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.

Palestinian population statistics Pro memoria

here,

Notice of Admin noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.84.1.2 (talk)

Children

• New report: Palestinian children in Israeli military detention experience violence, coerced confessions (14 April 2016), Middle East Monitor.

• Ex-Abu Ghraib Interrogator: Israelis Trained U.S. to Use "Palestinian Chair" Torture Device

Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:12, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I.e.Brad Parker et al.,'No Way To Treat a Child: Palestinian Children in the Israeli Military Detention System,' Defense for Children International April 2016. This is evidently an anti-Semitic smear. Firstly Israel has a unique conviction rate, 99% of the indicted, which shows it only detains the guilty. (b) The guilty are a chronic plague in that area, they swarm everywhere, which is why the system has had to convict 700,000 Palestinians. That's over 10% of the population, which means you have an exceptionally high incidence of criminality among those folks. (c) Thirdly, these are not children. Of this spurious report's so-called evidence only one child in 429 cited as witnesses, was detained in an Israeli prison from 2012-2015. The rest were 12 or over, i.e., adults. 1 in 429 is statistically meaningless. It's just one slip-up in Anat Berko's proposed law. 'Shit happens', and this was a minor skidmark.(d) This is war, not a matter, therefore, of prissy human rights fussing. But even in war, civilized nations, meaning those where a lot of English is spoken, there are rules, and these things fall strictly within the remit of Military Order 1651 (e) Brad Parker is an 'Advocacy Officer, and advocacy for a cause means he's biased, and his work probably indictable as incitement. (f) all parents need do is have the mukhtar conduct a whip-around, preferably by getting the muezzin to hand over his prayer broadcast system (and give the landscape some peace:we've had to close down 59 calls to prayer at Hebron this last month to allow the settlers at Kiryat Arba an uninterrupted clear audio reception of Arutz Sheva) and pony up the US$2,580 fine for stone-throwing, which is what most of this juvenile criminal element that survives rubber-coated steel bullets and toxic inhalation of suffocation gases is caught for. From a more general philosophic perspective informed by a deeper knowledge of the region's history, these folks should thank their neighbours that they are (for the moment) still alive. As Edward Luttwak, a distinguished historian, put it in an erudite letter to the Times Literary Supplement (19 February 2016 p.6) while expressing admiration for the restraint Israel had exercised in its so called assault on Gaza, in killing just 551 children,and permanently disabling only 1,000 of the 3,374 wounded kids,'if a Palestinian state had been established in 1947 or any other time, by now it would have machine-gunned many more Palestinians than the Israelis have every killed.' They're getting kid-glove treatment compared to what history would have dealt out to them had they ruled themselves, and should be grateful for the restraint. An Amora like Simeon bar Yochai must be writhing in his grave at our restraint in these unfortunate circumstances (Talmud Sofrim 15:10). Come to think of it, in this earthquake-prone zone, something ought to be done to calm things down. Nishidani (talk) 17:17, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Great analysis Nish, very insightful. Captures the brutality, viciousness, criminality, insanity and massive hypocrisy of the colonialists.

Does WP have an article along the lines of Imprisonment and torture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? If not, it may be a good idea to start such an article, using, among many other sources, the two sources I included above, and the sources in your comment above, and high-quality analysis from additional reliable sources, hopefully as high in quality as the quality of the insights/ analysis in your comment.

Ijon Tichy (talk) 13:50, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. The problem in the I/P area is not making more new articles, but improving the existing ones, which cover most things, more extensively (and of course my own views and analysis would have no place there). What really worries me is the amount of known facts and material generally existing, that never even gets into reliable secondary sources, or at least in those I examine to see if the topic is handled. In any case, we're into spring, and I intend to enjoy it. Apart from a few remaining duties, I'm thinking of taking a leaf out of your commonsensical book, and mucking about more in the non-wiki world. This was impressed on me the other day when I noted the kaleidoscopic imbrication at one focal point of my gaze of a colour mosaic of a thrush, a bee and an admiral butterfly all crossing the same point more or less simultaneously from different directions, only at different depths within the garden. See those things often enough, and reading ought to take a back seat. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:08, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Enjoyed reading your description of the bird, bee and butterfly. I have been enjoying the wildlife around here. And some of the cherry trees around here are already bearing delicious fruit.

You have been doing great work on WP. Keep up the good work.

• If Not Now, When? Young Jews Refuse to Stay Silent on the Occupation This Passover

• A quick tour of water and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 2003, but appears to still be relevant today. Written by Franklin C. Spinney

Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:21, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

I've followed Frank Spinney's articles for several years, since he retired (if only because he did a sensible think and played Ulysses round the Mediterrean in a small yacht, a very sane thing to do). A lot of ex-CIA folks say interesting things afterwards! Thanks also for the other. I'll offer in exchange these all too brief remarks by a fine writer Michael Chabon, recorded at Hebron, where he had the same reaction more or less as did Mario Vargas Llosa (see Tel Rumeida page)- Naomi Zeveloff Q&A 'Michael Chabon Talks Occupation, Injustice and Literature After Visit to West Bank,' The Forward April 24, 2016. Best Nishidani (talk) 20:03, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I guess you've caught 'Varoufakis and Chomsky,', but if not, it's here. I particularly liked the former's definition of modern economics as 'a religion with equations'.Nishidani (talk) 12:32, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, modern economics is mostly pseudo-science. It is almost entirely a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, for the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches.

You may be interested in this: Musician Roger Waters and a documentary film director discuss their documentary on Israel's Hasbarah efforts. (See the right-hand-side panel for all three parts of the conversation.) Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:59, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

IjonTichyIjonTichy The above is a disturbing post. Classic anti-semitic tropes populate the wording.I am sorry Nish, but I have been reflecting on the above for over 24 hours, and I must protest. Simon Irondome (talk) 02:19, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

No need to apologize, Simon. I'm logging in late from another computer as my own is being reengineered to rid it of the totalitarian intrusive claws of a self-installed Windows10 update which, despite my 95% successful attempt to get rid of it, still persists in little tricks to get me back on (their) updated ('date' means anus in Australian dialect) side. As to Tichy's post, I didn't see it in context, as antisemitic, unless the kashrut certificate is taken to signal that the kleptocracy has Jewish connections. An idiom like that would come naturally to someone like T who grew up, I assume, in Israel. We all have differently sensitized noses for these things, and even here in writing 'noses' I immediately realized that my choice of 'noses' could easily lend itself to a negative construal ('And the Lord said unto Moses...') implying an antisemitic mindset. Language is a death trap to the best of us (suffice it to follow the debate between Christopher Ricks and Julius re T S Eliot's antisemitism) However, when I wrote it, I had in mind Bloch's beautiful words on the task of an historian being that of have an acute ability to scent his prey and track it down. If 'kleptocracy', well that is almost the default word to describe post-Soviet Russia, and kleptocratic is fairly objective for describing the way the multi-trillion dollar private debt crashes in 2008 onwards were transferred to the public debit ledger, most recently in the absolutely hallucinating case of Greece, which has been utterly bankrupted for generations by 'loans' that are actually rerouted back to Germany and France etc.etc. To think, everytime a kleptocratic 'rort' of these epochal kinds is duly noted that the Protocols are in the background of the annotator's thinking, is dangerous

In short, saying that 'modern economics is a figleaf or whatever for 'the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches, ' seems to me both empirical and well-grounded theoretically (Michael Hudson, Piketty etc.). Most people don't think that way.There's nothing 'Jewish' about it: indeed, it is merely a late extension in terms of financial 'engineering' of the logic that impelled very unJewish empires like those of Great Britain and the United States to extract wealth from the rest of the world - this occurred formatively when Jews were still excluded from the said establishments.

Antisemitism can be very subtle, but diagnosing its pathologies is getting very difficult perhaps because it is now thrown around (I exclude yourself from this: you have proven consistently lynx-eyed in your discriminations here) so endlessly, not a little abetted by the narrative obsession in so many Israeli and diaspora newspapers of trying to highlight some ostensible 'Jewish' angle in anything from people in the news, Mickey Mouse, falafel, to Superman, comic books, beauty contests, gay society, whatever - I take this all as a sign of the negative effect of diaspora traditions- an unfamiliarity with what it is like to be a nationalist, nationalism being organically natural in a new state like Israel to create a common identity, since the diaspora experience was basically one of being on the receiving end of other nationalists-this made Jews great exponents of universal human rights) The sum effect is that anytime anything comes up for discussion a constituency is been unwittingly attuned to construe it ethnically, and read it for any potential political innuendoes or susurrations from the old whispering echo chambers that 'lie' in all historically mindful readers' minds. This worries me a lot.And I have always taken Tichy's exchanges as a reflection of similar concerns by someone 'on the inside'. Best Nishidani (talk) 14:01, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

As all can see, I have removed words from the original posting which are dramatic and unnecessary. I have forgotten how to strike out comments, and I have to be out in a bit to the bank to pay off some of my creditors in a somewhat painful monthly ritual. (Oh the irony, based on some of the above) so I cannot trawl through endless guides on how to do it. The diffs are there for all to see. The post is unfortunately worded at first sight, and not in character with the editor who made them, the many positive contributions here of which I am aware of. I almost never use such a line, as you are well aware Nish, and others who "know my style". You have more than adequately summed up my concerns in your above post. Your friend and colleague, Simon. Irondome (talk) 14:32, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Dear Irondome, am I correct in assuming you do not read Hebrew? Or, if you do, that you don't spend much time reading Hebrew-language mass media, including e.g. Israeli online newspapers and magazines, Israeli online TV and radio, Israeli videos on YouTube, books written by Israeli authors, etc? Because, as Nishidani tried to explain above, the term 'Providing a Kashrut Certificate' is commonly used in Israel as a general expression to denote 'bestowing legitimacy upon.' The term is used often (or at least not rarely) by average people in the street as well as by writers, journalists etc in a wide variety of contexts that have nothing to do with any religion.

(Of course, there is nothing wrong with not reading Hebrew, and Hebrew language skills are not a requirement, nor do I believe that they should ever be a formal requirement, for editing WP in the I-P area.)

In other words:

• The vast majority of Christian economists, in the history of economics as well as today, worked or work to provide a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, a Halal certificate, to bestow legitimacy on the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches. A relatively small (but perhaps non-trivial) minority of brave, courageous Christian economists worked or work today to strongly oppose this looting.
• The vast majority of Muslim economists, in the history of economics as well as today, worked or work to provide a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, a Halal certificate, to bestow legitimacy on the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches. A relatively small (but perhaps non-trivial) minority of courageous, brave Muslim economists worked or work today to strongly oppose this looting.
• The vast majority of Jewish economists, in the history of economics as well as today, worked or work to provide a cover, a fig-leaf, a Kashrut certificate, a Halal certificate, to bestow legitimacy on the global kleptocratic looting of the global public wealth to create private riches. A relatively small (but perhaps non-trivial) minority of brave, courageous Jewish economists worked or work today to strongly oppose this looting.
• The same applies to all other major religions in the history of humanity. In other words, providing a fig-leaf/ cover is independent of religion.
• Of course the picture is even more complicated. I am not blaming the vast majority of economists for the severe historical and current problems with the global socio-economic system. Economists are just people like you and me, just trying to survive and thrive and feed and house and clothe themselves and their families. And it is not only the economists who are providing cover for the global theft of the public wealth, it is practically every person who has ever lived or who lives now: the prevailing global socio-economic system is embedded deeply inside all of us, and we are all both victims as well as perpetrators, of the global system.

You may also be interested in watching this scene from Network (film). In my view, it's the most important scene in an excellent film that has many important scenes. In fact I strongly recommend renting and watching the entire film.

Best regards, and continued enjoyment and happiness in life (hope you are enjoying watching the exciting UEFA football, although I wish Iceland would have won it all ...), Ijon Tichy (talk) 23:49, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Your words are appreciated IjonTichyIjonTichy. I freely admit to overreacting to your well-meant comment. I was feeling thin skinned that day. It happens. I find your comments very interesting. I am only beginning to study Hebrew, so I fear I could barely struggle through the simplest paragraph at the moment. Shame on me, but give it a year, and I may be able to understand the nuances of simpler newspaper articles and the like. My ambition is to read an Amoz Oz novel in the original. Then I will understand. I hope all is well with you and yours. Hopefully we can discuss your points further very soon. Nish is a patient host so hopefully we can expound further. With all good wishes, Simon. Irondome (talk) 01:02, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Simon, no offense taken. I fully realize your intentions are pure and honorable. And I admire your aim to learn Hebrew - it is not an easy language to learn at any age, especially not at a later stage in life. When we immigrated to Israel many decades ago, I was only 5 years old and I learned to read and write Hebrew relatively quickly, my older siblings had a somewhat harder time learning to read and write the language although they eventually mastered it, and my parents had a very difficult time learning the language, although they eventually learned it well enough to understand most of what they were reading. My parents attended an Ulpan, which helped. Best wishes to you and yours, Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:25, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

There are some languages which, if we don't learn them, leave part of our potential selfs unread, to our loss. I've always felt that way with Hebrew. I could hitchhike round Israel, and even the Gaza Strip with a grasp of the idiomatic basics a half a century ago, but since then, when I have time, reserve it for parsing the Tanakh. I really should pull my finger out and do that extraordinary idiom's claim on me more justice. I helped a sister-in-law several years older than myself, with it a decade ago, and now her daily practice leaves me ashamed (joyfully). Pity that her being only Jewish on her father's side makes her, despite these valiant efforts in poverty, not formally (as opposed to informally) accepted as one of the tribe. So, S, do apply yourself. These moments of our day, stressed or otherwise, take on a different tincture of light when we recite to ourselves verses and words that take us out of mean time into a different universe. Best to both of you.Nishidani (talk) 08:04, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Ijon. This is stuff we've known for 13 years (parallel universes of modern information - the engineered moodosphere via the press vs. the ground, and underlying political calculations), but I've never seen it so meticulously documented as it is here. If you haven't see it, Jeffrey St. Clair How the Iraq War Was Sold CounterPunch July 8, 2016.Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

I would also recommend Eliot Weinberger, 'They could have picked...,' The London Review of Books, Vol. 38 No. 15 28 July 2016. It's a useful wake-up corrective for those of us who focus so intensely on Israel's problems, to be reminded that the Glicks and Qarims are small beer compared to the 'mainstream' lunacy in the Empire's 'Christian' heartland whose greatest pathologists are, perhaps coincidentally but nonetheless, Jewish, like the doyen of them all, Noam Chomsky. The diff is that that tradition has the language of Mein Kampf too close at home not to escape its resonance in the rhetoric of these little, for the moment, avatars of Hitlerism. Why is it in this harsh climate, my small orchard and vegetable plots promise abundance, apart from the perfume? RegardsNishidani (talk) 16:51, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the links to the articles. Indeed, these articles are informative, and frightening, and humorous all at the same time in that they expose the insanity of human so-called "society".

You may be interested in the following:

• The New European Fascists, by Chris Hedges. "Poland offers a frightening example of the right-wing populism sweeping through many nations. Neoliberalism is wrecking economies, creating rage among the working class, devastating cultural institutions and eroding liberal democracy across Europe and in the United States." (And, may I add, in Israel, in the occupied West Bank, in Egypt, in many Arab countries, and in fact in many countries around the globe ...)
• Why many poor white people have voted for Trump. Interview with J. D. Vance, a book author. Vance is a Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty of Appalachia. Offers good insights.
• Ur Fascism, by Umberto Eco in the NY Review of Books. From 1995 but still very relevant today.

Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:14, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Bit late getting back to this. I actually missed it, with intervening edits being made by others. Thanks for the links, esp. Umberto Eco. I discovered I have a trace of the Ur-Fascist - 1/14th of me corresponds to no.11, since I often imagine that it would be useful, when dying, to use the inevitability for some useful end. Talking of fascists, I see Philippe Sands, has just reviewed the evidence for Bliar in A Grand and Disastrous Deceit, LRB Vol. 38 No. 15,28 July 2016 pp.9-11. buried inside there's a good joke of the Iron Lady having dinner with her aides. They enter a restaurant, and the waiter asks her:

Waitress: ‘Would you like to order, Sir?’

Thatcher: ‘Yes, I will have a steak.’

Waitress: ‘How’d you like it?’

Thatcher: ‘Raw please.’

Waitress: ‘And what about the vegetables?’

Thatcher: ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

That pretty much sums up modern politicians. A megalomaniac surrounded by brownnosers. There's one exception. Elizabeth Wilmshurst.Nishidani (talk) 15:21, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

This joke comes from an episode, some thirty years ago, of the much-missed Spitting Image. [1] RolandR (talk) 19:10, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Roland. The fact that The Simpsons anticipated Trump's victory, and the Putin connection, 16 years ago, together with this vignette, is proof of the old rule of thumb. If you want to understand the world, read comics or watch the best comedians, or parodists of genius. They are almost invariably way ahead of the commentariat by several years. The reason for that is that, like reality itself, they are not bound by rules of 'common sense'. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:10, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Roland, thanks. I was not aware of Spitting Image. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I enjoyed very much watching the Spitting Image Election Special 1987. Absolutely brilliant satire/ parody, adhering to the highest production values in writing, directing, craftsmanship, etc. And still highly relevant today, for example the most-recent bread-and-circuses affair in my neck of the woods. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:17, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I highly recommend The Onion. I've enjoyed reading their twitter feed every day over the last 6 years, they do a great job satirizing and parodying many key aspects of human society. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Loved the joke involving the Iron Lady.

The following is interesting: Green Party of Canada Challenges Israeli Apartheid. "Green Party shadow cabinet member Dimitri Lascaris says the passage of the resolution in support of BDS could embolden other Canadian parties to take on the occupation." Also discusses a second, separate resolution by the Green Party, regarding the Jewish National Fund (JNF). --Ijon Tichy (talk) 03:58, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

An interesting article: The Cold War Is Over. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 19:10, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Yes indeed. I can't think of many other populations, save modern Palestinians, who have been comprehensively fucked over by history as have the Russians. I'm sure they must have a word as evocative as sumud, but can't think of one. Mind you I'm losing touch and have been boozing and shoving the snout into the feeding trough for several hours in a farmlet built on top of a Roman villa. Best Nishidani (talk) 22:16, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Glad you are enjoying life. Keep up the merriment. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:42, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Opinion: Russia is now top wheat exporter, proving sanctions won’t work, by Amotz Asa-El. By the way, the author has a Hebrew name, are you familiar with his work? Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:11, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

I"ve seen his works several times. He literally write in every single news paper/website he can. I never really understood what is his political agenda (didn't read too much of his articles) but it seems he is in the Israeli center-left side. He was the main editor of the Jerusalem Post, which is a mostly right-wing newspaper, but he was there ten years ago and at that time I could barely read so I don't know how was JP then. Anyway his articles usually full of historical references and examples instead of straight forward comments on spesific current events. He seems like one of the "good guys".--Bolter21 (talk to me) 18:31, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

(ec.) Thanks Stav. On the button, and informative as often. No, not familiar with him, IJ. I never take note of names like that, Hebrew or Arabic, except when the argument is specifically focused on the I/P area, the only place where often it can often assume a potential background relevance. It sounds like the forecasts given the Russian economy back in 1914: in fact perhaps the key factor deciding Germany for war were calculations that unless the rapidly industrializing neighbor to its East were destroyed, it would, given the developmental indexes, outproduce Germany in 2 decades. One point. We get a lot of eastern grain that is contaminated, even radioactive, through southern Italian ports. I once read in the 1990s that 16% of the Russian landscape was toxically affected. Indeed, I joined a programme to take in for several months a year children from the areas affected by the Chernobyl fallout. We had to feed them a special diet for 3 months,to rid them of the poison they absorbed from eating produce from local farms. Our child got on well with me, except for one dispute over which he was passionate - the superiority of a Lada to a Ferrari, but had nightmares suggesting he believed my wife was part of a plot to steal him from his mother. Jeezus. Didn't work out, but he went back with enough currency sewn into his trousers to tide them over for a year or so.Nishidani (talk) 18:43, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

Imperialism and Class in the Arab World. Published in Monthly Review by Max Ajl, a friend of Vittorio Arrigoni. -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:41, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Very good review, because it invites at least two rereadings (not that it's hard to read - I grew up with that style of analysis, just covers so many complex issues). I'll keep my eye out for Max Ajl's work, so thanks for the tip. Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry to hear about the passing of your cat. I'm the proud daddy of two small dogs which I love dearly, and you have my sympathies. How do you feel about your cat?

Here are some articles that I think you may find interesting:

• Israel and Academic Freedom: a Closed Book, published in CounterPunch Sept. 30, 2016
• Elon Musk unveils plan to colonise Mars, Sept 27, 2016
• Excellent, in-depth analysis and criticism of humanity's plans to colonize the cosmos, published in Monthly Review in 2010, still highly relevant today. And an additional article by the same authors from 2008, again still as relevant today as it was 8 years ago.

Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:24, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Not quite my cat. I have only one, 17 years old, with Alzheimer's and a massive Garfieldian appetite but a local woman, somewhat aspergeristic, used to buy creatures to cater to her daughter's whims, keep them in the house, then throw them out after a week. Evicted baby turtles and kittens ended up in our gardens, so I looked after them, reluctantly. 'Pirate' was a famished strayling who insisted on pouncing in to put on the nosebag when food was placed outside for the other two. Aggressive of necessity, ferocious, it eventually was tamed, and just as, after 1 year, I managed to stroke it, and it stopped hunting and just slept around the gardens till breakfast or dinner. I should have read the behavioural change and taken it to the vet, but it was quietly dying, I now see. We found it under a shrub while gardening, scenting the stench of death. It joins another 12 animals in a cemetery near my vegetable patch. I'm not an ailurophile. I remember, on reading the great Vladimir Georgiev 's Introduction to the History of the Indo-European languages in 1981, stopping in my mental tracks at p.232 at seeing him gloss the Etruscan word krankru as 'cat'. Very odd, I thought. Cats didn't exist in Italy at that time. Indeed, as anyone of his stature should have known, the Latin word feles from which we derive 'feline' actually refers to species like the polecat or weasel, which Romans kept as housepets. Indeed A.E. Housman once wrote a witheringly funny review lambasting a German scholar for reading the line, illic caelureos . .(venerantur) at Juvenal's Satires 15.7:'there (in Egypt) the heavenly ones are worshipped'. That was the received manuscript reading but had long been emended to aeluros ('There cats . . are worshipped'). Since there was no native name for the foreign cat Juvenal took the term from Greek αἴλουρος, and monks, unfortunately the text never fell before the eyes of the anonymous Irish monk who wrote the exquisite Pangur Bán, transcribing the text throughout the ages altered the strange word by conjecturing it was a corruption of the more familiar 'caeruleus' (the bluish ones, the sky creatures, gods)

The one kitten I took into the house, when I found its gravid mother shivering in the snow at Christmas, and gave it sanctuary as it went into labour, has been raised as a dog. My first impulse was to shut the door, and leave it to its own resources, but my conscience and wife prevailed. The former because I was raised where cats were disliked, so much so that I once, aged 7,witnessed a gang of kids failing to drown a batch of kittens in a laundry tub: they struggled hard, clawing the water. So they took them outside and smashed them against the wall. A buried memory, of grief, came to remind me I was obliged to make amends, even though I hadn’t been involved. All silent bystanders to evil must work it through, make recompense in the future.

Thanks for the links. I actually follow Elon Musk's work regularly, the cars and transit system are highly intelligent: going to Mars is stupid. As a pub-crawler told me in 1969 while watching the moon-landing: 'if they'd spent that money making life on earth decent, . . ' I replied along the lines,'Theology, and it's a theological project, has a longer hold on our imagination than humanism, and now we’re seeing its secular reincarnation’. Pat the pups for me.Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

"We have not approached the time when we may speak to each other, but in the mornings sometimes I have heard, echoing far off, the sound of a trumpet. It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog." Sherwood Anderson, A New Testament (1927)

By the way, both my pups are rescue dogs. They are sending their love to their uncle Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 05:00, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

• Israel and Academic Freedom: a Closed Book
• U.S. Admits Israel Is Building Permanent Apartheid Regime — Weeks After Giving It $38 Billion
• New Discovery About Persians in Ancient Japan Generates Excitement

--Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:33, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that one, I haven't been following the Japanese papers recently (by the way, some of the world's foremost experts on the North Eastern tribes of Australia and their languages are Japanese, god bless'em). Newspapers need sensations, I guess, but the fact that Sassanids were in Japan has been known for a century in scholarship at least, and was duly noted in the Nihon Shoki (720). Mind you, it's very important confirmation. We underestimate in our popular imagination how integrated trading was in antiquity: Egyptian lapis lazuli from the Pamir or Afghanistan region found i9ts way to pre-dynastic Egypt. China got their amber through Roman intermediaries. The Tarim mummies and Tocharians attest to viable I.E. speaking linkages. Christopher Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road, steps out at times on a limb, but it's as good a guide as any to the Eurasian globailization in pre-globalized times. Thanks.(Tell the rescue pups to practice retrieving granpa Nish from the morasses he gets himself into!)Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, including the links. It's all very interesting.

What are your thoughts on this: We May Never Truly Fathom Other Cultures (7 Oct 2016)

The pups are saying hello to granpa Nish. Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:21, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

(Wagging my tales in return:)) Generally I think that is odd. Terentius’s line in one of his plays, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,’Being a man myself, I regard nothing human to be beyond my understanding.' Bi/trilingualism was very common at the historical crossroads, and among tribal societies all over the world, even markedly different in moeurs, so that many 'primitives' could grasp societies that were otherwise profoundly different from the one they lived in. One could write a book that wariness of strangers, while natural, only took on its plenitude of incomprehension when accelerated wealth accrual led to elite isolates which, once their power and the reach of their centripetal imagination consolidated over centuries to become an aristocratic sense of cosmic privilege, lost all purchase on the countervailing instinct of sympathy.

Montaigne on reading all of those Spanish reports, extracted a fundamental conclusion which one can find in Book 1, No 31 of the Essays, generally takes the line that our own customs are, seen in reverse perspective, just as weird, bizarre and aleatory as those which the Christians deplored among 'savages'. We deplored their rites of cannibalism, while going to church every day to dine on the body of God, in the communion service, etc. What makes civilized violence (from the Aztecs to us) so much more incomprehensible is that it doesn’t consist in just killing your enemies pellmell, as in a tribal fight. No. It is justified by a whole series of rationales, racial, strategic, theological (the Book of Joshua is foundational). We develop a metaphysics of murder, and give it legal cover by erudite distinctions about just wars, extrajudicial killings, turning a blind eye to genocides caused to people by the collateral damage of our own vibrant economic system's developmental impetus or 'civilising mission' (the French colonial army killed a third of Algeria's population from 1830 to 1880). We maxim-gunned 10,000-15,000 tribesman in an hour or two at Omdurman, for the loss of two score men; a few years later von Trotha wiped out up to 100,000 Herero tribesman and, as if that wasn't enough, Roger Casement, whether reporting on South America or the Congo, exposed the industrial and imperial genocides underway, as King 11 Leopold (just take a look at that fatuous photo and compare the man inside the party costume to the photo portrait of Sitting Bull. ) to entertained European royalty while his men killed at a minimum 1,000,000 Congolese, etc,etc,. I guess WW1 was a relief to the third world - for a brief interim, the mass murders stopped abroad as the whites decimated each other. I can understand murder at the elementary level: it’s massacres for a sophisticated reason which are odd. Not the massacres themselves, but the self-delusional mechanisms people who engage in great civilization's mass killings to provide a warrant or charter for what they are doing (I disagree with Jared Diamond's recent middle class book on this). If you read Steven Runciman’s Crusades, and then read Prescott’s account of the Conquests in Mexico and Peru, the ‘incomprehension that anthropologist feels for Aztecs is not a mater of a psychocultural divide, it’s just that he hasn’t familiarized himself with history, and Western history, or the obvious fact that there’s a little Nazi infant hidden even in the most civilized person, ready to morph given the ‘right’ circumstances.

I was much taken by Marvin Harris’s books, esp. Cannibals and Kings when it first came out, and his cultural Marxist theory applied to cannibalism. Have a look at what he says of the Aztecs pp.99ff.He makes the point that ‘The Jews, Christians, the Moslems, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Roman all went to war to please their gods’(p.107) and provides ecological constraint rationales for things like Central American cannibalism.

You guessed it. No decent film on the television tonight! Cheers pal, and give the pups an extra pat (not a cow pat! what a dreadful thought). (As kids, our first ammunition was cow pats, fresh crap crusted slightly under the sun, which you could scoop up and smash into the other gangkids' faces. We'd come home, happy, covered in shit, greeted by my pharmacist mother's smile- She thought roughing it up, exposing one's self to bacterial filth, was part of a good education, and wasn't far wrong, despite the pong). Nishidani (talk) 21:23, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

Calmécac had it survived the Spaniards or been taken over by the Jesuits, might have vied with Morocco’s Al Quaraouiyine as the oldest university of the world (forgot to copy and paste this last bit). Nishidani (talk) 21:47, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

I agree. Deeply understanding other cultures is sometimes hard, but not impossibly hard. One can understand cultures, that may appear at first as extremely foreign to one's own culture, if one is willing and able to spend considerable amount of time on carefully studying high-quality sources, learning the language(s) of the foreign culture, and, if possible, traveling extensively within the foreign countries and spending considerable time living and striking roots (at least for a year or more) in the foreign lands.

Arabic translators did far more than just preserve Greek philosophy (4 Nov 2016), by Peter Adamson in Aeon Magazine. -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:03, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I like to think of it this way: every one of the 10,000 historical cultures was or is a form of human possibility and constraint. It follows that absorption in any other culture than one's own can open doors that are locked if one remains monocultural. Great civilizations run on a paradox; they are promiscuous by the eclecticism intrinsic to imperial overreach - since they must absorb a manifold of distinct regional cultural realities, yet tend to orthodoxy when the politics of power at the centre feels threatened by the centrifugal vectors of the accommodated diversities. It's not however that one finds something out there not available to one's own sociocultural backdrop: Lévi-Strauss in his Mythologiques essentially concluded that the devices of 'savage thought' were still with us, not overcome by progress, but simply reformulated. The imbrication of social and cultural categories with natural taxonomies is constant - we just think we have gotten beyond the apparent oneiric randomness of primitive thought because we have a technology that beguiles us into believing we are cognitive creatures that have made some quantum leap out of the historical past. Reading ethnography, one is constantly struck by the wild blindness of explorers: they die where natives thrive, they cannot read the landscape for the telltale signs of how to survive in it, signs that are meticulously archived in the ecology of native lore. Burke and Wills hauled 20 tons of equipment across central Australia, with food stocks calculated to last 2 years, and died of starvation, in an area where the Yandruwandha were living intelligently off the desert's recondite riches. The stupid bastards just didn't do the obvious things, like earning good will, learning the languages, changing their diet, etc. The !Kung-San of the Kalahari classify over a hundred insect species, and found close to 20 edible, while others have medicinal functions, and where early travelers saw a desert void of food, their native taxonomy closely classified several hundred plants, each with its ethnobotanical uses, all of course encoded in a different discursive form than what we are accustomed to think in terms of. I was going to write about the failed follow-through of Hellenism's philosophical impact on the Palestinian Talmud, as opposed to the Bavli, then Maimonides's failure, reflecting a broader Islamic missed opportunity, to take Aristotle's syllogistic system on board (monocultures etc) and got distracted, probably because I've had a long day's reading and need to rest up with some film. Thanks for the link and have a good weekend. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 20:47, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the insights.

When you get a chance, I'll be interested to read your thoughts about the failed follow-through of Hellenism's impact on the Palestinian Talmud.

Additionally, your thoughts on the following? Leonard Cohen Sang About Our Love Affair With Death and Destruction (14 November 2016). A short video tribute to Cohen's work over the last 5 decades. "The brooding singer-songwriter tried to humanize society's darkest wishes, and lamented its inability to ever be at peace." The Real News (4:29 minutes)

Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:24, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

50 years ago I read a comment by Moses Hadas raising the hypothesis of a decisive influence of certain Platonic texts like the (otherwise) draconian Laws. He had in mind the minute regimentation of every element in one's life according to an established tradition set down by philosophers/sages. Given that rabbinical literature took on board some 3,000 loanwords from classical languages, it still strikes me as odd that so little is done to try and reconstruct the lost historical hinterland, esp. in the ascendency of Hellenism over the world where at least the Palestinian Talmud developed. Some have argued that there are traces there of a syllogistic modus operandi, not evidenced in the Bavli,for this very reason, but that had failed to gain much traction. Abrahamic religions of course are systems of advanced irrationality whose function is to detribalize the Neolithic world by making its spiritual heritage more amenable to communities living within the powerful jurisdiction and statist universalism of empires. So it's particularly interesting to see how they cope with propositional logic, which, since Pythagoras, has raised the problem of the truth status of axioms. All three had creative skirmishes with the Greek tradition: Christianity tried to meld the two, and we have theology under pontifical and synodic authority; the Islamic world had a major moment of creative contact, evinced by the Muʿtazila only to suffer, devastatingly at least in terms of science, from a failure of nerve. Judaism, having, aside from the probable Khazar experiment,a role of minoritarian subordination to secular authority, just withdrew into an cognitive enclave where the chain of tradition trumped logical curiosity, though it retained an indirect contact with it through familiarity with Arabic translations of Greek works (e.g. Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, etc). The results more or less, from a classical angle, in the case of doctrinal Judaism, are more or less as Israel Shahak set forth. Despite the tragical nature of the necessity to dispossess and destroy another people in order to reenter history in the most imbecilic form of normalcy, it is fascinating to observe the utterly dysfunctional δυσκρασὶα (the inexorable discrepancy between ingredients forced to assume a form of amalgamation) between a modernist project pinioned on secular rationality, and an identitarian value base drawing on an ethics that is devoid of any purchase on logical principles. But, it's late here, and the ghosts of the antipodes are murmuring discontent over this whiteman's distraction. . .

As for Leonard Cohen, he's never been on my radar: I read several poems in the 60s that seemed pretty much in line with a lot of bad work of that period. Several songs remain in memory, but, again, so do a thousand others from that golden age. I guess I'll have to review my prejudices by getting some time to relisten to part of his corpus on youtube.Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. Very insightful, as always. I am still in the process of reading and re-reading your comment and trying to understand all the very interesting nuances, issues, complexities and insights. I will comment further in the future.

Your comment motivated me to read the WP article on Israel Shahak. (I was not previously aware of the work of this wonderful, amazing human being, thanks for bringing his work to my attention.) I don't know when is the last time you may have read the WP article, but I've read it for the first time, and to me, it reads mostly (although not entirely) as an WP:Attack page on Shahak and his work. I looked briefly at the history page, and it appears that several editors whom the community has recently determined to be highly disruptive or otherwise very problematic (e.g. the blocked sockpuppet Epson Salts and several other civil POV pushers) have basically turned the article into (largely, although not entirely) a piece of crap. I don't have the time to work on the article to bring it into compliance with WP policies, I am wondering if you, or anybody who reads this comment, may hopefully have the time, motivation and inclination to improve the article to make it adhere to NPOV (and other policies), because in its current form, this article is a disgrace to WP.

Thanks for sharing some of your perspectives on Leonard Cohen. Your ideas are thought-provoking.

On a somewhat different topic, I highly recommend these two recent, insightful interviews with economist/ historian Michael Hudson: Part 1 and part 2.

Last but not least, the puppies send their love to their grandpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 14:21, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Off to Germany again, and rushing to get a few notes into a backlog of stubs I have material for but haven' had much time to work on. I tried to edit the Shahak article into some semblance of neutrality some years ago but was hindered by an admin at that time distinguished for his brilliant wikilawyering on behalf of the cause. Shahak was an exceptionally insightful and erudite man. Our User:RolandR knew him personally and can attest to his humanity. You can download both his books from the net, even though unfortunately some copies are on anti-Semitic sites, but that will tell you nothing in itself. I recommend a close reading of them: to me they read like a version of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, a formative book for me as a youth, with Plato being replaced by rabbinical tradition. There was nothing new here: what Shahak did regarding the ghetto mentality of the arbitrators of the rabbinical chain of tradition has been done hundreds of times by scholars working on the irrationality of Christianity. One should be careful here: it is one thing to make a metacritique of a specific cultural code or intellectual tradition, another to dismiss its varied members as all implicated in a delusional system of collective scotoma. Marx, it is only slowing emerging, had a prescient intuition into the core end logic of capitalism, and found many eminent, deeply humane acolytes. Attempts to legislate his worldview into a political programme where, were, predictably (as he himself foresaw in 1854,) a disaster. That is true of all the Abrahamic (and other) religions: it's a paradox of humanistic, as opposed to scientific thought, that genuine wisdom and profound readings of human nature came bubble up from thinkers whose overall weltanschauung is irrational. One sees that studying the anthropology of 'primitive' tribes - it's a good exercise to absorb the ethnography of a 'backward' people sufficiently to assimilate their basic rules, and then walk round any city streets and gaze into the faces, minds ands manners of our fellow citizens, and suddenly twig how bizarre we are, how random and contingent our ostensible metropolitan 'rationality' is. One can learn from that rabbi or this imam, or Pope Francesco, or the present Dalai Lama, things that a hyper-rationalist or scientist knows nothing of, though from a higher perspectival angle, science, and the rules of logical method, must rule our better wits, with religion, and much philosophy deriving from it, merely a camouflaged echo of an ancient ghost-dance (there's a great book on this by Weston La Barre).

Nuzzle the pups. Best Nishidani (talk) 15:31, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

ps. that ostensible disproof by Immanuel Jakobovits is of course a spectacular lie: the situation generally was as Shahak said it was, regardless of the incident. One can ascertain this very simply, by googling the relevant topic. Unfortunately, at least at that time I edited, there seemed to be no RS connecting the ban with the Shahak incident, and a lot of malicious recycling of the pseudo-rebuttal.Nishidani (talk) 15:42, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

I've lived in Jerusalem for a number of years, and yes, you are right, the situation was, generally, as Shahak described it. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt?, Foreign Policy (magazine). "A new study has energized a century-long debate at the heart of China's national identity." Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:15, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

The only interesting datum there is Sun Weidong's note that the chemical composition of ancient Chinese bronzes resembles that of Egyptian bronzes. The rest is pretty weird. In ancient cultures metal-working was a closely guarded secret, and figures with mastery of it were regarded as shamanic, men of power and dangerous, so diffusion wasn't rapid unless the craftsmen migrated, or were captured, and sent elsewhere. There was an Indo-European element in western China, and one theory,very minoritarian, holds that the Shang were not speakers of a Sinic language, as were the later Zhou. But the idea of a Hyksos link looks wild. Strange things do happen, though. The 'isolated' aaboriginal peoples of northern Australia were bartering trepan they fished for goods with sailors for the north and it ended up in the fish markets of imperial China. In any case, controversies that wash every idea about the past in the lyes of nationalism are not worth following. I'll try a thought experiment tonight, and mentally transmit two juicy vitaminized biscuits to your pups. If they don't end up in there, put it down to the waning powers of their senescent grandpa. Have a great festive season. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:05, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, and, following up on Leonard Cohen, I found his line:'Everyone knows the war is over/Everyone knows the good guys lost' instantly memorable (particularly in the aftermath of the victory (if predictable, as I argued with some US friends much to their disbelief, or rather conviction I was just being geriatrically contrarian, not only in terms of Murphy's law) of that wanker with the dopey haircut.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Greetings Nish. I liked the brief (4:30 min) analysis of Leonard Cohen's work. Cohen was right, the losers on both sides of practically every war in the last 12,000 years of human history are well known in advance even before the war begins: it's mostly the bottom 90% [in income and wealth] of the population on all sides, while the top 1% smile all the way to the bank. I am not an expert in poetry and you may be right and Cohen may have been a mediocre poet, but he was right about the fact that the vast majority of the global human population is (and has almost always been) basically completely, thoroughly fucked and will likely remain fucked for many more years and decades. Human so-called 'society' is completely insane and has been so for the last 12,000 years. On the other hand we are also completely sane and rational at the same time. (I am slowly discovering that almost all great, complex, multi-layered truths in life are a paradox. Often, both the very complex thing/ topic/ item/ issue and its exact opposite are true and correct at the same time, at least to some degree ...) We can't even bring ourselves to talk about - and more importantly, make big decisions and commitments about - the big problems that are slowly but steadily destroying our lives - e.g. gross human overpopulation, massive overconsumption, enormous inequality/ inequity, Intensive animal farming, global warming/ environmental destruction/ loss of biodiversity, and much more ... At the same time, life is still beautiful and offers many good and enjoyable things e.g. love, friendship, enjoyable work, pursuit of beauty, art, science, pursuit of novel physical, emotional and intellectual adventure/ exploration/ knowledge, pursuit of excellence, and many more pleasurable and enjoyable and deeply satisfying relationships and activities ... In short, life is a piece of excrement and a piece of paradise, and everything in-between, all at the same time ...

Wishing you and yours good health and continued happiness. And keep up the good work on Wikipedia.

The pups received the biscuits and quickly wolfed them down and licked their lips afterwards. They asked me to relay a big thank-you to grandpa Nish. (I dressed them in their Santa Claus outfits and took them to the giant park nearby on both Saturday and Sunday, to the delight of many small children [and a few adults too] ...)

Joyful tidings, Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:11, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

It's a pretty modern thing to think of the poor being the victims of war while the elite profit and survive. Ever since homo sapiens insipiens has ruled the roost, at least down to WW1 and even 2, war was thought excellent for character-forming and a practical way to master the more intricate details of how to muster and therefore master the masses, even if the cost was substantial. A significant part of the ruling elite's rising generation of young men were mowed down in WW1. George Bush Jr.,'s family got things 'right', you funnel Nazi funds to safe havens, and pull strings so that your sons don't serve, but that only signifies something new.

I guess I'm a poetry rigorist. Apart from Shakespeare and a few others, most of the best poets are lucky, as Auden said, to ratchet up a score of poems that will outlive the ages. If you look at wonderful songs for their verbal poetry, many are total duds, though Christopher Ricks has made a great case for Dylan as a poet. Music's metrical baton can tap dull words into memorably orchestrated lyric. I read Cohen's lyrics in print, before listening to them, and that put me off, ,but I realize this was unfair, a prejudice. Sung, they exude a different, moving resonance to what they look like on the printed page. I recite stuff in the shower every morning, just to wake up by refreshing my mind with lyrics, and today sang von Eichendorff's "Mondnacht"

Es war, als hätt' der Himmel

Die Erde still geküßt,

Daß sie im Blütenschimmer

Von ihm nun träumen müßt'.

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,

Die Ähren wogten sacht,

Es rauschten leis die Wälder,

So sternklar war die Nacht.

Und meine Seele spannte

Weit ihre Flügel aus,

Flog durch die stillen Lande,

Als flöge sie nach Haus.

I learnt it as a boy because a German classmate who was, on casual acquaintance, a pretty normal happy-go-lucky 'petty bourgeois', stopped me one day and asked me what I got out of reading. he was puzzled by my anomalous presence in a college for drop-outs (I'd been expelled from an expensive college for subverting their culture and ruining their Catholic value system . I'd spend most time in class reading books and ignoring the teachers). Over a coffee we had a chat, I mentioned poetry, and he finally twigged. 'yeah I know what you mean. My granddad taught me this poem (then recited) and I think the last four lines the most breathlessly beautiful thing I've ever known.' In fact it was the only poem he knew, he was intent on a career in business. Nothing wrong with that, but if one does, one should recall how Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot handled it: diligent paperwork by day, and then, strolling home, down to lights out, the inner world where things make real, i.e. perplexing sense.

This utterly took me by surprise and rid me of whatever supercilious sense of being different might have lurked in me, Whatever stupidity the daily tsunami of global and provincial nonsense throws one's way, such things remind us of the reclusive adamantine potential for refinement in mankind, resonant in lyric, music, acts of empathy, courage, philosophical intuitions, scientific intelligence. It's not an elite thing: that kid's remark showed it's there, deep down, waiting to thrum if the right person can get past our mental messiness and touch the deeper chords. One story of Osip Mandelstam's final days in the gulag has him cared for by thugs, who were enchanted as, dying, he recited fables and poems for them. Today stacking timber that had just been culled from a distant wood and offloaded at my place, I noted these ants, wandering about dazed along the logs. Obviously clueless as to what had happened to their environment, thrown out of kilter from their daily round on the forest floor. I thought, spontaneously:焚き物にだれずに迷う森の蟻 (takimono ni/darezu ni mayou/mori no ari), i.e. 'On the firewood/unflaggingly, their way lost, they stray (perplexed)/the forest ants') Not much chop as a haiku, but more or less, we are the ants, much as you say, in a stripped and bulldozed woodland.

I'm meandering, which is natural enough, given the afternoon of hard 'yakka'. Delighted by the vignette of the santa pups. My family prevailed on me the other night to dress up as Santa Claus because a 3 year old niece, hugely bright, was convinced someone really would knock on the door and bring in presents. I did so, cushions on the stomach, a flowing beard, and, sneaking out back, banged on the door, and chuffed and huffed in with a tired limp, gasping from fatigue, handed over a bag of goodies, and then collapsed, sprawling, on a couch. She really was taken in, 'Oh poor Santa. He's so tired'. So I snored for 10 seconds, and then jumped up:' Must be off, all those kiddies in Africa are waiting for me too. An easier leg to do: no bloody soot or chimneys', and off I trundled.

Best regards and auguries for a good new year, even after the deadshit hits the fan on 20 Jan. Nishidani (talk) 16:59, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the beautiful poem, and for your comments. Your words are inspiring and encouraging.

Wishing you a full and quick recovery.

The pups send their love to Grandpa Nishidani. One of them is sleeping in my lap right now, the other is sleeping at my feet. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:08, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

Hi Nish, how are you? I hope you are doing well. Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:11, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

I've been inactive. Diagnosed as suffering from herpes. The medico said it hurts like a dog's bite, but, having been bitten that way, I never felt much pain, and don't now. Once in Paris, coming out of a restaurant, I saw a beautiful Alsatian and bent down to have a chat with it. It jumped at me and snapped at my face, its spittle on my cheek. I stayed steady, didn't retreat, but just kept murmuring dogtalk to it. It quietened down immediately, wagged its tail, and allowed itself to be patted. Which reminds me, give the pups a St Valentine's caress (or chocolate) from gramps! Cheers, IT! And thanks for the note, as always.Nishidani (talk) 18:03, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Wishing you a quick and full recovery. Indeed, the pups and I are enjoying Valentine's day. The pups are sending their affections to their grandpa Nish. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:27, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Ditto here. John Carter (talk) 14:59, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi Nish, how have you been? I hope all is well with you and yours. Ijon Tichy (talk) 06:23, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm always well. (I think those will fit for my last words, if I have time to utter such things before I kick the bucket:)) It's spring, and the tomatoes are flowering, while, in another garden the 'angel's breasts' or 'Our Lady's jasmine,(dogwood, or mock orange hardly describe them, are in full flower, wafting their scents over the house. Coming through Stansted yesterday, I picked up Scientific American, rummaging past all of the silly newspapers and magazines, for something to read on the flight back. Were there no science, or such popular weeklies like that, or New Scientist one might suffer from migraines, since the intrusiveness of nonsense has reached pandemic proportions, and, sitting in lounges or on trains, I kept counting who was reading a book or serious magazine, and who was thumbing an Ipad, and the latter kept winning hand or thumbs down. In any case, there's a good article in it How to Build a Dog, on a genetic experiment conducting over 58 generations to breed canine traits into a species of fox. (May 62-67) An astonishing story but, before I allowed myself to be swept away in admirations, I thought analogously of what would happen selecting these traits for humans, . . a dystopian utopia of quiet unaggressive folks? or fawning puppets? as the undomesticated natures (mine for one) were bred out. Well, bref, it may save foxes in a world that regards them as predators of food we think we have exclusive rights to, but the fox that is the glory of our countrysides, legends and stories, will disappear, a deeply unhappy thought. Best Nishidani (talk) 10:34, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Nish I hope you will re-consider your decision to retire from WP. I would like to remind you of several things.

It is important to always maintain a sense of humor about life in general and WP in particular. Yes, we should take our work on WP very seriously, but when we lose our sense of humor, we greatly increase the likelihood we will become burned out.

Ignorance is infinite, while patience is not. Over the last five years I have seen numerous cases where highly productive, policy-compliant WP editors (such as yourself) lost patience with the unchecked flow of ignorance and POV-pushing, at which point these great editors were sanctioned for incivility.

Thousands of people around the world read your work every day and rely on you for high-quality, accurate, reliable and truthful information. Moreover, several dozens of productive WP editors are inspired and motivated by your work on the project every day.

I hope you will take a Wikibreak. Take as much time as you feel may be necessary to re-balance and re-center yourself, and then come back to the project. The pups and I send our love. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:00, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

Yo Ho Ho

Doug Weller talk is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}} to your friends' talk pages.

April 2017

Please do not attack other editors, as you did with this edit to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2017 Jerusalem Light Rail stabbing. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Same with this. Thank you. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:19, 17 April 2017 (UTC) Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:19, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Worth noting that Cyrus the Penner was blocked for sockpuppetry within a week of this message. --NSH001 (talk) 06:12, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Cyrus the Penner why did you need to warn him several hours after the fact? And how is pointing out a bias in editing a personal attack? I do not think legitimate concerns should be swept aside with a warning template.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 04:41, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

I did not see the attacks until several hours after the fact, of course. And a consistent failure to assume good faith and claiming edits are being made out of bias (which is completely subjective, by the way) constitutes personal attacks in my book. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:45, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Well if an editor (I won't throw out names) refuses to understand policies on recent news and does not examine the merits (or lack thereof) of a topic that could be placed in a list, it becomes difficult to assume good faith.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 04:55, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Can't say I agree... I agree with his reasoning that these incidents always somehow find their way back into media coverage because of their motive and nature, thus solidifying notability. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 05:02, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

That runs against WP:CRYSTAL. For this kind of news, the criterion must be durability in coverage, something that cannot be known when articles are created a few hours after an otherwise relatively commonplace event has occurred. If it is a major attack, notability is assured. If it is just one of many tragic moments in local history, one should not gaze into the crystal ball and predict its 'notability' will solidify over time. This is elementary, and is observed by all established editors on one side (this has been discussed often and the counsel to refrain from imitating bad practice has been adopted), and systematically ignored by editors on the other. Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Let me redirect you to this. And we also have WP:CRIME, which says, "As with other events, media coverage can confer notability on a high-profile criminal act." Cyrus the Penner (talk) 04:19, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

It's not a 'high profile criminal act'. It looks like a tragic outbreak of maniacal violence by a psychotic individual, immediately framed by the usual media as part of a terrorism pattern, before the details began to emerge.Nishidani (talk) 17:42, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

April 2017

Please stop attacking other editors, as you did on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2017 Jerusalem Light Rail stabbing. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Comment on content, not on other contributors or people.

Please assume good faith in your dealings with other editors, which you did not do on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2017 Jerusalem Light Rail stabbing. Assume that they are here to improve rather than harm Wikipedia.

Cyrus the Penner (talk) 05:46, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

@Cyrus the Penner: Are you trying to increase your edit count? If you are going to drop messages like this, it would be better to get some clue about what they are saying. Try browsing WP:NPA and WP:DTTR. Someone willing and able to be helpful would write a message including a diff and some calm text explaining why, in their opinion, the diff shows problematic behavior. Johnuniq (talk) 06:15, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Well, the PAs are pretty much all over the place at this point. I thought it wouldn't be necessary. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 06:19, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

There's a good chap, just delist my page from your watchlist and waste your time elsewhere please. Don't comment here.Nishidani (talk) 07:09, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Cyrus the Penner (talk) 09:19, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Only replying because your statement is grammatically comical. 'regarding an issue with which you may have been involved'. This use of a modal verb asserting epistemic uncertainty, when you cannot entertain the slightest doubt that I was 'involved', stirs my funny bone. Have a nicer day, and don't return to this page.Nishidani (talk) 13:05, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Confirmed as a sockpuppet here. My compliments to Hijiri for a fine piece of sleuthing. Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

This is a weird case. Apparently, the sockpuppet was an enemy of EMG and wanted him banned. They tried to edit so as first try to gain the latter's sympathy, and then subsequently try to get them tarred by association. I don't think I've come across this kind of scheme before. Kind of makes one lose one's faith in humanity a bit. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 14:51, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

It did look very odd, his badgering EM Gregory on his page, and presumptuously pitching a matey tone of ostensible connivance. While not thinking it was a set up -eager beavers proliferate here - it just sounded false, and was one reason why I joined you immediately in arguing against the proposed ban of EMG. I can remember writing something along these lines in my first draft - EMG cannot be implicated on the basis of what a blow-in is asserting about him - but lost it when called to attend to more urgent home duties. I can vaguely recall a similar trick in my past, of someone brownnosing me with a feigned sympathy of 'pro-Pally' views, that had me instantly on guard. But I've had so many of these brush-ins and set-ups that I can't finger it, and don't care to. I wouldn't lose faith in 'humanity' over this kind of tripe: though it's true that in the virtual world, these meta-games proliferate. In direct social encounters, it's far easier to read and call such shysters out, since the constraints of reality kick in. In any case, Hijiri really did some excellent sleuthing there.Nishidani (talk) 08:39, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Philosophy etc. - Richard Rorty

What do you think of Richard Rorty? I only know a little bit about him, but I think his quip about "truth is whatever your contemporaries let you get away with" applies very well to Wikipedia. I've just started reading Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 00:12, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

I began reading him on the isle of Elba some 20 years ago, just after 4 of his volumes reached me by post. Far more interesting than the contents of Napoleon's library there. He's eminently worth close study: I'd advise you to read the follow up volumes of his collected papers, no burden giving the mesh of a lucid prose style and the erudition of his cultural reach. Generally I think his work as a 'reactionary metaphysician' salutary, but could never quite sympathize with his liberalism. I'd lost my liberal faith a decade before I encountered his. Of course I'm a still a 'liberal humanist', but I thought it was, in practical terms, a gross misreading of modern, particularly late modern structural trends in the world, easy to uphold if you are contributing to the 'conversation of the world' as that developed in Ivy League universities. Rush Limbaugh was infinitely more persuasive in engineering the kind of mindset you see in the apotheosis of Trumpism, than Rorty and co., who were very acute in teasing out evil and cruelty if it was a matter of an exercise in close reading of, say, Nabokov's novels (pp.141-168 of the volume you're reading) than in seeing it, and acting on it, as it unfurled on their neighbours' doorstep some kilometres down the road. That essay on Nabokov is Rorty at his best - a literary critic endowed with acutely tuned antennae. As to 'truth' being what contemporaries letting you get away with, it's not surely the 'truth' that should be the object of concern, so much as the quest for inaccuracies, sieving the clutter of secondary talk that buries discernible (if only just) realities under a mother-lode of rhetoric, misplaced focus (rendering prominent what is contingent, marginal) spin or/and irrelevancies. This is a Popperanian position of course. I still think wiki's rules, however weird, ideally militate against the flatulence or distortions of even our best news sources, and so, if one must evaluate it in these terms, it promises, depending on the stubborn persistence of its more careful editors, to give the average Joe-blow a better set of angles to keep somewhat informed of how the world works, than most other widely read sources in the public domain. That's just off-hand, but there's lots to think about there. Good reading.Nishidani (talk) 08:23, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Somewhere in that book (I flipped through my underlined copy a few nights ago) Rorty adopts the position that the quest for 'truth' is unnecessary if one simply ensures that a society has its freedoms guaranteed. That sounds very much like an Oxbridge exam topic ('Discuss'). It's a nice line, but like a lot of nice lines, question begging.I think he takes truth far too seriously in the abstract: in our everyday world, 'truth' is just getting the available facts and making likely inferences, as in crime stories or the third-degree interrogations of matrimonial conversation à la Virginia Woolf. Nishidani (talk) 16:23, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

I am still reading the book (slacked off a little due to other things), but I got distracted by a quirky book called Indiscrete thoughts (the title is a play on discrete mathematics) by late MIT mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota. It contains some very amusing anecdotes of mathematicians's lives and thinking, along with a very interesting philosophical section on Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Do you see any connection between Rorty's and Husserl's philosophies? Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 09:42, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Sorry to be late getting back on this. I just got back late last night from giving a talk abroad. I'll try to get back when I've gone through all the neglected chores: my tomatoes look like they survived the worst of a hail storm, but I need to rush out, check, and bind them to their 'tutors' (or props). Just at a rush, off-cuff, Rorty in his fundamental work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980, check) charged Husserl with being one of the philosophers in the turn of the last century who, like Russell, tried to reestablish rigorism in philosophy by chucking out the residues or recrudescenses of psychology in logic. So at least in that programmatic work he took exception to Husserl as delaying the perception that the philosophical undertaking was provisory, aesthetic, even literary, a kind of game of analysis at play with no sure anchorage or pretensions to descriptive validity. One would therefore, again, at a rush, think they were diametrically opposed, but since both Husserl and Rorty wrote voluminously, I'd need to do some checking. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 08:20, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

I suggest, if you get time, to read the 1980 book. He touches on Husserl, but his general view is well summed up on p.386, which I'll copy out here for you:-

The notion that we can get around overconfident philosophical realism and positivistic reductions only by adapting something like Kant's transcendental standpoint seems to me the basic mistake in programs like that of Habermas (as well as in Husserl's notion of a "phenomenology of the life-world" which will describe people in some way "prior" to that offered by science).p.382 (etc)

The most precise summation of his views on Husserl I can find are in his essay 'Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics', in R Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol.2 Cambridge University Press 1991 pp.9-26 pp.16f. That he can treat sympathetically that monstrous anti-Semitic cunt, Heidegger so favourably compared to the latter's great mentor, whom Heidegger stabbed in the back, leaves me, as usual, perplexed.Nishidani (talk) 11:01, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try to check it out when I get the time. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 13:06, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

More apropos wikiwork, I guess as a fellow aficionado of one of the few sensible analysts in the I/P area that you caught Nathan Thrall, 'Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace,' The Guardian 16 May 2017

The analysis is more or less what we agreed to was the case (the farce of the endless reports on peace initiatives), discussing him some time ago. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:28, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Blanking assistance required

At Katubanut. I created and wrote this page unaware that the tribe already had its article, shoddy, under Gadubanud. Wot I wanked should be blanked.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Copyright problem on Gadubanud

Please don't add copyright content to this wiki, not even temporarily for editing. Please do your amendments before you save the page, or use an external editor. Thanks, — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 12:41, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

It would help if you provided s diff.Nishidani (talk) 12:58, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

This history link shows that five revisions have been deleted. Presumably Diannaa (who does a lot of great work in the copyvio area) felt that there was a problem, but whatever it was has been removed. Perhaps you had a copy/paste error and inserted stuff you were working on accidentally? I've done that! Johnuniq (talk) 01:10, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

No 'perhaps'. It's just that I'm a fucking idiot re protocols. Most of the articles I am fixing and expanding are either (a) copyright violations that the bot doesn't note or (b) free composition. So what I do is go to the copyrighted text, look at exactly what it says, and then paraphrase it so that it becomes neither (a) nor (b). As for the rest, I research the topic, and put in nothing which cannot be found in any of the academic articles I work it up from. Nishidani (talk) 12:33, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Please help me out

Would you happen to know which incident is referred to here: "In 2016, an article by Walters about Hebron said Israeli soldiers “shot dead five Palestinians” in the city..."? Much appreciative for any help.--TMCk (talk) 15:58, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

No specific incident is being referred to, I assume. One would have to find his original article to be sure. 10 Hebronites were shot in that town in 2016, mostly in separate incidents.

List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2016, 5 between January and June

List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, July–December 2016 5 were between July and December.

One might deduce from this that the article was written in July, summing up the mortalities to that date. However that is just an intuition. You can check the details by doing a search of those two articles. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 16:35, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Ah, yes. I now could access an Haaretz article thru google cache which says Walters' article was published on January 12, 2016. There were 5 shot dead in the first two weeks of that month so you're most likely correct about five referring to several incidents. Much thanks, --TMCk (talk) 17:26, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Not shot dead surely? Or have I been nodding as I read up and edited that article? Still, good work. Nishidani (talk) 17:44, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

'Shot dead' of course. Corrected.--TMCk (talk) 18:23, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

From now on in, I will think of you as Tracy! Nishidani (talk) 12:33, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

I do like flattering with a pinch of offense. Thank you #1.--TMCk (talk) 12:59, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Offense? I grew up with, and loved, Dick Tracy comics. If it's gender, Tracy is an exclusively female Christian name:) Nishidani (talk) 19:16, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Hah, one could annoy me with pronouns but not offend me. As for Dick, my thought (of course) was on the unfortunate combination of words, potentially describing a much too common type of WP editor.--TMCk (talk) 21:28, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes! I did think of the risk of making a cock-up, but, what the hell-'Tracy' wouldn't kick over those phallic traces, but erase all trace of the innuendo (which of course wordgames never do. My brother once worked with a chap called Richard Dick, nicknamed 'Double Dick', which gave no offense. Some linguistic neighbourhoods, like the one I was raised in, thrived on what would now be considered the 'politically incorrect' - conversation was all punning and sledging verbal oneupmanship. A cousin of mine in a club, a person of some athletic distinction, was recognized by the then PM with the words, 'Well, here's a turn up for the books. How are ya, Shithead,' to which he responded, 'Good as gold, Fuckface'. They then had a beer and a laugh. With that kind of matey slang in my head, it's hard for me to tiptoe around the world's contemporary conversation! Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 07:06, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Consilium de digito extrahendo

Nishidani, do it yourself! Learn to use the tools the MediaWiki software provides. For example, if you create an article with a mis-spelled title then: move the article to the proper title and edit the redirect (not the talk page) on the wrong title to {{db-author}}. However the correct action in this case was to convert Kolakngat to a redirect - something which you could and should have done. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 21:04, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

What is it about WP:ARBPIA you don't understand or think you can play with?

What is it about WP:ARBPIA3 you don't understand or think you can play with?

You made an edit,[2] I reverted it,[3], so per WP:ARBPIA3, you have no right to restore your version.

If the regular edit warring user warning template reads "Do not edit war even if you believe you are right", all the more so in the WP:ARBPIA area.

Please be aware that this is your last warning before WP:AE and a likely block. Debresser (talk) 17:57, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

You are reading ARBPIA as a personal warrant for a reverter's omnipotence in asserting a right to have any final decision on whether what another editor like myself may add to a page. I have sought clarification here. Nishidani (talk) 20:03, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

No. All it means is that you must discuss first and edit later. Which is good advice even outside the WP:ARBPIA area.

The WP:ANI post was closed as an issue for WP:AE. I have already stated that I am not planning to pursue this issue any further. If you do intend to open a WP:AE post, please remember the mandatory notification on my userpage, which you forgot after opening the WP:ANI post. Debresser (talk) 20:31, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I discussed, remember. I gave you three points. You made an error in thinking the source did not mention 'Palestinian Bedouins'; you made an error saying B'tselem was a 'radical leftist' organization- B'tselem is all over IP articles, and no editor removes it in my memory, it has never been successfully challenged at RSN; 'Why at the beginning of the paragraph', you asked. because the paragraph on home demolitions started from the 1993 Oslo Accords, whereas home demolitions, as per a hundred sources, began in 1967, as everyone knows.

Therefore, your stupid edit summary was empty of serious content and unanchored in any policy, purely subjective. You said you'd think about it, and probably did, but said nothing. Debresser, you cannot just exercise a revert right and then shut up. Secondly, in you edit summaries or arguments you are obliged to be intelligible, not oracular. If experts are reading this, they can tell us who did what wrong. I am sure you violated 1R; you think I broke the consensus outrider. That is possible, only if it can be shown you tried to engage with my objections. You didn't. Consensus is not a matter of saying nothing, and trusting that a revert is enough to fuck up another editor's contributions. So by all means go to AE - if I get a ban, fine. It means this place, with all the brilliance of administrators notwithstanding, cannot fix intelligent workable rules, because saying I, for one, can be reverted, and must not restore the elided text until the silent interlocutor ignoring my comments decides some weeks or months if ever to say 'how about a compromise' is fucking farcical.Nishidani (talk) 20:46, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm nows informed I should take this to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment. I find all those places totally beyond my powers of comprehension, but this contrettempts is very serious. You are reading the rule re consensus as giving you the power to revert, even irrationally, and then say I have an onus to convince you. I try to do so, and you ignore me. If that is the meaning of these deliberations, i.e. that consensus means no one can restore what anyone else removes, even if the remover stays silent, then the word has assumed a different meaning than what it is supposed to bear. I'd go there, but I can't format a request that would make sense. So fuck it.Nishidani (talk) 20:55, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

@Debresser and Nishidani: Just to be clear, the "consensus required" clause in ARBPIA has been dropped by ArbCom. See this ARCA request. 1RR rule still exists as before. And, as before, it is still good to talk things over and try to get consensus. As a general rule, it is better to discuss on article talk pages instead of user talk pages; so that other people can join in. In this case, Nishidani restored an edit after a couple of days, with an explanation. If Debresser wishes to challenge it again, they can just revert it and/or discuss more on the talkpage. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 20:57, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I have discussed the matter on the article talk page. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 21:21, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm glad someone understands policy round here. I don't read that stuff, it gives me a headache. And Debresser's edit summaries and the remark above (so per WP:ARBPIA3, you have no right to restore your version) indicate he is as ill-informed as I am, and both reverted me on spurious grounds and made an AE threat that, in the ARCA light, would have boomeranged. Still the other page is the place to discuss things. Thanks for clarifying things, which is all I requested at A/I. Nishidani (talk) 21:30, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

It is annoying, but typical, that when enacting new restrictions warning are handed out to all editors, but when lifting them like 5 days ago, nobody notifies anybody about anything. Debresser (talk) 03:55, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Last warning

This is a last warning regarding discretionary sanctions that will most likely be implemented against you if you make one more denigrating or patronizing comment to an editor who disagrees with you. You started with me, but then you just moved to Icewhiz, and it is getting worse over time. This is simply the way you treat fellow editors, and it is unacceptable. All these are from one talkpage and only a few days, and it is simply a disgrace for this project.

• "Remember my advice Debresser. Opinions count for zilch in editing"[4]
• "This is kindergarten level advice", "Do you understand this?"[5]
• "It is bad enough for Debresser to start reverting me when he had read neither the whole page nor knew of the relevant policy", "That is not how we do things here"[6]
• "Look up the word 'prevarication'"[7]
• "This is getting absurdly complicated, indeed stupid"[8]
• "You are not focusing on the specific problem raised in this section"[9]
• "You clearly are totally confused and are not examining with any attention the material provided for you by other editors", "virtually all serious sources", "the conflict you wish to erase or render all but invisible"[10]
• "Your arguments are meaningless because you do not bring sources and you do not reply to the specifics raised by myself"[11]
• "It's lazy to remove"[12]
• "You appear to know nothing of WP:NPOV"[13]
• "Don't be naïve", "You are wasting editorial time"[14]

Debresser (talk) 21:54, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Read the thread. It started when you reverted while you made several egregious mistakes, showing an ignorance of wiki rules, arbitration rulings and policy. The evidence is set out above. One cannot edit in the company of people who refuse to enter into a rational dialogue, but just crowd in to revert and stay silent, or say no. The above remarks in context are all objections to evident stonewalling or talking past legitimate points raised. The same practice, of not listening, but even pushing the revert button to elide comments on the talk page is occurring at the talk page of the Balfour Declaration article. You should drop your mission in your recent wiki life to provoke me and then make threats. Piss off. Don't visit this page even to alert me to this inane menacing. Nishidani (talk) 07:34, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

I am obligated to post a notification on your talkpage that I have opened a WP:AE discussion regarding your recent and past uncivil behavior towards your fellow editors on Wikipedia. You can find it at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Nishidani. Debresser (talk) 22:19, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

One of the English synonyms for incivility is thoughtlessness'. In the I/P area many editors are incivil without leaving a trace of 'rude' language, or irascible remarks, because they are thoughtless regarding both the topic, and the evidence required to write up the article. Of course thoughtless incivility is not actionable, whereas its persistence as a mode of editing is far more deleterious than heated exchanges or one-sided vituperation. In my view, a due sense of modesty, if one is unwilling to roll up one's mental sleeves, would translate, in people who don't have a clue, into a greater restraint when tempted to assert their presence on difficult articles. It is, further, a disruptive abuse to keep trying 'Nishidani' to AE or, if not, tagteaming to revert every other contribution I propose. How often have POV editors complained about me there, eager to get me banned? I'd say a couple of dozens times, several cases this year alone. Drop it, and keep away from this page Nishidani (talk) 08:04, 30 May 2017 (UTC).

Dja Dja Wurrung

Hi Nishidani,

you suggested moving Dja Dja Wurrung to Djadjawurrung, and this has just been done by User:NSH001

Are you sure this is how it should be done? The official government web sites and the Dja Dja Wurrung's own organisation's pages] all use Dja Dja Wurrung as does the National Native Title Tribunal . Ian D Clark seminal work on Aboriginal languages and clans, identifies numerous spellings of the word but settles on the AIATSIS use of Dja Dja Wurrung. Garyvines (talk) 11:36, 29 May 2017 (UTC) Are you sure this is how it should be done? The official government web sites and the Dja Dja Wurrung's own organisation's pages all use Dja Dja Wurrung as does the National Native Title Tribunal . Ian D Clark's Aboriginal languages and clans : an historical atlas of western and central Victoria, 1800–1900, Published: Melbourne, Vic. : Dept. of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, c1990. ISBN 0-909685-41-X, identifies numerous spellings of the word but settles on the AIATSIS use of Dja Dja Wurrung.Garyvines (talk) 11:36, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

The short answer is no, I'm not sure, I was just responding to Nishidani's request on the talk page. Since no-one has objected in more than 3 weeks, and it seemed a reasonable request, I went ahead and moved it. At least, I thought, it'll provoke some discussion if someone really does disagree. I seem to have been successful in that aim! Any further discussion should be on the article talk page, of course, not here. --NSH001 (talk) 12:30, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Gary. As NSH001 advises, I'll respond on the talk page in a mo'.Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Notice that you are now subject to an arbitration enforcement sanction

The following sanction now applies to you:

You are topic-banned from the Arab-Israeli conflict for one month.

You have been sanctioned for the reasons provided in response to this arbitration enforcement request.

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

You may appeal this sanction using the process described here. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything of the above is unclear to you.  Sandstein  13:37, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

• I prize this comment by perhaps the most neutral and accomplished editor in this area after Zero and Huldra, who has many gifts I lack. Nishidani (talk) 15:33, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

• Permalink to the discussion and suspension

Barnstar!

		The Special Barnstar
		Hi Nishidani, I'm really sorry to see the note on your user page. I'm going to miss your posts and your superb "syllogistic thinking"! All the best to you, SarahSV (talk) 04:35, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Sarah. Thanks for the balmstar, citing one of the damning diffs, snippeted out of all context, which got me a month in porridge! I’d just like to clarify. Not syllogistic logic. The arguments I make in talk page disputes, when not clarifying the usage of terms, frequently adopt the rhetoric of analogy, where the analogy drawn assumes that there is a tacit identity between two separate discourses otherwise not apparent to one’s interlocutor. That identity is verified or fails when the common propositional form is elicited, and examined for its bridging cogency. No one questioned in this regard wants to go that far. My familiarity with the topic can be verified (by those who know my identity): I was asked to translate a book on an obscure nook of formal logic last year, and did so to help a friend. It is coming out in Germany latter this year. Wikipedia is a culture, and like all cultures, its codes may be internally coherent, but not logically cogent: there is too much room for subjective calls.

Still, this is all historical ('hysterical', in the comical sense). Since I keep getting reported on, to me, contextually misread trivia, and the bans are growing lengthier, clearly a formal permaban, as opposed to the informal permaban as now exists, is just round the corner, so the fiduciary contract between myself and the encyclopedia is broken, and it saves everyone a lot of bother (tedious wikisoapdramas) if I simply anticipate my retirement, voluntarily, by a year. I do somewhat regret that this means my project together with NSH001 to endow wikipedia with its first(?) complete field coverage (of aboriginal tribes) all under the same format, template and high sourcing bar will stop 400 short of the end (at 180) as a consequence, but one can’t have it both ways. It's a structural exigency people like yourself, with the due expertise, should raise eventually as something to be encouraged. Best wishes for the project, but, more importantly, your life in these troubled times, Sarah.Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

I may be about to retire myself, Nishidani. I honestly can't see it leading to a permanban in your case. People value you too highly. But I'm sorry you were upset by it all. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:56, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

A month will pass. Come back when its over; you are needed. Meanwhile, your ban doesn't cover aboriginal tribes so what is your excuse for slowing down there? Zero^talk 13:14, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

What Kingsindian say here, is very true. On Wikipedia everything is allowed....and nothing is allowed. I have seen admins wrangle for days over at AE giving an editor with a 7 year clean record, no blocks, his first block for an obvious violation. I got my first block after 10 year clean record...the whole of 3 minutes after I was reported to 3RR ..by an obvious sock, who could not hide his schadenfreude...and the block record stays, as arb.com people say "I was blocked by mistake, too, but that has never been used agains me!"

Idiots.

It is used agains me. My second bloc was from a crat, and to such elevated entities WP:AGF apparently does not apply.

I think the worst mistake of Wikipedia is that admins are give "life" powers. Until we get a system where admins are elected for a limited period, say 4 years, Wikipedia will be a place run by petty dictators with time to spare.

Why I stay? I noticed several years ago that journalists were starting to quote ....indirectly...from stuff I had added to Wikipedia. Early on, it was typically 1945 data, etc. (Well, theoretically they could have dug that out themselves....ha!) These last couple of years I have seen academic articles about places...that, oh so incidentally, mention exactly the same sources that I have put into an article.... Heh.

And that is about time!! Look at how, say Taibe, Galilee was started....lots of articles were like that. The general knowledge about Palestine the last 1500 years have been absolutely horrendous. Even the, shall we say, academic knowledge. I have been reading Frantzman phD thesis lately, (see User:Huldra/Frantzman) ...if I had done equally bad work on Wikipedia I would have been banned years ago (hopefully!)

But I see the day is coming.... 5 years from now, 10 year from now, when every 1596 tax data, every 1799 Jacotin note, every Guerin and SWP references, every Socin and Hartmann data, every Schumacher, every 1922, 1931 and 1945 data will be in the Palestinian village/town articles. And then never again can places with thousands of years of documented history been said to be "established in 1920 by the Bedouin".

Then I will retire.

Until then, I ...as the expression goes about politicians around my place making seriously painful compromises...:I "swallow camels whole", for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Every single day I edit here.

Now, back to work on my Palestinian villages. And you, Sir, should be back to your aboriginal tribes, Huldra (talk) 23:37, 6 June 2017 (UTC) (PS Kudos to Sarah, the barnstar is much deserved!)

• Seriously? You quit your painful enjoyment here just because you don't fit into this environment of utterly idiotic political correct nothing but useful to some brain farts who have nothing better to do than spreading their irrelevance all over the place to the pleasure of themselves and some agenda driven brain dead assholes? I sure do understand but the little difference you made here is missed big time and you should think more of pleasing yourself instead of those little, worse than a disease spreading cockroach creatures that make life on this planet more hell than hell ever possible could be. Little lies accumulate quite quickly while their proportional damage is enormous and since we're not living in an era of enlightenment (contrary to what some might think) every tiny little shiny light is unique and irreplaceable. Just a reminder of what I'm sure you already know. Take care, --TMCk (talk) 23:46, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Reconsideration

The aforementioned decision looks like a 'hissy fit', as young people used to say. Giving aboriginal societies their due should take precedence over some egotistic standing on one's dignity in the face of judgments I find deplorable. My premise was that I was being denied my natural right to edit I/P articles, and that, if that right was denied me, I would not supply the 400 remaining articles I am preparing on Aboriginal societies. Some arbitrators think the former is just my personal take and that I deserved a month's suspension for expostulative language. Well, I'll drop the expostulative language, and return to the I/P area alone, and see if I run up against the tagteaming revert pattern that exasperated me earlier. If this fails to eventuate, and I can work there with equanimity, then I'll take it I was mistaken, and resume my project on the comprehensive coverage of Australian tribal societies (but only on that condition). I will list the I/P pages I work on here, as editorial interventions dictate.Nishidani (talk) 12:25, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

This was immediately commented on, with an alerting link to another user here and a follow up denial of WP:AGF here and elicited a personal attack against me by the other editor.

Nish, ignore both of them. Completely and utterly useless to spend a brain cycle on them. So, please, dont, your remaining brain cycles can be put to so much better use. nableezy - 15:53, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

And if there is some egregious edit that one of them happens to make, try not to be baited into giving what may be called a dressing down with colorful language on the talk page. Just let me know about it. nableezy - 15:58, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Of course. But it helps to keep one's records in order, like noting that your remarks aboveare already giving rise to a theory we are organizing a conspiracy. Yawn. Nishidani (talk) 16:39, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Wtf cares. Im serious, let me know when theres something as bad as say calling unnamed editors "anti-Jewish". Those are things that somebody who has repeatedly taken others to AE for personal attacks should know better than to do, and it should result in a ban. Now this is likely not your preferred genre of music, and it is actually one of his shittier songs, but I find it cathartic to sing along to the chorus. nableezy - 16:46, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Well, I've always had problems with the ambiguities of the expletive 'Fuck you' and its passive variant, 'Get fucked'. In one sense, telling the world to 'get fucked' is tantamount to asking everyone to 'get laid'. I think this a friendly augury - meaning, if everyone got a 'piece', there'd be more peace. I'm sure someone has done a learned grammatical analysis for some linguistics journal on the semantic complexities of the words, but if they haven't, once I'm through with wikiwork, it is one of hundreds of topics I'd like to write about. Subtextually, the preceding signals:'Don't worry about me.' I never have, because that particular burden is something a lot of other people who (don't) know me do, quite pointlessly.Nishidani (talk) 16:58, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

I very much look forward to seeing you investigate this further. For now though, for the rest of us, just ignore what isnt directly related to the content. nableezy - 19:17, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

No. I asked the editor to retract his statement. He struck it out. Today he reintroduced it, insinuating I was not only anti-Jewish but also anti-Israeli, adding insult to injury My water-off-a-duck's back taciturnity in the face of a motherlode of this kind of sniping for a decade, i.e. rarely troubling AN/I and AE with reports, but just telling provocators to get stuffed, led to my being in turn suspended for a day and then a month when my remonstrative language was cited as a bad attitude. To not report this kind of atmospheric niggling, if it persists, while I watch my p's and q's, is to encourage it. That said, I'm focused on content. I'm here for the pleasure of editing, nothing else.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, I see that, and I agree. Im just saying you are much better off doing what you did now, that is ask the person to retract it and not respond to the personal attack otherwise, and if it continues to report it. Dont allow him to bait you into making disparaging remarks against him. Thats all he is doing, trying to wind you up with personal attacks so that he can report you if you make one. nableezy - 19:59, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani. Welcome back. I really like the talk you emailed me: I always enjoy a good story with personal anecdotes and it was rather humourous in places.

If you have any issues with opening RfCs or arguing about fine points of Wikipedia bureaucracy which no sane person would want to get involved in, but are sometimes necessary, feel free to ping me. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 02:24, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Very glad to read you again :) --TMCk (talk) 23:51, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

12 July

• Yinon Plan
• Shuafat reverted on a key point immediately, together with a personal attack ('one of your first new projects, you choose to clash with me. Again.', and then told to shut up. A subsequent insinuation of anti-semitism, i.e. I and another editor belonged to an 'anti-Jewish camp' was duly retracted at my request.A day later this retraction was retracted here and finissed here with a variation adding anti-Israeli as a further innuendo. For the record the article on Antisemitism uses the word ‘anti-Jewish’ as synonymous with anti-semitic. I asked the editor to strike out the offensive smear again. On his own page he appears in the meantime he appears to be encouraged to think there’s something conspiratorial about my behavior today.
• Archaeology of Israel on the talk page
• Khan Shaykhun chemical attack

16 July.

• Timeline of anti-Zionism‎. I was instantly reverted when I removed some recent trivia totally out of keeping with the contents of the page (I wrote about 95% of the entries, basically an annotated list of all Jewish thinkers, writers etc who have taken an anti-Zionist position. The page is deemed 'ridiculous').Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 16 July 2017 (UTC) Nishidani (talk) 20:59, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

23/28 July

• 2017 Temple Mount shooting This is a serious problem. One cannot describe Israeli/Jewish vs Palestinian-Arab incidents on the Temple Mount (the preferred English term for the former) without glossing at least on first mention, that it is also known to Arabs as the Haram al-Sharif. Indeed to satisfy both constituencies, we have two articles on the same site. So I introduced the parallel Arab term for the Temple Mount Haram al Sharif on the 23 July Per NPOV. Temple Mount alone espouses one narrative of the meaning of that location to only one party in the dispute.

Duly reverted the day after

I reintroduced it after some days. and again, after a day's wait the same editor removed it mentioning WP:COMMONNAME, a policy which refers to the 'title of an article, not to its content. If so then the revert is a case of a policy-wise false edit summary.I.e.

No need to include both, this is the WP:COMMONNAME for English. Saying 1 billion people call it that is meaningless as its a different language. The whole article is a POV attack piece.Nishidani (talk) 14:22, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

• 2017 Halamish stabbing attack Editors have restored the content of all material I removed on policy grounds and because the material introduced was using 'is expected' in the contextual sense of 'Israel sources have speculated', making a conjecture into a neutral generalization. NPOV abuse.
• Hilltop Youth. Material, which the reverting editor did not contest as RS-sourced was steady trimmed over several edits. I noticed this today, and restored the deleted material. Undid revision 792912511 by Nishidani (talk) BLPCRIME vio vs Ettinger, and also wrong on some details, you can only state what he was covicted for. This is a false edit summary, since it was a blanket revert changing (a) 'in the view of hilltop youth' into 'the ideology of' and erasing the fact that Hilltop Youth have been compared to ISIS, which has nothing to do with a WP:BLP/Crime issue. The editor involved has been the highest reverter of my few edits, before the sanction, and afterwards.Nishidani (talk) 19:05, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Chosen and Excluded – The Hate on Jews in Europe

Hi Nish,

Hope you are fine and happy to see you back :-)

If and when you have time, could you please introduce in English in this article the material that can be found in French here ?

You will understand in reading the article and the content that should be added...

Pluto2012 (talk) 17:05, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

I'll try to get round to it tomorrow. I've looked at the section (a lot of those adjectives can go of course. Responses should have a conceptual value, I think) By the way, the English title is flawed. You can't say 'Hatred on Jews' in English (as opposed to Hass auf in German, which is normal but where auf = gegen. You must write 'hatred of Jews.' (cf. FrenchHaine des Juifs ) Nishidani (talk) 18:22, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

I've checked it all out. I had a nice afternoon in the virtual company of a deeply intelligent man, Shahak. To have one's ears tuned to that kind of toxic agitprop is depressing. I don't even know if it's worth the bother to improve a page that was brain-dead on birth: the French page is far better.Nishidani (talk) 19:27, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Don't worry too much.

The idea was just to neutralize the English version with these 3 scholars.

DE, EN and FR articles are just depressing and b***sh**. Pluto2012 (talk) 20:22, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm a bit late, but must get a certain backlog of work, private and otherwise done, before I pass the translation on. Sorry for the delay.Nishidani (talk) 16:41, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Archiving

Welcome back, old chap. You've been missed!

Anyhow, now that you're back, I've restored the previous settings for the archive bot.

It is possible, if you really wish, to stop a specific section from being archived (I'm doing this for the long LHT clutter thread on my own talk page, at least for now), but in your case I strongly recommend against it, because your talk page is already pushing the limits on size and number of threads. Instead, I think you should just let the bot do its work in the normal manner. You can always put a link to an archived thread on your main user page, possibly with an excerpt or explanation. Regards, NSH001 (talk) 05:35, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Okay. Letting a 'bot do its work in the normal manner' is a phrasing that convinces me, if only because bot means also 'bottom', and I'm all for regular evacuation, and it excludes the other implication of 'bot', a cadger.Nishidani (talk) 10:40, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

AE comments

Hi. May I suggest some "Best Practices" for AE statements?

• Nobody reads 90% of what people write at AE. Therefore, statements must be short.
• Nobody reads the disputes between people who are not a party to the request.
• The more one writes, the more it can (and will) be used against oneself.

So, I suggest that you simply ignore what NMMNG is saying at the AE request. Nobody is going to read it. And if anyone does, it's likely to hurt you as much as him: admins will think that "these people can't get along with each other. Let's ban both of them".

If you want to complain about NMMNG, just open a separate request. Or you could just ignore them. I have told NMMNG the same thing, but they don't listen. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 02:56, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

You're quite right. I should stop thinking and behaving as if Wikipedia were an exemplary arena for the deployment of what Habermas called kommunikative Rationalität, esp. within the I/P death zone's basso ostinato of unkommunikative Nationalität. That kind of persistent fishing expedition, baited with just enough sneering to get under the WP:AGF radar while sufficiently rude ('your claim is self-serving falsehood,') to elicit a countering response (which in turn will be parsed to find evidence of a WP:AGF violation thitherto lacking) should be passed over in silence. It's just that while sympathetic to admins - it's tough wading through such motherlodes of unfocused discursive drift- I've seen enough judgements that are 'humoural' rather than policy-based or internally coherent, to think at times a further word of clarification is needed. by the way, having to reread through the history of my engagements with this case, I realized that it was correct to suspend. Wordsmith didn't think much of the plaintiff's evidence but went back and noticed I had unduly 'personalized' things once or twice by saying things like "from your nationalist perspective" and "the usual Israeli POV pushers." Apparently, however, this is more offensive that language that implies to most readers that someone is an anti-Semite. What is crushing evidence for a sanction in one case, is piddling in the other. Still, I'll take your and the other chap's advice to 'shut up'.Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Ah, I note in the meantime the case is closed. Back to serious editing.Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Aboriginal source page per Huldra's shining example

I think I need to muster up the fundamental early sources on the Aborigines, very much along the lines of my inspirer for this series. I'll begin to drop some bibliographical notes here, so they can be transferred to a new page, as she does.

There are two assumptions on future work once the several hundred outline articles are completed

• (1)All articles deal with the country where each aboriginal tribe lived, listing contemporary townships and cities etc. Eventually each town and city article in Wikipedia should have a link indicating the tribe(s) that inhabited the zone before white colonization. At the moment, most articles begin with white settlement, ignoring the pre-existing groups.
• (2)These articles are being written according to the relatively modern scholarly notices. However, once the list is complete, then each article should be reviewed according to the 19th century historical sources listed below, which are extensive and detailed yet difficult to use because they mention landscape, and customs, without identifying the tribes by name. Once we know from the articles who lived where, reading the classics accounts becomes simpler, in that we can immediately twig which tribe or tribal group is being spoken of.
• (3) It follows that each article should have in a History section RS citations of the first settlers, where they set up stations and cattle runs, even if the tribe is not specified. Thios is perfectly legitimate background, and not a WP:RS infraction. Often the early pioneer chronicles will mention the 'natives' or 'tribes' without identifying them, but the lack of a specific tribal name does not translate into passing over in silence their presence on those terrains. This is particularly exigent for articles on tribes for whom little information survives, since they died of introduced disease or massacres. Their articles can easily be thickened by using regional histories of the occupiers who took over their territory. Examples are the Bungandidj and Meintangk: the earliest forays indicate widespread smallpox marks, but few people. The archaeological evidence is turning up, to the contrary, evidence of dense populations until settlement.

I expect doing these two things is beyong my scope and span, but by setting up a comprehensive reading list and leaving it here, stray editors and odd bods may just be able to click read, and harvest information from these sources without making tiresome net searches on their own.

Overviews

• Tindale, Norman Barnett (1974). Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names (PDF). Australian National University Press. ISBN 978-0-708-10741-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Barwick, Diane E. (1984). McBryde, Isabel (ed.). "Mapping the past: an atlas of Victorian clans 1835-1904". Aboriginal History. 8 (2): 100–131. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Bibliography in chronological order

• Grey, George (1841). Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North West and Western Australia. Vol. Volume 1. T. and W. Boone. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Eyre, Edward John (1845). Journals of expeditions of discovery into central Australia, and overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound, in the years 1840-1 (PDF). Vol. Volume 1. London: T. and W. Boone. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Eyre, Edward John (1845). Journals of expeditions of discovery into central Australia, and overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound, in the years 1840-1 (PDF). Vol. Volume 2. London: T. and W. Boone. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Angas, George French (1847). Savage life and scenes in Australia and New Zealand: being an artist's impressions of countries and people at the Antipodes (PDF). Vol. 1, 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Morgan, John (1852). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-two Years a Wanderer among the Aborigines of the then unexplored country round Port Phillip, now the Province of Victoria (PDF). Hobart: Archibald Macdougall. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bunce, Daniel (1859). Language of the aborigines of the Colony of Victoria and other Australian districts: with parallel translations and familiar specimens in dialogue, as a guide to aboriginal protectors and others engaged in ameliorating their condition (PDF). Geelong: T. Brown. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Howitt, William (1865). The History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand: From the earliest times TO the present day (PDF). London: Longman Green & Co. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Beveridge, Peter (1865) [1861]. "A few notes on the dialects, habits, customs and mythology of the Lower Murray aborigines". Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria. 6. Melbourne: 19–74. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Smyth, Robert Brough (1878). The Aborigines of Victoria: with notes relating to the habits of the natives of other parts of Australia and Tasmania (PDF). Vol. Volume 1. Melbourne: J. Ferres, gov't printer. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Taplin, George (1879). Folklore, manners, customs and languages of the South Australian aborigines (PDF). Adelaide: E Spiller, Acting Government Printer. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Fison, Lorimer; Howitt, Alfred William (1880). Kamilaroi and Kurnai (PDF). Melbourne: G Robinson. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Dawson, James (1881). Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia (PDF). Melbourne: George Robertson. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Beveridge, Peter (1883). "Of the aborigines inhabiting the great lacustrine and Riverine depression of the Lower Murray". Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 17. Melbourne: 19–74. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Palmer, Edward; Howitt, A. W. (1884). "Notes on Some Australian Tribes". Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 13: 276–347. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (1886). Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent (PDF). Vol. Volume 1. Melbourne: J. Ferres. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (1886). Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent (PDF). Vol. Volume 2. Melbourne: J. Ferres. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (1887). Curr, Edward Micklethwaite (ed.). The Australian race: its origin, languages, customs, place of landing in Australia and the routes by which it spread itself over the continent (PDF). Vol. Volume 3. Melbourne: J. Ferres. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Howitt, Alfred William (1889). "On the organisation of Australian tribes". Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria. 1 (2): 96–137. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Beveridge, Peter (1889). The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina (PDF). Melbourne. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

This is a reprint of 1883, but more legible online

• Threlkeld, Lancelot Edward (1892). Fraser, John (ed.). An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal, the people of Awaba, or lake Macquarie (near Newcastle, New South Wales) being an account of their language, traditions, and customs (PDF). Sydney: C. Potter, Govt. Printer. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Meston, Archibald (1895). Geographic History of Queensland. Dedicated to the Queensland People (PDF). Queensland Government Printer. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bride, Thomas Francis, ed. (1898). Letters from Victorian Pioneers (PDF). Melbourne: Robert S Brain Government Printer. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mathews, R. H. (January 1898). "Initiation ceremonies of Australian tribes.Appendix Nguttan initiation ceremony". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 37 (157). Melbourne: 54–73. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mathew, John (1899). Eaglehawk and Crow; a study of the Australian aborigines including an inquiry into their origin and a survey of Australian languages (PDF). London: Nutt. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mathews, R. H. (1904). "Ethnological notes on the Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales and Victoria". Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 38 (Part I): 203–381. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Howitt, Alfred William (1904). The native tribes of south-east Australia (PDF). Macmillan. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mathew, John (1910). Two representative tribes of Queensland with an inquiry concerning the origin of the Australian race (PDF). London: T. Fisher Unwin. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

A barnstar for you!

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	Good job, brave knight! AssadistDEFECTOR (talk) 17:22, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps 'Good night, brave jobber' would be closer! Thanks.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Lake Bumbunga

See your diff here. Are you sure it's Lake Bumbunga (near Lochiel, Mid North)? I would love it to be but very little is known about the indigenous history of the lake and it's a long was away from Ngarkat lands. Are you sure the Pink Lake story is not about some other lake nearer to the riverlands where the Ngarkat and various Narrindjeri tribes might realistically have clashed? Donama (talk) 00:47, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for this note, of critical acumen. It's refreshing to realize not only that these obscure articles are read, but that they are combed through with care. I'm still shaking off cobwebs on an empty stomach growling for breakfast abroad, but a quick answer is this. The source is an academic specialist,Jessica Weir who in turn relied upon what the published a Ngarrindjeri elder Matt Rigney told her. I myself sat on that bit of info for a few days- it did look a bit far out of Ngarkat territory, but here we just have to follow what RS tell us. Unfortunately Rigney can't be contacted for further details, he passed away in August 2011, two years after Weir's book. It's true also that traditional lore can muddle names and places, and we need endless crosschecking. I'll handle this by adding attribution when I've had some tucker. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 07:18, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Okay, that is the Wikipedia approach and fair enough. I expect it will continue to bug me though, because it just doesn't make sense. The fact that there's being so much more information added to Wikipedia about SA's indigenous peoples, or generated in academia in the first place to support that, is what's really important so I'll try to just let it go for now! Thanks for your good work! Donama (talk) 00:21, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Just a final note. Distances don't mean much in mythic or legendary story. You can find the story of David and Goliath in the Iliad, which locates it in southern Greece, and in the Bible which locates it in the Middle East. Both refer to a battle at the river Jordan. The battle of Troy as described didn't necessarily 'take place' at Schliemann's Troy. For all we know it may relocate legends associated with the Lycian/Carian coast. All I think Rigney's remark tells us is that he heard s legend in which his tribe fought the distant (and much feared) Ngarkat. The Ngarkat functioned in several contiguous tribes as a bogey to spook their children. Obviously that is not the cause of the pinkness. And perhaps the Ngarkat were chosen because the Ngarrindjeri became tribally inclusive, and story-tellers might not have wished to offend recently incorporated groups, etc.etc. Myths are not based on facts. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 07:08, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I can't remember what article takes this kind of opinion on for its topic.-

Philip Weiss, YT, Reuters, Economist journalists self-censor reports from Israel so as not to be ‘savagely targeted’-John Lyons,' Mondoweiss July 26, 2017, reporting on John Lyons's new book, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir. HarperCollins 2017. Those self-censoring mainstream sites are what wiki qualifies as RS, those that fail to self-censor, like +972 magazine etc., are automatically removed if introduced, consolidating WP:Systemic bias. A similar logic operates here. If you try to edit the Palestinian realities of a double POV narrative, likely as not, the logic of targeting is inevitable.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of Meir Ettinger for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Meir Ettinger is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

AE

Reported here. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 01:25, 9 August 2017 (UTC)