Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 April 4

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April 4

Shouldn't incumbents want their own party's presidential candidate to lose?

In presidential systems (rather than parliamentary systems), especially two-party systems, isn't it fundamentally in the interest of incumbent politicians in the legislative branch and incumbent politicians at subnational (provincewide/statewide) levels that the opposing party, rather than their own, holds the Presidency? That way, they can blame any national problems that would make them unpopular on the President being of the opposing party and on divided government, thereby evading responsibility/blame and helping their own reelection. Obviously, they can't publicly state that they want the opposing party to hold the Presidency, because then they would look like traitors to their party, but they would actually secretly want that, no? In other words, shouldn't incumbents want/hope their own party's presidential nominee to lose rather than win the presidential election, and therefore try to subtly hurt/sabotage the campaign of their own party's presidential candidate?

(I'm aware of the coattail effect, but correlation does not imply causation: one interpretation of the effect is that "election of party's presidential candidate" causes "election of other party members", but an equally valid interpretation is that a third confounding factor -- "the electorate trending toward the left or the right" -- causes both "election of party's presidential candidate" and "election of other party members", in which case, their own party's presidential candidate winning never actually helps them, and it would remain in their interest that their party's presidential candidate lose.)

—SeekingAnswers (reply) 06:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Addendum: Further evidence that it is in the interest of politicians that their own party's presidential candidate lose rather than win comes from the article on divided government: the historical table shows that whichever party does not hold the US Presidency tends to hold the US legislature. (To be fair, though, the direction of causation in this correlation is debatable.) —SeekingAnswers (reply) 20:40, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Only if your interest is in blaming others and evading responsibility. But if your interest is in accepting responsibility, then no. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 06:49, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

By definition, an elected politician has to have an interest in their own election, or they wouldn't be an elected politician. Blaming others helps election. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 07:05, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Come on, you know this is off-topic. The solution to all politics can't be settled in the middle of a question. Wnt (talk) 14:30, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Well, it can, but that is an appeal to the basest of human instincts. Not all voters think that way all the time. Some hardly ever do. People yearn for leaders who can show them a vision of what's possible and realistically achievable. If only more politicians remained true to their altruistic motivations that got them into the public arena in the first place, maybe we wouldn't have the vast cynicism that's exemplified by StuRat's post below. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 07:44, 4 April 2012 (UTC) In the US, we had liberal politicians in the 1960's and 1970's who thought the solution to poverty was just to give money to the poor, but this resulted in dependency and despondency instead. Then we had Reagan in the 1980's, arguing that the way to help the poor is to give money to the rich and remove all restrictions on business practices. This, predictably, made the poor even poorer. This is just one example of how neither Democrats nor Republicans have any idea how to actually solve the problem (and I suspect that Republicans don't even really want to). For other problems, like warfare, both parties are just as bad. There's a reason for my cynicism. StuRat (talk) 15:59, 4 April 2012 (UTC) Undoubtedly. But blaming parties for what they did, or failed to do, in the '60s, '70s and '80s is hardly relevant to the concerns of 2012. Making political parties or governments responsible for fixing problems as complex as poverty may be asking too much of them anyway. Who says they have, or should have, the answers? Who says anyone has, or should have, the answers? Governments have a better chance than most other institutions of addressing issues that can be helped by injecting or redistributing money, but some issues cannot be resolved by this means. We've always known this; witness the very old story of the desert traveller who's on the point of death due to lack of food and water, and who finds a bag that he hopes contains dates, but all it has is pearls. Priceless they may be, but they have zero value to him right now. Worse than zero, because his hopes of being saved were raised, but now he's still going to die. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 19:35, 4 April 2012 (UTC) Most people have innate empathy with others ln need, and they have a strong impulse to do something to help. But society-wide issues such as poverty, domestic violence, drug culture etc often seem intractable, and we feel powerless. It pains us when we see pictures of starving African kids with distended stomachs and fly-blown faces, but we feel we cannot help them, much as we'd like to. We might be able to help save one or two through donations, but what about the millions of others? It's very painful to want to help but feel powerless to help. And many people cannot deal with that pain, so to alleviate it they say "The government should fix the problem". They know full well that no government has ever solved these issues in the past; so why should they magically have the answers now, just because we have deemed them to be responsible? People ought to learn to live with pain - not agony, but more pain than they're currently generally prepared to tolerate. We're supposedly the healthiest generation ever, but doctors are busier than ever. They've become not much more than clerks in a gigantic pill-prescribing factory, while obesity and depression and anger and disillusionment rage around us in pandemic proportions. Something is very wrong here. And it's not the government's responsibilty to fix it. It's down to individuals to once again take responsibility for their own lives. Kids typically get to adulthood having never been trained to think about how they might make a difference in the world. There's no vision (which is why so many people respond to someone who stands up and says, with conviction and passion, "Yes, we can"). It's all about having a job and a house and a car and zillions of other possessions and a family and travelling and enjoying ourselves and building up wealth and retiring as early as possible and dying. There's nothing wrong with those things, but is that all there is? Jeez, I hope not, otherwise I'm on the wrong planet. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:40, 4 April 2012 (UTC) Based on the desire for a leader who says "Yes, we can", I nominate Bob the Builder. :-) StuRat (talk) 01:39, 5 April 2012 (UTC) "Fly-blown" = fly covered ? StuRat (talk) 01:39, 5 April 2012 (UTC) I'm sure there's no perfect cure for poverty, but many (perhaps most) industrialized nations have done far better than the US. StuRat (talk) 01:42, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Most politicians actually believe the idiotic things their party claims. Thus, they think that they can bring paradise on Earth if they can only gain total control of the government, and be re-elected forever. Of course, once they do, then we find out what total morons they really are. StuRat (talk) 07:09, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

StuRat, hasn't that caused the recent fad of politicians signing contracts with the public stating they will resign if they fail to come through with election promises? Sheila Copps comes to mind.--Canoe1967 (talk) 07:44, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm, if they fail to come through on their other election proimises, would it be any surprise if they also failed to resign ? I've often seen politicians claim they will balance the budget once elected, only to then claim they can't, because their predecessors hid the extent of the problem. StuRat (talk) 15:47, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

If a party is out of power, it will probably get less funding from donors seeking to influence policy (the exception would be if it's obviously going to seize power soon). I'm not exactly sure how public campaign finance works in the US, but if your party loses the presidential election, that might mean it gets less in the way of state funding as well. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:04, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

State funding in the United States is minuscule and irrelevant. Also, if a party loses a presidential election, that has little effect on the ability of candidates from that party for other offices to raise money. Marco polo (talk) 14:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Placing blame has its uses in politics, but its not worth the loss of power that would come from letting the opponents control the Executive branch. Each party has policies they want to push through, and leaving veto powers in the other party's hands is a detriment to that. Also, if the President vetos a law, then Congress passes it anyway, they lose the ability to blame the President for the bad law. It's really not a sound political strategy to rely on blaming the President for everything. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 13:50, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I can buy your reasoning on the veto part (though even there, I'm skeptical of how much that matters since an override of a presidential veto is so difficult and is very uncommon), but I don't think the rest of this reasoning works. The problem is that the loss of power that would come from letting opponents control the executive branch, while it may inhibit the party's platform and policies, perversely does not inhibit and may actually help the individual party member's own election chances. And blaming the President for everything would seem to be a sound political strategy, considering how much the party without the Presidency does it and how effective it seems to be, as recent history shows us: in both the 2006 US elections and the 2008 US elections, Democratic politicians ran on blaming the US's problems on Republican President George W. Bush, and it worked: they gained seats at every level of government, from House to Senate to governorships to state legislatures. In the 2010 US elections, Republican politicians ran on blaming the US's problems on Democratic President Barack Obama (for that matter, the tactic is being repeated now in the campaigns for the 2012 US elections), and again, it worked: they gained seats everywhere. In fact, if we take a look at the article divided government, you can see that whichever party does not hold the US Presidency tends to hold the US legislature, again suggesting that it is in the interest of politicians that their own party's presidential candidate lose rather than win. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 20:40, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Seems a bad idea to me. Your bills don't get through. People are in the Senate, usually, because they want to get things done, and that includes the passage of legislation. Yes, it keeps the party's slot for a presidential nominee open, but relatively few senators are running for president at any one time. Some are too young, or too old (sorry John) or not eligible due to foreign birth and 1/3 are up for election in any given presidential year and they don't want to risk losing office by running for president and not making it.--Wehwalt (talk) 14:04, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

For sake of argument, let's suppose the national candidate's election really does hurt the local politician. In politics, what a candidate wants and what he says are two different things. A candidate might secretly agree with you, but obviously, he's not going to tell his voters anything like that or they'd desert. He's going to, in every way, seem favorable to the ideologies of the people who support him, and of the political party which often has substantial resources available to help him. Of course, if the candidate has some chance to backstab in secret, the difference is put to the test - but how often does a local candidate have enough pull for his small chance of an effect on the national election, and the small chance of that election affecting his election, to outweigh the chance that somehow the plot is revealed and he takes the rap for his actions?

Now once we've established that he must act in every way as a supporter of his party's candidate no matter what he thinks, the next question will be -- will he change what he thinks to match his circumstances? Every day we see yahoos who become passionate in support of one sports corporation over another, although the two are identical and vary only in terms of which better favors social opportunism. And politicians, beyond all others, are known for making choices in favor of expediency. So I see no reason why he does not, at this point, inwardly support his party, even starting from your hypothetical position of rational opposition.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Wnt (talk • contribs) 08:59, 4 April 2012‎

But it's very easy to subtly hurt the presidential candidate without doing anything overt, not through active sabotage, but simply through (deliberate, but impossible to prove) lack of effort: half-hearted endorsements, half-hearted presidential stumping, half-hearted fundraising. And in the case of the United States, its electoral college system makes it so that subnational politicians in close swing states can have an enormous impact on the overall presidential election. —SeekingAnswers (reply) 20:51, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Monogrammed Third Reich cutlery

We have some Third Reich cutlery monogrammed with an 'M'. Could anybody tell us who this relates to ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.37.151.251 (talk) 10:08, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

You could try this site or similar?

• http://www.925-1000.com/ --Canoe1967 (talk) 10:13, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I think the OP means it has someone's initials on it - strictly, though, a monogram is two or more letters combined into one symbol. But a letter M could, probably, refer to quite literally thousands of Third Reich officials, Nazi party members, Gauleiters and so on. Chances are that the cutlery belonged to someone who we have never heard of. However, it might be possible to provide an identification with a little more information - things about the cutlery like what is it made of? How many pieces in the set? How did you come to own it - is there a connection to Germany in your family? And, of course, a picture tells a thousand words, so maybe you could upload an image of the writing? - Cucumber Mike (talk) 10:20, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

By the way, in the used-cutlery industry, any engraved letter is referred to as a monogram.Ratzd'mishukribo (talk) 16:49, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Adding detail for a completely new topic (Roman ruins in Anatolia)

Whilst in Side, Anatolia, Turkey, on Holiday, in September 2011, we went to the ruins oif a Roman garrison fort up in the forested foothills of the Taurus mountains and several miles inland. The site was called Selecleure locally and was almost compleyely unexcavated but fairly well preserved, apart from two weeks in 1975 when the Turkish governemnt sponsored some work there. It is a substantial site, and was claimed to be the support garrison for Side during the occupation of Mark Anthony, covering a couple of square miles. I tried to research it on my return but found it was completely unreferenced anywhere on the internet and appears pretty much unknown to the archeological community. I have attempted to reference this on the "Side" page in wikipedia but they are going to take it down due to lack of other references which I am unable to provide apart from some photo's I have from the visit. How are you supposed to produce anything genuinely new, such as this, on this site? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lunn0667 (talk • contribs) 12:48, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

You can't. Wikipedia is a collection of previously published information, not a place for new research. --Viennese Waltz 12:58, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

For reasons of verifiability the working process at Wikipedia takes a strong stance against original research. You can understand that a powerful distinction has to be taken between information that can be verified and information which an editor says is correct but for one reason or another may turn out to not be correct. Therefore it is important to find sources that can be presented in support of all material added to articles or for starting new articles in the first place. Bus stop (talk) 13:02, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

This is true, but there are notable exceptions. First, you are very, very, very much welcome to take all the photos you can and upload to Wikimedia Commons. Your annotations there can be pretty much whatever you want, whatever you've read and heard, at least, that is, within the ever-boding censorship of copyright law. Next, you can insert such images into relevant articles with a much lower standard of proof than the usual. When editors add a picture of a flower, for example, they don't have to have a botanist publish that that flower in that image is what they think; they cross their fingers and hope for the best. So you can insert these images into an article about a Roman fort, even if you don't have strong published evidence that it is a Roman fort, and it's up to the editors of that article to decide whether you image satisfactorily depicts their topic or not. Wnt (talk) 14:22, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

The name you give does not seem either Turkish or Latin to me (though I could be wrong). There may well be other varieties of the name used - or, you could pinpoint the location on Google maps and do a search on the basis of the name of the nearest village, which may provide you with some verifiable information. Ghmyrtle (talk) 13:46, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Based on what you say, you might need to be able to read Turkish to find references. Marco polo (talk) 14:45, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Having examined a couple of maps, there are a few places near Side with Turkish names that sound something but not exactly like "Selecleure". I suspect that you have the name of the place wrong. If so, you'd need to get the correct Turkish spelling to have any hope of finding information. Marco polo (talk) 14:57, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Is this “Selecleure” perhaps Seleucia (Pamphylia)? For pictures see de:Seleukia (Pamphylien). --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 15:17, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

The German article seems to refer to excavations in the early 1970s, which fits. Ghmyrtle (talk) 18:22, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I improved the title. StuRat (talk) 18:58, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Thread diversion: A number of—not necessarily reliable—Web sites seem to identify Seleucia with Lyrbe, as does the final, somewhat-English-impaired sentence of our article on this Seleucia. I was all ready to delete that sentence as unsourced (as it is) but decided to hold off. If a source can be cited for this identification, the two articles should, I think, at least be cross-referenced via "See also" links. Can anyone shed any light on the matter? Deor (talk) 19:24, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

"The city of Lyrbe, about ten miles northeast of Side, preserves substantial Roman and late antique remains but they have not been reported in any detail: see Bean 114-116 and J. Inan in II.Kau (1980) 11-14. For the identification of the site, formerly considered as Pamphylian Seleucia, see J. Nolle "Forschungen in Selge und Ostpamphylien", VI.Aras.nrma Sonuflari Toplantisi (Ankara 1988) 257-259." - from Cities, fortresses, and villages of Byzantine Asia Minor, p.134. Warofdreams talk 10:26, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Seleucia-Lyrbe could have been conflated by someone, at some point, into the word "Selecleure". Ghmyrtle (talk) 10:53, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Are human rights a technology?

I've often had the feeling (which is also sort of implied in the article, I think) that human rights are a technology - in other words, that things like freedom of speech, democracy, prohibition of torture, trial by jury, innocent until proven guilty, and so forth are all things invented here and there and passed along and implemented by more and more people. Looking over countless little bits of history (like Pigeon cameras from a few days ago) we see that people a century or more ago were just as clever as they are today, so how could they believe in Kaisers and imperialism and glorious war and savage racism? Did they simply need to learn these technologies of human rights well enough to use them? Yet I can think of many other likely-sounding explanations to rival this one, for example...

• Human rights are the result of more tangible technologies, e.g. the printing press making it easier to tell your opinion to people than to kill them. Or in reverse, modern technologies that make it easier to spy on people than to trust them.

• Human rights are simply an average of free will and vary randomly (drunkard's walk) over time.

• Human rights are a sign of the workings of the Holy Spirit in Christian communities, from San Marino, the refuge of Christians from the lions and the world's oldest democracy, through the conversion of the Cannibal Isles and the Aztecs, to the modern world, where it correlates largely with Christian influence. Without continual divine intervention, people would turn on one another in hate and loathing until barbarity covered the Earth.

• Human rights are the result of endocrine disruptors. From the invention of democracy in the notably gay ancient Greek community to the modern day, human rights emerge when environmental toxins blunt the natural urge of fully male humans to kill and dominate the world.

So what I'm wondering is, has anyone looked into the question seriously, or even found a way to do experiments on the topic, to figure out what the nature of human rights really is? Wnt (talk) 14:23, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

On account of the relatively recent implementation of established human rights, the study of the history of human rights are still in its infancy. There has been plenty of people proposing theories of the history of them, but only in the last couple of decades have we had scholars who have exclusively specialised themselves in the field. Lynn Hunt being the most notable, but also someone like Samuel Moyn with his work The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History are relevant. Of course their conclusions are far more complex than any of the theories you propose above, and I should say rightly so, since human rights are really a conglomerate of a long development in philosophy, the history of ideas, cultural history and social and economic history. As such perhaps some elements of your list of theories has played a role, but overall this is not a question that can be boiled down to a paragraph or two, on account of the many many factors at play. I can only recommend that you read Lynn Hunts Inventing Human Rights: A History , which gives a very good introduction to the subject. --Saddhiyama (talk) 14:43, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! For others reading, here's the New York Times review of Hunt's book [1] (if a NYT link fails, just paste it into Google and try), the book on Google [2], a lecture at UC on YouTube [3]. Here's Samuel Moyn's NYT review [4] book on Google [5] and Columbia lecture on YouTube [6]. It may take me a while to go through all this, ;) meanwhile I appreciate your comments. Wnt (talk) 15:21, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

On Charlie Rose last night, Steven Pinker discussed his new book, claiming that there has been a steady decline in violence over the centuries: [7]. Personally, I'd like to see testosterone blockers sprayed over the enemy during a battle, to take away their desire to fight. StuRat (talk) 15:32, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

To annotate, that's Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" - Scientific American review, [8] Google Book, [9] YouTube lecture.[10] Wnt (talk) 15:58, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

As far as theories of the origin of human rights go, a lot of Marxist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist philosophers view human rights as an ideological creation of western free-market capitalism, constituted to serve the interests of society's rulers. Since the Enlightenment they have been linked with other positive and negative ideas about individualism, human freedom, man's dominion over nature, free market economics, the mechanistic scientistic/technological viewpoint, European/North American supremacy etc. Therefore it can be theorised that ideas of human rights are widespread because they primarily serve the interests of property-owning bourgeois capitalists (who used them e.g. in the French and American Revolution to seize power from absolute monarchies, and later to protect their property from socialists) and western colonial powers (who can use ideas of human rights to invade and subjugate third world countries). See e.g. Marxist criticisms of the "human rights", Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment (which discusses Friedrich Nietzsche inter alia).

But it's a mistake to see human rights either as a recent development, or an accompaniment of a perfected civilisation: plenty of historical societies have expressed belief in human rights, democracy, an impartial legal system, freedom of speech, property rights, etc, while still butchering political or religious opponents, allowing slavery, practicing genocide, etc. --Colapeninsula (talk) 15:34, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I'll link to the Google book [11] and Stanford's own free encyclopedia entry (who knew?) [12] Wnt (talk) 16:05, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

What you're saying is similar to what Jeremy Bentham meant when he said that the concept of natural rights is nonsense upon stilts.--99.179.20.157 (talk) 19:15, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to Bentham's Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable Natural Rights, part of his Anarchical Fallacies (1843). He is an eloquent and reasonable speaker, but such philosophical issues are difficult for me to divide out into true and false. I would not myself say that natural rights are nonsense; I believe in them; but I don't believe that anyone has so infallibly elucidated them that there is no possibility of error, except the freedom of speech, which I am pretty firmly convinced lacks any exception outside of the realm of the supernatural. Some rights, like trial by jury, non-excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishment, are so crudely and vaguely stated that they serve as little but place-holders until someone gets around to thinking about what the authors might have wanted to say. Others are between these extremes, cherished, but still needing reevaluation. We've practically fallen out of the habit of thinking about rights, because such an incessant war of nonsense is waged against them, every grasping hand looking for a chance to blame them for some intolerable condition we scarcely notice, that people are afraid of anything that would change them. But change they should, for the better, at some time in history when oppression is not the Horseman of the Apocalypse we most have to worry about. Wnt (talk) 20:28, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

(No doubt you meant to link to http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/ above, but didn't quite get the clipboard to copy the URL and so re-pasted the previous link.)

I just want to speak to one of your questions, which I take to be: "Has anyone seriously looked into the nature of human rights?" I think indeed there has been. In fact, that there have been serious ethical and political theories which are supposed to account for human rights is exactly why human rights began to be a topic of discussion at all. I do not think it was the other way around. There weren't first of all laws enshrining human rights or people wondering what human rights were and then justifications and answers given for these. Rather, there was ethical thought about what is right or wrong generally, or political thought about effective policy, and from these, conclusions were drawn that there are human rights of some form or that laws enshrining such rights should be enacted for some end, etc. So, for example, Locke did not start from the assumption that there were human rights and then sought to find out what they were, rather he started from the assumption that people are all servants of God and derived from that, and other considerations, that there are natural rights of life, liberty and property. I think some of the pages you've seen already can lead you on in this matter, but I'll relist them here as you like to do and which I think is a good idea too: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page [13], the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy page [14] and Wikipedia's own Philosophy of human rights. (With this edit I've also changed indentation above me so that things would be clearer.) --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 00:34, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Since others have covered the rights question well, I might just point out that under your usage of the term "technology," savage racism, glorious war, divine right of kings, etc., are all equally "technological" as are notions of rights. I don't take issue with calling them "technologies" if we understand what that means here — it is just meant to call our attention to their "inventedness" or "constructedness." Other metaphors/models we might use for what you mean includes the vocabulary of memetics, for example. But it seems fallacious to consider the rights to be the invented state and the other ideologies/memes/technologies to somehow be the "given" state of culture. There may be some cultural givens with human beings (something of some dispute), but the high-level examples you're giving here are just as constructed/invented/etc. as the concept of natural rights. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:42, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Regarding the original comment — Germans still believe in a Kaiser in Japan (see the introduction to de:Tennō) and presumably believe in past Kaisers in lots of countries, including the rulers of the Römische Kaiserzeit. Nyttend (talk) 14:46, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

On the origins of the Easter bunny (and Easter in general), and laying eggs.

In American culture there's the idea of an Easter bunny which lays colored eggs. Another tradition that comes about around the same time during the year is the Iranian Nowruz celebration, which also has colored eggs. The eggs in Nowruz celebrate fertility. Ēostre, a Germanic paganism Goddess, has been associated with fertility. Ēostre sounds very similar to Ishtar, which is a Assyrian & Babylonian fertility Goddess. Is this a coincidence or do these two geographically distant traditions share a common ancestor in the fertile crescent, which branched eastward to Iranian peoples and evolved into Nowruz, while it also branched northwestward and became the Pagan Easter festival? Thanks.--99.179.20.157 (talk) 18:59, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

The articles Easter egg and Easter Bunny covers some of this information. Following references from those articles may lead you to more detailed information. --Jayron32 19:02, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Certainly the origins of the name of Easter (see Ēostre) and such traditions as the Easter egg and Easter bunny are pre-Christian, but the name of the goddess Eostre can be traced back to an Indo-European root meaning "brightening" or "dawn". Assyrian and Babylonian were Semitic or Afroasiatic languages with no clear relation to the Indo-European languages, so it is likely that the similarity in the names of Eostre and Ishtar is a coincidence. However, I suppose that there is a chance that the name of this deity was borrowed from an Indo-European language into a Mesopotamian Semitic language or that the accepted etymology of Eostre is wrong. We don't know for sure, but what we do know makes this connection seem unlikely. On the other hand, the tradition of a spring festival and the association of eggs with that festival seems very ancient and widespread in western Eurasia, and it seems quite plausible that there are ancient links between Nowruz and the pre-Christian elements of Easter. Marco polo (talk) 19:35, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Au contraire. The simpler and more likely origin of the name Easter is the same as that of "East" maning "rising", as in the rising of the sun in the East. The Christian holiday is about the "rising" of Christ from the dead, and the two terms both relate more directly to the term "rising", which may also relate Eostre in some way, but Eostre did not likely directly influence the name of the Holiday. --Jayron32 19:39, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

"Simpler and more likely" according to who exactly?

Got a citation for that Jayron? That seems to contradict the etymology provided in the Easter article. In any case, I wasn't referring to the Christian bastardization of Easter, but the original Pagan festival which celebrated the Goddess.--99.179.20.157 (talk) 20:05, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

The problem with that is that while there almost certainly was a pagan spring festival, the 'goddess Eostre' appears to have been invented by Jakob Grimm based on a mis-reading of Bede. We know effectively almost nothing about the historic spring festival. AlexTiefling (talk) 20:33, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

You are incorrect. Ēostre is attested by Bede and can be further adduced by way of comparative evidence and historical linguistics. Jacob Grimm, an important linguist (i.e. see Grimm's law), reconstructed *ostara, the Old High German cognate goddess's name. He did this using comparative linguistic evidence. This is not simple conjecture, and modern Indo-European studies have since reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European Dawn Goddess far further. :bloodofox: (talk) 11:34, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

(ec) Hmmm, the details we have on Eostre sound awfully scanty and tentative. It sounds like it is presumed that all these East-related words came from some ancestral goddess. Is it possible that the goddess is actually a simple personification of the season, and that in fact, Easter and East, the rising of the sun, are all rooted in the most mundane perception of the returning summer sun? I am often suspicious that archaeologists ascribe too much to religion and ritual, rather than practicality. (Likewise the full moon, in ancient times, was a practical light source, not just some ritual significance) Wnt (talk) 20:38, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Here is the start of a two-part article by a knowledgeable pagan about the Eostre myth: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/502368.html - As far as I'm concerned, as an historian and linguist, it checks out. AlexTiefling (talk) 20:45, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Please do not contribute to spreading nonsense like this around. That "article" is so full of holes that I don't know where to start. Fortunately our article on Ēostre doesn't suffer from the same issues. :bloodofox: (talk) 11:34, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

This set me to rearranging Easter egg. Common sense tells me that the basics of life drive the rest - if ordinary people had to give up eggs from Mardi Gras to Easter, then can eat them again, and perhaps hard-boiled them for safety, well, there's the way the Easter egg came into existence, not by some particularly mythical Pagan goddess. Now maybe the coloring was inspired elsewhere, or the bunnies ... Wnt (talk) 22:47, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

99.179.20.157 -- This has previously been extensively discussed on Talk:Ishtar and elsewhere. All solid linguistic evidence is that the English word "easter" ultimately derives from an Indo-European root something like *aus- with basic meaning "dawn" or "to shine", while the Akkadian goddess name Ishtar comes from an early Semitic deity name whose consonants were *ʕθtr (where ʕ is a type of voiced pharyngeal consonant which does not occur in Indo-European languages). The supposed Easter-Ishtar connection was first advocated or popularized by Alexander Hislop in his virulent anti-Catholic tome The Two Babylons, and unfortunately some people keep some of the old Hislop nonsense alive long after he's been discredited by all reputable scholarship... AnonMoos (talk) 05:18, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Having last night been forced by some young friends to watch Hop, I can now confirm that the Easter Bunny poops jelly beans, lives on Easter Island, and travels the world delivering Easter Eggs in a "sled" drawn by hordes of fluffy yellow chickens. HiLo48 (talk) 22:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Does the Easter Bunny also deliver cuddly lambs with ribbons around their necks? I used to always receive one as an Easter present when I was a child.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 12:05, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

The most obvious reason why we have Easter eggs, is that until very recently, Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican Christians weren't allowed to eat eggs during Lent, because it was a fast (in imitation of Jesus, who spent forty days and nights in the desert not eating very much). We don't have Mardi Gras in England, just Pancake Day, the point being that you used up your stock of eggs making pancakes. Therefore, having an egg for breakfast on Easter Sunday was something to look forward to. As children, we always had a boiled egg for breakfast on Easter Sunday morning. I don't buy into all this pagan symbolism stuff. Here in England, the Easter Bunny is a recent American import; I really don't remember them in the 1960s. Alansplodge (talk) 12:28, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I thought Easter was when Jesus dies for our sins, lays for three days in the tomb, and then rise from the dead and comes out of the tomb ... and if he sees his shadow we get three more weeks of Spring. No? Blueboar (talk) 12:45, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Exactly right (but never heard of the shadow thing though); Easter Sunday is a feast at the end of a long fast that starts on Ash Wednesday. Alansplodge (talk) 12:55, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Who gave the idea of the Easter Bunny to the Americans in the first place? It had to have originated in Europe and then brought to the colonies by the colonists themselves.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 12:49, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

According to the Wikipedia article on the Easter Bunny it was the German immigrants to Pennsyvania who brought the custom of the Easter Bunny to the US. The Alsatians also had an Easter Bunny as part of their Easter celebrations.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 12:56, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm quite surprised to hear Alansplodge's testimony, because the Easter bunny has been hopping around Australia since at least as far back as my memory goes, which would be the early-mid 1950s. I'd need to check with my elders, but I feel quite confident it wasn't just a post-war thing either. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 12:59, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I may be mistook, but that's my recollection (or lack thereof). We always think of Australia as being a bit more Americanized (if that's a real word) than ourselves; again, that's just an impression. A very quick look for a reference gives "In recent years this game has been linked to the Easter Bunny, which only arrived in England relatively recently". Alansplodge (talk) 15:02, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Here's a bettter reference from Eastertide in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study By Alfred Lewis Shoemaker: "The Easter rabbit is entirely foreign to England, even to large parts of Europe.". Exactly the same words can be found in The Pennsylvania Dutchman, Volume 4, Issues 2-15 published by the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center in 1952. See also Postcards from Across the Pond: Dispatches from an Accidental Expat By Michael Harling, Debbie Jenkins (page 88).

The Stations of the Sun: a History of the Ritual Year in Britain by Ronald Hutton 1996 (p.203) says, "In the past few years, it has been joined by the central European Easter Hare, taken by German immigrants to the USA and given tremendous popularity as the Easter Bunny before being re-exported to Britain."

I also found The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins By James Jupp; " Easter, too, is largely Americanised as a secular holiday, despite attempts to replace the Easter Bunny with the native Bilby". Alansplodge (talk) 16:01, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm with Jack here. Television, and hence American influence, arrived in Australia in late 1956. The Easter Bunny was definitely around before then, so he's not an American bunny in Australia. HiLo48 (talk) 18:11, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, however it got to Australia, it wasn't England. Alansplodge (talk) 11:57, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Folks, please don't cite Hutton. He's a problematic reference and certainly no expert when it comes to Germanic paganism. Anyway, about this dating business, let's have a quote from Grimm, shall we? My bold and brackets:

To what we said on p. 290 [regarding the reconstructed Old High German *ostara ] I can add some significant facts. The heathen Easter had much in common with May-feast and the reception of spring, particularly in matter of bonfires. Then, through long ages there seem to have lingered among the people Easter-games so-called, which the church itself had to tolerate : I allude especially to the custom of Easter eggs, and to the Easter tale which preachers told from the pulpit for the people's amusement, connecting it with Christian reminiscences. (Grimm, Jacob (James Steven Stallybrass Trans.) (1883). Teutonic Mythology: Translated from the Fourth Edition with Notes and Appendix Vol. II. London: George Bell and Sons.)

In other words, here's the iconic linguist Jacob Grimm writing—in the first half of the 20th century—about Easter eggs being an extra-Christian custom that seems to have been absorbed into the event (sound familiar to the numerous customs we have absorbed into Yule/Christmas in Germanic Europe and its subsequent colonies?). Clearly enough, Easter eggs certainly were not a new custom when Grimm was around. :bloodofox: (talk) 18:22, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

It was the newness of the Easter Bunny to the UK that was in question. Alansplodge (talk) 10:31, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm still surprised at your claim. As Jack and I have attested (and we're both old enough to remember - sorry Jack), the Easter Bunny was definitely alive and well in Australia before TV and American imperialism arrived in the late 1950s. Virtually all our "culture" before then came from the UK. (There was nowhere else for it to come from.) It's hard to believe that he didn't exist in the UK back then. HiLo48 (talk) 12:16, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm with Alan. Yes there were Easter chocolate bunnies, but all this guff about egg hunts and the mythology that seems to surround the Easter bunny didn't exist when I was a little girl 50 years ago. There may have been more crossover between US and Australian culture than you're aware of, given the part played by Australia in World War 2. Easter Eggs were connected with chicks rather than being laid by a rabbit... --TammyMoet (talk) 13:45, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Tammy. I've managed five references (one of whom may not be an expert on German mythology) to say that the Easter Bunny is a new arrival here, plus now two first hand accounts. I don't remember chocolate bunnies, but chocolate consumption wasn't a big thing in our house. Alansplodge (talk) 15:53, 6 April 2012 (UTC)