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I have moved my interjection so you may wish to reformat your comments for better comprehension. [[User:LessHeard vanU|LessHeard vanU]] ([[User talk:LessHeard vanU|talk]]) 19:55, 11 August 2019 (UTC) |
I have moved my interjection so you may wish to reformat your comments for better comprehension. [[User:LessHeard vanU|LessHeard vanU]] ([[User talk:LessHeard vanU|talk]]) 19:55, 11 August 2019 (UTC) |
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:I should have put it further up, but fatigue wins out, and I don't think the correspondent will see what I mean anyhow. It's not important. Social engineering has an interesting history, but this one has all the features one would expect were you to ask someone with zero social skills, and bad grades for lego block building in primary school, to take on the task of writing a blueprint for society.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 20:04, 11 August 2019 (UTC) |
:I should have put it further up, but fatigue wins out, and I don't think the correspondent will see what I mean anyhow. It's not important. Social engineering has an interesting history, but this one has all the features one would expect were you to ask someone with zero social skills, and bad grades for lego block building in primary school, to take on the task of writing a blueprint for society.[[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 20:04, 11 August 2019 (UTC) |
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== iw and vm == |
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Given the previously [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Israeli_occupation_of_the_West_Bank&diff=896992096&oldid=896991426 stated support for replacing the section entirely], Id hazard the current change of heart is more a player vs player situation revolving around [[Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Antisemitism in Poland|this]] than anything else. <small style="border: 1px solid;padding:1px 3px;white-space:nowrap">'''[[User talk:Nableezy|<font color="#C11B17">nableezy</font>]]''' - 17:35, 12 August 2019 (UTC)</small> |
Revision as of 17:35, 12 August 2019
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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.'[1]
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.. .' [2]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
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.’ [4]
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’[5]. 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.[6]. 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.'[7]
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 [8]). 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.” [9]
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’[10], 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’[11]
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.’ [12]
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 [13], 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.[14]
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.[15]
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. [16]
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.[17]. 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'.[18]. 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.'[19]
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 [20] 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.' [21] 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.[22][23]
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.” [24]<
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.[25]
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’ [26]
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[27] 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 ’[28]
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)[29]. 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.’ [30]
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. [31]
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[32] 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.[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power[34]. 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[35][36]. 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.[37]
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.' [38]
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.'[39]
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.’ [40]
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’. [41]
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 unprovoked[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state[43] 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[44]. 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. [45] 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. [46]
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[47] 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'[48] 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.[49].
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), [50], 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".'[51]
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).[52][53] 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.[54]
(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’ [55]
'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.'[56]
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.
- ^ T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
- ^ Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
- ^ For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
- ^ Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
- ^ George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
- ^ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
- ^ Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
- ^ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
- ^ John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
- ^ Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
- ^ Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
- ^ M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
- ^ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
- ^ ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
- ^ John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
- ^ Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
- ^ Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
- ^ Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
- ^ Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
- ^ Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
- ^ Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
- ^ ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
- ^ cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
- ^ Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
- ^ Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
- ^ 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
- ^ Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
- ^ Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
- ^ Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
- ^ 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
- ^ 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
- ^ 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
- ^ Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
- ^ Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
- ^ William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
- ^ William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
- ^ Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
- ^ Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
- ^ James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
- ^ Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
- ^ See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
- ^ Numbers, 32:18
- ^ David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
- ^ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
- ^ Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
- ^ Michael Sfard, Occupation double-speak,' at Haaretz, 12 June 2012.
- ^ Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
- ^ Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
- ^ Yossi Sarid 'Israel is not killing the Palestinian people - it's killing their culture,' Haaretz 3 Octobr 2014
- ^ John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13
Further reading:-
- Mark Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go. How maps restrict and control, University of Chicago Press 2010
Nomination of Israeli occupation of the West Bank for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Israeli occupation of the West Bank is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.
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Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.
Arbitration enforcement sanction
The following sanction now applies to you:
You are blocked for a week, and indefinitely banned from creating or making comments in WP:AE reports related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, except if you are the editor against whom enforcement is requested.
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:Arbitration/Index/Palestine-Israel articles#Final decision and, if applicable, the procedure described at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions. This sanction has been recorded in the log of sanctions. If the sanction includes a ban, please read the banning policy to ensure you understand what this means. If you do not comply with this sanction, you may be blocked for an extended period, by way of enforcement of this sanction—and you may also be made subject to further sanctions.
You may appeal this sanction using the process described here. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything of the above is unclear to you. Sandstein 14:37, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
and so the chicken did come home to roost. I never appeal, even if, as here, the sanction is outrageouslycomically erratic. What I wrote was an analysis of evidence, with diffs, drawing a conclusion underlining precisely what had been stated by a far finer editor than myself earlier in the thread. Battleground mentality? That's rather like characterizing someone who comments on a conflict as, ipso facto part thereby of the conflict, and subject to the death penalty as other people nearby shoot each other. Still, this little contretemps only underlines how 'arbitration', which use to be connected to the Latin word for thinking, arbitror , can often excel in arbitrary thoughtlessness. I'll sit my week out - there's a lot of work in springtime with four gardens to cultivate.Nishidani (talk) 16:57, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
- One can't fight ignorance (among other things) so enjoy your gardens. The very best to you, --TMCk (talk) 17:56, 14 April 2019 (UTC)
...and there is light, again.--TMCk (talk) 18:34, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
- The judgment was that my inferences from those diffs were devoid of ‘appropriate evidence’. The argument for this was:-
- That is, in my view, patently flawed, one several grounds
- The named figures have an international reputation beyond Israeli politics. They are perhaps better known in Prague, India, New York, and Paris than in Israel. If an admin hasn't the time or patience to click on the linked names to see what is being said, the ability to evaluate the statements is seriously damaged. It may not be in the remit of an administrator to actually familiarize themselves with the meaning of what is being said when such illustrations are provided, but to make an informed judgement one is required to examine the evidence to see if an inference is fair.
- The use of ‘opinion’ to indiscriminately characterize as equally subjective two opposing statements about an issue is close to Pyrrhonism. In the real world, opinion is one thing, judgement another. The former is an expression of a personal view, the latter consists of an attempt, at least, to form a critical interpretation, based on evidence and logic, and the result, if consensual, forms precedent. A flatearther expresses an opinion, Copernicus expressed a judgement. Judgements can be subjective, of course, but, when a judgement is formed according to standard community protocols about how to ascertain the truth or untruth of a statement, we don’t call it a mere opinion. If the Supreme Court rules on a legal issue, the result is a judgement which then has real consequences for reality, since it becomes law. The minority dissenting opinion does not, and has no practical effect on the legal realities of a given situation.
- Let me recast the issue in a hypothetical, varying the names to render them recognizable to anyone with a sergeant-at-law's minimal grasp of his field, citing topknotch international lawyers from the same ethnocultural background who have expressed views almost identical to those the admin says were unknown spouters of opinions that were neither here nor there.
- That is, in my view, patently flawed, one several grounds
- If Stephen Sedley, William Schabas, Richard Goldstone and Thomas Buergenthal were characterized by an editor as ‘on the fringes of the (Western) radical left’ simply because they are on record as being critical of Israel's policies regarding Palestinians, he would, of course, be expressing an opinion, one patently so absurd as to lack any quality of judgement, being counterfactual, demonstrably false, and just ballistic hyperbole. That characterization of moderate mainstream institutional figures of world reknown as ‘on the fringes of the (Western) radical left’ would have only one meaning: whoever asserted such a claim would be adopting an extreme fringe viewpoint, and, in context, since the I/P conflict is commonly known to be a classic case of ethnonationalist conflict ([1] [2]), such a wild characterization would fairly be taken as evidence that the person who might make such a claim was asserting an ethnonationalist opinion that is itself extreme. One can of course disagree with my inference, but it is (a) an informed deduction from (b) evidence, and in being banned for it, suggestive that Catch 22 is starting to apply at AE: One must provide evidence from diffs for assertions about another editor's behavior but if you do so, any one admin's passing opinion that the evidence doesn't substantiate the inference can get you peremptorily permabanned from AE. Not that I give a fuck either way. Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
motivation
Honest question, if they hadnt been fucking around so much there, you think this would have gotten to be as large an article as it has? All thats happened for me personally is motivation to do more research and add more to the article. A single line was included about apartheid and that got challenged so fine, make a fully fleshed out section with unimpeachable sources. Im going to be a bit busy this week, but Ill be reading up on opacity. Please add whatever you can, as only you can. Cheers, nableezy - 18:25, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
- Hmmm. That stirs a pompous vein of angular erudition still fighting a losing battle against the slow grind of attrition that humps a ride on the cerebral shoulders of the ageing. Lad, familiarize yourself with the myth of Antaios, whose powers waxed mightily each time his feet touched ground: a fine analogy with those who, tossed and tussled, if not indeed, god forbid, tossled by antagonistic edit-warriors, draw renewed force from the ground, as one grounds oneself in the real world, as described by area scholarship.
- Perhaps, we'd better speak of a Farce-alia or still better still, in my case, an (old)Farts-alea
- Ah, there goes my infamous battleground mentality again! Hope Sandstone is not looking at this page, otherwise conniptions will lead to my being bestowed a 'perma-wave'.Caveat lector. Anataeus' ruse was seen through by Hercules, eventually, and he got the treatment Muhammed Ali meted[b] out to Sonny Liston at Lewiston back in '65. Come to think of it, Hercules is a Mediterranean reflex of Sansom in biblical folklore ... and were that the case, it would end up with someone being Eyeless in Gaza, opacity. Enjoy the break. Good editing is a matter of respecting the adage: σπεῦδε βραδέως .Nishidani (talk) 19:57, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
- You thought the occupation page would be gutted within months if I recall. Still standing. nableezy - 02:41, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
Notes
- ^
http://mcllibrary.org/Pharsalia/book4.html and when Antaeus felt
His foeman's arms close round him once again,
He flung his wearying limbs upon the sand
To rise with strength renewed; all that the earth,
Though labouring sore, could breathe into her son
She gave his frame. - ^ I'll avoid the pun on 'meated' given controversies about the phantom punch
One that slipped through the net...
My spy network tells me that this totally unsourced article Jerrinja is in need of some TLC (either that, or deletion, or merge with something else?). --NSH001 (talk) 10:00, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
- Jerrinja are an aboriginal community deriving from a founding population of 60 odd members at theRoseby Park Aboriginal Reserve back in 1900. They are all kin but do not figure so far as an independent original distinct 'tribal' group, or descendants of a 'clan'. More likely the disiecta membra of several remnant saltwater tribes on that coast. We can't fit them into Wandandian because there's no evidence they are connected ep to them any more than to other south coast Aboriginal groups. Nishidani (talk) 12:58, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
June 2019
{{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}
. Sam Walton (talk) 17:24, 2 June 2019 (UTC)- There we go again. Inability to read, incapacity to understand context, failure to actually spot irony, a lazy unfamiliarity with the background of the editors' interactions, and all the rest. [3],[4],[5] and this. The disattention here is so profound that this happens repeatedly ([6]) and one similar case led to a block that, examined, was immediately overturned, only to be cited by the disattentive oversight committee at Arbcom which, despite the unblock, used it as a smoking gun proof that I had to be permabanned. Jeezus. Wake up, wankers. Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- I agree with much that's written at your fourth link. It's lovely that you and another editor have a nice in-joke you can both laugh at, but the vast majority of people reading that back-and-forth would be astounded to see such messages being left alone because they have no idea of the context. In good faith I'll start an ANI thread to get a second opinion. Sam Walton (talk) 17:42, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- ANI thread filed. Sam Walton (talk) 17:49, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- Unblocked per initial responses at ANI. I still think you should reign in these comments - it makes the Wikipedia look like a hostile community to be a part of, regardless of whether you or the recipient appreciate it to be a joke. This is how we drive away new contributors. Sam Walton (talk) 18:16, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- There we go again. Inability to read, incapacity to understand context, failure to actually spot irony, a lazy unfamiliarity with the background of the editors' interactions, and all the rest. [3],[4],[5] and this. The disattention here is so profound that this happens repeatedly ([6]) and one similar case led to a block that, examined, was immediately overturned, only to be cited by the disattentive oversight committee at Arbcom which, despite the unblock, used it as a smoking gun proof that I had to be permabanned. Jeezus. Wake up, wankers. Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- Causing problems again eh?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 18:57, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- yeah. Once in the shit, the smell of poo takes a long time to wear off. Nice to hear from you Stav. Hope all is well. Best Nishidani (talk) 19:33, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- Sam. Does this blip stay on my log? Since 2009 when I was permabanned, assorted editors trying to get me repermabanned keep mentioning my block log record.Blocks are made, on the strength of trivia like this, no one noticing it was April Fool's day, and are duly registered on a block log though the block was immediately overturned as a misreading, and then just a month later, some distracted Arbcom members cite it as proof I abused a fellow editor and deserved a permaban. The permaban then has been ritually cited in every one of the 30+ occasions when I/P editors have tried to rid Wikipedia of my presence. I don't want you to reconsider that mess, but simply to tell me if this contretemps will register and remain as ammo for future challenges to my usefulness here?Nishidani (talk) 19:33, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- The standard line is that the software won't allow admins to revdel (or whatever) items from blocklogs. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:17, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- Sam. Does this blip stay on my log? Since 2009 when I was permabanned, assorted editors trying to get me repermabanned keep mentioning my block log record.Blocks are made, on the strength of trivia like this, no one noticing it was April Fool's day, and are duly registered on a block log though the block was immediately overturned as a misreading, and then just a month later, some distracted Arbcom members cite it as proof I abused a fellow editor and deserved a permaban. The permaban then has been ritually cited in every one of the 30+ occasions when I/P editors have tried to rid Wikipedia of my presence. I don't want you to reconsider that mess, but simply to tell me if this contretemps will register and remain as ammo for future challenges to my usefulness here?Nishidani (talk) 19:33, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- yeah. Once in the shit, the smell of poo takes a long time to wear off. Nice to hear from you Stav. Hope all is well. Best Nishidani (talk) 19:33, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
Jesus christ. nableezy - 19:46, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- Per NPOV, Nab. Allah! Yahweh!Nishidani (talk) 19:58, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- I would second Sam's comments above that in-joke or not, you should really cut it out going forward. Wikipedia is not the place to use ethnic slurs as in-jokes. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 23:53, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
- Serious question, this happened on a user talk page. Neither the user it was directed at or the user whose talk page it took place on saw fit to complain of any attack. Why is there even a need to police user talk pages in such a manner? Why does anyone need to take offense on my behalf? Fine, on an article talk page that should be a more professional environment. But this took place on a user talk page. Seriously, who gives a shit unless one of the people involved complains? nableezy - 03:46, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- *cough*--Bolter21 (talk to me) 23:15, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- Even user talk pages are entirely public and reflect on Wikipedia as a whole. IRL I would have no problem if Nish addressed me as was the case in this instance, or, with the C-word as a Britishism, or any number of other possible such little jokey variants that are perfectly fine between mates. Heck, if I'd given him cause to be pissed at me I wouldn't even care if he used such words in anger. I also wouldn't bat an eye over any general friendly banter on here that without the "friendly" bit adduced would fall far on the wrong side of CIVIL. I also curse like a drunken sailor myself, and take no particular offence to the mere words themselves (intent and context determine whether there is cause for offence, not the mere words). But racial or religious slurs are, in my opinion, in a different category and over the line for even user talk pages on Wikipedia. Other people do read user talk pages occasionally (including complete strangers, people new to the project, or entirely unaffiliated and just visiting). I agree that since it was pretty obviously friendly banter the block was too harsh a first response; but I also agree with Sam that these aren't acceptable and shouldn't be used here. It's a matter of showing some concern for all the people across the world and across history who have been dehumanized (often deliberately: British colonials' references to the native populations was no accident in many cases, and the same for American soldiers in their several adventures in various parts of Asia) by such terms (I trust I don't need to provide examples). They are inherently "punching down" and joking with them trivializes all they represent. I'm not sure whether I think this kind of thing should be admin/noticeboard fodder (it might be, in the general case); but simply as a personal appeal from me to Nish, I don't think they're ok even for user talk pages. --Xover (talk) 07:23, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- Serious question, this happened on a user talk page. Neither the user it was directed at or the user whose talk page it took place on saw fit to complain of any attack. Why is there even a need to police user talk pages in such a manner? Why does anyone need to take offense on my behalf? Fine, on an article talk page that should be a more professional environment. But this took place on a user talk page. Seriously, who gives a shit unless one of the people involved complains? nableezy - 03:46, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- If I may chime in. I cannot see what the original comment was (as it seems to have been struck, telling in itself). But given the way the world is today (and I am not passing any judgement on the rights or wrongs of that) I would not be able to walk into a School (or shop or pub or board a bus) and be able to engage in "banter" with mates that involved me using terms like "this is work for.." or "stop ... me up" and expect to get away with it. I agree that two mates can shout abuse at each other and its not a PA, but using inappropriate words terms or phrases reflects badly on the project. Its about us not facing accusations we tolerate ...ism. Simpler rule of thumb, if you would not say it in front of the vicar/mum/policeman/largeblokewithbigfists/sexybabe/boss/co-worker you should not say it in front of anyone else.--Slatersteven (talk) 08:33, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- I called Nableezy 'raghead' and, when the whim and context suggests it, will continue to do so, unless 'jihadi crackpot' or 'sandnigger' comes to mind first. I met up with him once, my head swathed in bandages from banging my head against a stout porcelain fixture, and then the floor, after a fainting fit at 4 a.m which had me hospitalized and diagnosed with a brain contusion. Against doctors' advice, I signed out because I'd promised Nableezy I'd show him round Rome at 9 am that day, and in all likelihood would never meet again and a host should never allow minor discomfort from getting in the way of social obligations. So when I turned up at the appointed place, I yelled out:'raghead meets raghead!', something that, among the several people there, sufficed to get us to recognize the unknown other. I'll be fucked if some sissy pussyfooting obsession with some generic principle, applied to interactions between people who neither know each other from a bar of soap nor agree on what NPOV content construction means, will get in the way of my liberty to use irony with a friend. I couldn't give a rat's arse what bystanders who choose to eavesdrop on a private conversation might think, particularly one aimed to console a editor whose care to keep patent ethnic smearing and skewering, by innuendo or otherwise, off wikipedia was, as in the past, met with punitive cavilling and blind bureaucratic rigour, when not, as in the most egregious instances on his blot-log, sanctioned by an admin patently was too distracted to actually read the chronology of diffs correctly. All that mattered was some theological commandment -'Thou shalt not swear'.
- You can be impeccably polite while running up dozens of articles focused exclusively on Palestinian acts of terrorism, while never deigning to disgrace such pages with any matter that would allow the reader to see the context in which such pathologies arise, let alone, write similar articles covering per NPOV the far more extensive evidence for state or settler terrorism in that area. And anyone can do so while systematically ignoring the contextual evidence for each incident that points to the latter aspect. Wikipedia doesn't worry about editors pushing ethnonationalist skewering as long as they interact with extreme caution on the talk page. Red lights flash, complaints are registered frantically for administrative redress, if editors known for facing down this POV abuse use remonstrative language, express exasperation, or even, as here, crack a private joke whose context leaves no scope for misinterpreting the words as anything but amicable. And why does this happen? Because admins state certain areas are 'toxic', and avoid following them to familiarize themselves with the POV shenanigans,- to edit there requires an iron capacity for forbearance, a long memory and a deep knowledge of the topic- only to weigh in over a few cherry-picked diffs usually brought in by some whingeing POV pusher: not because they are offended, but because it is a default stratagem to rid Wikipedia of anyone who opposes their blind activism for a partisan cause.Nishidani (talk) 11:09, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- Your prerogative, but then I am going to suggest that you will end up with even longer blocks.Slatersteven (talk) 17:42, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- If wikipedia were competently, cogently and coherently governed by its community, in a piddling case like this,- which does not involve IPs or newbies slashing out but very long established competent editors,- anyone sighting that one word would have (a) read the context and, if doubt arose and they knew nothing about either (b) could have checked both my and Nableezy's page where any suspicion of hostility would have immediately dissolved, (c) or emailed me to query the remark and obtain clarification (one outstandingly evenhanded but vigilant admin beat everyone by doing that immediately, and was quickly satisfied by my explanation, and ignored interfering) (d) emailed Nableezy to ascertain whether he was offended. None of these obvious options, which take a minute, no more, were exercised. Instead, a farcical hare was started. Huge damage is done round here by the consistent failure to use commonsense, care and discretion.Nishidani (talk) 21:49, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
It's a matter of showing some concern for all the people across the world and across history who have been dehumanized
- One shows one's concern many ways, one of which I took by writing articles about 660 dispossessed Australian aborigines, several on Tibetans etc. No problem there. But for helping write several hundred on Palestinians, I, like Nableezy or Huldra, have had a mother-lode of AE/ANI complaints raised for to write articles that do not implicitly demonize that group is sure evidence of secret anti-Semitic Israel-baiting. Go figure. Nishidani (talk) 22:10, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- "I, like Nableezy or Huldra, have had a mother-lode of AE/ANI complaints raised for to write articles that do not implicitly demonize that group is sure evidence of secret anti-Semitic Israel-baiting". Gotta say, regardless of that stupid incident, you, Huldra and Nab do make some regrettable statements. Recently Huldra made some statements about settlers and the right to resist them, which was interpreted as a call to murder civilians (and in a very very, butt-hurt sense, it was logical to think so). I was sent twice to ANI/AE to a long battle over my survival in Wikipedia because I really think there is no State of Palestine in practice and I don't think Wikipedia should imply there is. This became even more frustrating when I began serving within the State of Palestine. That scum sockpuppet that tried to get me executed used my current occupation as an excuse and deemed me unfit to edit because I must have an automatic bias against Palestine. But for me saying my service or national allegiance is the reason for the reports was not the right thing to do. Honestly, I did make some regrettable statements. I still stand behind them, but the phrasing and tone were not needed. Indeed some people were butt-hurt, and surely there was a certain motivation to kick me out because I am the "Israeli guy", but hadn't I made those statements none of that would happen. I don't think the other "Israeli guys", such as Debresser are better and we see a lot of ANI/AE against them as well. The point is, it is better to choose your words. Sure that was an in-joke and no one complained, but that doesn't make the general attitude in the I/P area polite. Heck I was once blasted for making edits that showed Netanyahu bad, and I got Emails from pro-Israeli editors asking me to please remove those edits, because of the underground mafia of Israeli wannabe Hasbara agents who think they can win by canvassing through a third-party tool. So just chose your words.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 23:41, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- If I may chime in. I cannot see what the original comment was (as it seems to have been struck, telling in itself). But given the way the world is today (and I am not passing any judgement on the rights or wrongs of that) I would not be able to walk into a School (or shop or pub or board a bus) and be able to engage in "banter" with mates that involved me using terms like "this is work for.." or "stop ... me up" and expect to get away with it. I agree that two mates can shout abuse at each other and its not a PA, but using inappropriate words terms or phrases reflects badly on the project. Its about us not facing accusations we tolerate ...ism. Simpler rule of thumb, if you would not say it in front of the vicar/mum/policeman/largeblokewithbigfists/sexybabe/boss/co-worker you should not say it in front of anyone else.--Slatersteven (talk) 08:33, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
- Perhaps because I don't follow editors, any, closely, or wake up to examine Nableezy's or say your contributions every day and check them all out, I miss a lot, like the sockpuppet incident you allude to. I think I noted once that that you happen to be under a legal obligation to serve your country, and no one can credibly attack an editor simply because he is doing his duty off-line, fulfilling what the law demands. An individual is never reducible to some profile which showcases their nationality and ethnic background, but a tertium quid compounded of an intricate mosaic of unique experiences and features. (Break: I must breakfast abroad).Nishidani (talk) 08:29, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
- As to language. I see a curious correlation between the public insistence on political correctness, and the vast increase over the last decades of structural prejudice. The more intense vigilance over language proprieties has become, the greater the growth of geopolitical violence and our blindness to it. I'm fairly convinced that the victory of the former will not drain the animus intrinsic to the latter, but merely make it even more invisible than it is, and therefore feed it. For, as one can see in the public coverage behind our Jeremy Corbyn/Antisemitism in the British Labour Party articles, the more obsessive the insistence that every i must be dotted, ever p and q examined, to ferret out and pin down antisemites ostensibly to ensure prejudice will die, the impact is the obverse of what is putatively intended. Political correctness becomes a pretext for McCarthyism, purging, group hysteria, and paranoia, while imposing a dominion of silence, or niceness about, crucial issues that ought to be discussed on their merits. Like Norman Finkelstein, I think that kind of relentless scouring of minutiae will generate the very pathology it pretends to be curing. My generation learnt about prejudice by listening to Alf Garnett. Now people with precisely his profile, in Italy, the UK, the US, Israel and everywhere else, are thriving politically. The difference is, their public lexicon has been purged. Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
Seems like Malik has decided to leave us. This place fucking sucks. nableezy - 02:16, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
- He's probably and understandably as embarrassed by the compliments in his defense, as by the shockingly purblind, illiterate yet pharisaical system that has been at his heels ever since that sockpuppetting dickhead racist jagged his sensitivities as an Afro-American by calling him a 'boy'. That shitstirring wasn't punished, but his street-wise, utterly understandable come-back to it was.Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
MYStakes in English-language news media
Hey, I was gonna dump the "director's cut" of my Corbyn comment in my sandbox along with everything else I decided not to post (in this case for obvious reasons -- it's practically a given that NYT journalists don't know about classical Japanese literature, but contemporary British politics are quite a different matter; I've been using the 最古の和歌集 test to demonstrate that popular news media are not "infallible, regardless of context" for a while), but I figured you might get a larf out of it given our shared history of editing other articles for which the following would not be completely off-topic.
- None of the above per WP:PEACOCK. Just say "several organisations". If I have to select one I would say first choice C, second choice D; but what does it say about our encyclopedia that we have to classify groups whose opinions we cite as "mainstream"? If it really looks like their opinions are not mainstream, it's probably because they are not mainstream, and were merely referred to as such by a journalist with an opinion -- The New York Times is not infallible: here are four pieces from 1983, [7], 1990, and 2018 that mistakenly describe the Man'yōshū, a late 8th-century Japanese poetry anthology as Japan's oldest poetry anthology, when every specialist in the topic knows that that honour technically belongs to the Kaifūsō, a collection of whose existence The New York Times seems to be unaware. (Full disclosure: I've been looking into how English-language news media translate the popular Japanese epithet 日本最古の和歌集 for quite a while, and have noticed that hardly any of them get it right except for the online English version of the Mainichi Shimbun, and them only because they took my suggestion when I emailed them about an article that printed the same mistake as the above NYT pieces; I am fully aware of how off-topic the comparison is for this page, and am really only using it to demonstrate how a New York Times article saying something doesn't mean we can necessarily say it without inline attribution or even a direct citation, since regardless of its fame no newspaper is completely infallible in everything it prints.) 16:48, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
Another interesting point: President Drumpf's advisers appear to have consulted either highly specialized works on Nara period literature, or our MYS article, specifically a footnote I added to it two months ago. I ... am a bit torn on how to feel about the whole thing. I mean, it's a given that everyone uses Wikipedia all the time nowadays, but the people who write the scripts for the most powerful man in the world are apparently collating information that is fed to them by foreign governments through interpreters who don't necessarily understand what they are translating (much of the confusion appears to originate from a mistranslation on the Abe Cabinet's English website[8][9]), regarding highly technical topics that (outside Japan) only specialists have even heard of, with what we post on Wikipedia: that is more than a little disturbing. There's also my pride in knowing that I made a small difference, pitted against the fact that expressing that pride in the wrong company could give the impression that I'm happy Donald Trump specifically benefited from my edits to Wikipedia: I told my mother about this in a Skype call last week, and when I was halfway through saying that she laughed and interrupted me "You're afraid they'll think you support Trump!" Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 16:49, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
- (1) The Manyoshu (Collection of Myriad Leaves), the earliest anthology of Japanese poetry
- (2) The 4,516 poems in the Manyoshu constitute the earliest available collection of Japanese poetry
- (3) Manyoshu, the earliest Japanese collection of poems.
- (4) The Manyoshu (the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry).
- 1,2, and 4 are statements that are impeccably correct, if you take ‘Japanese’ as referring to the Japanese language. The 懐風藻 consists of 漢詩, poems written in Chinese by Japanese. Only (3) is wrong, in so far as in‘the earliest Japanese collection of poems’, Japanese refers to a collection of poems made by the Japanese, which can only be the Kaifūsō, not the Man'yōshū.
- In Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (4.2) you can read a hymn he composed in Latin (cf.Kaifūsō), but that would never be cited as as the earliest example of English poetry, an honour, thanks to Bede, we assign to Caedmon who composed in Anglo-Saxon.
- I studied, all too briefly, under the Iwanami Kotenbungakutaikei editor of the Kaifūsō. I turned up reeking of Shōchū at his class, at midday, and with some justice, he suspected this was evidence I was a drunkard, and a lout, because I later corrected him when he asserted that the connotations of 散る could not be rendered into foreign languages. In short, don't allow fixing errors about scholarship in the public domain lay siege to your time. Life's too short.Nishidani (talk) 20:23, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
- It's difficult to parse "the earliest anthology of Japanese poetry" as not being synonymous with "Japan's oldest poetry anthology" in these contexts. Yes, it could be interpreted as referring to the oldest anthology of poetry "in Japanese" and not as contradicting the statement "It is not Japan's oldest poetry anthology, because there is an earlier collection of Japanese poetry in Chinese", but in order to read it that way one would almost certainly need to already know of the existence of the Kaifūsō, and I'm fairly certain almost none of the NYT readership does.
- The prevalence of the unambiguously wrong "Japan's oldest poetry anthology"[10] and "Japan's oldest anthology of poetry"[11], including in the same newspaper, supports the assertion that the two are just different ways of wording the same common misconception. Other eminent broadsheets use weird variants like "oldest anthology of domestic poetry"[12] and "the nation's oldest compilation of native poetry"[www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/japan-reveals-name-of-new-imperial-era-to-begin-next-month-1.3845320%3fmode=amp], which would look to any non-specialist like synonyms for "Japanese poetry", but I think you will agree that they are unambiguously wrong. (I suppose "native poetry" might mean "poetry in the poets' native language", but a few months earlier the same paper called it "the oldest existing Japanese collection of poetry"[13].)
- There are also English-language sources that recognize both the existence of the Kaifūsō and the fact that its poetry is Chinese rather than Japanese, but nevertheless call it "Japanese poetry" because of its having been composed in Japan by Japanese poets.[14] (Sorry for the GBooks link; I appear to have misplaced my copy of Seeds in the Heart, but I'm pretty sure it does the same.) Yeah, non-specialists calling the Kaifūsō "Japanese poetry", or calling it and the Man'yōshū the two oldest collections of "Japanese poetry", irks me in basically the same manner, as it did here. That's why I'm a little more forgiving of sources discussing linguistics that call the Man'yōshū "the oldest collection of Japanese poetry" and then make it immediately clear they are referring to poetry written in Japanese.[15]
- As for Bede, the comparison is largely irrelevant since (correct me if I'm wrong) I'm pretty sure Cædmon's Hymn was composed earlier anyway (our articles on the two -- of which I know I should trust neither, but it's a sunny day outside and I don't want to spend too much time researching this response -- imply that the Hymn was composed either before Bede's birth or at least by the time he had reached double digits), and an educated Anglo-American audience could be assumed to know that people in medieval Europe wrote in Latin a lot. Although I'm a little surprised you would put that reference in there for my benefit -- I have very little training in Anglo-Saxon history and literature beyond some hobbyist reading I did in my early teens and some open courses I've listened to on walks (BTWs, I've found this particular lecture and the entire series around it to be very entertaining and insightful -- and he actually references how much better Wikipedia had become in the five years up to when he gave that lecture) but am completely obsessed with classical Japanese literature (日本古典文学, not 文語体日本語による文学 :P ), and I was under the impression that I'd conveyed these facts about myself pretty well to you in our on- and off-wiki interactions. Did you put it in for the benefit of your talk page stalkers who somehow didn't clock out after my first sentence? Because you know no one ever reads these discussions between us: that's why as far as the peanut galleries at ANI and AE are concerned, you and I are the best of friends, always agree with each other on everything, and tendentiously defend each other every single time we wind up on the drama boards for that reason, even when we know it violates policy to do so. (笑)
- All that being said, your last two sentences are probably the most worthwhile part of this whole mess that I would be genuinely sorry to bring to your talk page if I hadn't missed our backs-and-forths. I'll try to take your advice. (Although I have found that depending on the context "You know, the translation of Abe-san's speech about the announcement of Reiwa actually contains an error: you have to be careful when translating superlatives" goes over really well, as I've recently been attending some 英会話 groups in Osaka where for some reason I'm usually the only native speaker, and the folks there are usually overjoyed to at least here someone speak "real" English and talk about translation intricacies.) I'm gonna go out for a run while I finish listening to that Al Jazeera documentary on my iPod. (Small nitpick -- I wish they would prepare two versions, one with Arabic/Hebrew/whatever speech subtitled for those watching on a computer and one that does the BBC [?] thing and dubs all dialogue into the same language so that it could be listened to without losing part of the message if you don't speak all the languages of their interviewees; that, plus some audiovisual translation courses I took, and my experiences of watching American comedies in Japanese movie theatres, sometimes dubbed and sometimes subbed, and in the latter case being the only one in the theatre laughing because the subtitles don't even try to be funny, have taught me that subtitles that are meant to be read by someone who isn't pausing so they can carefully read through it, as I'm sure Al Jazeera's are, are generally giving an even more incomplete picture than dubbing, unless one happens to speak the language that is being dubbed over.)
- Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:11, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
- Well lad, I stand by my analysis. I'll only add that of course all the examples you give are incorrect from a strictly philological view since they lack a significant epithet, and that not even the Kaifūsō figures as Japan's oldest poetry collection. The Man'yōshū after all is an anthology of collections of poetry preexisting both it and the Kaifūsō, which, once it was compiled, led to the extinction of the manuscript sources it was based on, collections like 柿本人麻呂's 人麻呂歌集 and 山上憶良's 類聚歌林. To exercise a precisian's acumen, all references, and your own animadversions regarding these remarks, should clarify that we are dealing with the oldest surviving Japanese poetry collections. I never read newspapers, except under compulsion. What news I get comes from googling journalists I regard as (a) literate (b) with a strong memory of the past and (c) some actual knowledge by direct experience of what they are describing. The rest are shills and shysters, Barnum circus bullshit artistes, wannabee wankers of logorrhoic jism etc.Nishidani (talk) 13:09, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
- Meh, as far as I'm concerned "oldest" kind of implies "extant". There are of course a lot of even worse renditions of 最古の和歌集 into English that apparently misread 最古 as 最初 and thus call it the "first" poetry anthology, but those are rarer, and the mistake is more obvious (even those with no knowledge of Japanese literary history at all should probably assume that the oldest extant example of any kind of written work was not the first of its kind) and so less of a concern to me. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:29, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
- Well lad, I stand by my analysis. I'll only add that of course all the examples you give are incorrect from a strictly philological view since they lack a significant epithet, and that not even the Kaifūsō figures as Japan's oldest poetry collection. The Man'yōshū after all is an anthology of collections of poetry preexisting both it and the Kaifūsō, which, once it was compiled, led to the extinction of the manuscript sources it was based on, collections like 柿本人麻呂's 人麻呂歌集 and 山上憶良's 類聚歌林. To exercise a precisian's acumen, all references, and your own animadversions regarding these remarks, should clarify that we are dealing with the oldest surviving Japanese poetry collections. I never read newspapers, except under compulsion. What news I get comes from googling journalists I regard as (a) literate (b) with a strong memory of the past and (c) some actual knowledge by direct experience of what they are describing. The rest are shills and shysters, Barnum circus bullshit artistes, wannabee wankers of logorrhoic jism etc.Nishidani (talk) 13:09, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
Future reference
Perhaps the article on Roof knocking needs to be finessed, or merged with a more general article on Israeli warnings to Gaza residents their home and livelihoods are to be demolished within five minutes so they should kindly fuck off and allow the IAF to destroy their lives without taking them, and thereby enable the purity of arms talking heads to gain high marks touting it as a humanistic army, brimming with solicitude for its victims. I.e. Gideon Levy 'Israel Gave This Gaza Family a Five-minute Warning. Then It Bombed Its Home,' Haaretz 6 June 2019 Nishidani (talk) 20:45, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
Notes on recent events
- It is worth reflecting on our use of the word 'community'. We are a community, and there is a detached organization ostensibly governing the efficiency and 'health' of this community. The word 'community' began to irritate me when I noticed that the default term 'society' began to be replaced with 'community' in political discourse several decades ago. The logic was evident. The more abstract 'big picture' outlook politicians were exposed to, the less comprehensible their actions to the society became. The greater the reification, the stronger the need to cosy back up to constituents, ergo they started talking about the 'community' they governed: the switch didn't alter or soften the hard logic of top bracket decision-making. It also irritated me because it meddles witlessly with Tönnies/Durkheimian/Weberian definitions about what constitutes modernity, namely the shift from village communities (cf. Gemeinschaft) to impersonal societies (cf. Gesellschaft). Essentially these days, we have turned back the clock rhetorically in speaking of even more abstract societies like those in social media and Wikipedia as 'communities', a linguistic remedievalization to get over the idea that, in joining up to these anonymous aggregates, we can retrieve something like the cosy intimacy of village life. Perhaps that is appropriate since villages, the producing majority, were, in the long run, under the thumb of a otioseseigneurial body, and that is what this innovative move by a minute corporate company constitutes, an assertion of feudal powers over the hoi polloi. Nishidani (talk) 11:44, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
- And the language reform will follow corporate usage, the coercion of euphemism, without changing the realities. Cf.Fiona Pepper and Ian Coombe, 'You're unallocated!' Making sense of the corporate euphemisms used to mask bad news Late Night Live 24 May 2019 Nishidani (talk) 19:51, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
(A)In Henry James's novella, An International Episode, Bessie and Lord Lambeth have the following exchange, meant to illustrate a cultural difference between American and European manners.
- "It is not the going before me that I object to," said Bessie; "it is their thinking that they have a right to do it—a right that I recognize."
- "I never saw such a young lady as you are for not recognizing. I have no doubt the thing is beastly, but it saves a lot of trouble."
- "It makes a lot of trouble. It's horrid," said Bessie.
- "But how would you have the first people go?" asked Lord Lambeth. "They can't go last."
- "Whom do you mean by the first people?"
- "Ah, if you mean to question first principles!" said Lord Lambeth
Henry James, An International Episode, (1878) in Eight Great American Short Novels, ed. Philip Rahv, Berkley 1963 p.111 Nishidani (talk) 08:39, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
(B)Some years ago I had occasion to allude to a trial, in which Joseph Brodsky had the book thrown at him because he had no state certification for being a poet, thought for himself and was, in sum, a social parasite constituting a threat to the Soviet order. An exchange took place between him and the judge i.e.
- Судья: 'У вас есть ходатайства к суду?'
- Бродский: 'Я хотел бы знать: за что меня арестовали?'
- Судья:: 'Это вопрос, а не ходатайство.'
- Бродский: 'Тогда у меня нет ходатайства.'
- Judge: 'Have you a request to make of the Court?'
- Brodsky: 'I should like to know why I've been arrested.'
- Judge: 'This is a question, not a demand.'
- Brodsky: 'Then I have no demand.' (Samuil Kučerov, The Organs of Soviet Administration of Justice: Their History and Operation, Brill Archive, 1970 p.215 Nishidani (talk) 08:49, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
(C) Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?,Juvenal,VI, ll.347–348
(D)‘using secret evidence, which is unavailable to either the defense lawyer or the defendant, taints the legal process; the defense is afforded no opportunity to know the contents or contest the veracity of the evidence directly. Under such circumstances, a defense lawyer’s only option is to request that the judge evaluate the merits of the secret evidence. Thus , the judge becomes the de facto representative of the defendant, since the lawyer is barred from playing such a role. Whether judges are capable or inclined to evaluate secret evidence skeptically and impartially is debatable. Indeed, many participants (including some judges and prosecutors) regard secret evidence as a serious derogation of due process protections for defendants. According to one judge, who vigorously condemned the pervasive use of secret evidence, “Justice has to be shown, and not just done.”Lisa Hajjar, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza, University of California Press, 2005 p.111
(E)W. H. Auden,Musee des Beaux Arts or Wikipedia's expensive sailing ship.
- About suffering they were never wrong,
- The old Masters: how well they understood
- Its human position: how it takes place
- While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
- How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
- For the miraculous birth, there always must be
- Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
- On a pond at the edge of the wood:
- They never forgot
- That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
- Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
- Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
- Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
- In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
- Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
- Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
- But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
- As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
- Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
- Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
- Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Nishidani (talk) 18:09, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
(F) Prediction.
- 'Ces scènes-là ne durent pas, sans doute parce que la résistance nerveuse a des limites. Le paroxysme atteint, c’est soudain le calme plat, sans transition, un calme qui confine à l’abrutissement, comme la fièvre précédente confinait à la folie.' Georges Simenon, La guinguette à deux sous, Fayard, 1931 p.161
(G)
- non ita caelitibus visum est, et forsitan aequis;
- nam quid me poenae causa negata iuvet?
- mente tamen, quae sola loco non exulat, utar,
- praetextam fasces aspiciamque tuos. Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, Bk 4, 9, 39-42
- They’ve chosen to rule otherwise, the gods. Maybe
- They’re just, and, what comfort might a man
- Gain by debunking the reason for his ban?
- Yet, I'll use my mind, that alone is free
- From exile, and view your robes of office, and the awe
- Flourished by the rodded axes of the law.Nishidani (talk) 17:23, 21 June 2019 (UTC)
(H) A structural analogy with what is going on here, and more widely, is in the following, somewhat far too optimistic survey of vetting options to resolve a systermic crisis. Andy Beckett, The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism The Guardian 25 June 2019
(I) While this does not of course reflect directly on the WMO, it is useful background reading for the environment in which it is located, since several reflections in the threads deal with the perception that there are many different cultural codes and standards for things like civility. A vast rich-poor divide between techies and the rest has opened up in what was once one of the most civilized and integrated cities in the world.
- “I am so proud to live in San Francisco and be a part of this community,” Google employees were instructed to say, as a preface to their remarks at a January 2014 hearing before the local transportation authority, according to a leaked company memo.
- “It was really hard to stomach the indifference that I witnessed from folks who’d been living in San Francisco for a while, simply stepping over the slumped bodies of people who lived outside or just cold ignoring people asking for money,” said Jessica Jin, who moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work for a tech startup, of her first impressions of the city. “I wondered how long it would take me to also become numb to it all.” Julia Carrie Wong, 'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed The Guardian 1 July 2019
(J)
Almost three years ago, the board published a strong statement against toxic behaviors and directed the Wikimedia Foundation teams to work to make Wikimedia communities safer for all good faith editors. A safe and respectful environment is not only one of our five pillars, it will also allow for more diverse voices to join our communities, bringing new knowledge with them. WMF
This repeated use of 'safe' confuses real llfe interactions with on-line identity. In so far as editors use a handle and do not employ their real names, who they remains behind the mask. The identity they assume on-line is one thing, the anonymous person they may be off-line another. This is a long and complex question. I am reminded of a wonderful book on masks by the anthropologist A. D. Napier.
'What is the relationship, in other words, between, between the horrific faces of Balinese art and the expressions the people of Bali recognize in their interactions with the world around them?' A. David Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, University of California Press,1986 pp.206-207
If someone dresses up as Caesar, and meets another garbed as Brutus, in a masked ball, should Caesar fear for his safety? Were they to suffer anxiety about being threatened, the problem would not lie in the presence of a Brutus, but in the existential insecurities behind the person posing as Caesar prior to donning the projective identity assumed for the masquerade. Undoubtedly, there is a complex psychology of confusion enabled by digital culture, which tends to give incentives to those who play within it to overidentify their anonymous selves with the persona projected. I write deliberately, as often as not, in a pompous style to mock that part of myself which gets a giggle out of pontificating sententiousness à la Sir Oracle caricatured by Gratiano. If called on that, I don't get offended. In the real world, I speak in dialects, and call a spade a fucken spayed. The nambypamby culture being forced on us has nothing to do with the aims of encyclopedic construction, but very much to do with social media mimicry and their pathologiesNishidani (talk) 08:24, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
it will also allow for more diverse voices to join our communities, bringing new knowledge with them.
- Whoever is responsible for that is philosophically and cultural illiterate, and more interested in identitarian politics than encyclopedic construction. This for me goes to the heart of the puerile inanity of the T&S project's innovation. Reading between the lines, it is pitched to editors who come from discriminated minorities, or editors who identify themselves with a discriminated minority. But the tacit premise is that diverse voices from discriminated minorities will bring new knowledge. This means that, whoever wrote that, thinks knowledge, of the kind an encyclopedia compiles, has secret dimensions known only to the respective voices of emarginalized groups. On the face of it, it sounds plausible. In Aboriginal communities, there was, and to some extent still is, a sphere of private knowledge that cannot be made known to either the uninitiated or to 'tribal' outsiders. Much of what has been recorded of it remains unpublished and a good deal of it has not, however, been handed down to the relevant communities. What we knew of the Dogon, turned out, as Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen discovered, to be significantly less than what was thought to be the case, when chance led them to interview Ogotemmelli.
- It is certainly important that we have people from as wide a spectrum of human background as possible vetting for oversights or prejudice how their realities are depicted. But the sources for this are not people, and their private knowledge and experiences. The statement above, no one appears to have noted, flies in the face of WP:Reliable Sources, which plainly declares that:
Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracyNishidani (talk) 12:37, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
- I.e. the drafter of that earlier language never stopped to consider the implications of what they were asserting, in some apparent haste to codify as a Wikipedia project aim the enlargement of editorial recruitment to discriminated group. It sounds like an accommodation to, a peremptory taking on board of what Robert Hughes called The Culture of Complaint, which should be obligatory reading to newcomers here. Whatever the sex, colour, ethnic or political background, the knowledge these new editors are asked to bring is not something beyond the purview or grasp of anyone else, outside of those specific groups, since it must be reliably published by third parties and in the public domain. My way of seeing the world underwent a sea-change on reading John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (1961), just after it came out. The knowledge he brought into awareness came not from being black, but from passing himself off as a black by undergoing medical treatment to change his skin colour. The best book on traditional Japanese homosexuality I know of was written by Gary Leupp, a heterosexual. One early groundbreaking study of Greek obscenity was written by a Dutchwoman whose scholarship arose out of a doctorate in theology. Henry Mayhew did not need to impoverish himself to write his classic London Labour and the London Poor any more than George Orwell had to forget his background at St Cyprian's and Eton to write Down and Out in Paris and London. Nishidani (talk) 12:37, 3 July 2019 (UTC)
(K)
Ne vous laissez pas impressionner par mon gendre, c’est tout ce que je vous recommande. Lui a emberlificoté tout le monde. Il est poli. Jamais on n’a vu quelque’un d’aussi poli. Il en devient écœurant.George Simenon, Maigret se fâche, (1947) Éditions Rencontre, 1968 p.20. Nishidani (talk) 17:15, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
(L)
'C’était toujours délicat de parler à Lognon parce que, quoi qu’on dît, il trouvait moyen d'y voire matière à vexation.'(Speaking to Lorgnon was always a touchy matter because whatever one might say, he would always find evidence in it of an intention to be vexatious.) George Simenon, Maigret et la jeune morte, in Georges Simenon,Œuvres complètes, vol. 18 Éditions Rencontre, 1968 p.182)
- That is about as good an insight into the problem of the courtesy policy being 'finessed' to bait hordes of whingers into editing Wikipedia, as one could possible find.Nishidani (talk) 19:38, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
(M)::
‘we argued that many parents, K-12 teachers, professors and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression. We suggested that students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of other cognitive distortions . Such thought patterns directly harmed students’ mental health and interfered with their intellectual development – and sometimes the development of those around them. At some schools, a culture of defensive self-censorship seemed to be emerging, partly in response to students who were quick to “call out” or shame others for small things that they deemed to be insensitive- either to the student doing the calling out or to members of a group that the student was standing up for. We called this pattern vindictive protectiveness and argued that such behavior made it more difficult for all students to have open discussions in which they could practice the essential skills of critical thinking and civil disagreement.’ Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind:How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Penguin Press 2018 p.10
- (Comment on A) And yet still makes more sense than Wnt... Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:47, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
I was born and raised in the states, but I have spent a not insignificant amount of time in Egypt. And after a certain age you understand why the people seem fearful in public, why they never discuss anything besides anodyne apolitical topics, why while they are warm and gregarious they have a distinct distrust of people they dont personally know, and sometimes of the people they do. Im not trying to hyperbolize, but this feels like that, that there is an أمن الدولة (state security) that operates in secret and can at any time vanish you for saying the wrong thing. Never a public airing of any charges, never a trial, just you were here yesterday and gone today. The majority, overwhelmingly so, of people here dont have much of an experience with a secret police. Thankfully of course. But there is an unhealthy, in my view, deference given by some to this faceless entity that makes abrupt announcements that "so-and-so has been banned from the English Wikipedia for one year" because they dont see parallels in their lives to such a thing as the state security or secret police. So they believe that because they say the evidence must be kept secret that means that the evidence must be sound and the decision above reproach. Yes, harassment is not good for the project, the community, or its individual members. A state security force is worse. nableezy - 18:41, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Quite. While I have been critical of many of Fram's action (I was utterly dismayed to see him block Gorllawarfare, given the history. And I have never gotten so many "tank you's" as after I gave her a barnstar back then). But the point it that all of what Fram was blocked for is on en wiki. No emails, not off wiki contact. Ie: it is all there for us to see. And I just don't see anything that sinister. A week or twos block for his language against arb.com; yes. A year ban: hell, no, Huldra (talk) 20:39, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Also the whole brouhaha over a frickin tweet had me look at the Women in Red initiative. And I saw redlink that could turn blue pretty easily if you want to lend a hand at User:Nableezy/abeer. nableezy - 19:08, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Well, I've desisted from editing articles since I saw that incident, and, sheesh, heard that we are going to live under a 'Community Health Initiative Regime' written by anonymous hands distinguished so far by a prose style that suggests to me zero competence in communication-they must be all drilled in Ayn Rant's sub-pseudo-sophomoric objectivism,- unless by that is to be meant 'bulletins from the Office to (the) hoi polloi.' Who in the fuck thought up that one? that everything done here has to be under surveillance by a health police, specializing in whingeing (not as up to now, in serious complaints like real life threats, pedophiles, and other such scumbag assaults on our work here). How many times have you, I and Huldra got emails or on-talk page edits with death threats, screaming upper case print screeds expanding on phrases like, 'You fucking Aydab asshole licker'; 'you anti-semetic cunt'? One just brushed this off,-water off a duck's back- save for one exception, to do with email security, aside (I reported an incident to an admin who looked into it). My thought was. 'Well, ya gunna cop tons of flak in editing on the wrong side of the I/P area, it's no skin off my nose. Let the miserable pricks rant,' since I was long taught to take insults impersonally, as a clue to a personality disorder in the aggressor, and that, if you are affected by slurs, it means they have tipped you off to a certain 'undiagnosed' weakness, perhaps a hidden hurt that has nothing to do with the actual recent incident that triggered the insults. I see we live in a different world now.
- As to the request, I'll look at it but can't promise anything. I'm not editing unless this threat is met. My impression is that the behavioural diagnostic software, and star chamber encroachment on our democracy will fuck up any lingering interest in my staying here. I've seen too many people with cognitive problems, sheer obtuseness to what texts mean, and obsessions with using Wikipedia as a forum for ethnonationalist rigging, or killing time in playing games with serious editors to think that, by putting this cocked weapon in their hand, and charging the civil gun with heftier armour-piercing munitions, anything other than serious encyclopedic damage is in the offing.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- I get it, but personally until I see what shakes out Im going to keep going about my life. Including fucking about on this website when Im sufficiently bored. nableezy - 03:40, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
- To be honest I think its just a massive cultural disconnect between the US-led ideological 'Just listen and believe' crowd, and the EU/Rest of the world that has a pretty damn ingrained cultural memory of good reasons why not to believe it when people in authority tell you they are doing it for your own good. Or you cant do it yourselves. I mean, quite a lot of the crap coming out of T&S smacks of medieval lord of the manner 'We need to take care of the peasants because they arnt equipped for it'. And pretty much anyone who attended school in the EU, Asia or S.America for the last 70 years could have predicted what happens when you vanish a public and outspoken critic of the regime. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:36, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Yes. There is certainly a cultural disconnect along those lines. But one could cite also the sociology of bureaucracies to endless effect to throw more light on the crassness here.Parkinson's law for example, that the logic of office expansion leads to subordination to rid the place of rivals etc. I appreciated that apposite pun 'lords of (our)manner(s)' by the way. I hope to get back to this when pressures of private life lessen somewhat. Thanks. Nishidani (talk) 20:45, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Actually I cant take credit for that one. I recently did a rebuild on my hardware and my autocorrect needs re-training. Its been doing all sorts of weird stuff since. I will leave it uncorrected for the amusement value. Hope life becomes a bit more relaxing. I can sympathise having recently started a new job (for longer hours, less pay, but far more demanding). Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:43, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Well, that illustrates an aspect of the problem: automatic software encroaching on the sphere of conscious judgment. Tiffs occur quite frequently here because, for example, an exasperative 'For fuck's sake!' triggers an alarm suggesting that the writer has told someone to 'fuck off!' Attempts to convince people that one is remonstrative about deplorable conditions, the other intolerantly dismissive of persons - a world of difference- often fail. 'For fuck's sake' signals that the other editor's refusal to come to terms with the obvious meaning of a source text/refusal to compromise,etc., causes frustration. In the end, an editor must erase any hint that an obstructive editor is causing one frustration in order to make that editor continue to feel comfortable in his, often strategic, persistence in ignoring commonsense. These protocols guarantee passive aggressiveness as much as they aim to ensure one form of 'civility', the form that is judged purely in terms of adherence to the politically correct, neutral and neutered terminology of interactions. They ignore the other side of civility, which demands, in a dialogic encounter, a certain ability to recognize the point another person may be making. As to working conditions in the real world. Most of the bright young people I know here have to cope, after getting a degree, even an MA, with job offers to work for 800 euros a month, while paying half of that in rent. The solution? Keep wages lows to attract capital, and blame immigrants.Nishidani (talk) 09:38, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
- Actually I cant take credit for that one. I recently did a rebuild on my hardware and my autocorrect needs re-training. Its been doing all sorts of weird stuff since. I will leave it uncorrected for the amusement value. Hope life becomes a bit more relaxing. I can sympathise having recently started a new job (for longer hours, less pay, but far more demanding). Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:43, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
- Yes. There is certainly a cultural disconnect along those lines. But one could cite also the sociology of bureaucracies to endless effect to throw more light on the crassness here.Parkinson's law for example, that the logic of office expansion leads to subordination to rid the place of rivals etc. I appreciated that apposite pun 'lords of (our)manner(s)' by the way. I hope to get back to this when pressures of private life lessen somewhat. Thanks. Nishidani (talk) 20:45, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
A kitten for you!
I can't recall if I've said this before, and I do apologize if I have, but I've constantly found your responses, replies, and general editing within the context of discussions to be eloquent and exceedingly erudite, to boot.
In short, thank you for brightening my day by teaching me new words (and also by the fluidity of your prose)!
—Javert2113 (Siarad.|¤) 03:14, 21 June 2019 (UTC)
- Reading that generated
Stroked, the fossil took on flesh and purred,
- a truncated trochaic pentameter. Thanks for prompting it, you can take the credit in return for the inspiring flattery!Nishidani (talk) 07:19, 21 June 2019 (UTC)
Pour information
Bonjour, J'espère que tu vas bien. Il y a actuellemenet un vote sur l'article relatif à la Guerre de Palestine de 1948 qui mériterait attention (sur wp:en) NoAccount2019 (talk) 17:33, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
- Malheureusement, j'ai été obligé de retirer ma participation à wikipedia. Je me suis mis en grève contre la tentative récente par des personnes extérieures à notre organisation d'introduire des procès secrets, en utilisant des preuves secrètes, sans appel. Une espèce de fascisme, que me rappelle ce qui se passe dans les procès militaires en Cisjordanie
- Je te souhaite tous mes meilleurs vœux. Nishidani (talk) 20:34, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Mention in upcoming issue of The Signpost
Just wanted you to know your name is included in a report about FRAMBAN in the upcoming issue of The Signpost. If you have any comments you can leave them on my talkpage or other Signpost official channels. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:44, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Bri, though it's rather embarrassing to be singled out among hundreds of wikipedians more at home with the intricacies of this dispute, and more eloquent about it than I could ever be. In your redrafts, it's something that could be sacrificed if pressure of space emerges. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 11:43, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
Recommended reading
Franz Kafka: Das Schloss | |
---|---|
... about about alienation,
|
Thank you - not only by click - for the enlightening language lesson of what "toxic behaviour" may mean! Proud co-author of Kafka, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:19, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'll have to earn that compliment by some payback! Hurried for time at the mo,' but in the K article
In his 1995 book Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient, Sander Gilman investigated "why a Jew might have been considered 'hypochondriacal' or 'homosexual' and how Kafka incorporates aspects of these ways of understanding the Jewish male into his own self-image and writing
- (1)That shouldn’t be sourced to the blurb, but to pp.63ff.,(hypochondriasis) and pp.160-163 (homosexuality) of Gilman's book.
- (2)I see Ritchie Robertson's Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, Clarendon Press, 1985 isn't listed. I know works on Kafka vie with books and articles on Hamlet for printing profligacy but that is a very good introduction. Roberto Calasso's K, is in the bibliog, but I've always found it a very incisively original reading of Kafka. Perhaps it is too textual, too reconditely hermeneutical, on reflection, for a wikibio.
- (3)
The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free them without ripping apart? And a thousand times rather tear in me they hold back or buried. For this I'm here, that's quite clear to me' = 'Die ungeheure Welt, die ich im Kopfe habe. Aber wie mich befreien und sie befreien, ohne zu zerreißen. Und tausendmal lieber zerreißen, als in mir sie zurückhalten oder begraben. Dazu bin ich ja hier, das ist mir ganz klar."
- Aside from the fact this obviously a serious mistranslation probably machine-driven, the original is sourced to Der Spiegel's Kafka page, which also doesn't work for me. Perhaps it should be replaced by
- 'The tremendous world I have inside my head, but how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me'.The Diaries of Franz Kafka:1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Peregrine Books 1964 p.222 (the entry is for 21 June 1913), which is also the source for the same quote in Louis Begley,Franz Kafka: The Tremendous World Inside My Head, Atlas, 2009 p.38 which of course takes its title from that passage in Joseph Kresh's translation as reprinted in the Penguin 1964edition. The German original can be linked to (a) Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke, Paperless, 2016(b) Walter Herbert Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka, Wayne State University Press, 2002 pp.67-68
- Best wishes Gerda, as always.Nishidani (talk) 13:16, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you, that's great. Will try to incorporate. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:50, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- ... but it will take hours, - on my way outside. Feel free to do it yourself! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:58, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- Sorry for giving you that workload. By all means take it or leave it, or just plunk the gist on the talk page for someone else to look into. I'm on strike, and won't be adding content to articles for, by the looks of it, quite a while. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'll take it, with thanks. Fresh air was good! - Once (2012), I considered strike, but then thought that seeing me go would be exactly what some would want, so I stubbornly stayed ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:42, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- I changed (3) as most urgent. Will see for (1) after sleep. Not sure I understand (2). Do you think it should at least be Further reading? Or even be used as a ref? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:09, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'll take it, with thanks. Fresh air was good! - Once (2012), I considered strike, but then thought that seeing me go would be exactly what some would want, so I stubbornly stayed ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:42, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
- Sorry for giving you that workload. By all means take it or leave it, or just plunk the gist on the talk page for someone else to look into. I'm on strike, and won't be adding content to articles for, by the looks of it, quite a while. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
(1) has note 102 Sander 'Gilman (see blurb)'. That should be replaced by
Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: the Jewish Patient, Routledge 1993 pp.63ff.,160-163.
- I am citing from the edition I have, reprinted in 1995.Nishidani (talk) 07:39, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
- I changed to the page numbers. Same edition. What about (2)? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:39, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
- Re (2) Robertson can be introduced and used re this:
- Hawes suggests that Kafka, though very aware of his own Jewishness, did not incorporate it into his work, which, according to Hawes, lacks Jewish characters, scenes or themes
- I changed to the page numbers. Same edition. What about (2)? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:39, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
- Hawes’s view is counterfactual, highly superficial and dated. One could for example write something along the lines:-
Kafka followed closely the scandalous Beilis trial dealing with a spurious accusation that the latter had engaged in the ritual murder of a Ukrainian boy, and towards the end of his life wrote a story based on it. The draft was destroyed when Dora Diamant burnt part of his Nachlass. However allusions to the affaire have been found in The Trial.(Ritchie Robertson, Kafka:Judaism, Politics, and Literature, Clarendon Press 1985 p.12.)
- (4) I really haven't time to do much of this, with household duties piling up. But you might consider also this.
‘What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself (and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe’) Note 114,
- This again is inadequately sourced. You could replace the web page with The Diaries ed. Max Brod 1964 entry for 8 January 1914 p.252; and provide the German text in a footnote ('Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam und sollte mich ganz still, zufrieden damit daß ich atmen kann in einen Winkel stellen’). Peter-André Alt, Franz Kafka: der ewige Sohn: eine Biographie, C.H.Beck, 2008 p.430)
- That ‘in einen Winkel stellen’, by the way, reflects a key leitmotiv in his work, the idea of being holed up, best illustrated by his short story Der Bau. This is explored splendidly in Roberto Calasso’s K., Adelphi edizioni, 2005 pp.pp.179ff . Best Nishidani (talk) 10:55, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
- (4) adopted, with a blockquote for both German and English. Yes, it's short, but of prime importance. Thank you, - no more time today, garden work, concert, Rhein in Flammen. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:19, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
Varying it, as a generalization along the lines,
Was habe ich mit anderen Leuten gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam.
has been, I have long thought, one of the most important points ever written about the 'toxicity' of all identitarian cultures. It is the best modernist tweak I know of regarding Kant's Was ist Aufklärung essay. All those seeking 'community' should first try to nurture some strong sense of self-irony, if not indeed a sense of the comical. We need it in these tragic times. Enjoy the fireworks! Nishidani (talk) 13:52, 6 July 2019 (UTC)
- (5)'zufrieden damit daß ich atmen kann in einen Winkel stellen’.
- Thinking over this quotation last night, with its west Yiddish preference for Winkel rather than the more usual standard German Ecke, reminded me that the Translation problems to English section is deeply defective and would have to be rewritten, if the aim was eventually FA.
Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text.[1] German's more flexible word order and syntactical differences provide for multiple ways in which the same German writing can be translated into English.[2] An example is the first sentence of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", which is crucial to the setting and understanding of the entire story:[3]
{{quote|Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. (original)
As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed. (literal word-for-word translation)[4]
- ^ Kafka 1996, p. xi.
- ^ Newmark 1991, pp. 63–64.
- ^ Bloom 2003, pp. 23–26.
- ^ Prinsky 2002.
- The note to Peter Newmark refers to p.64 a remark about German, not about Kafka in particular and is WP:OR
- The note to Prinsky regards notes for students, and is not quite WP:RS
- The note to Harold Bloom actually refers to remarks by others (Stanley Corngold et al.,) in a book of which Bloom is merely the editor.Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
- This paragraph is, for me, unacceptable, because Kafka did not make ‘extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language’. That sounds as if there were something stylistically peculiar in Kafka’s German that sets him off from other German writers. Well, in minutiae, there are some such tell-tale differences , but they do not concern this specific example. He wrote impeccable German, and it just so happens that like all German writers he wrote with a kind of syntactical expansiveness which, were it literally translated into English, would sound ungainly (this is true of any word for word translation from any language into another). The illustrative English sentence from the incipit of Die Verwandlung has to go, because there is nothing there that tells one what Kafka does with language. It could be illustrated by text from any German speaker or writer. The illusrative sentence’s various English versions show some of the difficulties in getting Kafka’s usage over into English: the problem is not ‘syntactical’: it is simply verbal (how to translate words like Ungeziefer etc., a word, if translated as 'a vermin,' becomes unacceptable as English, even though some noted writers have translated it that way.)
A barnstar for you!
The Special Barnstar | |
For your brilliant eloquence over WP:FRAM and especially for this note. ∯WBGconverse 06:48, 14 July 2019 (UTC) |
Question
Do you remember you once quoted me on your userpage? Do you remember what was the quote about? I couldn't find it using wikipedia on my phone.--Bolter21 (talk to me)
- Sorry, Stav. While many things you've said in our exchanges are certainly quotable for being insightful, I can neither remember nor find the allusion. I'm pretty sure that, if this is the case for my user page, the quote from you would have remained, since I have never removed quotes added there except on one occasion when, on the suggestion of some arb, I removed a citation from another editor calling me out as an 'anti-Semite'.Nishidani (talk) 06:42, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
- Was it possibly me?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 10:46, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
- Nope. That kind of crap long precedes your wiki birth, lad! Anti-Semitism is a specific intimately documented extreme on the vast, somewhat blurry spectrum of prejudice, on the end of the band dealing with hetero-ethnic contempt. As such, it can be reduced, analytically, to a set of more general principles. If one underwrites the idea of universal analytic categories - which is what science aspires to do - then the features of 'Anti-semitism' form a subset of a larger class. That is my position. The other, extremely influential view, is that 'Anti-semitism' is a unique class of its own, and therefore does not resonate with other forms of ethnic contempt. For anyone espousing the uniqueness approach, a principled universalist objection to ethno-nationalism, if applied to the IOWB, shades ineludibly into anti-Semitism, because the agents of the IOWB happen, besides being (certain) Israelis, to be Jews. Hope all's well. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 11:10, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
- Was it possibly me?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 10:46, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Don't get baited
Tl;dr version: when someone argues with you and makes errors of policy or fact, you should point out the problems with their argument once, citing policy, and then stop. If there is nothing new to bring to bear, don't get baited into responding again, especially if they just keep insisting they're right, or if they ignore your arguments. You can't force them to listen to you, so don't try. Unless there's something new to add, just stop commenting, even if they have the last word.
Full version: Nishidani, you're basically completely correct at Talk:Noongar, but, forgive me, you can be your own worst enemy in arguing your point. The problem is, you get sucked in and feel compelled to respond, whenever anybody says anything that you don't agree with, even if it's all been said before, over and over and over again, and even when you've already been proved right umpty-ump times already. Don't get baited, and don't get sucked in. Say your piece once, then refuse to engage. Follow WP:DR about the content, and talk policy about issuing neutral warnings, when appropriate.
Regarding the specific point about the 45,000-year age for Noongar, the burden of proof to provide sources that support their assertion is on those who wish to retain that false assertion; there's no need for you to prove that it should be removed. If they argue nonsense or deny WP:SYNTH on the Talk page, you can point it out once, but if they go around in circles, making essentially the same bogus argument over and over, don't get sucked in. You don't have to respond; let them have the last word, it doesn't change a thing. Ultimately, if they keep insisting on their point of view, arguing with them on the Talk page will not change their mind.
If it's merely a content dispute (which this isn't) then an Rfc may help. If they are going against policy, e.g., by edit warring to enforce their PoV, then we add warnings on their User talk page about edit warring, or about disruption, or whatever the case may be. Eventually, if they don't back off, you take them to ANI. But arguing the same point over and over and over on the Talk page is a gigantic waste of time, and actually works against you, because it makes it look like there is an arguable point somewhere in all that verbiage when there isn't, and makes it look like a real, back-and-forth discussion is going on, when it's merely one disagreement, repeated N times. That just makes it harder for other editors who come in fresh and want to assess the situation, to make out what is actually going on.
So, please: unless you have a completely new objection to what they are doing at the article that hasn't been discussed before, please just stop. Let them have the last word, it doesn't matter. Let the discussion stop, fix the article (like I just did) per policy and consensus, and wait for further developments. Mathglot (talk) 07:17, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
- You and I know this is a behavioural problem, WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT WP:IDONTLIKETHAT.The other two editors consider that I am the problem. Since there is no consensus, the page will remain stuck in its folly, according to normal procedures. All of the other measures you suggest are way down the line because one has to have evidence of disruptiveness, and you can only show that by following to the letter all of the WP:CIVIL protocols. including laborious WP:CONSENSUS forming until all alternatives, including dispute resolution, are exhausted, together with the patience of editors who see no reason why days, months, years should be spent trying to gain 'consensus' on 1+1=2 kinds of elementary facts.
- By the way, the 45,000 years figure is roughly correct: it just cannot be applied to a Noongar population. By 2001 at the Devil's Lair site and others it was established that human habitation of SW Australia dates back to roughly 50,000 B.P. which means 48,000 BCE. The fact that the editors there can't distinguish 'Before present' from 'BCE' is an index of the level to which we are reduced. The Trust&Safety heads in SFrancisco in any case would regard Noongar as an article in the discriminated minorities area, and therefore any putative representative of that area must be given extreme leeway and tolerance against aggressively Waspish suspects like myself, who lack nativist credentials and therefore shouldn't use RS to push out undocumented speculations by the relevant 'community'.Nishidani (talk) 09:09, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
- You're right again, on all counts. Yes, it's a behavioural problem; yes, it's IDHT, IDLT, etc. Doesn't matter that they think you're the problem, just ignore it; they don't understand policy. Yes, habitation dates to roughly -50,000. (The only thing I disagree with you on is o/t here, namely, T&S involvement. Believe me, they are so frazzled by the current situation, they will step verrry carefully next time. But they only get involved in extremely serious issues; they would never step in here, because they're simply not going to interfere with an interpretation of internal en-wiki policies like WP:SYNTH. Also, you're dreaming if you think T&S would get involved in something as minor as this; it's premture even for ANI (so far), ArbCom would reject it in a flash, and T&S is light-years away from considering something like this. Not a snowball's chance in hell it's gonna happen.)
- You're not "pushing out undocumented speculations", you are calmly, and clearly, altering article content (Btw, did you see my change at the article?) or you're discussing improvements on the Talk page in a neutral tone, without exasperation, and without aspersions. Once you've said your piece, there's nothing else to say; let them rant and rave. Let them edit war, and then they will be warned against edit warring. Let them disrupt the article repeatedly to enforce their own substantiated position, and then they will be warned against repeated disruption. At a given point, the disruption will become detrimental enough for them to be taken to ANI. (I'm not shy; I'll do it. But it's a last resort, so please don't jump the gun by trying that yourself, before every other method has been exhausted.) If they promise to stop at ANI, then that's the end of it. If they don't, they will be blocked.
- But this doesn't happen overnight, DR procedures need to be followed, so you may need to put up with nonsense in the article for a short while, or some pointless, circular discussion on the Talk page. Don't get baited: if they repeat a previous TP argument that you (or someone else) has already debunked, just let it go. Make your point once calmly, then stop. Follow WP:DR and WP:CIVIL to a fault. When there is a user behaviour issue, do not bring it up on the article talk page, rather, address the behavioural issue at their user TP. If they break user behavioural guideline in article TP comments, you can add "I've responded at your User talk page" at the article TP, but nothing more.
- Nothing to do now, but watch the article. If it gets altered back to unsourced POV claims, don't jump on it; let it sit 24 hours at least, then revert if you feel like, with a calm, brief, neutral edit summary, like, "Rv per [[Talk:Noongar#Verifiability challenge]]." If it happens again, wait another 24, then, "Rv per [[Talk:Noongar#Verifiability challenge]]. Stop [[WP:EW|edit warring]]." I will do the same. Don't revert a 3rd time. After you have reverted twice, and I have reverted twice, we can decide whether we want to open an Rfc, or go to ANI and request a block.
- Enjoy a break from constant strife at Talk:Noongar, and try to help contribute elsewhere. Are you signed up with Legobot's Feedback request service? There are good Rfc's all over the place, crying out for comments by seasoned editors like you, who understand policy well. Please sign up, it's fun, plus you'll learn all about corners of the encyclopedia you never heard of, as well as important ones that you already know all about, but didn't realize they needed help on a discussion. Good luck! Mathglot (talk) 23:05, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
- It even occurred to me after the fact, that they might be lurking here, monitoring this discussion without contributing. If they are, good! If they continue as before at the article, they are headed for a block. And now, they know. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 23:33, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'm just on strike until the Fram mess is clarified, so all I can do is offer talk page suggestions. When I began writing the set of Aboriginal articles, I realized the Noongar one was too 'nationalistic', rather like Yugambeh, to allow efficient editing, so I left it aside, though I accumulated a large amount of data for an eventual revision. It's a pity sensitivities are so high. When I began to document the genocidal acts of settlers against the Yugambeh, a descendent was upset, and didn't want painful memories disturbed by history. Scholarship has huge amounts on the devastations of colonial settlers, but the urge to bolster a community sense of having endured and survived, to flourish now, tends to focus on creating a generic picture of a common culture, when the records say this was rather more divided 'tribally' and riven by conflict than people like to admit. The sensitivity is driven by a legitimate fear, that land claims are imperiled if information is forthcoming of divisions within the ranks (the Commonwealth has exploited conflicts in scholarly evidence to undermine several claims). But encyclopedias should describe the problems, not cover them up.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
Systemic bias
When the former head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Lionel Kopelowitz punned that Jeremy Corbyn should be korban (an animal to be sacrificed, or like someone who was murdered in the Holocaust, it was taken by some to be an explicit call for his assassination. (Richard Silverstein, Former Board of Deputies President Calls for Corbyn Assassination Tikun Olam 21 July 2019) The news, unlike every titter of insinuation about the target's putative anti-Semitism, has scarce resonance in the mainstream, save for this “The word Corbyn in Hebrew is Corban, which is sacrifice,” he joked. “I think we should sacrifice him for all the trouble he has caused.” (Mathilde Frot'Former Board president ‘sorry’ for ‘sacrifice Corbyn’ quip,', The Times of Israel, 30 May 2019). A huge wiki effort is being put in to screw Corbyn for comments on Palestine/Israel several levels of magnitude lower than this. Every Iagoish drop from the cascading poisonous well merits expansion. The far stronger counterevidence is zilched, disappeared like this firebrand rhetoric. Nishidani (talk) 20:32, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
- Not sure why you're jumping on the defend Corbyn bandwagon. [16] among many in recent days. Or Labour lords resign, [17] or the Labour lords avert against Corbyn, [18], please take note how Israel isn't mentioned. You can be an antisemite without involving the IP conflict. I truly am mystified why someone who has nothing to do with the UK, nor of UK or Europe politics would wonder in to the Corbyn affair. And then to state that this is a smear as you've done before, and tried to use your old friends Chomsky as if he's the only source in the world to use. There is a reason why the EHRC in the UK is investigating the Labour party. Why not look up and see when else in history the EHRC ever investigated another party. Maybe when everyone is calling out the Labour party it's time to stop and listen. Sir Joseph (talk) 22:00, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
- I truly am mystified why someone who has nothing to do with the UK, nor of UK or Europe politics would wonder in to the Corbyn affair. Says somebody with an American flag waving on their user and user talk pages. nableezy - 22:24, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'm involved because of the antisemitism and how they attack those who fight antisemtism within the Labour party and let it fester for years. Not sure why that is surprising. I don't think it's a surprise that I'm Jewish and I care about a major political party condoning antisemitism and enabling the growth of it in the UK and how it's being investigated by a national body and the fallout of not catching it sooner, and how the damage one person can do to a party. Sir Joseph (talk) 23:17, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
- You dont know anything about where Nishidani grew up, lives, lived. And beyond that, the suggestion that only Jews and Europeans should be interested in or contributing to that article is rather silly. Finally, your first comment here also violated your topic ban. Try to stop doing that. Thanks. nableezy - 00:00, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I didn't say that only Jews or Europeans can comment, but it does seem odd for someone who never edited, to the best of my recollection, to suddenly be interested about Corbyn, and then to deny accusations about antisemitism? That is odd. All one has to do is read the papers or watch videos of Jews walking down the streets in the UK to see the increased antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn mainstreamed antisemitism in the UK moreso than any other modern UK leader. And then to claim it's a SYSTEMIC BIAS??!! Sir Joseph (talk) 00:09, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- What is 'odd' is your apparent inability above to either remember the well-known, or check the record. I have edited the Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn pages respectively 128 and 22 times.
- You characterize me as posting the above while never having edited this topic. I'm 'suddenly interested about Corbyn'. The anti-Semitism detector machinery's nervous calibrations tingle, the antennae quiver alertly, the nose sniffs the air to ferret out the stench behind a slight waft of speciously neutral observation. This is, in effect, the usual problem. No one outside the perceived ethnic fold may note anything, before their anti-Semitic credentials have been verified, their record minutely threshed, to scour up what their ulterior motives might be. For it is always a question of invisible, inferred, ulterior motives. For those who suffer from this, even a list of facts can, duly scanned, prove to be ad hominem.
- There is a simple, almost mathematically precise way to measure prejudice, antisemitism included. Take a murder threat by a Jew against a non-Jew of the kind:-
(a)“I think we should sacrifice him (Corbyn) for all the trouble he has caused (for Jews).”
- And reframe it, mutatis mutandis, for the opposite position. I.e. imagine Jeremy Corbyn stating
I think we should sacrifice/korbanize Lionel Kopelowitz for all the trouble he has caused (for the Labour Party).
- The first murder incitement is not notable, not reported, brushed off. The second incitement to murder, formally identical, only with the object of animus inverted, would create a political storm, with massive coverage, and the immediate resignation of Corbyn from British politics and cowering in self-inflicted humiliation for the rest of his days(and justly so). (a) was said, it is a fact (b) has never been said, it is a conjecture.
- Note that (a) for you is not even mentioned, though it is a fact. Instead (b) an hypothesis is raised as to why anyone like myself would think this noteworthy, with the infratextual nudge-nudge wink-wink innuendo there is something ‘odd’ about my even touching on the fact. This is the standard gambit: if I am criticized, then the gravamen of the charge is to be ignored, and I must galvanize my wits, wrack my brains, to figure out what odd trait is it in the other person that led him to voice his remark in the first place. A dinner guest licks his plate. The hostess remarks, 'Please don't do that', and the guest thinks:'Bloody hell, that's odd. She must dislike Irishmen like me.' This is one of the most common features of conversation on the I/P talk pages I have noted on Wikipedia.Nishidani (talk) 12:56, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- The last point was best said by the most intelligent commentator on this media farce, Sir Stephen Sedley
most Jews do understand the risk of hypersensitivity. There is the story about Goldbloom, doing well in the rag trade in Stepney, who has to make a dash for Euston to sort out a problem with his supplier in Glasgow. As the night sleeper pulls out, he realises he has left his overnight bag behind. Luckily the man occupying the other berth in the sleeper compartment has a spare pair of pyjamas, which he lends Goldbloom, and tells Goldbloom he can use his razor in the morning. But when Goldbloom asks if he can also borrow his toothbrush, he politely declines. The next evening, when he returns from Glasgow, Goldbloom’s wife asks him how the journey went. ‘Not bad,’ says Goldbloom, ‘but did I meet an anti-Semite!’ Nishidani (talk) 13:06, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I didn't say that only Jews or Europeans can comment, but it does seem odd for someone who never edited, to the best of my recollection, to suddenly be interested about Corbyn, and then to deny accusations about antisemitism? That is odd. All one has to do is read the papers or watch videos of Jews walking down the streets in the UK to see the increased antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn mainstreamed antisemitism in the UK moreso than any other modern UK leader. And then to claim it's a SYSTEMIC BIAS??!! Sir Joseph (talk) 00:09, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- You dont know anything about where Nishidani grew up, lives, lived. And beyond that, the suggestion that only Jews and Europeans should be interested in or contributing to that article is rather silly. Finally, your first comment here also violated your topic ban. Try to stop doing that. Thanks. nableezy - 00:00, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'm involved because of the antisemitism and how they attack those who fight antisemtism within the Labour party and let it fester for years. Not sure why that is surprising. I don't think it's a surprise that I'm Jewish and I care about a major political party condoning antisemitism and enabling the growth of it in the UK and how it's being investigated by a national body and the fallout of not catching it sooner, and how the damage one person can do to a party. Sir Joseph (talk) 23:17, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
- I truly am mystified why someone who has nothing to do with the UK, nor of UK or Europe politics would wonder in to the Corbyn affair. Says somebody with an American flag waving on their user and user talk pages. nableezy - 22:24, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
but yet you're still insinuating it's still all a smear campaign against Corbyn. That's the problem. Corbyn is still the head of the Labour party, this guy isn't the head of anything. Perhaps you need to read what systemic bias is, and not from a blog who thinks Corbyn is all warm and fluffy and antisemitism accusations are a smear, you need something grounded in reality. Sir Joseph (talk) 13:31, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- Okay. Whenever one is dealing with hysterics (impersonal), the thing to do is to look at the hard sociological evidence:. This is the reality, the objectively ascertained facts, as opposed to headline screamers
- (a) the percentage of Jews proportionate to the UK population is 0.45%
- (b) The percentage of Jews among Labour MPS is 8 out of 232, 11 of 330 for the Conservatives: They thus make up 2.9% of Parliament. Labour won 232 seats, meaning Jewish Labour MPS formed 3.45% of the elected party, slightly more than their percentage is as members of the Conservative Party (3.33%).(2017).
- (c)I.e. their parliamentary representation is 8 times higher than their proportion of the general population.
- (d) of the 540,000 + members of the Labour Party, 453 members have either been investigated, resigned or been sent to Coventry on the issue of anti-Semitism,=0.08% (2019)
- (e) Despite anti-Semites having a higher presence among UKIP and Conservative voters, neither of those parties has developed a mechanism for detecting, analyzing and expelling, if found guilty, members of those parties who might be anti-Semitic.
There is a reason why the EHRC in the UK is investigating the Labour party. Why not look up and see when else in history the EHRC ever investigated another party
- (e)According to Pew Research that, negative attitudes towards Jews in the UK amounts to 7% of the population, as opposed to the average 16% for the EU.
- (f)The Campaign Against Antisemitism survey revealed that of all 4 British parties, anti-Semitic attitudes were highest among Conservatives (40%) and UKIP (39%), with a wide gap separating them from Labour (32%) and the LibDems (30%)
- Meaning that if the EHRC were serious, they would be investigating the Conservative and UKIP parties above all. They are not.
- (g) The conclusions of (f) were independently confirmed by a Jewish research body which determined that UK surveys for the decade 2007-2016 consistently found a pattern of heightened animosity against Jews to be characteristic of the political right, while The political left, consistently emerged as 'more Jewish-friendly' ( L. Daniel Staetsky, 'Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain:A study of attitudes towards Jews and Israel,' Institute for Jewish Policy Research 2017 p.42)
- (h)The CAA also found that antisemitic attitudes had declined among Labour voters after Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015.
- (i) In polling the Jewish constituency it found that, from a low of 1 to a high of 5, British Jews ranked Labour's anti-Semitism at 3.94; the Ukip at 3.64; the LibDems at 2.7, the Conservatives at 1.96.
- I.e. Jewish community impressions seem to imply that the less anti-Semitic Labour is, the more it deserves to be called out for its antisemitism, whilst the more anti-Semitic you are as a conservative, the less this fact becomes noteworthy.
- (j)
We found that unambiguous, well-defined antisemitism is distinctly a minority position in Great Britain. Approximately 2-5% (when expressed as a range) or 3.6% (when expressed as an average) of the general population in Britain hold attitudes of a kind and intensity that would qualify as being called anti-Semitic Staetsky ibid p.63
- (k) 727 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the first six months of 2018. In context, 94,098 hate crimes were reported to police over 12 months to March 2018, of which Jews were victims in 1.1% of cases.
- Nearly 40% of Jews would seriously consider leaving Great Britain if the Labour Party under Corbyn were elected, while upwards of 85% are convinced he is an anti-Semite. They vote Conservative overwhelmingly, i.e. for the party with a far higher index for anti-Semitic attitudes than Labour, almost none of which is thought politically noteworthy by the mainstream and tabloid press. Go figure. You don't need to be a genius to work out what this means.Nishidani (talk) 14:50, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- As I said, you want to be an ostrich, and your last statement shows how little you know. Most Jews vote Labour, not Conservative. That is changing perhaps now, because of the party that is unwilling to tackle their antisemitism problem. You keep dancing around the problem that Labour is denying they have a problem, that they punish those who try to deal with the problem and actively put people in charge those who have antisemitic tendencies to deal with allegations of antisemitic incidents. There is a reason why Labour MP's are upset at their own party, unless you think it's part of some vast Jewish conspiracy. Sir Joseph (talk) 15:07, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
As I said, you want to be an ostrich, and your last statement shows how little you know. Most Jews vote Labour, not Conservative,' Sir Joseph
- Your misprision is rather comical after your insinuation there's no evidence I am familiar with the UK.
- If you can't make even an elementary distinction in English between 'wonder' and 'wander' ('I truly am mystified why someone who has nothing to do with the UK, nor of UK or Europe politics would wonder in to the Corbyn affair'), and mix up the United States with Great Britain, I suggest this page is not the place for you. It's hard enough trying to trying to get a grip on the real world empirically, without the complications of being constrained by courtesy to reply to people who appear unwilling to focus.(If this of course is another of your fishing expeditions to get evidence of WP:AGF violations (under provocation, e.g. 'ostrich'- you should be trouted for that) evidence to take to AE or A/I, which is as often as not the case, please note that acquatically, I don't identify with gudgeons. The kind of Oncorhynchus mykiss Robert Hughes recounts trying to angle, with memorable eloquence in his memoir, is more down my line, though I don't imagine that will lure you to reel with laughter. Goodbye then, that's a good chap. Nishidani (talk) 16:00, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- no need to be condescending. Your TL;DR is that you're still unwilling to admit that Labour has a problem with antisemitism. That's your problem, not mine. Sir Joseph (talk) 18:11, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- Anyone who thinks a short page is TL:DR shouldn't be editing Wikipedia, let alone pretending that they inform themselves sufficiently to add content to a topic. Your remark shows that you didn't read what I wrote, and yet want to reply to it. I answered every issue raised, you dodged all the evidence adduced. That is your problem, and, you being an editor, it is a characteristic that would arguably create problems for wikipedia.Nishidani (talk) 18:52, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- No need to be condescending lol, for demonstrating how little you know about a topic you are lecturing him on editing. Well done. Nish, if I might humbly suggest not engaging with people who have no interest in learning anything? nableezy - 18:57, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- On the other hand, if editors want to document in great detail their ignorance, I don't really think it fair to deny them a space to showcase their nescience. Noblesse oblige, as condescenders might say.Nishidani (talk) 19:00, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- What is simple is that you are unwilling to admit that Labour has a problem with antisemitism and that you consider it a smear. That you think it's ignorance to say otherwise, is a pox on you, not on the millions who are complaining about Corbyn and Labour. That the EHRC has now received volumes of evidence suggesting a coverup is not a smear but fact, yet you continue to decry it as a smear. That is shameful. Sir Joseph (talk) 19:04, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I listed several facts you got wrong, among them an astonishing belief that most Jews vote for Labour. You confused the UK Labour Party, evidently, with the US Democratic Party, how is beyond human reckoning. If you cannot get a simple fact straight, then you are not in a position to confidently advise people on how to read anything. Let me use your uncivil psychological ploy (the suggestion that behind my reasoned judgments there is an 'unwillingness') against you. 'You are unwilling to admit that when you assert that Labour has an anti-Semitism problem, you have no evidence for the contention, and brush away the evidence, accepted by Jewish scholarly studies, that anti-Semitism is stronger in the ranks of the Conservative and UKIP parties than it is in Labour'.
- What is 'shameful' is that one of the most viciously modern expropriative experiments in ridding an historic population of their right to property, life and liberty is justified by systematically screaming 'anti-semite' at whoever, out of sheer decency, considers obscene this daily harassment, demolitions, shooting kids (59 killed,2,756 injured in 2018, per the UN) often in the head, burning olive groves, bulldozing historic sites, stealing land in the name of ethnocracy.Nishidani (talk) 19:20, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I don't think the last paragraph is quite what you are fishing for, evidence to report me as a deleterious presence on Wikipedia, but, one cannot satisfy every whim.Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'm not fishing for anything. And why are you talking about Israel in your last paragraph when we're talking about the UK? What does the UK and antisemitism have to do with Israel? Again, you are still unwilling to answer, so I'll ask a simple yes or no question, does the UK Labour Party have a problem with antisemitism? Sir Joseph (talk) 19:28, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- The UK attack on Corbyn, see the relevant pages, is 90% documented by mentioning his and members of his party's attitudes to Israel and Palestinians, exactly what happened in the US, where no one in public life can mention anything negative about the former's occupation without ending up in the crossfire of multiple 'anti-Semitic' barrages. The latter is all minutely documented in impeccable scholarly works, such as Mearsheimer and Walt's 2007 book. As to your question. The UK Labour Party has a problem with a massive persistent press campaign asserting, contrafactually, that, compared to all other political parties, it uniquely has an 'antisemitic' problem. I should add that when anyone complains of 'antisemitism' I examine what the theoretical basis for their outrage is: political, moral, ethical, etc. Anyone who complains of anti-Semitism, while silently ignoring the massive daily evidence of the humiliations, harassment and violence dealt out on a systematic basis in Gaza and the West Bank, is ranting hollowly to my ear. For anti-Semitism is our most egregious instance of reviling, abusing, harassing, even killing people, because of their ethnicity, ergo, if any Israeli or Jew or whoever reviles, abuses, harasses or kills (not in self-defense, but to pursue territorial hegemony) Palestinians in the occupied territories, they automatically deprive themselves of any credibility in complaining of anti-Semitism, a cost which, were I a Jew, I would never accept under any circumstances. This is fundamental to civilization, as Hillel understood in his statement at Shabbath folio:31a, 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.'
- Oh, he did conclude that by the addendum, 'go and learn.'Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- So a Jew in the UK can't complain of antisemitism in the UK until Israel shapes up? Is that really what you're saying? It seems to me that is what you're implying that antisemitism is indeed tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and while for many instances it is, for many instances it isn't. And it's quite egregious of you to say that a Jew in the UK loses credibility. You do realize that is one instance of antisemitism, don't you? Further, you really ought to read up on antisemitism in the Labour party and how many instances have nothing to do with anything outside the borders of the UK. But it is quite clear now why you are interested in the topic, but I'm done. Have a nice life. Sir Joseph (talk) 20:04, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- Any person of any ethnic group can legitimately complain of racial prejudice. But if a Burmese complains (s)he has been insulted in the UK, while remaining silent or indifferent to the plight of the Rohinga, or even defending their government's ethnocidal measures, then, while I have no reason to doubt the complaint should be addressed, the plaintiff's outrage in context is personal, not ethical. They are upset at behavior meted out to them personally, while insouciant if someone else beyond their kinfold cops the same treatment from one of their community. If an Egyptian is outraged by their maltreatment in the UK, but condones what Sisi does in Egypt, their complaint should be addressed, with full awareness however that the offended person doesn't find anything wrong in having other Egyptians tortured. If a Jew is spat on in London by some anti-Semite, they do well to seek redress and punitive costs; but if that person, on hearing that Christian priests are customarily spat on in Jerusalem by Haredi passers-by, can't make the connection between what befell them, and what befalls non-Jews, then the outrage is not grounded in a universal moral sensibility: it is personal, and, often, ethnic. Whenever any ethnic group is targeted for abuse, that violence is, implicitly, directed at every other ethnic community. Europe hjas falsely addressed its anti-Semitic history. The anti-Semitic tradition was recycled as hostility to Arabs. The psychological and cultural odium remains - it is just cathected onto another group, while Islamophobes vaunt their pseudo-philosemitic (pro-Israeli) credentials.
- So a Jew in the UK can't complain of antisemitism in the UK until Israel shapes up? Is that really what you're saying? It seems to me that is what you're implying that antisemitism is indeed tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and while for many instances it is, for many instances it isn't. And it's quite egregious of you to say that a Jew in the UK loses credibility. You do realize that is one instance of antisemitism, don't you? Further, you really ought to read up on antisemitism in the Labour party and how many instances have nothing to do with anything outside the borders of the UK. But it is quite clear now why you are interested in the topic, but I'm done. Have a nice life. Sir Joseph (talk) 20:04, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'm not fishing for anything. And why are you talking about Israel in your last paragraph when we're talking about the UK? What does the UK and antisemitism have to do with Israel? Again, you are still unwilling to answer, so I'll ask a simple yes or no question, does the UK Labour Party have a problem with antisemitism? Sir Joseph (talk) 19:28, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I don't think the last paragraph is quite what you are fishing for, evidence to report me as a deleterious presence on Wikipedia, but, one cannot satisfy every whim.Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- What is simple is that you are unwilling to admit that Labour has a problem with antisemitism and that you consider it a smear. That you think it's ignorance to say otherwise, is a pox on you, not on the millions who are complaining about Corbyn and Labour. That the EHRC has now received volumes of evidence suggesting a coverup is not a smear but fact, yet you continue to decry it as a smear. That is shameful. Sir Joseph (talk) 19:04, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- On the other hand, if editors want to document in great detail their ignorance, I don't really think it fair to deny them a space to showcase their nescience. Noblesse oblige, as condescenders might say.Nishidani (talk) 19:00, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- no need to be condescending. Your TL;DR is that you're still unwilling to admit that Labour has a problem with antisemitism. That's your problem, not mine. Sir Joseph (talk) 18:11, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- As I said, you want to be an ostrich, and your last statement shows how little you know. Most Jews vote Labour, not Conservative. That is changing perhaps now, because of the party that is unwilling to tackle their antisemitism problem. You keep dancing around the problem that Labour is denying they have a problem, that they punish those who try to deal with the problem and actively put people in charge those who have antisemitic tendencies to deal with allegations of antisemitic incidents. There is a reason why Labour MP's are upset at their own party, unless you think it's part of some vast Jewish conspiracy. Sir Joseph (talk) 15:07, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- I don't need an augury for a nice life, I've had an exceptionally fortunate one. I never stole anything from anyone (except a book from a library, which I later repented of, and paid for)), have lived in other countries only by invitation, and never cheered on or turned my head quietly away to think of other things as bullies bashed the shit out of weak people (. Mine is nigh over, fortunately. I have no interest in overstaying in a world that has, in three short decades, forgotten what WW2 was about.Marx was wrong in his gloss on Hegel's view that 'alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen.' Mi dispiace.Nishidani (talk) 20:43, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
Sir Joseph
Can't really reply to you without violating his ban. Let's give his user talk page a break, okay? Thank you. El_C 21:39, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
- Yes, agreed. The problem was the interaction between you, Nableezy and SJ was so rapid, it took me a half an hour to get on edit in. That done, I thought the second reflection important. It disturbs me to find, so often, that the logic of elementary propositions (what are the ethics of prejudice) fails to get a foothold. It doesn't require a response, since it is not a criticism or provocation of SJ, just a personal anecdote he might reflect on. My apologies if those two remarks looked disruptive.So, that's it.Nishidani (talk) 21:46, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
A daimen icker in a thrave
(I'm assuming your devious poetic mind can understand twig the heading... Apologies if not.)
Could I trouble you to translate some Italian text I quoted on List of honorary degrees awarded to Noam Chomsky (note d), please? You can post it here, and I will look after the formatting, etc.
When I started to learn Spanish, at night school many years ago, I took a decision to avoid Italian, because of the risk of mixing the two up. (Our night school teacher was fluent in both). My sole experience of Italy and Italian is limited to a long-distance bike ride from England to Venice. It was a large group of cyclists, and most of the social interaction was within the group, not with the locals (basically limited to shop assistants, waiters/waitresses, and similar). Not much chance of picking up any Italian. Easy enough to get the gist of newspapers/magazines (from Spanish), but spoken Italian was incomprehensible. Was surprised how extensive the German-speaking area in the north was. Friendly, helpful people, beautiful scenery, esp in the Lakes/Dolomites. But from a cyclist's POV they're the worst drivers in Europe! Driving up the arse of the car in front, overtaking before blind corners, blind tops of hills. Yikes! No respect for cyclists (big contrast with the French).
Anyway, thanks in advance for your help, hope you're well. --NSH001 (talk) 23:06, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
- No problem, N. Just a bit busy today, as my wife needs a special bed rigged up, for when she gets back from hospital today. Just send me the direct link to the Italian text(s) you need English. I'll try to do it within the next few days. Hope you get some holiday time off in the sun, and by the sea. Best Nishidani (talk) 10:50, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
- Your priority is your wife and family, Nishi, not Wikipedia. Looks like you're doing the right thing, and your wife is in good hands. You're probably right about my needing to get some more sun, but I'm allergic to beach holidays - I grew up by the sea, where we had lots of beautiful sandy beaches. We'd get hoardes of uncles, aunts and cousins staying with us for a cheap holiday in August/September, and if the weather was good we'd all walk down to the beach, or sometimes drive to a beach a bit further away, and just laze in the sun. Used to drive me nuts with boredom, esp as I couldn't (and still can't) swim.Here's the Italian text (it's not very long, hence the heading above):
- "Il 16 aprile 2004 Noam Chomsky ha ricevuto la Laurea honoris causa in Lettere dall'Ateneo fiorentino, 'quale riconoscimento allo studioso eminente nel campo delle scienze del linguaggio e delle capacità cognitive e all'intellettuale da sempre impegnato in difesa della libertà di pensiero'. Il 1º aprile 2005 ha ricevuto la Laurea honoris causa in Psicologia dall'Università di Bologna.Il 17 settembre 2012 Noam Chomsky ha ricevuto un PhD honoris causa in Neuroscienze conferitogli dalla Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati di Trieste."
- Thanks again, and give my best wishes to your wife. --NSH001 (talk) 07:32, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Neil.
On the 16 April 2004, the University of Florence conferred an honorary Arts degree on Noam Chomsky, 'in recognition of his eminence as a scholar in the field of linguistics and cognitive science, and as a public intellectual who has never ceased to engage in the defense of freedom of thought.' On 1 April 2005, he received an honorary degree in Psychology from Bologna University.
On 17 September 2012 he was awarded an honortary Phd in neurosciences from Trieste's International School for Advanced Studies ."
- If you can do distance running, swimming's a piece of cake, as I found out at 4 years of age when I was thrown into a pool, had my fingers stamped on when I tried to get out, and was told I had to make it doggy paddling to the other side. It helped that I drank half the pool while flailing to that destination. I then had my fingers stamped on again and was told to go back where I started from: I did, and was yanked out. Never put the wind up me. I once dove off a yacht in Bass Strait, a hundred miles from the coast while doing the backleg of the Sydney to Hobart. That's the only time I've felt just a tad uneasy, if only because the crew hoisted a spinnaker, and the yacht veered off with all laughing and waving goodbye. Ah, youth!Nishidani (talk) 12:08, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks Neil.
- Your priority is your wife and family, Nishi, not Wikipedia. Looks like you're doing the right thing, and your wife is in good hands. You're probably right about my needing to get some more sun, but I'm allergic to beach holidays - I grew up by the sea, where we had lots of beautiful sandy beaches. We'd get hoardes of uncles, aunts and cousins staying with us for a cheap holiday in August/September, and if the weather was good we'd all walk down to the beach, or sometimes drive to a beach a bit further away, and just laze in the sun. Used to drive me nuts with boredom, esp as I couldn't (and still can't) swim.Here's the Italian text (it's not very long, hence the heading above):
Interesting times, we live in
You might be interested to see this thread .... ∯WBGconverse 18:02, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
re this...
I have moved my interjection so you may wish to reformat your comments for better comprehension. LessHeard vanU (talk) 19:55, 11 August 2019 (UTC)
- I should have put it further up, but fatigue wins out, and I don't think the correspondent will see what I mean anyhow. It's not important. Social engineering has an interesting history, but this one has all the features one would expect were you to ask someone with zero social skills, and bad grades for lego block building in primary school, to take on the task of writing a blueprint for society.Nishidani (talk) 20:04, 11 August 2019 (UTC)
iw and vm
Given the previously stated support for replacing the section entirely, Id hazard the current change of heart is more a player vs player situation revolving around this than anything else. nableezy - 17:35, 12 August 2019 (UTC)