User talk:Nishidani

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The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem

Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.

• An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.

• The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.

• The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.

(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.

'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'

Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….

‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .'

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:

‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”

Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:

‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’

The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?

Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:

'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'

Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity ). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.

John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect

‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.”

The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’, 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.

Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’

Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that

‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’

Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora , the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.

Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.

Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands.

Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.

The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.

(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank

When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-

'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'

One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Wikipedia itself.

Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-

We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.

Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-

‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” <

Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.

Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,

’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’

and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-

‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’

The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:

‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’

Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache). In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.

(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.

‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’

In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued.

In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war. The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.'

The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.

‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'

A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.

‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’

Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:

‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’.

An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovokedinvasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank.

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions' Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area..

This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), , thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.

Michael Sfard indeed has spoken of Hebrew being mobilized to lend itself to the national emergency of occupying Palestine, and denying the Palestinians the liberty to be themselves. They are passive subjects of an activist language that wraps them about in bureaucratic euphemisms.

'It has been tasked with providing a soothing, anesthetizing name for the entire project of suffocation, for the blanket system of theft we have imposed on those we occupy . . Thus extrajudicial executions have become “targeted assassinations”. Torture has been dubbed “moderate physical pressure”. Expulsion to Gaza has been renamed “assigning a place of residence”. The theft of privately owned land has become “declaring the land state-owned”. Collective punishment is “leveraging civilians”; and collective punishment by blockade is a “siege,” “closure” or “separation".'

A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo). According to Yossi Sarid, the process, illustrated further by Knesset proposals to eliminate Arabic as one of Israel's official languages, constitutes a form of ethnocide.

(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’

'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'

After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8

We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh

The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.

Further reading:-

• Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010

Things to be done/Notes to self (or what pieces are left of that hypothetical entity)

• Huldra trans Talk:Bardala‎
• Huldra trans Talk:Nisf Jubeil
• Sabah as per promise to Doug Weller
• Abu Iyad as per promise to Al Ameer
• The Ashkenazi Jews/Khazarian origins theory
• Werner Muensterberger
• 中里介山 and also his 大菩薩峠, which have no wiki article. ('to call him Dickensian would be utterly inadequate, to call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be to flatter him greatly' William E. Naff, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Tōson, University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 p.4.) Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

(2)'To call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be an over-statement of his considerable gift for for creating memorable characters, while to call Kaizan "Dickensian" would be a seriously misleading understatement. This richness became all the more impressive when set against the national drive towards human standardization.' ibid. p.430

To be kept close to the bottom of this page because I forget the agenda as time scurries on Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

• • e.g.<ref="Horowitz" /> Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Note

Yonatan Mendel, Diary, London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 6 -19 March, 6 March 2015.

Red Dawn

I caught an incredibly bad film tonight, Red Dawn. Mutatis mutandis it could be a Palestinian fantasy of 1967 onwards, only the people defending their homeland are terrorists and the 'Koreans' the good guys. Hope all is well.Nishidani (talk) 22:11, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

All is well. Taking a very long break from WP. Will probably return sometime in the future, but not soon. Focusing on my professional work, as well as on reading books, and enjoying spending time with my two puppies, working on my yard, talking to friends and family, etc.

Every day I read at least the edit summaries of all your contributions, and the full text of your contributions to talk pages, noticeboards etc. Good job on motivating the community to improve that profoundly and vastly incorrect, indeed largely false and misleading, lead section of the WP article on Jews. Enjoyed reading your insightful, thoughtful, evidence-based contributions to these, as well as other, discussions. And good job on keeping your calm and composure in the face of the relentless onslaught of vitriol and ad-hominem attacks on your character and motivations, including the many sick, twisted, baseless innuendos, derogatory hints, implications or insinuations from the usual crowd of civil pov pushers and not-so-civil, serial, habitual, obsessive violators of NPOV, OR, V and RS.

Reading your comment above, I'm glad I missed catching Red Dawn. I've been enjoying watching many good movies recently, mostly foreign films, especially European, Asian, Israeli, Arab, etc (as well as many older Bananamerican films). For example, to our pleasant surprise, we've greatly enjoyed a relatively large number of good films from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. And China and Japan.

I have also been re-reading my copies of books by philosophers, thinkers and scientists such as Sheldon Wolin, who died last month. Especially his two most recent books on Inverted totalitarianism. I highly recommend the following conversation, where Wolin and Chris Hedges explain in great depth and breadth why capitalism and democracy cannot co-exist:

• Link to 8-part conversation (8 separate consecutive parts): [1]

• Link to full version (all 8 parts combined): [2]

You wrote on WP recently that you've made Quince jam and Pomegranate wine (or juice). Quince jam is my favorite, together with rose-petal jam. And I have a big Pomegranate tree bearing a large amount of fruit every year, I'm now inspired by you to make more productive use of the fruit. Do you use a special device or tool to extract the Pomegranate fruit-seeds? What do you recommend? (I've not yet researched this online, there's probably some tutorials/ info on YouTube ...)

By the way, the WP articles on Quince and Pomegranate are a pleasure to read, with many beautiful photos.

Keep up the good work. Hoping to hear from you soon. Love, Ijon. -- IjonTichy (talk) 00:31, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed Wolin's demise, (unlike that of the late lamented, and similar thinker, Gerald Cohen back in 2009), and I'm indebted for your links to the RN video interviews, which I will take in slowly when my house is less encumbered by noise. I'm glad to see you are well, and even more so that you are enjoying a long wikibreak.

I read in Newsweek in the late 70s, I think, an article on suburban trash archaeology in Houston, and it's held me in good stead as a 'tip' (sorrow for the pun: 'rubbish dump' in Australian usage!), as I've foraged through the 'news', which is mostly instantaneous rubbish with a decay rate superior to that of an Ununoctium isotope. One can find out as much about the world by sieving crap, arguably, as from reading Aristotle's Prior Analytics, though it's best to do the former, obviously, after having mastered the latter. I apply this also to trashy popular culture with films like Red Dawn (I made the wrong link to it, I was referring to the 2012 version - their narrative structures are, unknown to the entrepreneurs of patriotism who make them (perhaps Yoram Globus/Menahem Golan etc. etc.etc., were more canny in creating all those crap movies for a political purpose), and the force of analogy appears to be lost on the mass audience. Red Dawn is just a remake of Red Dawn, which had far better actors, and both go back to Invasion U.S.A, 1952. Among the fundamental books for my generation, Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel held a high place, it gave one a sense of profound recurrent patterns over the messy promiscuity of time's endless churning, in line with the vogue for archetypical analysis from Mircea Eliade (a closet fascist who wrote two good books however) to Northrop Frye. It's a lost world now, I guess, but the conceptual gridwork was sound, and helped one reduce, without loss of sensitivity to nuance, a dizzying plethora of novels and films to a manageable framework. I think it was Vladimir Propp who said, or cited either Grimm or Goethe as saying, that mankind has only 5 basic plots for the infinite sea of stories it generates. That's why news is never 'new'. Everything that happens in the I/P conflict, to cite the obvious example, happened 70-80 years ago, and even then, most of the content is in the Book of Joshua and a number of other chronicles.

The only tool used to extract pomegranate seeds is a swat to keep my nephews from getting near enough to plunder them. Just the fingers, to avoid squashing or wasting the juice which tends to squirt. You soak them in pure alcohol for 20 odd days, filter the juice, while separately you make with 2 cups of water and one cup of sugar, and peels of lemon, a concoction, and when it is all dissolved, you leave it to cool, and then mix it in with the pomegranate juice, and after a few hours, bottle it. More or less. I'm glad you have a garden to work, it's a source of infinite pleasure,-especially in these times, if one goes to it alert to the message of A. D. Hope's poem Standardisation murmuring on one's mental lips and one can get a lot of good clean food from one with little labour. If you have a lemon tree, use it as a toilet, to pee on. Does wonders and saves water wastage by flushing. Best as always Nishidani (talk) 15:01, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Without wishing to disturb either your intelligent withdrawal from this rathouse or leisure, I came across, in a very very good deconstructive article on how many postwar myths identifying Arab and also Palestinian national aspirations with Nazism were fabricated, the following remark:-

The specter of a “Nazi Palestine” in the hypothetical event of Axis victory in the war has been shaped for an American readership. The Perish-Judea literature remains steadfastly silent on the depth and prevalence of prewar and wartime American judeophobia as well as the immovable public resistance to providing haven or temporary refuge for European Jews beyond the restricted quotas established in 1924... The major primary source for American anti-Jewish hate production is the four-volume The International Jew that was sponsored by Henry Ford and put together by a team of writers and investigators working for Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper. It influenced Hitler and other future leaders of the Nazi party and contributed to the racist and anti-Semitic backlash on immigration that would last throughout the Nazi period. For the judeophobic and pro-Nazi sentiments in America, see Lee 1980, Dinnerstein 1994, Warren 1996, and Baldwin 2001. For the political or administrative defeat of numerous proposals to offer Jews refuge or temporary asylum in the mainland United States, Alaska, the Virgin Islands, or other U.S. territories, including the Wagner-Rodgers bill that would have accepted 20,000, mostly Jewish children, see Wyman 1968; Morse 1968; and Rosen 2006.

This is precisely the historical structure of inversion and failure to make the implicit analogy I noted in ther 2012 Red Dawn film. Huge volumes of junk are written about Amin al-Husseini's complicity in Nazism, and therefore the Palestinians, yet the record for having systematically denied to Jews a refuge in America (the same goes for Great Britain) during the 30s is infinitely denser than anything you can tease out of the record re Palestinians. Yet the whole onus of blame falls on them, as amnesia surges and the politics of disremembrance and blame-throwing emerge to dominate the discursive landscape. Wiki articles glaringly lack any attention to this informational lacunae across articles on the U.S. for the decisive period, because POV pushers have a sacred alliance, I guess, to sustain. Enough! Nishidani (talk) 16:59, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi Nish, thanks for your responses. I am not yet familiar with the scholars you alluded to above, I will read their WP biographies and check-out their books from the local library. Also your other comments (e.g on the timelessness of human conflict) are thought-provoking and insightful. In my view all human conflict is basically between brothers and sisters.

Yes, I agree peeing at the base of lemon trees is good practice, I've been doing this.

Some recent analysis you may find helpful to your continuing efforts to improve/ develop WP articles:

• Interview with Max Blumenthal -- an in-depth analysis of the steady, systematic, relentless, on-going process of Nazification of Israeli society. -- (By the way Sheldon Wolin in his last book on Inverted totalitarianism explicitly discusses the Nazification of US society.)

• The Distortion & Death Behind Israel/ Palestine Coverage -- an entry-level, basic introduction to the topic, including about Hasbara propaganda. Among other things, shows an Israeli figure saying something about efforts to edit Wikipedia to add 'a Zionist perspective.'

• On the right-hand-side column of that page you'll also see links to other recent, informative video essays, for example: one on the savagery, brutality and viciousness of the House of Saud; another video on the root causes of the global refugee crisis; an interview with Noam Chomsky; and more.

Warm regards, IjonTichy (talk) 21:36, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Anti-Syrian Muslim Refugee Rhetoric Mirrors Calls to Reject Jewish Refugees During Nazi Era. "Opponents of Jewish immigration during World War II used arguments that are being echoed today by opponents of Muslim immigration." -- IjonTichy (talk) 05:28, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

These ironies are everywhere. The most egregious example was the huge hasbara effort to circulate the 'tunnel terrorism' meme during Israel's recent conflicts with Hamas. It flew, outrageously, in the face of Jewish historical memory, but who cares? The otiose somnolence of the moralizing punditocracy gets away with murder, and it is splashed all over numerous wiki articles by loyal editors because few sources make the obvious connection:

The Jews did not distinguish fighters from civilians. The villagers took an active part in the fighting. They prepared themselves for the war for years, and in their villages they built underground networks of caves, storehouses, shelters and hiding places- all of which Cassius relates. Jews visiting these areas in Israel today (for example, near Kefar Amaziah in the Lachish Region) still experience proud excitement, for these sites serves as proof of the nation’s enterprise, of the power of its inventiveness, and also as a mark of the people’s mobilization for war. The Jewish farmers emerged from their caves to stage surprise attacks on the Romans,. However, as soon as the Romans came to know these caves and how they were being used, they probably developed countermeasures, for example, sealing off the entrances and exits, throwing combustible material into them to force out those inside, and setting ambushes at the cave entrances. Thus, unfortunately, many caves turned out to be death traps for those who hid in them Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Bar Kokhba Syndrome: Risk and Realism in International Politics, Rossel Books 1983 pp.32-33

The allusion is to Dio Cassius, 69:12, a text that sounds like the template for so many official Israeli handouts on what Hamas or Hezbollah do.

The Zionist myth of an expulsion after the Destruction of the Second Temple is showcased everywhere as an irrefutable claim to the justice of return, whereas the same doesn't apply to the nakba ethnic cleansing visited on Palestinians in 1948. The analogies are everywhere, and it attests to the strength of propaganda that even intelligent commentators miss them. That is what the blinkering ideology of nationalism does, argue that 'we' are permitted to weep for X, or do Y, while if X or Y relates to the adversary's experience or behaviour, even through our own vindictiveness, it is to be dismissed or condemned as 'outrageous' and a different paradigm ('terrorism') applies. It's hypocrisy on a massive scale. Nishidani (talk) 09:18, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, there is massive hypocrisy.

By the way, brave Jewish fighters also used tunnels extensively while resisting Nazi occupation during WWII. For example, the use of sewer tunnels by armed Jews during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, or by armed Jewish partisans in France, and in fact by armed Jews in almost every country in Western and Eastern Europe occupied by the Nazis or by the Nazis' fascist allies.

Jewish resistance under Nazi rule is an informative, interesting, powerful article.

And Jews also used tunnels while resisting the British Mandate forces in Palestine in the 1940's.   IjonTichy (talk) 03:21, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Yep. I've documented several times on various article pages the use of synagogues to store arms in the Defense of Jerusalem and earlier during the British Mandate period. And there is an excellent Israeli study published some years back on the use of kibbutz kindergartens and health clinics to cover secret underground armouries. Everything Hamas is accused of with moralistic outrage was part and parcel of Israel, and indeed, normal military strategy in conflicts the world over. The only amazing thing is, why the commentariat never laughs this shit off the page when it's plashed there. I mean, the hasbara organizations don't believe it either: they just know it works on the public imagination abroad, and therefore has a function.Nishidani (talk) 08:42, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Interesting discussion with Eyal Weizman in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Among other important issues, he appears to support the sources you cited recently, sources which said the various colonialists (Israel, Britain, Italy, USA, France, many more) were using false reasoning when the colonialists claimed they were justified in stealing the land and other resources of Muslims because the Muslims "deliberately abandoned or neglected the land or otherwise did not take care of the land, resources or economic infrastructure out of deliberate, premeditated negligence." In other words the colonialists are using Orwellian language for falsely, mendaciously claiming that "Muslims are, well, primitive desert-dwelling savages who are naturally inherently incompetent and un-deserving of the resources and thus we are justified in stealing the resources." IjonTichy (talk) 16:47, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Like everything else, this all goes back to one of the foundational documents of our civilization. The Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites (all of whom were constitutive of the future Israelite amphictyonic league's populations) had an eretz zavat halav u'dvash, and that's what attracted the nomadic outsiders in the neighbourhood. The Babylonian novelist(s) who wrote Exodus then had the old storm god tell them, during the transit at Sinai, that they must not covet their neighbours' goods, having earlier promised them that they could covet the land he promised them. It's an early example of what Gregory Bateson called the Double bind, take-but-don’t-take/be-moral-but-break-the-rules. A huge amount of discursive waffle is required to paper over the schizoid contradiction in the dual message. In modern times, when Zionism dusted off the books of Exodus and Joshua and gave the archaic remit a secular cast, one needed a justification somewhat less visibly internally inconsistent, and so the Land of Milk and Honey was what the Zionists promised they would create from the empty desert that they imagined was Palestine. In short, Zionism reversed the Biblical image, while retaining its colonizing narrative. This time, ‘we’ would not be a nomadic people out of the infertile Transjordan and Sinai teeming into the rich pastures and agricultural lands of the Canaanites. ‘’We’’ would be an advanced urban people (as the Pharaoh's Egyptians were) teeming into the barren, empty landscape of a desertified Palestine to turn it back to what it was when the Canaanites had it, and the local inhabitants, if recognized, were dismissed as vagrant poverty-stricken nomads. They turned the Bible on its head in modernizing the archetype. Religious Zionism now looks like, at last, reverting to type by reversing the secular heresy of early Zionism in a way that will make it more compatible with the original novel’s scenario, now that the Palestinians are finished. My best wishes for a serene productive New Year.Nishidani (talk) 18:28, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Nish happy new year. What is your own personal philosophy of technology, especially what are your views on the impact of technology on humanity?   An interesting article from a couple of days ago by Paul Kingsnorth (30 December 2015): The keyboard and the spade, in New Statesman. -- IjonTichy (talk) 00:43, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I liked Kingsnorth's prose, when he talks about what he does working the land. All the rest of it, about Kelly and co and googleboys - well, that kind of hypnotic utopian vision of the future has come out regularly over the last century, and the terms change, but it bores me. Perhaps they're right, but the vision is distinctly dull to me. They sound like combination of spokesmen from the new people who destroy the intuitive people in William Golding's The Inheritors, with the folks you meet in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. If what he quotes is a sign of the caliber of Kelly's mind, then Kelly is a bore, and not too bright, who will of course produce a new species of überbores. In high school, my class had 6 kids with a genius+ IQ. All nice kids, all conformists, and devoid of interesting conversation. When Lobsang Rampa's The Third Eye came out one of them buttonholed me,a precocious skeptic it was thought, and brought it out as proof of miracles. I tried to tell him what my father told me, that it was just proof some plumbers had an imagination that went beyong fixing shithouses. Couldn't convince him, and didn't care to. The technium androbots will be like him, only kill more things.Nishidani (talk) 18:23, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

I have been fascinated by technology since I was a child and I now work professionally in the high-technology sector as an engineer and startup founder, but I dislike most aspects of the blind, overly-simplistic, brain-dead belief in Technological utopianism.

Well! There I go putting my foot into it, and inadvertently insulting you! I once mocked the style of architecture best illustrated by Philip Johnson et al., to a Palestinian interlocutor. He heard me out politely, and his wife added, after my tirade (I was raised on architectural talk at home), that her husband was an architect. The major objection, apart from human rights, to Zionism, is that its Swiss style exurbs and landscaping are an unbelievably painful sight to eyes drenched in the elegant stonework of traditional villages, or what remains of them after bulldozing and bombing. Rawabi for the moment shows the way this development should have been done. I can't get beyond the parameters set by that wonderful man Ian McHarg. Engineers of the pre-high tech era, in cahoots with architects won over to the béton brut style, thought they could force their will, architects called it their 'vision' on a landscape, rather than understanding it, and the aesthetic economies of intelligent human planning. High tech (I'm a fan of William Gibson's novels)'s another world. My humble apologies to your profession.Nishidani (talk) 12:05, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

A couple of articles I think you may find interesting (although I suspect you have probably already read them): Human enhancement,   and   Existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. -- IjonTichy (talk) 21:16, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

ISIS in Gaza, by Sarah Helm, in the New York Review of Books. Your thoughts? Best, IjonTichy (talk) 21:49, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

More on the continuing, on-going process of Nazification of Israeli society: Netanyahu, Bennett and Shaked Stoking the Fire of Fascism in Israel. -- IjonTichy (talk) 20:33, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it Nazification. In problematical areas, the first lesson is to steer clear of any kind of jargon that is simplistic and reductive. When, as happens daily, I read of arrests of children, beatings, seizures of land, hot halakhic airbags wheezing over the theology of snuffing out semisouled goys etc., dozens of societies come to mind. The way the IDF and border police work over the border is more similar to Stasi, and the KGB, but also to South Africa's police under Apartheid. I have the same objection to bundling up Fascism, Phalangism, and Nazism, as to reducing all Arab tinpot dictatorships to the same theoretical template. It is the vice of the contemporary right to dissolve our intellectual care in marking boundaries, distinguishing things easily confused, and when the 'left' follows, it makes a fatal error. In none of these states was it possible to understand, analyse, and publish openly details of what was going on, as it is in Israel. That itself makes a huge difference.

Must be off to my Rome haunts. You're lucky your persimmons stayed fresh. My crops last dozen look like imploding, just too many to get through, and they languish outside in quiet decay.Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Comparisons with Nazi Germany in the article on criticism of the Israeli government gubmint.   I use the comparison as a reminder to myself, a mnemonic to help me remember more easily the massive hypocrisy at the root of the structurally corrupt policies of the Israeli gov't, which cynically manipulates the real horrors the Jews have suffered in the holocaust in the hands of the fascist Nazi regime, in order to position Israel as the victim in Israel's own fascist policies towards the Palestinian people.   I hope you are enjoying your stay in Rome. I stayed there when I traveled in Europe decades ago and enjoyed the city and especially its people very much. Will you be able to go see art such as the Sistine Chapel and other attractions? IjonTichy (talk) 19:39, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

And a serene and productive NY to you. Briefly, I like technology, it's proof that the species is sane, which is rather a contrafactual statement. I read New Scientist every week just to assure myself that what I read in the press about the world generally is not representative of anything other than the fact we are primitive animals biologically. My generation will be fossilized shortly, as technological evolution takes over the development of the species. The problem is not science, but the economic system it is embedded in, which assumes that rationality is best determined by a zero-sum game and a quick return on capital. That means ethics, and indeed choice based on long term complex system analysis, is counter-"productive". I look on, bemused, happy to have experienced much of the best the past has given us, but indifferent to the future which will look back on man as he was much as folks at the Smithsonian stare at the dead artifacts. It's late here but I will look at your links tomorrow, for which many thanks. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:20, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

What I'm about to say is an over-simplification, due to limitations of time and space. Over the last 8-10 years I've come to develop a very similar philosophy to yours. In my view, humanity is clinically insane - many key aspects of the global human society have been Psychopathologically crazy for many millennia, even thousands of years prior to the advent of the ancient Greek and Roman empires. At the same time, some key aspects of the global human society have always been sane and remain sane to this day. This is a paradox, which is not surprising, since life itself (from "before" the big bang to date) defies logic and is basically a paradox. Several smart people (including e.g Einstein) have said that in their view our technology/ science have progressed far beyond our humanity. In many important aspects our global socio-economic system (capitalism/ private property/ ownership/ money/ power/ hierarchy/ a system based almost entirely on exchange value rather than use value/ a system that commodifies everything, including human lives and more generally almost all life) is obsolete, is enormously detrimental, and is severely slowing down human progress. Any possible transition to a more sane, humane, rational global socio-economic-cultural system would be enormously complicated by the fact that 'capitalism' is extremely deeply, profoundly embedded in the fabric of human society.

Another aspect of the paradox is that, despite the massive global human psychosis, there are still many key aspects of humanity, and more generally life and the natural world, that are rational, kind, beautiful, pleasurable and enjoyable. Cheers, IjonTichy (talk) 20:33, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

A long, detailed investigative report: Technologies of Oppression: The Celebration of the Israeli Security Industries in Brazil. Among many other things, explains one of the main reasons why the Israel government has not been, is not now, and is not likely to be in the future, interested in ending the conflict with the Palestinians. IjonTichy (talk) 01:41, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Well that's been evident from the beginning, and I think a lot of critics within the PLO and in the diaspora noted that the 1993 Accords effectively turned the PLO into an indigenous proxy of the occupiers, even if it was justified by citing the schedules for a 'finalization' of the conflict's issues. There's nothing unique about Israel's sale abroad of the technologies of control developed to keep Palestinians down. The only diff is that in Israel these technologies reinforce a colonial project against another ethnicity, whereas the foreign customers use it to control and repress their internal proletariats in the ghettoes and favelas. The middle class, hag-ridden by financial insecurities, if it notices at all, tends to endorse more policing of the underclass, failing to note that the trend is extending upward, and will soon apply to them as well. If the economist Michael Hudson whose work I've followed for several years, is correct (I note the Reaganite economist Paul Craig Roberts is now praising him to the skies and providing a thumbnail synthesis of his theories), then the rough-ride of the post 2008 decade is structural, and will only worsen, with global ramifications for the whilom middle class. So you have Russia's Chechen solution spilling over into Syria, China's Uyghur panic extending to tensions with Turkey, India's internal Hindutva ideology re Muslims altering its traditional Third-Worldist sympathies, all feed into a first-world 'summitry concern' with coping with 'terror'. There is therefore nothing peculiarly Israeli about this dirty-linen. It's all sold as the protection of the hard-won values of the middle estate, when what is happening in the deeper structural shifts is an hyper-capitalist onslaught on any residual form of social investment of the kind that built our 19-20th century modern societies. The Trumps, Cruzes, Netanyahoos, etc of the world are playing draughts, when the board has morphed into a different game, as intricate as Go. I.e. four opening moves compared to around 360. If you look at the other end of the equation, the logic of computerized financialization, those who draw mathematicians away from science to become quants brainy enough to formulate elegant algorithms that can cope with cosmically massive variables, the result is no better.' Given the volume of trading under HFT, the system can now collapse over the space of a few milliseconds, before human traders or regulators have the opportunity to act. Nincompoops and wizards rule the world.Nishidani (talk) 11:10, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Over the last 10 years I have spent many hours every day extensively studying all the issues you alluded to above (including, among many others, Michael Hudson's and Paul Craig Roberts' work), and I fully agree with everything in your comment.

I recently re-watched the insightful interviews with Sheldon Wolin (links above) in which he shows why capitalism and democracy cannot truly co-exist.

I've now just started reading the book Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets. Which books have you been reading recently? Which ones do you recommend?

I just finished reading Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty. I very highly recommend it. Best, IjonTichy (talk) 17:45, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

They sound like compelling reads, but, unfortunately, like much don't turn up on Italian bookstore shelves. Aside from a score of novels since January, I've been rereading the Aeneid in Latin over the last few weeks, while reading up on the history of Hamas and the works of Hazlitt for some wikiwork. I've just read Manuel Musallam's book in Italian,A Parish priest in hell, describing his 14 years in Gaza City (1995-2009) which a local store ordered for me. I've also started rereading Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, in the 12 volume paperback copy I bought when it first came out in the early 60s. Hazlitt had a penetrating mind and wrote with superb trenchancy. Toynbee wrote with an elegant Graeco-Latinate prose on the global structures of history. I read such things for their intrinsic interest and as a relief from the endless wash of verbal noise one has to sift just to keep informed about the world. I don't recommend them to you, esp. since your reading list is just as enviable! Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

No, that won't do. I thoroughly recommend Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks 2015. It is a superb study of what the erosion of dialects and language does to see nature, as it was seen and conceptualized in wonderful words of great descriptive precision. Best regards (I must comment eventually on Wolin, it's just I've been a bit pressed for time lately).Nishidani (talk) 19:48, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

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There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. [3] Thank you. Jeppiz (talk) 19:08, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

November 2015. Teaching Granny to suck eggs

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. You appear to be engaged in an edit war with one or more editors according to your reverts at Amin al-Husseini. Although repeatedly reverting or undoing another editor's contributions may seem necessary to protect your preferred version of a page, on Wikipedia this is usually seen as obstructing the normal editing process, and often creates animosity between editors. Instead of edit warring, please discuss the situation with the editor(s) involved and try to reach a consensus on the talk page.

If editors continue to revert to their preferred version they are likely to lose editing privileges. This isn't done to punish an editor, but to prevent the disruption caused by edit warring. In particular, editors should be aware of the three-revert rule, which says that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Edit warring on Wikipedia is not acceptable in any amount, and violating the three-revert rule is very likely to lead to a loss of editing privileges. Thank you. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 18:57, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Don't pepper this page with insipid templates. As to the al-Husseini page, examine the history. If you have already done so, you have selectively misread it, ignoring the reverts by several others, (User:7uperWikipedan, rightly topic banned and a sock, for example) and overestimating the significance of 2 reverts in 3 days, against User:Bad Dryer, whose elisions directly violated a vast 16 vs.4 RS/N consensus.Nishidani (talk) 10:18, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I didn't warn 7uperWikipedan because he's already banned from the article. I warned every other editor who has recently reverted. You seem to be arguing that your edit warring isn't disruptive, because your position in the content dispute is right and your opponents are wrong. However, edit warring is always wrong. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 18:34, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Reverting is a right, and sometimes a duty, to be judiciously used. I exercised it. If you can see any evidence I am a congenitial or persistent edit-warrior (a characteristic of those I revert if you check their records) you've got better eyes than I.Nishidani (talk) 20:22, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:53, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words

Thanks, Nish, for the kind words about my help with the SAQ article. Next to Tom, you of course deserve the most credit for participating in the Sisyphean task of getting and keeping that article where it is. And then Paul Barlow (R.I.P.). The others you mention I consider to have been the "second tier" of supporters (in which I am proud to be included), and to that list I would like to add Xover, who I am glad to see is back (after dropping out for a while), ably helping with all Shakespeare-related matters. Regards, Alan W (talk) 17:56, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Tom rode the prime herd of words: I was one of the horse wranglers, but without those like yourself, Johnuniq, Bishonen , Xover, Peter Farey and a few others riding shotgun and securing the key logistics, it would have, as in the past, been rustled to extinction before getting into the FA corral. (Yeah, I read Jake Logan's Roughrider last night. Nowhere near the Nobel level of Cormac McCarthy's western epic, but a good read for a lazy day off). Thanks, Alan.Nishidani (talk) 19:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

An ethnography of Wikipedia

And now for something completely different. I have lately been interested in how Wikipedia works behind the scenes, and I found this to be a fairly serious and detailed look at the issues, both philosophical and practical. My general aversion to philosophy was overcome by the other aspects, and I found it quite insightful generally. I have only skimmed it, but it might be useful in getting some insight into the intractable nature of many of the wiki-conflicts. The chapter on "The Challenges of Consensus" is simultaneously humorous and serious (in the sense of serious discussion of real issues). Kingsindian ♝♚ 15:50, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks indeed. I'm busy redrafting the Islamofascism article so won't have time for a day or two to read it closely, but it certainly looks interesting. As to ethnographical aspects, I don't think of conflicts here that way. I'm always reminded of what my Russian teachers, exiles from 1917, taught us about conversing with folks on visit our way, sailors, businessmen, etc., from the Soviet Union, i.e., that their upfront conversation would be a mix of clichés regarding history and culture grubbed up from a primary and secondary school curriculum thoroughly soaked in a nationalist reading of their world, much of which they wouldn't repeat amongst friends and in the family, but a makeshift rhetoric for defensive purposes, employed within earshot of outsiders. What they really knew in practical terms wouldn't emerge, and one had to learn to read between the lines and navigate the tedious flow of hackneyed official points of view. This is exactly what you get all too often in the I side of the I/P zone (probably because one simply doesn't get many representatives of that community's larger constituencies here, understandably): Zionism in general (there have been and still are great Zionists whose positive approach to the state stops at the 1967 borders, and opens up in libraries, Noam Chomsky, the utterly neglected Georges Tamarin, David Dean Shulman, Avishai Margalit, Nahum Goldmann, Uri Avnery, just a few of an egregious caste of thousands) is an ideology like any other, intensely nationalistic, thoroughly obtuse and irritably at odds with information that might disturb the serenity of its unbelievably silly rewriting of the past, or of Judaism and the diaspora. An ideological mindcast is impermeable to any information that might disturb its self-assuredness, and rather than evaluate fresh perspectives, it is furnished with an impressive array of mental-military defense mechanisms, most of them honed to zero in on other people's ostensible (here 'non-Jewish' editors') motives. It takes only one edit exchange to twig if the editor in question is open-minded and committed to a popperian open society, or here to defend his country's official (political) perspective, his society, his ideology at whatever cost to credibility, facts and, worst of all, the state of knowledge in his country's towers of higher learning. All the rest is just basically a pantomime of assuming good faith. Good faith ain't the problem - indeed it is absurd to demand of editors to act counterfactually with editors who are stubbornly wedded to a belief those who contradict them are in bad faith. The rule should be: if you meet a dickhead, watch your p's and q's and stay focused on the issues. I don't mind suspiciousness and bad manners -water off a duck's back - but the profound hatred of learning or investigating anything that might upset what you were told when you were in nappies or as a boy scout, is the primary nuisance. No joy, just a simmering odium for anything that discomforts one's complacency. And, . .I detect a fragrant curry from the kitchen, and am obliged to investigate appetites deeper than, alas, book knowledge itself.Nishidani (talk) 16:38, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

As to an aversion to philosophy, I don't believe you. Didn't you quote Keynes's famous words somewhere some time back:'Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”. Alfred North Whitehead said European philosophy was just a footnote to Plato, and most of what we think is the drugged residue of influential thinking disproven as theory, but surviving in the inefficient market place of consumer ideas. Philosophy is simply a matter of clear thinking and the precise, witting use of terms as we would have them mean, not what they appear to mean when we spout them unreflectively. I see no evidence here that you are, in that sense, averse to philosophy: to the contrary. (It's a chicken and rice curry, in any case, and won't be served for another half hour). Philosophy is just a form of mental hygiene. Nishidani (talk) 16:52, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree generally, my point was about philosophy by itself. Basically every philosophical idea I have ever read is embedded in problems of politics, economics and science, almost as a side-effect of them. I am ok with such philosophical discussions. Whenever I try to read some "pure" (relatively speaking) philosophical texts, I find that I simply can't handle a high level of abstraction consistently. I always need concrete instances to help me make sense of stuff. Kingsindian ♝♚ 17:11, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Well you're bound to have read Isaiah Berlin's only really readable book The Hedgehog and the Fox so I won't recommend it, other than noting you're now self-defined as cognitively alopexic (i.e. ἀλώπηξ no allusion intended to Ninja turtle types).Nishidani (talk) 22:08, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever read anything by Isaiah Berlin. I vaguely remember some stuff, but it was mostly truism and hot air (maybe I'm remembering wrongly). Also see this review of a George Scialabba book which discusses Berlin among others. Also, this Scialabba review of Berlin's book. Kingsindian ♝♚ 02:40, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

You haven't missed much in not reading him . He was an extremely intelligent gossip and networker, deeply well-read etc but a windbag, with one or two useful insights, that weren't quite new. But the essay I suggested is light, fast reading, a compact edition would run to 70 pages (my old 1957 edition to 153 odd pages) and can be read in an hour, without strain or sweat. It elaborates on a Greek adage, and the binary division of intellectual casts of mind (Tolstoi-Dostoievksy, Plato-Aristotle, Herodotus-Thucydides etc., gave a nice rule-of-thumb. At least, I began to take more interest in it when I came across E. T. Bell's summary in the 2nd vol of his Men of Mathematics (1937) of the modern world's split in mathematical types (George Cantor vs. L. E. J. Brouwer as illustrated in the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy) (Bell. Vol.2, Pelican 1953 pp.632ff.), and the way George Steiner deployed it with close heuristic acumen in his Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (1960), this time (he's a bit of a theory poacher) with acknowledgement (pp.228,242-243). All 50's generation, old fogey stuff though, and perhaps dated, in these post-Derridean times.Nishidani (talk) 11:25, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Formal mediation has been requested

The Mediation Committee has received a request for formal mediation of the dispute relating to "Palestinian stone-throwing". As an editor concerned in this dispute, you are invited to participate in the mediation. Mediation is a voluntary process which resolves a dispute over article content by facilitation, consensus-building, and compromise among the involved editors. After reviewing the request page, the formal mediation policy, and the guide to formal mediation, please indicate in the "party agreement" section whether you agree to participate. Because requests must be responded to by the Mediation Committee within seven days, please respond to the request by 16 December 2015.

Discussion relating to the mediation request is welcome at the case talk page. Thank you.
Message delivered by MediationBot (talk) on behalf of the Mediation Committee. 21:39, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Muhammad Najati Sidqi - DYK

Just got in and saw your note on Huldra's page. I was thinking of nominating it, but there's no hurry since we have 7 days from date of creation, and I like to get such articles to as high a standard as possible within the allowed time limit. I'll certainly nominate it if no-one else does. Meanwhile there are some over-long sections that ought to be split up into smaller sections (and I never like "Biography" sections anyway, since the whole article is really itself the biography). Priority was first to correct all the little spelling and other slip ups, now mostly done (but I bet there's still one or two lurking there), so I'm now pondering how edit it for better style and "flow". Cheers, and thanks for the good job you did creating this one. --NSH001 (talk) 21:34, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

When I asked you to do the footnote, for example, I was put off by the apparent discovery that we had no article on a very important figure, Khalil Baydas. In a few spare hours, I did a draft. Only by pure chance did I find out that an article does exist on him Khalil Beidas, and I'll now link the mention of him to that page. But the Beidas article (a) should have the name changed to Baydas, since that is the more common transcription and (b) it is completely devoid of notes, being a translation from the Arabic wiki. Since I have 20 odd sources on him, I will now attend to the latter, and thoroughly document and expand the page. Your assistance has, as always, been indispensable. And I can only justify my time-consuming importunity as a way of helping that knee mend, by forcing you to sit down for a while and fix the old codger's fuckups!Nishidani (talk) 10:40, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Well dammit, one of them invisible things dislineates Aida Imangulieva's book. I've tried several times, reread your advice but nuffen doen, it won't go into military parade vertical allineation. The second mystery is that I've bookmarked Khalil Beidas on my watchlist, and it absolutely refuses to appear there, despite removing/adding/checking several times! Go figure! I think I'll do something simpler than mastering the intricate esoterica of wiki formatting, something like learning Tocharian, or doing a master's degree in quantum mechanics. . .Nishidani (talk) 21:16, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Duly fixed, problem was exactly the same as before. If it happens again, you can see what I mean by putting the cursor to the immediate right of the asterisk. Then press cursor-left key: cursor moves to the other side of the asterisk, as you would expect. Then cursor-left key again: nothing appears to happen! That's because you've moved it over the invisible character. Cursor-left key again, and you move to the end of the previous line, as you would expect. To get rid of the little blighter, just blast it out of existence by using the delete or backspace key over where it's hiding (i.e., the place where the cursor didn't move). Simples! Sorry I can't help over the watchlist problem, as I can't see your watchlist. You could always try asking at WP:VP(T) if the problem persists. --NSH001 (talk) 22:18, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

You should be ldelighted to know, as I certainly was to discover this morning, that your four edits to that page had the inadvertent result of fixing the watchlist problem. I'll look into which one did the magic, and let you know. As always, I'm deeply indebted to your generous exhaustion of personal time to fix my fuckups. Thanks, N. Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I doubt my edits had anything to do with it. My best guess is that at some time in the past you set your watchlist to "hide" your own edits; since all the recent edits there (at the time of your complaint) were yours, then naturally you wouldn't see them (unless you'd also set it to show edits for a ridiculously long period). Regards --NSH001 (talk) 16:23, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Request for mediation accepted

The request for formal mediation of the dispute concerning Palestinian stone-throwing, in which you were listed as a party, has been accepted by the Mediation Committee. The case will be assigned to an active mediator within two weeks, and mediation proceedings should begin shortly thereafter. Proceedings will begin at the case information page, Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Palestinian stone-throwing, so please add this to your watchlist. Formal mediation is governed by the Mediation Committee and its Policy. The Policy, and especially the first two sections of the "Mediation" section, should be read if you have never participated in formal mediation. For a short guide to accepted cases, see the "Accepted requests" section of the Guide to formal mediation. You may also want to familiarise yourself with the internal Procedures of the Committee.

As mediation proceedings begin, be aware that formal mediation can only be successful if every participant approaches discussion in a professional and civil way, and is completely prepared to compromise. Please contact the Committee if anything is unclear.

For the Mediation Committee, TransporterMan (TALK) 22:09, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
(Delivered by MediationBot, on behalf of the Mediation Committee.)

Grammar

Regarding your edit summary. If you compare the previous version, you can see it was more than just a grammar issue. Anyways, if I would have understood the meaning, I would have rewritten it myself. Since I didn't, I am glad you rewrote it, but the edit summary was unnecessarily offensive. Debresser (talk) 20:17, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

C'mon. No offense meant. We collaborate here, and given the fact that I've had extremely limited time to catch up with many edits, I've been editing in haste, and that was one example. Since I'm a known nutter for precision of this kind, all anyone who knows me need do is drop a note here and tell me to pull my finger out. I'd have made an instant correction. reverting in my book, unless solidly reasoned, is lazy, and though your grievance was legitimate technically, it was not a sensible strategy for the page's well being. Nishidani (talk) 20:40, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

On might argue, that editors making sloppy edits (spelling mistakes, unclear) are even worse for a page's well-being. That is most certainly my point of view, and I think such edits should be reverted. Hopefully, the effect will be an improvement of such editors' edits. Debresser (talk) 22:11, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Okay, I'll call a spade a spade.

According to Weiss the yeshiva received $27,000 from the fund in 2007 and 2008.[8] The report of (the yeshiva) being subsidized by on(e) office in a New York Tex(t)ile company was confirmed by investigative reporter Uri Blau in 2015

This is not 'ungrammatical': it is colloquial and has two self-evident misspellings , relying on the reader contextualizing 'report' as referring to Weiss's article, as it logically must. If one reverted, rather than improved, the damaged, sloppy flow and syntax of articles, most of these I/P screeds, patched up by editors who don't read the page, would be mutilated. The only thing wrong was stylistic, and that you could not see the clear meaning is probably due to the fact that you are not a native speaker of English, and didn't trouble to read the lead. To repeat, if there is some ambiguity in one of my edits and you don't know how to fix it, do the collegial thing, and ask me to elucidate. Reverting the like is a sign of incompetence, laziness or a failure to construe the intent of the passage.Nishidani (talk) 09:15, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Ignoring your allusion to English not being my native language, which has nothing to do with the fact that you wrote or copied a sentence that was ill-constructed and included mistakes, I respectfully disagree with your opinion about reverting. If I know how to rewrite a sentence, I usually do so, but when I don't, first thing is to remove the nonsensical sentence from the article. Debresser (talk) 10:22, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

It is one of your habits, to revert automatically without thinking. As I said, do me the courtesy of asking me when in doubt about one of my edits. I've linked courtesy, in case you fail to grasp what it means.Nishidani (talk) 10:46, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Paul Barlow's Million Award

Hello there, Nish. Idly browsing some talk pages, I was given pause when I noticed that the Millon Award you so kindly bestowed posthumously on Paul Barlow was awarded for his edits to William Shakespeare. But he was also instrumental in bringing the Shakespeare authorship question to Featured Article status, and the percentage of his edits to the latter article was much greater (about 4% vs. about .7% to the William Shakespeare). If you had your reasons for choosing one over the other, fine. But in case this was an unintentional name switch, I thought I would call it to your attention. Regards, Alan W (talk) 04:11, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Then again, I don't know if the SAQ got enough page views to qualify. Very hard to determine that (seems to require making some list of top 5000 most-viewed articles). The important thing, I suppose, is that we remember Paul and his sterling contributions here. I miss him every day I access this site. If there were more currently active Wikipedians like Paul, this would be a far better place. As you know very well. Regards, Alan W (talk) 04:30, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

As usual you are correct in the details. I did look and noticed that the SAQ page on a monthly average, by simple multiplication, gets 300,000 hits annually which converts to 1,000,000 over 3 years. Nothing like Shakespeare, but when you consider how few readers the average scholarly work gets (back in the 70s, one was 'successful' academically if 500 copies were sold over a few years), that is still an extremely high figure. We're peons, mercurial amanuenses, dragomanic engineers doing the synaptic bridgework roping up the recondite crevasses of the unaccessed rockface of scholarship down to the broad public in the plains (mixed metaphors!!), who are somewhat reluctant to scale the rockface given the ominous fatigue-load apparent in the voluminous prospect. In terms of the kind of frequency of mention used by publishing houses these days to boost or burn and author (they even monitor Twitter and Facebook mentions of a new book, and if you are not tweeted about and touted quickly, I'm told, the contracts die as quick as the ink dries) that number for the SAQ is exceptionally good and consoling. I think it has effectively buried the screwball, let me say the Will'o the wispocracy's pretensions to hog the publicitarian limelight with their fringe discourse on the Great Conspiracy. Paul elsewhere was very intent on dispelling the larger myths that blind the public and manipulate genuine, inchoate curiosity down the barren byways of speculative flimflamery. But, aside from all that, I recall the whole arc of composition, with its colourful gallimaufry of diversely motivated, but acutely perceptive figures, (esp. towards the end rather than when it was just a rerun of revert shootouts at the OK Corral) as a very encouraging experience of an intelligent working 'community' (a word I dislike generally) harnessed to an ideal of enlightenment, and seamlessly laboring to achieve an ideal of informed discourse, something which, in the world, is, to these greying eyes, rather rare these days. Cheers, pal. Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Whew! You have indeed got your metaphor mixer running full blast. But after several rereadings, I think I grok your drift. Sometimes I think that the remnants of an ideal scholarly "community" are among us Wikipedians. There is satisfaction in roping those crevasses and bridging those synapses (you do have a way with words), and perhaps it is enough if we find "fit audience, though few". Not always as few as we might think, either, as your calculation of the SAQ readership shows. Enjoy this holiday period in the mode of your choosing, Nish! Regards, Alan W (talk) 03:07, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Ahimè,these ritual holiday periods in Italy never allow a 'mode of choosing'. From Christmas Eve to the Epiphany, one is required to don the nosebag and munch through a routine of fare, as each family in the clan fusses to outclass Trimalchio in slapping up a lucullean 'do', lunch, supper, dinner, and, at midnight, a plate of pasta to ease one's postprandial languor into the arms of Morpheus, or more infernally, towards a somnambular waddling like Ciacco through the retching slush of an intestinal nightmare. It's a trencherman's paradise, of course, but one bridles at the lack of choice. Rebuffing food is a snub to the host - and it's poor form to be nudged to chip in on the pleasantries of convivial yarning over the banquet, when the foison only prompts one to think of hungry masses dieting to ensure that those last dollars will buy them a place in the next waterlogged fishing boat towards either Europe or a winedark grave. Now, that written, I've checked to see if the point of the exercise, of not mixing metaphors this time, worked. It appears okay. The compositional difference must be due to the fact that the first drift you had to sweat seven shirts to 'grok' was written at speed, as She Who Must Be Obeyed gonged me for tiffins, i.e. written rumpolescamente on an empty stomach (think of Virgil's gurgite vasto rari edentes), while I've just wound up this piece after the repletion of dinner. Shakespeare is our superior because he could write in any style while dining off the smell of an oilrag, and with this, best wishes for this festive period and the New Year, Alan. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:11, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

I had forgotten you lived in Italy now. Never been there, but I grew up among many of Italian ancestry and their food, still among my favorite cuisines. And I understand, a cultural thing, you can't politely just pick and choose or refuse. Does sound like a bit much at holiday time over there. As for your mixing of metaphors (and one might argue you have done it again, what with "waddling" through "slush" of an "intestinal" "nightmare"), I never meant to criticize. If Shakespeare can mix metaphors, who am I to complain when you do? That, with your endless web of allusions spanning cultures, languages, and centuries, and so on, always provides me with an agreeable and amusing mind stretch. For now, I'll just wish you digestive peace! --Alan W (talk) 06:12, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

That Ciacco allusion was an example of what Sterne would have called 'the superfetation of a rantipole brain' rather than a mixed metaphor. With 'somnambular' I happened to be thinking, at the same time as I was imagining the glutton Ciacco's domain in the Inferno, of one of the great lines in Vergil's otherwise stupid poem, Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram/Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna. I find myself occasionally writing here like that only because I find the strain of the Ayn Randian objectivist prose required for Wikipedia a coercive menace to the natural bent of my own mind, and indulge myself in an exuberant clatter of metaphors and analogies prophylactically in order to ward off a gradual domestication of my imagination to a neutral and to me, neutered, syntax. There's no reason why the two can't live in convivial coexistence in the one brain, but unfortunately I find in editing properly that I develop a habit of repressing spontaneous associations that I would otherwise use in my private world, and I find duty threatening playfulness, to the detriment of the latter. Thank goodness there are sharp minds in here that can cut to the chase and tame the wilder side of my rambling nonsensical herdplay! Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

A reminder of how costive my own prose has become after nearly twelve years of Wikipedia editing. Ah, well, I have a role to play that fits in here, and I can make myself useful. Regards, Alan W (talk) 04:49, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

It's my page, and I have the last word here! No, no. Your prose has been sharp, precise and focused throughout the SAQ work, as befits your literary interests. There's just, just a touch of fatigue visible on the Hazlitt page, more than comprehensible because with 40% of the edits, you shouldered a large part of the burden there. He's a wonderful writer, and the article does him justice. Perhaps in the New Year, if you don't grudge me a light intrusion, we might look at it together. Payback, I hope, for the close work you did on the Shakespeare AQ. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:25, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Excuse me for adding a bit more, but (1) thanks for the kind words and (2) another pair of eyes focused on the Hazlitt page (or any page I've contributed to substantially; actually, regarding "William Hazlitt", measured by quantity of text, my contribution is 80%) would be very welcome, especially when they are eyes such as yours. But I want to make clear that (3) when it comes to Hazlitt, it's no burden. Hazlitt is my all-time favorite "nonfiction prose" writer. ("Wonderful writer"? I'll say!) I've read just about every word he is known to have written, as well as most of the criticism and biographies. Purely a labor of love. Again, though, as I learned well in my years as a book editor, a second or third pair of eyes, with a different perspective, and of course the right attitude, can only help. All the Hazlitt-related pages are on my watchlist, as is your talk page, and of course my own, so I'll see when you are able and ready to take a look at it, to whatever extent you choose. Thanks again. --Alan W (talk) 01:59, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

I was thinking overnight that my suggestion must sound more than a tad narcissistically self-promotional: what I meant was we should try and ring in some of the old textpoker gang that lassoed in the membra disiecta of Shakespearean scholarship (I don't think we need Bishzilla to ride herd necessarily - it's less wrought by grubstaking carpetbaggers and rustlers- but we could ask!). I'm thinking of Tom, Johnuniq, Xover (already present) and the likes . . In any case, I was astounded to see that the article had a lowly B rating, and reckoned with a little teamwork, we might just prod your work, quickly past GA, into the FA corral. Practically, for the moment, I suggest you, as the resident Hazlitt authority, ride shotgun as consecutively I and any other interested ringer, combs over the text making emendments (I think of just tightening the prose for the moment), with you then adopting or excising whatever you think useful. Tom's no doubt busy making Indian dances as a prophylactic against incumbent tornados, and that means he's probably stoked up on peyotl but I'm sure he can find the time to tinker. User:Johnuniq's invariably helpful with his technical insights, and if he can join the muster, all the better. That work definitely is within FA reach with a good collegial will, and whatever the others do, I'll try to get round to a provisory recension in the next few days, on the premise that you know the subject, have the right editorial judgement to see what is an improvement and discard any wanking misprision an outsider might inadvertently add. Sounds like a nice way to work off the mental flab clotting the neurons after the last hectic days of snuffling the fodder in forcefeeding fashion in the Italian Christmas trough!Nishidani (talk) 09:01, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

If you want to run it through GA nomination as a warm-up exercise I'm game to review it (I've had occasion to do a few recently so I'm familiar with the process). I haven't edited the article and am only (very) superficially familiar with Hazlitt, so there should be no COI-type concerns. But, of course, keep in mind that the criteria for GA are barely above high school essay-level (unlike the FA criteria), so there's limited direct value in it. The main benefit is mostly that there's a process-type expectation at FA review that a candidate there has been through both GA and PR, presumably because it's an indication for the reviewers that the article isn't entirely half-baked. --Xover (talk) 09:25, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Great. Give it a day or two, and then go for it. I was disappointed to see that B-article grading, it was almost offensive given we have an Hazlitt expert on it who's invested a huge amount of effort on making it so informative. I am absolutely out of my depth with all wiki procedures, GA/FA etc., which you and others show a professional mastery of, so I'd just be happy to be there, and adjust with Alan and others, the text wherever someone deeply familiar with these processes sets out the criteria required and so far lacking, etc.Nishidani (talk) 11:43, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Yikes Nish, you lost me at gallimaufry but as it is gluttony season I read and relished it all. Characters of Shakespear's Plays is detailed! Who knows what interesting things I might have learned if I hadn't got lost in the computer universe. For more festive cheer, have a very quick look at Chaneyverse which documents an elaborate series of hoax articles—it's wonderful how creative people can be! Johnuniq (talk) 09:59, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

'gallimaufry' popped up because it was a culinary term in keeping with the gluttony of what my father used to call 'the silly season'. I used it in the sense of 'hodge-podge'. It used to be fairly common in the late 50s and 60s but then disappeared from the radar. It's one of the words Shakespeare was indebted to Rabelais for (la Gualimaffree des bigotz (Gargantua & Rabelais Bk.2 , ch.7, loosely translated by the otherwise wonderful, and sadly forgotten polyglot translator J. M. Cohen as 'the Omnium-gatherum of bigots' Penguin ed.1957 p.190, but better glossed as pot pourri by French commentators on that hilarious text:'le pot pourri de toutes sortes de superstitions pratiquées par les faux dévots', which to borrow loosely from Christopher Marlowe means 'a ragout of every kind of superstition practiced by 'religious caterpillars'), hypocritical practitioners of religious flimflamery, which segues neatly into what Warren Chaney appears to be doing. Nice name, obviously derived (in homage) from Lon Chaney, whose protean ability to morph into any shape was celebrated in a Hollywood anecdote about a woman, I vaguely remember, put out of sorts by the sight of a cockroach in the studios, and being told to calm down. It was probably just Lon Chaney developing a new disguise.'Warren' fits that too, a nominal identity as intricate as a rabbit's warren. Nishidani (talk) 12:22, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Stalking

Are you stalking me, or was this page[4] on your watchlist? Debresser (talk) 16:45, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Palestinian population statistics Pro memoria

here,

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A christmas kitten for you!

Pretend it has like a little santa hat. Anyway, thank you for always assuming good faith in me even though we disagree about some things... and have a happy new year!

--Monochrome_Monitor 19:00, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Very sweet of you, dear! Disagreement is the salt of any good relationship, virtual or otherwise, and is not a problem, but an ernest of sincerity. I don't celebrate Christmas, except at the eating trough, though I will say that, as my wife, a devout woman, took up her annual Christmas cake, baked especially for them, to the Franciscan friars near us, they asked her to say a prayer, at which I of course maintain my silence. But at the end, on request, they had me recite the Hebrew prayer of thanksgiving for a meal. They provide temporary asylum for a young Syrian family of refugees. Good fellows. The cake was a depiction of the nativity, and everything has to be eaten, down to the crib. My very best wishes for a happy and productive New Year, esp. in your studies and life. It goes without saying that if you need any help in this neck of the wiki woods, drop me a note. Regards Nishidani (talk) 19:19, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

I assumed you were somewhat observant because you said you were Irish Catholic. Anyway, lovely story. Thanks! --Monochrome_Monitor 20:24, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh no. I came out of an Irish Catholic background, as Moses came out of Egypt, losing his Egyptian character in the process. But the early Bible stories left me with nightmares, that only passed when I came across, at 8, the Iliad and the Odyssey and, took to the imaginative landscape of ancient Greece like a fish to water. There at least, one knew that the stories were make-believe. I'm a pagan, and regard all thought and cultural systems as ideological straightjackets unless, finding oneself swaddled in one or another, one works out, Houdini-like, a Penelopean method of unraveling the threads of bondage, in order to reweave the skeins into a woof and weft more consonant with one's nature, melding the protean malleability of infantile curiosity and the germinal slant of one's formative years. I've never understood anti-Semitism (well, I have. It's a form of paranoid schizophrenia, patently, and that is something clinically understood) because anyone like myself born and reared within the European world, by the seminal origins of Christianity in Judaism, is conceptually heir to Judaism, and to have an animosity for the latter is to disavow what is instinct in the cast of Western civilization, even if, from a Jewish perspective, it is an heretical deviation. One is the sum of one's past, small and large. Like all good sons (bad pun) maturity requires a certain Oedipal revolt against what the sum of the past would lay down for you as your fate, in order to emerge from the 'nightmare of history' (Ulysses) by making its antic/frantic patterns heuristically open to personal revision, rather than acquiesce in any one tradition, and by endorsing it, wrap oneself up in an, ultimately, arbitrary symbolic system no better or worse than any other of the thousands forged by man over time.Nishidani (talk) 20:47, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Just as a pendant, I happened on two articles that underwrite this from a 'Jewish' perspective. The 'Jewishness' of goys in J.J. Goldberg, 'Why Donald Trump's 'Schlonged' Doesn't Matter — and Why That Fact Matters,' The Forward December 24 2015 (A Catholic boy in a Jewish majority area innocently replying to a query about his religion by stating he was 'goyish' and (2)Richard Falk, 'A Christmas message in dark times,' Mondoweiss 25 December 2015, only marred somewhat by St. Augustine's presence, a great autobiographer but detrimental philosophically (after all, he believed male 'erections' began with the 'Fall') which may work out in quantum physics but looks like a counterfactual paradox in our fleshy Newtonian world. (Redeemed by his spelling 'Magi' as 'Maji', a slip which of course had the delicious poignancy of those fond misprisions that mark a not quite complete mastery of the other's codes!) In both, one's primary 'tribal' culture does not exclude a profound sense of belonging also to the other's world. Nishidani (talk) 20:11, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Not enough Japanese drink today!

Have some sake!

Not enough Japanese drink today! Have some sake, Nishidani! Bishonen | talk 21:54, 26 December 2015 (UTC).

Harry's gaiters, as soldiers stationed in Tokyo in the late 40s used to put it!Nishidani (talk) 10:49, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Khazars

Four times today you have neglected my es statements. Your rv-motivations are beside the point. On top of that, mirroring the situation, you accuse me of being ignorant (PA). Instead, you better try to understand & respond to my points raised. -DePiep (talk) 10:10, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Reimagine the situation from someone else's perspective. 3 times you walked into an article and excised material, ignoring that on both occasions the sentences summarized per WP:LEDE the sections lower down the page. Your edit summaries were consecutively opinionated, and patently uninformed since you challenged the RS used to source both statements, and they are impeccable.

(1) hypothetical theory that is not often supported etc: too fringe to be in the lede. awkward wording

• I responded in my revert precisely to this. WP:LEDE sums up the section at bottom page. The theory was widespread

(2) his "association" is secondary at best (but more like gossip by association). Fringe, sourced maybe but not a R(!)S. Has little text in article too. So no need to be in lede.

• Here you excise a second sentence, and again, your edit makes an assumption contradicted by numerous secondary sources used on the page. You claim (a) Davies, Alan (1992). "The Keegstra Affair". In Davies, Alan. Antisemitism in Canada: History and Interpretation. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp. 227–248. ISBN 978-0-889-20216-0. And Vogt, Judith (1975). "Left‐wing " anti‐Zionism " in Norway". Patterns of Prejudice 9 (6): 15–q8. doi:10.1080/0031322X.1975.9969275. are not ‘RS’. By what token?

(3) as already said in my es's: may be documented, but that's not assuring RS and eliminating FRINGE. Still gossip (see also sentence vagueness), still no)

• I replied at this point that you are clearly unfamiliar with the issues. You have made 0.06% of the total edits to the article, and there is no record of your presence on the talk page. You dismiss as not RS 2 sources that self-evidently fit those criteria governing good sourcing. You're an experienced and productive editor, and you should know that when the several stable contributors who built the page have defended these sentences against constant IP tampering and removalists, the sentences you challenge have a consensus and are stable in the article, and that on such occasions the proper thing is to raise any query about them on the talk page. Such time-attrition would drive better men than me to drink (Where's that old bottle of 月桂冠 sake?, now that I think of it.)Nishidani (talk) 10:35, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Your ownership is deluding you and ending up uncivil towards me. -DePiep (talk) 15:59, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I wrote most of it, but there are enough strong editors active there to ensure that I don't abuse the construction by personal bias. I don't have an ownership problem, which you are confusing with the knowledge an editor gains over several months by close study of scores of complex variegated source materials, and which enables one to see whether a novel contribution is firmly grounded in scholarship, or a misprision.

What we do on Wikipedia is very fragile, and given the instability of an electronic medium, which the caprices of adventitious mutations under the protocols of perennial review render even more labile, even an optimist must allow that the virtual prospect of the encyclopedia's metropolitan landscape, fashioned from the best materials, and with hardy banausic craftsmanship, is liable to decay over time and like,

The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

In the interim however, one trusts in the regard of fellow artisans, whose competence is there to correct flawed brickwork and repair shonky worksmanship. When I've done a lot of work on an article, I know that, nonetheless, that is no warrant for regarding it as a personal fiefdom. I also know however, a lot of editing here is careless. Even had I a certain proprietorial attitude here, I would still be guided by an alertness to Prospero's words.

Let me not

Since I have my dukedom got

And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands

I.e.whatever pride one might unconsciously entertain in the quality of one's work, it must be informed by an awareness that this place is collegial, and that good hands will ensure that the main editor is not a captive of his emotional investment in the hard labour of article construction. Concretely, you edited out successively two parts in the lead that for some years every hardbitten IP editor or man with a private take on Khazar theory has taken exception to, and every other editor who has been there from the start has systematically restored because there is a consensus as to their adequacy as a summary of the state of the art. You have a very good record, and there is nothing personal in my stating that you were showing an unfamiliarity with the topic and the text's history. No one, bar Zero, is infallible here.Nishidani (talk) 18:09, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Delusion, I said. -DePiep (talk) 23:02, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Hazlitt article

Things were drifting far afield, what with "gallimaufry" and so on, and this no longer pertains to Paul and the Million Award, so I'll start this new section.

Thanks, Nish, for that fine beginning. I think most of your edits are good, and glad to have 'em. Just fixed one typo. But I will have to go through it all again. Some of what you improved was just material predating my beginnings with the article, which I tended to leave alone. But you have also improved some of my wording, and thanks. Of course any contributions by Xover and Johnuniq would be helpful, even in providing more pairs of eyes not necessarily belonging to anyone who knows much in particular about Hazlitt. But another Wikipedian who is also especially interested in Hazlitt is Celuici, who wrote most of two worthy articles on Hazlitt's father and brother, and with whom I have fruitfully collaborated in the past. I'll drop a note on his talk page.

Oh, and as for ramping this up to GA status, I never tried for that before mainly because I had long intended to beef up at least one or two later sections, mostly "Posthumous Reputation", first. The latter is not just inadequate, it's plain wrong at times, but it would take some bit of work to set it straight, and I kept putting that off (while working on plenty of other Hazlitt-related material here).

To be oontinued ... --Alan W (talk) 19:15, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

My idea was just to run once through the article, for some simple suggestions, to get my feel for it organized. Please be tough here if I overstep anywhere. Though I read two works by Hazlitt donkeys' ages ago, as you can see from some of the book sources I cite, I have better collections on Coleridge in particular, for that period (I think Hazlitt's analysis beginning 'the subtlety of his tact . . .' one of the most prescient and trenchant observations ever made on STC). Let's think of this as an, at least, three month work stretch, so that no one feels there's a rush to tinker everywhere. I hate deadlines. Tom and I gave the SAQ preliminary draft a good 6 months' workover, before we angled around for FA help. If we can get more numbers from the start, it should be a more fluent process, particularly if the experts on GA/FA tell us what needs to be done. Perhaps Xover could drop some indications on the talk page?, where we can shift perhaps this conversation in duke horse.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Ah, Hazlitt's review of The Statesman's Manual, etc., in the Edinburgh Review. Haven't read that one in a while. But his summary review of Coleridge's career in The Spirit of the Age, eight years later, I highly recommend that one if you haven't read it (if you have, you'll understand what I'm saying). A perfect balance of rhapsodic admiration and razor-sharp, unrelenting critical scrutiny. There was someone who didn't have to be reminded to "be tough"; yet, as Lamb, who knew Hazlitt better than anyone, and knew Coleridge well too, remarked about a similar instance of Hazlitt's "tough love" of Coleridge, there's a "respect shines through the disrespect".

Anyway, I'm with you about deadlines. I work slowly, deliberately; but I'm stubborn, too, and I do finish eventually. I see you have added the first comment in years on the article's talk page. I'll take a look at that now. --Alan W (talk) 22:55, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

A bit more time right now than I had expected, so I'll mention this. I see you have been citing the Wu bio of Hazlitt, and perhaps you have been reading it at length. It's good in some ways, and Wu can be a sound scholar. But he does let his imagination run wild at times, and he stages certain scenes that no one possibly could be sure ever happened exactly as presented. He should have been more explicit in such cases and pointed out that a given scene was his re-creation of what likely or possibly happened, and nothing at all verifiable now. I think the man (still very much alive, and I offer the disclaimer that this is just my own opinion, etc.) is a frustrated novelist. Just a caveat. --Alan W (talk) 19:45, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

You're calling the shots, pal. I didn't know that, but, in any case, I'm editing only with provisory suggestions, and you should jump at anything that doesn't square with the scholarship you've mastered. I did however think that the 'mishap' of him putting the hard word on the wrong woman should be contextualized. I have to really make an effort to find some Pom of distinction who didn't screw in the Stews, the Mews, or have a quickie knee-trembler against the walls of the Mall or St. Paul's, and it's only fair to state that Hazlitt's burying the bishop in those quarters wasn't exceptional. What was exceptional, hence his 'modernism' was his readiness to come clean on the dirty side of everyman's life. Chop anything I do as you will, no worries. Nishidani (talk) 19:56, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Nothing to chop at this point. As I said, I think what you added about prostitution in that period and Hazlitt's propensity to "come clean" is all very good, and it is supported, in a general way, by other biographers and historians. I was just issuing the caveat for any possible future use of Wu. I recall one passage where Hazlitt, dissatisfied with things he is writing, is depicted as crumpling the pages and tossing them one by one in the fire. I really don't think there is any evidence such a thing ever happened, though of course it could have. Just an example of a place where I think Wu really crossed some invisible line that true scholars should not cross (and there was no specific warning that this was just a "dramatization" or anything like that, unless I'm forgetting now).

Before I read what you just wrote above, I was composing the following addition: Second thoughts about "run in" vs. "run on". Looked at it again, and it was not "run on the family" but "run on his mother's side of the family". I must have been thinking of "on this side" vs. "on that side". I'll let it remain as is ("run in" now) for a while and see if it still looks OK. Might well be all right as is.

Also, after reading that about the quickie knee-trembler, I think you should be the one writing a novel based on Hazlitt's life. Good one. It'd be hilarious, anyway.--Alan W (talk) 20:11, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Sorry to see you're now laid up with the flu. Ugh. I'm a bit under the weather myself. While you're recovering, I made a few tweaks of my own, including tweaks of your tweaks. Feel better! --Alan W (talk) 23:42, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Good, you must be recovering. At least you've retained enough of your mental acuity to have made some good edits. I did rework some of them, though. If you'll pardon my saying so, I think your diction was getting just a wee bit stilted at times (trying to be as impartial as I can, I will also say that you also smoothed out some of my awkwardnesses and made some excellent improvements).

Oh, also, glad to see you found this recent book by Burley. I was unaware of that one and will want to read it one of these days. While I'm thinking of it, I will mention also that I thought it advisable to remove the direct Web links. The regular citations are enough. Books on Google Books that are in copyright are usually just "previews", with only selected pages, and what those pages are could change at random, so there is never a guarantee that someone who clicks the link will see the intended contents. When I tried the last one, I got some notice (in Italian!) that the page was not available, but I was not at all surprised. Continue to feel better. --Alan W (talk) 00:47, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Quite(w)ri(gh)(t)e)! Once you dropped that ironical contrafactual bit about your writing costively, -talking about throwing down the gauntlet! - I couldn't withstand the temptation to show you what constipated style can be!! I link to what I edit in on google books fully aware that this is not necessary for the final article, but direct evidence to you of the source page so you can check and review it. They are meant to be excised once that supervision is done. As to google books, if the page doesn't come up, you can make it do so often by replacing 'it' in the url with 'de' (German ) or 'fr'(French etc. The Web links are as useless as tits on a bull (though in these postmodernist times, that's beginning to sound archly out of whack with the tenor of the times or Zeitgeist)!Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Appreciate the implied compliment, but in my case I meant that the right words just don't come as I need them. You never seem to have that problem. A flood of the right words, wrong words, any words you want seem to come at your bidding. I'm a bit comforted though when I see that even Hazlitt couldn't immediately call up the best words. In that he disagreed with Cobbett, who contended that the first word that comes is always the best. In my own case, I suppose I should just be content with what skills I have and put them to best use. I know (I confess immodestly) that I'm pretty good at some things, so I just do those things. And if at times some felicitous phrasing comes to mind also, so much the better.

As for the Google Books links, yes, I figured out something like what you said, and I was able to view the cited material. Always good to double-check where possible. Anyway, just as I thought, your perspective has proved very helpful, and we're moving along nicely. And as for "tits on a bull", well, yes, nowadays you never know what would-be transsexual bulls you might have offended. (Note to the Wiki-police/censors: just some private jesting on a talk page; I would never put anything like this into article space.) Hope you're recovering well from your bout of the flu, and, again, to be continued (not the flu, hopefully, but our co-editing of course). --Alan W (talk) 22:53, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

No worries. I have a foolproof fool's technique for whipping flu'. I just smoke the bastards out! Nishidani (talk) 09:09, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Interesting, Alan, to see a mention of Fives, as if it required a gloss, and as though Hazlitt's 'play(ing) it with savage intensity, dashing around the court like a madman,' were peculiar. It was called, simply, 'handball', a fixture of our intensive sports curriculum at the public school I went to as a child, which was furnished with 4 courts. One great advantage of proficiency gained by intense play on the courts was that it rendered one's fingers and palms tough enough to withstand the 'best of six' thrashings with a cane or a 'gat' (a piece of flexible wire in a tube embedded in rubber lining and then sewn up on four sides with strips of leather. One could dispense with the standard prophylactic of chalking the palms before 'copping a hiding' (caning). The usual inventiveness of boys transformed this standard punishment into a competition: a £5 prize was ponied up, a stake being won by the boy who managed to top the list as the most 'gatted' kid every term. My cousin always won, not least because he was a fine handball player.Nishidani (talk) 14:58, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Regarding GA nomination… The GA process has a few steps, but most of them are usually done by a bot. So a brief description of it would be as follows:

1. Whoever wants to act as nominator adds {{subst:GAN|subtopic=Language and literature}} to the top of the article's talk page
2. The bot picks up the edit and adds it to the list of nominated articles at WP:GAN
3. Someone decides to review the article and creates a review subpage (will be at Talk:William_Hazlitt/GA1)
4. The reviewer goes through the article evaluating it against the GA criteria and leaves pass/fail status as well as other review comments
5. The nominator then has (typically) 7 days to address the issues identified by the reviewer (but the reviewer has significant latitude to exceed the 7 days suggested timeframe)
6. Once all issues have been addressed (in the reviewer's opinion), the article is passed and listed as a GA

The two big pain points of the GA process are that waiting for someone to review the article can take several months, and since anyone can, and often do, review GA nominees your odds of getting a decent review are not optimal (and while you can renominate immediately, you then face a new months-long wait for a review). And the big downside to the GA process is that the criteria are very lax such that even a good review that sticks to just the criteria will not give you a lot of useful feedback. For example, I'd guesstimate that William Hazlitt would be passed essentially as is by something like 3 of every 4 reviewers, with only token review comments.

What I was suggesting, then, was that, since it's sort of expected that an article pass through GA and PR before being nominated as a FA, one of you could nominate it for GA and I could step in to do the review (thus avoiding the waiting) and make it a thorough review (thus avoiding the minimal review problem) that would hopefully be of some use in improving the article. Since I haven't edited the article I should be free of any conflict of interest that would otherwise have prevented me from doing the review. Once I'd done the review I'd probably have to be considered too involved to be considered uninvolved at FA, and so once the GA nom was completed I'd be free to help out directly. A sort of "two birds with one stone" approach on the road to FA, in other words. --Xover (talk) 18:33, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that clarification, Xover. We're still in the early stages of working it over, which should take some time, mainly. Regards Nishidani (talk) 21:24, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, Xover, and for the offer of help when we get to the GA stage. This'll take a while, though.

Nish: once again you have dug up more books that I'll want to read eventually. Good to see that one of our contemporaries appreciates Hazlitt's critique of Malthus, which seems to me to have been way ahead of its time. Once again, in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt presents a more balanced view, allowing that Malthus performed a useful service in noting, contrary to the prevailing earlier view, that population increase was not always an unmitigated blessing; but he still sees right through Malthus's "sycophancy", and regrets that Malthus did not address the problem more fairly. Also, I see that now it's not only we two who are going over this article but now Carbon Caryatid has joined in. Hazlitt certainly deserves the attention.

Oh, and that about Hazlitt's handball playing, it appears that he mostly played a variant where racquets were used. But he was for a time an avid follower of fives and wrote (in Grayling's words) an "affectionate obituary" of the celebrated player John Cavanagh for The Examiner, later added to his essay "The Indian Jugglers". Also amusing to hear your recollections of your education and recreation of those days, including the sadistic recreation of the schoolmasters at the boys' expense. It was also just "handball" in this country in my own early years, presumably descended from the earlier "fives". --Alan W (talk)

The schoolmasters weren't sadistic, save for 2, a headmaster, and one who was a stamp thief. The others were just trying to rein in the wild spirits of tough kids, who got maids pregnant, stole wine reserved for saying mass, tried to hang an umpire who'd made a wrong call in a football match, etc.etc. No one I recall of hundreds, ever held the beatings against them: most of them were for known infringements of the rules. The college was dominated by a sense of fair play, and the poor and rich mingled as equals: snobbery or ethnic and class discrimination unknown. Now it is a high-price college for the sons of doctors and lawyers, who would sue or litigate at the slightest complaint from their offspring. In sport we were unbeatable: the modern record is mediocre. A different culture, and I feel lucky to have gone there.Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying—and for shining a spotlight on a vanished era, in a country and culture remote from my own (but not so remote that I can't feel some connection or appreciate what you've recounted). I too feel, though there were many differences, that I am old enough to have been far better educated than most of the young folk growing up today, except maybe some of those with unlimited reserves of family money to pay the outrageous sums that a good education costs these days. --Alan W (talk) 02:34, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Your latest round of edits is fine, though at times a bit challenging. My major quibble is that you, via Barker, misread Hazlitt's reading of Wordsworth's poetry with respect to the poet's "egotism". Egotism was a good thing when it clothed the landscape, etc., with the poet's thoughts and feelings. This actually enabled Wordsworth to create a new kind of poetry, in Hazlitt's view. It was when the egotism led to smug moralizing, preaching, and so on that Hazlitt drew the line. Here again, Bromwich's account of Hazlitt on The Excursion is splendid, more than 26 pages on this topic alone.

Again, you remind me of the Hazlitt material I have not yet read. Metaphysical Hazlitt sits on my shelves, as yet unread, but I'll get to it one of these days. Regards, Alan W (talk) 17:43, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Noted! I'm a relative neophyte there, Alan, and I only hope my amateurish forays are not creating more problems than are inevitable when I barge around that page. Actually, Barker is quite evenhanded, and also cites the positive evaluation by Hazlitt of W's 'depth of feeling' which gives to every object an almost preternatural and preterhuman interest'. I edit always wary of word counts in a long article like that, so I didn't gloss everything, esp. since she is a Wordsworthian, not a Hazlitt specialist like the scholars who form the basic sourcing. If I was over-selective in representing her, mea maxima culpa. Hack away at any deadwood I might inadvertently offload, and by all means do so without feeling obliged to drop me an explanation when or if it seems a sheer misreading. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 18:18, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

It's not that I feel I have to explain all my edits, I have benefited from the dialogs that have resulted. As I just did now. So you were quoting Barker out of context in a way that was misleading. And now my overhasty negative view of Barker has been revised, and there is yet another book I would like to read eventually. My feelings about Wordsworth are very much in line with Hazlitt's, and whatever of Wordsworth's poems he loved, I tend to love, plus The Prelude, which of course he couldn't have known. A shame you acquired one of those "forced on me in school" dislikes at an early age. Regards, Alan W (talk) 22:20, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

One reads to overcome a prejudice (enlarging one's sphere of empathies), and for pleasure. I originally thought everything in the canon had to be read, which contradicted the principle of pleasure, while advancing the demolition of adventitious biases. Eventually, I decided pleasure must dictate the terms of taste: thus, though with a guilty conscience, I suspended the dutiful reading of masterpieces in the canon like Moby Dick and Don Quixote(till I was in my forties) because I couldn't get past the first few pages or chapters. Then, the right moment hit for each, and I read them both with astonishment. I hated Latin, but learnt it. It took 3 decades for my prejudice against the imperial tongue to wilt and allow me to reread it with joy. Taking instinctively to Hopkins in early adolescence, I dithered pugnaciously over Tennyson, until I realized he was to be read by ear, and pounced at his works. I have yet to experience this quite with Shelley, but I can read Wordsworth in large patches with enjoyment. John Ashberry seems to me 99% fraud, the 1% being Daffy Duck In Hollywood, idem Jorie Graham. No amount of explication de texte by Helen Vendler can budge my boredom there, and in so many other writers hailed as indispensable. So, to politely undermine your compliment elsewhere, I'm not well read. But if I do read, I try to read minutely to jemmy the ark and set forth the arcana whose hidden magic gives me the frisson that, in many acclaimed masterpieces, I can't feel. (These lacunae don't embarrass me!) Nishidani (talk) 11:49, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

You are too self-deprecating! To me it's clear that you are far better read than most. That doesn't mean you have to like all you have read. So much does come down to personal taste. Without commenting on every writer you mention, I'll just say now that, although I never looked at Ashberry the way you do, still, whatever I did read by him (and I hardly remember now) left me cold, and I don't recall anything about it, so I never went back to him. In my case, it was Don Quixote and Moby-Dick that opened magical doors for me in my adolescence. Individual differences. Part of what makes life interesting, I suppose. Regards, Alan W (talk) 07:53, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Transferred the following from the Hazlitt talk page: Thank you for digging up all those recent sources of which I was unaware. I hope to read all or most of them sooner or later. Quite a bit of work done on Hazlitt lately. Heartening, but also frustrating that none of my local libraries (at least those to which I have access to for withdrawing books for home reading) have at all kept up with this flood. I suspect it's better in the U.K., but even then maybe only in some academic libraries. I used to have access to some of the best local academic libraries, but since I abandoned my (brief) academic career (yes, another distinct career), those privileges ended some time ago. I might just want to purchase some of those that look the best to me. Burley, Gilmartin, Ley, Whelan, Dart—I had no idea! All highly intriguing to me. Good night (wee hours of the morning, actually, over here). --Alan W (talk) 08:04, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't think we should be hampered by lack of complete access to all the recent critical literature, or feel doomed to bide our time until we have thoroughly devoured their contents. Publish or perish is the sword of Damocles hanging over those who make a professional career in literature. And it gets out of hand: I remember noting to myself that the secondary literature on Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, whose works I was reading in sequence at the time, was 'enriched' yearly by several or a baker's dozen of sizable tomes, each in turn referring to 'new research' as specialists took up hints and, in Hamlet's words, giving the impression of 'thinking too precisely on th' event' so that each quartered thought, though contained some minor lustre of wisdom, often was lost in the finicky dross of feckless equivocation, simply to expand a note or afterthought into an essay for inclusion into a book. A simple calculation told me that simply to keep up with the billowing tide of commentary (50-100 books/articles per decades) one would have to renounce primary source reading, a bit like throwing up the opportunity to spend an evening at the Globe where Shakespeare's latest was being played in order to listen to the tavern gossip about him on the other side of town. Notes & Queries handled this better in the 19th century. You have a command of the opera omnia and the secondary literature of lasting importance, and that should be the beacon that guides us over the wash of googled tidbits. And now to Sunday lunch!Nishidani (talk) 11:10, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more about the state of academic publication in general. I was just referring to my own interest in reading some of the better material recently published on Hazlitt. I do not, certainly, intend to postpone working on Wikipedia articles until I've digested all the secondary sources there are on a given topic. I agree, they multiply faster than they can be read. It's a hopeless task when approached that way. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. --Alan W (talk) 16:27, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

I was wondering if you'd go back and notice that Austin/Austen slip, and you did. What you didn't realize is that you wrote "synthetic" for "syncretic" in that quote from Armitage, although as it turned out I cut out some of that passage anyway. You can always use it in the Liber Amoris article if you think it's worth it. Though, in my view, I'm not even sure I know what Armitage is talking about. Hazlitt "intuitive" rather than "syncretic"? What the hell is that supposed to mean, anyway? To me, it's words, words, words. Or, to change the metaphor and play, sound and fury, signifying nothing. --Alan W (talk) 22:58, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Meant to look into this before out of curiosity, but, although I haven't read a note or query therein in many years, I'm pleased to see that Notes & Queries is still around. Civilization is not dead yet. --Alan W (talk) 05:57, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Question mark?

You speak japanese, correcto? Or have some understanding of it above mere Anglos? I'm wondering cause there's something I'd like a legitimate translation of, since the google translate seems rather odd. --Monochrome_Monitor 20:44, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Hey, young woman, ya wanna complicate my gasping over flu' and make this New Year's eve even more toilsome than these puckered lungs are allowing? Really! Ask Hijiri! he owes me one, and I only pretend to know furren lankwitches to console myself for never learnen em.Nishidani (talk) 20:49, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh no! Feel better! I'm alone this NYE as well, but that's because I didn't make plans... Anyway I am recovering from a recent surgery, so I suppose it's best to stay sedentary. I feel like an idiot because it look me at least ten seconds to figure out what you meant by "furren lankwitches", I legitimately thought it was some kind of Tuetonic cuisine. --Monochrome_Monitor 01:51, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I'll ping him/her. @Hijiri88: Hello there! I'm wondering why does the Japanese article on Jews link to the Bank of England in the lede? Google translate doesn't offer a lot of answers. --Monochrome_Monitor 01:57, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Monochrome Monitor: I emailed you. While I am definitely amping up my editing activity related to the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature, as well as early (Jewish) Christianity, I'm not interested in getting into the whole mess of what the word "Jew" means in 2016, or anything related to the I/P conflict, for the time being. Also, I'm a "him" -- "Hijiri" as a real name is only for girls, but the same character can also be a boy's name, and that's entirely peripheral to why I use it.

@Nishidani: Don't take the above to mean my debt to you is paid, or that you can't ask me for assistance if there are any more obvious trolls in the I/P area. ANI is still on my watchlist, anyway, and I'm apparently more willing than most to read up on the dispute and do my homework before weighing in on those kind of threads. ;-)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:53, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

This isn't I/P! This is possible wikiracism. Thanks anyway though. --Monochrome_Monitor 03:11, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Shows what I know. Why I don't want to get involved. And like I said in the email, I have no interest in Japanese Wikipedia. While they have their equivalent of WP:Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, they certainly don't enforce it anywhere near as effectively as here -- and even en.wiki still leaves a lot to be desired on that front. Complaining about "wikiracism" on Japanese Wikipedia is like complaining about "reddiracism" on Reddit, "4characism" on 4Chan, and so on: it exists, by necessity, because the internet is awash with both genuine racists who don't feel comfortable expressing their views in the real world and trolls who may or may not genuinely believe that "the Jews control the media" but are really only saying it for shits and giggles. If someone adds text like that to the lede of the English Wikipedia article on Jewish people, then we can complain. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:53, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

That's a rather defeatist attitude, no? Populism on wikipedia is one thing but racism is another. --Monochrome_Monitor 08:16, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) That's a good attitude for you to take. But it's an English Wikipedia attitude. Seriously, on English Wikipedia, if you find a user who consistently violates our core content policies (V and NOR, mainly) and revert a bunch of their edits that follow the same pattern, you can get blocked or banned for "harassment"; on Japanese Wikipedia, if you make edits that conform to V and NOR, you can get blocked or banned for "harassment by implication", because on Japanese Wikipedia you are expected to violate V and NOR. The Japanese versions of these policies are straight translations of the English ones, but on Japanese ANI if you quote these policies to the admins' faces you will be told that you are "misinterpreting" them.

For example, yesterday I found that our article on Alexander VI is both incredibly poorly written and essentially unsourced, and many of the inline citations bear no resemblance to the prose to which they are attached. On English Wikipedia, I can fix the problem myself and unless the article has OWN problems I won't face any backlash, but if I tried to figure out who was responsible for the sorry state of the article, and when I did I noticed they had done the same job on hundreds of other articles, if I reverted them or posted on ANI, I would face repercussions; on Japanese Wikipedia, fixing the problem myself with no further action can be seen as harassment.

Just ... stay the hell away from Japanese Wikipedia ... it's not worth it.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:28, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Might I ask why japanese wikipedia is so terrible? Is it just neglected, or is it a cultural thing? --Monochrome_Monitor 08:19, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: Oh, if you're interested in the history of Early Christianity, James Tabor is a great source. With a great blog! [5] --Monochrome_Monitor 08:26, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I've looked. Yes, the last paragraph of the lead contained an anti-Semitic innuendo, apart from being totally inept (Hofjuden in the Bank of England controlling the global economy as an object of ongoing research!) I've removed it. By coincidence I just got round to reading C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers in sequence, having only read a few of them before, and am wading through the 3rd volume, The Conscience of the Rich which is a deeply empathetic description of the March Jewish banking family (though it looks very much like a rewrite of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, with Jews as an aristocratic minority replacing the Catholic Marchmain family: Charles March a remake of Sebastian Flyte, just as the Ist novel essentially plagiarizes, with topical variations D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers) and a few other distinguished novels from 1910-1917.(English antipathy to Catholics and Irish was not unlike the strain of anti-Semitism, perhaps worse in some regards since Benjamin Disraeli could become a PM, but no Catholic, even from the nobility, could entertain such an aspiration. That is one of the reasons why I raise my eyebrows when I observe a tendency to reread Jewish history in the light of a unique victimhood of persecution, given my background) There was an upsurge in imported anti-Semitic literature in the 1930s and 1980s in Japan. The practical effect of the former was that, by a very complex train of events, it actually may have been one of several factors conducive to saving many of the Jews who ended up in Harbin and Shanghai, and later in Kōbe, thanks to Chiune Sugihara, the reasoning perhaps being that if the Jewish conspiracy were correct, then preserving refugee victims of Nazi insanity could prove to be an important card in future negotiations (with the Jacob Schiff story in mind). The latter phenomenon blew over pretty quickly and was basically a profitable publishing scam, translating Japan's chronic economic frictions with the U.S. into a Jewish conspiracy. The outrageousness of this adopted paranoia is best illustrated by the fact that Jacob Schiff saved Japan's arse from bankrupcy and defeat in the end negotiations for the Russo-Japanese War because he had relatives, if I recall correctly,who had been massacred in the Kishinev pogrom. The Russians had the upper hand since Japan consistently failed to get a loan to tide it over a deep financial crisis until a settlement could be made. That decisive intervention is well remembered in Japan, that at a critical juncture in its modernizing process, the country, isolated and desperate, found a friendly hand extended only from a Jewish banker.Nishidani (talk) 10:11, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

In any case, I haven't bookmarked the Japanese page, but will be interested to hear if my obligatory removal of that paranoid claptrap is accepted, or reverted. I'm not going to editwar if it is reverted, but someone there ought to be notified that the rubbish is unacceptable if it is restored.Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Well, the difference is a Jew can convert (as Disraeli did) and remain a Jew, but a catholic cannot. The funny thing is I started looking on japanese wikipedia for an article on Chiune Sugihara, but arrived at Jews. Weird coincidence! Agree on the persecution. Jews have been persecuted quite a bit, but it's only maladaptive to consider them, or any people for that matter, as permanent passive victims. This sets a rather self-destructive, though likely well-intentioned, standard of behavior for Jews which has been particularly harmful to Israel, who seeks to actively avoid further persecution. --Monochrome_Monitor 18:12, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

A Catholic in the traditional view can renounce his 'faith' but, having been baptized, the rite's effect is, in one theological position supported by Cardinal Newman, indelible. Newman's exposition is very similar to Rashi's. It was quite dangerous for Jews at times to have Catholic household help in Italy at least: you might just get a pious woman to secretly baptise one of your kids, and the damage was done: Edgardo Mortara. Baptism in that sense is the Catholic version of the Jewish laws of identity through blood (or 'seed'), which of course explains little in terms of the manifold dissonances among Jews, if they are ever bored enough to get a barren fixation on the concept, about what constitutes their common identity. There's no principle that covers all cases. Bruno Hussar was accepted as a Jew though a convert to Catholicism, while Oswald Rufeisen was rejected as a Jew, in secular terms, because he converted to Catholicism. Both are religious doctrines and, of course, make little sense in terms of the complexities of historical identities.Nishidani (talk) 20:16, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I love how you used "baptism" as a verb. There are similarities but the key difference is there is no ethnic or national component to catholicism, at least anymore than there is to protestantism. --Monochrome_Monitor 03:30, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Well, I am an anti-essentialist pagan:Catholics, Protestants, Jews etc., are as they do (i.e. individuals before they are pinned like butterflies into a taxonomic ethnic grid), which in practice has almost nothing to do with the various belief systems within, in multiple subcultures, each of them, and which at the most superficial level, are used to define them.Terence Tao and Albert Einstein share an identity much deeper that either has, respectively, to Mou Zongsan and Yosef Qafih (Einstein once expressed a sense of affinity to Yemeni music,). Ethnicity is the lowest of common denominators.Nishidani (talk) 15:52, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Note to self

The en dash (–) is slightly wider than the hyphen (-) but narrower than the em dash (—). The typical computer keyboard lacks a dedicated key for the en dash, though most word processors provide a means for its insertion.

Not to mention minus (−) for negative numbers! And em dashes should not have spaces around them, and many other fascinating rules. Johnuniq (talk) 22:04, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

All sources consulted in the meantime, dear chap, fail to include the neglected 'dicky dash', a motherly word for a wee chap's whistle. Being mostly, in those 'tender' years pendant, it probably should be the technical sobriquet for | - -:)Nishidani (talk) 09:29, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

How could you cease to mucking on Israel?

Continue your beloved work here: List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2016 (Don't take it personal)--Bolter21 (talk to me) 21:39, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

? (a) It's drudgery. (b) I didn't start these articles: dozens of POV pushers began writing scores of articles on Palestinian terrorism or rockets or whatever. In 1914 Sept-October, seeing the proliferation of one party pseudo histories lists of 'incidents', whose obvious purpose was to whinge about and promote a sense of unique national victimization, inflicted on a colonial power, while remaining utterly insouciant of the numerous reports (usually swept under the mainstream carpet) of what the IDF et al, do on a daily basis, I decided to ensure that violence on both sides was duly and clinically reported, including at last what Israel does in its colonies. This upset a lot of people. I've continued the series out of duty, not out of interest. And 'mucking on' Israel is bad idiomatic usage apart from being a misreading of what I do, i.e. registering what Israel does, and Palestine does, in the conflict.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Nishidani, I made the same mistake you did, but I think what Bolter really means is that he wants you to work on his rival article. Whatever he means, I've nominated it for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2016 --NSH001 (talk) 09:12, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Correction accepted. I've found Bolter a very decent and reasonable editor in a difficult area. My apologies, B. Thank goodness in these geriatric years, I have caretakers around (like my wife who trails me with a scoop to pick up the odd bits and ends that keep falling off (no problem) and soiling the house (a huge problem). The two articles are complementary.Nishidani (talk) 09:31, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Whoops! No. The parallel article Bolter made Israeli–Palestinian conflict (2015–present) which I initially tried to tinker with, is irremediably flawed by the fact that it is Israelocentric, listing predominantly attacks on Israel, and (this is the effect of using a 'terrorism' definition for violent content) systematically ignoring the structural violence of Israel's occupation. Since it has that flaw, I decided to leave it to its own fate, and do what should be done with all of these conflict articles, namely, just list every episode of violence in a broad and inclusive sense (home demolitions, gassing children's schools, stealing property, denying water rights, driving people out of their homes, looting houses under the pretext of search-and-arrest missions, etc.etc.) That's the only way neutrality can be achieved. Of the 140 odd incidents of Palestinian 'terrorism', the statistical breakdown of analysts is suggesting that at a very minimum 30% consist of Israeli soldiers shooting people suspected of posing a threat for which there is scant evidence, and of the 70% remaining, a large number are equivocal, i.e. someone brandishing a screwdriver or razor several yards from a military outpost in the territories, and being shot dead as a terrorist (the Ferguson syndrome). The article you draw my attention to should be eliminated.Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Many belong in short to this category.

Let me tell you a true story that happened in Gaza, not far from my parish. A boy of sixteen, who was living with his large family without work, going out one day, saw his sister begging at the entrance to a mosque. He went back home, wrote a brief letter to the father and mother, then went to attack an Israeli frontier post. He went to face death. Three hours later he was brought back on a stretcher, dead. Then they discovered the letter he had written: «Father, mother, I love you. I wanted to live for Palestine, but I have avenged you. I have endangered my life, I have killed myself so as to spare a piece of bread for one of my brothers. Now you are no longer ten, but are nine. Now you can feed everybody in the family». This is not the story of one person alone, there are others, each day. Was that young man a terrorist? In the Occupied Territories we are up against a historical crime against a whole people, mainly children, women, the elderly, all innocent and punished because they live in Gaza. Who has the responsibility for protect ing them from the captivity imposed today by the State of Israel? Many Palestinian by now see no other alternative than between slavery and death.Nishidani (talk) 09:52, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I.e., many of the reported 'terroristic' attacks are forms of suicide by cop. I'm sure analysts will get round to providing a competent survey of the phenomenon, but so far all we have is a mass of press reports bundling everything up into 'terror', which is, in any case, a very problematical category to apply mechanically.Nishidani (talk) 11:57, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Should I laugh at what I just did, anyway my bad, you already made an article for that.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

We all slip up, and my lapses are the despair of many, not least of whom, myself. No problem.Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

1RR

Your recent whitewashing edit on Ezra Nawi broke the 1RR restriction on that article. Kindly undo it. Bad Dryer (talk) 20:46, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I was unaware of your intervening intervening edit, which used the word 'brag' in the source, but not neutral, while copying, and ruining the template of, the highly critical source I added (Leibovitz is one of the most intemperately hostile sources around and shouldn't be used in any serious work, but unfortunately he is reliably published and his distortions must be registered. I will note that rather than looking into what my edits were doing, you interrupted them to stop them by making any further work a violation of 1R as is typical of your probably sock puppet past (personal view, not proven, but I know that voice). You didn't note that the edit I added clarifies that the Palestinian law, according to Edo Konrad, is not against selling land to 'Jews' (as dozens of sources are now hysterically repeating, while ignoring that Israel repeatedly refuses to alienate, or even lease, what it calls its state land to non-Jews) but to Israelis. Perhaps he is wrong, and if so further sources will clarify that, but his point remains crucial at this stage, until controverted. What is certain is that your disruptive, distorting, and unbalanced edit now removes an important clarification since I am obliged to revert, which means returning the text to the inept and incorrect, dysfunctional template and all, which you copied and pasted. You know, as well as I do, that the material I added will be restored by myself tomorrow, unless some wise spirit intervenes to undo your gamesmanship's aim in the meantime.Nishidani (talk) 21:03, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

DYK for Muhammad Najati Sidqi

The DYK project (nominate) 00:02, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

For the record

Apropos Sir Joseph commenting on the indefinite block on User:Bad Dryer.

I expect this will be removed, but since you also, the third person here, keep asserting falsehoods in my regard I would note, as a European, that you are wrong in asserting:

There is no such thing as consensual sex with a 15 year old

repeating the claim that at 15 you can have consensual sex with an adult is ludicrous.

See to the contrary Ages of consent in Europe

Personally, I think sex before 18 is deeply misguided (which makes me wildly out of touch with contemporary attitudes), and that adults who sleep with anyone under that age are indulging in an exploitation of a power advantage that is profoundly detrimental to the teenager, totally unacceptable and worthy of sanction. You won't believe this, of course.Nishidani (talk) 10:28, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

• Can I just say that I think it's foolish to get sucked into some kind of content or "what he said" discussion on the talk page of a blocked editor? Drmies (talk) 20:52, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

I wrote when that matter was under appeal, and 3 editors were and one still is, repeating an injurious slur about what they take/took to be my personal beliefs. But you are quite right. I'll archive this manually ASAP. Thanks for the advice.Nishidani (talk) 21:04, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

About numbers in the Israeli-Palestinian list

Please see WP:NUMERAL. In general, 1-9 should be spelled one-nine, numbers up to nine can be spelled both ways (17 or seventeen). Thanks.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 20:35, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Western Wall

My revert was about the "boycott" by Jews about prayer at the wall. He already has that in there in another section. He just wants to put that in there again. I don't think my revert caught anything about transgender prayer. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 18:28, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Nish, it seems this is a case of Kay Long vs. Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Chesdovi (talk) 19:33, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Sir Joe. It takes some time to work up material for an edit. No time to erase it from the page. I can see some things I would question in Chesdovi's edit, but I think that, once done, the right thing is to discuss this on the talk page. or trim or offer suggestions. It is laziness to peremptorily eject material with nothing more than a vague edit summary. I respect content contributors, which is what C is. Chesdovi and I have disagreed very frequently, by the way, but we manage to get on quite well, because, I think, we try to look at each other's work on its merits and not personally. Nishidani (talk) 20:05, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

BTW, I'm not sure if you saw my thing on DH, but why would that not be a RS? If half of CD's edits are RS, certainly DH should be a RS. It is sourced to R' Eli Mansour, a respected rabbi in Brooklyn, NY. Regardless, the edit I linked to from DH was sourced ultimately to R' Moshe Feinstein the greatest posek in the late 20th century America who all Jews respected, you should read his obit in the NY Times if you have the chance, and the DH also quoted Maimonides as well. Regardless if the sources say the Wall is sanctity or not, the fact that the Wall is a synagogue means that the wall is now a sanctified. So it is indeed POV to say the Wall is not a sanctified place.Sir Joseph ^(talk) 17:26, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Kamm again, after all these years

Kamm's was one of the first articles I ever edited on Wikipedia. Since then, I've largely heeded Nableezy's advice (not to me personally - and sorry I can't find the diff) that it is better not to edit articles on people whom one despises. Much more uplifting, and better for your health. Plus it's the articles on good people that usually need the work. Thankfully, Kamm retreated behind a Murdoch paywall, but he recently popped out again, and got what he deserved here, especially in the comments. It seems that Kamm can't stop lying:

"Ex-Hedge Fund manager, now Murdoch leader writer Oliver Kamm published a disgusting and blatant lie and smear about me ... Usually it is best to ignore the lies of far right Murdoch employee Oliver Kamm, but ..."

--NSH001 (talk) 14:36, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, I don't 'despise' Kamm. I don't really read that kind of 'stuff', and bundle journalists and POV warriors in the commentariat (Steven Plaut, Pamela Geller, or many of the mechanical ranters at CounterPunch, etc. come to mind) who don't appear to visit archives and libraries, or hold off till they have thoroughly grasped the history of the subjects they deal with. I do read a good deal of material from writers and journalists whose POV I find distasteful, or whose POV I generally share (several at Counterpunch), who do teach me something because they happen to either know things I missed, or articulate lucidly an important interpretation. Rather than disgust, that kind of publicist for causes just bores the living daylights out of me if I persist past the first para. As to health, I'm sufficiently old not to care about petty things like extending one's mortality:) (That last remark was inspired by hearing Umberto Eco died just as Cameron sealed a victory for his bid for GB to be granted an exceptional status, thus sealing the fate of the EU by setting into gear the eventual nullification of the postwar EU social compact, in favour of predatory finance (vs. long-term infrastructural investment finance). A polymath expires as his profound reading of European culture is rendered obsolete by failing to give the speculative return that markets appreciate. Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Did Prospect magazine, as Craig Murray claims on his blog, print on the Oliver Kamm page attacking him, the correction of what Kamm misreported? So far I have only Murray's words for it, on his blog. But if indeed there is independent proof that Kamm's remarks were officially corrected then this would be appropriate to his article. I can't see it because I am at my readers' limit for free access to that magazine.Nishidani (talk) 21:32, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Well I've just signed up for the 7 "free" articles a month. The article does now quote Murray correctly, but I can't see any formal acknowledgement that the article was corrected, let alone at Murray's request. I'll see if I can find an archive/cache version with the previous wording. --NSH002 (talk) 22:57, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Nah, no luck, but not a great surprise, I suspect they disallow external archiving for copyright reasons. Probably wouldn't be useful as an RS anyway, but it would be nice to have verification. --NSH002 (talk) 23:29, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Now that I've finally had a chance to look at Kamm's Prospect article, I'm appalled at what a pile of trash it is, and surprised that Prospect (which I've always regarded as a fairly decent publication) should print such a shoddy piece of work. But kudos to Murray for getting Prospect to correct it, as it now makes Kamm look as though he's telling the truth. --NSH001 (talk) 12:45, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Umberto Eco's funeral at Castello Sforzesco, on state television, has just ended ended. While watching I thought of all the insipid leaders written by the innumerable heads in the punditocracy, the incapacity to twig the obvious, the tedious recitation of ideas that have an instrumental end (persuasion of an 'ignorant readership')rather than any analytic cogency, and of how Eco, could hold a young class spellbound on the intricacies of palaeography or the philosophy of semiotics, delight a middle brow public that ran to dozens of millions worldwide with racy novels that melded endless allusion to erudite theories while telling a straightforward story, or talk commonsense about high problems with wit and depth comfortably combined, or exchange an infinite number of Yiddish jokes with Moni Ovadia, appraise the profound learning of a comic of the stature of Roberto Benigni, or be the first editor to introduce Woody Allen to the Italian public, or write middle brow weekly comments on virtually every topic to make a bridge between the universities of knowledge and commonsense, and of what he said off-the-cuff, with prescience because he never allowed political blowhards' rhetorical games (easily seen through by a master of the classical works on oratorical tropes) to get the better of the obvious. All of this while dutifully taking classes of students for decades, correcting exam papers, and, after many a class beaming at a bar at a day's work well done. So I looked at what he said about the invasion of Iraq, as it unfolded. Spot on. Dead right. Not original, except for the historical allusion and the inference about the foibles of losing the 'good of our natural reason' when the hounds of war are unleashed and generate Manichaean mentalities. I translated it and lost it when the computer failed to put it up. It's here. 'Si può vincere avendo torto.' L'Espresso 30 April 2003.

Eco deeply admired Wikipedia's project, Kamm jeers at it from the sidelines, with a contempt for (the) hoi polloi. Everything that the former wrote will stay on, which is not a proposition one would bet on for lead writers for the Times.Nishidani (talk) 16:38, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Plot Spoiler spoiling Seaman article

Hi Nishidani. I never cared much about studying WP diplomacy and its zillions of guidelines in detail, but I did grasp the spirit quite well, I think. You seem to be well-versed in this parallel universe, maybe you can help. I'm not concerned in the least that I'm doing anything wrong regarding the Seaman article, but I know that smb. stubborn, and Plot Spoiler shows all the signs of being such, can cost me a lost of (uselessly wasted) time. Do you know how to call up some "higher authority" to arbiter in this issue? I won't let go, that's for sure, but I'd rather keep the procedures as short as WP allows. Many thanks. Arminden

PS: I see you've introduced into the article the most academically written chapter it now contains, which adds a lot to its quality. However, it takes a very well-versed reader to read between the lines and notice the issues created by a high-ranking public information official with such opinions, as long as they are presented in such a smart and articulate manner. For my part, I am convinced that the far more blunt Seaman statements Plot Spoiler wants to "nineteen-eighty-four" out of existence are very much needed in a fast medium like WP. Cheers, ArmindenArminden (talk) 18:09, 26 February 2016 (UTC)