User talk:Nishidani/Archive 27

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Nishidani. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 20

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Archive 25

B

Hi Nish, re your comment: "since it implies such SA entities exist in that area, confusing a process for a possible future geopolitical structure with an achieved reality on the ground"; I consider the status quo to be a de facto permanent geopolitical structure (nothing is ever truly permanent...), much like the 1949 armistice lines. The current arrangement has the core essence of bantustans - that of providing a false sense to the international arena that independence and self-determination has been provided to the subjugated population. Hundreds of sources describe the current area A+B as being bantustans. Do you have a different view on any of this? Onceinawhile (talk) 11:13, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

I've no doubt that the status quo is a proto-Bantustan arrangement, designed as such, and more or less functioning along similar lines. But my angle from the beginning has been, as I noted twice, to document the history of the Bantustan model in upper-tier Israeli political thinking - the genealogy of the idea (a pity that when I introduced Toynbee's note, which really means, the way we British have organized the mandate bantustans are inevitable, an edit-warrior took it out not realizing that, thus contextualized, Israel later was doing nothing innovative ('Jewish/Israeli') but merely continuing with policies the Mandatory authority weighed up as perhaps necessary or practiced - a neat piece of POV balancing.) Israel is seeking an intrernationally-sponsored 'accord' with Palestinians on that model, which, were this ever to be achieved by negotiation, would effectively transform overnight the fragmented geophysical spaces relegated to Palestinians into a fully-fledged Bantustan model. It would be a masterstroke (recurring back to Toynbee's model) of diplomacy to have the Quartet, the US, Europe sanction, indeed press for, what would be in effect an apartheid model. Some editors voting for a name change or indeed erasure are thoroughly aware of this, but are worried solely among the negative image fallout.

In any case, the point of the major thrust of the article, since it has a chronological format, is process. I think it was a mistake in the RfC not to adjust the request to include Bantustanization. Israel's success diplomatically lies in its virtue of patience, to achieve a long-term goal by small step-by-step movements all however towards whatever goal it sets itself, and in this it is far more zweckrational than most modern nations, the US included.

The objections almost all based on an achieved common perception, a discursive victory in the battle of how media must report that reality, duly established over decades that any intimation that there may be an analogy between its practices and similar practices deplored in other nations, betrays hostility to Israel, and perhaps anti-Semitism. So the RfC will result in a defeat of the scholarly record, most of the details of which we owe, not really paradoxically, to the unblinkered analyses of archives by scholars working in, or from, Israel. Sigh. It is a constant problem in the I/P area that 'pro-Israeli' editors privilege the US mainstream press reporting over what Israeli scholarship states. They are either not familiar with it, or choose to ignore it. Nishidani (talk) 13:25, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

The existing discussion is an RM so the situation is somewhat different to an RFC, once again we appear headed for nocon, not that unexpected given the suggested title, more aspiration than expectation. The Afd closer suggested RFC I don't know why the suggestion was not taken up.Selfstudier (talk) 15:20, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Just to throw in my view on this, I broadly agree with Nishidani's analysis, which I think echoes the quote from Julie Peteet's article I shared further up that discussion ("With the enclaves, a new spatial device has emerged. The enclaves contain a population expelled but still within the territory of the state; they are neither camps, detention centers, nor Bantustans. Although certainly lodged in the same analytical field of other spatial devices of containment, they are unique spatial formation that we have yet to develop tools to conceptualize"). Peteet says they they're closely related terms but still distinct – and not perfect mirrors of each other.

I agree with Nishidani that as an ongoing process the term "West Bank Bantustans" (1) is not a fully accurate description of the current situation (proto-Bantustans perhaps, but Peteet says there isn't a term that accurately fits (she sees a colonialist/nationalist-political parallel to the immiseration thesis used to critique capitalism),

(2) I think it also risks going into CRYSTAL territory, i.e. we can say that "experts assess" that the outcome may look like crystalised Bantustans, but this is an analysis that we shouldn't state in wikivoice and

(3) as it's fundamentally a framework used by many to describe a situation which doesn't fit existing terminology, a more precise, neutral title (that isn't a contested, even if widespread, analysis) is needed: enclavisation, fragmentation etc. are indisputable and don't come with implied moral baggage ("bantustan" isn't yet a broadly accepted political science term in the way that "pogroms" is, for example, and there is plenty of academic sourcing describing how its use is generally pejorative).

As for mentioning "Bantustans" in the lead, I think the a far better and more neutral approach would be something like "the process of enclavization in the West Bank has produced segments of Palestinian land that [have been compared to apartheid-era Bantustans by many scholars/are considered by many scholars as exhibiting traits similar to Bantustans (of apartheid South Africa?)]. This fragmentation, together with the development of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, is widely considered to have undermined the prospects of an independent Palestinian state, and is seen/described as a primary obstacle to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process".

How Bantustanization is discussed within the body is more complicated, it's currently weaved in with the historical facts, which is advantageous as it helps to explain how events contributed to the situation we see today, but also problematic as the result is a singular analytical narrative throughout the entire text, one that is not perfect as even its proponents accept, and which is closely connected with the apartheid analogy – and no matter how sympathetic we are to the analogy, it's a fact that it's contested and seen as controversial by some scholars and political commentators, so not universally accepted. I know that Onceinawhile disagrees with me here, but I think presenting this without also publishing the views of those critical to the apartheid analogy would not be a reflection of "all significant views that have been published by reliable sources". The alternative, a separate, fleshed out section on 'Analysis' discussing bantustanization, and perhaps also a section on the impact on the peace process and/or Palestinian autonomy, risks being overly repetitive and perhaps under-emphasising the phrase (although should we be making that judgement as editors?), but I still favour it as it allows a clearer separation of the uncontested factual development of enclavization and the scholarly interpretation. I think this way there's also less pressure to 'balance out' the use of 'bantustan', as it'd be explicitly presented as a framework/parallel to describe the situation, rather than an uncontested factual description of the situation. Jr8825 • Talk 16:50, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, that is very thoughtful. I'm rather busy tonight, but will try to address your concerns tomorrow (of course any one is welcome to use this page to that end. The other place is far too rickrackety for my ears,) Nishidani (talk) 19:49, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Peteet's apartheid comparative is of limited utility since our article is not a comparison with apartheid. She expresses a more thoughtful view in her subsequent book, which is about our article, she likes "dystopic spaces" in that

As dystopic spaces, enclaves can be contradictory, fostering intimacy and creativity as well as isolation and despair. I use dystopia less to refer to a degenerative process and more to an exclusivist utopian project that spelled disaster for the indigenous population and transformed their terrain into dysfunctional, unsustainable places.

Palestinian dystopia, that's pretty close, but the opinion of one is largely irrelevant, many commentators just call it the way they see it, bantustanization. All these verbal circumlocutions are nothing more than an attempt to find a way around what the balance of sources say.Selfstudier (talk) 10:54, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm still struggling to find time to do justice to User:Jr8825's observations. Peteet actually does recognize, in the book you allude to, that for a good part of the period we are covering for the use of the term, what Israel was doing down to the early 90s was creating bantustans. Speaking of enclavization mentions the case of two Jenin girls who managed to get to Ramallah for a conference

‘They sought to enjoy every minute out of their enclave. In the enclaves, they are hemmed in by the wall, a network of Jewish-only bypass roads, more than five hundred checkpoints, and more than one hundred colonies that encircle the Palestinian population centers. Like Native American reservations and South African Bantustans, the enclaves reflect the power of one party to spatially enact its interests. Within Areas A and B, and between the major west-east division of the West Bank . . there ar over 160 enclaves; many are actually enclaves within enclaves. Fenced, walled-in Gaza resembles a geographically singular holding pen, the West Bank an archipelago. . . “Open air prisons” is an apt metaphor for the enclaves, which mimic prison conditions and, contain the marginal or those who are expelled from the social order.p.44

Her argument is technical, a contribution to theories of spatiality - which became a voguish branch of Political Geography sometime round the mid 2005s from memory. And the gist of User:Jr8825 argument concerns terminological neutrality and conceptual accuracy, which I hope to get time to address later. I will say that it is worth reflecting on euphemization in this I/P area, a process which is not neutral. Zionism started out unembarrassedly as a settler colonial project- When decolonization movements started after WW2, that self-descriptor caused some awkwardness in Israel's burgeoning relations with the Third World, so, as here, settlement was chosen as the default euphemism for what were and are 'colonies' in the West Bank. . . . I'll get back on this (I can accept, to anticipate, enclavization as the title if the first sentence is crafted to gloss as 'alternatively called 'Bantustan(ization)' ,'to remain loyal to the sources. My own preferred term is ghettoisation, but while several sources accept that, Bantustan remains the WP:Common name).Nishidani (talk) 14:32, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Nishidani, very well said. Two small points: (1) I agree ghetto is closer to the reality, but it is less common and has the downside of appropriating a sensitive part of Jewish history which I think is not necessary and arguably comes close to Reductio ad Hitlerum; (2) I remain of the view that this should be entitled with a plural noun rather than a -ion process suffix, as these areas already exist, and it is likely that going forward the enclaves will be partially consolidated rather than broken up further. Onceinawhile (talk) 15:57, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Your ghetto argument is essentially the same argument that the detractors are making against the use of bantustan ie making an association rather than assigning a word value. This is additional support for adding "ization" to either, it steps away from such associations. The present/past status is easily addressed by a title like "The Bantustanization of Palestine" which will stand either way while not hiding the fact of a still ongoing process (particularly in EJ, which we haven't really addressed).Selfstudier (talk) 16:34, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

ghettoization qua Reductio ad Hitlerum. I can't help thinking like that. Zionism for me is fascinating because it strikes me as burying the history and wisdom of Judaism. The analogies are constant (Hamas's tunnels replicate Bar Kochba's resistance caves and tunnels both made by an indigenous force to counter the military superiority of the occupying power: the existence of the former creates hysteria, while the latter are objects of devout tourism rtc.) but drawing them is tabu, it excites very intense spirited objections. Ever since I studied Victor Turner and Franz Steiner (whose wiki bio I eventually got round to writing after I was I/P permabanned for making 8 reverts in 45 days) a half century ago, I have been fascinated by academic or conceptual taboos. I think I put in here on the wiki I/P area because it is an extraordinary minefield, a terrain pitted with clichés which, if you step on them, explode, or rather lead those who set them, engaged as they are in strict semantic border controls, to explode in outrage. My father told me his unit's soldiers, repatriating by foot from lagers, observed or had hearsay of the Soviet army using non-Russian ethnic minorities, from places like Siberia, to clear them simply by being the first to march through them. Things like the reductio you mention are jejune, but that too has become a rhetorical trope to place a roadblock on the passage into discourse of a number of analogies that, precisely because they are by association tabooed, merit close and open study. Sorry, intense offwiki day, I still haven't got to Peteet. By tomorrow, I hope to write it up, unless the RM goes to closure with its inevitable, I would hazard, verdict against you scoundrels.Nishidani (talk) 19:31, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Always a pleasure to read. Thanks Nish. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:48, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Julie Peteet’s analysis. In essence, Peteet’s argument is that the Israel(I practices in the WestBank)-apartheid analogy is flawed because what Israel practices is far more savage in the rigorous thoroughness with which it carries out threshing Israeli wheat from Palestinian chaff than the SA model was in sorting Boers et al from the indigenous black nations. Implicitly, if that formulation is correct, she regards bantustans as a rather broader subcategory than ‘Palestinian enclaves’, which have more restrictions.

(A)She states over a fourteen points of similarity between apartheid and IsraeliWB practices, and then elicits two to make the respective realities conceptually different..

-The demographic proportions are different In SA a white minority dominated a maassive black majority whereas in the I/P area the demographic figures are on a par.

objection. So? One might equally argue that the analogy is correct because in terms of territory, both SA and Israel command(ed) 87% of the total land. (a)The land ratio implies an identity, (b) the demographic ratio implies difference. Peteet excludes (a) which strengthens the analogy in order to privilege (b) which creates a dissonance between the two models

-The labour situation differs: Bantustans furnished labour for South Africa, whereas the WB Palestinians now don’t (and won't presumably in the future). But she is critical of the wider analogy, arguing that that it was apt for those decades when Israel depended on Palestinian labour which is now expendable and therefore while in terms of their spatial arrangement the P enclaves do resemble bantustans, unlike those, which furnished house-cleaners, babysitters, cooks and minors, this is largely untrue of Israeli WB practices today. (here pp.250-251 and in her 2017 book p.63)

Objection. Of course that is untrue of Israel, but the analogy we are dealing with is not Israel-SA but Israeli practices in the West Bank (and Gaza) beyond Israel, where cheap Palestinian labour is exploited both by numerous settlements (even the Psagot winery) and major dirty industrial zones like the Barkan Industrial Park. At the time of her writing (2016) at least 36,000 West Bankers were employed in the settler economy, and that is an underestimate. This is an empirical failing.

(B) Since the issue is the validity of comparison, Peteet addresses the general problems related to comparison, which is undertaken, also, to establish generalizations that can be valid over the whole field of all human cultures. This higher-order conceptualization is extremely difficult. Steiner argued, for example, in his classic monograph Taboo that the word tabu itself had been misappropriated from a very particular sociocultural context in Polynesia and applied, with imprecision to all sorts of similar phenomena subsumed under the (pseudo)category of ‘primitive society’. The result was confusion. (my synthesis of that book on that wikipage is very much bare bones stuff, and would require considerable expansion to avoid misapprehensions) It is being argued here, on similar lines, that Bantustan is misappropriated in a strategy to broaden its reference to include Palestinian territories. The problem with that is that we know the Bantustan was an important model for what Israel did with those lands, something which makes Steiner's point irrelevant here.

Concept maps always imply an hierarchy: analytic classes have their subsets. Peteet is arguing for a generic concept of enclave that subsumes otherwise distinct subclassifications which can be represented, to use the examples she cites, roughly thus (a fork diagram/graph would be better, but I can’t do’em).

Category =Enclave

Primary Sub-divisions	Sub-class	examples
Non-Punitive	human utility	Gated communities,animal holding pens etc.
Punitive	carceral/immiseration	Gulag, Ghetto, Bantustan, prison, etc.

Primary Sub-divisions	Sub-class	examples
Uniquely Punitive	Hafrada	Palestinian territories

At a glance you can spot her error. She had decided to use the name of the class to represent one of the constituent subsets of that class, confusing the general with the particular. What the page's evidence clearly documents is that the Palestinian territories are designed as a variation of the Bantustan model, logical a subset of that set, since its defining terms are inclusive of the elements of the Bantustan subset but even more particularized.Nishidani (talk) 12:37, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

(C)Hey. Hold your horses, Nishi, the key phrasing in Peteet’s text that forms the gravamen of our colleague Jr8825ìs argument runs as follows:

("With the enclaves, a new spatial device has emerged. The enclaves contain a population expelled but still within the territory of the state; they are neither camps, detention centers, nor Bantustans. Although certainly lodged in the same analytical field of other spatial devices of containment, they are unique spatial formation that we have yet to develop tools to conceptualize.").p.268

Uniqueness is a notoriously null category in comparativist thinking (Toynbee pulled it to pieces in the 1930s) Peteet must be aware of this since she herself remarks

The post-modern turn in anthropology- which claimed the uniqueness of cultural phenomena while tending to gloss over economic and political structures carried with it an anti-science tone that further marginalized the comparative method.'pp253-254

Her next move is to declare

This article subjects the Zionist/apartheid comparison to an anthropological analysis that is trans-regional and historically grounded, and which also attends to each case's distinctions. In doing so, it works to de-exceptionalize an ongoing settler colonial project.

She recognizes that Israel’s hasbara is premised upon the notion of exceptionalism (which debars comparisons, esp. invidious analogies). Exceptionalism is a euphemism for ythe narcissistic self-sufficiency implied by 'uniqueness')

In this particular instance, comparison also unfolds in the context of the muting of an Arab narrative, history, and presence in Palestine. Palestinian narratives have been dwarfed by the hegemony of Zionist constructions of history. This may animate, in part, assertions of an Israeli/apartheid comparison and can illuminate the way cases of comparison are not simply given but are constructed in specific political and historical moments to accomplish certain tasks. A comparative approach to Israel as one in a panoply of settler colonial societies butts up against a vigorous national narrative claiming "exceptionalism". p.254

The extraordinary thing in these scattered statements is that her conclusion argues for Israeli exceptionalism, as in the above passage quoted by Jr8825, whereas her prefatory remarks dismiss it as part of an Israeli POV spun for the persuasive effect it has in dominating discourse on Palestinians. Nishidani (talk) 13:47, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

So the end result is actually a third subset

Primary Sub-divisions	Sub-class	examples
Uniquely Punitive	Hafrada	Palestinian territories

This hafrada (p.260) denotes putatively a distinct entity in the series which sociology had yet to develop adequate analytic tools to conceptualize. (The unique by definition cannot be conceptualized, technically), therefore endless waffle. I really admire Peteet's work, but that take sounds dangerously like (which I'm sure wasn't her intent) a bid to carve out new territory in the anthropology of political institutions, in defiance of the only principle that counts in broad concept formation in the social sciences, Occam's razor.Nishidani (talk) 14:35, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

(D) Word bias and neutrality.

Palestinian identity

For my interest, do you happen to know if Palestinians divide themselves up in their discourse as "West Bankers" (as you used it above), (East)Jerusalemites and Gazans? Leaving aside the Palestinians of Israel. Has the very identification as Palestinian also been fragmented?Selfstudier (talk) 13:33, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Selfstudier, no it has not. Palestinian nationalism remains firmly rooted in pre-48. For example most Gazan identities will be along the lines of “I am a Palestinian from Gaza, and my parents were from Lydda”. The word sumud sums it up nicely, by which I mean that the Palestinian psyche is fully focused on ensuring that the Israeli government does not achieve their goals of destroying the “Palestinian people”. The breakdown in political relations between the WB and Gaza is considered to have been aided and abetted by Israel, so the Palestinians refuse to give in to what they consider to be a transparent colonial strategy of divide and conquer. Onceinawhile (talk) 14:16, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

A question

Here I propose a principal for Wikipedia articles:

History of State of Israel - deals primarily with the history of the modern State of Israel with less weight to its origins (Zionism, Diaspora, ancient Jews etc.) which are explained in various articles. Respect to Israeli Zionist narratives.
History of State of Palestine - deals primarily with the history of the modern nation of Palestine and its roots from the 19th century and with mentions to the origins in late and early Islamic periods as well as relations with more ancient people (explained through DNA for example). Respect to Palestinian Arab narratives.
History of Israel and Palestine - deals comprehensively with the history of the land from the formation of its geology and appearance of fauna and flora, through the arrivals of homo species, through the process of neolitization and the formation of civilization, and through history until the early modern period. Respect to anthropological, archaeological, and historical narratives.

Will you agree to this principle? And if better titles are possible, please contribute.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 13:39, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I think you are correct with regard to 1 and 2. The History of Israel article is a total wreck, probably (I haven't checked) a response to the History of Palestine article. Unfortunately, I disagree with the third proposal. There was no 'Israel' for over two millennia, and the default term in historiography is Palestine. Gudrun Krämer is more sympathetic (between the lines) to Israel's achievement than to the Palestinians (without prejudice) but entitled her magisterial 2011 work A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. The outstanding French Arabist Henry Laurens shows throughout an empathy for the Palestinian record, while remaining rigorously neutral, and like Kramer sticks to the tradition in calling his historical quadrilogy on the modern period La Question de Palestine. A strong historical imagination must accept the lay of the land, which is dissonant. Dissonance can stick in the craw, sometimes, I know. But it is what our understanding of reality demands.The tasks you propose are huge and I worry that, taking them on board will affect your studies. You are one of the most promising editors for this area, esp. now your university studies are underway. The longterm benefits you will reap from your curricular engagements should take priority over a sense that Wikipedia's ongoing mess in this area requires immediate overhauls of an herculean dimension. festina lente But this is just my prejudice kicking in. Nishidani (talk) 14:10, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I am aware of the international use of the name "Palestine" to refer to this land, but I've seen in many other places the parallel use of "Israel". For example, the journal Paléorient only uses the current political names (Israel, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria etc.). Amihai Mazar which I can only believe is an enthusiastic Zionist like the rest, uses "Palestine" in his volume of Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, but Amnon Ben-Tor, from roughly the same school, uses "ancient Israel" in his Archaeology of Ancient Israel (which deals in everything from the Neolithic to the Iron Age). It is a serious problem to find a label for the land. The Oxford Handbook of Levantine Archaeology simply chose to call it "Cisjordan", as opposed to "Transjordan". I think that "Israel and Palestine" or "Palestine and Israel" is a great compromise. Making both sides equally happy is impossible, so maybe it is better to make them equally unhappy because most of the views goes to History of Israel rather than History of Palestine. One thing is clear, you will not get a proper history of the land under "History of Palestine". I will not contribute to it and Israeli narratives will barricade "History of Israel" and a counter-narrative and while I have the clash of narratives, I totally understand that. The only thing I want is a framework to deal with history, and the label "Palestine" is simply not acceptable. Most of the people who read about this land care more about the "Israel" part of it, since this is the modern state that is there, and an ignorant person thinks of "Israel" just like he thinks of "Poland". I think that proper documentation of the people who didn't record their history is much more important than the etymologic reality of "Palestine" in the 19th-century Christian world and its implication on modern academic sources. This is Wikipedia, not Oxford and I don't trust the good faith in saying that "Palestine" is merely the academic name of the land accepted by both neutral scholars and Zionists.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 15:05, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Oh and I don't think it will have a negative effect on my studies. I am busy enough and frankly speaking all of the essays I write to myself to memorize what I learn look like Wikipedia articles.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 15:11, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

That augurs well for the future of Wikipedia. Your homework will provide us with great improvements, in old as well as new articles. RegardsNishidani (talk) 22:30, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

The only thing I want is a framework to deal with history, and the label "Palestine" is simply not acceptable. Most of the people who read about this land care more about the "Israel" part of it

Who are 'most of the people?' This is a global encyclopedia. One quarter of potential readers are Chinese for whom the historical region is 巴勒斯坦地區 (Balesitan). Even your proposal amounts to a title change, because Israel only since 1967 can be construed to refer to all of that territory (i.e. as many of its maps project); in those short centuries where there were two distinct Israelite political entities, you could hardly lard the narrative by referring to them as 'Israel'. It is even worse to speak of the land prior to the monarchic period as 'ancient Israel'. Talking of the Chalcolithic area in those terms is profoundly question-begging or linguistically slipshod in its pointiness. Sources would simply not allow a regular alternation of Israel and Palestine. It doesn't work geographically or historically. I know you find it unacceptable. Most scholars are comfortable with it, and I think that true of the broader reading public. I am surprised at the drastic adjective 'unacceptable'. Remember Zionism is an ideology and Israel is the one modern democratic state which still subscribes to an ideology, bringing with it a fixed mindset that is relatively impermeable to considerations of neutrality.Nishidani (talk) 18:47, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

In addition, as we know from Cartography of Palestine and Travelogues of Palestine, the name Israel is not used for the area in ANY pre-modern geographical sources. Not one. As a geographic name it is a neologism. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:52, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

and it is disappointing that you think that there is something 'Christian' in this. Christians regard themselves as 'children of Israel', not of Palestine. Some day, all these wiki articles with their hectic sweated Manichaean battles over what is Jewish and what is Arab will, if they ever become readable and reliable texts, have to register the fact that a major third party has for millennia had as profound an attachment to the land of Palestine as the other two. I state that as a pagan. Nishidani (talk) 21:08, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I believe there will be a solution for that issue. Until then it is better to focus on other stuff.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 22:39, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Calling spades shovels

I don't know how much you keep track of the goings on, you certainly know about the so called "outposts", illegal both in international and in Israeli law. So there was first a "regularization bill" to make them legal and this has fallen by the wayside but no matter, there is the slower process whereby everyone pretends that they were set up on private Palestinian property "in good faith" and they get "legalized" one at a time in that manner. But having seen Trump's plan wither away and himself about to leave the scene, this is too slow for these particular settlers who have now hit upon a rebranding of themselves as "Young settlements" and are now trying to get everything legalized in a rush while there might still be a chance to do so. Of course it is of little relevance since the youngsters will only grow up into adult settlements and remain illegal internationally.Selfstudier (talk) 11:39, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I hadn't heard of that one. The Chinese logicians spoke of a rectification of names, which however is a far more complex issue than the name itself suggests. Brand names are marketing devices, though selling this one amounts to little more than a shabby ploy to steal land without regard to prior ownership or market value. I wouldn't, as an outsider, mind Israel taking over the whole of historic Palestine, so long as it was prepared to pay the contemporary market value of the physical assets, along the lines followed by Israel's fundamental model for creating the nation, i.e.,the Louisiana or Alaska Purchases, though there it was a matter of empires buying and selling assets regardless of the indigenous populations, whereas in the I/P area,.. there's that little complication of the identity of the local population with its legal or international title. and Palestinians have proven, historically, to be far too attached generally to their land to evaluate it on a commercial basis.Nishidani (talk) 13:13, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

	Merry Christmas Nishidani
	Hi Nishidani, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Year, Thank you for all your contributions to Wikipedia, –Davey2010^Talk 20:01, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Talk page guideline

Hi it seem that by this edit [1] you violated WP:TALKHEADPOV Specifically:

Don't address other users in a heading: Headings invite all users to comment. Headings may be about specific edits but not specifically about the user. (Some exceptions are made at administrative noticeboards, where reporting problems by name is normal.)

Please fix it.Thanks --13:05, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Look, every other edit of yours I seem to happen on has a spurious edit summary, and the last one was particularly gross: pretending that there was a source falsification when none existed. It is obvious that you didn't do your homework: of three sources you read the first, and jumped at the impression the text was flawed, whereas had you read the accompanying second and third reference to the same text you would have realized it was correct as a view attributed to the New York Times. That is either sheer laziness, or POV pushing, and, as usual, causes serious editors to waste their time. This is particularly reprehensible because you ignored the revert motivation I made and restored the defective text you wanted to showcase. Of course I will slightly alter the header, but something like that is needed to wake up editors who persist in not focusing.Nishidani (talk) 13:44, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

West Bank bantustans

Please strike your comments today about editors at Talk:West Bank bantustans. Levivich ^harass/_hound 15:53, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't harass people and never have, on line or in real life i.e.,I don't resort on principle to using a microscope to parse everything said in a discussion to tease out potentially 'incriminating' spoors that, at some distant tribunal, might lead one or two to suspect that some extreme sensitivity to honour has been deliberately rubbed up the wrong way. If editors paid as much attention to the logical and material substance of arguments, as several do to pettifogging over perceived hurts, even such innocuous generalizations as my own would not be read that way. Concretely clarify to me whose point of view, Israel's or the Palestinians', is violated when one mechanically, as so many editors do, mentions MPOV as disrupted? I've asked several times. No one will clarify. Is calling Palestinian territories 'Bantustans' not neutral with regard to Israel, the occupying power that fragments them, or is is not neutral with regard to Palestinians in those 'enclaves'. Clarify that here, and I might reconsider. No one else seems to give this crucial question any consideration, and that refusal to respond may well engender some light 'frustration'. Nishidani (talk) 18:09, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

I will not discuss article content with an editor who relentlessly insults other editors. The following comments of yours at Talk:West Bank bantustans are just from the last week, but you have been making comments like this for months (e.g., my Nov 27 request here at your talk page at #Comment on edits not editors).

Jan 2: "That is extremely muddled thinking, that shows no familiarity with the article's documentation. You are describing a future situation as a 'de facto' reality, for Chrissake. Read WP:CRYSTALBALL and try to get some handle on orderly rational focused analysis." [2]
Jan 3: "Nope. Once more you are not reading or remembering the sources, or even grasping my points. ... Alas, sigh. But this is Wikipedia, where numbers count, and an impressionable glance at chat, not familiarity with the scholarly complexities." [3]
Jan 4: "Point proven. You don't understand the terms you use, and you don't grasp that this, apart from the obtuse disregard for English usage, violates WP:Crystal." [4]
Jan 5: "I.e. you don't understand the meaning of the legal terminology you cited, and apparently didn't even bother to check it on Wikipedia itself. The future doesn't exist in reality, exception in some temporal implications of physics theories and comic books." and "... a majority voting for the proposed name change on some vague assertion of NPOV while totally ignoring or failing to answer the crux ... and the actual editors of the page familiar with the topic's sources, and having extensive textual evidence ..." [5]
Jan 7: "Just to remind editors how really thorough POV whitewashing occurs, the (ostensibly) corresponding, sister article in Hebrew has actually zero references to the extremely well documented thinking about the Bantustan model which we have here. Great job there! Absolutely NPOV - in the sense it is being used here: never refer to the actual facts." [6] [7]
Jan 8: "The contrafactual reading has consensus, but then again, as recent events remind us, people don't focus on reality and the meaning of terms." [8]
Jan 8: "The majority refusal to accept 'enclavization' however boils down to either unfamiliarity with the subject, or POV voting for a political result favourable to one of the two parties in the dispute ... I'm a realist. While I've been arguing 'enclave' uninflected is a gross violation of NPOV, I have been convinced nonetheless from the outset that, as so very often, political calculation of the crucial national interest will determine the outcome, as it has. Few actually edit this hotspot area, but touch the national interest of that country, and masses turn up and the serious arguments are buried. I've watched this going on for 14 years." [9]
At this point, I wrote the above message here on your talk page, after which you posted on the article talk page: "The silence on this is another distrubing elephant in the room of this talk page" [10], which seems to be a continuation of the above.
And also "Editors should be able to explain what they have in mind when flagwaving a policy like NPOV, i.e. not neutral regarding entity? So far there is a studied silence it, it's all nodnod, winkwink. So, to repeat, an explanation is required of a policy endlessly flagged, but not specified as to its contextual referent. I'm patient. Levivich?" [11]

Please fix your comments. Levivich ^harass/_hound 18:57, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Oh, I see (I can't see anything a normal person with a normal adult ability to engage in difficult discussions should find wounding there. Yes, there is probably some 'stuff' that just might allow anyone with malice aforethought who do muck a drama at AE, to rid Wikipedia of another troublesomely constructive editor in an area where a bare several editors are constructive while dozens, quick to complain, do little more than tweak, revert, argue incomprehensibly ('muddled thinking' is a precise description of the comments, and I analysed exactly why, linguistically, the editor in question was confused. At AE you will quote the term, and ignore the substance of my refutation, which can't be talked around, since it is logically indisputable that 'de facto' cannot refer to a future reality,etc.etc.etc.) This list strikes me as just a formal preliminary: the second stage of a double-barreled punishment process, begun with the denunciation of Oncenawhile, and to be followed up by a report to AE against myself, in both cases for documenting the scholarly treatment of an argument that should not be covered in the terms the academic literature uses. You are asking me to spend hours discussing and redacting my comments? No. I really have real life commitments that scarcely allow me to parry pettifogging for days and days. I've made a list of a 11 people who would jump at the opportunity to push the complaint, so the odds are you'd win this gambit. I don't think I'll even trouble to defend myself. My defence is in the quality of the articles I write or rather, that, I never complain of the silliness of this place, but simply add content most of the time, and 99& of its sticks not from any merit on my part, but because I read and paraphrase what authoritative scholars say, and don't give a flying fuck for the consequences.Nishidani (talk) 23:24, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

The only thing I ever ask of you, and I've been asking for over two years now, is that you stop being so mean to other editors. It's not a big ask. Hundreds of thousands of editors over 20 years have had no problem editing without being mean to other editors. I don't know why you do it, and I don't know how to get you to stop. Levivich ^harass/_hound 04:47, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

'Mean'? The word you've chosen always has a Dickensian edge to my ear. I give away a tenth of my pension to the poor every month, just as I tithe what knowledge I have or garner in daily reading so that a broader public, via Wikipedia, can, without troubling to work, familiarize themselves with what the finest minds - those whom we paraphrasing peons owe our debts - think about whatever topic is being described. Only a fool or someone with personality problems would think that doing this has some egoistical return. There, in self-defense against a horrible epithet flung my way to pin me on the wall as 'disruptive', you've forced me to say things I'd prefer not be known. And I am not an exception: the several editors who have dedicated years of hard offline reading to get a balanced perspective on two parties in this 'toxic' area, and not just revert, tweak, or thoughtlessly opinionize, have perhaps even a longer history of 'harassment' on and offline, than myself. The immediate antecedent here is the disgraceful way several people have jumped at a chance to use Wikipedia's pettifoggery about niceness to get at one really erudite gentleman whose precise contributions to this place and general kindness in the face of real stalking harassment should be a model for everyone. There's where this mania for formalizing etiquette gets you (one) - the loss of all perspective and the devastation of the most elementary criteria of decency.

I am sure you cannot not know that several organizations have gone public declaring that they intend to fix this area of Wikipedia by assailing with smears editors who don't show love for their political cause. But this manipulative intent is not, apparently, something that raises your distaste, or fits your criterion of social 'meannness'. Yeah, I dislike waffling, fuzzy illogic, and the abuse of precise language, and if I sight people who come up with opinions that are nonsensical, I will often state that fact. I learnt to respect teachers who do that, because only by doing that, rather than endlessly worrying about their students' 'sensitivities', do they manage to get us, students all, to reach beyond our adolescent frivolousness or blind amour propre or passionate dedication to some vague cause, by inculcating us with the sense that respect for knowledge is the goal. That requires (a) humility, because to learn the lesson you must acquire a sense that there are and always will be people who know more than you do (b) a subjugation of a natural, if embarrassing, self-protective instinct to be loved, admired or recognized to an objective benchmark where self-regard must always readjust itself according to external criteria relating to integrity - bridling one's subjective biases, so that one's understanding is ever more closely harnessed to the facticity of the world and its logical forms. The cause of civilization is not advanced by slipshod thinking: that is why social media are not civilizing, and the more we prioritize, on Wikipedia, securing an environment where everybody must calibrate their behavior to make the vast anonymous world of contributors, with all of their mixed motivations, feel 'good' and comfortable, even when we egregiously goof off (as with that horrible de facto example), the stronger the tendency of this place will be to drift away from its extraordinary ambition to be a universal encyclopedia of global enlightenment. If one thinks enlightenment is not hard won, -that knowledge itself comes invariably from learning the ropes in the school of hard knocks - then little in the way of illuminating articles will ever be written. If some soapy chimera of creating a 'social playground' is more important, where the slightest lapse from euphemisms gets the alarm-bells ringing, and committees sitting to ply a mixture of anodyne, and punishment to restore order, then we are creating a kindergarten, one seething with childish games of manipulation and point-scoring. Thanks for the insult that I am mean. Even casual remarks like that can tell me something.Nishidani (talk) 10:39, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Actually, Lev, I'm in your debt for that remark. In my experience, few things are more productive to thinking than an insult. That is why I find it difficult to feel offense at a gratuitous jab like that punched my way. It elevated my noon walk under a cloudy sky with drizzling weather into a very interesting (to me) set of reflections I might not otherwise have made, all flowing from the temporal notation in your remark 'I've been asking for over two years now, is that you stop being so mean to other editors.' I'll share them here if I can get time to write them up by this evening. Regards Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

To anticipate, the starting point was

'That's wot my sentiments is. I can't abear a meanness. I'm afore the public, I'm to be heerd on at the bar of the Little Helephant, and no Gov'ner o' mine mustn't go and do what's mean.' Game Chicken in Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848) Penguin 1970 p.899.

What do we mean by 'mean'. Well, not miserly, close-fisted, certainly. No, you bridled at my describing, with a reasoned analysis, another editor's failure to understand what de facto means as an example of 'muddled thinking'. This, you are suggesting, is a personal attack rather than a statement of fact. You're wrong, unless you can prove that the analysis I made is defective. That would mean that you would have to show that 'de facto' can be used to describe a situation that does not yet exist. You don't do that. You simply say in describing his thinking as muddled, I am mean, and being mean is a violation of wiki etiquette. In other words, it would be reasonable to infer that when following, or monitoring, I/P pages, it is not the quality of the arguments, or the cogency of the content that draws your particular attention, but rather the nuances of potential offense in the minutiae of the language interlocutors use.

'Mean' in the sense you employ the word, is classified as one of the slight, sublimated forms of cruelty, a social failing, much as its other sense of tightfistedness is - putting one's obsession with money over and above the needs of people one might, as part of one's social world, help out without any real damage to one's pocket. I have, you argue, a chronic trait of being mean/cruel to other editors. It is fascinating to me that you say you have studied my edits for two years and find this a notable characteristic of my work here. What topic do I concentrate on? Israel/Palestine, but specifically on what occurs in the territories occupied by Israel. There one cannot avoid finding an abundance of examples that would outrage anyone sensitive to meanness. I won't make a 1000-diff long string of illustrations from the Israeli press. Suffice it to click on this this, or this etc., while bearing in mind that this handful is the tip of the iceberg since 49,000 houses in that territory have been bulldozed and their families rendered homeless, in the last five decades, and, virtually everyone in the world outside of a certain nationalistic mindset would instinctly consider such acts as, at a minimum, 'mean'.

I don't know how you would regard them. I do know now that you consider that the term most people would use to describe that reality for you is equally applicable to someone like myself who remonstrates at another editor's incoherence while arguing on the internet. The acts out there in reality are not sanctionable - they are, in Israel's spin of the law, legal. My picayune remonstration here merits, I think you are implying, a report to the authorities for an eventual sanction.

When I try to grasp what I find difficult to understand in terms of the psychology of people engaged in these acts, I have over the years looked to anthropology, using Natan Sznaider's point of departure in a seminal article over two decades ago that analysed the 'relationship between an assumed increased sensitivity to physical pain and the emergence of liberal society.'

He wrote:

This involved a revolution in sensibility. It contained a new aversion to pain, to be avoided at all cost. Pain was considered evil and happiness the absence of pain. Humanitarian efforts in every field of reform during the last two centuries were mostly concerned with the abolition of pain. These efforts were composed initially of the fight against cruelty, understood as the unjustifiable affliction of pain.' Natan Sznaider, Cruelty in Socio-Historical Perspective International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1996 pp.331-354 Nishidani (talk) 21:23, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

So there are two distinct, but interrelated, realities. One is the objective reality of what occurs in, say, the West Bank as titrated through reliable sources and paraphrased into our articles, and the styles of negotiation between editors in conflict over how to represent neutrally that reality. The policy of NPOV advises one to be detached, however monstrous the reality, so that, even in this case, both the victimizer and the victim are described with due care not to prejudice the point of view of either the persons who sympathise with the rationale of the ostensible persecutor, or the persons who empathize with the plight of those who suffer from the actions of the party which exercises a preponderanc of power. Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

One advantage I will certainly admit pro-Israeli editors have, with regard to situations like this, compared to editors who detail Palestinian history under occupation, is that probably it is markedly easier for the former to be utterly detached from the cruelty or meanness of the occupation, and therefore edit, tweak and argue with more equanimity than say editors who unfortunately grew up as heirs, witting or otherwise, to modern Western civilization's sensitivization to the pain others suffer. I suspect that my occasional, actually in terms of edit counts overall, rare expressions of irritation, frustration and impatience with what I consider heedless opinionizing in this delicate area of Wikipedia are, technically, signs of an inability to wholly neutralize my outlook in accord with the Olympian austerity of wiki social policy in its narrowest reading. Admittedly, however, if people like myself could read this material, day by day, for decades with that ideal nonchalance to grief and gratuitously inflicted suffering, then the articles we have, however inadequate, would never have been written. No branch of knowledge in the humanities has ever advanced anywhere without some native passion, fervid curiosity or bewilderment at human nature's weirder ways stirring the minds and hearts of those who embrace such fields of history and society and culture. Sorry for the length. If Wikipedia thinks it is better off without people with this kind of nature who fail to reengineer their souls to the strictest values of perfect detachment such that their language never betrays unease or on occasions causes murmurs of anxiety in other editors, well, stiff cheddar, Nish. ps. I took this edit of yours to be 'mean' because it endorses a filer. I can't surely be the only one who can spot the obvious. Nishidani (talk) 22:37, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Sharon

Hombre, would you mind awfully rejigging your efn Sharon material so we can get shot of the old Haaretz stuff. Afaics, everything is available in scholarly sourcing so we can do without them, I think. If there is something not covered, let me know and I will hunt it down in a journal or a book. Levivich is correct that there is also material in Peteet 2017.Selfstudier (talk) 16:21, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

I've been doing that in draft form in the few hours available to me these last two days, actually. And supplying several new book sources. The whole conversation is available in Primor's German book of 2003, but Eldar has points not covered there. I work slowly, since I have no POV to push but that of ascertaining the fact5ual record.Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

In your own time, amigo, miles to go before we sleep.Selfstudier (talk) 22:27, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Of course, I'v e no problem with anyone editing anywhere any section according to their own lights. I kept up efn notes because given the page was under attack, I thought all the used evidence should be outlined in notes. In my experience, most people don't read many sources, indeed they don't familiarize themselves with the topic: they draw an opinion from their impressions of the lead and perhaps some quick perusal of the text, particularly in a complex article like this. Obviously, now that an irrefutably Israeli-driven POV title has been settled on, one task that remains is to conserve the information in those notes by laconic paraphrase, avoiding all temptations to gut them and the article to make out some tertium quid. Nishidani (talk) 09:57, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Increasingly Brazen Israel Begins Building Settlements In The U.S.

Increasingly Bold Israel Begins Building Settlements In Downtown Albuquerque.

"In a move that shocked and angered city residents, including families that have called the area home for centuries, an increasingly bold Israel announced Tuesday that ..."

This is yet another informative and fast-breaking news article from The Onion. -- Warm regards, Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:22, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Actually, apart from the skit, I'm always refreshed by news of the increase in Israelis moving to the US, Europe, Germany, anywhere since it is in the natural logic of history, demographics and topological constraints, that Jews will continue their ancient tradition of emigrating out over the world from the far too narrow confines of that tormented land. It's not, in my view, healthy to be locked up in that situation, and caught up in a hypernationalism that is not congenial to the general thrust of Jewish history. In the short term this will have a negative side, - inter-Israeli marriages in this new diaspora are notably the norm, compared with the practice in Jewish populations generally, and a lot of the usual patriotic cant plays into an ethnic conversation that, in the diaspora, has been far more open and flexible to reason. But, in short, the ideal greeting in this phenomenon for those embarking on a broader horizon should be: 'welcome ab(r)oard!' Nishidani (talk) 12:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, the usual serendipity. I was catching up on some reading this morning and caught this remark from Avraham Burg

'For this reason he is convinced that Jews in Israel can learn from Jews in the Diaspora. “When I look at the [people attending] non-Orthodox synagogues in the United States, I think that they didn’t grow up the way I did, but that is where the next corpus of the Jewish people was created,” he explains. “Instead of sending our [Israeli] children in large numbers to the death camps, they should be sent on Birthright trips to the Jewish communities [abroad].' Ravit Hecht, ll-israel-let-him-1.9414503 'A Scion of Zionist Aristocracy Wants to Quit the Jewish People. Will Israel Let Him?,' Haaretz 2 January 2021

One of the uses of reading widely is to decentre the egotistic thrust always complicit in trying to think for oneself. One discovers that almost everything one slowly works out has been thought by others. Almost everything that Burg states here confirms my own conclusions, and I was particularly delighted to see the clever way he turned Ahad Ha'am's famous view on its head in asserting the diaspora should be the spiritual centre of Israeliness. Nishidani (talk) 10:36, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. Yes, I agree with your insights, based at least on my own personal experience. And I have great respect and admiration for Avraham Burg. --- Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:00, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Appreciation

"Appreciation of Your Articulation"

Your articulated prose and well-crafted verbage,
may be lost to those who don't know Burbage;
You've mastered the art with style and finesse,
and are worlds apart from those who know less.
Reading your words is time well spent,
despite the turds who express discontent.
They simply don't know what each word means,
because their highest plateau is a hill of beans.

For fun, an articulate video you might enjoy.

^{Atsme 💬 📧 15:56, 7 February 2021 (UTC)}

Ah! Finally the tedium of wiki broken by a bit of wit. What can I say? Thanks, of course, but. . . um . . .

Like flecks on sequent waves, like frail sea-foam,

Thoughts crest the pulsing folds of our fleshed brain

And flicker in instant triumph, till each comb

Falls to the tow of silence as memories wane.

Time flows in dumps and billows: on each surge

Men in their millions mill into the light,

Ride out their sun-glanced moment and then merge

Back with the smattery suck of vacuous night.

The babbling child prates into quipping youth,

Youth to discursive manhood’s wordy prime,

Till, sputtering syllables past a single tooth,

Age ebbs out on the wrinkled neap of Time.

Though Time’s scythe may well let these verses stand,

Tongues change in time, till none Will understand.Nishidani (talk) 16:27, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Pro memoria re I/P sourcing

Netanyahu – the same one, of course – prodded David Radler more than 30 years ago to engineer the newspaper’s acquisition by Conrad Black and his Canadian Hollinger group, who promptly turned The Post from a widely-respected and quoted newspaper to a right-wing rag of no importance, as it remained during most of their 14 years of ownership.' Chemi Shalev, 'Farewell to Haaretz and All Its Readers – but Especially American Jews,' Haaretz 21 December 2020 Nishidani (talk) 10:18, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

(1)In this respect, the examination of the crime of apartheid will probably have to be taken into consideration, particularly in view of the recent reports by the Israeli associations Yesh Din and B'Tselem, which concluded that there was a crime of apartheid attributable to the Israeli authorities, taking into account all the characteristics of the occupation policy, which systematically discriminates between Israeli settlers and the Palestinian population.Some reflections on the International Criminal Court decision on its territorial jurisdiction in Palestine.' François Dubuisson (professeur de droit à l'Université libre de Bruxelles) 'The ICC decision to investigate war crimes in Palestine has huge symbolic significance and will likely consider the crime of apartheid, given recent reports.Mondoweiss 6 February 2021

Perhaps wishful thinking, but law is the only medium whereby this quagmire can be pumped clean of its neurotic muck.Nishidani (talk) 18:17, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

(2)Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on brand, called it “pure antisemitism.” “The court established to prevent atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people,” Netanyahu proclaimed, “is now targeting the one state of the Jewish people.” With predictable righteous indignation, Netanyahu went on to accuse the ICC of “outrageously claiming that when Jews live in our own homeland, this is a war crime. . .The ICC’s decision is not final. Ms. Bensouda is leaving in the summer and it is unclear if she can pursue an investigation until then, or if her successor will. But in the coming months, Israel will need to reconcile the fact that, rightly or wrongly, it has refused to cooperate with the ICC and refrained from presenting its case at all. This means that Israel cannot appeal the decision, but can only urge a proxy to do so on its behalf. You can claim hypocrisy, travesty and miscarriage of justice while staying out of the fray, but only to very limited effect” Alon Pinkas, (Israeli diplomat,political analyst and Fox television pundit) 'Don’t Dismiss the ICC Ruling on Israel, but Don’t Blow It Out of Proportion Either,' Haaretz 7 February 2021

(3) 'The International Criminal Court on Friday determined that it has jurisdiction over the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, despite Israel’s insistence to the contrary, opening the way for an inquiry into allegations of Israeli, and Palestinian, war crimes in the region. . .Dealing a severe diplomatic blow to Israel, the court ruled that for its purposes, Palestine qualified as the state on the territory where the events in question occurred and defined the territorial jurisdiction as extending to the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The ruling was not unanimous, with one of the three judges, Péter Kovács, presenting a dissenting opinion, disputing the notion that the court has jurisdiction in this case.'Isabel Kershner,'I.C.C. Rules It Has Jurisdiction to Examine Possible Israel War Crimes,' New York Times 5 February

Peel Commission

Based on the new archive material released in 2017 https://www.paljourneys.org/sites/default/files/The_Secret_Testimony_to_the_Peel_Commission_Part_I-_Underbelly_of_Empire.pdf (Part 1). There's a Part 2 as well https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1525/jps.2020.49.2.8?journalCode=rpal20. Worth a read.Selfstudier (talk) 16:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks. One of the problems of recent history is that what is obvious (between the lines or the heavy silences, will only be known as archives are released, long after the content's power to make people see reality has been defused, and their potential for disrupting the thrust of immediate geopolitical interests diverted. It is obvious all the discursive pussyfooting over peace negotiations that shambles along has but one purpose - get more land without forking out a cent towards its real estate value. It's long been the business dream of the century,88% of a whole country taken without paying for the market value of even a square kilometre.Nishidani (talk) 16:10, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Deep Analysis of Israeli Politics

Some great, penetrating insights into the increasingly complex and convoluted Israeli political system. (Suggest to increase playback speed to 1.5 times the normal speed, to save time listening.) -- Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:46, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I've often wished to read more of Shir Hever's work than I've managed so this was a nice surprise. Mind you, I don't follow almost any political talk - in Italy they excel in it. 15 hours of daily discussion, at a low rule of thumb calculation - sometimes consisting of three hour long debates, on politics and recently the Covid problem - has long been a feature of television here. Meaning, the more intractable a chaotic system is, the more you talk around it, when the essential data for a year can be summed up in five minutes. And in any case, that kind of TV has to compete with bookshelves, and invariably loses out.

As usual, incapable of following advice, I listened with my slow ear, on the grounds that Nietzsche's advice about the art of slow reading should have aural ramifications. Thanks, and pat the whilom pups for me. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 16:20, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Laugh a minute

Hahaha

Well, on reading that '“There is something mistaken about using the first sense of the word because no one is actively entering and occupying now,” he said, adding that in the military sense Israel had already taken over the West Bank and there was no ongoing military campaign to seize control of the territory.' I was surprised to learn that editors of the Hebrew wiki don't trouble themselves to read their local press or tune in to catch the daily video reports on how folks visiting the West Bank to have a nice picnic can be chased back to Israel by dumb kids in military fatigues when the settlers complain that these Israeli intruders, perfectly fluent in Hebrew, failed the bloodtest that would otherwise give them a right to have a barbeque in God's own country. First Covid restricted movements, now you have to have a DNA warrant to validate where you can move in that landscape.Nishidani (talk) 01:10, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Your disruptive activity at RfC

Is there a reason you chose to put your long-form, frivolous complaints about the RfC in the "Votes" section when the instructions explicitly asked for conversation in the section below to keep it organized? Wikieditor19920 (talk) 17:27, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

pings

You can go to preferences -> notifications and near the bottom can mute users so that they cant ping you. Ive found it useful. nableezy - 23:30, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't mind being pinged in principle. I take exception to being pinged on a page I follow, esp. by people demanding constant attention for their tedious and un believably dull comments. I regard it as noise disturbance, practiced by almost no one in my regard except the chap I've referred to. I don't see why I should be compelled by that discourtesy to block out quite a few editors who, from time to time, ask me for input. My mother was on call 24 hours a day in her pharmacy, I can't live up to that old and noble tradition, but in a collaborative project like this, one should strive to be available to anyone who seriously seeks some advice.Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, you can block pings from any specific user was what I meant, not in general. nableezy - 23:41, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

なるほど (naru hodo: 'I see' in Japanese). Dumb me. I got into a drinking competition in three different louche bars tonight (there's a very able chap here who has been vaccinated who is teaching me how to get round the 6 o'clock lockdown rules). Will try that when I have a tot, a morning hair of the dog that bit me, tomorrow. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 23:46, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Must need a gin and tonic together with a cup of tea. I tried that, writing (a)Wikieditor19920, then User:Wikieditor19920, then User:Wikieditor19920, which all came up as redlinks. Will any of these function? Borry for the sother.Nishidani (talk) 08:14, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Just Wikieditor19920 and then select the name from the drop down list. nableezy - 13:44, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

It was a tremendous intellectual tussle but I finally managed to work it out in 5 sweaty minutes. Thanks for your shortcut advice. Nishidani (talk) 19:57, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Accusations of disruptive editing

Here, per usual, you made an accusation of "disruptive editing." Please provide the specific reason why these edits are "disruptive" or we can resolve this at WP:AE to get to the bottom of these incessant personal attacks. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 01:00, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Ignoring a talk page consensus is disruptive editing. nableezy - 01:12, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Nableezy Point to a specific and recent consensus that was "violated" by any one of my edits. Nor is there any such "consensus-required" limit on this talk page. No, the fact that you disagree with an edit does not make it "disruptive," that's a specific accusation that you need to back up rather than casually throwing around the moment you disagree with another editor. Now's your opportunity to do so.

And while you're here, Nableezy, did you in any way solicit, on or off wiki, Nishidani to make this edit and restore your revert, after you yourself had to undo it due to the 1RR restriction? Wikieditor19920 (talk) 01:19, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

lol no. The recent consensus is where myself, Nishidani, and Jr8825 all explicitly disagree to your removal of the source earlier, along with Selfstudier who initially put the source in. That is 4-1, with not one single person agreeing with the incredibly inane idea that Peteet is not a reliable secondary source. If you try doing that again I will absolutely go to AE. I already asked an admin if that sequence is worthy a report and seems like it may well be. Editing against a talk page consensus is disruptive editing, regardless of a consensus required provision being there or not. Stop doing it. nableezy - 02:07, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Nableezy Not only are you lying on this talk page, you are also lying to an admin who openly told you they haven't reviewed the context of the situation, only your framing of it. There was no "consensus." I raised an issue with a source, and you refused to substantively respond and reinserted it as a knee-jerk reaction.

Your antics in this topic area are tiresome, and you've gotten away with it for far too long. Your taunting/belligerent responses create a toxic editing environment for anyone who doesn't fully agree with you, you edit war, you claim consensus in ongoing discussions and deny the existence of consensus when you are outnumbered, you file frivolous reports, you fight over talk page headings and formatting to try and make your points the most visible -- It is astonishing you are permitted to still maintain a presence in the IP area. The same goes for Nishidani, who repeatedly attacks others in endless screeds or talk page summaries.

If this keeps up, I will file an AE report, and then we can have the full context presented there. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 04:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Your repeated abuse on editors and calls for their expulsion from the I/P area eerily echo what activist web sites are pushing for. 'Endless screeds'? If that is how you view the desultory but ongoing dialogue with friends here who disagree with me over the heart of the kind of conflict we cover here, you are not obliged to read them. These exchanges show that while disagreements can be profound, they can be explored with gentlewomanly vigour, without the usual hysterical suspiciousness and hostilities public argufying displays. With people like Bolter or Arminden, one doesn't have to go through the artificial antics of formally assuming good faith, because the question never arises: the quality of their contributions shows the temper of their minds and, I assume, their characters, and our exchanges are conducive to underlining the fact that in this 'toxic' area, it is possible to beg to differ and yet maintain very amicable relations).

It is 28 February. The month is so called after an Osco-Umbrian dialect term, that of the Sabines borrowed into Latin with the sense of 'means of expiation' (febbrua), and is synonymous with 'purgation'. I.e., it marks the season where ritually important areas and places like houses are cleansed for the new year. In ancient Rome, among other things, they cast salted roasted spelt: in Japan they still celebrate similar rites at Setsubun, tossing soybeans out the door (mamemaki), while inviting the bustling devils and demons who have sponged on the site over winter to cordially fuck off and allow good fortune to reenter. So, it is an opportune day, on the eve of spring, for you to disappear from this page, and stay off it. If you are meditating vengeance at AE I suggest the Ides of March. So, goodbye.鬼は外! 福は内!. Nishidani (talk) 10:42, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

No, I and every other person on that talk page has substantively replied to your asinine assertion that Julie Peteet writing in Anthropological Quarterly is not a reliable secondary source. Every single person who has commented on that page has disagreed with said asinine assertion. And yet, he persisted. And yes, editing against consensus is disruptive. Do it again and see what happens. Feel free to go to AE, would honestly love to see that. nableezy - 13:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

never seen an editor

Oh old man, you forget names of yore like Amorouso and Jaakobou. This isnt a new thing, its just much louder and annoying now. nableezy - 15:59, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Stop picking on me for being senile. As the Old Possum overheard some bird tweet, 'humus beans cannot bear too much reality TV'. I was tempted to report this raghead ragging at AE for the nasty innuendo that I suffer from Old timers disease so that you'd get permabanned, until I realized that the evidence runs in your flavor, um, favour. G'nite Nab, (sighed his nibs, when snubbed).Nishidani (talk) 22:17, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Kong

Does this edit have anything to do with reality? Johnuniq (talk) 04:18, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Stone the flamen crows, old bean! Had I read that when I got up a few hours ago, it would have made even more easeful the passage of yesterday's dinner through that other less-than-wholesome cavity! Next some Chinese wikieditor will be retaliating by glossing the Chinese bio of Charles Dicken(d)s as 'Mr Prepuces'/or more literally, 'Chip off the old cock'. With that precedent we can note that Chaucer is Mr.Cobbler,(and Michael Schumacher as Mr Shoemaker), Cicero as Mr Chick-pea, Plato as ‘broad’(brow), either of the George Bushes as ‘President Shrub'), Frank Knopfelmacher as Mr. Buttonmaker, or Adam Smith as Mr. Earth Metalworker!

Of course, 孔 ‎kǒng was just a clan name and did mean 'fissure', then more broadly 'aperture/hole' in ancient Chinese, but why stop there? In archaic Chinese, the earliest graphs suggest it was a pictogram conjoining (丿 piě, a downstroke+ 子 zǐ ‎(child‎), and thus perhaps a representation of a newborn child's skull where the cranial bones had not quite melded, leaving a gap. In that sense, if one accepts that reading, 'Kong' could be glossed as Mr. Fontanelle. Or in another traditional deciphering (Bernhard Karlgren, Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese, 1923 no.206 p.86) the hole (燕窩:yànwō) where swifts (Aerodramus fuciphagus) placed their nestlings (子). Looks like Confucius ends up in the soup with that angle, since those nesting holes are a delicacy in Chinese cuisine.

So, chum, your admin burdens will have to take on those weighted shoulders another fardel, figuring out whether a technically correct gloss on a name should be permitted on Wikipedia. I don't envy you! Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Morning walk, reciting Prufrock, a cappuccino and a toasted ham sandwich have brought me to my senses. Sorry for being frivolous. I'll do the necessary edit. Nishidani (talk) 12:33, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

I.e.(this and here) As Auden wrote in The Quest,

'Fresh addenda are published every day.

To the encyclopedia of the Way,'

a particularly apt citation, since Auden was evidently there (and in section XIV) himself alluding to Arthur Waley's 1934 translation of a Chinese classic The Way and Its Power (Dàodé Jīng), where the Way is a naturalistic critique of Confucianism.Nishidani (talk) 13:29, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Breathtaking, thank you. I was hoping you would say something simple like it's rubbish so I could look important but nothing here is simple! Johnuniq (talk) 00:12, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Breathtaking? Lemme reach for another gasper, and add that there is, as Walker notes, a curious item in Sima Qian's biographical entry on Confucius, which states that his given name Qiū (hillock:丘) was chosen in part because his skull was out of whack. Sima Qian remains one of the world’s greatest historians, but this marginal notice is neglected. Perhaps, connecting the dots, it might betray some reading of an obscure tradition that read his family name kǒng as redolent of the oracle bone graph's apparent depiction of a fontanelle. Master Fontanelle, or should we say, given his regal dominance of Chinese thinking, King ‎Kǒng(孔). But, that would be stretching a point, dotty thinking by yours truly.Nishidani (talk) 12:20, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Memorable compliments

made my day, and night:)Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

French needed!

Could I ask you to look over the Guerin-quote on Monastery of Saint Theodosius? I have a feeling that my "google.translate"-French could be improved.. Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Hm. Just as I started to feel a frog in my throat and wondered about the Covid status of the wonderful Egyptian cook who made a pizza for me! Yeah, late here, but I'll do that tomorrow (not in four years). Cheers H.Nishidani (talk) 22:57, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Hang on, the notes have two extended quotes from Guerin there. Which one?Nishidani (talk) 11:52, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

The 1863 one, starting with "The remains of the monastery of St. Theodosius ..." and ending with "....another way to their country", (all of that quote is from "google.translate"), cheers, Huldra (talk) 21:11, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Okay, I'll fix it tamorrah, if needed (ad break tweak. Watching Guess Who's Coming to Dinner tonight)Nishidani (talk) 21:13, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

PA at AN

Hi Nishidani. I suggest you take a course in elementary logic or do some remedial reading [12] is calling an editor stupid, and that's a personal attack. Editors who disagree with you don't deserve to be talked to that way. Please strike it, and don't write things like that in the future. Thanks, Levivich ^harass/_hound 04:18, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Pretty sure there are plenty of admins in that thread who can deal with a PA if there actually is one. nableezy - 04:24, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Creating work for admins would not be productive; better for the author to fix it. Re "if there actually is one": is what I quoted a PA in your view? Levivich ^harass/_hound 04:45, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Not especially no. Context being a thing, and the beginning of the diff being ignored (Since there is no way one can get from what I wrote to what you inferred). nableezy - 16:07, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I am sympathetic to the view that people should be nice. However, your request would have more merit if you also addressed the comment that Nishidani replied to. That comment was an absurd put-down totally unrelated to what Nishidani had written. Is it ok for someone (the other editor) to post insults that appear to be intended to deflect points made (aka troll)? Johnuniq (talk) 06:32, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Levivich. Don't be so predictable. People who actually have done the overwhelming bulk of constructive work in building some respectability for I/P articles have over the decades dealt with more sockpuppets than most wikipedians. One dryly puts up with weeks and months of polite WP:AGF with the usual blow-ins, even though one is dead certain one is addressing another toxic disruptive sockmater's (sic) puppet (as almost always emerges). All this as one (a) waits for proof and (b) observes how people who share the sockma(s)ter's POV, back or support the newbie. Do I really need to construe for you Jayron's jack-in-the box leap from dry comment to snide personal insult, with its pathetic implication that wiki can do without a lot of people like me, but not without him. I rarely see a form of prose that shoots its own assumptions, in attack, in the foot. If you want to be helpful in these things, sometimes just ignoring obviously ridiculous trivia, both the provocation and its reaction, is the best move. I've nothing against Jayron - I don't hold grudges, and we all have our moments and completely miss the mark. He did, going ballistic at my suggestion that those disruptive arseholes be given the flick pass (fuck'em) in no uncertain terms.Nishidani (talk) 08:12, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm shocked that Nishidani insulted another editor's intelligence. Levivich, I for one think we should give Nishidani a pass here because this behavior is so out of the ordinary for them. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 13:29, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

I told you not to comment on this page some time ago. Last warning.Nishidani (talk) 13:37, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

John, don't excuse chronic incivility. When you enable, you become part of the problem. Levivich ^harass/_hound 15:33, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Persisting in your inability to construe a straight piece of English? The 'John' here was not enabling some 'chronic incivility' (that's your private beef, and I have long assumed you want to act on it) on my part. In writing:-

I for one think we should give Nishidani a pass here because this behavior is so out of the ordinary for them.

'John' is making a feeble effort at being ironical. That rhetorical implication I note is not subjective, for the editor in question has over the past month repeatedly claimed that my behaviour is characteristically uncivil.

Nishidani, ... You've demonstrated no ability to follow basic talk page decorum ... Just know that AE will be sought as a remedy if you keep insulting other editors. Wikieditor19920 (talk) 16:58, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

You keep misreading tone and ignoring context. 'Keep on' means the verb following becomes frequentative. If he now writes 'this (insulting) behavior is so out of the ordinary for them (Nishidani), you have irony.

~~If you still have difficulty grasping the obvious, click on the link to irony and read the page.Nishidani (talk) 18:58, 5 March 2021 (UTC)~~

I thought that coming after wikieditor's edit, Levivich was addressing him, and not Johnuniq. My error. I've been rapped over the knuckles more than once by Johnuniq over a decade. He calls things as he sees them, regardless of personal likes and dislikes. That's why if he tells me to pull my finger out, I take him seriously and trust his judgment, as opposed to that of many others who invariably come down on the side of the other party to a dispute with me. Now to business.Nishidani (talk) 20:24, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

When you play hall monitor while ignoring any context, you become part of the problem. nableezy - 16:05, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Asking an editor to strike an uncivil comment isn't playing hall monitor, it's being a responsible member of this community. Join me. Levivich ^harass/_hound 17:01, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Implying that others are not responsible members of this community can best be classified as what exactly? I think it begins with a personal and ends with attack, but Im not all that sensitive tbh. nableezy - 17:08, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

"Enabling by deflection" is when, in response to Editor A raising a concern about a comment Editor B made, Editors C and D intercede and raise concerns about Editor E and maybe also Editor A, thereby deflecting the focus off of Editor B and Editor B's comment, or perhaps even attempting to excuse or normalize Editor B's comment by demonstrating that someone else said something as bad or worse. Eventually, Editor A tires and goes away, leaving the original concern unaddressed. Editor B doesn't change their behavior, thinking that Editors C and D's equivocation means that what Editor B said was OK in the first place. And thus, Editor B is enabled to continue posting comments suggesting that other editors who disagree with him are stupid. How are we to address civility concerns when editors will enable by deflection, even in response something as mild as a user talk page post saying "please strike"? Levivich ^harass/_hound 18:46, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

You seem to misunderstand my position here entirely. I am directly saying I see no problem with what Editor B wrote, given the context, and that what I think is the problem is Editor A interceding on behalf of somebody who is perfectly capable of raising any concern he has with Editor B's comment that was directed at him and no Editor A. And the problem that I do see is this "hall monitor" activity of trying to police a discussion that they were not involved in and had nothing to do with them. If Jayron took offense to that comment he could say so. He apparently has not. But, and being totally serious here, do you think implying that because I do not have the same view as you on incivility that means I am not a responsible member of this community? Isn't it a personal attack to insinuate that I am not a responsible member of this community? nableezy - 20:32, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

"Join me" referred to "asking an editor to strike an uncivil comment", not to "being a responsible member of this community". I don't care if Jayron took offense, and I'm not raising anything on anyone else's behalf. I took offense, and I raise it on my own behalf (as before, as always). Levivich ^harass/_hound 23:41, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

if you say so lol. I dont quite get how one takes offense at a comment directed a third person, but its a whole new world in 2021. nableezy - 00:01, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

You've never heard "an affront to justice anywhere is an affront to justice everywhere"? This of course wasn't anywhere near "affront to justice"-level, but same basic principle applies. I'm not going to only ask editors to be civil towards me, I'm going to ask editors to be civil towards everyone. Or to put it another way: Nishidani chooses to call another editor stupid; I choose to ask him not to; others choose to criticize me for asking him not to and defend Nishidani for calling another editor stupid. We're all exercising free speech. See also MeatballWiki:DefendEachOther. Levivich ^harass/_hound 00:07, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

I really dont think youre MLK in this story. nableezy - 21:06, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

(Here ya go, another screed that your cosmonauts will note, as a new geographic feature, called 'The Great Wall of Porcelain prose') I don’t believe for a minute what you say about your Martin Lutherish motivation (‘"an affront to justice anywhere is an affront to justice everywhere"?) for harassing me with frequent piddling complaints about my ostensible abuse of other editors. I’m entitled to that reading of your persistent niggling. You nag away, piling up pseudo-evidence and coming to my page to ‘warn’ me to mend my atrocious ways, while regularly ignoring ridiculously WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT bludgeoning of editors elsewhere (The new anti-harassment nonsense does state that bad faith arguments' are part of the problem). As I wrote earlier:

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 (Nov 2021)

Two editors told you that Jayron's remark was offensive. You ignored that remark, and focused on my response. Had you a disinterested concern for not having other people offended, you would have told Jayron he was out of line, and, that done, you would have acquired the right to direct a reprimand also my way. As it stands, you tacitly backed an admin's irritated personalizing boutade against me, and went for my jugular for having the audacity to respond to him. Elitism. Worse still, you keep repeating that my remark branded Jayron as 'stupid': that is a crass distortion. His remarks were in the protasis-apodosis mode -'if..then' - a form that, in logic, has an efficient value in propositional explorations. but in wiki discourse, absolves those technically of any accusation they attacked people. 'No, what I said was hypothetical...' Since the intent of J's remarks was to tell me to piss off, and was based on inexplicable inferences from my post, I didn't use a rhetorical ruse. I called a spade a spade. He had misread my remark and replied to it illogically.

You 'monitor' me, and I don't think this peculiar obsession you have with my ostensible roguish ill-manners speaks of sensitivity to 'justice' as much as animadversion for my I/P work. I think I am entitled to read your interest in me as Javertian in a minor key. Generally I don't like monitors, and for a good historic reason. I saw an unfortunate but strong, brawny deaf-mute boy at our school pummelling the life out of a boy two years younger than him, and responding to the younger boy's weeping, I went down the stairs -everybody else just watched - and grabbed the puncher in a headlock, somewhat anguished that I had to use this recourse, because I knew that the victimizer had on occasion been teased by louts and was justly offended as often as not. The boy being pummelled wasn't one of that handful of shitheads. In any case, the only thing to do was to paralyse the deaf-mute in a harmless, but strong headlock, so I could drag him out of the mêlée and then calm him down. He tried to bite my left nipple off. I senior monitor passed, grabbed me and hauled me upstairs saying he was going to report me. So I grabbed him by the collar, and, though he was much taller than me, lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the wall, yelling angrily that he'd, yes, misread the situation. He wouldn't believe me. Fortunately a friar hearing the hullabaloo came and had overheard my rapid fire spitting reconstruction of what happened:('You fucking dickhead. S . .was bashing a kid. I intervened and stopped him, without hurting him. . .'), didn't object to my vituperative language, but took me aside and listened closely, and noting the blood on my shirt, examined the wound and called a doctor. I was given a week off, stitches, a tetanus injection and thanked. So monitor me as you like, but don't tell me about some fucking principle of justice you're extremely sensitive to, that I supposedly violated, and thus personally offended you who feel instinctively motivated to step in whenever the planet's miseries are compounded.

Writing this I remember that passage in Kafka's Amerika. Karl Roßmann, a lift-operator, finds an acquaintance in serious trouble, dead drunk, and, after trying all sorts of things to help him without leaving his post, finally calls another lift-attendant to replace him for a few minutes. On returning, his absence is noted, and though he protests that he'd earlier filled in for a full two hours for the boy he asked to replace him for a moment (Ich habe ihn doch auch zwei Stunden lang während des größten Verkehrs vertreten) he gets fired, the other boy retained. Later the episode is summed up:

It had come to pass far more quickly than he had reason to expect, for after all he'd really done his best working there for two months, and undoubtedly much better than a lot of the other young boys. But clearly such things were never taken into consideration anywhere on earth, either in Europe or America when a decision had to be made, but rather judgment was passed on the basis of the first words, spoken in rage, that spilled out of the mouth of the person delivering the verdict. (Es war allerdings schneller gegangen, als er gedacht hatte, denn schließlich hatte er doch zwei Monate gedient, so gut er konnte, und gewiß besser als mancher andere Junge. Aber auf solche Dinge wird eben im entscheidenden Augenblick offenbar in keinem Weltteil, weder in Europa noch in Amerika, Rücksicht genommen, sondern es wird so entschieden, wie einem in der ersten Wut das Urteil aus dem Munde fährt.)(Arminden, please step in and fix this atrocious version of a prose master.!

That passage should be pinned up on the wall of all of the etiquette-fixated fusspots, wikinursury nannies and assorted brownnosing snifffarts who succumb to the temptation to think this is a medium for feely-goody chat and inimitable social form rather than for hard-nosed, lynx-eyed, encyclopedically constructive yakka.Nishidani (talk) 13:27, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

Hold your horses, Levivich old son. You need a remedial lesson at this point in how to construe the plain English of a conversation exchange. But stretching my legs and buying a pizza is the priority for the next hour.Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

A lesson on how to read, rather than allow one's antipathies to get the better of a set of texts.

Evidence.

(Exhibit A) That ideal solution gives sockpuppets enormous room to jam Wikipedia by eating up serious editors' time. If, rather than mass revert, one were obliged to scrupulously examine the merits of each particular edit (dozens), committed wikipedians who have other things to do would be sucked into a timesink, with the sockpuppet chuckling. Fuck'em. Revert everything, and whatever is left over to be fixed, will eventually be fixed. Zero tolerance.Nishidani (talk) 18:35, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

The solution offered was Jayron's. I called it ideal, but noted how, in practice, it could lead to abuse, by allowing sockmasters to game wiki, and wage an attrition on serious editors' worktime. There is no nuance of hostility to Jayron, or his proposal, just a banausic note on an unforeseen possible implication were it applied rigorously.

Within 8 minutes the riposte from Jayron was

(Exhibit B)If you don't want to make Wikipedia better, no one is forcing you to do so. You aren't being paid, no one really needs you here. If you aren't here to improve things, at the very least, just stay out of the way of people that are trying to do so. --Jayron32 18:43, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

(Exhibit C) Since there is no way one can get from what I wrote to what you inferred, I suggest you take a course in elementary logic or do some remedial reading. Nishidani (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

B cannot be objecting to 'fuck'em'(sockpuppets). For our euphuism ‘fuck’ reappears when Jayron closed the thread using it himself ('Unfuckingbelievable')

I noticed B and ignored it for an hour, - no quick on the trigger anger there. Then I reflected. No: a response is due. Admins should not be allowed to get away with a broad and gratuitous insult. esp. if their language gives the impression that they imagine themselves as denizens in a world apart from us content peons, as if,- it is my inference from his language, they seem to assume they are on a rang in some wiki hierarchy, and the hoi polloi are, unlike themselves, dispensable. Ergo, C.Nishidani (talk) 20:40, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

What you have done,Levivich,is ignore B, and assert that, thus decontextualized, C is damning evidence for some character trait of my editing, chronic incivility. To prove your case you would be required to show where my text supplies the warrant for the following inferences or innuendoes Jayron made on reading it:

(1) 'If you don't want to make Wikipedia better, no one is forcing you to do so.'

I.e. where in what I wrote is there an indication I don't want to improve wiki?

(2) 'You aren't being paid'

On what evidence does he base his insinuation that somehow I am disgruntled at not being paid for my edits?

(3) 'no one really needs you here'

Where did this admin get it into his head that he can speak for the entire community which, with Olympian authority, he assumes contains not a single editor who really gives a fuck whether I, for one, help out or disappear?

It is true that no one is indispensable here. It is also true that each editor makes a difference. It is not indispensable that someone like myself change these 9,848 tidbytes) into the 90,568 bytes article we now have in just 7 edits. But the difference remains - between cheap casual dumping of bits and pieces and something with comprehensive depth and coverage of a very difficult topic.

(4) If you aren't here to improve things, at the very least, just stay out of the way of people that are trying to do so.

Where in my first post is there any evidence for the inference I don't collaborate to improve edits.

The implication of the protasis ia 'Nishidani in that remark looks as if he is not here to improve things'; the advice in the apodosis is: 'piss off. I and others here, unlike you, are trying to improve the encyclopedia.

Unless you can give logical and textual warrant for this series of out of left field attacks, you don't have a case. If anything, you are just taking sides and repeating your usual refrain than I'm an uncivil arsehole, whose work you monitor to prove that theorem (no doubt for eventual administrative action).

I would have already moved on, forgotten this piddling hairsplitting tiff, had you not thought it deserved scrutiny. So while citing Jayron here, I have absolutely no desire to blame him. In my view, it was just a momentary lapse, and probably,(I don't know him from a bar of soap) doesn't represent his very productive approach and contributions to this encyclopedia.Nishidani (talk) 21:10, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

We'll all be fired soon, lol. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262966/wikipedia-harassment-new-universal-code-of-conduct-policy Selfstudier (talk) 23:52, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Poor buggers. Still, as one scans that tripe, one does note that two surprising things are included(a)'bad faith arguments' and (b) 'deliberately introducing biased, false, inaccurate, or inappropriate content” to Wikipedia.' Use such criteria and one would end up potentially criminalizing the editing of most I/P area editors of one particular POV. That's how silly these attempts to nanny-engineer a social media nursery atmosphere as a priority and formal precondition for writing a PhD level content encyclopedia can get.Nishidani (talk) 09:27, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

harassing me with frequent piddling complaints about my ostensible abuse of other editors is really not a defensible characterization of our interactions of late. Let's review the facts:

In November 2020 at #Comment on edits not editors, I wrote "Please do not use article talk pages to comment on editors as you did here: [1] [2] [3] [4]. Article talk page comments should be restricted to addressing only content, without addressing other editors' behavior/knowledge/competence/etc."
Here's what you wrote that prompted me to write that message:
- Most editors commenting negatively here have no record, as far as I can see, of writing in-depth articles on the basis of the scholarly documentation. [13]
- Most of the above is specious nitpicking that, to illustrate, reveals you have little practical grasp on what writing historical articles involves ... Nearly every point you mucked up above shows unfamiliarity with hands on construction of complex articles. [14]
- I see now [Editor1] and [Editor2] are now teaming to revert stuff out. When you can't argue a point, that's the violent option, create an edit-warring atmosphere and then shout WP:Battleground. It's what socks do, and several are on this page. [15]
- :Whoever you may be, to judge by this edit you shouldn't be editing here. Editors who rewrite text without reading the source are on extremely dangerous ground. ... You're lucky I don't report people. [16]
In January 2021 at #West Bank bantustans, I wrote "Please strike your comments today about editors at Talk:West Bank bantustans."
Here's what you wrote that prompted me to write that message:
- That is extremely muddled thinking, that shows no familiarity with the article's documentation ... Read WP:CRYSTALBALL and try to get some handle on orderly rational focused analysis. [17]
- Once more you are not reading or remembering the sources, or even grasping my points. ... Alas, sigh. But this is Wikipedia, where numbers count, and an impressionable glance at chat, not familiarity with the scholarly complexities. [18]
- Point proven. You don't understand the terms you use, and you don't grasp that this, apart from the obtuse disregard for English usage, violates WP:Crystal. [19]
- I.e. you don't understand the meaning of the legal terminology you cited, and apparently didn't even bother to check it on Wikipedia itself. and a majority voting for the proposed name change on some vague assertion of NPOV while totally ignoring or failing to answer the crux ... and the actual editors of the page familiar with the topic's sources, and having extensive textual evidence ... [20]
- Just to remind editors how really thorough POV whitewashing occurs, the (ostensibly) corresponding, sister article in Hebrew has actually zero references to the extremely well documented thinking about the Bantustan model which we have here. Great job there! Absolutely NPOV - in the sense it is being used here: never refer to the actual facts. [21] [22]
- The contrafactual reading has consensus, but then again, as recent events remind us, people don't focus on reality and the meaning of terms. [23]
- The majority refusal to accept 'enclavization' however boils down to either unfamiliarity with the subject, or POV voting for a political result favourable to one of the two parties in the dispute ... I'm a realist. While I've been arguing 'enclave' uninflected is a gross violation of NPOV, I have been convinced nonetheless from the outset that, as so very often, political calculation of the crucial national interest will determine the outcome, as it has. Few actually edit this hotspot area, but touch the national interest of that country, and masses turn up and the serious arguments are buried. I've watched this going on for 14 years. [24]
Here, in March 2021, I wrote "Hi Nishidani. I suggest you take a course in elementary logic or do some remedial reading [25] is calling an editor stupid, and that's a personal attack. Editors who disagree with you don't deserve to be talked to that way. Please strike it, and don't write things like that in the future. Thanks, Levivich"

What I'm writing is far less frequent and far more polite than what you're writing. The November and January diffs were all from Talk:Palestinian enclaves, which I walked away from in part so I didn't have to read these insults that you were frequently writing. But now I'm back because I've read yet another one of your insults, this time at WP:AN. I don't hunt after you, but I can't seem to escape your incivility! If you choose to use your voice to insult our colleagues, I will choose to use my voice to ask you to stop. And I find it both amusing and sad that after throwing insult after insult after insult upon other editors, you (and some others) react so defensively to a polite request to strike. Levivich ^harass/_hound 19:32, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

I really wish you would put that level of effort in to dealing with the root of the problem here, that being editors who do things like this or this. Deal with the garbage that people who are trying to write an encyclopedia deal with and then maybe youll see a nicer place. Though I will grant you one thing, Nishidani would do well to make some of his comments less personal, if only to remove the go to method to remove him and his contributions when his interlocutors cant on any policy basis. nableezy - 21:15, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

South Hebron Hills again

I thought it was bad enough already, but take a look at this: <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-children-arrested-sparks-outrage>.

Watching that video must be unbearable for any parent of small children.

--NSH001 (talk) 08:31, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

These last few days it seems to be unending, [26]. Just look at the expression on the faces of these guys in Sheikh Jarrah: [27], Huldra (talk) 20:48, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Huldra. Your links don't work, but these ones do: B'Tselem on Alyan family near Mitzpe Yair and Sheikh Jarrah. --NSH001 (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, User:NSH001, I linked wrongly, using a "," in the middle of the link. Huldra (talk) 22:14, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

If you want to know what those folks in Havat Maon and similar places get up to see David Dean Shulman's Dark Hope (2007). Why 2 millennia of Jewish historical testimony to what contempt for the 'other' means should be cancelled for a few patches of carpetbagged desert in the WB is beyond me. Under these conditions, it is tempting to think that Israeli identity is inversely proportional to what we all should admire in Jewish history.Nishidani (talk) 21:12, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Look at the Gamaliel II-article; years ago it included things like "Rabbi Gamaliel’s overriding philosophy was: Whoever has mercy on other people, Heaven will have mercy upon him; whoever does not have mercy on other people, Heaven will not have mercy upon him."[28] Now it says "So long as thou thyself art compassionate God will show thee mercy; but if thou hast no compassion, God will show thee no mercy". I guess it is better to cloak it in old language; as if it has absolutely no relevance to people living today, Huldra (talk) 21:57, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

It is always (hermeneutically) dangerous to cite old texts like that as if the literal appearance of the wording contained a generalization. The mitzvot of halachic law are hedged by numerous cautions and context-specific clarifications in the subsequent commentaries where, as often as not, the general principle's application is qualified in terms of the religious status of the persons concerned. Thus mercy, for example, can be in good conscience defined as not obligatory if the person is not Jewish~~, or doesn't belong to the peoples classified under the Noahide laws~~. The haskalah secularists and some reforming Jewish rabbinical schools reelaborated these so that they would apply, regardless of 'race', 'religion' etc., but that is a minority position.Nishidani (talk) 10:51, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Ugh, I did not know this (that it possible wasn't "valid" for people not Jewish); I normally "don't do" religion; I'll think I'll return to that....Huldra (talk) 22:14, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I should clarify that what, say, Gamaliel meant (general or particular precisely) isn't known. It could well be that he asserted this as a general principle. What we do know is that in the centuries that followed, commentaries began to hedge and particularize it. The greater the ascendency of an 'orthodox' textual awareness, the more restrictive such principles tend to become in a specific religious environment. I'm sure most modern Jews, on coming across such quotations, take them as a general guideline. The same argument could be made for many other well-known quotations from foundational religious figures. Think for example of the behavior of Jesus in the incident of the Syrophoenician woman recounted in Matthew 15:21-28, which shows him embarrassed: he was preaching as a Jew to Jews, until that non-Jewish woman's desperation put him into intense difficulty, which he resolved by extending his healing powers beyond the fold. But in thus crossing ethnic borders, he suffered a crisis, and fled.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Just a small question, as I landed here only by chance: I never dwelt much on the subject, but I thought the Noahide laws cover all Gentile humanity, not just some peoples. The enWiki article also defines them this way. Did I miss something? I know the related Muslim concept of the "Peoples of the Book" only offer dhimmi protection to monotheists, but that's another matter. It does connect nicely to the question of "where did the spouses of Adam & Eve's children come from", and the contorted ways religion tries to answer it. Fun makes the world go round. Arminden (talk) 12:30, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for picking me up on that, A. I was thinking of the halakhic judgement (599) obliging Jews to exterminate the Amalekites, who in the myth certainly descend from Noah. They technically would have come under the Noahide dispensation but, perhaps because of stories that they were capable of transmogrification into animal species, treated as outside the pale of humanity, as they still are, in terms of those glosses taught in Yitzhar and some other West Bank yeshivot which equate their descendants with Palestinians, ergo . . I've struck it out, but I'd be curious to know how that mitzvah sits with Noahide principles. Nishidani (talk) 13:40, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Israel Shahak cites the following from the Sefer ha-Chinuch for his view that in the Jewish religious tradition ethical values like 'mercy', respect for one's fellow man, etc., always refers to Jews, whilst the nature of the value changes if the person is a non-Jew:

And at the root of this religious obligation is that we should not do any act of mercy except to the people who know God and worship Him; and when we refrain from doing merciful deeds to the rest of mankind and do so only to the former, we are being tested that the main part of love and mercy to them is because they follow the religion of God, blessed be He. Behold, with this intention our reward [from God] when we withhold mercy from the others is equal to that for doing [merciful deeds] to members of our own people.Israel Shahak, Jewish History,Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, London, 1994, pp-95-96

Of course, one should handle such medieval sources with care. It is not as if the said work, ascribed to Aharon HaLevi was papal writ. Things are much more complex, and this reflects a strict orthodox viewpoint whose 'niceties' were probably unknown or ineffectual in the larger world. Certainly in the diaspora, that kind of strong reading would be disowned by most rabbis and their congregations. But it does illustrate the ongoing tension between universal and particularistic values in Judaic tradition, and the kind of declension of tradition which can be an enabler of the perplexingly nonchalant brutality one observes in the occupied territories.Nishidani (talk) 15:36, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Brigading?

Hi Nishidani, I just read your post on the Nabeezy ANI case. Are you saying there are external webpages which direct people here to edit Israel-Palestine articles? --Boynamedsue (talk) 19:45, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but we don't satisfy their urge for visibility by linking to them. It's known to the relevant administrative bodies. Leave it at that.Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

By the way, in editing around here, don't assume of course that people who disagree with you about these issues are necessarily connected to that racket. Most of the I/P editors I disagree with over the issues have been around far longer than that outfit and appear to work, like the rest of us, off their own bat. Take editors strictly in terms of what they do, in terms of quality of sourcing and respect for policy.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Incidentally, that creep had a "conference" lately, one of the speakers was a guy from "Dishonest Reporting". He talked about how Syria was "raining bombs over Israel" (more or less in those words): that got me going "Huh??"

When did Syria last bomb Israel? Did I miss something? I cannot remember any, at least since BA took over, in 2000. Is my memory faulty? (Israel has of course bombed Syria plenty of times these last decades; funnily he never mentioned that), Huldra (talk) 21:39, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

The ratio is around 1 (Syria)/150 (Israel) in Israel's favour, from memory. Don't waste your time following that crap. It's to concede, if you take trash seriously, a victory to people screaming for attention, to one's own detriment. The background story of what is still going on up there (Wiederholungszwang)was revealed by Moshe Dayan in an interview in, I think, 1975.Nishidani (talk) 21:57, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

oh yes, I do know (pretty much!) what is/was going on; it still astonish me that people tell lies so easily...and nobody corrects them :( Huldra (talk) 22:20, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Come now, everybody up there knows, surely, the memorable Ibsenian line:Tar De livsløgnen fra et gjennomsnittsmenneske, så tar De lykken fra ham med det samme.Nishidani (talk) 22:27, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Btw, when was that one time? I think I missed it? Huldra (talk) 23:28, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

It wasn't a Syrian strike technically, that one, but a Hezbollah drone (all from memory, no time to check). The picture up there is unilateral airstrikes by Israel for its own perceived geopolitical interests. It's interesting technically, a unilateral war.Nishidani (talk) 08:53, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Your User Page

You should remove "This user is no longer active on Wikipedia." from your user page-you are active--Steamboat2020 (talk) 20:12, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

As others have neutrally pointed out more than once - I don't get it, either. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.111.51.247 (talk) 22:21, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

You dont have to. nableezy - 22:29, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Modest flowers

Thank you for what you said on Yoninah's talk, - see also Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-03-28/Obituary! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:41, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

In the news

On 11 April 2021, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article Aten (city), which you created. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. Onceinawhile (talk) 05:33, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

maybe replied in wrong place?

This edit https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Talk:Goths&diff=1014849647&oldid=1014849049 --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:45, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

There's been so many section shifts there it's hard to keep up. By all means place it where it should be: no need to ask my permission, either. Nishidani (talk) 13:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Late answer but just for the record I left it untouched, because an answer came later that united several threads. Would you have a moment to look at some drafting? [29] (Short one on the right, might represent a reasonable direction?) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:00, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Andrew I've been overwhelmed by visits, cooking, cleaning etc., hence the delay. I'll try to get to it in a day or two (tomorrow is difficult). If I don't, rebuzz me on Tuesday. I should keep an electric prod round the place to jolt myself as it is.Nishidani (talk) 17:38, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Akevot

Want to do an article on them? Selfstudier (talk) 15:26, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Certainly deserves an article, though access is still quite restricted. Perhaps first a short bio of Lior Yavne would be in order but that may be difficult. If you do start one on 'Footprints', I'll pitch in of course. That is what this is really about, finding traces/spoors for that immense amount of information that rarely hits the front page, but tells one what is really going on.Nishidani (talk) 16:14, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Have you seen this?Selfstudier (talk) 16:57, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

No, but have have now. My problem is the allocation of what time remains: most of it has nothing to do with Wikipedia, and in the latter, I prefer to harvest the secondary sources by scholars who do that groundwork in archives etc.Nishidani (talk) 18:33, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

odd question for a wordsmith

Buongiorno, Nish. I'm looking for an example of a noun N and adjectives A1 and A2 such that the sequences A1 A2 N and A2 A1 N have substantially different meanings in English. For example, "red soft ball" and "soft red ball" have much the same meaning so that isn't an example. Examples where somehow a different impression is given aren't good enough, nor are examples where only one of the two orders would customarily be employed by a native speaker. It has to be an example where both orders are meaningful but the meaning is different. Any ideas? Zero^talk 07:39, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Coincidence. I've just wiped the cobwebs off my meatpies after hammering zeds for five hours -sleepless till the wee hours from memories of 康丹, another chap who would have jumped to the challenge of your enigma. Being in the lesser spheres of the luminaries, I'll have to take Sherlock's advice and buy a carton of cigarettes, and take a long walk in the hills to try and smoke out that one. But I'll give it a go.Nishidani (talk) 08:30, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

A shower, half a fag and a sip of tea with my mental turnstiles churning alternate vowels patterns gave me 'soft brown kid/brown soft kid' (that came up while putting on a leather shoe, perhaps influenced by reading of glover manufacturing in American Pastoral yesterday). Not an answer, but it highlights the problem for me: many nouns have two or more meanings and the adjectives applied will, contextually, restrict the potential polysemy. 'Kid' means child, but also a young goat, ergo 'leather' from the same. If you say 'soft kid', you can imply either a child who is either gentle or daft (soft in the brain), or equally, in another context, say were it uttered by a workman in Seymour Levov's Newark glove factory, 'pliant goat leather'. 'Soft brown kid' would at first hearing refer to a child, given the order of the adjectives, whereas 'brown soft kid' would, given the sequence, tend to prompt an image of leatherwork. But the example is faulty - not what you are requesting - so I'd better pound the cobblestones, get a cappuccino or several, and ask a local chap who haunts the same bar for a few of the reefers he smokes, or supplies to friends. Nishidani (talk) 09:17, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

I would have thought large blue tit and blue large tit would be more your style. Johnuniq (talk) 11:00, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Right, there are cases where the adjectives serve to disambiguate a noun that has two meanings. I didn't think of that and it only gets you half marks. I'm hoping for an example where the meaning of the noun is the same for both orders. Zero^talk 11:04, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps "long lost friend" - meaning, your friend had been absent from you for a long time, until you found him again, as opposed to "lost long friend" which means that your friend of a great many years is now lost and nowhere to be found.Davidbena (talk) 11:35, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Bit like "little black dress".Selfstudier (talk) 11:40, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

According to Jim Feist (7 September 2016). Semantic Structure in English. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 206–. ISBN 978-90-272-6652-1. "Nigerian single parent" works.Selfstudier (talk) 12:05, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, clever. That kind of inversion does work in linguistics, but the pattern Zero is seeking is different since here 'Nigerian' as an adjective is semantically invariant in the two samples, whereas he wants both adjectives to differ in meaning according to the arrangement? I was fixated on the monosyllabic pattern of single vowel alternate adjectives yielding different meanings when their sequence is reverted in defining a noun, which is how I took Zero's example.

One of the several problems, apart from what Zero remarks of Johnuniq's (sexy) suggestion (I'd thought of dozens like 'dry fresh dill' and 'fresh dry dill' and a score of similar examples where dill qua clunk and dill qua vegie, fresh as in food and fresh as in impudent/dry as 'not wet' and dry as terse-witted, etc.) is the case of gerundives with adjectival functions (of course Zero is searching for monosyllables I assume.) Well, won't go into that. But

(a)Hot red car ('hot' meaning the cynosure of all eyes, alluringly new. A red vehicle that is the talk of the town)
(b) Red hot car ('hot' defining 'car' means 'stolen'. A red vehicle that has been stolen.)

But we're not there, because 'redhot' in (b) also bears the idiomatic sense in (a) Nishidani (talk) 12:15, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

(a) four new irons
(b) new four irons

Again the problem is that one of the adjectives remains semantically identical despite the reversed position, unlike 'four' which is an enumerator of quantity in (a) and a descriptor of loft angle in a golf wedge. And the qualified noun's meaning is different. Thunder, so I'd better switch off and think at the hearth.Nishidani (talk) 13:14, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone for your ideas. It's interesting that defining the problem is at least as hard as solving it. Zero^talk 09:39, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Defining a problem is usually 99% of the work of finding a solution, which is not the isdsue here (so far) however, since you've posed the question clearly. I can only momentarily assuage my frustration by recalling Auden's lines in 'The Waters'

Poet, oracle, and wit

Like unsuccessful anglers by

The ponds of apperception sit,

Baiting with the wrong request

The vectors of their interest,

At nightfall tell the angler's lie.

It's one of those backburner puzzles best left to the 'method' Poincaré recommended to solve recalcitrant cruxes: forget them and, as with his approach to Fuchsian functions which he had illuminated on a geology excursion while stepping into a bus, the unriddling answer will come spontaneously like a bolt from the blue, (a phrase that, in Japanese translation by the way -seiten hekireki (青天(の)霹靂). perplexes a younger generation of Japanese readers if we are to trust Murakami Haruki's recent novel Killing Commendatore).Nishidani (talk) 13:23, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

May we ask what prompted you, Zero0000 to ask the question in the first place? I agree with Nishidani that what Selfstudier was trying to do with "Nigerian single parent" was to use a figure of speech known as "Inversion." Simply put, an "inversion" is a change of the normal order of words or phrases, so as to emphasize them. For example: "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," instead of "Diana of the Ephesians is great." Zero0000 was looking for a legitimate grouping of words, two adjectives followed by a noun, where, if you switch the adjectives, the meaning of the word is totally different. The example that I gave, i.e. "long lost friend" (see: long lost friend) is used today to refer to a friend who was lost, but who is now found. If you reverse the adjectives, the sense is that he is still lost; two distinct meanings.Davidbena (talk) 14:26, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

No, I don't see how that fits the criteria as Zero set them down.

(a)Long lost friend is self- explanatory. Long is temporal
(b) lost long friend

In (b) 'long' cannot escape the somewhat comical implication the friend in question is long as opposed to short, apart from the fact that the adjective in the second sense is elliptical, referring back to long-lost. In both cases, the adjectives' semantics remain identical, which is not, I think, what Zero is looking for. To compare a discarded one that came to mind when I was rinsing a jumper in a bidet this morning (no, not a widow's idiosyncracy - my wife used it also to that end).'('I saw a long Latin mass on the seashore at Naples' (a mass of Latin/Italian people: long is spatial, Latin is an ethnic term) as opposed to 'I heard over Eastertide a Latin long mass (where mass is a religious rite: Latin is a language, and long in long mass is not spatial but temporal). That example is somewhat strained, 'long' being used for a 'full mass', lasting as long, say, as Bach's St Matthew's Passion oratorio. That is the kind of thing we are looking for, I believe, but even there the forced inversion to wring out different senses by inverted sequential placement compels the noun to alter its meaning, from 'mass' of people (Tennyson's 'Latin crowd' in his 'Sir John Oldham, Lord Cobham' in Poetical Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Macmillan London 1899 p.522 'and then in Latin to the Latin crowd') to 'mass' as in the rite.Nishidani (talk) 14:58, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

If the type is the same then reversal shouldn't change anything, I think. What about "smartest two"? Nope, no good, not an adjective, modifies everything. Hum, too many "types", I am just confusing myself now;) Selfstudier (talk) 15:15, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Back to basics, then (perhaps my construal is exaggerated). Z wrote:-

examples of a noun N and adjectives A1 and A2 such that the sequences A1 A2 N and A2 A1 N have substantially different meanings in English.

So it's not the adjectives that have to change their meaning, but the inversion of the order of the adjectives will created a different meaning in the overall phrase. I've noted one thing: such inversions of an adjectival sequence almost in variably modifies the meaning of the noun, so that a latent premise seems to be that the noun itself must bear two distinct meanings. But here's an exception to that intuition.

(a) A fair fowl day (a reasonably good day for buying fowls)

(b) A foul fair day (bad weather on a day set for a fair).Nishidani (talk) 16:16, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

(a) a fly green man (a clever spirit/wraith/ghost of the kind wonderfully recounted in Kingsley Amis's best novel The Green Man, with 'fly' in its British sense.

(b) a green fly man (Of an entomologist specializing in aphids).Nishidani (talk) 16:44, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Re (b) of course there is a complication. 'green fly man' could be heard as meaning an entomologist beginning work on Diptera but still considered to be a neophyte, inexperienced (green) in the opinion of his Phd supervisor or elder peers. Nishidani (talk) 16:55, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

A variant on Feist- Spanish English speaker.Selfstudier (talk) 17:02, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

@Nishidani: If I'm not mistaken, "fair" in A fair fowl day seems to be temporal, like saying "pretty" in a pretty good girl. It, too, does not fit what Zero0000 is looking for, even though if we reverse the order (good pretty girl), we come-up with a different meaning altogether.Davidbena (talk) 20:28, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

No, David. It means 'equable', 'reasonable'. The example fails Zero's request on other grounds. 'Fair' in (a) is a true adjective whereas 'fair' in (b) is a noun in an adjectival position assuming the adjective's function though a substantive (in the sense that 'New York' in 'New York city' is a noun but has a kind of adjectival function by virtue of its qualifying position). I at least am looking for true adjectives that, when their sequence is inverted, take on each a different meaning on relocation. I don't believe that's quite what Zero is looking for, but at the moment, talking in the context of green flies, that has become a bee in my bonnet, even if I don't drive a car ( bonnet) or go in drag with female headgear (bonnet), but rather sport an akubra.Nishidani (talk) 21:13, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:50, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Plum? Apricot? Damson?

Hey, have you ever noticed how Wikipedia's article on ume says that in English it is called an "apricot" and our article on sumomo says "plum"? I can understand that some Japanese right-wingers would want to avoid referring to aspects of Japanese culture as "Chinese", but the noun elements of these common names seem to differ from what Keene, McCullough, Tyler, Seidensticker, Waley... everyone has actually called them. My understanding (which I've had to piece together with no help from WP:PLANTS...) is that apparently the ume is genetically slightly closer to the European plant(s) traditionally referred to as "apricot" and so botanists and horticulturalists call them that, but that traditionally scholars of the humanities have either ignored this or never been made aware of this and so they've continued calling them by their traditional names, which in my mind was what "common name" meant (i.e., not necessarily scientifically accurate, but widely used by convention). There seem to be a fairly large number of online sources now that say ume is widely referred to as plum but is technically more an apricot, but I suspect this may be the result of WP:CITOGENESIS, since I've been unable to find a non-scientific print source prior to the 21st century that says this, nor a source written by an actual botanist or horticulturalist that seems to be aware that everyone outside their field says the "wrong" thing.

I'm interested in hearing whether you've ever noticed this. I honestly had no idea in the 15 years between when I took up Japanese studies and when a translation client of mine asked me about a year ago to change a translation from "plum" to "apricot". (Needless to say, the job had nothing to do with botany or horticulture, but rather related to Japanese poetry, as have about 2/3 of the ume-related translations I've done since the end of the Heisei era.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:36, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Good grief. Reading this after just waking from a somewhat sleepless night, I imagine now that shortly, singing as usual under the shower, I will be yodeling like a run-down Frank Ifield in a plumb-tuckered voice 我は梅の子....Nishidani (talk) 08:37, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Don't worry about Keene and co., getting it wrong. When Donald Keene accompanied Mishima Yukio on a trip south, when the latter was researching the landscape for a scene in 豊饒の海, Keene was surprised to find that Mishima didn't know the proper names to distinguish a red pine (Pinus densiflora/赤松 ) from a black pine(Pinus Thunbergii/黒松). Confusion in plant names is universal. I have several loquat trees, which everyone here refers to as nespolo (Mespilus germanica) what we call a medlar. But that species has been trumped out by the imported Eriobotrya japonica (枇杷/biwa) whose delicious fruits have to endure the indignity of the traditional term 'nespolo'.

The correct scientific classifications are:

梅 Plum.* Ch.Méi/Jap.Ume, namely Prunus mume , which of course is a term borrowed straight out of old Chinese (Karlgren‘s muäi, Heian Japanese mume
李 Plum. Ch.Lǐ/Jap.Sumomo, namely Prunus salicina
杏 Apricot. Ch.Xìng/Jap.anzu, namely Prunus armeniaca. (Francesca Bray, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6. Biology and Biological Technology,pt.2:Agriculture, Cambridge University Press 1984 p,548 /though she glosses prunus salicina as prunus trifolia).

Plums and Japanese identity were discussed in a couple of bestsellers by Higuchi Kiyoyuki (樋口清之), one on Pickled Plums and the Japanese Sword (梅干と日本刀日本人の知恵と独創の歴史 (1974)) and the quick follow-up (続°梅干と日本刀(1975)) both appropriately published by Non Books.Nishidani (talk) 11:13, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

To answer your point. 梅 is not a 'plum'. Chinese plums in terms of morphology -hairless fruits and stalked flowers - were of two kinds, the apricot plum and the above-mentioned Prunus salicina. The confusion in terminology came about when Philipp Franz von Siebold classified this in the Linnaean system as a Prunus mume/Japanese apricot. All of this is closely documented by Needham,Lu Gwei-Djen and Huang Hsing-Tung in vol.6 of the encyclopedia above (CUP 1986 pp.420ff.)Nishidani (talk) 14:31, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Gee... thank you so much! I don't have access to Needham presently and the next massive, multi-volume, very expensive book I might fork out for is the Shinpen Kokka Taikan (¥34,080 is a little steep). But once the plague has died down and I can visit libraries again I'll look into it. Your above information, though, is all extremely interesting and helpful.

And yeah, I know it would be wrong to say "梅=plum", but a lot of these common names in both Japanese and English are, of course, not very scientific; heck, I'm pretty sure Japanese popular consciousness treats the Prunus japonica as a subclass of ume given that it's called niwa-ume, but it actually appears to be a member of a completely different section (Prunus sect. Microcerasus as opposed to Prunus sect. Armeniaca); meanwhile, I've never considered "plum" to refer to a specific species (or section, or subgenus, or genus) of tree but rather to fruit that "looks/feels/tastes plummy", and my father (who has an extensive background in gardening), when I brought this matter up with him about a year ago, said that well, maybe "plums" and "apricots" can be the same thing and that's why scientific names are useful. (Our article on Plum actually defines it as "a fruit of some species in Prunus subg. Prunus", which would include P. mume.) Wikipedia aggravates this problem a little by naming its article on Prunus sect. Armeniaca "Apricot" while its article entitled "Plum" is essentially about fruits that look/feel/taste plummy, not to mention that Wikidata encourages editors to create false equivalencies across languages. Interestingly, a Google image search for "梅" brings up mostly images of blossoms, while a Google image search for "plum" brings up mostly images of fruit; "apricot" brings up similar types of results to "plum" in English while "アンズ" shows substantially more fruit than blossoms.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:26, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

DYK for Karl Marx in Kalbadevi

On 5 May 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Karl Marx in Kalbadevi, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the play Karl Marx in Kalbadevi depicts an imaginary visit by Marx to Kalbadevi, the hyper-capitalist area of Mumbai, India? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Karl Marx in Kalbadevi. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Karl Marx in Kalbadevi), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

— Maile (talk) 00:02, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Nishidani. This wouldn't have been possible without your help. --Gazal world (talk) 19:06, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Don't underestimate yourself. I'm a contented rung in the ladder when climbers lightly spring higher than I would ever go. Best Nishidani (talk) 21:21, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Yardumian/Schurr

Nishidani, I don't know how to contact you, I hope this is OK, here is a new email from Aram Yardumian <aram2@sas.upenn.edu>, email him directly if you wish, I can't deal with this, I do not plan an making anymore edits/posts on Wikipedia at this time. Aram Yardumian 9:27 AM (1 hour ago) to me

Hi Steve

Thanks again for all the work you've done on this. If the discussion continues, It seems like you have a very good grasp on our position. Here are a couple of points that might be worth considering should the discussion continue, or should edits to the 'Genetic Studies of Jews' page be made:

1. I don't disagree with the mainstream authors about the 'Middle Eastern' origin of certain male Jewish lineages, but some have jumped to the conclusion that 'Middle Eastern' = Palestine, ergo proof of 'origins' according to the biblical narrative. I think Eran Elhaik was responding to this illogical assumption as well. The lineages associated with contemporary Ashkenazi males appear all over the Middle East from Iran to Iraq to Egypt to the Caucasus, even Mediterranean Europe, and furthermore they are diverse. One cannot settle the case of Jewish origins in Palestine simply by reaching the conclusion that the preponderance are 'Middle Eastern'. Much more work would have to be done to suggest that these exact lineages coalesced in the Iron Age Levant as the 'Jewish People'. The closest anyone has come to doing so is Behar et al. (2010) with the tight clustering of Ashkenazi Jews and Druze, but as we point out, the Druze are a people of uncertain origins themselves. I wonder what the same plot would look like with ancient Aegean / modern Cypriot individuals.

2. The apparent recent common origins of Ashkenazi Jewish males would seem to be Southern Europe, not the Levant. This does not mean Levantine admixture does not form some part of the story, but again, much more work is needed to demonstrate that Jewish ethnogenesis is not simply the story of a network of converts to some form of Judaic monotheism in the greater Near East (Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Anatolia, North Africa, Rome) over time.

3. Also, regarding the lack of subsequent citations for this paper since 2019, I cannot think of a single paper that has emerged in two years since publication that would have cited it. There has been no new direct research into the question of Jewish origins for several years (Xue et al. 2017; Behar et al. 2018, perhaps being the latest examples) and the only other studies have been regional genomic surveys. So I don't find Skllagyook's argument about lack of citations compelling at all.

Feel free to put the above in your own words; no need to quote me.

Please keep me informed as edits to other wikipedia pages occur, and let me know if I can offer assistance. Regards Aram — Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveBenassi (talk • contribs) 15:33, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

I hope you have permission from Professor Yardumian to share his emails, and in public. My wiki email address is readily available if you click on the left hand of this page under 'email this user'. Please note that one must exercise extreme scruple in exchanging views on an active editing issue offline. Regards Nishidani (talk) 15:42, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Nishidani ... I asked for permission ...

Steve Benassi <steve.benassi@gmail.com> 11:40 AM (0 minutes ago) to Aram

Dear Aram,

I am not a Wikipedia person, they call me a Newbie.

I did this one thing for You and Elhaik, I thought it was important, but now that it is done I do not plan on making new edits/posts on Wikipedia in the near future.

The person you want to email is Nishidani (talk), I forwarded your last email to his wikipedia email. I think he wants permission from you to receive your emails.

I told him I would email you for permission.

He has your email address, I also told him to email you directly, I don't have his email address, it is internal to Wikipedia.

If you give me permission to forward your emails to him, I can do that.

So let me know.

Steve

SteveBenassi (talk) 16:43, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Nishidani ... I asked for permission, and got it ...

Aram Yardumian 11:48 AM (2 minutes ago) to me

That's fine, Steve, and quite understandable. I'm not a Wikipedia person either! But I thank you for all your work on this. It's fine to forward emails to Nishidani and for him to contact me directly at this address.

Regards, Aram — Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveBenassi (talk • contribs) 16:55, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Rocks

I appreciated your recent Sappho quote. My favourite translation of Sappho, ever, is Mary Barnard's of "Μὴ κίνη χέραδος": "If you're squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble" ---Sluzzelin talk 20:36, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

'Don't stir the shingle's flotsam.' Nishidani (talk) 06:41, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

The problem, as often, is that the rare word χέραδος suggests the runoff of gravel and pebbles from a hillside stream down to a shoreline, whereas flotsam points in the other direction, the jetsam flung in by the waves. A poet, looking at this dazzling elusive fragment, would do well to reimagine it, in terms of the χέραδος as a metaphor for the fate of Sappho's own unsurpassed lyric output -shattered by the randomness of glib transmission till we can only glimpse her full genius from a handful of poems. Her power is such however, that even a word or two, surviving in arcane glosses, can stun the reader. This line, read decades ago until you reminded me of it, has teased my thinking most of the afternoon. Nishidani (talk) 21:34, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Hah, such is the koanic power of Sappho. Thanks for that! Barnard's generous addition of conditional antecedent had also intrigued me (and the person who first pointed this out to me). ---Sluzzelin talk 08:18, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Notice about a new WikiProject Proposal

Hey Nishidani. I recently proposed an idea for a WikiProject for 2021. You seem to have a strong interest in the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis article, which started in 2021. So I thought I would drop by and let you know about the proposal. Feel free to drop your opinions here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/2021. Elijahandskip (talk) 19:17, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

ITN recognition for 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis

On 22 May 2021, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, which you updated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. starship .paint (exalt) 15:47, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

hi there

hi there! I'm so pleased to see that you are active here. how have you been? it's been a while!!! ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 15:24, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

More reactive than active in my retyring phase. I think I'll only know how I am when the evidence comes in from the coroner doing my autopsy. I feel fine, but, following one of my basic rules, I remain wary of being duped by appearances and feelings. Hope you are well, Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 15:30, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

lol! gotcha. well, I'm glad you are still making the efforts. sounds good! ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 13:28, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Israel-Gaza cycle of violence

I'm surprised there is currently no article exploring the Israeli-Gaza cycle of violence. This cycle has erupted many times and consists of a blockage of Gaza, Hamas rockets, Israeli retaliation, internationally pressured ceasefire and then the cycle repeats itself. It has been explained in depth in this report (which received coverage by Vox) but the concept is talked about in academia and newspapers. Should we create an article on this? Also tagging Selfstudier and nableezy. VR _talk 22:05, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes. It is all very repetitive, demanding a slight rewriting of Marx's rewrite of Hegel: tragedy repeated becomes a farce, for those who pretend it isn't a tragedy but just business as usual. Thanks for the links. Perhaps there is indeed room for an article, but one would expect by now (other than Finkelstein's magisterial history of the conflict in Gaza) a greater volume of studies devoted to the narrative and factual repetitiveness, esp. given the way Biden and Blinken are handling it so far (i.e., prop up the slipper pantaloons in Ramallah as they have for 15 years in order to sideline Hamas, rather than do the obvious, talk also to them, as NGOs do, and some priests). Nishidani (talk) 22:13, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Hard to say whether to do it. In many ways, it suits the current IsGov to divide and rule. If you try to do it, the usual suspects will come out of their boxes, squawking "Hamas! Terrorists!", I'm sure you know the form. I would say it like this, if Palestinian elections go ahead at some point, then I would write it.Selfstudier (talk) 12:07, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I actually think that sounds like a good idea. how about History of Israel-Gaza conflicts, 2000-present? ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 13:30, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

We have a lot of coverage of the conflict, very little of what analysis of the structures undergirding essentially the same type of event conclude. To do that one would need severl solid sources focusing on the structure of the conflict itself. We can, those who have followed this stuff since 2008, predict almost everything that occurs, and will recur, from the military, ideological, economic, political (an allusion to Michael Mann's IEMP model of social history. An overview should, if done, limit itself to meta-sourcs of general analysis, rather than the history itself.Nishidani (talk) 13:41, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

If you're still intersted in the topic, you may want to glance at the recent edits. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:53, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. I have a hard time getting interested in de Vere. He had a reputation for having farted at Queen Elizabeth's court, but, really, I much prefer the lyrical sonorities of the Shakespearean stage, very much as Queen Elizabeth would have. Regards. Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 26 May 2021 (UTC)