is appropriate. But, if the rules demand that the above be cancelled, I've no objection. In any case, the interlude stops here. Cheers.10:58, 22 June 2021 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)

ps. I see that the same wanker, or team member, under a different name, has been at it also, far more violently, at User talk:Huldra, and that the reverting editor has not yet erased the thuggish message from the edit history. Needs doing.Nishidani (talk) 12:22, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you

... for what you said on User talk:SlimVirgin - missing pictured on my talk, with music full of hope and reformation --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:28, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

CRT

Greetings. I've reverted your addition of the NYT "guest essay" once again. The word "opinion" appears at the very top of the page. The authors Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams are not subject-matter experts in critical race theory or US law. Only one (Stanley) is an academic, but in philosophy, not law. Thank you. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:43, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

I hope that makes you feel better. Of course, while you have a nice day, you might find a few seconds to reflect that a subject-matter expert on 'critical race theory' would hardly be a disinterested party. Nishidani (talk) 07:39, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Reminder: Edit summaries

Hello. Just a reminder that a WP:Edit summary should be used only to summarize your editorial change, not to communicate with other editors. Thanks. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 16:33, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Point, the superior wisdom of years, is well taken. I wasn't communicating with other editors, as relieving a momentary lapse into weakness that caused me some anguish. Reading 80 odd pages of details in an afternoon such as

There was one poor sod there he was I would imagine my age actually and I’d heard people say in the past that you could take your eye out and have it cleaned and put it back and I always believed it but it’s not so because this lad’s eye was hanging down on his lip, on his cheek. The whole eye had been knocked out and it was hanging down and there was blood dripping on his face.'Matthew Hughes, The Banality of Brutality, 2009 p.330

is not conducive to equanimity. One tends to, not communicate with others, but work off one's angst of repulsion at cruelty, particularly since these things are ongoing in that area for the last 100 years. Rather like the observer who wrote of things his police colleagues did in the 1920s in the same area of the world:

When one of the Nablus detachment produced an old cigarette tin containing the brains of a man whose skull he had splintered with his rifle butt … . I felt physically sick … the sight of that grog-blossomed face of the gendarme with his can half-full of human brains proudly brandishing his smashed rifle-butt as proof of his prowess, altered something inside of me; people who owned skins other than pink Western ones became human beings.' ... I am afraid that I have gone to great lengths over this small Nablus episode, but to me it meant a complete mental and spiritual transformation. Over that cigarette-tin holding the grey animal matter which had once been the physical mechanism of an immortal soul, standing on a beer-soaked table in Nablus, a couple of hours after skidding so close to violent death myself, I lost my mad and arrogant ideas of being one of a "Master Race" of conquerors, and began to appreciate the fact of our shared humanity, of our common brotherhood under the Fatherhood of the Lord God.'Douglas V, Duff, Battling with a teaspoon, 1953 p.46; Hughes ibid p.332.

Of course feelings have no place here. Only the facts. Best regards, and stay hale.Nishidani (talk) 16:57, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Protocols

Hang on, Norman Cohn's theories about the origin of the Protocols are largely discarded. I'll send you some sources tomorrow. Zero^talk 15:53, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Good grief. I read that twice when it came out. It changed the way I thought, or rather, taught me to read history. I take it as read his theories are dated, since you have the literature on hand. Revert my addition, unless it can be retrieved as 'according to'. I say that because, he must have read Barruel and Robison, and if his construal of their work is correct, then the paranoid template, one would think, can be found in those works. Umberto Eco in his notes to his late novel on the Protocols, The Prague Cemetery, (Il cimitero di Praga Bompiani 2012 p.515) took on board Cohn's reconstruction, and, while inventing the grandson whose obsession drives the narrative, states that the other figures in the text, captain Simonini and Barruel, are 'real'. Odd that the rigorously meticulous Eco missed the details. Still, while the bucket's nearby, there's still much to learn before one kicks it. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Apart from downloading Robison's 1797 book, I just read Reinhard Markner's 'Giovanni Battista Simonini: Shards from the Disputed Life of an Italian Anti-Semite,' in Marina Ciccarini, Nicoletta Marcialis, Giorgio Ziffer (eds.), Kesarevo Kesarju. Scritti in onore di Cesare G. De Michelis, University of Florence Press ISBN 978-8-866-55570-4 2014 pp.311-319 where Poliakov's theory is partially dismounted along with the scholarship that dismissed it completely, the identity of the drafter of the letter is established, a known historical figure, Giovanni Battista Simonini, and Barruel's annotations show it existed, and was alluded to in literature in French prior to the drafting of the Russian protocols. Markner (Innsbruck University) is apparently an expert on the Bavarian Illuminati and the history of Freemasonry.Nishidani (talk) 17:06, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Also Claus Oberhauser, 'Simoninis Brief oder die Wurzeln der angeblichen jüdisch-freimaurerischen Weltverschwörung,' in Juden und Geheimnis: verborgenes Wissen und Verschwörungstheorien, in the series Juden in Mitteleuropa, Institut für Jüdische Geschichte Österreichs, 2012, pp. 10-17

On p,17 he writes

Barruel, Deschamps und Jannet wurden 1893 vom Jesuiten fr:Léon Meurin in seinem Werk La Franc-Maçonnerie Synagogue de Satan (Paris, 1893) zitiert, um durch Simoninis Brief zu beweisen, dass die Juden und nicht die Freimaurer von den Manichäern abstammten

The protocols do not cite the sources all historians agree inform the forgery, so if it is valid to mention the hitherto known textual precedents for the content of the forgery, rhe many sources from 1878 to the end of the century circulating the contents of Simoninis' letter can't be excluded.Nishidani (talk) 21:02, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I also read Cohn twice: once back when I assumed it was the final word on the subject and again (maybe more of a skim) after I read in the works of De Michelis, Hagemeister and others that the story of French origin that forms that core of Cohn's work is the "the testimony of various adventurers and convicted felons" (Markner, loc. cit.) and full of impossibilities and improbabilities. Here I am not referring to Simonini's letter, whose authenticity is an interesting historical puzzle but irrelevant to its influence. I'm referring to the more central question of who wrote the Protocols, when, and why. Because Cohn got that wrong, and badly so, I tend to treat the rest with suspicion. Regarding stuff like Simonini's letter, I have no objection to Markner's "prefigure the vision of hidden Jewish domination" but I do object to "The details of this letter contain the earliest form of what later was forged as the Protocols of Zion" which can too easily be read as proposing a direct link where none is known. Zero^talk 03:22, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Well, of course, as a longtime collector of 'last words', I know that nothing is ever the final word on anything: biographers write as if Wittgenstein's deathbed remark that he'd had a wonderful life jars with what we know, while Gerard Manley Hopkins's several biographers, while duly noting he expired saying 'I'm so happy', document a life marked by evidence of misery. As usual, my ignorance is appalling, so I'll remedy the lacuna by catching up with the recent scholarship you've so generously shared with me. It may be worth one's time putting the Protocols page on a solid updated footing, but I'm as busy as a bee in a spring garden of borage at the moment.

I have adjusted my draft to read

'The letter, Cohn concluded, 'seems to be the earliest in the series of anti-Semitic forgeries that was to culminate in the Protocols.'Cohn 1970 p.31.

Unless evidence that Simonini's 'reactionary balderdash' (Cohn's undisputed description of the Protocols, p.80) is shown to have been preceded by earlier examples of paranoia about a Jewish world conspiracy, I should think that part of Cohn's thesis remains valid. He's not talking about influences there, but of the structure of the myth we find in the Protocols in the earliest form he had encountered in his research by that time of writing. I wouldn't be surprised to see his specific reconstruction of the actual Russian text's authorship, almost a century later, flawed, but the genealogy of an idea doesn't presuppose that each subsequent link in the chain is forged in an organic relation to the links preceding it. Newton and Leibnitz both developed almost identical approaches to infinitesimal calculus and some scholars long argued as to whether or not Leibnitz swiped Newton's intuition or not: apparently the similarity was fortuitous, as were the similarities between Héroult and Hall's designs for the smelting of aluminium, almost identical and published in the same year, if my memory of the first book I tried to write, a history of every element in the Mendeleev table in 1964, doesn't fail me. The story of Hamlet is prefigured in the Orestean legendary cycle, at least I once argued that in a 4th year Greek paper, but Shakespeare didn't read Aeschylus. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 07:40, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia Wars and the Israel-Palestine conflict...please fill out my survey?

Hello :) I am writing my MA dissertation on Wikipedia Wars and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I noticed that you have contributed to those pages. My dissertation will look at the process of collaborative knowledge production on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the effect it has on bias in the articles. This will involve understanding the profiles and motivations of editors, contention/controversy and dispute resolution in the talk pages, and bias in the final article.

For more information, you can check out my meta-wiki research page or my user page, where I will be posting my findings when I am done.

I would greatly appreciate if you could take 5 minutes to fill out this quick survey before 8 August 2021.

Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary and anonymous. There are no foreseeable risks nor benefits to you associated with this project.

Thanks so much,

Sarah Sanbar

Sarabnas ^{I'm researching Wikipedia} _Questions? 20:50, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Good luck with your thesis, Sarah. Unfortunately I don't think the survey format can grasp the dynamics of knowledge production in a conflicted area, let alone motivations. Of course, if you'd like to pop me a question or two here, I could try to respond. Regards Nishidani (talk) 21:06, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank, Nishidani! I definitely agree the survey isn't enough alone, but if you check out my research page you can see more details on the other methodologies I'll be using to shed light on some of the more meta-level dynamics. The hope of the survey was to get some insight on the personal motivations of editors, which aren't always shared on a user page, for example. So far I've gotten some interesting results, and like I said I'll be sharing my findings on my meta-wiki page when I'm done if you're curious.

You definitely seem to have been one of the more prolific editors, though - even if currently retired! - and would love to set up a 15 - 20 minute interview with you if you've got the time. Would you be open to that? Sarabnas ^{I'm researching Wikipedia} _Questions? 09:35, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

What follows will prove to illustrate what in wiki insiders' jargon is called WP:TLDR, for which my prose is notorious.It is a reprobative euphemism for a style of exposition whose tediousness absolves the reader from reading it. It's the nature of this medium, demanding quick extempore replies rather than the carefully manicured, corrected revision of what one writes when one writes more concentratedly, at leisure. To plagiarize Luther, 'Ich denke und schreibe more meo und kann nicht anders'.

I don't have the technology to be interviewed. Motivation? Leaving aside psychoanalysis, professionally I've long worked on what I privately call scotoma - those blind spots caused by systemic bias, cultural blinkers, or nationalisms with their ingrained incapacity for giving due to the 'other'. I was raised in a racist nation by parents who, each independently, had a profound, shared tacit sympathy for the plight of aborigines. Nothing formally expressed, just a icy look at anyone spouting an ethnic put-down, or a friendly relationship fatally frozen by silence if 'niggers' were mentioned in jokey disparagement. One absorbed the implicit message. Early reading found me siding with Hannibal or the Parthians against the Romans. I 'barracked' for the losers in histories that otherwise were written with the triumphalist hindsight of complacent imperial victors, meaning I read a lot of prose with a natural defiance of the author's rhetorical intentions.

I was greatly attracted to Tibetans and their culture, and cantankerously dismissive of Yarra Bank or Hyde Park orators who justified their subjection and the erasure of their magnificent cultures as a leap into modernity, Marxist or otherwise. I drifted late into Wikipedia just to check a few things and tweak one or two articles about a topic I know thoroughly, and then began to consult it regularly from 2006 onwards and was surprised, on looking up the article on Hebron, a West Bank town occasionally mentioned in the press, to observe, in its early form, that it said almost nothing about the important role of gentiles in its past. Scarcely anything was registered about the pagan/Muslim/Christian contributions to that city's history. The page spoke to 500 settlers' ideological interests, and ignored the 160,000 (then) Palestinians' attachment. I rewrote it so every side's investment in that historic city's complex multiethnic, multicultural background was covered.

I found meantime, an extraordinary degree of hostility as I did so, and as I looked further into this area - numerous attempts to temper what I perceived as a slanted imbalance in representation was branded as 'antisemitic'/'against Israel'/'hostile to Jews' etc. Well, that kind of Pavlovian reductive dismissiveness of complex issues gets my 'Irish' up. A large part of my extra curricular reading as a youth took in the outstanding and formative histories of anti-Semitism, which has always fascinated me as the palmary example of the paranoid violence intrinsic to man's general liability to privilege the bonds of kinship which, under the stress of modernity, so easily morphs into ideologically-informed ethnophobia. Antisemitism is the 'accelerated grimace' of a general antipathy for the 'other'. Failure to grasp how it in particular functions means one can't read the world in any depth. Learning from those who, with their analytic scalpels, have teased apart the intricately meshed thews and sinews of its corrupted thinking, and you get to know, not just how Jews suffer, but, more comprehensively, how the pathology which led to their decimation is not 'unique' but the tip of the iceberg of a larger set of mechanisms in history. I learnt that from Norman Cohn's works in the 70s. In reading Palestinians' modern history, I am ever alert to analogies with Jewish history, and however upsetting to many editors profoundly attached to a monocular Zionist vision of the foundation, emergence and ongoing establishment of the state of Israel, who tend to think challenging it anti-Jewish, or anti-Semitic, or anti-Israel, the perplexity of how similarity can be so radically suppressed fascinates and, ergo, motivates me. I learn far more, in editing here, than I contribute, while tackling matters as seminal as this.

Since I had the leisure, being retired after pursuing a lifetime of personal interests, I took on editing in what was considered a toxic time-sink by most editors and admins. Subscribing as I do to the Lippmann-Chomsky thesis, and not disagreeing with the essentials of the Frankfort school's readings of modernity and, of course, those of figures like Foucault and Deleuze, I consider a large part of public discourse delusional, feeding as it does on the rapid impressionism of mass media -newspapers, television and now the digital venue for instantly (dis) informing trivia -for its failure to reflect what, on another level, the nitty-gritty of traditional area research has meticulously documented. The I/P area, thanks to masses of Israeli, diaspora and generally, area specialist doctoral theses, books and articles, is one of the most intensely studied realities of modern times, and yet barely any of this intricate assessment of the complex realities of history, past and present, inflects what is broadcast in the mainstream media. The dyscrasia is striking, but not unique. And a final motivating point, was that Wikipedia is not governed nor owned, as virtually all the major organs of influence that inflect public opinion are. Despite frequent attempts to 'infiltrate' topics by self-motivated ideologues, or groups of special interest pushers, it remains the one medium of coverage that, by its technical nature and regulations, tends to shake off attempts to despoil it of its stubbornly principled neutrality.

Of course, I have an ingrained point of view, what the Japanese call somewhat aristocratically hōgan-biiki (sympathy for the underdog:判官贔屓) that might be seen as unfair to the major narrative, whose hegemonic and some what dumbed-down voice however finds little empirical corroboration or support. I see my job, in this area of wiki, though I range more widely at times, essentially as mediating between the whisperings of the unsaid (Palestinians experiences of their dispossession and occupation as they are filtered increasingly into scholarship) and the exhaustively repeated public clichés of the victor's dominant middlebrow narrative. There, that's your 15 minute interview, all up front. No need to mention me, Nishidani. I'm just one of scores of stalwarts, apparently from all walks of life across the continents - since few of us know much about the others, despite protocols-of-zion-ish-like netrumours fantasying that we all form a tight cabal of dangerous 'Israel-haters' - who have brought some balance in the public record, (tinkering with the flaws in its fractured glasses), as it gets reflected in this extraordinary anonymous and autonomous experiment in securing without any monetary interest, reliable knowledge for an inveterately confused and disformed set of publics* the world over. My auguries for your thesis. Nishidani (talk) 12:13, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

*Being a member of some of which means I too suffer from the same disorientation as my fellow-citizens.Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to share your motivations with me - I greatly enjoyed reading this. Much of what you wrote resonated with me, particularly with regard to ideologically-informed ethnophobia, as you so eloquently put it. In discussions with friends and acquaintances, I am often frustrated by people's inability to see the larger picture - artificial systems of injustice that feed off our baser instincts - and the similarities these systems share, even if their manifestation may be different. Scotoma indeed!

You should be proud of your work on the Hebron article (you did write 42.6% of it!), and your edits have certainly gone a long way in balancing the narrative, even though I don't particularly like the term 'balance'...after all, who created the scale? I am fascinated by epistemology, and for me Wikipedia is a wonderful experiment in alternative forms of knowledge production. The fact that it works so well gives me hope for a future that is less rigidly hierarchical and more inclusive of the wide range of human experiences. Where else does someone marginalized and disenfranchised have as much power to share their knowledge and perspective with such a wide audience, in such an authoritative source?

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Is it alright if I quote you in my research, and if so would you prefer to remain anonymous?

If you can't avoid mentioning me keep it anonymous, Nishidani. Nothing to hide, of course. Anyone can ascertain who I am in a minute or two, though it took a decade of adversarial detective work apparently to figure out the obvious from my abundant allusions to what I do and where I was raised. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:49, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks as well for teaching me a great new word - I too see hōgan-biiki in myself :) Sarabnas ^{I'm researching Wikipedia} _Questions? 16:45, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

@Sarah:, I'd be interested to read the results of your research and am hoping that it will be published in some way. Hopefully the following will give you food for thought. The Greenstein and Feng Zhu "Is Wikipedia Biased?" article states: "If an article reflects NPOV, then conflicting opinions are presented next to one another, with all significant points of view represented." Significant points of view are those outlined in "reliable sources" or, otherwise, those stated by individuals whom editors argue have importance through prominence or expertise. Criteria for what constitutes a reliable source is that it should have a reputation for fact checking or that its publisher should be known for the quality of its output. Some sources, such as academic journals, because they have a process of peer review, never have their reliability questioned. It gets a bit messy when it comes to the news media and organisations such as, for example, Bellingcat and the ADL. How is the reputaion for fact checking judged then? At least, in the American journalistic tradition, news organisations often employ teams of fact checkers to go over articles. However, the effectiveness of these is affected by how easily checkable the information contained is and, in turn, how reliable the sources which are being referred to do the fact checking are. On Wikipedia, questions on source reliability are raised on the Reliable Source Noticeboard, where editors express their opinions. Those opinions are subject to prejudice, with editors having variable ability to argue impartially. At worst, editors support sources which share their own opinions and dismiss those which don't, perhaps producing a rationale for doing so. After discussion is complete, a moderator reads the arguments and writes a conclusion. The fairness of the process is, of course, affected by whether the moderator has biases and whether he or she can put them aside. When it comes to article neutrality, significant opinions may be omitted either because, although they are expressed by sources judged reliable, they simply have been overlooked or, they are expressed by sources judged unreliable, their omission is deliberate. In cases where all the sources expressing an opposing point of view have been dismissed as unreliable, the point of view of the remainder becomes 'fact' rather than 'an opinion'.     ←   ZScarpia   15:30, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

An excellent summary of the process. Several things render the task of neutrality somewhat difficult. By the nature of an open editing regimen, articles, save those that achieve FA status, are in a constant state of compositional flux, and being labile, the weighing of bias gets complicated with each new addition. Most 'fights' are not about the article overall, which, I suspect, few editors read, but emerge as challenges to each addition when the new edit looks 'sided'. Notoriously, leads engage fierce battles, because inattentive editors tend to think that is all, in these fast-paced days of skip reading, that counts, or as ugly use would say, 'impacts'. The third is that, while the encyclopedia ideally strives for the detachment of secondary source scholarship, with its virtues of retrospective analysis, large numbers of articles reflect 'breaking news', which, particularly in descriptions of conflict, is often piecemeal and partisan. Fourth, 'mainstream' journalism is privileged for the latter. There is solid warrant for that, I admit. But in the I/P conflict, that boils down to Haaretz, The Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, and Ynet -all Israeli - plus foreign papers like The New York Times. The latter is notoriously, if tacitly, partisan. It has placed its journalists reporting from the Golan Heights as writing from within Israel. Its concept of 'balance' in a reports of, say, The Great March of Return worked out as giving equal space to covering both sides as suffering equally in their anxieties and deaths, when one Israeli soldier died at the most over several months, while 223 youths, civilian overwhelmingly, were shot dead day by day coolly by snipers at a range of 100-300 yards, and a further 8,079 were injured by live fire. Compare their reportage of Black Lives Matter incidents within the USA, and the flagrant bias leaps to the eyes - police perspectives are not given equal weight with those of the victims.

Of course, this is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of the I/P realities. The last point merely alludes to how difficult getting reliable information proportionately distributed in an article which must, in our remit, strive to be neutral (which most of our acceptable newspaper sources are not, though Haaretz, for one, certainly goes more than an extra mile to do so). The ideal would be to ground the major articles strictly on sources that are written by specialists and peer-reviewed, but that criterion would, if applied, lay waste huge swathes of accreted text and, not improbably, also toss out important details in newspapers that never survive in secondary sources, as too contextualized for notability.Nishidani (talk) 16:14, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

And that should be enough. Undue divagations here are distractive. A thesis, esp. at King's, requires hoeing a lonely road, months on books, not talkplace chat, which is all we can offer. They also require a kind of detachment familiarization with the subjects can threaten, perilously, to undermine. To take a tip from Coriolanus, 'gracious silence, hail'. It was a fixation with Shakespeare who has Cordelia, like a true scholar, watch the action in Lear while withholding comment, or even Hamlet who, in that ever playful maestro's inability to avoid a pun even in tragedy, is made to gasp in his last breath: 'the rest is silence'.Nishidani (talk) 16:25, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

@ZScarpia thanks for sharing! I have found the Greenstein and Zhu article fascinating, and will be using their methodology in my own research. Similarly, I have found reliable sources to be one of the main points of contention within articles and talk pages, and exactly as you pointed out the process for determining source reliability is a critical one to examine. Wikipedia simultaneously undermines and reinforces dominant modes of knowledge production in a wide variety of ways, and I think the emphasis on reliable sources is one way in which Wikipedia is reinforcing systemic biases in modern epistemology. Nishidani outlined some of this beautiful - when sources deemed reliable are themselves biased or skewed towards the dominant narrative, the dominant narrative becomes more 'neutral' than wherever true 'neutral' may be, if such a thing even exists. We must ask, who benefits and who is disadvantaged by our definition of reliable source? What of the citizen journalists, sharing live updates and recordings from the ground? One of the fatalities of a policy of 'verifiability, not truth.' I haven't quite made up my mind on whether the costs are worth the advantages (I am certainly a supporter of rigorous and peer-reviewed research!), nor have I figured out a better system. It will take more time in the books, as Nishidani said, and though this talkplace chat is fascinating to me (and certainly much higher quality than I find on other social media sites), it is time for me to return to my lonely road... Sarabnas ^{I'm researching Wikipedia} _Questions? 16:58, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Don't waste your time replying to this note.

'I think the emphasis on reliable sources is one way in which Wikipedia is reinforcing systemic biases in modern epistemology'

In I/P working practice, RS reinforce systemic bias when the sources are the kinds of newspapers citable for breaking news, current events etc. But the same RS criteria, which place the highest reliability on peer-reviewed scholarship, undermine the systemic bias of mass media because generally the relevant peer-reviewed scholarship on the conflict lends little support for the kind of bias mainstream newspapers show. Israeli and diaspora scholarship provides the most comprehensive deconstruction of the traditional 'Zionist' spin one still gets in newspapers. RS newspapers boast of 'fact checking' which means the few facts (out of the manifold rarely mentioned) are checked by an in-house editor. What isn't checked it the thoroughness or adequacy of the research in those articles. With academic work, the corresponding control is through 'peer-review', which concerns not only a simple check on facts, but, far more broadly, assessments by multiple reviewers of the adequacy of the paper or book in terms of the depth of its research, and originality. That means, spouting a line, following a lockstep hermeneutic bias, or endorsing a known ideological construction of the past, won't get you much credit career-wise. Exceptions do exist and one could list upwards of 40 instances over the last two decades where academics have encountered severe problems with tenure and promotion for publicly challenging the clichés, but overall scholarship has meticulously undermined the standard hegemonic narrative in this area. Worth pondering.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

"Settler colonial"

This seems to be getting some traction in the background. Selfstudier (talk) 11:41, 28 July 2021 (UTC) More OutrageSelfstudier (talk) 13:11, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Pretty scatter-brained. The chap, a lawyer, is out of his depth in straying into history and sociological analysis. Settler colonialism is a broad category, each constituent illustrative element of which has its differences. These differences serve to refine the different subsets, not to undermine the category or ruling concept. In any case, Israel proper's origins are the same as those of the United States, Canada, Australia, (a major difference being however that Zionism sought, and still does, an imperial power under whose protection it strove to realize its colonization: the other countries were occupied, dispossessed and then stocked by people who were originally culled from the populations of the home country-GB) and, in so far as we don't persist in calling thee latter 'settler colonial', it is pointless do persist in using the label of Israel. However, what is unchallengeably 'settler colonial' with no possible equivocation, is Israel's policy in the West Bank. In so far as Israel itself, not now settler colonial, programmatically pushes the colonization of Palestinian territories, it lends itself to the broader thesis, much as France, though not a settler colonial state, became one in Algeria.Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

There is online a scan of a 90 page book titled "The Jewish Labour Movement in Palestine, Its Aims and Achievements", published in 1928, which was written by W. Preuss and submitted by the Jewish Socialist Labour Confedereration Poale-Zion to the Labour and Socialist International Congress of that year. Poale-Zion was at that time a Marxist-oriented part of the the Zionist movement. The renamed Jewish Labour Movement, affiliated to the UK Labour Party, was the UK branch of Poale-Zion. Contrasting with the way the Haaretz article claims that early Zionists saw themselves, it is shot through with the use of terms such as colonisation, colonies, settlers and settlements. For example, on page 8 it states: "Thus arose the Palestine Movement which came to be known later on as Zionism - the Jewish National Colonisation Movement." It goes on to say on page 9: "The work confronting a Socialist Party in the process of national colonisation is admittedly not simple. ... But a national emancipation movement which takes the form of colonising a country and setting up a new economic and cultural community is quite a new thing and as peculiar as the whole of the Jewish problem. Nor must it be forgotten that the International Labour Movement is still without a colonisation programme. To-day people already know the difference between colonial exploitation and the settlement of new lands. So far the notion has mostly been that colonisation is an elementary process in which Labour can take no part. Not until recently, after the overthrow of Europe's economic life by the War, interest has been aroused for migration and settlement in organisations like the British Labour Party. People are slowly beginning to realise the importance of colonising and opening up new countries by means of Labour and not by Imperialist exploitation. They are beginning to feel that the settlement of backward and undeveloped countries is also an integral part of the upbuilding of a Socialist Commonwealth." Settler colonialism rather than colonial exploitation?     ←   ZScarpia   01:43, 29 July 2021 (UTC) {... complementing the preceding, a Mondoweiss review of Maurice Samuel's 1924 book "You Gentiles".}

I think it's pretty well established that early Zionism envisaged itself as a colonial movement - that word crops up repeatedly and that a change took place in the 1950s with the rise of decolonization movements in the third world. So it dropped that kind of language, in favour of the new vogue for national liberation rhetoric (i.e. liberating the country from the imperial British overlord whose patronage has been sought in order, precisely, to achieve the aim of colonization), since its foreign policy and economic interests lay in cultivating alliances with the wider world periphery beyond the predominantly Arab circle of states surrounding it.Nishidani (talk) 06:55, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Hrm

Yaniv Kobovich, Israeli Military Covered Up Negligent Killing of Six Gazans During Recent Conflict Haaretz 3 August 2021 Selfstudier (talk) 15:50, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. The IDF furnishes grunts with a superb working environment. Perhaps the title, along with several hundred others dealing with what B'tselem calls MAG 'whitewashing', should read: 'The ineffable lightness of being us, and not them.'Nishidani (talk) 16:26, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Acra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acra_(fortress)#2015_discovery

Lo, maybe save me some rooting around, do you happen to know anything beyond the 2015 "discovery", scholarly consensus, etc?

Selfstudier (talk) 13:15, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

No, I don't know much about that development. The editor to ask would be either @Arminden, or young @Bolter21, though the latter should probably not be disturbed given his studies. I've done some edits, but I find nearly all ancient pages on wiki unbearably bad: that includes Rome/Greece and elsewhere. The only safe ones are those that have the luck to find one or two editors who really know their stuff and do them from top to bottom, respecting the iron rule always ignored, i.e. no primary sources unless they are leached through recent modern scholarly commentaries. AhiméNishidani (talk) 17:11, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

As best as I can tell up to now, the discovery has not risen to the level of scholarly consensus. 2021 book Andrea M. Berlin; Paul J. Kosmin (31 March 2021). The Middle Maccabees: Archaeology, History, and the Rise of the Hasmonean Kingdom. SBL Press. pp. 35–. ISBN 978-0-88414-504-2. "whether identified as the Akra or not" and a 2017 PHD thesis The Memory of the Temple in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature "I should however admit that the exact location of the Akra is unknown." but is still pushed as of 2016 by the IAA (well, they would wouldn't they?) the Second Hill, which Bore the Name of acra, and Supported the Lower city...” A new look at the lower city of jerusalem in the end of the Second Temple Period Selfstudier (talk) 08:56, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, well, the second document does call it a theory, so I've edited to that end. If every area in Rome and its surrounding villages were dug up with this admirably meticulous, almost religious care, giving precedence to satisfying obsessions with high antiquity over contemporary life, much of the city and the villages would be in elegant ruins, and 2,000,000 people would be homeless. A score or two metres below me, a permit was given to build a house a few decades ago. Preparing the foundations, they unearthed a perfect multi-roomed Roman house. It was surveyed then reburied. I reused blocks of Roman basalt masonry, which I came across while clearing one of my garden to plant trees, to build a stepped path up to another garden. Pieces of sarcophagi, votive figurines, etc., crop up regularly. They say 40% of what hangs over from antiquity lies still buried, and authorities don't know where to display the 30 million archaeological pieces already crammed into long underground storerooms so far. Ah, perhaps that's the solution to Italy's chronic unemployment crisis. Raze the cities and dig up the past.Nishidani (talk) 11:59, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Said in jest but not that bad of an idea, they are selling off villages for a buck.Selfstudier (talk) 12:09, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

One euro for a stone-house, that just needs restructuring. Not bad for one of the most civilized countries in the world, with an outstanding quality of life if one had enough of one's wits to calmly put up with an endlessly dysfunctional bureaucracy, enjoys fine food, and a picturesque landscape with massive historical memories. Still, even at that price it's rather extortionate. After all, we could house hundreds of thousand of Africans in those emptying historic villages. Why we couldn't set up two contiguous villages with 15,000 Gaza refugees, to cultivate abandoned fields, is something that fails me. Perhaps the gutless wonders who rule think they'd lose office on charges they were conspiring to 'Islamicize' Europe. Nonsense. The best pizza makers are, by common accord, Egyptian immigrants.Nishidani (talk) 15:14, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm curious: do you think there might be a linguistic link between Italian pizza and Turkish pide or Middle Eastern pita?     ←   ZScarpia   17:59, 12 August 2021 (UTC) [... after posting, I began to suspect that I'd be able to answer my own question by doing some simple searches on Wikipedia. But, what the hell!]

Turkish would have got it from Greek, and in turn there's a Judeo-Spanish connection the details of which you can find here thanks to the Israeli semitologist Samuel Hopkins. The Italian word is usually connected to Spanish pisar, which via Latin pinsere (pound (grain), is cognate with ancient Greek πτίσσω (Attic dialect πτίττω /ptittô) to 'winnow/thresh'(grain) and Sanskrit pindṣṭi. Of course language is a whorehouse where semantic fuck-arounds are promiscuously exuberant and, the results, like clap, travel fast and 'infect' far and wide, so one can never be absolutely sure who did what to whom, i.e. the parent term. I wish, sociologically, nations behaved in the same way, and dropped their manias for purity of line/language(culture.Nishidani (talk) 21:14, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Dunno why, Gråbergs Gråa Sång but what the heck

Um. . . Today's the 15th of August. . .precisely 76 years ago, the Japanese finally had an opportunity to hear the thin reedy voice of their imperial deity whisper out of the crackling air over radio broadcasts the personal pronoun which was exclusively reserved for occasions when the Emperor referred to himself - chin (朕) in addressing the nation (Bad pun: I guess, like the kanji, this makes him our to be a 'unique character'). . . In Italy, the day also has echoes of transcendental forces, being the Feast of the Assumption . . .Why the status of what logic calls a 'premise' should be coloured by religious undertones puzzled me as a boy . . . . The incorrigible Italians sorted the confusion out, reading 'feast' day as an occasion for sybaritic culinary self-indulgence, with a vague respect for historic precedence since Ferragosto (Feriae Augusti- Augustus's day off) was instituted about a decade and a half before the rumoured founding event of Christianity, ergo paganism still trumps religion even when the latter imposes its adjusted priority on the calendar.

Yes, there is that formal nod to custom, the obligatory short mass but . . instead of some reedy voice out of the ether, what then follows is a festive rattling of knives and forks as, donning the nosebag, they tuck into several hours of bagel-like biscuit- (taralli) munching, potato-dumplings in duckling sauce (gnocchi al sugo di papera), roast pigeon or in my area, stewed chicken with peppers (pollo in umido con peperoni) together with any number of subsidiary pasta dishes. All swilled down with the soothing unction of wine. For once, the streets empty, and signs of life, for the solitary stroller, are only given by the eerie chirr of clattering kitchenware, stakhanovite champing and chumbling, and a slight increase in humidity caused by the drift of sweat, from hundreds of intent brows and cheeks, wafting out of windows onto the still airs of narrow streets as the contents of millions of fridges are ransacked and shanghaied into the oven. So, it's hardly casual that one's mind goes back to a sonnet written in Roman dialect by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, celebrating this date. It's of a man whose joblessness forces him to seek an income in another town. The 15th of August happens also to be his wife's birthday, and he racks his brains to think what he can offer her, when he himself is stoney-broke. Only a letter of apology. I think it's much better than what Crollolanza could have ever penned.

No 27. Pe la madonna de l'Assunta, festa e comprianno de mi' mojje (Rome 15/8/1830)

Mojje mia cara, a sto paese cane
Nun ze trova nemmanco a ffà a ssassate;
E cquanno hai crompo un moécco de patate,
Fai passo ar vino e cquer ch'è ppeggio ar pane.

Io pisto er pepe, sòno le campane,
Rubbo li gatti, tajjo l'oggna a un frate,
Metto l'editti per le cantonate,
Cojjo li stracci e agliuto le ruffiane.

Embè lo sai ch'edè cche cciariscévo?
Ammalappena pe ppagàcce er letto:
Anzi, a le du' a le tre, spallo e cciarlèvo.

Duncue che tt'ho da dà, ppòzzi èsse santa?
Senza cudrini ggnisun chirichetto
Disce Dograzzia e ggnisun ceco canta.

27. F’r Our Lady a the Assumshun, feast- an birfday a me missus.

Dear wife, it's tombstone here. This cuntry's ded.
As fa jobs, yu'd be lucky ta toss yonnies or shuvel mud.
An when yu’ve scrounged up tuppence wirth a spud,
Ya pass up a drop a wine an, wirse still, bred.

I grind a bidda pepper, ring church bells ev'ry nite,
Swipe cats fa soup, then cut a friar's nails.
Glue up edicks on streetcorners, n’ if that fails,
I scrounge rags n’ pimp fa sluts when things are tite.

An woddu I get f'r’all this? well may ya ask me, luv.
Just anuf ta cover the hire uva cot.
Tho I'm offen kicked out with a boot n’ a shuv.

Wot can I give ya? Yer a saintly woman, ya dear thing.
But if ya don’ coff up a ha’p’ny, no altar-boy’ull trot
Out 'Gobbless', an the blind acorse won’ sing.Nishidani (talk) 04:24, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

...well, I guess notoriously supporter and friend of Jewish community and rose in the barber (???) will go on. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:48, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Yep, will go on, and go on, like life itself. Apropos, I was approached by some people the other day, whose children were chattering in English, while the mother and father spoke to each other in Swedish. They saw I was reading an English novel, so asked me for directions. It wasn't that far off, but in intricately winding alleys and lanes, so I took them directly there. I strained to recall some of the Swedish I learnt 50 years ago, and lo and behold, a poem I'd been taught popped into mind. I still think it masterly.

Hela vinterdagen lång

gnolar Mozart i mitt öra.

Fjärran stråkar kan jag höra,

fjärran rösters tysta sång.

Arbetsdagen går sin gång,

pennan fyller pappersbladen.

Ljusen tänds i fönsterraden.

Snövind går i nakna träd.

Mozart susar ljudlöst med.

Natten faller över staden.

It's by Alf Henrikson. Apparently, notwithstanding my hopeless pronunciation, they understood it, except for the way I pronounced 'gnolar'. Is that dated, or is it just incomprehensible with an Aussie phonological underlay?Nishidani (talk) 12:42, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Well, in Swedish, the g in an introductory "gn" isn't silent, that may be it. A collegue once had to correct mine and some fellow fantasy-geeks pronounciation of "gnome", we'd never used the word in conversation with actual anglos. That is a beautiful poem. If you learned Swedish 50 years ago, you may have come across a certain Runeberg. Hugely national romantic (and sometimes quite funny) but I like him. Kulneff is an old favorite.

Ett glatt hurra, ett högt hurra

För varje man, som kämpat bra,

Vadhelst han blev i livet än,

Vår ovän eller vän!

A merry hurrah, a loud hurrah

For any man who fought well,

Whatever he became in life,

Our enemy or friend! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:15, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Your phonological analysis was spot-on, thanks. I'd nasalized like an aborigine. I'd need more than a cutlunch and a demijohn of absinthe to hike a path through the niceties of Kulneff, though the drift was pretty clear. Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 21:14, 15 August 2021 (UTC)

Yakov Kulnev. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:47, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I would have let G'nome pass. But if I had heard you speak the g in Gnocchi words would have been had. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:59, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Then it's good we haven't had pasta together. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:05, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Come to think of it, we treat "kn" the same. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:09, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

A fascinating flutter in the phonological dovecote. I still hear the gn in gnola, which is transcribed in IPA as ɲɔ as distinct from the palatized nasal gn in gnocco (IPA ɲɔ), All I can say at the moment is that 'gnocco' not only rhymes with 'sciocco' (dopey) but is a synonym for the latter, which is more or less how I feel.Nishidani (talk) 10:31, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Ah, James Joyce to the rescue in Finnegansesque fashion: the double sense in gnocco (dumpling/dolt) could be conveyed by writing 'dumbpling'.Nishidani (talk) 10:36, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm still reeling from the description of Gnocchi as 'pasta' above... Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:14, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Then you better go edit List of pasta. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:59, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Good grief! (What an extraordinary phrase that is!) This is shaping up as a rerun of the best film of 1977, Ridley Scott's The Duellists, and as I draw up a virtual chair, I am wondering who is going to play the Carradine role, and who Harvey Keitel? Only in Death, just a word of advice. Despite your admirable Goethean sense, inscribed I n your handle, of die Forderung des Tages, you ought to chuck a shufti at Grey Song's role model Yakov Kulnev, whose career would make Gabriel Feraud look like a wimp. I'm perplexed, since I'll have to play seconds to both parties. Well gentleman, choose your arms (opening a case, the duellists are offered an option of gnocchi with a sling, and a handful of whiplong lengths of pappardelle)Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

ANI

There is currently a discussion here regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. St★lwart¹¹¹ 02:30, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Broken 1RR

Apparently you broken 1RR [1],[2] I know that more then week passed would you willing to remove offending part? --Shrike (talk) 15:31, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

A week ago? What/who (NonReproBlue 841 edits, like 3 others recently active just 300+ edits over the Arpbia bar?) on earth brought that to your late attention at this particular moment, when you are chipping in on an utterly unrelated matter suggesting I be hauled to AE?

That page is not under the 1R rule, (see the talk page header, no mention of Arbpia). As such only 3R applies. You know very well that, whenever you have notified me that I might have broken a rule, I inquire and if you are correct, I revert. I have no problem with that. Still, just out of curiosity, what is the part you find 'offending'? I need to know because if page watchers here confirm your view, then of course I will excise it. Nishidani (talk) 16:47, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Unsolicited advice

I imagine you're going to wake up to the ANI notice above, so good morning! Here's some unasked for advice: please apologize for calling other editors "low performing newbies". I admire the fraction of your work that I've seen, and I hope to see you continue it. I also hope you'll recognize that avoiding comments like that, and expressing contrition when they leak out in moments of frustration, is essential to collaborative work on this project. As is always true when I give unsolicited advice, know that I won't be offended if you delete this or don't respond. If you want to offend me, I am particularly sensitive to insults to my cat. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 05:11, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

If you think I ever get offended by, esp. friendly, advice, then you would be misreading my record. I think I owe an apology to a few editors who, in the face of a pointless piece of niggling, had their time wasted by stepping in to defend that record, and my remarks in context. everything for which a request has now be made that I be hauled over the administrative coalfires, was stated, by me, over two weeks ago. No one, even those alluded to, objected. An extremely protective reading of the fine print of wiki policy does allow people the right to makes a huge fuss over a stray piddling word or two, and call for sanctions. Personally, when attacked, I don't play that game, though it is a common 'wheeze' among combative POV-pushers. I've been an adult for half a century, much of it spent studying real violence, and so I have a cognitive inability to grasp why a failure to scrupulously monitor one's p's and q's to avoid giving even the slightest occasion for a perceived offence to unknown casual interlocutors can be construed as parlously offensive and shift the levers of arbitration to vet the idea of dragging me into heated wikilegalese repercussions and appeals for justice. 44 dead, children, brilliant medicos, etc., and in this angle of the woods, an editor or two feels wounded. Ah well, whatever. I have a busy workday , - i.e. reading just one more load of 100+ odd pages of fineprint to figure out whether this or that edit ought to be made to any number of pages here, so whatever. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 08:17, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I appreciate your reframing about the relative scale of this dispute. I respect your position on playing the game, though I disagree. Moving forward, I hope you find the words "I shouldn't have said that" come to you more easily. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 15:10, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

As I said I'm not going to be sucked into a timesink of the usual nagging to-and-froing (up). The RfC in question was initiated with language that, rather than, as required, being neutral, was formulated as a personal attack targeting me. Should I have cried mummie and whinged and complained at some arbitration forum? Nope. Whatever. Who cares? Certainly I don't. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, I still think Wikipedia should assume 99% of its editors are adults, and not children. Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Oh I agree 100% that RM was opened with unnecessary vitriol targeted at you. I admire your decision to not drag it to the dramaboards. I don't think the recent ANI thread (now closed) should have been opened at all, and I was clear there about believing your statements to have been misconstrued. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 15:21, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks FFF. Your advice was eminently sensible, and without people who take care to move around and make suggestions, the social oil that partly helps this place run would dry up, and make editing at times more grating than it need be. Like your imaginative monicker by the way - I can't place it but 'firefangled' is a wonderful poetic trope. I may use it one day (not on Wikipedia). Cheers Nishidani (talk) 19:39, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks back! My name is from a Wallace Stevens poem. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 19:48, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Ah, that's both a relief, and a disappointment. A relief because instinct told me only a superb master of poetry could have crafted the image of 'firefangled'. So my feel for language is still intact. A disappointment because I've read his collected poems twice, slowly, and it should have rung a bell. That it didn't speaks of the wearing of memory with age. Now that you finger WS, and cite the source, the poem evoked his Anecdote of the Jar, thematically - one I have by heart. What palmary luck we have, with the company of poets. Best Nishidani (talk) 20:25, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Might be helpful

This Selfstudier (talk) 09:10, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Actually I downloaded that two days ago and read it yesterday. 49 pages detailing just how widespread concern is. On topics like this especially, I like to take my time before intervening. I have a WP:COI in this. In my reading, that definition, as tagged with its subsidiary stipulations makes me, to name but one out of a potential target audience of millions, out to be (a) an anti-Semite, and (b) potentially subject to administrative or legal sanctions if I express myself, in that (c) it contains implicitly a violation of a basic constitutional right to free expression. Nishidani (talk) 10:22, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

As I understand it, the universities (UK) are currently being placed under a lot of pressure from the gov to "adopt" the definition (+ the examples) and even threatened with funding cuts. Apparently the UJS made an FOI request and 29 of 133 universities have adopted with a further 80 having no plans to do so. UCL academic board has forced a reconsideration of UCL adoption and I expect there is going to be further kickback. If a case should get to court, it will likely be thrown out on free speech grounds, in general and because it is a specifically protected thing for universities, it is also likely unenforceable in any case.Selfstudier (talk) 10:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Retired

I can see that you're using it as a joke, but it says in bold font "This user is no longer active on Wikipedia." You should replace the template with a custom box. MClay1 (talk) 12:56, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

A wanker in Woopwoop

I wuz sitten outback in a shidous shack

Twas a prick uv a stench, bejeezus,

Wif eff-all ta do 'xcept play in the loo,

Cos there's nort else ta do f'rus geezers.

But ya soon tire a that, a fiddlen with a fat,

An so ya mind turns ta finken a bit.

So I dialed up a fort I'd recently cort

on the blower frum anutha local git.

"If ya wanna kill time, the best fing fa mine,

Iz this wheeze they call wiki, fair dinkum.

Ya can perve all day, nag and niggle away

Pull the piss owda boffens 'n their finken.'

So ever since then, like Gibbon wif his pen

I scribble, scribble scribble -like crayzi,

N' tho' I don' ava clue- I c'n shitstir a blue -

The fun neva ceeses t'amaze me.Nishidani (talk) 14:56, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Article

here u might likeSelfstudier (talk) 17:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I missed it. I grew up surrounded by architects, first of all my father who trained under Walter Burley Griffin, and so follow what the Forensic Architecture group do since I first learn about it while reading numerous papers on the the destroy-Corbyn-scam, though I was an admirer of Eyal Weizman's work before that.Nishidani (talk) 21:36, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Joe Dukes' article about the Halabi case in The Guardian, then learning that FA's Eyal Weizman was denied entry to US by some algorithm-generated security threat notification, and reading Remy Brulin's article about the press coverage of Ronen Bergman's book - all in a day, well, a deep breath, patience, and a bedtime reread of the relevant Orwellian tracts is in order. The obvious truth will out of course, but as in the Afghan fiasco, predictable from day one, it takes at least 20 years (in Bergman's case 37 years) for confirmation, by which time the damage is permanent. Vide the Halabi scam, the tip of the iceberg. Nishidani (talk) 22:07, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Annoyance

Hello, I didn't enjoy the interaction. Please refrain from messaging me in general. If you see a remark I make on a talkpage, you do not have to feel obliged to give conter-criticism of the criticism itself, rather choose to address it in general without asking me to personally respond to you. I don't see the point, and I respond solely because of the provocation, not from interest in the discussion. It's quiet unpleasant and useless. Goodbye.Vanlister (talk) 11:45, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

You don't appear to be familiar with Wikipedia. We don't come here to 'enjoy interactions' but to construct articles collaboratively, regardless of personal views. Raising problems with problematical edits or articles is not 'a provocation'. It is an obligation per policy.Nishidani (talk) 11:50, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

This editor posted the exact same message on my talk page. Perhaps he is bored? Selfstudier (talk) 11:58, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Dunno. But it's just chatnoise. There is no sign that they have read any of the 16 sources on the page complained about. Newbies should grasp that working in that area requires a readiness to read 100-200 pages offline before you start asserting you know the topic. That goes for every article. I know the results are often upsetting for a certain 'mentality' that has never heard of these things, but the emerging facts should not 'annoy'. Most people, including the historic actors, rest easy by simply ignoring them. But that can't translate into trying to stop other people reading up on the topic's details by suppressing what one dislikes hearing about.Nishidani (talk) 12:18, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Roland R is currently ahead in the insult stakes I think.     ←   ZScarpia   12:42, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

If you take that matters personally, maybe ask yourself why, making comments on Wikipedia between good and bad blacks is offensive, people should not be discriminated based on their identity.--Vanlister (talk) 14:16, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Good grief! The things one misses. I don't know how, with that kind of smear, this chap appears to still get a free pass to Go at arbitration.Nishidani (talk) 13:04, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

You don't really understand my message since you continue calling me for more messages. Who is doing chatnoise now? Let's say goodbye, you are not paid for chatting with me, go continue editing my friend. I am done, last message. --Vanlister (talk) 14:16, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Altering the flow of talk page messaging and changed pass to "ass" in Nishidani's comment. Some CIR issues here, methinks.Selfstudier (talk) 14:33, 24 August 2021 (UTC) {... indentation altered.     ←   ZScarpia   13:00, 25 August 2021 (UTC)}

My apoligies, error humanum est --Vanlister (talk) 11:24, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Just on the finer point of introductory Latin: error is a masculine substantive, and therefore any qualifying adjective assumes the case gender, i.e., 'error humanus'.Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

It's a very long time since I did Latin at school, but I'm assuming that Seneca's was up to snuff: "Errare humanum est."     ←   ZScarpia   13:25, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, quite. It occurs with some frequency in Latin writers, but when they were intelligent in their dictums, they were usually pilfering from Greek, in this case: Euripides:σύγγνωθ᾽: ἁμαρτεῖν εἰκὸς ἀνθρώπους, τέκνον. (Hippolytus l.615). 'Be forgiving: man can't help bungling things at times, laddie'Nishidani (talk) 13:47, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

"... ignoscere divinum." [3]     ←   ZScarpia   12:46, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm trying to figure out what 'making comments on Wikipedia between good and bad blacks' means. What have 'blacks', or their moral status as good or bad, have to do with the price of fish in this discursive market? Go figure. As I made a cuppa, I overheard a US spokesman John Kirby talk a minute ago. Same effect. Meaningless - the art of talking to no purpose in order to respond to questions whose answers are already known, but can't be officially endorsed. The jobs people have.Nishidani (talk) 14:54, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

I bumped into an old friend at noon today, a noted photographer (of Catholic/Jewish descent), and we discussed the play of light on the streetscape, and moments of experience we each had of such fascinating effects. We of course as fogeys lamented the increasing inability of people, eyeballing their smartphoneys, to see and be moved by the beauty or otherwise of the obvious. He told me an anecdote: he was watching in southern Algeria a striking desert landscape, waiting for the light to realize it perfectly. The moment came: he whipped up his camera and just as he was about to press home the snap, he was disturbed by a tug at his jacket. Pissed off, he wheeled round cursing, and saw an old Berber man, who was indicating a little boy by his side, and who said in English: 'help me'. Acute embarrassment. All thoughts of his art and the landscape died. He had no money with him - no use in the desert. A moment's thought, and he stripped off his shirt and gave it to the child. I'll never be able to use the idiom for generosity, 'give the shirt off one's back', without recalling the scene.Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Nice, I see you care much about identity an people's social value, particularly Jewish identity, while also being preoccupied by social purpose. The story interested you, since it is the summer break, and people usually express their desires in changing their ways. You feel particularly moved by a scenery because it may remind you a personal situation or rather a lack of pro-social behaviour that may damage the image you have/had of yourself. You have also a tendancy to associate situations and concepts, in a romanticised way. Maybe in link to the intellectualism, that you cherish as a value, ( that also relate to this story, in the case that make you defer from the child. And child is innocence. And you ask yourself... --Vanlister (talk) 21:26, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

What that man has seen and documented in his huge archive covers not only scenery but five wars from Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, and Central America, allowing me to think, in listening to an eyewitness like him, that I, who know those realities mostly from books, am not far wrong in my grasp of what really happens. Unlike most bureau reporters, he would actually, for example, get mujahideen to guide him in freezing treks for days and nights over the mountains to photograph military bases, dressing as one of them. But these days, we don't talk about war, excepting in discussing from time to time the extraordinary resilience of people who are endlessly hammered by armies.Nishidani (talk) 21:56, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Ali Hassan Salameh

Your recent edit has 2 instances of "had undertaken" without saying what they had undertaken. I would try to fix this myself but I'm not sure what the correct words are, particularly in the latter instance. Also, I'm not knowledgeable on this topic, but I assume Israel wanted to assassinate him for more than just his PLO-CIA connection, no? –CWenger (^ • @) 17:30, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

With regard to your last query: pre-Israel Jewish groups/Israel and Palestinian groups have been engaged in a conflict with reciprocal recourse to terrorism at times. When Israel succeeded in obtaining statehood, it could pursue that course in terms of a right to defend itself or act preemptively for security ends, whereas the loser, doing much the same, automatically could be denominated as terroristic, as per the usual logic of asymmetric war reportage. There are many reasons behind such acts, but they are not clear from contemporary newspaper reports. One element in the policy was to continue killing the most talented and politically able exponents of PLO nationalism eg,Atef Bseiso to name one of a dozen (their abilities were admired and feared), esp. those with good intelligence credentials in Western countries. (The nincompoops who run the PLO/PNA are evidence of the success of weeding out the best and brightest) The public reasons always assert often unproven connections with specific terroristic acts. Perhaps some of these claims are true: we, as opposed to the Mossad archive authorities, don't know. According to Ronen Bergman's 2018 book pp.216-218 the CIA regarded him as one of its most important intelligence assets in the region. His own men stood guard outside the US embassy at the time, in compliance with the US reguest for assistance in that regard. Thanks for picking that up. Nishidani (talk) 17:35, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Bedtime reading

Adam Geller, Fares Akram, Gaza's Toll: After four wars, Gaza families struggle with the cost,' AP News 25 August 2021 If you haven't seen it already Selfstudier (talk) 22:07, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Actually I don't scour the web for nightmares, and I'm sure neither do you. Usually, I just try to inform myself of a morning when I notice changes to articles on my watchlist, then get on with life. At bedtime, I only read books that give evidence that man is sane, imaginative, and sensitive, to bury the testimony of what the day and its news hammers away at suggesting is the reality of the dyshumane condition. Nishidani (talk) 22:26, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

I have rss feeds, they come up in those. Tell me, does your reading suggest that man is becoming more sane, imaginative and sensitive, or less? Selfstudier (talk) 09:41, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Postwar kids grew up to think

Hegelian progress was the default

Gear of history. Now, on the brink

Of years that draw one to a halt,

Some of us will sense that we

In trusting that the drift of time

Improves, were blinded by complacency.

Assuming the vast register of crime,

Folly and misfortune Gibbon's trawl

Through Europe's past revealed, had ended,

That the story of Rome's Decline and Fall

Was 'history', a lesson apprehended.

Pose any problem. and the essence is

To define one's terms, rather than quiz

Opinions shorn of propositions that

Inform as premises our mundane chat.

What is meant by progress for mankind?

The growth of knowledge? The best were blind

To all the subtle forces that, unseen,

Cog the dice of human choice. The gene

Is mapped, and much of the molecular

Nerving of cognition in our particular

Machinery of being has been traced,

With millenia of philosophy now disgraced.

The nature of societies - before

Mere chance arrangements shorn of law-

Yield up their local logics as we thresh

The rules that make apparent chaos mesh.

Belief in choice, our exercise of will

The vaunted freedoms modernities instill

In all of us to prove how progress won

A larger sphere for liberty, are undone,

As algorithms make randomness a ruse,

We're never so predictable as when we choose.

Age rambles, following Nestor's noted glib

Prolixity that outran Homer's nib.

To cut to the chase, so I can take a nap,

I'll try to dig a nugget from this crap,

Some stool of wisdom one can flush like shit

If hurried lives can't stop to dwell on it.

Our species-being - I hope you'll pardon

My careless recourse to old Marx's jargon-

Remains immune to all of tampering time's

Finangling with change- our monkeying minds

Have learnt a trick or two, but still the ape

We came from more or less lends shape

To how we see and feel, and even think

As members of mankind. The missing link

Was always there -under the thin ice

Of consciousness. To be precise,

A million biological years outweigh

Post-paleolithic civilisation's sway,

However much its bantam lightw(e)ights preen

Themselves on progress as the lucent green

Of yesteryear grows concrete grey. Yes, far more

Is known, but only smidgeons of that store

Of incremental knowledge alter our

Apish instincts. Sophisticated power

Expands the violence innate to our kind,

And drives the lethal greed our blind

Pursuit of every appetitive whim

Seduces us to risk both life and limb

And fill the yawning void of senselessness

That, grasped, would otherwise make us less

Urgent, more disposed to catch our breath

And live within ourselves till death

Reminds our kin and kith that life

Just needs a roof, some friends, and, skirting strife,

Food, thought and kindness to the poor

For three score years or so, then nothing more. Nishidani (talk) 14:30, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Belle Dame sans Merci sort myself:)

Extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau or posthumanity, choose an outcome.Selfstudier (talk) 15:08, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

We cannot choose life's larger outcomes for

They knock, unbidden, then unhinge the door,

Burst in at dinner to smash the place

then vanish, cordially making space

For other tempests on the horizon

Of our fears, as we set eyes on

Incinerating landscapes, or a flood

That turns our gardens into mud.

Some will survive: mankind always has

Outlived his episodic fits of madness,

And rearisen, repeat his old distinction:

Eating all other species to extinction,

Until at last the patient sun's fatigue

Exhausts itself to join the bigger league

Of giant stars, and, bursting at the seam

From hydrogen-starvation, begins to stream

Fireballs beyond this planet and consume

The earth, appeasing our prophets of doom,

As this nanoblip beneath eternity's gaze

Is vaporized back to matter's primal faze,*

Those nuclear molecules that from the start

Began creation's dance will once more tart

The chaos with fresh order, or should we say,

Ordure?, as life redefies inertia's sway.*

• Aural pun intended, with 'phase'. No lapsus calami there
  • lectio facilior.

I’ve overegged this pud of verse, so ‘Basta’.

It’s time for me to cook some pasta

I could drone on like this all day

But tedium will drive my reader away!Nishidani (talk) 11:29, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Rofl :) I think I should "re-tire" myself, haha.Selfstudier (talk) 11:38, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Tyring is indeed important while we are on this bus, having been in Bali on a bus that had a failed tyre, re-tyring is indeed important JarrahTree 11:00, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

When John Gunther Dean's convey was hit by fire a team of assassins in Lebanon, bullets deflated the tyres. But they were some variety that spontaneously reinflated when punctured, allowing him to Schuhmacher or slalom his way out of the killing zone, much to the distress of his potential murders.Nishidani (talk) 11:06, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

There's an article explaining how 'self-inflating tires' work here. General Motors started fitting one version of it, Central Tire Inflation System (CTIS), which is used by the U.S. military, in 1984. I don't know what was available in 1980, when the Dean assassination attempt happened. There are also run-flat tyres, one version of them being self-sealing ones. Advice on equipping your armoured car with bullet-proof tyres can be found here. Not really bedtime reading, though!     ←   ZScarpia   16:53, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

My tired eyes can catch the scene:

Shots pinging windows, bullet-proof;

Grenades struck the boot, missing the roof;

Incompetent aim is what saved Dean.

Souls are ghosts in the machine:

Imagined guests in an empty chair.

Man’s mostly water and hot air

With double vents from snout to beam.

An obvious truth that troubles some.

It punctures our innate self-esteem

The yearnings of our deepest dream

To eke on when death lifts its thumb.

Souls must live on, we tell ourselves,

Not sizzle when our flesh burns out,

But in some form survive death’s rout

Like figures in fairy tales, like elves.

Perhaps, we’re tempted then to think,

When winded by death’s knockout blow

Souls reinflate if punctured, so

We’ll find ourselves back in the pink.

But man has yet to find a cure

To mend deflated egos by

A pump that kicks in when we die

To patch the wound of tired nature. Nishidani (talk) 13:37, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks N, I'll treasure it.     ←   ZScarpia   16:48, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Maureen Wroblewitz

Hello. Help improve and copy edit. Thanks you. Kolpb (talk) 09:33, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

This editor should probably be reported. 84 edits in a day, consisting simply of copying and pasting requests on 82 wikipedian editor pages for the said article. Perhaps that's a new way of getting up to snuff with 500 edits over the IP bar? Who gives a fuck.Nishidani (talk) 09:37, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

You've got mail

Hello, Nishidani. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Thanks, warshy ^(¥¥) 20:31, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

Score

Hi mate. The dork-as issue went down the drain, your pun being the only productive & memorable outcome. Thanks. I had no idea of how the procedure goes. It's a joke, and one w/o a punchline. Now I know what I've always felt: why to stay away from "positions of authority", and not just on WP. Conclusion: I'll definitely avoid that format in the future.

Good to find you in a poetic mood. Take solace: Kim Jong-un has lost weight. And so have I, swimming a lot helps a lot. The world is lighter and can bounce back. Which, thinking of basketballs, can also mean: against the wall. Arminden (talk) 12:04, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Fucked if I can figure out why one would prefer to call one's daughter a roedeer (Dorcas) instead of a gazelle. Win one, lose ten, seems to be the rule. As soon as I see procedures kicking in, I long for a golf course, or catch a Wooster and Jeeves rerun. For the mo', I'll chuck some consoling doggerel your way, mate, since it's movie time here, and I need one.

Working in wiki is Chaplinesque,

Unpaid drudging on a conveyor belt,

Editing endless intray papers on a desk

Hoping against hope they won’t get messed

Further down the bureaucratic chain,

Or end up trashed down memory lane.

Pissing against the wind, I’ve often felt,

Aber das ist der Lauf unserer Welt

Nice to hear from you, esp. the swimming. It should come in handy, or backstrokely, when climate change raises the waters, and the next generation, if some smidgeon of tradition survives smartphoning, may chortle passages from childhood lore about Noah's arc.Nishidani (talk) 19:34, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

You're pouring out rarefied poetry, while I'm sticking to my native expletives. I came across Chufut-Kale and had to stun. In Romanian ciufut (read: chufut) made it until today as 'grumpy', with the added benefit that ciuf means shock of hair, and fut, well, plain fuck. But now I see that it has an illustrous history (can't remember all the vowels, but who cares): Aramaic yahud, to Persian jahud, to Ottoman Turkish çıfıt, to later Turkish çufut, the latter two making it into all the usual Balkanic suspects. And the bonus is: in Romanian it started as a word for stingy, cheap; moody, grumpy; moneylender, usurer, loan shark. But never explicitly for Jews, although the "stingy usurer" is more than a commonplace cliche there too. A case of fun winning over xenophobia? I'd like to think so. As I was writing to Warshy, who noticed my editing, for any normal-thinking Romanian the word conjures the image of an angry person with a wild & disorderly hairdo. Kind of an irascible, bad-mouthed Wilder Mann. The rest didn't matter much, I guess. May the Romanian sense of humour rule the world! But it doesn't, not even at home. To many of the ciufut type do instead. Here you go, an opening for those who prefer the Turkish meaning & world domination theories. Arminden (talk) 13:58, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Actually I saw that discussion on Warshy's page, but, though tempted to drop the first thing that came into my mind apropos the stupid equation of stinginess with Jews. I held off in deference to a sense one should not barge in with frivolous asides on a sensitive issue. Iin Italian ebreo can bear that sense, used also of tightfisted, other, non-Jewish, Italians, though any goy from Scotland can cop the same smeary flak as does anyone from Genoa: they can be hit with the same accusation, esp. if their behaviour suggests that when it comes to paying on the nose they seem to act as if they had 'snakes in their pockets' (Aussie idiom). Uh, the first thing that came to mind was the hilarious joke about the highland Scotsman tramping 200 kms down to Edinburg and sedulously visiting every shop where materials were repaired stitched up etc., from cobblers to sartorial establishments, inquiring about their pricing to have one worn prophylactic sewed back into usable form. He finally manages after laborious negotiations to get the best skimpy deal (says 10 pence) for a repatch on the dishevelled 'franger' (Aus dialect for a condom), but hesitates to seal the deal (of his century). Why. 'Weell, now, I must hie off back to the clan. Since we all use it, I need their consensus on the price before we close the deal. And cud I prevail on you to provide me then with a written assurance that your emproium will guarantee us it will last for another ten years? I think that would win over any of the men who hold out, being a touch too close with the clan's investments!'

'The meaning in Roumanian ciuff is, I'd hazard, influenced by Italian ciuffo which means a chock of hair (and is cognate with Germanic Schopf).

If I kept turning over in my mind how many derogatory smears I've encountered in my reading of the Irish, or the insults thrown our way in a Protestant-majority town as a child, I'd probably incubate a grievance. Water off a duck's back. Anyone from any ethnic group, if they have their ears to the ground, can recite a litany of outgroup prejudices. Of course, one makes a mental note, but in daily experience it is only useful to characterize any one individual, not the group.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

And that's exactly wht I found it so refreshing that Romanians never adopted the initial Turkish meaning, "Jew/Jewish", but just the meanings attached to the cliche. Maybe they didn't bother to learn Turkish properly, just "după ureche", 'by the ear', as it remained common until this day. -- As you can see, ciuf might well have made it in directly from Latin, w/o the Italians playing any part in it. I wonder how it sounded in Latin, 'kufus'? Caesar probably used it, "kufus Germanicus longus est." Arminden (talk) 18:13, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Romanian linguists will have decisive say of course. But there are two competing hypotheses for an Indo-European line of descent for ciuf. One via Germanic languages, as I hinted, and the other via Latin. i.e. tufa, a kind of plumed standard or military banner, which according to an old etymological dictionary of Italian I have, is cognate with the Romanian word. As for the 'fut'/fuck compare futuere in Latin. Nishidani (talk) 20:12, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

1RR violation

In this edit [4] you restored "It closely coordinates with the Israeli government." to the lead, after it was removed here by User: 11Fox11- [5]. Coupled with this revert, you've broken 1RR on the article, so please undo your latest. Inf-in MD (talk) 16:35, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I'll take your word for it, and revert, taking out the perfectly self-evident

It closely coordinates with the Israeli government, Danny Ayalon regarding it as a key US asset for the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. <ref name="Guttman" />

But 11Fox11's removal, now that I examine editors who worked the page before me, is nonsense. That the said organization works in close coordination with the Israeli government is attested in numerous reliable sources as a fact. Nishidani (talk) 17:10, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

It is still in the body in the criticism section, in the end the lead will have to have criticism in it because the criticism section keeps getting larger and it is a policy requirement as Nableezy and I have both pointed out. No hurry.Selfstudier (talk) 17:17, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Labour party conference

Idk if you saw it but quite a stiff resolution passed, referring to "ongoing Nakba" as well as apartheid. Labour has to get elected for it make much difference but still.Selfstudier (talk) 15:37, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Update, here's a link with the text

PS https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-flying-palestinian-flags-is-not-illegal-jerusalem-court-confirms-1.10244189 Maybe stop some of the abuse. Selfstudier (talk) 15:37, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. That's a turn-up for the books. I must be getting complacently pessimistic, since I thought discourse in the UK on that area of grossly entrenched human rights abuse had irremediably followed the American model, where talking about the obvious is all but impossible politically. If that inane drift continued, a decade or so down the line we'd end up with the paradoxical situation of Israel being the only nation whose press and public could, as they continue to do, discuss Palestinian grievances. As to the flag case, the oddity was that the law of Israel was applied to Sheikh Jarrah as if that formed part of Israel.Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Reciting on a morning walk the other day (while thinking of an AE case fatuously on the boil at the moment, one of those endless attempts to silence the obvious by twisting what people say, as happened more notably with a decent (questions of competence aside) man like Corbyn) Kipling's If, when I came to the lines:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

I mused on how spinning as antisemitic a universalist plea for decency fitted the passage perfectly. It's a recycled version of McCarthyism. Nishidani (talk) 16:56, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

May they fly their flag in their own state soon, peacefully; and roasted chicken fly into my mouth while laying on a golden beach. Anyway, some Palestinians prefer a different flag, and some Israeli soldiers miss the irony of it. Arminden (talk) 14:25, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

It won't happen, pal. The Nakba was the Palestinians' Bar Kochba and they'll have to get used to diaspora existence. It made Jews what they are, and with imitative tenacity, it might eventually forge Palestinians into the kind of creative minority civilisations need to prick the conscience of the ethnicizing nations hosting them.

Back in Australia in 2011, at a mate's place just behind the dunes on a lonely stretch of ninety-mile beach, we woke up from our hangovers and thought we'd do well to forage for some supplies for the next few days onslaught on the liver, and drove to the nearest town, chatting and slanging each other merrily. As we drove in, all of us, 5 fell silent (60 year oldsters) Around the main store all these teenagers were girded in Australian flags. Nothing said, we went in and got a swag of booze and tucker (food) and drove back. As we drew off, we all starting saying the same thing. It was Australia Day, but none of us in our 200 years of experience had ever associated that with flying the flag or wrapping oneself in it and then hanging around publicly. It was, well, shocking, distasteful, to wear one's native love of one's country on one's sleeve. That was a very private thing for all of us, and regarded as an 'Americanism', brash, a politicization of intimate pride. mBut then again, my generation is a cultural dinosaur, on the brink of extinction.Nishidani (talk) 14:46, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Was going to reply to Selfstudier's original post here, but meanwhile a few things on my mind. The good news is that I'm finally getting my hernia fixed, the surgery is scheduled for Saturday. Beginning to get a bit nervous about it, as it's an operation under general anaesthetic, and since I'm a dinosaur like you they want to keep me in overnight, which is fine by me in case there are any complications (it takes 90mins to get to the hospital from here). Gave a COVID test sample this morning, and I'm under strict instructions to self-isolate till Saturday. The backlog due to ops being cancelled because of COVID means I've had to wait about 5 months longer than normal, during which time the hernia has got a lot bigger (no pain at all, fortunately). Better late than never. Anyway, back to Selfstudier's point. Yes, it's good that the motion passed, but I doubt it will ever be implemented. The right wing of the Labour Party has total control of the party bureaucracy, and is using it to purge the "left" (really quite moderate social democrats). They have no shame in ignoring their own rules, and if they're (a) still in control of the party and (b) get elected, they will simply ignore the motion, like they've ignored many other rules. These rule breaches are certain to be challenged in the courts, which might provide some good news. The worst thing is David Evans being confirmed in his post – again they had to rig the vote to achieve this result. It's astonishing how vicious and ruthless they are, and they aren't going to give up. I think the Labour Party is now on a knife-edge, and it is quite possible it could meet the same fate as the Liberal Party did at the beginning of the 20th century. I wouldn't have thought that a year ago, but it's inevitable if the right-wing continue what they're doing. See the two links to Ken Loach that I recently posted on my talk page. I can't find any fault in what he has to say. --NSH001 (talk) 16:24, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't think you need auguries for that type of operation, but I'll be thinking positive thoughts about it and your speedy restoration to normal health on Saturday.

The Labour Party is fucked. To get power the power brokers and shills argue that they have to bury a century long tradition which still has strong roots in the population, less so among the assorted schemers, careerists, dickheads, brownnosers, wanking policywonks and lipservers that have hijacked the bureaucracy. It seems a fatal tendency of Western social democracy. I'm sure books will start to come out in a decade which talk about the extraordinary wave of barefaced conmanship and foreign meddling which more or less used the 'any criticism of Israel's occupation is antisemitic' to derail a long tradition, both philosemitic and yet sensitive to the universal claims of human rights. Everyone who abetted that was involved in a rerun of McCarthyism and made one's 'attitude to Jews qua Israel' a core issue in British left politics, as the right, with its natural anti-Semitism or lipservice, nicely sailed under the radar. The petty purging going on looks will probably generate, from resentment at the principles behind this preposterous ostracizing toe-the-linism, a real upsurge in the (pseudo-)anti-Semitism it is putatively designed to root out. And the real insanity of this campaign within Labour's ranks is underlined by the apparent fact that Jewish socialists are, according to Ken Loach, four times more likely to suffer expulsion from the Labour Party than non-Jewish members - all in the name of ridding it of anti-Semitism! Jeezus! The idiocy of brandishing as a factional identity in a party a group like '(Labour) Friends of Israel' is never mentioned. No political party should have factions that pronounced themselves Friends of foreign countries, China, Russia, the US or whoever etc. In politics there are no such friends whose partisan interests and connections must trump the national interest. Proverbial political wisdom stated the opposite. One's country's interests by definition can never coincide with those of a competing foreign state. Palestine is never mentioned here either whereas Israel gets more coverage than most Eu countries. The one exception was the magnificent Yiddish theatre director Moni Ovadia a few night back who, asked about Afghanistan's treatment of women replied: 'Sure, as we should complain, but we don't deplore Turkish abuse of Kurds, Israel's of Palestinians etc.' He can say that because he is Jewish to the core and inimitably Italian to boot. Some of that pressure can be seen slowly seeping in here. In September alone, Huldra, then Iskander, then ZScarpia, now Selfstudier (30 September) and now imminently Nableezy (October 1. wow! Well done guys. In 1 month admins have seriously mulled taking out 4 of of the most constructive I/P editors with a collective 60 years of work and experience, on the basis of reports of several 'new' editors with around 3000 edits up) hauled before AE with newbie accounts of non-performers, mostly, apart from 5 old sock accounts, who suddenly crawl over the 500 bar suddenly jumping in to 'opine' for sanctions, as they are all doing in the attempt to rid Wikipedia of CounterPunch. It's a pattern, obvious to the attentive eye, and, this time intelligently, slowly white-ants the foundations of neutrality by incremental attacks on one issue after another, whose basso ostinato is that country's right not to be criticized. I won't lose sleep over it since it's not a puzzle.Nishidani (talk) 20:12, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Hernias are things that come out when they'd better stay in, so a sign of youthfulness. Nichtsdestotrotz (what a wonderful mouthfull!), get it over and done with and be back in your giardino & taverna before they even notice you were gone. We'll try and keep the place warm (not the shoes, nobody here is so conceited as to try that trick). Arminden (talk) 23:12, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Damn it. My flawed indentation made the remark about health appear to be a quote from Neil directed at me, my technical guardian angel for over a decade here. I'm sure you'll not mind if I redirect your very kind augury over to him. The only twinge I've suffered recently that told me I'd better accept my age and not behave as though I were 20 years younger occurred a month back when, on request, I flipped myself up against a wall in the pub, and, head to the floorboard, put one hand on my stomach, and, with the other, grabbed a glass of beer and skulled it to show unbelievers one can drink upsidedown, and that Newton's laws of gravity are thereby proven to have a startling exception. Wheeling myself back to my feet, I felt a slight twinge in a dorsal muscle. Hmm. 'Act your age, old fool'. I thought. By the way, talking about Balkan Jewish culture, you might like try to catch what you can of Moni Ovadia's Oylem Goylem performance here. No doubt that tradition of Yiddish theatres thrives in Israel, but Ovadia manages to keep its traditions brilliantly alive for a continent which committed suicide in trying to rid itself of one of its great traditions (some jokes on the slur about Jewish financial one-upmanship begin around 5.30 minutes in, though in rapid fire Italian). And of course, if you, or N, feel a recuperative need for Italian air and food some time in the future, the mezuzah on my door lies close to a 'Welcome' sign. Cheers A.Nishidani (talk) 08:42, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Expecting to see you hale and hearty in short order, cruzar los dedos:)Selfstudier (talk) 00:30, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind wishes, S. I have some idea what to expect, since I had a hernia fixed on the other side, several years ago. No pain at all if you don't move, but as soon as you move, agonising pain. That stage lasts about 2 days. Pain then gradually reduces over about a week. I was warned not to do any exercise for a week, but it took longer than that before I was able to return to the gym. But there are some differences from last time: (a) I have more confidence in this surgeon than the one who did it last time; (b) this time they're using laparoscopic surgery instead of the crude, old-fashioned method; but (c) the hernia is about 4 times bigger because of the COVID delay. So we shall see. --NSH001 (talk) 06:02, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

update: I've just had a phone call from the hospital. For some reason, the surgeon is unable to operate tomorrow, so it's been put back to Sunday, and I'll still be around here till then. --NSH001 (talk) 16:14, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

(till then) . .and after, of course. Auguri.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Best wishes Neil!     ←   ZScarpia   22:06, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

October 2021

Hello, I'm Levivich. I noticed that you made a comment on the page Talk:StandWithUs that didn't seem very civil, so it may have been removed. Wikipedia is built on collaboration, so it's one of our core principles to interact with one another in a polite and respectful manner. If you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. I've previously posted messages on your user talk page about this in Nov 2020, Jan 2021, and March 2021. Today, in our first content dispute in a long time, you again made ad hominem attacks, writing Look. Could you try to be less predictable in always siding with a pro-Israeli viewpoint. I commend your equyable manners, but if you want your judgment to be considered neutral, of admin quality, you should takle some distance from the topic. Thank you for commending my equable manners; please also employ equable manners by commenting on edits, not editors. It's not true that I always take the pro-Israeli viewpoint, and I shouldn't have to tolerate your accusations to the contrary. Also, I don't care if you consider my judgment to be neutral, or what your opinion is of me. I'm not going to remove this comment (or respond to it at the article talk page), but I do care that you please stop making ad hominem attacks on article talk pages, and so if you choose to remove your comment, that would be appreciated. Levivich 22:42, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't follow you, but only read what you write when, rarely, I encounter you on arbitration pages of various kinds. In general, you are a gifted and sedulously attentive analyst. I think it collegial to say I don't find this gift apparent when you edit this particular area. It's not an attack. I wish the detachment and care you show in other areas were visible also there, since it requires, what it so lacks, good neutral administrative-type judgments. I was highly disconcerted that you thought it necessary to devote what appears to be several hours to gather evidence and intervene against Zscarpia, one of whose edits I found, when I read the evidence, careless but in context an illustration of Horace's noted dictum: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. He perhaps allowed his usual detachment to be exasperated on being classified off line as one of the gang of 'anti-Semitic terrorists' on Wikipedia. All that was needed was to tell him to be more careful, and pull his finger out.

Zscarpia has been on wikipedia for almost 16 years. He has never been blocked,-I can’t eve n recall him being reported. He has worked 989 pages, with over 10,000 edits. He is, I gather, timid, with a strong dislike for disputatiousness. We don’t interact much so this is just my impression (I know of several naturally patriotic pro-Israeli and pro-Palestine editors, all very meticulous, who regard the I/P area as fascinating, but a timesink and deathtrap for editors less thick-skinned than people like myself, and so avoid it, to wiki’s loss) You chose to intervene, ignored the fact that his lapse is one small slip-up in 16 years of service, and came down like a hammer on him].A newbie User:Ozmulik, with a spare 90 edits since January, hence in violation of ARBPIA3, today posted that Professor David Miller had made 'multiple antisemitic comments'. And did so on a page which is apparently on your watchlist, i.e.StandWithUs which is a rightwing hasbara outfit. This is of course not a fact, but a claim. Why did you think this neither here nor there as a BLP violation (you watch the page) but devoted hours to making a case against ZScarpia for an identical BLP violation? You don't need to reply of course, but I notice things like that: the difference between what editors note and what the same editors ignore, when the issue is identical. Nishidani (talk) 16:06, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Just as a final note. I notice no one has taken up the 'pro-Israeli' BLP violation by Ozmulik on the StandWithUs page though it stands out like dog's balls. On pages like that, such violations, if someone identified with a non 'pro-Israeli' editing profile is associated with them, almost automatically go to AE. I think going ballistic at AE and ANI over things that can be sorted out easily too often lends itself to suspicions of gaming or sidedness, and one should make every effort to avoid such implications, and have therefore notified the editor to remove it. I will give them a day, and report it at the BLP page if the editor refuses to revert himself. That is the simple, unharassing, gentlewoman's way of making this place workable, collaborative. No drama. Nishidani (talk) 09:51, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Exciting news!

[6] Zero^talk 12:57, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Well, spare me daze! Stone the crows! I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!

Reminds me that fascists or nostalgics for a differently dysfunctional Italy often used to tell me, as I mentioned I was off to take a dip in the area of Sabaudia, that one of the mountains there miraculously showed Mussolini’s face in profile, advising me with religious fervour to throw a shufti at this eighth marvel of the world. Always ruined their meme by telling them the story arose probably because Mussolini settled a lot of folks from the north in that area, and they probably knew that a sculptor actually carved his dial off the rockface of Pietralata at the Furlo Pass way up north on the Adriatic side of the country back in 1936, after which they saw the duce’s mug all over the Italian landscape.Nishidani (talk) 14:06, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

The great Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli worked that yarn twice. Strine versions would run more or less like these two

861 Nowuz's ark

Elafents, fleas, lions an cats,
Sheep, wolves, dogs, birds, hares,
Flies, foxes, hens, stallyuns, bears,
Heffers, pigs, mokes, an rats.

Cheese, scraps a meat, melon peel,
Corncobs, bones, bran, chickenfeed,
Clover, branmash fa swill, an birdseed,
Hay, wirms, n’diced harts f'r the owls' meal.

All these things, an lots I can' fid in
Were put t’gether inside a Nowuz's ark
Then the hand a God closed the lod in.

F'ra year or so it floaded abowt, that barque!
How'd they cope with that hodgepodge, the shit 'n din?
Well, folks, go’n ask tha goodly Patriyark.Nishidani (talk) 14:25, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

(2) Er diluvio univerzale 928 The Flood

God sed ta Nowah: "Lissen, Patriyark
Yu an ya boys ged an axe an apply
Yaselves ta this sketch a mine f'ra barque,
An bild it this long, this narrer an this hi.

Then nail on a roof, an cuvver the boat
Jus' like the pontoon at the Tiber port;
Wunce yu've tarred it, travel the wirld an rope
In the anamals: bord ev'rywun yu've cort.

Then the wirld'ull be soaked by a Flood thad'ull slue
Down so hard Tivoli's warderfall'ull seem
No more by cumparison than a pee in the loo.

Then when ya catch site uva rainbow, relax.
Thad'ull be the moment, Nowah, ta slip down a beam,
Sweep up the mud, an start sowen the paddocks.Nishidani (talk) 14:41, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

All fixed up?

I want to say "How's it hanging?" but I don't think I should:) Selfstudier (talk) 12:52, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Well, though a regular beer drinker, I nonetheless to date have no signs of suffering from 'brewer's droop'. By the way, there was this chap who went to a public lavatory and was disconcerted to observe a fellow apparently fiddling endlessly with his tackle at the porcelain wall urinal. He was tempted to report him for obscenity in public, but due civility demanded he remonstrate first.'Hey, what on earth are you doing! Playing with yourself in public?' The other chap replied: 'Oh dear, yes, excuse me. I can give that impression. Problem is, I'm somewhat underendowed in that department, and have a bit of a struggle to find it before I pee.' 'Oh, good grief, I apologize for my absurd suspicion.' 'Oh, no worries. Your misapprehension was understandable.' Intrigued, the observer probed. 'This may be indelicate, but just out of curiosity, do you have children?' 'Oh sure, two fine kids.' 'Oh, wonderful. Um., but, with this particular difficulty, isn't it a tad difficult in regard to, uh, conjugal duties? Tell me to get to buggery if I've overstepped the line.' The chap with the diminutive weenie replied: 'Ah mate. No worries in that department. When we make love, there are two of us that go looking for my, as my wife calls it, leprechaun, my, uh, bald headed gentleman, and, it's not really that hard to ferret him out, esp. because he doubles in size on those occasions.'Nishidani (talk) 14:42, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Civility reminder

In your comment on the BDS talk page, you made a couple of statements which I found a bit troubling. These are just suggestions.

• "the editor falsified the text ... Source falsification like that actually is sanctionable."

This reads a bit like it might be a threat, and if you had concerns about my actions a better place to discuss them might have been my talk page.

• "You twisted the text deliberately to make it say what it nowhere states."

This comment accuses me of nefarious intentions, instead of assuming good faith. Just a reminder to please try to keep things civil.

-- Bob drobbs (talk) 00:50, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

It's more incompetence, intended or not is beyond me. When I protested that your two attempts to rewrite the text distorted the source, you admitted that you had made a mistake in choosing the word "some". 'It was not intentional. And it has been fixed.' Your 'fix' then created another distortion. And then, when that was pointed out, you erased the source in question. You then implied my use of the word 'smear' falsified the text, since it is not there. That was hilarious, trying to turn the tables. As I pointed out, the text uses 'slur' and 'malign' and in paraphrase one distances oneself from the ipsissima words of the source for copyright reasons. You must have known 'slur' and 'malign' are precise synonyms for 'smear', but the attritional game of nitpicking to death and argufying for hours on a very simple issue of precise reading is typical of WP:Bludgeon, which is uncivil in its massive extortion of editors' time to extract a 'compromise' between the obvious position, and an extreme position that simply refuses to acknowledge what a source clearly affirms. Go to the WR:OR board: that talk page has exhausted our exchanges so as you entertain a minority view, seek outside neutral input if you remain unconvinced.Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Continuing this thread because I saw implied threats you made against another user, and it seems concerning. I saw the discussion in the BLP noticeboard, and your comments on User_talk:OzMulik talk page, and have some concerns.

It seems inappropriate for you to unilaterally declare that OzMulik is guilty of a violation and that unless he undoes his changes it will "will cause [him] to be sanctioned". It especially seems troubling because it turns out you were the one who was wrong, the BLP noticeboard disagreed with you, and your threat was without merit.

Threats like these seem like they might have a chilling effect on new users and chase them away, and I don't want to accuse you of bad faith, but I can't help but note that his politics happen to disagree with your own. It could be good idea for you to leave him a note saying you were wrong and he's fine.

So another reminder to please be CIVIL and WELCOME new users who have fewer edits than you. -- Bob drobbs (talk) 21:04, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Bob, this is beginning to look like harassment or a fishing expedition to make a report. Apropos threats you made this one. Now I asked you below to address me on the relevant talk pages, and you ignore that as well. Kindly do me the courtesy of raising whatever issues you have on the various talk pages, and desist from worrying this page. Thank you. Nishidani (talk) 21:11, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Just a FYI. Selfstudier gave me the exact opposite advice and said that any criticism and suggestions should be given here, on your talk page. -- Bob drobbs (talk) 21:17, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Technically this is called trolling, a cheeky come-back when you have been told to desist. Are you enjoying this? I wrote my request after Selfstudier's suggestion. Do you understand the consequence of sequence? Now, that's a good chap. Disappear from this page (a Blaise Pascalian chiquenaude offline accompanies this magical incantation). Nishidani (talk) 21:33, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm not trolling. Here's the advice that Selfstudier gave me on my talk page:

You do what I just did and raise your concerns at the user's talk page.

-- Bob drobbs (talk) 22:35, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

That is the third time you have ignored my suggestion to stop dropping remarks here. That is trolling, and a violation of our harassment policies. Your trolling consists also in ignoring time stamps. Selfstudier told you that yesterday 22:30, 5 October 2021. As above. I told you a day later to desist from using this page, and used the word sequence. This refusal to grasp what is said, or focus on what you are told, is trolling, and it retrospectively characterizes your edits over the past few days. Now, don't come here again, or I will report you for harassment, of my right also to read The Adventures of Augie March , which bored me stiff last night, but, compared to this tripe, now looks dazzling. Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

I disagreed with Nishidani at BLPN but his interpretation of BLPTALK was clearly a good-faith one, with the intention being to avoid harm to living persons. This is a pet peeve of mine: please don’t use “threats” to refer to mentions of low-stakes administrative action on Wikipedia. We get enough real life, actual threats. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 21:29, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Dispute resolution - HRW and Goldstein

Our disagreement about Goldstein's opinions and whether or not you've engaged in WP:OR seem intractable.

As such, I've filed an entry in the dispute resolution noticeboard.

Please share your thoughts there.

-- Bob drobbs (talk) 16:51, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

---

@Nishidani: I'm really sorry to see that you rejected outside input in the DSN. Our disagreement over the text span three different issues:

• Did you correctly summarize Goldstein?
• Did your text violate WP:SYNTH?
• What is acceptable attribution?

So I ask you respectfully to please allow a discussion to go forth in the DSN, because it encompasses more than just a WP:OR question. -- Bob drobbs (talk) 18:08, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

No, it isn't. A WP:Synth suspicion goes to the WP:OR board. If you think my judgment is so flawed, that I cannot understand policy, then it is pointless in arguing further. As it is pointless for me to argue with you since I don't believe you understand how to paraphrase a simple statement. The problem in my view is WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT. I was consistenly Ist in my class almost 60 years ago for précis. I don't think I've lost that talent, having used it professionally for more than a half a century. Of course I can fuck up, but objections over 85,000 edits to my ability in this regard have been extremely rare, and I have summed up, it must be, over a thousand books and articles. Nishidani (talk) 18:46, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

@Nishidani: Really not my first choice, but per your request I've created a new entry in the OR noticeboard. -- Bob drobbs (talk) 20:14, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

That is the third time you have ignored my suggestion to stop dropping here. That is trolling. Trolling consists also in ignoring time stamps. Selfstudier told you that yesterday 22:30, 5 October 2021. As above. I told you a day later to desist from using this page, and used the word 'sequence'. This refusal to grasp what is said, or focus on what you are told, is trolling. Now, don't come here again, or I will report you for harassment, of my right also to read The Adventures of Augie March , which bored me stiff last night, but, compared to this tripe, now looks dazzling. Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Stop pinging me here, and also on the BDS page. It is clear I have bookmarked it. Nishidani (talk) 20:16, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Nomination of Israeli occupation of the West Bank for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Israeli occupation of the West Bank is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Israeli occupation of the West Bank until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by E.M.Gregory (talk • contribs) 15:32, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	...and for you my friend, I give you the Barnstar of Good humor. Sure editing Israel-Palestine page is exhaustive but you still showcased humor, and that at the end of the day we are all just humans... tada enjoy your barnstar (and who knows, maybe one day small steps like these may actually leads to peace) LostCitrationHunter (talk) 09:20, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd be happy to accept this if you cast your net a little wider, and caught some excellent editors with a different orientation to my own, let's say on the other side of the POV wall, whose sense of humour and irony is evidenced, even in exchanges on this page, were likewise awarded. Otherwise it would appear to be partisan. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:40, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Shav Vahini Ganga

Hi Nishi. Doing well ? See Draft:Shav Vahini Ganga, a Gujarati poem. I wanted to nominate it for GA, if possible. Thanks. --Gazal world (talk) 16:53, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do shortly. Keep up the good work. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 07:41, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Cæsarea Philippi

I think the Arbpia warning is not on the talk page and there is no edit notice either (it is on the Banias page). Do you think it should be added being a primarily historical article? Or I could put the partial one? Selfstudier (talk) 11:06, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Probably a partial one, though I'm not a specialist, so my opinion's not worth a brass razoo. Technically, by the way, Supreme Del's revert of Gilabrand's edits was correct formally. But she is a first rate copyeditor and in these cases, one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater, but rather, while reverting, retain some of the corrections someone like her made in the contested edit. Some of the fatigue/nuisance that plagues the area could be attenuated if we all try to exercise commonsense, rather than make automatic reverts.Nishidani (talk) 12:18, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

K, I'll do that then.Selfstudier (talk) 12:20, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Just a Nestorian aftermath to my note on the other page

In my phoneyillogical crack, I was of course ironically alluding to the jüdische Geschwätzigkeit spouted by the usual myrmidon suspects, but, as a collector of books on national stereotypes, a life-long reading in the genre impresses me with the insight that any negative or positive adjective/substantive can be used of virtually any people. To seize on just that word illustratively. The Germans themselves or generally Nordic stock were thought garrulous, for example, as opposed to say the French or the Italians, who were thought garrulous in a different manner. Even my forebears, the Irish were not immune to put-downs of this particular kind. Even the Japanese, who entertain a major self-image as taciturn, struck several Meiji foreigners as garrulous, an impression one might be tempted to endorse if you watch too many of their TV shows (as anywhere, for that matter/mutter/Muttersprache). The point of this Shandyean digression being that prejudice by outsiders works on a very sorry stock of simplifying terms of approval and disapprobation that only tell us something about those who use them. 'Jewish' before any noun, if used by an outsider, naturally alerts one to possible prejudice in the shady wings of conversation, but cognitively, among Jews, the same set of terms is often greeted with a knowing nod (as if it were true, in that context) Nonetheless, one does well to put one's self in another ethnic boots, or on another set of stilts, and see how this works with 'German', 'English','Chinese', 'Russian' (and any other ethnos). The results are surprisingly similar, though none of the others wear the particular burden of having the antennae fine-tuned to the kind of ethnophobic niggling that, in the longue durée, has afflicted prophylactically an awareness of being 'Jewish'. Many studies of anti-Semitism lack this comparativist dimension, producing a sense that, in every instance, being singled out for stereotyping is singular, or unique to Jews. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:29, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

​Sorry for being so simplistic in my comments and even overlooking a fine irony-by-reversal. Wikipedia pedantry seems to exacerbate my own, to the serious detriment of my humour perception. Half sad, half funny. Anyway, that masseba/matzevah story is just the latest example of my banal struggle with the English spelling of Hebrew words and place-names: what's "right" nowadays, between the influence of German and Yiddish (tz/z), strictly Yiddish (ei, ey), and lately English (ts), on top of the switch in the context of Biblical Hebrew from b to v (Strong's abib and today's aviv). David does readily have all the answers of a Tanakh scholar who went through a solid modern education, but I don't know him well enough to appreciate how well he can offer the view from outside the fonderia.

In Romania the degree of verbosity is supposedly a direct function of the region you're from. Seen from a German perspective though, all Romanians, with no exception, seem to always shout at each other, so that Germans constantly expect them to exchange blows when they're just having a friendly chat. As they say, "mămăliga nu explodează", polenta doesn't blow up, even if it constantly burbles. Some add to that, "dar şi cînd explodează!", but (hold on well) when it does blow up! In other words, people here shouldn't take my verbal belligerency all too seriously either. Not most of the time. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 15:25, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

When guests from several countries met my Italian relatives over lunch or dinner, they would frequently interrupt the conversation to ask me what the Italians were squabbling or upset about. Many conversations struck them as verging on WW3. They were relieved to find out that the Italian contingent were talking about their children or recipes amicably .:) Nishidani (talk) 16:01, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Q.E.D.! Unless one drops in the cliché of Latins & their ways. Arminden (talk) 16:19, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

And top that, subversively, by noting all of the perceived differences between, or sterotypes associated with, Lombards,Piedmontese,Venetians, Sardinians, Tuscans, Marchegiani, Neapolitans, Calabrians, Sicilians, Romans, each having distinct dialects, cuisine,etc., Until recent times, you could travel through 4 villages within a radius of 15 miles and listen to 4 dialects that were almost mutually incomprehensible, and each with a resolute sense of being different from the others. In the village where I summer in, their dialect had three versions,- upper, middle, lower -according to hillside location and socio etc.economic function. Now a dozen languages are spoken by immigrants from China, India,Morocco, Nigeria. Nations are a fiction, with some real legal powers, as are the identities attached to them.Nishidani (talk) 17:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

​I guess it is, like any extension of oneself - family, clan, tribe, circle of friends... If kept on a rational level, it goes into how important it is to have and preserve the cultural environment one needs in order to feel at ease, which includes certain aspects of nature, one's main language, a way of expressing emotions, the sense of humour, food, artistic expression, memories and so on. Every single thinking person must at some point at least ask oneself how much they'd be willing to sacrifice for obtaining or preserving that kind of comfort, or how well they can live without it. There will always be many more or less concentric layers, humanity not even being the largest one. I don't believe such questions have a single, ultimate answer, like this or that major concept being but a fiction. It has been said about love, family... almost anything; in some cases science can refute or support such a claim, in others less so, in my view. It can work better for some than for others, for some a radical change of environment can mean torment and even life cut short by many years, or loss of meaning. I have little use and patience for patriotic symbols and ceremonies, even myths, but I do have affinities and a sense of gaining or losing life quality if parts of the natural or cultural environment I feel closer to are replaced by foreign ones. One can be more at home in his class, among people with a similar education and values, no matter where they come from, but those won't ever be one's only affinities. To feel understood, to communicate a bit more effortlessly, one needs varying degrees of things familiar. Those things belong to a wider universe than one can carry around with him, like an inner backpack – but it still is a limited and defined universe. If some call it nation, it's their choice of words, but whatever you call it, it's more than fiction. Unless everything human is either physiology or fiction. My two pennies. Variety is great, and I'll always try to walk behind the immediate horizon and hang out among new people and look if I can find there what I cannot find at home, whatever home means; but if I go too far, I feel the pull and if I have the luck to hava a home to come back to, I'll be happy to be back. At least for a while. Arminden (talk) 01:45, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not repudiating myths. Indeed, to the contrary, I live by them. Some of the most important events in my life occurred because of the way I read what I experience in terms of them: when my new companion and I glanced at a poster mentioning the Aeneid, and she expressed an interest, I burst forth on an impromptu disquisition at the corner of Piazza Venezia while we awaited a No.46 bus, underlining my then strong dislike of Vergil's epic. I noticed how at one point, her eyes sparkled. Analysing this some months later, when in Australia, I realized that she had intuited something in my abstract critique of the book, and I managed to elicit the subtext, which I wasn't quite aware of, namely, that my outburst jumped on a core myth of the Aeneid that bore an analogy to my situation at that time. My future Lavinia turned out to be a reality far more congruent with my own deepest self than Dido, not a fallback, as it is in Vergil's text. This mode of reasoning has been with me since I was exposed to Biblical stories and Greek myths from an early age. I've been out all morning, but your concentric circles image urges greater reflection, since it spurred a cascade of memories, the first of which was this. I heard a knocking on my door in my digs in Osaka as I was reading Lévi-Strauss (a volume which a girl there thought was a history of jeans). Opening it, I found five Papuan fellows, looking tense, asking if I was, as someone had told them, an Australian. 'Geez. Yu blokes look like yu'd relish a stubbie or two, eh! Come in.' The anxieties on all five faces dissolved, as they herded into my cramped quarters smiling. They were scholarship lads on a technical training course, and were all at sea in this oriental world, unable to communicate with anyone. The mere sound of a broad Aussie accent, more or less similar to theirs, made them feel suddenly anchored in friendly waters. I always thought of Australians in New Guinea as colonial arseholes. For them, it was the accent of their home, since they all had different tribal backgrounds, and used it as the default language among themselves.Nishidani (talk) 13:22, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Age kills off so much of anyone's Heimat. How much more can one allow himself to lose? I will probably never know what needs to happen for me to go to war for it, but that's my conflict; others sit more comfortably within themselves. People with stricter and shorter self-definitions, maybe. Or even complex ones, but with a closed end. We all need a Heimat, be it just one person. Whatever has that kind of stringency is far above fiction. Hell is not just the others, hell is not having a Heimat. Which might be the same, as it throws you totally among the others, but it has its distinctly own shape. Arminden (talk) 13:46, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Good grief! Hi mate. . .that untranslatable 'Heimat' evokes so much that passes beyond the reach of English, esp. for its vast philosophical and literary resonances, (we all immediately twig to the whispering shade of Nietzsche with his:' Als Zarathustra dreissig Jahr alt war, verliess er seine Heimat und den See seiner Heimat und ging in das Gebirge. Hier genoss er seines Geistes und seiner Einsamkeit und wurde dessen zehn Jahre nicht müde). I don't think of loss, but aggregation, when thinking of Heimat or identity. With age I increasingly feel a stranger in the country I grew up in, like a revivified fossil lumbering past his Jurassic period of extinction. If I recite Ian Mudie's They'll Tell You About Me there, most people a generation younger than I scrabble to catch the allusions which everyone knew when I grew up. I'm not questioning love of one's country: I love mine (but the 'mine' is, by now, several). Heimat in the sense you use it, I too have. It is not a geophysical reality, but a landscape of memory I dwell in, but not as in the early stages of mourning, with a sense of the grief of loss, but rather to evoke the beauty humour pathos of a unique, because personal, lived past, which, as Faulkner stated, 'is never dead. It's not even past,' until one passes. You are far richer in this dimension than I - with equal native fluency in at least four languages and cultures which you can call home, in differing senses and degrees. Thank your lucky stars, friend. Nishidani (talk) 16:36, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm thanking them whenever they start blinking. The problem is with losing the firm ground on which to stand. Too many can mean none, makes finding a partner in conversation much harder, and life is a conversation. As you say, time lets the pool increasingly dry out anyway, a perplex expression when one opens up, or even when he says a joke he considers anthological, can easily finish a relationship. Your encounter was possible because Vergilius was not an obstacle, or at least there was an ease there of seeing through the erudition and nailing what was personal behind it. That's hard to find even with a relatively similar upbringing. You can widen your Heimat and gain immensely; the problem starts when that puts you on an island others are not likely to reach, or even look for. Btw, it's some degree of fluency in three languages, out of my own fears or stupidity, but one can improve. I need to like the music before I start to learn an instrument, and that might take too long in my case.

Such a contrast: our chat here about what should be, and Tsar Deadfishovich starting again the traditional mass killing not so far away, making clear how we've misspent the real-world chances of the last 4 centuries or so to take the Cossack, hussar, or any type of cockaded cavalry off their horse. Arminden (talk) 17:07, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Fuck Putain and BidetBiden.

Ōsugi Sakae once wrote, before policde thugs murdered him for his culpability for the Kanto earthquake seismic event, that the evolution of conversation followed a trajectory from long monologues to short dialogues. In the end one stages duologues alone: On se promène, lisant au livre de soi-même. We read , or rather, man historically used to read, because conversation generally in real time is functional to bartering, social grooming, entertainment, killing time, negotiating to advantage to avoid open conflict, asserting one’s honour, etc., and has little to do with the pursuit of intellectual pleasures. 95% of the communicative content in human exchanges, if my memory of a book on sociolinguistics I read in 1965 does not err, is sleeved in the slight tics of body language, and the gaze. And that’s fine. Informed by good manners, careful listening and sparring wit, even such, in computer theory, human noise in the message can prove to be more functional to a decent society than highfalutin conversation itself.

Silent reading changed all that: our interlocutors are mostly in books, the dialogue of the self with other selves as they distil their experience in succinct forms, propositional, philosophical, historical or aesthetic. So, the cultivation of that moribund social art in this venue is not isolating – it’s more devastatingly delusional to write on twitter or social media in the expectation that the world will pause. Real agoric communities are rare, and faute de mieux one must, in their place, create an inner world of discursive robinsonnading. As a boy I immediately recognized the truth worth of what Renan wrote in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse (1883 Nelson/Calmann-Lévy ed) p.282) ‘.On peut être à Paris bien plus seul qu'au fond d'un désert’, a point underlined soon after when I read Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua and encountered there an anecdote. The provost of Oriel, Edward Copleston, on observing the freshman Newman walking out on his own with a somewhat lonely air, reformulated in Church latin a passage from Cicero’s De Republica as a suggestive compliment by murmuring his way:’Numquam minus solus quam cum solus sum.’(Never less alone than when on one’s own.p.16) These phrases of course come back to caress me in recent times, as a solace. At a certain phase in life, a cat or dog becomes the only secure, 'humane' warmth life might withhold from one. And that is good, for however nice civil society might have been, it is tacitly premised in modernity on the extermination of the creaturely world.Nishidani (talk) 23:01, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

​Who said I'm in constant pursuit of intellectual pleasure? I'm not. I'm coming across people who seem to be at different degrees of satisfaction with life who are even much less into that kind of pursuit than me. There are plenty of much more earthly needs, like talking to one's child, or staying in touch with friends one needs or who themselves need a word or a deed. We're all, without even noticing it, fighting our old boxing or chess matches even when a new basketball or backgammon game is being offered. Everybody in the end seems to need a resonant chamber more than they need a dialogue, but not always. I'm still trying to learn my way out, but that's my problem. Have a good night, my friend. Arminden (talk) 00:29, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

‘Intellectual pleasure’ – the sensual awareness of things and how to negotiate our paths through real life routines,-covers the phenomenology of everyday life down to the most recondite crannies of the banal. Let me illustrate. The laconic friend whom I accompanied yesterday as he drove round to have his weekly clinical tests, stopped at the usual spot for a pee. Coming out, he joined me for a smoke, and, as he always remarks, every week, on doing so there, said appreciatively: ’This parking area is really clean.’ And I of course (while he pees I light up and observe the landscape and what’s happening in it) replied: ‘The cleaning lass here is meticulous. She not only keeps the toilets spick and span every hour, but sweeps the whole length of the curve regularly outside.’ Time to move off. I stubbed my fag and went over to a neat bin, with its ashtray, and dropped the butt there. Turning, I saw him flick his onto the asphalt before getting back into the car.’ Clearly, he doesn’t ‘listen’, to others, or to himself.

A grandfather who picks up his grandson from school everyday always stops over at the bar on his walk with him homewards. He grumbles as he sips a coffee, despite his extreme protectiveness for the child, that the boy is bright but disattentive at school, hyperactive, vocal only when talking of new toys to replace the ones he has, but otherwise constantly practicing with his skateboard in the square, or breaking things at home. One notes that the younger boy is the cynosure of all attention, that the daily excursion to school with the elder boy requires grandpa to also take the youngest in a pram. One makes hypotheses. Is there a link between the fussiness that everyone sheds on the baby and the first grandson’s behavior?. If so, how can a mere friend help out without intrusively meddling in what is a family manner. Invent a casual wordgame for English vocab to describe a skateboard etc. Then over a month, slowly apprize his quick response to new words, and suggest he’ll be so good than he can become his younger brother’s teacher, since he is the grown-up. Just a chancy unobtrusive way of trying to mend a young manner without obviously wanting to barge into what is a family’s private life. Recently, I noticed that he’s become proud of taking over from his grandfather by pushing his brother’s pram. A lot of practical life requires the same intensity of abstract thinking one uses to master an intellectual discipline, but leaves no dour odour of the lucubrations involved.Nishidani (talk) 13:51, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Beautiful. Note to self: move back out of the cave. Arminden (talk) 14:36, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

​If the guy below does indeed do me the favour and helps me quit this "toxic relationship" I got myself into, Wikimania, and if you want to keep up the chat - a line once in a while -, Zero has my email. Attempting "suicide by cop", since I don't manage otherwise. Some people I really don't care sharing the same space with, that's the other upside of it. Take good care mate, Arminden (talk) 22:55, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

G'luck wit dat!

https://www.rt.com/news/530204-idf-soldier-sues-ben-jerrys/ (I know it's deprecated but you have to laugh).Selfstudier (talk) 17:18, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Made my night (Anna Kiesenhofer's magnificent strategy and the victory in the woman's road race outside Tokyo made my day - the front-runners all let her go off thinking she'd suffer burn out so they complacently hung back to conserve their energies in a herd mentality peloton that had them all watching each other, unaware she hadn't dropped out from heat exhaustion, but kept her advantage for 40kms), thanks. Pity we can't put that into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, in a hypothetical section for NPOV balance, documenting the profound existential stresses caused (blame them Pallies) by having to rule another people (without one's fav icecream to lick as you lick them). Ahimé. From any outsider's perspective and I would think that includes many Israelis', there always has been something utterly surreal about 'over there'. Nishidani (talk) 21:03, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Selfstudier (fact following The Onion's fiction). IDF patrols also have to wait until they're back across the Green Line if they want a Big Mac.[7][8] A more serious bit of lawfare was at least partly responsible for Airbnb reversing its decision not to carry West Bank listings (it's interesting that the soldier's mother who is suing is a lawyer specializing in class action suits).[9] Extra editor points if you manage to spot accusations that B&J's is "delegitimiz[ing] the Jewish presence in the West Bank". Heartening news (for me anyway) is that I've come across a "Jewish" business which I think should be supported strongly, the Pink Peacock, a queer, Yiddish, anarchist, pay-what-you-can café in Govanhill in Glasgow which appears to have suffered a bit of heavy-handed police attention.[10]

Nishidani, hope you'll forgive me for once again making free with your user talkpage. It would, I think, be hard to exagerrate the size of the shock the silver medal winner of the cycle road race must have got when she realised that she hadn't won. One of the curiosities of the race is that part of the reason for the upset is being put down to the Dutch riders, who were individual competitors, not a team, not co-operating with each other.[11]

    ←   ZScarpia   12:20, 26 July 2021 (UTC) (... Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid writing on Twitter about the decision of Ben and Jerry's not to trade in the West Bank: "Over 30 states in the United States have passed anti-BDS legislation in recent years. I plan on asking each of them to enforce these laws against Ben & Jerry's. They will not treat the State of Israel like this without a response."[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19])

Just an update re Big Macs above. You guys seem to follow this stuff more closely than I manage, So the MacDonald Corporation's refusal to sell in the West Bank, identical to Ben & Jerry's, has not met with the same venom.

• Jonathan Ofir, How Ben & Jerry’s got on Israel’s ‘terrorism’ radar, and McDonald’s didn’t Mondoweiss 2 August 2021
• Jacob Magid, “How McDonald’s took the same stance as Ben & Jerry’s but avoided public backlash”. Times of Israel

Unlike a B&J article is made, perhaps some of this material should go to a section of the BDS article (which I rarely look at).Nishidani (talk) 16:08, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm inclined to think Zonszein had a point in suggesting the icecream story was pushed to distract attention from the really serious problem that emerged at that time, namely Israel's cybersecurity exports. Mairav Zonszein Israel Wants to Have Its Ice Cream and Cybersecurity Too New York Times 27 July 2021. The former will probably have an early useby expiry date. In law they don't have a leg to stand on technically, but, more importantly, were states to act on Israel's bidding, that would showcase the occupation and get millions of icecream lickers' interest engaged. Not a good move. Nishidani (talk) 19:57, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

I shouldn't think that the NSO scandal will help Israeli exports of telecommunication equipment and software such as phone billing systems. Presumably, the Israeli government is pressing the UK government to pressurise Unilever, owners of Ben and Jerry's. I'm guessing that you're probably aware of them, but there are a couple of comments on Mairav Zonszein's Twitter feed about the Israeli reaction to Ben and Jerry's divestment decision, including one linking to this Axios article by Barak Ravid.     ←   ZScarpia   01:22, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

No problems with commenting here. I followed the race, teetering for an hour on my chair and worrying that the sheer effort of running solo, having notched up a 2 kilometres advantage, put her at risk of covering the last leg like Dorando Pietri in the 1908 London marathon, i.e. without anything left in her legs. A victory for science and sheer willpower (I kept looking at her back for a water pack, but she seemed to go without). van Vleuten did breast the line looking as though she'd won. The Italian commentators made her out the favourite. Apparently the Dutch team blamed it on the Cool Hand Luke syndrome, as when Strother Martin tells the Paul Newman figure, 'What we got here is a failure to commoonicate.' The curse of broadcasts here is that much of the excellence is lost, as broadcasting focuses on the Italian side, so that women's softball gets more coverage that numerous major tournament finales that lack Italian representatives. Another reason for hating nationalism. Tunisians have performed remarkably well, I cheered Cheung Ka Long' s victory in the men's foils finale, one for Hong Kong, and of course Aron Szilagyi's third gold in the men's sabre finale against our local Luigi Samele. Sportsfans should follow the example of Emil Zatopek (a childhood hero of mine, like Valeriy Brumel. The Hungarian gave one of his own gold medals to Ron Clarke, the greatest runner of his day (his office was just up from my home, and whose brother Jack Clarke played for the Bombers, the football team I supported) who was dogged by bad luck and never won Olympic gold.Nishidani (talk) 13:15, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't know whether it is an intentional distraction or not but my sense is that . many are not that impressed with the Israeli reaction Selfstudier (talk) 09:17, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

One is not many :). That looks like an example of Israeli liberal outrage, the stuff of dinner talk, but won't have much traction. Norbert Wiener somewhere in his 1950 classic wrote that 'the more probable the message, the less information it gives'. That remains true, but these things don't run on 'information' but on clichés, which have a far greater staying power than information in the formation of an outlook or cultural values. In a 'normal' world, connecting the Holocaust to an entrepreneurial decision about icecream franchising would have writers jumping to make Monty Pythonesque skits. But the genre of farce has lost a toehold here, where examples of it proliferate, and in the theatre of observers, if you respond with an hysterical burst of belly-laughing at such absurdist comedy, a thousand eyes are likely to turn your way and stare at the 'idiot' in the crowd.Nishidani (talk) 11:08, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Scoop: Israel launches maximum pressure campaign against Ben & Jerry's "Scoop", lol.:) Selfstudier (talk) 11:15, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Scarpia gave that link above. One could certainly make an article of this: comic relief may have a role even on Wikipedia, but I prefer to take a backseat view and watch the shenanigans. I still don't think pitching this in the USA through banner-waving evangelicals protesting outside Ben and Jerry outlets will make for good publicity. It could well backfire and end up in tongue-lashings.The Zionist tactic has always been to customize the exceptional, -the slow but persistent infringement of accepted law, as a new normal by just sitting tight and waiting for exhaustion to set in when protests prove to be of no avail. That began with the 1920-1929 Jerusalem Wall, and has proved remarkably effective. Once the new normal becomes the default perception, any upsurge or disruption can then be spun as anti-Jewish or terroristic, as one Israeli politician branded what those two decent Vermonters did. On the other hand, one should never underestimate the way the intense desire for normality by an Israeli majority in its own borders takes these challenges arising from the situation in the West Bank and Gaza as symptomatic of antisemitism, indeed, more about the outside world's hostility to Jews than about the conflict. The underlying conflict is between Israeli nationalism and diasporic universalism, something unresolved since the times of Isaiah, and unlikely to disappear.Nishidani (talk) 13:04, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

As far as aquiescence in its expansion goes, Israel has managed to make remarkable progress. The US has recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital and recognised settlements as being part of Israeli territory. Israel has managed to exploit the struggle between Iran, Syria, the Gulf states and their proxies in order to form alliances with the Gulf states.

There is, I think, an interesting contrast of viewpoints between Diaspora and Israeli Jews. Diaspora Jews seem to view there as being a compact where, by supporting Israel, there will be a haven for them to go whenever more persecution of Jews occurs. Israel seems to regard the purpose of Diaspora Jews as being to serve the interests of Israel and, as such, regularly harms or disregards the interests of Diaspora Jews themselves, historical examples being the purported covert bombing campaign in Iraq used to encourage emigration of Iraqi Jews and the position that Algerian Jews were put in by Israeli assistance to France during the Algerian War for Independence. Regarding possible harm done to the interests of Diaspora Jews by the activities of Zionists, there are a few things I find curious. One is that the place which the siding of Zionists with the British in exchange for the issuing of the Balfour Declaration played in the stab-in-the-back theories of Nazi ideologists such as Alfred Rosenberg is pretty much ignored. Similarly, the potential harm done by offers by American Zionists to help bring the US into the First World War on the side of the Allies in exchange for the Declaration is overlooked.

    ←   ZScarpia   12:25, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Well, it all hinges round the concept of 'normalcy'. Zionism thought only an independent ethnic state could restore 'normalcy' to Jewish lives, in the sense that it would dispel the discomfort of being regarded as quintessentially 'other' by 'hosting' nations. I don't think the hosting idea gets very far in historical analysis: Jews in France and Italy for most of the 19th century were envied esp. by Eastern Jews, because they were, while retaining their distinctive cultures, thoroughly at home in their native countries. I think most diaspora Jews in places like Canada, the US, and Australia shared that feeling. Numerous testimonies speak of growing up while never being aware of any of the notorious hostilities of traditional anti-Semitism. American Zionists who believed they had sufficient 'pull' to influence US WW1 policy were, surely, a minority, the general view being that America was the 'new Zion'. For the great majority, 'normalcy' had been achieved, because the fact of being Jewish simply didn't register in the cities and towns they grew up in (Jewish kids were in nearly every Catholic school I attended - the word referred to the fact they weren't obliged to pray, nothing else). The idea of a haven was hare-brained from the beginning because it assumed you could get on with your life by having the fact of being Jewish downscaled to irrelevance, because in an ethnic state, that would be ideally what every one of your neighbours also was, and thus 'antisemitism' would have no ground on which to get a toehold. Choosing an environment like the Middle East to achieve this - with its comcomitant and endless exclusion of non-Jews who however wouldn't go away, meant, rather than living one's Jewish identity implicitly as something wholly natural (French, Italians, Australian etc., don't go round thinking of themselves as French, Italians or Australians every day), it became assertively ideological, incessantly self-justifying (who needs to justify their religion or identity in a normal state?) the opposite of the aim intended. And Israel demands of the diaspora that they concern themselves with this as an intrinsic part of their 'Jewish' identity, becoming as 'conscious' of their Jewishness as something which sets them off from their contingent national identity as Israelis are educationally and environmentally impelled to be, whereas in the pre-Israel diaspora, the two stood together with far less a sense of being caught between two different claims on them that exists today. 'Normal' people anywhere just want to get on with their daily lives with family, friends, interests, a job: they don't want this constant shouting about who they must be, or what their fellow ethnic groups' members suffer the world over everytime they read a newspaper or watch the news. In its aims, therefore, Zionism is a failed experiment that, nonetheless, will continue to flourish, and conserve the tradition of existential anxiety Israel was supposed to demolish.Nishidani (talk) 13:33, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I think that Israel prefers to be feared than liked. That makes sense if you take the view that the non-Jewish world is either inherently or endemically antisemitic:. Any friends you make today may turn on you tomorrow. By mounting a massive response to disinvestment decisions, it helps to deter others from doing the same. Others know that they will likely face a cost in career, time and money. Businesses may face shareholder unrest. That is the stick. In order to gain, Israel doesn't need to get Ben & Jerry's to reverse its decision, it just needs to cause visible pain by tying the company up in court cases or forcing a few resignations or sackings. Internal politics are also involved, whereby Israeli politicians must show themselves to be Zionist he-men or women. Any backlash is most likely to be felt by Diaspora Jews rather than Israelis. Israel actually benefits from a more fearful Diaspora in the form of increased support and increased settlement-fodder immigration.

Another aspect is the extent to which Zionists regard what others view as occupied territory as rightfully part of the Land of Israel (Greater Israel). If others don't share their view, it just indicates that they are antisemitic. The Zionist right-wing who are now in power in Israel rejected the Oslo process. A central belief of Revionist Zionism, the tradition from which current right-wing Israeli parties descend, was that they were cheated of Transjordan by the British in 1922 (Vladimir Jabotinsky: "Two Banks has the Jordan – This is ours and, that is as well")[20][21]. Left-wing Zionists also felt cheated, but grumbled more mutely. The kind of two-state option which right-wing Zionists tend to have in mind is the Jordan is Palestine one. Because Transjordan should also rightfully have been part of the Jewish Home, allowing it to become the Palestinian state would just be generosity.(See, for instance, Uri Avnery on Yitzhak Shamir[22]: "He wanted a Jewish state in all of the historical country. ... As prime minister, his most outstanding achievement was to do nothing, except building settlements – quietly and unobtrusively. Under American pressure, he attended the Madrid peace conference, determined not to budge an inch. As he remarked later, he was quite ready to negotiate with the Arabs for any length of time. He did not dream of making peace, which would have drawn frontiers and barred the way to Greater Israel. ... His other great achievement was preventing Jews from reaching the US.")(... And Uri Avnery on Ariel Sharon[23]: "In the middle of the 70s, Ariel Sharon asked me to arrange something for him - a meeting with Yasser Arafat. ... He told me that his plan was to help the Palestinians to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy, and turn Jordan into a Palestinian state, with Arafat as its president. ... At the same time, nine months before the Lebanon War, he disclosed to me his Grand Plan for a new Middle East of his making. ... Basically it was the same as the one he wanted to propose to Arafat. The army would invade Lebanon and drive the Palestinians from there to Syria, from whence the Syrians would drive them into Jordan. There the Palestinians would overthrow the king and establish the State of Palestine.)

    ←   ZScarpia   18:59, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Charlie Chaplin playing a certain moustachioed character who twiddles a balloon of the globe on his fingers in short. A good part of history is the enactment of fantasies by uncertified crackpots, who however invariably fail to grasp the law of unintended consequences. The Persian invasions of a minor regional congeries of internecine statelets let to Alexander's occupation of their empire; Napoleon's invasion of Russia strengthened Prussia, stirred the national unification of German statelets, and led via the Franco-Prussian war to WW1 and WW2; the evangelistically inspired Bush Jr., 'liberated' Iraq - of at least 500,000 Christians; it's not unimaginable that in another half century, the Zionist insistence on a Greater Israel territorially will lead to a Palestinian majority state. But predictions of the future are rather pointless since the assumption is that civilization as we know it -the one we grew up with which had some lineaments, decency for one, to commend it- will survive intact for another half-century.Nishidani (talk) 20:40, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

There's that good ol capitalization thing, it was always "Jewish home" and "national home for the Jewish people" despite persistent attempts to capitalize (in every sense).Selfstudier (talk) 19:08, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Well, whatever, but there is nothing exceptional in this, which is essentially playing a nineteenth century imperial game in the 20-21st century. As Judt argued, the anomaly is, in historical hindsight, merely temporal - the ongoing recourse of a mentality and form of statecraft which was normative throughout the power structures of imperial state competition in their heyday down to a century ago. Even in what is deplored in the way Palestinians are treated is no Israeli invention, but merely the continuation of the Mandatory power's emergency regulations and methods to repress, again to use an anachronism, Palestinian 'counterinsurgency', with a difference that GB justified its murderous collective repression in 1936-1939 as warranted by a state of exception that lasted 3 years, as opposed to an occupation that has endured for 54 years and, in an optimistic vision, won't exhaust itself for another 30 years at the least. As for the Palestinians, they have Paul Éluard's dur désir de durer (sumud), which will be even more stressed as climatic changes in that area kick in. The only unknown is the degree of reverse aliyah, back to the diaspora. Our job's just to describe these things as they occur, in any case, not edit with some optimistic illusion that setting neglected facts into relief has any redeeming or ameliorative function. The task is simply to set the record straight so that the ostensible jigsaw puzzle's missing pieces are put in place to make the once discursively jumbled landscape readable as serious history rather than a doggerel rehash of the poetics of redemptive identity.Nishidani (talk) 21:33, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

And of course let's not forget the good news about people who have grasped both Jewish ethical traditions and the real lesson of the Holocaust and acted on them. I was reminded of the Lifta villager learning a lesson retained for 73 years after the nakba. He picked flowers in an old village woman's plot to enjoy the sweetness of their perfume, until she told him that culling them kills the flower. He has never plucked a flower since, witness to an acute sensibility that, one would think, would entitle him to be allowed back to tend the landscape of his childhood. One of the curses of this area is how millions of remarkable individual stories are lost in the collective rage that newspapers dwell on. Nishidani (talk) 16:23, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

A Mondoweiss article containing background information which I hadn't seen anywhere else.     ←   ZScarpia   21:33, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Afternote on icecream.Adam Ziv and Alaa Sweetat’s joint Jewish-Palestinian icecream company Buza.Nishidani (talk) 10:13, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Interesting article, I wonder just how widespread the identification as Palestinian is, the article says "now often self-identify" perhaps it is rising? Maybe Arab citizens of Israel needs a move.Selfstudier (talk) 10:38, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

No, such a move would be premature. Palestinian identity in Israel is a very complex matter that won't be captured by simplistic polling techniques, such as the triumphalistic one by a ridiculous outfit a couple of years ago that said only 7%, down from 18%, self-identified thus. Answering that question immediately implicates one in a question of dual loyalty, and honest replies (where do you or your parents come from) would, psychologically, put on the record an attachment that, were it intercepted or know, potentially threaten the acquired rights one has as citzens (second-class) in Israel. So the majority formal answer would be that a notable majority identify as Israelis, even though, as they know, for a majority of Jewish Israelis, they are somewhat like a foreign entity in their midst.Nishidani (talk) 12:56, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Nableezy has overruled you:)Selfstudier (talk) 18:00, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks

Hey Nishidani,

I realize you're super busy, so I appreciate your efforts to help re-organize the article. I'd be willing to do the heavy lifting, but I think guidance and input from users like you would be very valuable.VR _talk 21:16, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

I've always found articles on Islam very painful reading, for the highly politicized spinning and negativism that mars so many. That's why I applaud any attempt to go systematically through them and put them on a sound historical footing. You know the stuff so I can't teach you anything there. The link to the concubinage in Islam article you point out already answered part of my request (but I still think simply listing and summarizing the relevant Qur'anic passages on cocubinage etc., is not adequate. Every passage requires some historical contextualization. Still you have more on your plate than any tantalized gourmand could cope with. Yes, certainly, I'll keep an eye on the page and help where possible. Festina lente. Regards Nishidani (talk) 21:25, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

NGOs

Jonathan Lis,Hagar Shezaf, 'Gantz Declares Six Palestinian NGOs Terrorist Organizations,' Haaretz 22 October 2021

Israel designates NGOs as terrorists including Al-Haq. The criminal telling the innocent they are guilty, chutzpah is not the word.Selfstudier (talk) 16:08, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

The flippant riposte is, 'it takes one to know one.' One expects I guess that the next move will be to list al-Haq as a 'deprecated' source, along with Addameer. It's the same logic hounding BDS (who (BDS) by the way recently managed to get Norman Finkelstein disinvited from a Cambridge University discussion) as anti-Semitic (the IHRA boofheads). Regard for Human Rights, at least in regard to Israel, is increasingly either proof of anti-Semitism or incitement to, support for, terrorism. Nishidani (talk) 19:55, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Fyi, I started some stuff at Palestinian NGOs Network#Outlawing of Palestinian NGOs by Israel and made an Israel entry at List of designated terrorist groups#Israel (someone put the 6 NGOs in the list which looks ridiculous, tbh, but correct technically, I guess).Selfstudier (talk) 12:23, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. It's not citable on wiki but I occasionally check Richard Silverstein's blog at Tikkun Olam because he appears to have good sources within Israel's security networks. He wrote this of the present farce. Nishidani (talk) 17:59, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

The blog has an rss so I added it to my list, thanks. Looks like Gantz has put his foot in it.Selfstudier (talk) 18:15, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Sink tank is right, lol, that Steinberg character...As best as I can figure out, they have been pushing this anti Palestinian NGO thing for a while now.Selfstudier (talk) 17:59, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps even better stink tank. Of course, this is all déjà pu, since exactly the same technique was used in the first decades of the occupation to outlaw any form of civil or political organization among Palestinians. In short, enculer pour mieux sauter.Nishidani (talk) 19:48, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Israeli Government defies President Biden, announces 3K new Squatter Dwellings on Palestinian Land, 28 Oct. 2021, by Juan Cole. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:53, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Becoming Typical Mideast Dictatorship, Apartheid Israel Declares Palestinian Human Rights Groups “Terrorists”, 23 Oct. 2021, also by Juan Cole. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:53, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

G'day pal. I don't think the Israeli government has ever 'defied' US Presidents. They know from long experience of precedents, Eisenhower excepted, that one can get away even with virtually anything. What to call it? the superfetation of outrageous acts, even on a daily basis, over a decade, let alone several, leads to cognitive assuefaction, so that, in the end, one no longer notices, or if one does, one just brushes past with a sigh of 'what can one say, that conflict will never end'(I've heard that when some events forces Italian television to mention violence). 'Conflict' of course meaning a thug systematically smashing nail after nail of his victims' fingers and toes, the victims being complicit, their very presence being an incitement, to the hooligan. Keep well, and caress the grandpup.Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Bright red line, eh?

It's a great thing that other editors have finally noticed the steaming pile of horse-based bowel derivatives I've stumbled upon, and while I agree that I probably shouldn't go barging about in ANI - had no intention to really - is it really not more of a problem that this edit: [24] was a major 3RR breach in of itself, i.e.: six reverts in one (not even including the citation bot)? I see the words 3RR ... "bright red line" written on Wikipedia, but I've just watched a user cross it by a significant margin, then repeat the same sextuple revert. The line is beginning to seem murky red at best at the fringes of Wikipedia. Also, one technical question: if a user makes a 6-in-1 revert, and that is reverted/undone, is the reversion of the reversion/undoing of the initial multiple revert still a multiple revert, or at this point only a single revert? I haven't quite been able to wrap my head around the logic of it. Iskandar323 (talk) 21:57, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

@Iskandar323: for purposes of 3RR a single revert counts as only 1 revert, no matter how many edits its reverts. In fact, all consecutive reverts by the same user count as the same revert.VR _talk 22:36, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Illustration.

John adds X. (12 pm)

John adds Y and Z. (12:30pm)

Tom removes X. (1pm) <--- counts as Tom's 1st revert

John restores X. (1:30pm) <---counts as John's 1st revert

Tom removes Y. <--counts as Tom's 2nd revert (partial revert = revert)

John restores Y. <---counts as John's 2nd revert

Tom removes Y. <---counts as Tom's 3rd revert

John makes a minor edit.

Tom removes Z. <---counts as Tom's 4th revert

John restores Z. <---counts as John's 3rd revert

John undoes his last edit. <---John is back to having made only 2 reverts (undoing your revert means that revert doesn't count against you)

VR _talk 22:41, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

I know reverting a series of consecutive edits by the same editor counts as a single revert, but that edit rolled back edits by me, then Grufo, then you, then me again, then you again, then me again - six groups of connective edits: hence six reverts Iskandar323 (talk) 06:11, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

@Nishidani I see they've reverted you now, just outside of the 24hr mark, after receiving a formal warning on their talk page. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:59, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

theAnalysis.news

A couple of interesting recent videos from theAnalysis.news:

• A passionate denunciation of Israel's war crimes in Gaza, by John Oliver

• A thoughtful and insightful analysis of several important elements of Iranian society, including the domestic as well as the foreign policies of Iran, by Hamid Dabashi

My pup is sending her love to her granpa Nishidani. ----- Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:15, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Great to hear from you (one pup?) Will get back on this, somewhat fatigued from reading 600 pages by now on a topic than bores me. But not enough to ignore my avularesian (avus/lares) duty to the pup. In 15 minutes as I retire, I'll be reciting the following hexameters about Argos and his master, when they reencounter one another after 19 years, and while doing so, think of your dear pet.

ἂν δὲ κύων κεφαλήν τε καὶ οὔατα κείμενος ἔσχεν,
Ἄργος, Ὀδυσσῆος ταλασίφρονος, ὅν ῥά ποτ᾽ αὐτὸς
θρέψε μέν, οὐδ᾽ ἀπόνητο, πάρος δ᾽ εἰς Ἴλιον ἱρὴν
ᾤχετο. τὸν δὲ πάροιθεν ἀγίνεσκον νέοι ἄνδρες
αἶγας ἐπ᾽ ἀγροτέρας ἠδὲ πρόκας ἠδὲ λαγωούς:
δὴ τότε κεῖτ᾽ ἀπόθεστος ἀποιχομένοιο ἄνακτος,
ἐν πολλῇ κόπρῳ, ἥ οἱ προπάροιθε θυράων
ἡμιόνων τε βοῶν τε ἅλις κέχυτ᾽, ὄφρ᾽ ἂν ἄγοιεν
δμῶες Ὀδυσσῆος τέμενος μέγα κοπρήσοντες:
ἔνθα κύων κεῖτ᾽ Ἄργος, ἐνίπλειος κυνοραιστέων.
δὴ τότε γ᾽, ὡς ἐνόησεν Ὀδυσσέα ἐγγὺς ἐόντα,
οὐρῇ μέν ῥ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἔσηνε καὶ οὔατα κάββαλεν ἄμφω,
ἆσσον δ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἔπειτα δυνήσατο οἷο ἄνακτος
ἐλθέμεν: αὐτὰρ ὁ νόσφιν ἰδὼν ἀπομόρξατο δάκρυ,
Best Nishidani (talk) 22:07, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

One of my pups died last year, he was about 17 years old when he passed away from a combination of several different chronic as well as health issues. He was in a lot of pain and my ex-wife and I decided to take him to the veterinarian to have him put down. (My ex and I share custody of our dogs.)

I still have my second beloved pup who appears relatively healthy for her relatively advanced age (about 15 years). Moreover, recently I have adopted a young male cat that has been abandoned in my neighborhood. He is very affectionate, he often randomly walks over to wherever I am sitting or standing and lays his body down over my feet and rests his sweet little head on my toes, and we both just stay there motionless for a while. I am enjoying both my cat's and pup's companionship/friendship.

Thanks for the hexameters, I tried to translate from the Greek via the Google Translate website, but the translation software did not recognize any of the words. I think the Wikipedia software may have flipped around the order of the letters in every word so that the first letter in the original word now appears to be the last letter in the word on the Wikipedia page, the second letter in the original word now appears in the second-from-last position, etc. For example, the first word above was originally νἂ but the two letters were reversed by the Wikipedia software and thus the word appears to read ἂν on the Wikipedia page.

What are your thoughts on John Oliver's condemnation of the atrocities in Gaza, and Hamid Dabashi's analysis of modern Iranian society?

Warm regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 22:57, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

How fucking obtuse of me. With my usual complacency I thought mention of Argos would ring a bell, simply because, given my own peculiar encounters with literature, it has chimed with me from childhood. I should translate the hexameters, but only by making a travesty of Homer. Still, at the risk of further boring a reader here with extempore versifying, at a hurried glance,

(There was a dog that lay close by as they spoke.)

Catching the voices, it stirred and raised its head,

Ears pricked. Flash! Forebearing Ulysses had bred

The pup until the war with Ilium broke

Their bond for nineteen years. And, for a time

He was unleashed to hunt and hound the spoors

Of hares, wild goats and roedeer by the suitor boors.

Now, he languished in neglect, in the thick grime

Of mule and cattleshit, with just a brief respite

Whenever household hands, in moments of rare toil,

Would rake it up to manure the rocky soil

Of their missing master’s lands. Now, at the sight

And sound of his master’s voice, so near,

Flash, filthy and flea-ridden, flicked his tail

As his ears flopped. Unable to move, too frail.

And Ulysses, glancing aside, wiped away a tear.

Ah, fuck, reading that makes me mock some Victorian strain in myself that has turned Homer's dry genius into a maudlin pastiche that almost trumps the notorious death scene of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. But as a dog dad, I hope you'll pardon the lapse. I must have breakfast, will reply to the rest later. Best as ever Nishidani (talk) 09:56, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

I had little to say re Hamid Dabashi's remarks. He said with trenchant authority what I think any amateur neutral analyst would conclude. From John Oliver I would have expected something more effective: we all know that is the case, but no one listens. They would were some stand-up comic to reframe the gist in a dry patter of black comedic caricature. 'Once more Israel has been forced to defend the deserts of the Negev from a metal barrage of fizzling lampposts that had ruffled the sandy soils of the south and damaging one or two houses, by obliterating the upmarket area of Rimal, and wiping out several families. The message was. Touch a smidgeon of our real estate, and you won't have a state, or even a real life. In fact, you'll be dead. And when we pray/prey on your mosques, it won't be for the repose of your souls, arseholes ' etc. Disproportion can't be argued except by the ballistic hyperbole of sardonic inversion.Nishidani (talk) 13:45, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

What Oliver's remarks did stir back to life in me was an old puzzle, I pluck away at and tease. It's this, and will perhaps strike you as naïve. The larger question lurking in the background, the one that has long fascinated me, is, how one can embrace a Zionist cultural outlook and retain one's 'Jewishness' or even what we perhaps mistakenly take to be normal sensibility? Of course, this is a false question (anyone can pull its assumptions apart at a glance), but if you take the two to be at diametrical odds, provisorily, - the polar opposites of intense self-investment in a collective identity that must erase all sense of the right to equal dignity of those beyond that fold, and a culture of historic memory of what it means to suffer, at times lethally, from discrimination - one can retrieve perspective, especially by comparing, to note one of numerous examples, the life story of Zakaria Zubeidi and the testimonies of the difficulties decent Zionist soldiers experienced in not following an order to mow innocent people down. I don't think that on average many, if any, pre-Zionist persons raised within a strong Jewish milieu would have experienced that dilemma. In the diaspora one by definition had to absorb a deep knowledge of the 'other', positive and negative and indeed share to a good extent common values of co-existence.Nishidani (talk) 16:56, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your translation of the hexameters by Homer, this is emotionally powerful and moving. I enjoyed reading it very much. And I agree with your insights regarding Hamid Dabashi and John Oliver. As always, my dog and cat send their love to their grandpa Nishidani. -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 23:23, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Copy comment

Hey Nishidani,

Can you copy or otherwise link this comment to this section? I highly doubt that the closer for the RM would be able to find your comment in that huge section on the lead image. Thanks, VR _talk 10:50, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Um, could you do that for me? Or even erase it? I'm a duffer in this sort of thing. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:26, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

This is what I did? Is that what you meant? Please modify to what you think is most suitable, as this is your comment.VR _talk 14:02, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

I won't even check it. I'm not sensitive about things like having my comments shifted around to a more appropriate venue, and trust people who are closer to the topic and rules to adjust as context and the rules require. Regards. Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

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