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Help!

Can someone fix this at Jewish Israeli stone throwing? I can't seem to follow the directions to get my edit request posted on that page. The text is

I request that 'Gaza Strip' be restored to the lead. Its removal was unaccountable for two reasons. The article covers all areas of Jewish/Israeli stone throwing in this area, and it is well documented for the Gaza Strip during the time of the 19 settlements there. I have provided a short list of sources which confirm the obvious. As it now stands, the article is suggesting the Gaza Strip, uniquely, is extraterritorial to the topic. Thank you.Nishidani (talk) 18:06, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Please re-edit back in: 'Gaza Strip'

References

-

Looking into it. El_C 18:43, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process

Hello!

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Kbrown (WMF). I'm sorry, I don't do surveys. but the brief answer is (a) I knew consultation was asked for (b) didn't participate because (a) the Fram discussion showed there was, and is, an abundance of admins and editors with a precise grasp of policy and proposals implications for editorial practice far beyond what I might aspire to, and I think they are the people to make inquiries from. And secondly, my focus here is on content creation: I try to avoid anything that distracts from this aim, such as the wider issues of wikiculture. Frankly, also, I admit to a certain reserve about the analytical quality, vitiated by an efficient formalism, that was coming from the office in its various responses to comments on the Fram process. Onwiki discussions, however at times unwieldly in their verbally philoprogenitive longueurs, have been in my view far more incisive, trenchant. A survey will never supply one with a grid of reasoned argument, philosophically, sociologically, anthropologically and in terms of rational work practices tested in the operative field, of the kind one gets on Wikipedia pages themselves, optimally. That said, as a beneficiary of the office's close attention to abuses of editors, I appreciate any effort you all make to thrash out these issues. Regards Nishidani (talk) 11:02, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

You've got mail

Hello, Nishidani. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template. Bishonen | talk 14:33, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

edit war

Means reverting users more then once with a break between edits, I made one series of reverts, and thus that is not an edit war (read wp:editwar).Slatersteven (talk) 17:17, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Please stay off this page.Nishidani (talk) 17:35, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Happy Christmas.

Happy Christmas. Nishidani (talk) 18:13, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

	Merry Christmas Nishidani
	Hi Nishidani, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous New Year, Thanks for all your contributions to the 'pedia this past year,    –Davey2010talk 00:51, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Aboriginal group names

Hi Nishidani. As you seem to have been one of the main editors in this area and I am not au fait with all of these groups and the best sources, would you mind having a look at a couple of recent changes to List of Australian Aboriginal group names, if you haven't already been alerted? According to the Amangu article, that one does indeed belongs in the Yamatji group - but there it gets complicated because of the direction to the Wudjari (spelt Watjarri on the Yamatji page), but Wudjari do belong to Noongar according to wp, but not according to the recent IP editor. (If you don't want to attend to this, I will post it on the Australia project page and see if someone else wants to pick it up. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 03:10, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your work here. Naming is a mess in this area with authorities themselves disputing, and historic names for specific groups cancelled by new names for larger groups whose descendants come from varied backgrounds, and develop new collective identifiers. The names I provided were those ascertainable from ethnographers active down to the early 1970s, and approximate to historic distinctions that are not now carried over. I'll look into the examples you cite, but can't guarantee anything quickly, having a lot of offline issues to deal with. Regards. Nishidani (talk) 18:18, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

French needed

If you have the time, would you care to look at Tarrama, and translate the Guerin quote?

Translate.google gives: "we reach the top of a hill which rises as in successive steps and whose land is supported by several supporting walls. A last surrounding wall, which has been demolished, but whose traces are recognizable, once surrounded the upper platform, where are scattered clusters of large disjointed blocks, having belonged to a fairly powerful construction, almost entirely destroyed, which appears to have had a military destination. We also notice several caves practiced in the rock, one, among others, whose walls are pierced internally with a crowd of small niches similar to pigeon holes. These ruins are designated to me by the name of Khirbet Terrama" ...I would have liked to put that just after the quote, alas I don't trust that translation enough.

Also: Happy New Year! May 2020 be without the normal tsunami of socks (alas, somehow I doubt it...), cheers, Huldra (talk) 21:42, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

PS: ....and same for Al-Majd, Hebron, Huldra (talk) 22:40, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Your comments at Talk:Trump peace plan

Note that your comment about user:Icewhiz at Talk:Trump peace plan is a violation of WP:CONDUCTTOBANNED. From that page: Personal attacks, outing and other behaviours remain unacceptable even if directed towards a banned editor. Calling a banned editor a "POV warrior" on a talk page is beyond the pale and unnecessary. It's also the same kind of conduct that you acknowledge got you banned from filing at WP:AE. I suggest that you redact this comment immediately, or I may ask an administrator to do so at WP:ANI. I hope that's not necessary here. Thanks. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 15:34, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

lol. nableezy - 17:55, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 00:54, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

• Um, Nishidani? Not a good look. I get that you're still sore, but this doesn't help your reputation any. I closed the ANI thread in the hope that you'll think better of it all when you've had a bit of time to consider. Guy (help!) 08:41, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

I think I took to heart Arthur Koestler's advice about the dangers of subscribing to the Society for Kicking Dead Horses several decades ago, and the only soreness that afflicts me are the strains and twinges of physical ageing. I presume 'grave-dancing' is wikispeak for Schadenfreude, a rather nice domestication of foreign idiom, but we already have 'malicious joy', the way we rendered the theological sin of delectatio morosa, a Christian reworking of malevolentia, a term that is less accurate, as is usual, than the classical Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία (epikhairekakía), alluded to by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics. My sentiments are with Greek usage - triumphalism over the dead or departed, inimical to a civil world as they might have been, apart from an invitation to the exactions of nemesis, is despicable.

I don't think I have any reputation to defend, other than being an 'erudite blowhard' with a somewhat tedious obsession with the correct use of language, and a respect for the rules, violations of which I cannot complain of at AE. I rarely did. I think I hold the record as the least plaintive editor there regarding the I/P conflict over 15 years.

For the record, the ANI whingeing takes exception to a number of factual remarks I made, which had absolutely nothing to do with personal attacks. I stand by them, since they refer to what is on record here, and known off record by competent authorities. The problem is not such piddling trivia, but the fact that editors spend more time complaining of other editors than in carefully assessing the merits of evidence and respecting the rules of compliance governing our encyclopedic undertakings. Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Nish, I think over those 15 years you should have learned something. That there are people here who a. cannot abide allowing what you so meticulously document with the highest quality sources to stand on Wikipedia, and b. have no policy compliant reason to remove it. So they have, and will continue to, gone with the only option they can to stop those facts and sources from being included, that being to report you for whatever it is they think will get you blocked and/or banned. So while yes, I agree there is nothing factually wrong with what you wrote, and that you were remarking on your own ban not really the verboten ones, you would still be wise to maybe no longer bring up that username again in the future. If and when we see the same face with a new name then SPI can be the place where he is mentioned. Besides that, it just gives the people who have no argument a chance at their objective. nableezy - 18:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Nishidani, The fact that you see nothing wrong with calling another editor an ethnonational extremist and continuing to attack them on unrelated tangents shows a remarkable lack of self awareness on your part. Clearly the admins who have reviewed this, JzG and Drmies, acknowledge a problem, even if they don't want to escalate it to something more serious. Unfortunately, your above post conveys that you don't. If you keep hitting below the belt per WP:NPA and making comments in the same vein I will file another report documenting this pattern of behavior. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 18:29, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

WP:NPA: "Do not make personal attacks anywhere on Wikipedia." The policy applies anywhere on Wikipedia, including on Nishidani's user talkpage. What is a personal attack? They include, "accusations about personal behavior that lack evidence". At the top of this section, you accused Nishidani of "calling a banned editor a 'POV warrior' on a talk page." Nishidani did not actually do what you are accusing him of. Rather than calling Icewhiz a POV warrior, Nishidani actually made a statement about himself, saying that he was banned from AE for calling Icewhiz a POV warrior there. You accused Nishidani of gravedancing (the subject of this essay), which fundamentally means making "personal attacks against them in discussions about the blocked/retired user". It would have been wiser if Nishidani had not referred to Icewhiz by name, but otherwise what he wrote is a pretty straightforward (mild, even) description of what happened. As such, it does not fit any of the criteria for what a personal attack is. Therefore, Nishidani was not, as you claimed, gravedancing. In your previous comment, you say that Nishidani was "continuing to attack them [Icewhiz] on unrelated tangents," a personal comment which you shouldn't have made without strong evidence backing it up. You say that Nishidani shows "a remarkable lack of self awareness," a strong personal comment. Also, you state, "you see nothing wrong with calling another editor an ethnonational extremist." It's not clear whether your objection is to the description, epressing it, or both, but I feel sure that Nishidani thought it was accurate and, no doubt, there would be editors who would agree. The error that Nishidani made was in believing that the licence for making personal comments on the AE and AI noticeboards is broader than it actually is (which was actually, not too different to your apparent belief about what you are allowed to say on this talkpage). 'Etremism' is in the eye of the beholder and I'm sure that Icewhiz could have mounted a sturdy defence against the accusation. However, I think that it would have been interesting to see Icewhiz stating that he is not an 'ethnonationalist'.     ←   ZScarpia   02:36, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

And also, dear friend, please see WP:BLANKING. You are perfectly entitled to remove anything you like from your talk page if you feel it unworthy of being here. nableezy - 21:37, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Given that Nishidani was sanctioned for, effectively, making a personal attack on an admin noticeboard, I'd be interested to see what happened if Wikieditor19920 was reported for doing the same on this talkpage. @JzG:: Guy, perhaps you'd like to comment on whether the remarks made here were acceptable.     ←   ZScarpia   14:47, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Not worth rehoeing, I think, and admins have a hard work load without having to tussle with textual archaeology on a talk page. I'd question though whether I 'effectively made a personal attack' in that case. If memory serves me correctly, I documented a certain attitude and drew an inference, and, as was noted at the time, policy allows one to set forth one's views on how another editor behaves if one takes the trouble to provide evidence through diffs that ground those inferences. That is how ANI/AE works. The admin in question didn't accept this, but thought a scroll through my log indicated I was a chronic case of engaging in disruptive ratbaggery. And, as always, the proper thing is to take the sanction on the chin and not whinge. But this is all down the Wikipedia memory hole, and it's time for a midnight stroll.Nishidani (talk) 22:39, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

• My 2 cents: I think the admins here are aware that Icewhiz is still very much involved with harassment and (attempted) outing of various wp-editors, myself included. As late as this year, 2020, (months after he was banned from wp) Icewhiz have stated things about me (off-wp) which he would never, ever have dared to state here (as I would have brought him straight to AE...I am certainly not banned from posting there.) (I will not link to it, but can email admin links if they want it.)
• It is rather frustrating only having to "take punches" (all "below the belt"), without ever being able to defend yourself. Nishidani has been accused of "grave-dancing": the problem is that this "wiki-corpse" is very much alive....on other internet-sites than Wikipedia.
• As for my opinion about Icewhiz and his "mates", that can easily be summed up: "#$%&/(%$#!"#$%&=)(/&%$#"#!!!!!!!!, Huldra (talk) 23:36, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

I often think words tend to have more depth and personality than the people who use them. Calling people like David Dean Shulman and Zeev Sternhell - the former , a Gandhian exponent on non-violence who is often stoned, beaten and arrested for protecting Palestinian goatherds, the latter injured by a pipe bomb for espousing liberal views- voices on the fringes of the Israeli radical left, has only one meaning logically, the one I gave regarding the person who expressed that judgement.

I know that in the scattershot blahblahing of contemporary discourse, words themselves mean nothing, it’s simply the throw-weight of innuendo or contempt they may evoke which counts. But if one calls people of profound liberal persuasion exponents of a fringe so extreme that it lies further left than even the positions characteristic of far-left politics, this can only mean that the person espousing that view thinks, in this case, that a liberal view of human rights is tantamount to subversion. If someone brands John Stuart Mill a far-left exponent of fringe leftist politics, the description tells us nothing of Mill: it does imply strongly that the values of the person espousing that caricature are so extreme that they cannot distinguish civil decency from outrageous delinquency. Those unfortunate enough to have some sensitivity to the world about them are of course only exhibiting ‘a remarkable lack of self awareness on (their) part,’ a lack of self-awareness more troubling than what we find when editors go ballistic about NPA even while, in their diatribe, resorting to insults and insinuations about their target’s lack of cognitive consonance.

I'm sure we all have better things to do. I have a motherlode of pruned branches to clip into next winter's kindling.Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Assange

Came across this from Stefania Maurizi (she probably deserves an article. BTW):

"Per me, è veramente choccante vedere come hanno ridotto Julian #Assange: negli ultimi 10anni ho lavorato con lui per il mio giornale incontrandolo molto spesso, so decifrare il suo volto, i suoi gesti: è una tragedia, una vergogna come l’hanno ridotto"

--NSH001 (talk) 12:24, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks N. I really don't know what one can do there, except add one more note to one's file on extraordinarily violent things that happen in our midst, and which almost no one, certainly not the majority of 'reputable' speaking heads, notice or deem worthy of, at a minimum, massive civic outrage.

(first time I have seen scioccante' written 'choccante', which sounds ugly in Italian, apart from requiring the native reader to pronounce it as 'coccante', even while thinking of chocolate)Nishidani (talk) 14:17, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't spot that solecism at all, effect of Spanish, I suppose. --NSH001 (talk) 15:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

My revert was done by mistake.My apologies --Shrike (talk) 14:40, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Apology appreciated, Shrike. --NSH001 (talk) 15:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Nishidani, I'm aware that Maurizi is published in Italian media. If you come across any useful articles by her or anyone else in the Italian media, feel free to mention them on my talk page, and I'll probably add them to my Assange bibliography. --NSH001 (talk) 15:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

permit regime opacity

I was looking back at some things and see we never got around to adding material on the structural opacity of the regime. You still interested? nableezy - 19:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

One way to wake up on a Sunday morning:

The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra stages a virtual performance of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' from their homes (Hat tip: Tania Mathias)

Hope you're well.

--NSH001 (talk) 08:39, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Neil. I hope someone organizes a sing-in of The Internationale to the same end, a thought inspired by the arrival of a squad of Albanian doctors, following a Russian army unit specializing in infections, a Chinese contingent, and a Cuban group of 52 doctors here in Italy. It has always struck me that the persistent American endeavours by trade sanctions to shutdown Cuba and make it collapse - eerily similar to Israel's efforts in Gaza - are tragically ironic given that the US has the most expensive and least efficient healthcare system in the developed world, and, were it not so morbidly ideological, could cope better than it will with the ongoing disaster if it abolished its strangulation strategies and asked Cuba for assistance (of course, there would be an ulterior political motive in doing so - if Cuban doctors could go to the US, large numbers might be incentivized - since this is also a US programme - to never return to Cuba, and therefore allow the US to recruit cost-free (in terms of training) large numbers of medicos while creating a vacuum for medical personnel in Cuba through drainage, thus achieving the long hoped for collapse of the system's brightest achievement).

Since you're English, black humour is acceptable, I hope. As I read reports, I can't help thinking of the 34 sonnet sequence written by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli when a colera epidemic struck Rome in 1935, exploring the rich brogue and gossipy superstitions of the illiterate to chronicle popular reactions. One in particular on the eve of the outbreak assumes the voice of an undertaker, and their perspective. Since it's pure dialect, it can only be translated into a comparable dialect, with the same conventions, phonetic respect for actual pronunciation etc. This renders them unreadable to most literate eyes, unless you've been raised within a dialect, and are at home with how people actually speak, rather than how literature would prefer them to. Best wishes and keep safe.

1109 Li bbeccamorti

E cc'affari vòi fà? ggnisuno more:
Sto po' d'aria cattiva è ggià ffinita:
Tutti attaccati a sta mazzata vita....
Oh vva' a ffà er beccamorto con amore!

Povera cortra mia! sta llì ammuffita.
E ssi vva de sto passo, e cqua er Ziggnore
Nun allùmina un po' cquarche ddottore,
La profession der beccamorto è ita.

L'annata bbona fu in ner disciassette.
Allora sì, in sta piazza, era un ber vive
Ché li morti fioccaveno a ccarrette.

Bbasta...; chi ssa! Mmatteo disse jjerzera
C'un beccamorto amico suo je scrive
Che cc'è cquarche speranza in sto collèra. 18/3/1834

1109 Undatakers
Uh, bizness? Nowun’s dyen: gone oudda fashen.
This dash a malarial air’s just past, n’ ev’rywun strives
Ta kick on, they’re all ded keen on their bluddy lives . .
Strewth, its hard wirken as an undataker with a pashen!

Me pall’s in an appallen state! Look at the mold.
If things keep up at this rate, an the good Lord
Dudn’ enlie’en them quacks, we’ll all go overbord
An the prafeshen uv an undataker’s bound’a fold.

17, that wuz a good year. Them were the days!.
Ya cud make a fine liven on the market cos the ded
Were flutt’ren down like snowflakes an fillen drays.

Stuff it! . .; who knows! Yestadi, I was told by Jack
Ut a mate uv 'is in the trade’ud ritten an sed
Things wa shapen up, now ’ut this colera’s back. 11/12/2000

enlie'en = Enlighten, (the intermediate 't' (like all final t sounds in male talk in traditional Australian dialect, is not pronounced, with a pun on 'lie'.Nishidani (talk) 15:41, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

One more reason to be proud of wikipedia

See here Nishidani (talk) 17:45, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Haaretz is the only newspaper I know of which seems to have a Wikipedia correspondent. If my memory is correct, this is Omer Benjakob's WP user page. An interesting situation: being able to cite one of your own newspaper articles to update Wikipedia.     ←   ZScarpia   13:29, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Could technically be a conflict of interest, but since the identity is declared, and, judging by the edit link, the detail uncontroversial, I wouldn't worry about it. Hope all's well over there. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

When I commented, at the back of my mind I realised that what I wrote might be read as 'dark hints', but I hoped it wouldn't be. Real-life-wise, I'm doing fine. My biggest worry is trying to foil my elderly mother's death-wish attempts to escape self-isolation. How are you? What's the situation in your part of Italy? Are you allowed outside to do gardening?     ←   ZScarpia   10:47, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

I've a similar problem - caring for a relative with Lewy body dementia. In Lazio, there are 5,500 cases with 322 deaths. It's convenient that there's a Covid centre a few hundred yards away, though waiting six months to fix a toothache is a minor annoyance, considering the general grief. I've always lived in relative isolation so that's no problem. Whether I'm allowed or not, I spend a good part of my day in 4 gardens (at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to tighten the tension on a Makita chain saw, when not tinkering with a broken float in my underground cistern). It looks like we're a month ahead of the usual seasonal cycle, heatwise, so I've planted early, several varieties of tomato - doesn't matter if I might not be around to eat them, a grandnephew is crazy about them, and thinks they're better than lollies. Conceptually, it would be nice to live a bit more - given the huge systemic fuck-up, which will mean we're in for a revolutionary decade for once. Probably by historical precedent, not cause for optimism, but, for once, science is trumping political chumpery. On the other hand, we are now Eskimos, who kill their aged, just as many areas, not in Italy, are denying care for the disabled. In Italy the worst hit are professional thieves and cadgers - you just can't move round to case houses and plunder them. On the other hand, illegals might now have a chance to get papers since they are the backbone of the agricultural industry, and need incentives to get back to work - it's hardly worth dying for 2 euros an hour of backbreaking work under a broiling sun.Nishidani (talk) 12:43, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

Tightening the tension on a Makita chainsaw is something I have done. While I still have that dangerous and hard-to-start device, I prefer the battery operated units that became available in the last few years. They are less powerful but that means it takes 10 seconds for a cut rather than 3. Their principal benefit and curse is that they only need a light touch on the trigger (and safety) to start grinding fingers or anything else nearby, and you really must take the battery out before mucking about with them. Johnuniq (talk) 23:41, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

I was a bit loath to start making suggestions about how to tighten the chain in case I found that, in the course of an eventful life, you'd done a stint as a lumberjack in British Columbia, or some such, so that I was being a bit patronising. Also, I'm sure that you're more than capable of using Google without being given tips. Makita has a site where you can download manuals using the model number here. Perhaps a reason why you were scratching your head is because you actually have a model with an automatic tensioner?

I'm glad that that you've been able to go out into the gardens and sun yourself a bit.

Here, there have been reports of burglaries on the homes of medical staff. They're the people that the thieves know aren't going to be home pretty much constantly.

Yesterday I went to a car and bike spares place to buy new pedals, the first non-food shopping I've done since the beginning of our lockdown. Finding how much things have changed came as a bit of a shock. Shoppers were allowed in one at a time, where they stood at a barrier just inside the main door and about two metres from a counter, which was behind a perspex screen. An assistant went off to find what you were after, then held it up behind the screen for you to say whether you actually wanted to buy it or not. The last time I can remember shopping in a place where you didn't just browse the shelves for what you wanted must have been over ten years ago.

A lot of the symptoms of LBD sound similar to my mother's. We took her to a series of consultants, but don't have a definite diagnosis. She deteriorated very quickly and it's still getting worse.

    ←   ZScarpia   04:04, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

It's tough on carers, very tough. All solutions are provisory but I've found or worked out several that seem to allow moments, even half an hour at a time, of brightness. It depends on those elements of childhood that can return as hallucinations or mannerisms. Spot them, or those that seem to occasion an easing of depressive hallucinations, and work them into a ritual: I use lollies, a feint at dancing together, mentioning a special biscuit type or lemonade bought exclusively for her (the idea of a present/surprise), and learning to interleaven, in her case, the ceaseless Joycean babble of disjointed phrases with words, exclamations and phrases that give the victim of dementia a sense that their fleeting inner world of images is understood. Every patient will have something there in their residual identity associated with joy, and if one can find pockets of such feelings, one can play along with them- At day's end, a few hours won from the stark disorientation and grief that afflicts sufferers, makes the world a little more bearable. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 12:47, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Re this

Apropos these remarks on User:Debresser’s talk page

• Nishidani is indeed a disruptive editor
• tendentious insistence of a clique of editors
• that is Nishidani making his usual personal attacks and putting down people to squash all resistance to his opinions
• a scholarly point of view, however I have noticed that that point of view invariably coincides with your POV and in addition, that you convey your posiiton in talkpage conversations by using a very unpleasant tone of superiority, including explicitly stressing other editors' inferiority.

All these are personal attacks, and you've been repeatedly warned not to engage in them. So drop it. It is provocative, as is your invitation to me to report you to some forum. I assume that means you want me to provide you and the other editor on that page with an opportunity to rehearse the long stale list of complaints, mostly turned down, about me being an abusive editor. The situation you are describing as my 'bad attitude' refers to a curt dismissal of a disruptive editor who is almost certainly a sock or a sock's meatpuppet. Everyone else there knows this. I'm bad, yeah: bad at being inept. Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Read. Debresser (talk) 15:44, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Three years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:47, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Cleaning up human waste in Gaza

e.g.Nishidani (talk) 16:45, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for posting Nishidani. This is disturbing and depressing. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:04, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Israeli help in preparing for the corona virus in the West Bank

here.Nishidani (talk) 18:48, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for posting Nishidani. This is yet more disturbing and depressing behavior by the Israeli government. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:05, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, disturbing. I, too, thank you for helping to keep us informed, Nishidani. El_C 17:08, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Barnstar for you !

		The Special Barnstar
		For helping editors like me who are not good at English, and whose writing skill is poor. Thank you very much for all your help. Gazal world (talk) 18:50, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

That's very decent of you, pal. But it is partially false. Your English is very good. And a further consideration: as a notorious blowhard, requests from others to help in the art of the précis actually help to save me from my vice, since they spur me to rein in my congenital longwindedness. So your occasional requests for assistance are really incentives for stylistic self-correction, and most welcome. Keep up your great work in expanding wiki coverage of Indian regional linguistic cultures, it is a powerful corrective to our occidental ignorance and biases (and you deserve a barnstar, actually in context a bahnstar (भण्) for that).Nishidani (talk) 09:01, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Nishidani, an barnstar from such an accomplished editor as Gazal world is indeed a most worthwhile acknowledgement. El_C 17:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Expropriation, immersion, purification, erasure: on Israel's frenzy of springs

A long investigative report. Warm regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 01:12, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

Deeply appreciated note from a long-missed voice. Hope the pups are thriving, even if they are no longer dogteenagers. Coincidence, I was thinking about Ein Hanya the other day while doing this edit, having also read this piece a week or so ago. Further proof of the thesis that Israel's occupational practices spell the death of a core component of Jewishness, as we have come to understand it admiringly over the few centuries. Nishidani (talk) 14:32, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

Do you even read Hebrew?--Bolter21 (talk to me) 11:14, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani, I have invested a great deal of time in 2016-17 studying the many different types of the highly detrimental impact of the intersection/ interaction/ re-enforcing feedback loop (a process of adding fuel to the fire) between capitalism and Human overpopulation. In 2018-19 I have shifted to studying the many different scientific issues at the basis of Antinatalism, including e.g. the process of evolution by natural selection. I am basically spending almost all my non-working hours learning a lot more about antinatalism, by reading books and websites, and by viewing and reflecting upon posts on various social media, especially YouTube, Twitter and Reddit philosophical essays posted by thoughtful and insightful thinking people. The pups and I send our love to you. Ijon Tichy (talk) 16:09, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

G'day. Retrospectively, the irony of existing consists in being born without having been given any opportunity to have a say in the process. There's something piquant, too, in the idea that we are a statistically marginal byblow of the pursuit of anatalist pleasure - of several thousand orgasms in an average life, a couple occasion entities capable of consciousness, which then have to cope with the (mis)fortune. The polyphiloprogenitiveness of 'primitive' societies functions to provide parents with a pension, offspring, some of whom will survive the attrition of disease and hazard and whose affective liens will ensure support for parents when they themselves are no longer capable of hunting and foraging. It's a 'seminal' investment, in that perspective. There are many reasons for parenthood, none of them 'rational', but then love itself, without which there would be no civilized life, is not rational, but then again neither is 'civilisation'. Nishidani (talk) 09:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, only yesterday that estimable Aussie lady, Caitlin, released this short reflection: How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human beginning, "We all showed up naked, slimy and clueless in a world of inexplicable sensory input we couldn’t make head or tail out of. We were then taught what’s what by people who showed up under the exact same circumstances a blink of an eye earlier." --NSH001 (talk) 11:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

NSH001, thanks for the link. Caitlin's essay is thoughtful and insightful. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Nishidani, agree that life is an imposition. In my view imposing life is highly unethical, as it involves enormous risk to the recipient of that so-called 'gift.' Being given life is more of a curse than a gift in my view, as the various pains, discomforts, needs, deprivations and suffering most people experience in their lifetimes, are much more impactful, powerful and important than the experiences of pleasure that most people experience in their lives (and many people on the planet live lives that offer them almost no pleasure). And besides, the vast majority, if not all, of the so-called 'pleasures' we may experience in our lives are just a form of a relief/ easing/ reduction/ amelioration/ partial alleviation of some (minor, moderate or major) pain, discomfort, need, deprivation or suffering. These needs/ deprivations/ pains should not have existed in the first place, they would not have existed if we were not brought into existence (without our consent) in the first place. There is no need to create the need, i.e., there is no need to bring life into existence that did not exist before.

If one wants to be a parent, one can try to adopt an already-existing child (whom was born without his/her consent), given that there are millions of children globally that need to be adopted (about 500,000 in the USA), or to adopt pets (again, born without their consent), given that animal shelters globally are packed with dogs, cats etc, many of whom are routinely euthanized for lack of adoptive humans. Nishidani, both you and I are childfree, if I recall correctly you adopted animal(s)? As you know I adopted two small dogs (that were abandoned in the street near my home) that I love. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:34, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

I was asked some years ago by a sociologist of happiness what was the single happiest moment in my life. Though retrospectively I had numerous instances to cite, I told him the following. I'd worked several hours, eyes to the ground, sod-busting and sieving handful by handful the upturned soil to rid it of seeded weeds like couch grass, and ready it for planting tomatoes. As dusk flared, I finished the last flick of the spade, and sifting of the soil, packed my tools in a corner and went over to close the gate of that particular hortus conclusus. Doing so, I looked up,turning round to face the sun that had warmed my sweat for some hours and caught sight of the sun's iridescent panorama of symphonic colour on a distant hill, and, well, burst into tears. Tears of joy. And the immediate thought accompanying this was:'I'm just a coagulation of water and matter, the molecular work of billions of years of physical laws, and, like my species, nature has endowed me with consciousness, a form of consciousness that allows, though individuals like myself, nature to assume self-awareness and see the stupendous beauty of the world, the universe. This extraordinary privilege has been accorded me, as a member of the species, for several decades, and death cannot cancel it. Indeed, death is robbed of its meaninglessness and its menace if, in the interim, we can see things like this, which 99.999999999 of the universe's matter can never achieve the complexity to enjoy.' Something like that. So, I disagree. The basic value one must cling to in life is gratitude for its gift. The pain comes from its denial to billions, who are born with exactly that capacity that rewarded me that day. A desire for justice is not just grievance: it can rise out of a very simple sense that one's given capacity for a sensual pleasure in just being is harassed out of existence by the arbitrary circumstances that impose misery on billions of less fortunate others.Nishidani (talk) 18:41, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

As for childlessness, I never felt the need. I had the extraordinary good fortune to be married to a miracle of a woman for 38 years. I sang, at her request, psalm 23 in Hebrew at her funeral, which was attended by several hundred people. Mischievous to the last, she had managed to get her pagan lifecompanion to do something religious in the end.Nishidani (talk) 18:48, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Lego for you

Skagen painting in Lego for you!

You have been awarded this Lego artwork in recognition of this fine edit summary. Bishonen | tålk 20:50, 3 May 2020 (UTC).

Blast from the past

It was embarasing seeing Khazars listed on my long-forgotten ETVP examples subpage, given the poor state of the citations there. Anyway, you might wish to cast your ancient eyes over it. The cites are now much better, and I fixed a bunch of cite errors, but there are still a dozen or so left, which you might be able to help fix. BTW, some of the very clever wiki-geeks have introduced some new harv/sfn error messages and error categories, according to which what you and I have been calling "cite errors" are now "no target" errors, a better term in my view, so I propose to use that instead from now on.

The article has been heavily edited since you last looked at it, another reason for drawing it to your attention.

Best wishes, and take care, NSH001 (talk) 11:23, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

Busy now, just one consultation cost me 3.5 hrs, damn it, and must finish the Wadi Qana article. But thanks for fixing the errors and redmarking things to check out. I can't see any material change to the content of substance, so it's just a matter of house-keeping, and I'll get round to it (when I've washed the floor under my desk!). You too, keep safe.Nishidani (talk) 15:36, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

No rush on Khazars. A couple of points on Wadi Qana:

1. I fixed the no-target errors you created on ARIJ|2013, using the standard date disambiguation technique. But another approach you might consider, and which I recommend, is to use something like ARIJ: Deir Istiya|2013 for the "a" version and ARIJ: Immatin|2013 for the "b" version. This is more meaningful for our readers, and is also "safer" for my script to handle. You can see this technique being used, for example, on Indigenous Australians – if there is no year involved, it's pretty much the only way of doing it. (This time I took the quick and easy method, to reduce the risk of treading on someone's toes with an edit conflict.)
2. The biblio is sorted alphabetically on the title if there is no author and no editor, for the simple reason that the title is what is displayed first by the CS!/2 templates in the absence of any author or editor. Trying to sort on anything else would be arbitrary, and not clear to our readers. One possibility might be to get the Lua module that processes the cite templates to allow a new parameter that specifies which field is displayed first, but that would need to be properly thought through and discussed, and it may not be possible to get consensus to do it. In any case, it would be a major effort.

--NSH001 (talk) 08:05, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Okay chief, I'll try to remember and comply, and will adjust at Wadi Qana. I must admit to a sense of complacency, i.e. just throwing in harv/sfn knowing that, if I screw up, there's a lynx eyed cluey guardian angel looking over my shoulder. But that's unfair. I should pull my finger out.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Out of where? Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 01:05, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Unfamiliar with the idiom?, referring to what in unpolite circles is called a 'freckle' or, in an older jargon, one's 'acre'. On the walls of Pompei I'm sure some archaeologist will find in the future a graffito to the effect:oportuit evellere digitum e podice, though shorn of context that might sound offensive to others:)Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

I figured as much, though I thought I’d confirm. I chuckled while asking, I’ll admit. As far as ancient Roman graffiti goes, I can’t think of any current such examples that mirror that specifically, but the truth is generally stranger than fiction when it comes to ancient graffito. One of the more recent graduate students at my university recently finished their dissertation on graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it’s rather enlightening. Just the sheer extent of it, and the fact that people used it to leave messages to each other, in the manner of an e-mail, is fantastic. (Also, thanks for including a little Latin for a budding Latinist). Symmachus Auxiliarus (talk) 21:27, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

I hope the dissertation included my favorite graffito from that area:'futuitur cunnus pillosus multo melius quam glaber eadem continet vaporem et eadam vellit mentulam.' I first learnt about that when I read the anecdote by A. D. Hope about how he tried to attract the attention of Christopher Brennan an extraordinary philologist with a prodigious memory and promising poet until Downunder, drink and despair got the better of him and he lingered on, a fabulous untalkative toper, in Sydney. Hope visited one of his boozing haunts, waited until Brennan went to the dunny to relieve his bladder and, sidling up, whipped out his own marriage tackle to feign taking a leak and, meanwhile, scrawled the first part of that graffito on the toilet wall. Brennan, still 'siphoning the python', splashing the boots', 'shaking hands with the wife's best friend', or 'pointing Percy at the porcelain' etc., as Barry McKenzie might say, glanced at the first part, which Hope by the way got wrong, (futuitur cunnus pilosus multo melius quam glaber ), took Hope's pencil and completed the graffito flawlessly.

To master the classics compels even the prurient to add a large extra wing onto the memory mansion where all the rough bawdy can be stocked. As my classics maestro told us on the morning he eased the class into a discussion of farting and filth in Greek poetry, one just has to get a handle on the exuberant obscenity of classical cultures to get anywhere, and he reminded us (this was before the Aristophanes scholar Jeffrey Henderson came out with The Maculate Muse and Amy Richlin published The Gardens of Priapus) that the best work on classical obscenity to date was by a Dutch woman with a doctorate in theology.Nishidani (talk) 22:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Hmm

After all that work, I've just noticed that we also have a Book of Esther!

--NSH001 (talk) 19:14, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

We have 3 esther pages, one on the name, the second re the book, and this re the personage. This invites confusion. I'd conflate 2 and 3 ideally. There is an enormous amount of scholarship on The Book of Esther however, and there would be room for a person page, mainly literally analysis of the figure. I haven't raised the problem, because I just prefer content over technical arguments about merging or not. None of the pages is satisfactory, as usual, and for the moment it seems easier to handle the quiet Esther personage page. Thanks as always for your invaluable corrections.Nishidani (talk) 19:22, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Ah, please forgive my being stupid, I should have seen the hatnote at the top. My mind was preoccupied with other matters, but that's no excuse. Still can't believe I missed it. BTW, thanks for the amusement I gain from time to time while looking at your talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 04:53, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

May 2020

You seem to not understand WP:BRD. It means that if after you added some information it is removed by another editor, you are the one who should seek consensus for its addition on the talkpage.

In addition, it seems you are involved in an edit war. Please desist or risk being reported and drawing the shorter straw.

I am of course referring to Wadi Qana. Debresser (talk) 06:53, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

You seem not to understand that reverting, esp. someone with 14 years of wiki work, is not an arbitrary right. Any revert at this level requires policy compliance. You once wrote:

'I have little patience with editors who think they know better than me how things have to be done' Debresser (talk) 07:19, 14 December 2011

When you were sanctioned several days ago, you made an extenuating plead for a reduction of the terms of your penalty for edit-warring to the 3R limit Your week ban and here.

Since you asked me not to comment on your page, I refrained from doing what you do here. But it would appear that the whole episode recapitulated a characteristic attitude which has been on evidence since at least 2011, something admins won't have the time to check, let alone remember.

If I am blocked, I don't appeal on principle. If you are blocked, you haggle. And the pattern of demanding a reduction of the sanction is identical.

Your 9 year record consists of repeated problems with the following pattern:

• (a) violating a rule and then when sanctioned
• (b) pleading for a reduction of the sentence which, after an immense amount of haggling,(the gist of which is that admins don’t understand you: they keep trying to extort a realization from you that you were in fault) in which you keep replying that your intentions were right hence your refusal to admit to simply error you too were at fault, and the drift is
• (c)okay, pretty please, gimme a break
• (d) admins relent because it appears you might have,well, finally rephrased an admission you could have been more attentive, and undertake to mend your ways.

In our several board confrontations over the years, I have called this a WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT manner, an inability apparently to understand what other people tell you because you are dead certain you know what you think, and that is what people who disagree with you must understand.

What happened with admins in May 2020 was identical to what occurred throughout mid-late 2011. The lesson hasn't been learnt. To help you see this, examine the following:-

warned for uncollaborate editing (2011: here); (2011:2 blocked for 31 hours here,(2011 September 1 (3 blocked for 48 hours here; (2011 September 5 here; unblocked with reduced time.2011:3 here 27 October 2011 here; unblocked with bans by Gwen Gale.5 November 2011 here; blocked for 1 month here, and unblocked under appeal again time served one week.

In 9 years nothing has changed. I didn't add this from my notes to the May 2020 case because I have better things to do (like picking aphids off tomato plants when they resist prophylactic dosing of the tomatoes with copper sulphate), and don't consider it part of m,y wiki work to indulge in trivial pursuits of other editors. You more or less got off the last days of the rap by promising to be more careful with 3R and then jumped to use it against me, in a manner that shows lack of concentration, perhaps mental fatigue, because your 3 reverts were incomprehensible and visibly created page flaws, left uncorrected. So in the future, if you persist in breaking a rule or running it to its limits, only when caught to plead mitigating circumstances, someone will eventually notice that you have been doing this repeatedly for nine years, and your otherwise useful contributions to this encyclopedia will suffer severer sanctions than they have earned so far, because the original pattern, which can be amply documented further, will finally be brought to admins' attention.Nishidani (talk) 09:21, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

This is not the place to review my conduct. Nor do I agree with your view of it. This is where I posted regarding your conduct, which in this case is in violation of WP:BRD and WP:EDITWAR. Nuff said. Since you don't leave me a choice, I'll report you, and we'll see how other editors review your conduct. Debresser (talk) 13:03, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, be careful per WP:BoomerangNishidani (talk) 13:07, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Right off of of a block for edit-warring after reporting somebody you were edit-warring with you do it again lol? Wow, ballsy is right. nableezy - 17:40, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

I think the word of the day is chutzpah. Still, a bdesmic storm in a wildbill hiccup. My duckback is watered.Nishidani (talk) 18:21, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Shavuot

I don't know how you got to the Shavuot page and I don't care, but please don't bring hostility from the IP conflict to a different area. Templates are color coded and a holiday that is celebrated by 700 people should not change how millions celebrate it and remove the color coding. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 20:49, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

I've restored your insinuation that somehow I tracked you to indulge, I guess, in some obscure gusto (guasto?) in reverting your edits. Perhaps on posting, you realized that I almost certainly would have noticed your exchange with Nableezy on his talk page, one of course I have bookmarked. (Or perhaps you recalled that we have a mutual agreement not to post on each other's pages). That made me bookmark the page since it was, I gathered, one subject to IP pov pushing, something I control, like Nableezy. So there was no conspiracy. The rest of your remarks are not worth rebutting. You think one should not mention that Shavuot is not only a Jewish holiday, but also a Samaritan one, and sneer at the latter because their numbers, once near a a half to a full million in antiquity, now just 900 or so, small coin compared to the only people who count, the 16 million Jews. I find that contemptuous, a disturbing echo of a long line of rabbinical prejudice dating back to the Mishnah branding them as Cuthites as cowardly converts from the true faith or mere heretics. Nishidani (talk) 21:40, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

In any case, be a good fellow and don't post on this page. If you want to reply jot a note on your own page, which I haven't bookmarked and don't read.Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Aftermath. Just for the record, what followed, which has nothing to do with the editor above, was the usual dumb revert on another page I contributed to, dumb in the sense that the edit summary is nonsense betraying a total ignorance of the topic by asserting the Samaritan religion is a small, umm,... offshoot of Judaism!!!,hahaha, um wow!!, as youngsters exclaim. That looks like an adventurous desire to go public and declare one knows little of Judaism's history and even less of that of a kindred faith.

The Samaritan religion preceded the formation of what we now understand as Judaism, since the split occurred among the preceding Israelitic groups prior to both. The Samaritans were in all probability the major ethnic majority in Palestine during most of the latter half of the Ist millennium BCE. Yet, they are utterly invisible, despite the historiographic reality, because, um, uninformed editors think the only indigenous people there were Jews before the Romans are said to have exiled them. All our historical articles are distorted by this unilateral focus on one ethnos, and the suppression of the other, as occurred, typically, last night.

The informal ban on my trying to improve articles on Judaism, that suffer deeply from a superficial knowledge due to the apparent fixations of many who edit them, indifferent to what the scholarly record itself within that tradition documents. It happened with this edit a year ago, at Jewish religious clothing, for unknown, indecipherable non-policy reasons, and no amount of gentle persuasion of the editors approving the excision could restore the matter. Content dispute. Nah,WP:IDONTLIKEIT, and the scholarly record be stuffed. Worse still, the corrections added to clear errors were erased, allowing the errors to remain. But no: 'noli nostra tangere' is the rule there. Throwing cogently topic-relevant academic treatises out because you dislike their content, or so resolutely disinformed that such documentation disconcerts one’s self-complacent acquiescence in nescience, is tantamount to editorial book burning. But you can get away with it here.

The I/P area's toxicity can be summed up as follows: it has a conflictual continuity because two groups exist, those who desire the full factual and scholarly record to be set forth in articles, and those who insist that a lot of information must be repressed. One generally shows an encyclopedic passion, the other evinces a bureaucratic surveillance of articles designed not to construct them but simply monitor the content to assess whether its ethnoreligionationalist slant is favourable or not.Nishidani (talk) 05:49, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

You make valuable edits, which are usually well-sourced. If your first edits in the field of Judaism articles weren't appreciated, that doesn't mean that other edits will not be appreciated. Please do try something else. In short, don't take it personal, because it wasn't. Debresser (talk) 18:32, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

On a side-note, you are obviously not retired any more. You might want to update the banner on your user page. Debresser (talk) 18:33, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

'Usually' should be, the adverb is a concession to modesty, 'nearly always'. I'm sipping a gin and tonic now that this evening's film The Man with the Iron Fists has been dutifully watched to the end, and I must admit that your revert - the bone of contention - was nowhere as discomforting as my present sense of having wasted one and a half hours under the false impression that, if Russell Crowe was starring, the film must be worth watching. I know from experience your frequent reverts of my work are not based on any specific knowledge of the details at stake, but on a certain suspicion that, here and there, on Judaism or IP articles, my motives are suspect. Otherwise your erasures of harmless corrections or additions, as I provide, are not comprehensible,

Let me illustrate. I saw Shavuot was subject to some IP anonymous POV pushing, from Nableezy's page. I read it and noted the error: to state that this is a Jewish holiday is perfectly correct. To add that it is Samaritan holiday also is perfectly factually correct, and to clarify, adding two academic sources written by scholars with a great knowledge of that community, is also appropriate.

These additions were true (no one can contest them), perfectly sourced to eminent authorities on the Samaritans, and, since the topic is Shavuot, indisputably on topic.

You just chucked two excellent book references out, and the Samaritan baby with the barfwater, with the edit summary the stress on a small offshoot of Judaism is completely undue.

When I saw that, I had a flashback memory to the mid 90s, when, after waiting over a decade for it, the second volume of Anthony Grafton's Joseph Scaliger appeared. Grafton is one of the most erudite minds of the modern world, with an impeccable eye for details, such that, on my copy, I don't have a leaf noting errata. But I remember that in reading it, he made one odd remark. Checking my copy I see now that he wrote that in the second edition of his work on ancient chronologies, Scaliger 'clearly distinguished between two deviant forms of Judaism that still flourished in Scaliger's day: the Samaritan religion . .and the.. Karaite religion' (Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 11 Historical Chronology, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993 pp.413-414). Why did that strike me as odd?

First the word 'deviant' was an extremely rare indelicacy. But, to what degree can one classify Samaritans as part of Judaism (were that so, Christianity comes under the Judaic fold, since rabbinical texts occasionally branded both as minim)? I reacted the way I did because in reading Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History in my impressionable adolescence, he always spoke of the Samaritans and the Jews. If Judaism is the religion of Jews, one which often has considered them as having left the fold of Judaism, how one call the Samaritans part of Judaism, except by historical carelessness and anachronism? After all, the Samaritan perspective is that they represent the old quintessential Israelitic people as represented in the Torah, whereas Judaism, they maintain, is a later reelaboration of that archaic faith.

So in bluntly reverting me without asking me what could have been a legitimate question on the talk page, you were in good company, Anthony Grafton's, but only on the pages quoted. Later Grafton tells us that what Scaliger subsequently discovered (also through correspondence with the thriving Samaritan community in Cairo in the 1580s) - a theoretical smack in the face of European collectivist anti-Semitic hostilities by the way - was that there was no one 'Judaism', or rather, that, since ancient times, Judaism was not one religion, but exhibited a wide spectrum of variations. What the Jewish tradition held about calculating festival dates differed notably from Samaritan calculations: the same festival could be celebrated with a month's difference in the timing. The Qumran Essenes even had a harder time, since, they couldn't observe the new crescent moon with any facility, hence Arminden's edit tonight.

All ancient history is conjectural reconstruction but there is a significant vein of scholarship which considers that Judaism as we understand it today arose from a conflation of Israelitic and diaspora pre-modern era traditions, the Samaritans cleaving to a more primitive form (note their insistence on a priesthood retained the more archaic elements) while Judaism crystalised by keeping much of the earlier shared tradition, under revision, in a far broader vision determined by the intense deliberative writing and rewritings of a democracy of learned meritocratic scholars, the rabbis. That single distinction in comparative historical sociology is an almost certain index of a transition from the archaic tribal to urban societies. In this light, to subordinate Samaritans to the later Judaic synthesis might be true, or it might be religious point-scoring by one party in a dispute.

Rather than revert me as you insistently do, automatically, in my 'Jewish topic' edits almost invariably, you really should consider that there are gentlemanly options, like, at least every now and again, simply placing a query on the talk page to understand where I am coming from (aside of course from my notorious anti-Semitic, racist, bigoted hatreds, as they are rumoured to be) technically. It's past midnight and I must read a detective novel about an aboriginal detective called Napoleon Bonaparte. The point is for the last few decades scholars are far more careful about distinguishing Samaritans and Jews, and not subscribing to the orthodox Jewish account of their origins. See Ingrid Hjelm's The Samaritans and Early Judaism: A Literary Analysis, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000 generally.Nishidani (talk) 22:47, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Much as I read your reply with genuine interest and an open mind, there was not much information about Judaism and Samaritanism in it that I wasn't already aware of. Please believe me that I am aware of the origins of Samaritanism and its relation to Judaism, or perhaps I should say the shared origins of Judaism and Samaritanism, that I reverted out of WP:UNDUE considerations only, and that by no means was my decision to revert made automatically based on the identity of the editor. Debresser (talk) 14:04, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

You may be aware of the origins of Samaritanism and its relations to Judaism, Dovid. The problem is, contemporary scholarship is not. The historical nexus is utterly obscure. Of course, one can trust the narrative within the rabbinical tradition as reflecting an historic truth, but that is a partisan viewpoint, and the point of my excursus was simply to underline that, whereas you consider Samaritanism an offshoot of Judaism a significant body of academic work challenges this traditionalist view. So the edit-summary was a personal siding with one of several viewpoints, and as such, not a proper warrant to excise the innocuous, neutral and sourced text I added.Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Whoops, I only read as far as the first part when I had to rush and fix a leaking water main. If the origins are, as you concede from a common root, then clearly neither one nor the other is an 'offshoot' (there are serious scholars who regard Judaism as an outgrowth of the Israelitic tradition as embodied by Samaritan lore, lore and practice). As to Undue, no. To note that is like saying that on the article Easter, it would be undue in the lead to note that it has an overlap with the Jewish Passover. A large part of the rituals of Christianity are, historically, those practiced for over a millennium by the early Church's lineal descendant, Catholicism, which however, as we scrupulously uphold in these articles, does not allow us to write up these articles where numerous denominations have similar liturgies as though the latter were undue in the lead, since they are 'offshoots' of Catholicism.Nishidani (talk) 17:38, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

This is actually not the first time this issue has come up. There have been other articles where editors tried to add "Samaritans" or "Karaites" and were reverted for this reason (WP:UNDUE). If you feel strongly about this, you might try to propose a general change at WP:JUDAISM or some other forum. Debresser (talk) 18:28, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Ethno-religious exclusivism has no place on Wikipedia. That there are precedents among a number of editors for eliminating any note to the marvelous internal rifts and variety of historic Judaism so that we get a neat image of unruptured unity doesn't interest me. Every edit is judged on its merits, and if there is some rule that Judaism articles must not be despoiled by noting the internal diversity of its traditions, or analogies with culturally contiguous faiths well, numbers are what count here, not scholarship, and, well, let the articles languish in this complacent dream of oneness. I've better things to do.

Uh, we've finished here, Dovid, and should return to the standard courtesy of not editing each other's talk pages.Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Sourced Information

Nick, can I please ask you to stop removing verifiable and sourced information from reliable texts posted on Wikipedia without first initiating a discussion about the texts on the given Talk-Page. Removing a text before any discussion has taken place is disruptive.Davidbena (talk) 23:42, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

What was disruptive was you editing a page that falls, even per its lead, patently under the I/P conflict area. What was extremely generous was the abstention by myself and other editors from noting this. What was disruptive was your return to the old problems, of inventing stuff and misreading sources, and quarreling for its retention when it was shown repeatedly to be flawed. here where I was obliged, wasting a morning, to set forth, in just one of numerous instances, the way you operate. I know that you a very amicable fellow, but you do not understand policy or how paraphrase of sources works. What is more disconcerting is that at AE (where I am banned from, for what reasons I have never understood) you are asking to be allowed to edit I/P articles, asserting you have mended your ways. You haven't. I am absolutely certain you are in good faith. I am equally convinced you don't understand the nature of editing Wikipedia,- the restrictions placed on us to avoid OR, and never have. Rest assured I wouldn't have commented on your AE appeal even were I allowed to do so. Regards Nishidani (talk) 11:18, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

A Better Edit

Nishidani, I think that I've come-up with a better edit, that will satisfy you:

The retentention of the Old Hebrew name for Cesarea Philippi, according to Schürer, effectually began in the 4th century, when the name Paneas was once again used. The names Lod, Beisan, and Sepphoris were preferred by Semitic groups over their Greco-Roman names, viz., Diospolis, Scythopolis and Diocæsarea, respectively. By the time of the Middle Ages, Hadrian's intention to banish the Jews from Jerusalem and to apply his own name Ælius to the city, and which was done, according to Philostorgius, "that they might not find in the name of the city a pretext for claiming it as their country," had no longer been realised.

References

Davidbena (talk) 21:38, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm sorry David, but I can't ignore my impression that the problem I and others identified back in your Arbcom case in 2018 persists. You cannot grasp a technical issue, regarding Wikipedia policies on original research, primary sources, and how encyclopedic articles are composed. I'm not trying to pull rank in this: I was trained in classical Greek, how to write through primary and secondary sources, and, in each case, always, when citing a specific passage in a primary source, look up what the available secondary scholarly literature says, before venturing a judgement. Here we cannot even venture our own opinion, and that's fine by me. But we can't google say, Philostorgius through dear Sozomen, -an historian born at Beit Lahia in the area now known as the Gaza Strip- to tell us what was in Hadrian's mind several centuries earlier, esp. since there is an impressively huge literature on Hadrian's reasons for changing the name Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, drawing on classical writers very close to that date and their verdicts differ.

And that in any case is not about Hebraicization' but a fugitive attempt at Romanization of an ancient pre-Israelitic, Canaanite toponym. Not on topic.

The page is about a process called 'Hebraicization' of toponyms, and you just can't seem to understand that this kind of edit is not based on a source discussing the two together, but on you reading a (very dated, but always interesting) historian,Emil Schürer and noting that he says local people, unspecified, kept the old names (as they tend to do everywhere). There is nothing intrinsically Jewish in that, there is nothing specifically Hebrew necessarily either since Aramaic was also the issue, spoken by all ethnic groups in the region. If anything, you can't see the irony of using this composition to say, more or less, 'Foreigners (Romans) tried to impress the landscape in Israel/Palestine with toponyms from their language, but the native population (which you take to be Jews, when perhaps half of the population at that time were Samaritans, not Jews) resisted the attempt, and its analogy with contemporary circumstances where a recently immigrant population assumed political and military hegemony and is trying to rewrite the landscape with its new, or revarnished or pseudo-archaic place names, erasing everywhere (which the Romans never did) the traditional place names as conserved by ex-Aramaic, now Palestinian Arabic speaking population.

Reread all the thread on the page, and this, very very slowly. Analyse it.

You don't seem to understand the points of view of editors who disagree with you, and keep repeating the same cognitive misprisions that got you into trouble in the first place. Be calmer. Israel has won. It will impose its will, linguistically or otherwise. All one does in encyclopedias is to tell, not the political version of history - but the factual record, what actually occurred, and doing the latter will not change the 'facts on the ground' which are and will remain for the forseeable future, all in Zionism's favour. But you can't have everything. Politics is one thing but history is not wrought by a spanner for torqueing/talking spin manipulated by technicians wearing rosy-tinted glasses, but by gimlet-eyed boffins pouring over archives, by ogres, in the great Marc Bloch (shot by a firing squad of Nazifascist goons)'s image, who, when they scent human flesh hunt it as game to prey on.Nishidani (talk) 22:13, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Manilal Dwivedi

Hey Nishi, Thanks for you help. Two things:

(1) he turned to Dwivedi's book on Rajayoga. [and also Dwivedi's commentary on Bhagvadgita (as mentioned in the same sentence of that book)] use Manilal instead of Dwivedi. As stated at the start of the article, he is commonly referred as Manilal in Gujarati literature.

(2) You just added one sentence in lead. Can we move it somewhere else into article, as we don't put reference in the lead. Keep the sentence in the lead as it is (without ref.). Just put the same sentence with reference somewhere else into article.

Thanks. --Gazal world (talk) 16:52, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

No need to ask my permission for anything, mate. I just add stuff. You reuse it as you see fit since you are the expert here. I've had an intensely busy day, and so my usual hasty slipshod performance has ratcheted up a notch or two on the dumbo scale.:) Nishidani (talk) 17:21, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Note to self

Yorkshire memories. The past is another (imagined) country.Nishidani (talk) 12:13, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

a page that could use some work

Nur Masalha. nableezy - 21:02, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Yep, like so much else, but he is a particularly important scholar in the field and deserves better. I've started working on an article to illustrate how the recent push about using primary religious sources should be confronted, simply by showing that secondary sources of the highest quality abound which say everything, and far far more than what anyone might extract from a partial, cherrypicked exploitation of some writings from a few primary sources. It's not hard to do in itself, just that one needs to organize 30 articles and books dealing with the same issue with attention to a logic thematic development. If a busy off line schedule allows me to get that done in the next few days, I'll try to re-organize the Masahla page (annoys me always to see the BMorris exchanges. It's a decade and a half that I've been waiting for two things. (a)A book on the 1936-39 British suppression of the Palestinian insurgency, a full-scale destruction of whatever capacities the Palestinians had to defend themselves from the future threat and (b) someone who simply does the obvious: measure what happened after the UN partition plan in NOv 47 in terms of maps, who was where in all of the subsequent violence down to mid May 48. Anyone can see that his narrative collapses completely if every military action is measured according to that criterion, since the Yishuv throughgout was not defending and security the area generously conceded to it by the international decision, but violating its principles to possess land way beyond its acceptable borders. I.e. there was no 'invasion by five/six armies' at the declaration of independence. What the Yishuv planned and did, was already an invasion of extensive territories marked out for the future Arab state.Nishidani (talk) 06:35, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Check your email. Zero^talk 06:42, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Check future commentaries on Dante's Inferno Book 4 for glosses on line 151 (is it?). Memory is shaky these days but its maestro di color che sanno needs the annotation that it now refers to an entity modestly known as Zero. Nishidani (talk) 06:50, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Busy downloading with feelings of joyous gluttony (no, not a toilet reference at this morning hour) while ashamedly wiping the goog off my dial.Nishidani (talk) 06:54, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Re a discussion of Huldra's page

here. It ended with the following remark, which I place, as a discretional courtesy, here.

:Yes, Nishidani, we should end this discussion before it gets blown way-out of proportion. You're right that there is no explicit commandment in the Torah for women to cover their heads with scarves, but the custom is merely implied in the section on the Soṭah (suspected adulteress) in Numbers 5:18, where the Scripture requires of the priests to "uncover the head of the woman" (Hebrew: ופרע את ראש האשה), often mistranslated in English editions of the Hebrew Bible, but which - by the Hebrew - implies that the hair of Israelite/Jewish women was initially covered. And, yes, it is a Jewish tradition for women to do so, just as we find in Mishnah (Ketubot 7:4).Davidbena (talk) 17:22, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

I.e. logically, the Torah is YHWH's word. But rabbis 1,500 years and more later could guess tons of things God never said, presuming, like Moses, that they knew God's real thoughts better than He himself deigned to reveal. The same verb is used at Leviticus 10:8 when YHWH orders Moses and other males not to uncover their heads. But of course the rabbis just jump at the use of the verb at Numbers 5:18 to make the order apply only to women, and indeed, inferring from a priest in one verse uncovering the head of an adulteress that all women mustn't thereby uncover their hair (otherwise they will be whores). In Israelite society, as generally in Semitic societies, both males and females wore headgear. Rabbis thought it was a protection against desire, but nota bene at Shabbat 156b, to rein in desire by keeping one's head clothed was applied also to a rabbi, Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak It would be like inferring from Leviticus 21:10 that, since there it is only specified that the high priest must not uncover his head, any lesser man (or woman) may.

This is profoundly stupid in its arrogance pseudo-knowallness. Rabbinical control of the Torah just means that everything not stated there can be imagined ('inferred') by rabbinical consensus, which means, ultimately, that what rabbis think is more important than what God had Moses write down. That is what a layman like myself would think. I'm reminded of Church Fathers thinking they could guess from Genesis, that Adam never had an erection in the garden of Eden, or theologians writing tractates on what happens with the snipped part of Jesus's godly prepuce. One could go endlessly on pilpulling this way and that, to no purpose. Such 'study' is just unhinged from any real grasping after the historical realities of mankind. Be well, nonetheless David. People can be good in whatever system, metaphysical or otherwise, they find themselves, no matter how much the ideology tries to spin them like tops. We all find that out at a certain age, since we are all subject to the same torque, though our talks, culture by culture, differ. This was the lesson of Mencius. Nishidani (talk) 18:10, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Just to allay your doubts, first, the Hebrew verb פרע‎ is used to mean "uncover", in the case of the suspected adulteress, but it can also mean "to let one's hair grow unkempt," as in the case of a priest of Aaron's lineage in Leviticus 21:10, where he is commanded to have his head shorn at a certain length (based on the explanation given in the Book of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 44:20), and brought down in the Talmud (Betza), or where, in the case of a leper (Leviticus 13:45), he is commanded to let his head remain uncovered (Hebrew: וראשו יהיה פרוע), just as we find with respect to Jewish mourners. Compare 11th-century Rabbi Isaac ibn Ghiyyat:

“ …and he (i.e. the mourner) requires uncovering his head. What is meant by uncovering the head? It is exposing the hair and exposing the head from [being covered] by his hat or his habit, or similar things, and [allowing himself only to be] draped as the draping of the Ishmaelites, as we cite [concerning the leper] (Lev. 13:45): ‘And his head shall be bare’… ”

Anyway, as far as the rabbinic tradition is concerned (in which you seem to find fault), let us remember that their authority is alluded to in the Torah itself and where we find that they have been given the authority to explain the otherwise difficult passages of Scripture, as it says (Deuteronomy 17:8–11): "...You shall act according to whatever they teach you and the decisions they give you. Do not turn aside from what they tell you, to the right or to the left" (לֹא תָסוּר מִן הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר יַגִּידוּ לְךָ יָמִין וּשְׂמֹאל‎). I hope this was helpful.---Davidbena (talk) 19:18, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

References

The passage you refer to vindicate rabbinical authority refers not to rabbis,(who didn't exist until at least a thousand years after the biblical chronology of the Mosaic era) but rather sctually says that in matters of bloodshed and violence the leaders of Israel must ask the very small Levite priestly caste (kōhănîm) to adjudicate. Nothing about hair and such trivia. One more proof that the rabbinate reads into the Torah whatever serves its own specific ends, to augmrmt a jurisdictional authority it never had since Israelitic times down to the tannaim, extend its control over communities noted for their customary heterogeneity, something typical, almost identical, in Islam and, also, now historically, in most earlier forms of Christianity. So your point, ever infra-rabbinical, tells me nothing really about history. You'd never know from it that the order that women cover their heads is Mishnaic, not Israelitic, and before 200 was not, as it then became, obligatory. here p.130 and here p.91.

The psychology of all this is fairly obvious. Male insecurity about women. Jealousy is one of the five primal biological emotions, and drives the insecure to be possessive, to exert control over people whom they cannot entrust autonomy to. My wife's sumptuous golden hair was the equal of the Shulamite's, but not for that reason did I get nervous when people admired her dazzling shock of hair in public. Rather, I was proud of her for that. Not so the rabbis, whose fears others might desire one's spouse because of her beautiful locks meant she had to be visually locked up - very Semitic. No doubt in certain rabbinical groups this existed, -St Paul had a Pharisaic upbringing, and expresses similar fixations about female hair's capacity to arouse men -but Jewish women generally before 200 CE were under no halakhic obligation to cover themselves this way. Just as the overwhelmingly majority of Jewish women today have no such obsession. History is something you will never get from the internal resources of the rabbinical chain of tradition. That is why Spinoza walked out of the ghetto. He wanted to think, not to be told what to think, and then receive a blessing to tell a rising young generation what to think in turn. The disproportionately great Jewish contribution to the world came when they were allowed to enter the larger world under the Enlightenment's dispensation, and study everything. The rabbinical tradition was in good part responsible for only this, conserving for over a millennium, the habit of intense study as a secunda natura. Once unleashed on real objects of learning, the results were spectacular. As long as it remained focused on just a Judaic religious tradition, it discovered little of enduring 'human' interest (the same goes for all ideological/religious systems=). So, if you grasp this is where I am coming from, repeated citations from scripture are pointless. I read them, but, I know that it's just not intrinsically interesting to outsiders like myself who want to understand the past and have no particular affinity for one ethnos, or religion, or whatever. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto Regards,Nishidani (talk) 20:15, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Each generation has had its qualified teachers, whether Sages who had been officiated the rite of smicha, or a host of rabbinic scholars in our generation who have, mostly, passed down unto us the traditions of the ancients. We say in Hebrew: "Jephtah in his generation is as Samuel in his generation" (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 25b). In any case, the quote taken from Deuteronomy 17:8-11 is used by a host of rabbis (Maimonides included) to show the authority vested in them to explain difficult cases in Jewish law, among those being the cases that you mentioned above. Maimonides brings further clarity to the whole matter when he writes:

When the High Court (Sanhedrin) was abolished, disputes flourished in Israel; one rendering a thing unclean with plausible arguments for his words, while the other rendering it clean, giving plausible arguments for his words, the one prohibiting [a certain thing] while the other permitting it. Had there been two wise men or two courts of Jewish law at a time when there was no Sanhedrin, if one declared a thing to be defiled and another declared the same thing to be clean, [or] one prohibiting [a thing] while the other permitting it – before their case had come before them (i.e. the High Court) – whether they had gone there together or had gone there one after the other, if you do not know where the judgment lists, if it is a matter pertaining to the written Law, go after the more stringent ruling. However, if it is a matter pertaining to the words of the teachers of our laws (lit. scribes), go after the lenient ruling.

As for the period of Enlightenment in Europe, I see no real contradiction. Jews have contributed to science, and, in the case of Albert Einstein, his early upbringing, where he was trained in Yiddishkeit, definitely helped frame his state-of-mind.

As for what you called "hair" being trivia, yes, it is a small matter, but still an important one. The Torah speaks about "binding them as a sign upon our hand, and as frontlets between our eyes," yet does not tell us how these Tefillin (phylacteries) are to be made. The rabbis passed down the tradition, Halacha l'Moshe m'Sinai, telling us exactly how they are to be constructed: black straps, a knot made into the shape of a dalet, etc. Trivia, yes, but important, nevertheless. Davidbena (talk) 20:55, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

References

This is getting boring, David. Maimonides is boring, and if I have to read that period stuff, give me Averroes or Aquinas any day - far sharper minds who, in so far as they focused on a past master, thought of Aristotle i.e. logic, rather than a long chain of rabbis opinionizing about God and trying to codify and make sense of a motherlode of contradictions in the Tanakh. You clearly know nothing of Einstein, whose knowledge of the Bible came from a Catholic elementary school and who later declared from memory, that studying one's ancestors leads nowhere. Hungarians, Japanese, Chinese, Iranians etc.etc.etc. have contributed to science, but only an ethnic nationalist takes that, in each case, to be proof that therefore they have links to greatness because someone distinguished in their field happened to have some cultural or genetic link to their particular tribe. Puerile. The logic of that is: there is a famous murderer or a famous fool who happens to share one's ethnic background, and thus, everyone in the ingroup should feel some pride in the connection. There's nothing in the rabbinical tradition that wasn't synthesized in one line spoken by Hillel the Elder. All the rest is just, well, s playground where you mostly have sand thrown in your eyes, but studying who throws best can occasionally lead to interesting results, if one is distracted that way. Let's leave it at that.Nishidani (talk) 22:02, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Do you not know that Maimonides was also greatly influenced by Aristotle? Maimonides refers to him often in his Guide for the Perplexed. The book is also available in English translation. While Einstein may have studied in a Catholic Elementary school, he was also trained in the Jewish classics as a youth, although I am unfamiliar at what age. Perhaps you should read this again. He, in fact, mentions the rabbinic studies that he encountered in his youth, when he studied the Talmud.---Davidbena (talk) 00:10, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

David, of course I know about Aristotle. Apart from reading Greek philosophical texts, I translated a book on modern logical issues with that Greek thinker. I read the Guide to the Perplexed ages ago, and have often examined sections of his tractates. Like all religious thinkers, he is not a philosopher, because his premises exclude serious analytic challenges to the assumptions of the field he thinks in. The point I made was: for 1,600 years, no thinker worth their salt came out of rabbinical training, until Spinoza, that most lovable of all philosophers, achieved greatness by walking out of the mental and material ghetto, indifferent to bribes to have him shut up, threats to kill him, or the despicably intolerant herem declaring he was, qua Jew, dead to their world. 'No thinking please,' as they used to say at high table in Oxford.

I've read two biographies of Einstein and he was not trained in the Jewish classics as a youth. The family entrusted an uncle who would visit from time to time to talk about Jewish history and tell him bits of Talmudic stories. It was very thin. In that sense he's no more Jewish, than Terence Tao is 'Chinese'/Confucian, or Maryam Mirzakhani was Iranian/Islamic, or Srinivasa Ramanujan 'Indian'/Hindu. Being extremely intelligent, unlike Herzl, he would have picked up quite a bit, but being a Jew for that kind of background basically had nothing to do with religion. It was a sense of knowing down to the marrow of your bones that in the not too distant past, large sectors of European societies had been infected with a primordial prejudice that, in critical moments, could explode and affect, even end, one's existence, but mainly, in Zurich as in Milan esp. seemed to be just an occasional bother, in his childhood and youth. Being Jewish was a social condition, not a religious matter (as it has been and remains for the vast majority of Jews today, I think) Like Noam Chomsky's experience, one heard it in faculty decisions or table gossip, social chitchat or buying a house, a bit like being an Arab in Israel. But it had nothing to do essentially with what one did in life, i.e. 'think' at the cutting edge, like every other peer person in your milieu, of whatever background. Only Nazis think Einstein's physics represent a Jewish mentality. As to your link, did you actually read it closely, slowly? There's nothing 'Jewish there'. I say that because I agree or sympathize with virtually everything he is quoted as saying there, and I came to similar conclusions being neither Jewish nor particularly intelligent.

Obsessing about one's ethnicity is a donkey's game, in my book, David. It tells one nothing about mankind, and has, essentially nothing to say to anyone outside a sectarian world moulded from the same tedious template of groupthink. Individuals are fascinating, but, as soon as a group definition kicks in, they drop off my radar because, qua representatives of a set, they no longer think or talk personally, but are playing a dull game of us/you politics, which means they can't think in any depth. It's like the drive of sports fans. You may be a weakling, but, by overidentification with a superb tennis or football player, you begin to feel that everytime your iconic figure wins, that you yourself are somehow part of their success. Who wants to be a stereotype, self- or other-defined? Ugh!Nishidani (talk) 05:49, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

email

Check yer bloody email. Zero^talk 11:53, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

William Leonard Marshall

I was writing a note for private reasons on memories of my reading two novels by William Leonard Marshall when they came out, and checked the wiki page, only to find out, disconcertingly, that he apparently died in 2003. He became better known as a popular detective writer, but the two early novels were very very promising as examples of 'serious' literature- the thread of the plots always dealing with historical recurrences, and breaking their patterns. The point is, why can't his life be adequately written up? I've searched in the obvious places for obituaries, without success. All I have to go on is a memory from I think 1972 of reading in The Age about his frantic (à la Dustin Hoffman wooing Katherine Ross in The Graduate) romancing of his future wife at the ANU. If he is dead, I'd like to fix his bio. Anyone able to fish up anything? I'll do the drafting legwork if enough sources can be mustered (and I've looked in vain).Nishidani (talk) 11:12, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

3RR

Reverting someone who broke 3RR is not one of the exceptions allowed for 3RR, so be careful. Someone will take care of it. Zero^talk 07:30, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

It's clearly vandalistic, which I thought can be reverted on sight. But then I know fuck all about policy. Fixing just a few edits yesterday that had slipped in due to editors' carelessness on that page, which I basically wrote (it's not a WP:OWN matter. I just like some prospect of the appearance of approaching perfection, whoever does it) took me 9 hours. The whole page several months. What is not widely understood is that any blow-in - this one is malevolent and clearly a banned sock there for disturbance (note the characteristic misspelling of 'semitic' as 'semetic')- can come in, and with a flip of the fingers, trash work that is immensely painstaking. And then we have a 'discussion' in our anxiety to be 'fair-minded'. Sigh Nishidani (talk) 07:44, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) WP:RANDY. Bishonen | tålk 09:12, 13 July 2020 (UTC).

Ah, what would a dithering geezer do withoutcha, Bish? If I'd known about that link, I could have saved myself, and stalkers' 'meatpies' a load of disgruntled ink per above. I promise to spend an hour or so memorizing the link. Mind you, I've some hesitancy - afflicted on a provincial level with the syndrome diagnosed by the incomparable Kafka, a (Zögern vor der Geburt. I.e. 'randy' can't help strike my foulminded Aussie-inflected ears with other connotations, conjuring up images of a hyperactive horntoad hardly consonant with the polymorphic Boisean dumbo in Wikipedia's whispering closet of skeletons. There, ya see, I can't help being longwinded! Thanks Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

I know! I have foulminded European-inflected ears, and once a class I was teaching in Uppsala was joined by an American student called Randy. I didn't know where to look. It was his name, too — I mean it wasn't short for Randolph or anything — I asked — and he was quite unaware of any associations non-Americans might be afflicted with. Oh, hey, have you seen WP:MANDY? Nothing to do with the current circumstances, but also a cool essay. I'm just trying to keep typing here, to rival your long-windedness. No, I guess I give up. Bishonen | tålk 11:06, 13 July 2020 (UTC).

That's another beauty, great link! I'll also risk mnemonic overload by committing that to the mammary-blanks (another old timer's disease-abetted eggcorny ) as well. Sorry to see she carked it as well. Following that scandal was my first, adolescent, exposure to the concept of hypocrisy in public life, and to the tabloid destruction of a very decent man, John Profumo (not to mention his faithful spouse, Valerie Hobson). I read once a memoir in which the writer recalled being seated at a swank dinner next to a quiet gentleman, who was very attentive and never spoke, who finally opened up exchanging a few luminous words. The writer inquired after him later, and heard it was Profumo, his informant adding that he now cleaned toilets at Toynbee Hall, and had so for twenty years, in penitence. I've a clear memory of thinking, I must put that into his wiki bio, but can see no trace of my edit there, so again one of those false memories Oliver Sacks wrote so eloquently about. As my old age totters into the lean and slippered pantaloon, don't try to keep up with my drivel, which, increasingly will resemble the aleatory slapdash of the mythical monkey, as I revert to our ancestral type, banging away on a typewriter or keyboard and, at some point in eternity, generating by chance the complete works, in Borgesian fashion, of William Shakespeare, much to the disconcertion of proponents of that puncy jerk Edward de Vere.Nishidani (talk) 11:48, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Well, actually, changing "sometimes" into "wombat poo" is vandalism but changing "sometimes" into "usually" is not. Don't blame me; that's how the word is interpreted. It doesn't matter how stupid, ill-informed or annoying it is. The concept of vandalism is much narrower than that of disruptive editing. Zero^talk 14:52, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

'often' is not synonymous with 'usually'.

But, yeah, of course, it's not a fault to gloss the law, and illuminate the judicially, if injudiciously, nescient. From a tutorly perspective in real world orthopraxis, when a text writes down the page:

According to Michael Barkun, the Khazar hypothesis never played any major role in anti-Semitism,

And some blow-flybynighter keeps changing the lead summary of this ('sometimes') into 'often', it means they haven't read the page, are unfamiliar with the sources and subject. When corrected, they refuse to budge, while persisting in restating their contrafactual choice of terminology;and when reminded of rule violations, they expunge the wording. I know this is considered just 'disruptive' but in normal legal usage, vandalism consists in 'the willful destruction or damaging of property in a manner that defaces, mars, or otherwise adds a physical blemish that diminishes the property's value.' Translated into article marring, the semi-literate IP airhead (i.e. someone who writes it is one of the many antisemitic tropes used to delegitimize the genetically backed fact that askenazi jews are semetic in origin knows nothing of genetics, standard orthography, let alone the Khazars and clearly never reads for anything other than some dumb meme about identity they identify with) willfully and repeatedly left a blemish that diminished the accuracy, and thereby, the value of the article on Khazars, which is close to FA level. The only point of the exercise was to provoke committed editors. It is as you say, here, but it's vandalism in any girl's language, nunthemoor. Wikipedia's laws are generated by bureaucratic necessities, which of course, means that commonsense can be pettifogged to seem inappropriate.Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

While you have Hughes open...

...he has a good bit on Special Night Squads (p281ff). Zero^talk 13:57, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

yeah, I read that. The problem is, Hughes has such a mass of information we haven't yet used, that it would take a month or so to systematically harvest it, focusing solely on that period's articles. I'm sure, if covid or whatelse doesn't conspire to trim the short wick of the candle stub I am, that I'd like to use it as the basis for a total rewrite of the 36-39 Arab Revolt. But at the moment, I have a complex article to write, using about 40-50 sources, and, come to think of it, must hurry even now since a mate is about to bowl in with a sophisticated gardener's toolbag, to enable me to grout out some stubborn weeds that have resisted extirpation. . .here he is. Nishidani (talk) 14:08, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

A Reflection on the debate on the Exodus page

More appropriate here.

There is a Christian legend that the family of Jesus, escaping from Herod’s persecution, stayed overnight at the Monastery of Gerasimus near Deir Hajla. This is almost certainly not ‘true’, at least in the form we have it. It is a Christian adaptation of the Exodus story, reflecting ancient Judeo-Christian thinking, in which the Departure from Egypt, under the threat of a Pharaoh, was rewoven to make Jesus, a Jew to his last days, embody in his own early life an experience of the persecution and flight imagined by his ancestors to have happened, illo tempore, in Egypt. Its poignancy lies in the reversal, the message being: we were forced out of Egypt and found sanctuary as a chosen people, under God, in Palestine. Now the Messiah is, paradoxically, compelled by another secular state murderer to flee the Holy Land and find refuge, of all places, in the earlier once hostile land that expelled his ancestors.

The historicity of this is immaterial to the tradition of believers, and rightly so. For the point of the tale concerns a culture of persecution and refuge, with its acquired sensitivity to the pain of exile. And that is something even irreducible pagans like myself can take on board, so that it inflects, positively, my reading of the real world. When I read of what happened to the extended family of Abu Dahuq of the systematically persecuted Jahalin bedouins, a family given refuge in the Monastery of Gerasimus after they were driven from their pastoral lands at Nebi Musa in 2003, I think of what Exodus means for Jews, and what the Flight into Egypt means for Christians. Both are historicizing novelettes, our article on the latter unembarrassedly, and correctly, calls the Christian version a ‘fabrication’.

Myths have, and as long as we remain human will exercise, extraordinary power, heuristic and moral, over our lives, and understanding that narrative power not as historical, but as a cognitive heritage that illuminates the human condition is something believers and unbelievers can share, without secular animosity or fideistic harrumping. If you have these stories at heart, whatever your belief system, they will make you see even more poignantly the ‘sense’ behind the persecution of, say, Abu Dahuq, now that a modern Pharaoh or Herod type once more drives an afflicted family out of their tents, out of the solace and shade of the monastery where their patriarch was guardian, back into the desert, because Arabs are not wanted, anywhere, in that land so bedevilled by ideologically-impelled religious conflicts What is done in the name of a religious destiny, that is the irony, is countermanded by core narratives in the religious traditions themselves, once understood, not as facts, but as moral paradigms of compassion for the dispossessed and persecuted, thrust into an eternal repetitive exile from a fundamental right and natural desire to feel at home, somewhere, in some haven, in the world.

(Of course there is also biblical writ to warrant this persecution, even from Exodus. Suffice it to associate the Bedouin here with the āsapsup (rabble) at Numbers 13:4, or the êreḇraḇ at Exodus 12:38. But the obvious riposte would be that the latter is very resonant anagrammatic word play on the root behind Eber/ibri/Hebrew). In any story anyone might come up with about an 'other' there will be a deeper dimension whose cogency is summed up by Horace, (Satires, I, 1, 69-70), de te fabula narratur). Nishidani (talk) 06:32, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Writer's Barnstar
	For your many, many articles on indigenous Australian peoples. Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 14:35, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Deeply appreciated, esp. given that the Makassar people treated aborigines with great respect long before white colonials came, and destroyed their trading relations with your ancestors, while robbing them of their homeland.Nishidani (talk) 14:52, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm not actually Makassar and have never been to Indonesia, although the username could well be misleading. :P

Lately I've been working on articles more related to my own country—some day I hope to have high-quality articles for all of the redlinks in this template. I'll probably get sick of it before finishing, though, as I appear to be the only person on Wikipedia working in this field. That's part of what so impressed me about your work WRT indigenous Australians; you actually went and made all the articles that needed to be made.--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 16:25, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction. I've got three shelves of books on shamanism, but those on Korean shamanism are only in Japanese. I'm sure the research is more adequately covered in Korean sources. I once won a scholarship to study the impact of Central-Asian shamanic cultures on the mythology of the Kojiki. Please do press on with those articles, and if you like, notify me of those you create, because the topic fascinates me. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 16:48, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

I've just finished a fairly lengthy article on a set of sacred ritual implements called mengdu, which might be of interest to you. If you have any questions or comments about the topic, feel free to contact me, either here or on my talk page—it's not every day that I get to talk about this stuff online.--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 15:35, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

My compliments on an extremely good piece of ethnographic synthesis, that is close to the highest standards we strive to achieve on Wikipedia. All I can do of course is learn. I should of course add that I have never quite accepted the reconfiguration of the term and concept of shamanism to cover folk and possession-based religious forms. There was an undoubted bias (linked to his alt-fascist ideological thinking, which he tried to repress after WW2) in Eliade's radical opposition between shamanism, and possession, but it was a fine working distinction. There are huge differences between classic shamanic cultures of central continental Asia, and the religious phenomena of eastern China, Korea and Japan, as you will know. But that distinction has been abolished by the academic conflation of the two, so what I think is irrelevant. I'm very busy now helping another friend with some complex issues concerning logic, but will start reading more broadly on this, following your articles. Congratulations.Nishidani (talk) 18:28, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Notes

• June 29. At Yavne this reverting/expunging this Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
• June 29. source falsification here, first introducing a self-published source (not RS) for its phrasing and then retaining that phrasing while removing its book source and replacing it by a mediocre article that never employs that phrasing. reverted hereNishidani (talk) 17:20, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Needs a scholar

[1]--TMCk (talk) 19:30, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Maybe too late. Just now: PC police......derail discussion...shut down next step...--TMCk (talk) 20:34, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Mathglot said some reasonable things. I would ignore that pseudo-discussion. The question was just shit-stirring, the usual victimist whingeing by spokespersons for a powerful and successful state.Nishidani (talk) 13:32, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Pseudo-discussion and shit-stirring indeed but the boredom will never cease until it's getting bad enough to get better. Something like that.--TMCk (talk) 18:42, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Notice of noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Yamla (talk) 15:14, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the courtesy. That is a bizarre complaint (it would be offensive were I not insouciant to insults). I'd only respond if asked by a serious admin, that it be treated seriously. Otherwise, answering it is to dignify ignorant, or designedly provocative, tripe.Nishidani (talk) 16:11, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Please stop vandalizing human shieds page

{subst:Uw-ew}} You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Human Shields; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

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

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Fathiyimah (talk) 17:33, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't know why these 'newbies' never wake up to the dead giveaways in their modus operandi. I have a private one that is nigh infallible, but duly pretend on articles per WP:AGF that the sock is not one. The discussion I was forced into is here

Immediately blocked for being a sockpuppeteer. Nishidani (talk) 19:17, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Just a quick note of approval

Greetings Nishidani,

good job on restoring balance between Saudi Arabia and Iran (well, at least in the [news article]). I might not fully agree with the exact wording, but that edit was definitely a step towards NPOV. As it should be obvious to most people that wars - even proxy wars - usually require two sides to them.

Also, I must admit that I was slightly irritated by the "retyred" massage on your user page. I'm not sure if that's kept for personal (or, given the spelling, humorous reasons), but yeah I was slightly confused as you do not seem to be completely retired from Wikipedia.

Cheers, LordPeterII (talk) 06:37, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

I have a deep psycholinguistic streak propensive toward failure, or is that fey-lure? - an inability to avoid bad puns. I retired several times, out of exasperation, and the last time I came back decided my proper status was that of someone who remained 'retired' but active yet somewhat fatigued, and therefore a neologism came to mind: re-tyred, a worn-out wheel with new tyres for continuing to idle on down wiki's version of The Road. By all means tweak to improve my wording. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 07:40, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps the most influential article in modern times 200 million reads

Wade Davis, The Unraveling of America, Rollingstone 6 August 2020 (Or listen to him here Has COVID-19 signalled the end of the American era? Philip Adams Late Night Live)

Chalmers Johnson argued much of this two three decades ago, making the few who listened realize they were not queer in thinking outside the consensus.Nishidani (talk) 17:45, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Starry-eyed

Dear Nishi, thank you so much for the... what was it exactly? Do I need a barn now? That might finally ground me and give me a purpose in life, so you don't even know what you might have set in motion. Or not.

That funny word, making one think of stammering turtles and talkative TNT - does one need to live in England, preferably be born & raised in the Bodleyan behind the dictionary shelf, to have ever heard it or at least of it? I was wondering how much of a compliment it really is, like that time when some nice middle-aged lady told me full of smiles that she could listen to my voice for hours, it's so smooth that one can fall asleep. Oh well, one cannot choose his blessings. What I want to say: thanks again, it's my only such award since being a well-behaved Young Pioneer in the Carpathian Proterozoic. It put a bright smile across my stubbles. Arminden (talk) 15:48, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Arminden As an incorrigible aficionado of lost causes (including things like sanity and, more existentially urgent, crackers that don’t instantly crumble when you ever so lightly butter them to prepare them for a smidgeon overlay of vegemite, something that began to occur 20 years ago when some smart young economist figured out you could improve profit margins on the turnover of crackers by reducing the lard and leaven just enough for the biscuit to resist the pressures of machine packaging until it reached the supermarket, after which it was up to the customer (so' cazzi loro, as the Romans say) to learn how to dab a pat of butter ever so feather-lightly on one that it won’t disintegrate) I strive to adopt the lexical waifs orphaned by the accelerations of modern linguistic fashion and cosset and cuddle them for eventual recirculation. Such is ‘tolutiloquent', a latinism for eloquence so nimble it resembles the rhythm of a cantering horse, perhaps like an exemplar of the admirable Houyhnhnms said by Swift to lie south of the Yahoos of the antipodes.

I have a 53 year old memory of learning the word from reading either any of James Joyce's books or Ellmann's biography, but err, as wizened nitwits do. Fortunately, unhappy from youth that the 22 vol OED misses so much, I've kept and regularly refresh my own private dictionary, and, on consulting it, find I must have swabbed it up from Frederick Rolfe, whom I read around that same time.

'They were tolutiloquent in expressing horror at the impiety of mob rule’.Frederick Rolfe, Hadrian the Seventh 1904 (Penguin 1963) ch. 9 p.157.

Contextually it was perfect, since you railed against what you perceived to be conformist tendencies in your Silwan divagations.

I enjoyed the Bodleian allusion to Baudelaire (Mon berceau s'adossait à la bibliothèque,i.e. roughly misprisioned: 'my child's body lay in a cot by the library'). The barnstar was long deserved. It won’t be the first time that Athene noctua is quartered in a barn. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 18:30, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Your trust in my erudition greatly honours me. Sorry to disappoint so often. (That's what I meant with being put back in my place, which is one of intellectual aspiration rather than achievement. But all societies need a solid mid-class, it lets the elites shine even brighter.)

So, I made my own attempt at riding the barnstar stallion, but it proved to be stronger than me and more rapacious than ever. Which is good, now every entry on my messy talk-page will be headed by a gilded astre, as in the essential Romanian poem "Cîte stele sînt pe cer": "Stars, as many skies can hold / All desist at dawn. Need proof? / But for one, stupid and bold / That stands on our factory roof." But there's always a 1989, which will eventually bring my talk-page back down to Earth. No hurry. Arminden (talk) 12:30, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

Well, that's tossed me, except I imagine it must refer to Ceaușescu. I don't know Romanian but can read a bit, even the biography of Tita Bărbulescu who sang a song of that title, with 70% comprehension, because it's a Romance tongue. However it was called 'Câte (not 'Cîte') stele sunt pe cer', which is immediately decipherable to a Latin eye: 'Quante stelle ci sono per il cielo'/How many stars are in the sky', but the poem that followed didn't mention a factory. To the contrary it read like a Romanian version, slightly elaborated, of two fragments by Sappho (34/168B don't check) mediated by Leopardi's valley imagery. The associations evoked when I read are, as usual, totally irrelevant to what is being said. I will suggest that 'Stars, as many skies can hold' can't be a literal translation, and there's an awkwardness in grammar that subverts the undoubted strength of the conceit because 'Need proof?' (for the rhyme) is followed by an exception to the rule that stars vanish at dawn. The one on the roof (a political image) is still up there as the workers trail into the factory. As the Italians say in such circumstances, Boh!. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 14:44, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

I apologize for what follows, but duty obliges me to have afternoon tea in a boring environment of chat, and therefore, my misprision of your poem generated as I pretended to listen to others

That every single star in the sky’s vast vault

Dislimns its studded light at break of dawn

Is nature’s law, its harsh, eternal truth.

But history shows that nature is at fault:

As workers trudge to factories every morn

Their leader beams down on them from the roof.Nishidani (talk) 17:21, 6 September 2020 (UTC)</br<

Poetry raining on me! I'm flying on its wings. Yes, you've almost caught the spirit, to which you've naturally added a touch of Victorian gloss. The initial source would feel much honoured. You also introduced me to Tita Bărbulescu, who could claim to have stayed closer to original folk-lore, unlike today's painful Lycra & burnous cross-overs (Romanians blame Gypsies for it, but they're grateful takers for what's on offer; you can do a study comparing an unashamedly Gypsy wedding with a somewhat mixed affair. Or better not, if you have a sensitive stomach). The red five-pointed star has preceded Ceauşescu by some two decades, but thank G. (-orbachev) it didn't outlive him, at least not on factories.

But yes, Comrade C. is omnipresent, even by his absence. When the old guard from the Academy of Science found itself without its beloved Conducǎtor, they quickly decided to prove that they've always been proud patriots and lovers of Latinity, and have reversed a very reasonable spelling reform from Stalin's time. Romanian is about 2/3 Latin, but its ǎ, î, ş and ț don't sound like the noble voice of "our respected father, Trajan", because they came about through contact with Turks, Slavs, Germanics and Magyars. In Soviet times, we used î for the sound Turks write down as ı, and the first-person present form of to be as sînt. In the year '90, the old farts from the Academy, most of them hitting themselves on ninety, who had all become members under, through, and thanks to Stalin's placeholders in Bucharest and of whom none (!) was a philologist, voted for replacing î with â and sînt with sunt. Philologist ran amok, because it makes absolutely no sense etymologically, but so what? I made ideologically. Away from Moscow (and the Ottomans), forward towards the past - and that's Roman. If it helps with whitewashing one's collaboration with the Securitate, what's the harm? So you see, I'm avoiding the "new" orthography whenever I can. Which, funny enough, now makes me an old-timer. But the Germans have also messed up their spelling, the 2000 reform made zusammengesetzte Wörter widely taboo, completely changing the Sprachgefühl, attacking the inner workings of the language and culture, but hey, reform must be! You can't imagine how confused, and then happy I was when I discovered that English doesn't have one supreme forum presiding over its spelling and dictating the rules. Too bad I'm not a native speaker, but nobody's Jack Lemmon. Arminden (talk) 20:37, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

I commend your superb commonsense and thank you for the most succinct exposition of the ideological meddling that fucks up simple phonological tradition. Sorry about the Victorianism, but I had to retain most rhyme words you gave, and that was an awkward constraint, meaning I had to pad a bit. As for native speakers, to hell with that prejudice. Nabokov, Conrad and so many others wrote and write (eg now Indian and African novelists) far more fluently and zestfully than native speakers in their adopted tongue, that linguistic hegemon that is English and, fortunately through globalization, is now being wrested from its inventors in the best classical tradition of Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. In my dialect, my first tongue, with 5,000 words not customary in the King's English, speaking 'proper English' was chided as 'speaking with a plum in one's mouth.' Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:53, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

So, it emerges . . .the The Doctoring Plot

'Netanyahu Used Doctored Video of Abbas to Influence Trump's Policy, Woodward Reveals,' Haaretz 12 September 2020

Trump was leaning towards the Palestinians until Netanyahu had tapes doctored to give to the US President who then viewed them and heard Abbas apparently urging Palestinians to kill children. Waal. The whole history of that region is based on major decisions based on carefully pitched rumour-mongering in the right ears. But at least we have proof now.Nishidani (talk)

A different form of doctoring, in which sensitivity to injustice is now diagnosed as hate speech, and requires a kind of algorithmic lobotomization of criticism of Israel's behavior beyond its legitimate borders. Neve Gordon Anti-Semitism on Facebook CounterPunch 25 September 2020 Nishidani (talk) 21:52, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

1RR

You removed twice a "militant" from body of the article while the first removal was made by other user[2] you still made 2 reverts. Pleaser restore to stable version --Shrike (talk) 20:10, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Well, did you read my edit? Apparently not. I added militant just below where it was originally placed.

which has not in the past excluded resort to terrorism - of seeking legitimation through the provision of social services and militant engagement in armed challenges to the Israeli occupation

I don't think that constitutes a revert, but if neutral editors watching this page tell me it is, I'll restore it to its original position (for the moment).Nishidani (talk) 20:21, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Unacceptable

When you reverted my edits on Hamas, you reverted all of my edits, including copyedit and typo fixing. That is unacceptable. An experienced editor like you should be able to revert only the part he needs to. Consider yourself trouted. Debresser (talk) 20:26, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

By the way, I hope your edit summary including "the top contributor, with 18% of text to my credit" doesn't mean you are having WP:OWN issue here, do you? Debresser (talk) 20:33, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

You are adopting an exceptionalist view of editing. You reverted everything I added and when I restored my text,You complain:'You reverted all of my (Debresser's) edits.' In Talmudic usage, that is a case of Haposel bemumo posel, the pot calling the kettle black. You have violated 1R, unlike myself, and owe Wikipedia an explanation as to why, again uniquely, you think you have an exclusive right to (a) protest when others revert you, when you reverted everything they added and (b) you can break the rules others are obliged to honour.Nishidani (talk) 20:42, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

I provided that explanation in the lengthy edit summary. You are right, however, I was provoked. And the only real improvement I reverted was your addition of sources, however, I don't see the need for those, as long as they are not yet in use in the article. Debresser (talk) 20:59, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I appreciated the Talmudic reference. Debresser (talk) 21:00, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Of course you would. In context it means in challenging me as an abusive reverter, you are automatically declaring yourself to be an abusive reverter. You are breaking another rule: as you told me never to edit your page, I asked for reciprocal rights, i.e., not to disturb this page with your nonsense. I have honoured the pact, and above, you abuse it. Proof of the problem I noted: you edit arrogating to yourself the right to be above the rules.Nishidani (talk) 21:22, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

And lastly, in a behavioural pattern I have long found bizarre because it defies logic in its ex cathedra self-assertiveness, it is notable that I added text, you reverted it, and I restored it. You write above that your revert was due to my provocation? That inverts the law of cause and effect. You reverted, and by your logic, in doing so, provoked me. In short, for you, the effect is what produces the cause. Jeezus. What a nightmarish approach to textual reality. I've seen you get away with this innumerable times before third parties, and that is the puzzle, rather than your airy disregard for logical thinking and process.Nishidani (talk) 22:42, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Notice of edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you. Shrike (talk) 07:14, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

I didn't made an official report I mentioned you edits in Debresser thread.--Shrike (talk) 07:15, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Grab

Hi, I just had to unburden my - I don't exactly know what. I hope it's the keeping-the-world-balanced-gland, and not something else. Anyway, looking up a chapter from the Bible, I ended up, via wikilink, on a... parashah page. I posted a message on the talk-page and went on. Another one. OK, a new posting. And so on. Being a bit slow, I only realised after a good dozen postings that they are - legion. If you care to read about a chapter from the HB/OT, you end up in an online yeshiveh. Not even a thought lost over those who might not be into reaching the higher spheres of Rabbinical wisdom, but just get some basics - or, may G-d forbid, they might be the uncircumcised looking for proof that Scripture is all about announcing Yeshu's coming, may he... this and that, in a specific underground department that doesn't show up in the Hebrew Bible at all, but who cares, Sha'ol is too good for him anyway. So just take a look here, or actually at he sheer endless list on the parashah page (not all HB/OT chapter names are leading to the yeshiveh-only articles listed there, but a vast majority). Damn André Malraux with his "The 21st century will be religious or it will not be", I wish somebody had shot the messenger for a change. Is the fight lost, did Enlightment take its final goodbye, or is there a chance for the pendulum to take another swing? Rhetorical, rhetorical, but troubling. Nevertheless, nichtsdestotrotz (what a word!): have a great day, with peace of mind! Arminden (talk) 12:19, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

G'day, A. I'm just in the middle of darning some socks (no pun about wiki phantom editors intended, more likely prompted by a dazzled reading of 'The Tailor in Panama' the other day), which isn't quite conducive to thinking that kind of issue through. Spinoza managed it, grinding lenses, but he's in a sphere of his own, G-d bless his memory. Gimme an hour and I'll look into it.Nishidani (talk) 12:59, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Not worth getting one's bowels in a not over, surely. I admire the tenacity with which you comb the shaggy mane of wiki articles, teasing out the bullshit 'stranding' any number of pages, but these look like harmless links. The 'Micks' brigade, as disloyal heirs of Judaism, could do the same thing, since their lectionary corresponds to the parashot. But they lack the fervour of the kind of chabadniks who, apparently, make those links (and are probably too pissed to have the time and concentration: by the way, have you heard about the Irishman who was sandpapering rust off a car boot, and found a geni who offered him one wish, and he got his - the power to piss huge quantities of Irish malt whiskey? Can't tell it on line fortunately) I was duty-bound to attend a commemoratory mass yesterday evening - a beautiful celebration of an extraordinary, much missed devout Franciscan layperson, and the presiding priest, taking note that the liturgical year commanded on that day a reflection on St. Matthew, managed to spin a parashah linking her to Caravaggio's Vocazione di san Matteo, perhaps in deference to the prayerless widow who, pagan but eucumenical, stood before him in the first row. If the Enlightenment is anything it is tolerance, even empathy for, those, the majority, who will always feel lost in the disillusioning dimensions of reason's entzauberte Welt, and live, indeed flourish and prove splendidly decent, by virtue of the intensities of ancestor-worship, which is what religion is. The thing you mention is, really innocuous.

In any case, rather than lose valuable time over it, just post an RfC on the issue, and see what happens.As to the Enlightenment, I was persuaded in my youth that Adorno and Horkheimer's post-Holocaust reflection on the topic - a paradox because it predates the onset of the decline of the Enlightenment (more appropriately entitled siècle des lumières) by 2 and a half millennia: for them, the rot set in with Odysseus,(reflecting the bad press he got later in Greek tragedy, particularly at the hands of Sophocles) i.e. long before the actual modern phenomenon ever arose- In short it was stillborn before its formal conception - Their approach more or less hit the nail on the head. Unlike André Malraux, James Lovelock's record for prophetic anticipations has a fair success rate: he foresees 90% of mankind wiped out by the end of this century,(and given his longevity he may well be around to be there to verify if his calculations are correct). There is some consolation in this: as I watch, while dining of an evening, a large gecko housemate slip out of a breathing hole I drilled to relieve the damp on the kitchen wall caused by a rusted downpipe, and admire his nimble defiance of gravity as he skirts the walls to set up his nocturnal ambush for moths, I console myself over human mortality by the reflection that, after the anthropocene has wiped out its last victim, man himself, these midget miracles of the creaturely world will have a long-needed breather, and an opportunity to kickstart evolution again. Time for an evening beer at my local bar. Best Nishidani (talk) 16:13, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

By the way, Malraux later challenged that alleged remark often attributed to him, in a conversation with his Japanese translator Takemoto Tadao (竹本忠雄). He meant a revolution in 'esprit' quite another basket of eggs. But he always was, after the first three novels, a bit of a hedger.Nishidani (talk) 16:21, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

You've made my day. My compulsive-obsessive and escapist dealings with this Wiki-monster make me forget what's beautiful out there. I hope I can find the way out. I recently looked up Monochrome Monitor, and she seems cured. One edit per year can be termed a complete remission, I guess. I love geckos, they look almost surreal, as if invented by Escher to fit a pattern. Climbing up the walls might be a good start into a new evolutionary race for supremacy, but if this Covid housemate sticks around for a tiny bit longer, I'll be in that race as well. Unless the German expression proves to be the more realistic one, and I end up with the ceiling dropping on my head. Erich Kästner, only mistakenly relegated to the children's bookshelf, has a poem where he's calculating that the whole humanity would hardly fill up a cubic km, which cube could fit wonderfully well in a minor and nameless ravine in the Andes, easy to overlook. But then again, I hear my daughter's voice on the phone and hope Lovelock and Kästner and Malthus and and... go the way of the dodo. But not her, whatever "sins" I might have accumulated and passed on to her. I hope your beer is of the best genie quality in this whole wide emerald world and we both get to check out on Lovelock's fiasco. Thanks for the O2, Arminden (talk) 00:01, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Cripes, thanks indeed. That's a turn up for the books. I'd read at the University a mention or two of Kästner's poem but never followed it up, but now you mention it, I've finally managed to fish it out with a googler fly. Bit early for me, as brunch abroad beckons, but at a glance

A math guy’s now been claiming of late

It’s really about time we built a pile,

Something shaped like a solid crate

In size a quarter of a cubic mile.

Eleven hundred yards it would span

And just as high, room enough to hold

Two billion of us, that’s every living man,

That’s what his core calculation told.

A crate of this dimension’d fit in

All of mankind: muster a bit of heft

Up, say,a range like the Andes, then

You could chuck it down the deepest cleft.

And there we would lie, nigh out of ken,

A package looking just like dice

Thatched over with grass, sand blowing in,

And wintering under sheaths of ice.

Vultures would wheel and screech on high.

Huge cities would stand emptied of us

Up in the Andes mankind would lie

With no one round to give a tinker’s cuss.

But I must resume my identity with some tucker, loyal to Feuerbach's dictum, Der Mensch ist, was er ißt, and I'll be wracked by speculations about what Hamlet ate while I tuck in to a cream puff. Perhaps ambrosia, given his immortality. Nishidani (talk) 11:12, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

This evening I raised a glass, not siphoned from the genie's fount, to your and your daughter's health and the serenity of long lives. In deciding against having children, one of my arguments was science could not guarantee the conception would result in a female. From my own experience males are far more difficult: we undertook to parent for three months every year a child from Chermobyl contaminated by radioactivity. The poor little fellow bonded with me quickly, since he spoke Russian, but treated my wife, whose tender care was meticulous, as a woman trying to kidnap him, and wrest him from his real mother. She bore the wound of repudiated affection with unoffended stoicism. Nishidani (talk) 21:40, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Skål! That's the only kind of prayer worthy of a man, thanks. Sorry for allowing myself to comment, but egoistically speaking, shame you didn't pass on what you have to someone, be it a little Nishi-san. Or maybe you did, it doesn't need to be one's own offspring. There's also a son here, but he's in the monosyllabic phase and out of the nest, so for now it's about waiting for the next phase. As you said, boys. The Chermobyl story is worth a chamber piece with a Strasberg & Stanislavski cast. But you have to write it. Shall I understand that Russian is part of your language cocktail? Has your life's ambition been to prove that IA has nothing to add to our potential skills? It's not about flattering, I'm just being envious. So the kid was compartmentalising, and the mom box was checked already, but the - dad? uncle? - box not yet?

A funny symmetry: an Aussie helped me through the first lockdown. It was "Rake", on Netflix. Now I'm weaned off Netflix and you're anzacking to the rescue. Hanging head-down from the planet seems to have a terrific effect on thinking & humour. I'll try it at home with a bar. Maybe it's the bats who'll have the edge over the geckos next time around after all. Arminden (talk) 12:54, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Well if my elicited meanderings have a Covid19 function, I may dilate a little, I guess.

Nishi-san? The tetragrammaton forbid! Every child is a tertium quid posing hard questions to parents from the outset.Whenever small animals have landed on our door, up for adoption from starvation, they’d of course lack a name. Familiar terms of pet endearment would roll off tongues, as advice was given (Pippo,Felix etc., strewth!). I’d shake them all off, pleading the Plautine ‘nomen est omen’ to invest a creature with a name is to prefigure its fate or impose on its intrinsic identity when one doesn’t even know what or who it is. Weeks would pass in close observation, until some mastering trait or quirk emerged that marked it off from others of its species. And that determined its nickname. Some kitten crawled up to us on two paws three years ago. A neighbour hearing it mewling inside his house, gave it a practiced soccer booting. The vet said it was past help: fractured pelvis, broken femur, snapped tibia. My wife saved it, somehow, without a nosepeg. For the mere sight of someone, even with an eye-dropper charged with milk, would have it fart in fear as the carer approached. I thought ‘Auschwitzeine’ might do, but that seemed a blasphemy on the memory of millions exterminated in gas chambers. Then it came to me in a moment trilingually: Putzi (puzzare (to stink) in Italian/wee fellow in German /pussy in English. After three months with the name and nurture, the house no longer stank, though every unfamiliar visitor would be greeted with an anxious posterior efflatus for several months. Had I had a child, I could imagine myself fussily disrupting calls for a baptismal name for ages, until I might figure out a monicker which reflected some key aspect of a new being’s self-somatic identity. If I had one word of advice to parents it would be: don’t imagine your child is going to fulfill dreams of possibility your own respective lives have, by circumstance, forsaken. But then, I have no credentials from experience for giving advice there. .

I'm not bright (I've known far too many brilliant people to deceive myself there), I'm just fucking stubbornly curious. I should have written that I had a fair memory of a one year University course in Russian at the time, and should underline that, on walks, my occasional recitation of stanzas from Evgeniy Onegin – done to get him curious about reading - had the little fellow mocking my accent - certainly not as bad as Clive James’s slurring of Dante, but an honest assessment. One of the wonderful things about children, why they are more interesting than adults, is that they see closely how weird, farcical, hypocritical, pretentious the grown, accustomed(ized) world is and can prompt one, in their frankness, out of that complacency conplicit in assuming adulthood. I like to take Matthew ch.18 as reflecting Yeshua’s grasp of this fact, that adults must in a sense allow themselves to be re-reared by their children’s gifts of naïve truthfulness as they go about rearing them. What is art in its moments of creative sublimity but ‘edenic’ eyes/ears/hands refashioning our canonical perceptions by a freshness wafting in from the pristine margins of rare, undomesticated experience?

Decisions are never monocausal: the deeper one goes, the more indeterminate one’s grasp of the why behind the step taken. The best known example of this is the intricate lesson –asking why is pointless- almost ineffably woven under, and embedded seamlessly beneath, Frost’s ‘The Road Never Taken’.That may look disappointing in light of the Enlightenment’s faith in a fathoming reason that can get things right, but actually the indeterminacy of motives is our best claim to respect, our strongest warrant for tolerance: if we cannot quite know ourselves, we must tiptoe, like Cricetomys gambianus on a short leash in a minefield, when judging others. That is why much of the normal world strikes me as a lunatic asylum:in its predilection for attaching an ethnic badge to personal identities that are far far deeper, richer than any common factoring could ever allow. What is the lesson of the obscenity of antisemitism if not this – the most in-your-face example of expunging man’s redeeming, infinite variety of selfhoods – by collective branding, as a farmer does his livestock at pasture, before, as bills are to be paid, they are dispatched to the abattoir. We recognize the obviousness of the evil there, but it persists innocuously at all levels of everyday life – its name is Legion. To walk past a beggar outside a supermarket, and not return his gambit of ‘hello’ with a ‘hi’ is the small change of the same contempt. ‘Hi’ and a smile doesn’t mean automatically a follow up 50 cents. It simply signals to the other that whatever necessity drives them to ask should not be cause for embarrassment. That respect is their minimal due.

When I say a deciding factor in foregoing paternity was that chance might give me a boy, rather than a girl, it’s true, but like all truths, misleading in its partiality. We married late, my wife somewhat older than I. This is a family tradition on my side: our parents married in their forties, and managed four offspring, but my youngest sister was a Downie, whose eagerness to be was disfigured by radiotherapy caused by a false diagnosis that my mother wasn’t pregnant but had uterine cancer. The kiddie was given 6 months at the most, and the nursing sisters overrode my mother’s desire to care for her baby at home by a siege of arguments that the child’s disfigurement would disturb her elder siblings. Reluctantly she released our sister to nuns in a care home, on one stringent condition: that when the expected deterioration set in, she would be notified so that through the child’s last weeks she could have her mother by her side. Several months later, she got a phone call announcing the girl’s death, and was bequeathed a legacy of infinite grief that she had abandoned her little girl in that hour of final need, a hidden grief that undoubtedly contributed to her premature death. With that burnt into one’s soul, one doesn’t approach the prospect of late parenthood easy. I could go on ad infinitum about the enigmatically evasive complexity of individuals and their life choices, but note this just to illustrate the point briefly. Pardon the excursus. Nishidani (talk) 15:58, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Given the story of your mother ('Ihrer Frau Mutter' seems more appropriate, given the context) and your sister, as much as of Putzi's: it's perplexing how you manage not to hate. Or not to show it. I know all the invoked reasons for not practicing that soul-consuming rite, but it's one of the more difficult propositions of wisdom over reflex. It's such a huge urge to make those things undone. Please give Putzi a stroke between the ears from somebody she'd fart on. PS (to change the tone): it's good you didn't go about it quadrilingually, as Romanian would have pushed the thought from wee to weenie, in the innocent kiddie talk spectrum. It's a language not well-suited for serious discussion, as it has far too many of those associations. Arminden (talk) 18:55, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

The Romanian sense is also in Viennese dialect (if I can trust a memory of a conversation with a German mate from Karlsruhe going back 45 years). By the way, my life is a string of coincidences having dashed off that remark about naming /'impose on its intrinsic identity', I picked off the shelves Brooke's edition of Macbeth and sauntered down to the bar. A half an hour into my grog and text, I read the note to the line 'tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee' in Act 2.3.66, 'the act of naming conferred actuality on a thing otherwise amorphous'. The ad breaks over, so back to Crowe in that noir,'Broken City'. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 19:47, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Jeezus, another fucken ad break. I was perplexed why you would think those were memories that would stir up hate. Perhaps in children, but I'm old. I was keeping up with my daily university self-tutoring by eavesdropping on Paul Cantor's views on the Shakespeare Authorship Question and James Shapiro 's argument for the supremacy of Shakespeare over Milton these last few days. The answer's there -ah, the movie's on again.Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

My apologies. I implicitly undertook to finish my reply. (Un)fortunately, your point re hate left me thinking about that for two days. Inexhaustible topic. By Shakespeare, I suggested listening to two ways (at least) any passage can be recited, each swaying the viewer to interpret the protagonists' emotions differently. Watch, the different way, depending on how one chooses to read the voiceless text, a key passage in Macbeth can be played. 34 minutes in Lady Macbeth inciting her husband to murder down to 44:22 Shakespeare's genius, to recite a cliché, lies in the ability to slip inside every imaginable character, and make whatever prompting voice, evil or otherwise, seem plausible and, therefore, empathetically accessible. Milton too, though he's a hedgehog, does manage this with Satan, drawing our sympathy at key moments. But to be brief: every snippet we tell, of an incident, is only a fragment of a larger very dense story, a bezelled facet of the infinite prism of lives in context. So at a glance, the realities behind the incidental people singled out as responsible for a tragedy are obscured (the female doctor, or nuns above), so how can one hate what is opaque (well, a good deal of hate is excited by opacity, by (technically) a cathexis against an external object that in skewering the other unburdens an internal rage in the hater whose own intimate dimensions in turn have little to do with the excuse one would use to justify the outburst of hate. I used to make an experiment on myself: imagine a loved person murdered or killed by negligence. The result has always been (but this is hypothetical and perhaps vitiated by some narcissistic self-esteem) that the culprit would be invisible. The intensity of grief would expunge the idiot, a sense of some infinitely valued thing lost would leave no emotional energy for thinking about the cause (except if one was, onself, culpable - another story). There is nothing more lacerating for those who make a career of hurting than to insouciantly ignore them, leaving them to stew, and cope with their demons undistractedly. No need to reply.Nishidani (talk) 13:52, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

My current solitary confinement isn't very helpful with thinking straight, but makes me hyperemotional at times. I apologise for mixing two issues of very different amplitude, but what brought up that unfortunate thought was as much Putzi's recent story (you're still a neighbour of that Möchtegern-Maradona with Rudolf Höss instincts), which was the "opener" in your posting, as your older family tragedy. I just know how I cringed at the first, and then came the second blow. I think I'll go now and share a pudding with some feral kittens outside the house. A wonderful poet, Ana Blandiana, once wrote a tiny essay about how she managed to get closer to the least fearful & aggressive among a pack of stray dogs on her street (Bucharest had thousands after Ceauşescu demolished as many houses). At some point Italians were buying dog hides from Bucharest for luxury shoes, and the skinners didn't always wait for the animals to be fully dead. When the dog catchers came, that dog was the only one who didn't run. I can't put that story out of my mind. That's why I wrote "it's such a huge urge to make those things undone." Sorry, and again sorry for bringing up things like this.

Talking of morals and what a maze full of pitfalls it can be: I just bumped into a story about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is credited with changing army rules about immediately discharging female soldiers who became pregnant and didn't consider abortion. She helped a Catholic soldier give birth and remain in the army. Until she took that case, most women felt pressured into aborting. A twist in the idiotic "lifers vs. abortionists" saga playing out in that never-ending experiment called the US. A country that brought us Kodak film but seems to have a huge nostalgia for black and white.

I bet you'll find most of what I wrote rather shallow and all over the place, but you opened the door and I keep on crashing through it. Have a great day, with the kind of satisfaction that only comes about when thoughts and feelings are entering in resonance with each other. Arminden (talk) 21:52, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Shallow? Nonsense: au contraire. I opened the door, and anyone who enters is only accepting an invitation. In talking anything goes if it conduces to a laugh, or thinking, no harm done. Painful things have to be thought through. I did imagine you might have found the nuns' judgment horrible, and had a few backup stories there just in case! One explains why I never learn the piano. At 9 I was the only boy, in a college of hundreds of boarders, who wanted to learn the instrument. A nun had to be brought in to teach me, and in two brief lessons so ardently beat my nervous fingers with a ruler when I hit the wrong note while playing 'Way Down Upon the Swannee River', - the errors were incrementally proportional to the thwacks - that I couldn't write my lessons afterwards, and had to give up the piano. Sounds horrid, but years later, I figured out why she did so. Two teenagers at her convent were made pregnant by college students from my school a year earlier and she found going there traumatic.

Dogs, ugh, or horses or donkeys. It's a nightmare: Nietzsche in Turin with the thrashed horse gave me a few nightmares when I read it at 16. Man can overcome his instincts of fear and domesticate wild creatures and love them, less so with his fellow man. I've a million stories about dogs (cats are an ecological menace in Australia, and I only learnt to like them in Italy, where they are far less nocuous to wildlife than hunters) Thanks for the story about Ginsburg and the Catholic, particularly poignant now that the blinkered right is stacking the Supreme Court with ultramontane Catholics (I was raised (Irish-) Catholic and am deeply thankful for that background, despite all) to replace people like Ginsburg. The finest minds (that's nothing. No one earns their intelligence, and one should never boast of one's luck if one has it - it's the character that makes the difference in the fine tuning) in that court, for decades, were, like Ginsburg, of Jewish origin, and it's painful to witness the passing. It's like watching a baton change in a 400 metres Olympic event, with Jesse Owens passing the baton for the last hundred yard sprint to a doped up Ben Johnson. Cheers A. And thanks. Think of the positive side to being in a lockup. If Albert Speer could mentally walk to the Kamchatka Peninsula in his cell over 20 years using ethnogeographical prompts from the Spandau library, I'm sure sane people can use these two years more creatively within the confines of a home, with the massive resources of the internet at one's fingertips. Nishidani (talk) 22:59, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for mashing together the reply to your and Huldra's comments. Actually it was more than an answer, I should have placed it on my own talk-page and point it out to whoever does take offense. (I used to sneeze like crazy when the lilac was in bloom, and to escape my sadistic bench neighbour in high school, who said "bless you!" every time I sneezed, I wrote "thanks" on the table and just pointed to it while preparing for the next one.) Clearly, much of what's written there was not meant for you; more for putting my own thoughts in order, and also for Huldra, who I believe is also the one who called you to the rescue, and for whoever else happens to bother knowing my general stand. Which would be me again (I'm quite forgetful), with few other exceptions.

I've been through enough righteous eureka moments myself, finding solutions to major malaises of the World. But when sixty looks closer than fifty, there's less willingness to cheat oneself that perfect theoretical solutions are reachable in the real world, and the name of the Rückzugsgefecht (killer word, right?) is to defend at least some general principles. Others are holding on to their crusading spirit for a while longer - or forever. Louis IX made it to sainthood in this spirit, while being a total naught militarily and a nasty and heartless fanatic; others might fare better. And no worry, I've hardly ever managed to keep my New Year' resolutions - or mid-year's, for that matter. Have a great day, Arminden (talk) 17:56, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

mail

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again. Zero^talk 12:08, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Hamas

Sorry for not replying in the discussion on Hamas. I think your suggestions are good, but I haven't had time to debate. I'm already "stuck" in other almost endless debates on other pages. And I loathe having to debate so much, I just want to write content on Wikipedia. ImTheIP (talk) 10:48, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

No need to apologize. We all have our priorities, and bad editors are legion, and engage pointedly in attrition to ensure article content can't be improved. Debating is mainly a matter of courtesy, since some editors there are just waiting for the numbers to tip their way to shout consensus and plug in their POV crap. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 20:46, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

On euphemist substitutions

Here Nishidani (talk) 14:35, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Philippe Daverio/Bernard Cohen/Robert Fisk/John LeCarré, and dear Mickey Drippin', sit terra vobis levis

"la tranquilla crudeltà della burocrazia fascista". Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 2 September 2020 (UTC)Nishidani (talk) 21:39, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Request for Comment

Hi, I'm a reporter for the Jewish Journal. I just wanted to follow up on some emails I previously sent you – I'm writing about Wikipedia and it will include some information about you, so I was wondering if you could answer some questions for me so I could get your side of the issue. Aaron Bandler (talk) 05:56, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

There's nothing to discuss. This is just a rehash of a ludicrous story that keeps repeating itself, at least since 2008, a fantasy narrative that, deconstructed, works out as imagining a hydra-head Goliath yabbering in varied voices about how, in forays to plant the flag, one keeps copping a lot of flak near the Jordan from a miniscule bunch of Davidic (in his days of brigandage) nanonerds, and hitherto silent brigades in the hinterlands, incited to outrage and anxiety, are then asked to chuck in some lucre to finance a bruited punitive campaign to muster myrmidons and defend the imperiled trenches of entrenched opinion. It's all very boring. As I was taught by a distinguished economic historian 45 years ago, never take seriously a chanting refrain of clichés: just follow the money and you'll end up grasping what the hullabaloo is really about - lipservice to wet the snout on the gravy train.

• Tamar Snyder, ‘Latest Front In Mideast Wars: Wikipedia,’ The Times of Israel 14 May 2008
• ‘Candid camera,’ Harper's Magazine. July 2008.
• Benjamin Hartman, ‘An online battle for Israel's legitimacy,’ Haaretz 14 November 2008 on the Jewish Internet Defense Force
• Haviv Rettig Gur, Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Wikipedia:Editors fight against anti-Israel ‘mobs,' Jerusalem Post 16 May 2010
• Elad Benari, ‘Zionist Struggle on Wikipedia ,’ Arutz Sheva 3 August 2010
• Nir Hasson, 'The right's latest weapon: 'Zionist editing' on Wikipedia,' Haaretz 20 August 2010
• Robert Mackay, 'Wikipedia Editing for Zionists,' New York Times August 20, 2010
• Rachel Shabi and Jemima Kiss, 'Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups,' The Guardian, 18 August 2010
• Ravi Somaiya, Wikipedia: 'A New Battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,' The Daily Beast/Newsweek 31 August, 2010
• Avi Issacharoff, 'Palestinians prepare to battle 'Zionist editing' on Wikipedia,' at Haaretz Aug.29, 2010
• Aliyana Traison, 'Wikipedia founder: Israel-Palestine is heavily debated, but we're vigilant on neutrality,' at Haaretz 5 August 2011
• Eddie Wrenn, Will Wikipedia edit itself out of existence?, Daily Mail, July 27 2012
• Barak Ravid, 'Think tank: Israel's poor international image not the fault of failed hasbara,' Haaretz Dec.30, 2012
• Oded Yaron, 'Aligning text to the right: Is a political organization editing Wikipedia to suit its interests?,' Haaretz 17 June 2013
• Ben Zehavi, 'DC-based command center fights Israel’s war of ideas,' The Times of Israel 16 January 2015
• Michael Arria, 'When Israel’s military begins to attack, so does its army of online trolls,' Mondoweiss 15 November 2019 Nishidani (talk) 15:19, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Bravo, Nish. Dan Murphy (talk) 21:37, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

It might make you smile

A great example of involuntary (?) humour: check out the Falastin quote. Especially since the adopted style is so incongruently "polite" and Western. Monty Python would be proud of it. Arminden (talk) 23:31, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

That seeded my afternoon thoughts with far too memories of contrary things to allow me to see any irony in it. I think your summary misses the tone there, and the flaw in the original report (she mentions Hebrew and Arab press reports disparaging mixing on the beaches, but only quotes one things from the Arabic language that could reflect on the 'Arab mentality') Were it excerpted for a tee-shirt quote, as you suggested, the irony in context and the writer's rhetorical intent in the original would be lost on the reader who would construe it as expressive of sanguinary enmity.

Jewish women from Tel Aviv came to the beaches in Jaffa to spend time with young Arabs. The Hebrew and Arabic press denounced this phenomenon and wrote several articles condemning it. One article from the Filastin newspaper published in August 1927 wrote: “Several recent cases on the Neve Shalom beach in Jaffa have raised an outcry because a Jewish girl swims in the water, starts to drown and our boys rush to rescue her. Then there was the incident where a lifeguard himself, of course Arab, almost drowned. Rescuing others is commendable, but a philosopher once said, ‘Let me live on dry earth because I’m not ready for heaven … The Jewish woman will be kind enough to drown in the sea of Tel Aviv.”

Wear that snippet in public, and 99% of readers, as with the social media today, would take it not as comically MontyPythonesque, but rather redolent of endemic anti-Semitism, and underlying the often-bruited notion that the Arab response to having their country overwhelmed by immigrants from Europe was to plan for 'throwing the Jews into the sea'. Time for my evening beer, so I won't cite passages from the Hebrew press that would lend themselves to similar impressions.Nishidani (talk) 16:22, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

My sour reception of your joke owes something to memories of two Moroccans and a Muslim Bangladeshi, in three separate episodes over two years, some years back, dying after they dove into the sea in northern Italy to save drowning children, in an area where Muslims are despised by the Northern League. The news didn't surprise me so much as reading between the lines and twigging that many Italians present didn't take the risk. They weren't good swimmers like Ahmed Gebrel or Mary Al-Atrash, who had to practice in a 25 metre pool because access to several Olympic size pools in Jerusalem, round the door from Beit Sahour was denied for the usual 'security' reasons. The line behind the joke can easily be read to signify: 'Why don't these intruders have the courtesy to avoid getting in situations where their lives are at risk, and putting us in danger as we try to save them, when they are determined to swamp us. If they want to commit suicide, let them do it in their own backyard, not on our beachfront'. A guess at one possible reading in lieu of access to the whole article.

In short I always have a problem with context: for thirty years I've listened in, or read of, the most outrageous statements day in day out, pummeling our natural sensitivities to a pulp that, dulled, no longer quivers at the meaning of words in their sociohistorical context. As was said by Barry Jones the other day: when Clyde Cameron, who left school at 14, was scheduled to speak in the Australian parliament at 8pm (dinner time) in the 70s, the place would be crowded to catch his oratory, acuity of analysis etc. For the last twenty we listen to ex-University graduates, lawyers et al., primed with bulleted notes, penned by press secretaries and assistents, answering some opposition issue in question time, to an empty gallery. The ongoing farce of American politics underlines this: behavior and bold prevarication that no one, right or left or wherever would have ever got away with a half century ago, is now acceptable as an alternative discourse, equally valid, to half of the voting constituency. Damn it. from the smell wafting into my library I think I've scorched the fettuccine.Nishidani (talk) 19:34, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

The thing with humour is that if it's good, it can make you lough whatever the context. The Monty Pythons knew it. Recently a pastor pulled a face when I mentioned "The Life of Brian" - his loss. Move it to wherever you wish and (I hope) you'll be able to laugh at it. A Northern Irish newspaper referring to some (freezing cold) beaches in Belfast, or an old English one hoping "The French mam'selle will be kind enough to drown on her side of the Channel." Or simply turn the phrase around, as there's just recently been a case of a Jewish Israeli who did drown saving a Bedouin family, mother and children, from going down in a reservoir, and he did leave behind three orphans. I hope I'd have the courage to do the same, but that's nowhere close to the topic. There's so much dirt being spread around, with the US momentarily leading the way, and my own personal degree of isolation so quasi-total and depressing, that I'm more than grateful for anything that makes me not just smile, but lough out loud inside. And this line most certainly did have that effect on me. "Will be kind enough to drown..." You can't beat that. Arminden (talk) 23:13, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

This raises so complex a throng of interwoven issues that, given my lockdown antidote's time-consuming addiction (20 volumes of Patrick O'Brian's magnificent Aubrey-Maturin Napoleonic novels - Maturin's a character right up your alley, profoundly enamoured of the world's minor details), that I can't find time to do it justice. But the points raised (a) the nature of laughter (from Bergson to Legman) (b) why jokes work or fail (c) flouting convention by crosshatching the separate weaves of meaning (d) much like violating tacit taboos (e) and how the subset of the genre, ethnic jokes change according to who tells them (what the ingroup says in joking about itself, viz the vast troves of Yiddish or Irish fun-making self-mockery, takes on a different tone if relayed by an outgroup that is prejudiced against the ingroup) etc.etc., that to reply would take up an afternoon I cannot refrain from spending travelling with those sailors past St.Paul's Rocks down the coast of South America, sometime in the early 1800s. Let me for the moment relay one my father told me in the late 60s.

As planning for the Normandy invasion went forward, anxieties mounted among the British elite. The Yanks had such massive supplies, soldiers, ordnance, compared to what Britain could come up with. Somehow, they had to muster some advanced diplomacy to get more materiel for their own contingents than their bombed out industries could supply. It happened that a US general in charge of logistics was due to fly in, so he was given royal treatment. After a hectic day of showing him round London, visiting royalty etc., he was told he was to be guest of honour that evening at the Savoy, a huge spread with the cream of the cream of British society in attendance. Everything went off smoothly, preprandial snifters, alert conversation, sexy company indulging in flattery, and, as the men retired to a room over port, one Whitehall nob, asked the distinguished guest:

'Well, General, I hope you didn't find the day too exhausting? There's so much to see here. Could I make bold as to enquire of your impressions of London, sir?'

'London?, you say?', the General, four sheets to the wind from the grog,'I tell ya guys. I'm from Texas and we shoot straight there, and frankly, I think it's the asshole of the world.'

A moment of silence, as then his interlocutor, throwing caution to the wind, slid in one of those subtle knives of quiet English allusive understatement.

'Oh, yes, of course sir.... You're just passing through of course.'

It's a good example of how the joke might sound differently depending on whether an American or an Englishman heard it.Nishidani (talk) 14:19, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

[The template swallows the colon] :))) Thank you for the laugh!! I'll whizz on now. Or is it whizz through? Anyway, the park is the target. Arminden (talk) 20:36, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

That 'personal degree of isolation so quasi-total and depressing' niggles away at me. There is such a thing as the fellowship of wikipedians. Perhaps a poor sally of wit per diem might have some minor tonic uplift, so, here's another which was suggested to me by your struggles with the colon-devouring template. James McAuley, the very gifted Aussie poet and drinker, got cancer of the colon and the oncologist said an operation was needed: you have two options: radical surgery to remove much of your lower intestine, and therafter wear a colostomy bag - this would ensure you several more years. Or you can just leave it take its course, with retarding medical treatment. The latter would mean death in the proximate future is a certainty.' McAuley is said to have opted for the latter with the quip: 'Better a full stop than a semi-colon'. Nishidani (talk) 11:13, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

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Bantustans

Someone needs to tell Amira Hass. She can't write a book as written here, it's not allowed ;)

In this book, she plans to describe the external and internal processes of creating the Palestinian Bantaustans – separated and potentially disconnected enclaves of limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza.

Selfstudier (talk) 12:49, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

You know Amira Hass. Like Gideon Levy, she can't avoid writing bluntly about what she knows from first-hand experience. One is not supposed paedagogically to retain the clear-eyed capacity to see (which childhood endows us with) into maturity where complaisance with thoroughly socialized consensual thinking sets in like concrete. (When I read her I can't avoid recalling the fox's parting remark in ch.21 of Le petit Prince:'On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux..') That is a terrible burthen for those who wish to live a sane life. She's unstoppable, tetragrammaton willing. But I think all concerned about the infamy that inevitably arises if one embraces humility before the empirical facts (one of the prime criteria of the human(e) sciences, according to Robert Conquest and others), should take it up by the usual route -a shitstorm, to use a term adopted by Angela Merkel, of outraged emails directed to the Harvard Divinity School and a word to donors to draw the right conclusions about future philanthropic bequests to that institution. It worked with Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University, after all, and with a score of other scholars I know of.Nishidani (talk) 14:19, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Harv

Can I ask why sometimes your refs say harv and other times sfn? Is there some advantage in doing that I am missing? Selfstudier (talk) 14:41, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

This was explained to me by that technical wizard User:NSH001 several times. My memory has a certain notoriety among those who know me, but my attention gears into neutral with technical things in this field. I parse the sentences of an explanation, nod my head, do other things, and five minutes later the whole things has slipped out of the tentacles of recall. I know it is sheer laziness and sycophantic exploitation of NSH's time because he cleans up my messes much as a carer for the decrepit. He's posted on that page so if you drop him a note, (unless he explains here, a page he watches, I'm sure the diff will be clarified. It's very simple. Perhaps that's why I can't retain it in my memory blanks.Nishidani (talk) 18:40, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

I watch your page so if it's OK with you, I'll just ping him here: @NSH001:. I see Once is famous, lol Selfstudier (talk) 19:43, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

Selfstudier (replying to ping) Firstly, could you do me a big favour and e-mail me a copy of that Haaretz article? (I can't see it because it's behind a paywall). Many thanks.

On harv/sfn, it's all down to my ETVP script (there's a huge thread on my talk page about ETVP). Some time ago, I made a nice easy change to it so that a sfn at the +++end+++ (and only the end) of an efn-type note got changed to harv. This has the advantage that the reader can immediately see (without having to click or hover the mouse) who the author is, and readers only need to click once to go to the full citation (not twice as you have to do with the superscripted citation). It has the further advantage of reducing the length of the "Citations" section. I also think it enhances the appearance of the note, but I appreciate that's a matter of taste. Some people dislike the harv form of short citations, saying they disrupt the flow of text. That's why I only do it at the end of notes, where that disadvantage disappears; furthermore I only do it within notes, never the article body, precisely because of that objection.

But one thing that's been bothering me (and this is where something simple starts to get complicated) is what happens where you get two or more consecutive short cites at the end of a note. Fortunately this is quite rare, but when it happens it looks horrible to have an sfn superscript short cite immediately followed by a harv short cite in parentheses. This little problem has been bugging me for months, and I finally got round to fixing it yesterday, so that consecutive short cites are now consolidated within an explicit pair of parentheses (so it's still a parenthetical cite, but using harvnb instead of harv). At the same time, I made another change: if there are superscripted cites earlier in the note (not at the end), then the final short cite is then always sfn. Otherwise the presentation might appear to be giving different emphasis to the different cites.

Finally, if people really don't like the parenthetical form, my script has an option so that it can be turned off very easily. Oh, and one of these days I might get round to documenting all this ETVP stuff properly. --NSH001 (talk) 21:37, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

Technically (I don't know how it is done) that article must be cited at the top of the talk page of West Bank bantustans to indicate it has been mentioned in the news. It will no doubt be mentioned in others as well, since one of the people interviewed there has set up a recruitment centre and request for money to fund work to make Wikipedia 'pro-Israel', and is apparently pestering all sorts of news outlets to get notoriety for his group by coverage of this and many other I/P articles. Haaretz has taken the bait and unwittingly colluded in the wheeze, and you can expect further ring-in editors charging in. It is all illegal of course in wikilaw, i.e. to get meatpuppets to edit in the POV for an external agency, group, nation. But one shouldn't be too confident. So far we have masses of votes without any grasp of what the 60plus high quality sources attest. So far no one will reply to repeated requests to clarify why the architect of the West Bank/Gaza fragmentation explicitly informed his cabinet and foreign ministers that the model he had in mind, and which was then implemented, was a Bantustan. If an architect designates his building by a name, and builds it, and his successors in the firm add extensions, the building's design name is valid and neutral. It is an Israeli idea, not a 'pro-Palestinian' smear. But as usual, those who have to 'wear' the collateral effects of the plan's implementation are to blame, together with the dryasdust historians who simply write up what the archives note as the architect's intentions as those of his firm's next generation of designers. Nishidani (talk) 20:09, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

Comment on edits not editors

Please do not use article talk pages to comment on editors as you did here: [3] [4] [5] [6]. Article talk page comments should be restricted to addressing only content, without addressing other editors' behavior/knowledge/competence/etc. Levivich ^harass/_hound 03:45, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

I didn't comment on editors save for one remark where I noted that a newbie who reverts was immediately seconded in their behavior by an old hand. (2) you have been around long enough to know that in this area, socks are a permanent feature of the landscape, either stirring needless controversy or jumping in to sway votes. They are caught a few weeks or months down the track. (c) you know that a public announcement was made that in 2020 a coordinated effort was to be made to make Wikipedia 'pro-Israeli', and (d) the promoter of that plan wants the editors he recruits to out a handful of editors whom they identify, moronically, as 'anti-Israel'. He was interviewed by Haaretz yesterday. (d) I.e. that is an open declaration of war on the anonymity and neutrality of Wikipedia that is frowned on by the administration here (e) No editor, particularly the several who actually work hard here - rather than the forum fusspots who spend most of their time scouring pages where issues are raised to opinionize, who judge, comment on policy niceties, - is obliged to be stupid and pretend they don't know what goes on (e) If you really believe talk pages should restrict themselves to addressing 'only content', you should follow up your advice by doing precisely that. There is almost no discussion of the actual content of the article in question. All we have so far is erratic cascades of feelings, takes, policy flag waving, with an adamant refusal to face the reality that this is a content-rich article. It leaves few content, perhaps because editors find it easier to talk round the facts rather than addressing them, which means that they 'personalize' content contributions by considering it purely for possible impacts on their fav nation's image, rather than evaluate the facts to see whether, as per standard procedure, the content is strongly sourced, and grounded in known historical realities. There: more time wasted.Nishidani (talk) 07:49, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Here was me laboring under the misapprehension that WP was already pro-Israeli, tsk.Selfstudier (talk) 14:03, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

I dislike the pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian opposition tiresomely and tirelessly deployed in newspapers, hasbara, and on Wikipedia forums and talk pages. It is another damaging contamination of language typical of newspaper reportage of the area. I'd be embarrassed to be identified with a national cause or causerie. The implication is that if, per NPOV, one specializes in adding content regarding the Palestinian side of this complex narrative, ipso facto one is pro-Palestinian, ergo anti-Israel. We all recognize the insidiousness of this rhetorical strategy. To be anti-Israel means, since it is an ethnic nation, anti-Jewish, and therefore to write up the Palestinian record per NPOV balancing, is to sail close to the winds of anti-Semitism. I don't edit on behalf of Palestinians, and while I certainly write extensively about Palestinian realities, that in no way implies that I am anti-Israel. I consider anyone who is anti-Israel probably tinged if not dyed with antisemitism. If one does not accept that Israel is a fully legal state (and one cannot be for or against a legally constituted state per se) then, in my view, one is making an exception of Israel, and the strong odds are that, at least for non-Jews, this refusal to accept that inexpugnable legal reality must tacitly imply that the 'anti-Israeli' in question has some neurotic fixation with Jews.

Wikipedia is neither pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinians. Given the aleatory nature of who comes to edit whatever I/P page, and the randomness of each editor's interests and knowledge, you get a hodge-podge of articles written purely from an Israeli perspective (e.g.IDF), mixed 'on the one hand..on the other hand' scrappy adventitious mishmashes from a generation of editors putting in stuff they come across and some, not many articles that are written from top to bottom purely on the strength of a summary of the fundamental scholarly sources (these are exceedingly rare- save for Huldra's superb and amazingly exhaustive microhistories of nearly 500 Palestinian villages. That sacrifice of time for an encyclopedic project has earned her endless smearing and threats). And they arouse the most polemical ire because no one can contest the quality of the sourcing.

What is undisputable is that the I/P area is nectar for POV-pushing hasbara advocates, tagteaming, sockpuppetry. 99% of it, for decades, comes from people who come to wikipedia with an intensely passive aggressive attitude to the Palestinian half of the equation, and a spirit of impatient urgency that Israel's image as a flawless actor in a terror-ridden region is endangered if any uncomfortable facts that blemish it are cited. Working here is a bit like the Oslo negotiations. Israel had upwards of 200 lawyers working on successive drafts, word for word. I think Arafat and co., had 2. The difference is that, as with the present dispute over the Bantustan article, those in favour of the article generally have a fairly thorough familiarity with the history of the area and are acquainted with the scholarship, whereas those who thumbdown the article are all new to the area, and appear to have no knowledge beyond a newspaper reading background of any aspect of Israel's history and its engagement in the Palestinian territories.

Writing what Israel does in a foreign land (across the Green line) is taken as a judgment of what Israel is within its own frontiers (a fully-fledged democracy, albeit with an ethno-centric set of priorites, like so many modern states) Of the 10 regular editors who actually write articles in depth,- rather than waltzing in to kibitz and meddle-muddle for endless snippets of POV slanting, the majority of these content editors tend to spend most time on the Palestinian narrative. There are no Palestinian editors here, and when I first noted articles in this nook, that narrative was almost invisible (Hebron in 2007 was just a place with Jewish history, with the 2300 years interim barely recognized). At least two (I hope they are not offended by my naming them), Bolter 21 and Arminden are passionately interested in Israeli history. They don't have a neurotic fixation about Palestinians - it is not that reality which commands their curiosity, and quite fairly so. All these regulars have, from time to time, marked differences over content at times, but negotiations over text are not about POVs - it is a matter of accessing the cogently informed scholarship relevant to topics. We learn a lot from each other - and the standard hostilities of a 'toxic' editing zone are absent. Why? Because, all those regulars - whatever their POVs - subscribe to the standard methodology of the social sciences: (a) master the history; (b) bow before the facts if reliably established (c) don't think cui bono? (which POV will be buttressed if one adds this or that) when editing, etc.etc. If the result offends one identifiable POV or another, stiff shit: history can't be written worrying about the reader's tender sensitivities.Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

I generally view the IP situation through a human rights lens and I don't really like the "pro" label. I have been asked about my "bias" before and responded by saying that although in principle I support the rights of both sides because everyone has human rights, my POV informs me that one side is significantly more deprived of those rights than the other. I used to edit historical articles mostly until I had the misfortune to run into Icewhiz and another whose name escapes me for the moment. After that, I thought I would take a more active position. C'est la vie.Selfstudier (talk) 15:22, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani, I've been watching your talk page as I was previously considering leaving a message similar to Levivich's. I'm glad to see your comment that I dislike the pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian opposition tiresomely and tirelessly deployed and it gives me hope that we may be able to find common ground. Going back to the issue Levivich raised (outright dismissing the concerns of other editors with comments on, in your view, their lack of suitability to offer input on the topic), I think a positive way forward is to only address others' views when you think one of their specific points can be addressed productively. If you personally think a comment is total nonsense/wrong, simply avoid replying to it rather than trying to prove that it's invalid. Others editors feel that they're making valid points (or they wouldn't be raising them) so it's not getting us anywhere when you respond to every contrary argument to disparage it and the qualifications of the editor putting it forward, no matter how misguided they may be. Jr8825 • Talk 16:12, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for the input. The remark you bold has been my view ever since I began editing this area in 2006, often stated in numerous discussion on talk pages or in my archives.

My problems with comments begin when erratic policy flag waving occurs. I respect editors who go beyond voting in a stampede (this is normal here) and take the trouble to analyse the issues in logical systematic terms.

• The fuss this article engendered is based on the perception that those editors who contributed to it are using Wikipedia to attack Israel. I've seen that response several hundred times for over a decade. Whenever there is a controversy, arising from article content, regarding that country's policies re Gaza and the West Bank you get a duststorm of POV pushing outcries. Not infrequently, the innuendo is that this is, an extreme left wing, anti-Semitic, radical position (i.e., Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'tselem.

I think my whole career here shows that (not only) I reply exhaustively to any cogent objection raised about a page, or a subject or a reference. My problem in the two discussions so far (the AfD and the West Bank Bantustans) is that they seem, apart from two or three important contributions, drive-by shoutings about Israel which indicate that either the page has not been read, or the sources cited digested.

Levivich is a formalist. In many discussions on wiki technicalia he is often acute and neutral (in so far as I have chanced on them, which is not often since admin pages bore me), but the rigour disappears with this topic area (as it did with (Mottainai, where he had no knowledge of the topic or context). Frankly this list is sheer nonsense and I can only explain its speciousness as a reflection of unfamiliarity with serious content editing practice. I thought it a frivolous makeshift to give the impression of extensive problems, one that would, like it or not, tie up time in a pointless waste of argufying. But here's some example to illustrate why I read it that way

• (1)Toynbee writes:

'I prophesy confidently that, sooner or later, they would find themselves'. His text was in the footnote.

Levivich writes:

2.The "Background" section consists entirely of what one person "prophesied" in 1931. The word itself is not neutral and should not be used in wikivoice, but also there is much more to "background" than the opinion of one person in 1931.

Note how Arnold Toynbee, one of the greatest global historians we can have the pleasure of reading, - I have his 12 volume opus just a metre and a half from my desk- becomes just one person out there. Toynbee was also an international affairs expert for Chatham House as well.. But nah, fuckim, just another bod out there opinionizing like anyone else so undue. That is deeply contemptuous, like it or not, of scholarship.

I.e. he is saying (a) that one should not use the (ironic and risky) ipsissima verba of the source's writer. Well, don't whinge. Adjust to 'prophesied' (indicating it is quoted) or readjust to predicted/foresaw. No, leave it intact and make a talk page complaint about it, as if one can't just edit in a correction.

(b) There is much more to background than Toynbee's remark. Sure. But, as every editor knows, one writes with what one has, and over time the passage or section develops.. By Levivich's premise, no article or section could ever be written unless they emerge, like Athena from Zeus' head, fully formed. That's just silly niggling which, again, shows unfamiliarity with article construction.

• (2) putative defects by omission.
• (3) It omits large time periods that basically no RS about Israel/Palestine omits:
• 1.Pre-1931
• 2.1931-1948
• 3.The 1948 war
• 4.1948-1967

Where on earth does one get that amazing generalization that 'basically no RS about Israel/Palestine omits' The assumptions are at least twofold, and both are, in practical editing terms, absurd.

(a) Levivich unlike the rest of us working peons, has apparently a total command of reliable sources on Israel/Palestine? I've read a thousand sources that do not mention the whole time frame of the Israel(Palestine conflict since the majority of RS sources are issue-specific. Only comprehensive historical overviews, a limited if impressively furnished genre (Howard Sachar, Mark Tessler, Anita Shapira.Colin Shindler etc. cover that). Raise a point like that and, if you really do expect a reply, you are asking editors to state the obvious by mustering up a list of hundreds of sources which give that odd generalization a lie.

(b) The second premise is that an article on a specific theme must contextualize it in a comprehensive broader perspective, even if all of the sources dealing with that specific theme do not provide the comprehensive overview. That is an open invitation to engage in WP:OR and again testifies to unfamiliarity with policy-compliant rules on article writing. There is no evidence that bantustans (so far)were on the agenda in the periods discussed. There is a mass of evidence that the solutions mulled consisted of ideas about shifting the Arab majority into Syria and Jordan, or incentivizing the resident Arabs to emigrate (as with Gaza in the aftermath of 1967 - whole truckloads of them).

(3)The 1967-1995 section gives undue weight to:

• 1.What a small group of officers advocated for in 1967

This is considered significant by the Israeli Middle Eastern history specialist Avi Raz, who teaches at Oxford. We don't erase topic relevant material by ranking historians by some editorial assertion that a pertinent fact about Bantustan thinking, in an article on bantustanization, is intrinsically WP:Undue. That is a blatant absurdity in investing uninformed passing editors with an authority to judge what competent area specialists cite because they think it relevant.

• 2.The attributed opinions of two ministers (out of dozens and dozens of ministers who served during this period)

What on earth has this got to do with the price of fish? :Moshe Dayan and :Yigal Allon? To avoid ‘singling out’ as all sources do, the primary actors regarding West Bank policy Levivich says me must include the views of other cabinet members who were ministers for agriculture (Haim Givati) Finance, (Pinhas Sapir), Health Ze'ev Sherf etc.etc. That is a fatuously impractical suggestion, one that sources do not give us. Implemented apart from being WP:OR such figures have no place precisely as WP:Undue. That policy is very frequently the default policy pretext for people who can't find a serious objection.

• 3.The attributed opinion of Avi Primor

So? An Israeli political insider, with all of the requisite qualifications per RS talks about basntustan thinking in a period he was personally familiar with, is undue? Why? No explanation.

• 4.The 1984 Ariel/Peres thing.

What’s that, but WP:IDONTLIKETHAT? I added it actually for POV balance. Peres at that time, when an Israeli-Bantustan connection came to light, condemned apartheid as stupid. It reflects well on Israel, and Levivich dislikes that?

I could go on but I burnt the pasta trying to answer a set of silly questions on the talk page. In short, Levivich’s list looks to me like an exercise in barrel-scraping whateverism to plunk on the page a list that gives the Potemkinish negative impression of a long string of serious flaws, when on analysis what we get is a long string only of his misprisions about what policy compliant editors actually do in practice.

Objections must have a plausible basis. If they are, I am quite happy to respond. So far, that page just seems largely a mush of raggedly incoherent source-insouciant impressionism that it is difficult to sift serious issues from the sand-in-the-eyes bluffing, yourself and one or two others excluded.Nishidani (talk) 20:49, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

There are many points here to unpack and discuss with you, but I'm going to resist the temptation for now because the issue is not disagreement over content – it's comments about other editors. You explain your thought process to show why you "read it that way" – the problem boils down to the fact that not everyone reads it your way. Half of your long response lays out why think a certain way, which is fair enough, but the other half is bashing others for thinking the way they do.

Saying that those who disagree with you are "whinging", that their views are "sheer nonsense", their points showing "unfamiliarity with article construction", their good faith concerns "barrel-scraping whateverism" designed to cynically create a "Potemkinish negative impression", their ideas the "blatant absurdity" of "uninformed passing editors", mocking an editor for having "apparently a total command of reliable sources" and characterising their comments as "a long string only of his misprisions" (deliberate concealment of one's knowledge of a treasonable act) – none of this can be assuming good faith or acting civilly. If you think those who disagree with you only have "a mush of raggedly incoherent source-insouciant impressionism" with no "plausible basis", largely motivated by "sand-in-the-eyes bluffing", keep your opinion to yourself, rather than venting your frustration on-wiki. If you look back on your reply above, can you see how your content concerns repeatedly turn into personal attacks?

If we sat down and had a face-to-face conversation I strongly suspect we would find that our views on I/P mostly overlap, yet you told me at the RM discussion that my concerns were "mere assertions of an impressionistic personal opinion. You ought to familiarize yourself with the topic". The problem isn't content, it's your attitude towards those who don't agree with you and your refusal to consider their points, even if there's plenty of common ground to be found. Jr8825 • Talk 23:02, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

This is not about Levivich as a person - I find many aspects of his wiki identity, witty, of an analytic turn of mind, etc - congenial. It is about what be writes, and my assessment that, in this area, he writes a lot of nonsense. It's not a matter of asserting he is this or that, but 'unpacking' the meaning or lack of it, of comments purportedly on theme he has made here. I could go through that whole screed and unpack it as I did the first parts, and clarify in further depth why remarks that should address aspects of a problem turn out to be, designedly or not, remarks that (a) show no competence regarding the topic (b) are careless (c) waste significant swathes of working time by being so unfocused they seed confusion.

People of high seriousness, all of us who have that bothersome tendency, are all prone at times to be disattentive, unfocused, It was a constant theme of my father's table - commenting on keen, ready collaborators who had bucket loads of advice, but didn't know what they were talking about, didn't put in, or thought kibitzing as others work was an activity on a par with the actual drafters (he was an architect) or of equal weight to the actual physical labour done by men who mixed concrete, cleared rubble, jerry-rigged provisory tools to do something they lacked the proper instrument to do.

I find that the concentration level on wiki skyrockets generally when one discusses people's editing behavior in the denunciation forums - words with a subjective nuance, a hurtful tone. It is understandable biologically - man is a social animal of a species that spends a large amount of its time chatting, and grooming. In line with its Randian objectivist principles, Wikipedia nurtures as an ideal impersonality exclusively concentrated on (a) detecting sources of information out there, evaluating its merits case by case, and crafting that material by accurate factual paraphrase into articles. The rider is, don't interpret the editor.It's one of those Ibsenish fictions we are all obliged to take on board. Fine, but what is lost in practice is that (b) one inevitably must interpret the flaws that emerge when editors misread, don't consult, skew or ignore the sources. Those who confuse these two levels, often take to some administrative forum for sanctions people who engage in the latter as doing so because they are intent on abusing the former guideline.

Sure I used 'whinge' of L's preference for making a case out of trivia instead of taking two seconds to to edit in a one-second simple solution no one would object to. What's the problem? Why make a talking point when there would be no objections to doing what all serious editors do customarily without fuss? I use verbs and adjectives at times as a protest against a persistent ingrained tendency of numerous editors to chaff while ignoring the wheat. It's frustrating, and perhaps is meant, precisely, to be frustrating. But we are supposed to be grownups here. And people who move around here with such impeccably courtly manners as those set out in the standard galateos of the 16th century should recall that the cultivation of extreme sensitivities to the niceties of form thrived in a social world of lethal competitivess and social gaming in which the actual realities and facts were quickly lost from view, and they did so while showing a mien of disarming politeness.

I must make some breakfast, but I would appreciate a moment's essay on your part in unpacking just one example I gave of 'sheer nonsense' and saying where I err, or at least, why that demonstration is a subjective judgment about personality, rather than an illustration of a serious oversight by the editor whose remarks I was commenting specifically on. Best regards. Nishidani (talk) 09:38, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Just a note re my impression you were not familiar with the topic. That was admittedly harsh, making a generalization just from a couple of your remarks. What worries editors like myself is that a lot of editors who come in to comment and advise do do their homework, in the sense that they have clicked and read several or a dozen other wiki articles on matters connected to the disputed topic. But, Wikipedia articles esp. in this area are not very reliable, most of them are inept Pelion on Ossa amassments of the itsy-bitsy snippets added over decades, and lack long-term scholarly correction. By 'knowing' I mean regularly following publications that specialize on Middle Eastern history. Not that scholarship will tell one the truth of the past: it simply corrects the errors of earlier scholarship which had less access to the archives. It's understandable that few have the time to do this. And of course, those who do dive into the tsunami of info have all their work cut out to avoid the lethal flotsam and jetsam of collapsed theories and data as they surf it. I apologize, as a survivor of the tides of this infodeluge, for a certain arrogance in that judgment. Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

User:Nishidani has been told and warned to stop putting down his fellow editors, and was reported for it on various admin forums, who then decided to restrict my rights to report him, even though he is one of the most toxic long-time editors on Wikipedia. He is not capable of refraining from this, it is who he is. I have stated my opinion many times, and only find myself vindicated from time to time. Unfortunately, admins feel that reporting bad behavior is worse than behaving badly. Debresser (talk) 17:48, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

I.e to call another editor 'toxic' is a decidedly vicious personal attack, several degrees above 'whinge'. We agreed not to post on each other's page and it is a breach of good manners to play the opportunist and, in that Wikipedia administrative forum's beloved idiom, 'poison the well'. So shift that bitchy shit off onto your own page, where it won't raise a stink.Nishidani (talk) 18:16, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

(Caplan 2010)

Sorry if this was explained in the article and I just missed it. You said there was a secondary source for the Motro content but then just gave the author and year. Caplan is a common name, including the founder of the magazine, so just going off of 2010 is difficult. Also were you able to verify that the magazine was peer reviewed, to be honest I could not find any info on that.AlmostFrancis (talk) 05:24, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Neil Caplan of course. He is one of the fundamental documentors of the conflict all readers familiar with the topic area would instantly recognize.Nishidani (talk) 09:25, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Nagorno-Karabakh

Hi. I know you're thoroughly re-tired, and new topics might not be an attractive proposition, but knowing about your stance and involvement in the Palestinian (I wouldn't even necessarily say I/P) Wiki project and the topic of erasing cultural memory, I thought you might want to look at this. No need to drop the cuppa, pint or grill tongs and reply anything, just as food for your thoughts. Sorry if it's not a more sunny subject, but I'm a Kästner fan, if fan is the right word. Have a great day, yours truly & obviously obsessed with some old demons, Arminden (talk) 10:54, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I really enjoy the poems from him you send on, and am immediately tempted to rhyme out a version. Unfortunately, I tramped in a sweat, wearing an overcoat against the wind, over to a supermarket three kilometres off, stocked up on some Lebensnotwendigkeiten, and a farming friend seeing me overloaded, since I'd taken off my overcoat on the steep incline of the road back, offered to give me a lift up the rise if I'd have lunch with him and his family. Three hours of conversation later and a few glasses of bay laurel liqueur (got the recipe, will make) leave me only a few minutes before I go out for my evening souse at the local bar. Will get back to this.Nishidani (talk) 15:52, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Mein lieber Freund, kennst du ein Land wo die Kanonen nicht glühn? Two sheets to the wind, I think, after the latest outcry above about my toxic nature here, that a nice way to end the day is to make an open hearth fire and curl up before it with the sixth novel of the Aubrey-Maturin series. It will remind me that once upon a time even worlds as violent as our own managed to remain dazzlingly literate. Best Nishidani (talk) 18:27, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

The novels prompt me to digress (time for a Sunday reflection) from my absorption in them and turn back to respond to your prompt. In volume 6, Jack Aubrey takes on board a lovelorn hand, Herapath, who has learnt Chinese, ostensibly to help his father's Boston-based trading corporation in the Orient. Stephen Maturin notes on his desk a poem translated from that language:

Before my bed, clear moon light

Frost on the floor?

Raising head, I gaze at the moon

Bowing head, think of my own country. Patrick O'Brian Desolation Island (1978) 1991 pp.273-274

That sounds somewhat flat. It is one of the great masterpieces of Chinese literature, immediately recognizable to anyone raised in China or its diaspora. Even those unfamiliar with it can, if scanning the original characters, see how much is lost in the visual play of the poem:-

床前明 月 光

疑是地上霜

舉頭望明 月

低頭思故鄉

前 qián:'before';明 míng: 'clear, bright';月 yuè:'moon'; 望 wàng:'gaze upon (from afa)', all contain the character for 'moon' (月) And note the brilliant effect in the two lines where the characters tease out the component 月 as a minor embedded element (前→明→月/望→明→月) till at the first line-end it is capped by the rays of the word for 'light' (光), and, with the second example likewise successively stripped of its halo of radicals and subsidiary signs, like Gypsy Rose Lee shedding layers of clothes, it finally stands out naked, alone, a graphic mimesis of nature mimicking what occurs with the crescent course of that birthing stellar body in its monthly celestial voyage, morphing - much like the original meaning of the first glyph 前 which analytically represented a boat drifting along- from a wispy glimmer in the west to a fully formed moon. Not to mention the exquisite music of the wording etc.

What's the connection with Nagorno-Karabakh and its soon to be devastated antiquities? The poem's T'ang Dynasty author Li Po was a native of the Silk Road town of Suyab in present day Kyrgyzstan - not too far from the present area of the Azerbaijani/Armenian conflict- and, in one hypothesis, though quintessentially 'Chinese', he may have had some Turkish origins, since he states that he could compose poetry in another language. In that perspective one could read the poem as diasporic, capturing the nostalgia of a naturalized Chinese for his ancient homeland.

When I started to collect and read Toynbee at 16, I was struck by a phrase in A Study of History's incipit:'The spirit of Nationality is the sour ferment of the new wine of Democracy in the old bottles of Tribalism' (1962, 1:9). The Anglosaxon New World is basically a promiscuously diasporic mishmash of states with heterogeneous populations learning to live together in their respective national melting pots, and, comparatively (cf.Eastern Europe and Europe) have had a low nationalist profile in their drive towards modernity, always enriching it by inclusiveness. The Holocaust changed all that, decimating one of modern Europe's most creative minorities, and resolving its anti-Semitism by conniving with the madcap fantasy of Zionism of 'safeguarding' Jews by concentrating them all in a minute enclave in the Arab world. Europe solved its anti-Semitism first by the Holocaust and at a second moment, in the immediate post-war period, by a kind of tacit ostensibly guileless ethnic purging, and asked the Arabs to pay the cost. The loss was Europe's, since the EU expanded by incorporating into its eclectic embrace the classic, intensely anti-Semitic, highly nationalistic countries east of its heartland. These of course now are all 'pro-Israel' since their anti-Semitism can now survive undercover and thrive as Islamophobia. A leopard can't change its spots. . . The worst aspect of Israel's conflation of Jewish identity with a nation state is that it 'infected' the body of Judaism with a species of one-eyed nationalist-patriotic fervor the diaspora never had, but rather was constantly victimized by.

As Europe lost its most significant 'Other', Judaism's polymorphic cultures were all poured into the singularizing mould of a nation-state, with all of the potential flaws of such states: monolingualism, paranoia, ethnonationalism, bellicosity against very real or utterly imagined threats (the two are confused). 1948 was more than understandable at the time, not so much in our recent world with its climate and water crises, especially severe in the Middle East; the technology of miniaturization of nuclear weapons; the genocidal possibilities of germ warfare; the digitalization of all systems crucial to social functionality on platforms that can be devastated by cyberwarfare's hacking programmers, etc. Survival, if you take cultures and ethnic units, is only guaranteed by dispersion, not by concentration in a single targetable patch of tenuous territory.

The Azerbaijanis will follow the classic line, intensified nationalist repression of internal variegations, ethnic conformism, and the Armenians will suffer a further diaspora, like the Palestinians. In both those cases, the sensible thing would be to relocate way out of the nostalgic comfort zone with all of its chronic geopolitical threats, and live in diaspora, jealously guarding memory, language, customs and history. That was the lesson of Judaism to the West for 2,500 years (that date because the Babylonian authors of the Bavli tended to mock their stay-at-home Palestinian cousins, and felt themselves superior). I would hope, against realism, that since we are dealing with a mere 130,000, that Europe, the US, Canada and Australia and the likes could easily absorb them. After all, in a masterstroke, Merkel took on board a million Syrians and Germany will find itself the beneficiary of a polylingual, highly educated class of workers and fresh professionals pressed by the harshness of the past to strive for success as their children grow up and into the system. The Armenians, like the Palestinians, have a strong tradition of dedication to education, and that is why they succeed, as did Jews, in the diasporic mode. Near 5, time for a beer at my local dive.Nishidani (talk) 16:00, 29 November 2020 (UTC)