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Latin?

May I ask if you understand Latin? I am looking for a translation of this text, pp. 159-160, from 1151 CE, involving "Calandriam", which is Kalandia today. From translate.google I understand they (=the canons of the Holy Sepulchre) are leasing some land to a "Nemes Suriano", and his children and grandchildren?? Cheers, Huldra (talk) 18:44, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

That's the gist. The prior Amalricus is dictating and witnessing a 'privilegium', a conession in favour of Nemes the Syrian (Syro-Palestinian) and to his brother Anthony and their descendants to preempt disputes in the future to the vineyards and orchards attachewd to Calandria. They are obliged to give the convent a moiety of their yearly production from these fields. No point translating it really, is there? Nishidani (talk) 21:10, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh no; no detailed translation needed; just the summary, a line or two to put into the article; thanks. The same man is mentioned the next year, p. 70-71; something in connection with Melisende of Jerusalem? Cheers, Huldra (talk) 21:24, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Iblardi has been quite helpful with Latin in the past and appears expert at it. Zero^talk 01:49, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Whatever any prelate of the holy church concedes to anyone by the assent of his chapter, it is necessary that this be recorded for future memory by the firm bond of writing, lest, as time passes, what had been concluded earlier by his decree, might give rise to contestations and therefore perhaps lead to repetitious quarrels. Therefore I, Amalricus prior of the Holy Sepulchre, and the whole assembly of its clergy yield over to Nemes the Syrian and to his sons and the sons of his brother Anthony the lands and vineyards which they have in Calandria, and which he and his sons and the sons of his brother Anthony might eventually acquire in the future, so that they may take possession of them under a perpetual oath, but on condition that they will faithfully hand over, every year half of the fruits of the land, namely of all of the vineyards and orchards, which they have already planted or which they shall plant in the future. And in order that our concession in the present as in future times may obtain an abiding force, we confirm the deed with the present paper and our seal. Below are the signatories. Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Don't take that as holy writ. I had to strain my eyes to read it, and the reading the language of testaments is sheer boredom.Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, you are an angel :) But I hope you noticed those two small magnifying glasses down to the right, on p. 159? One with a "-" inside, the other with a "+" inside. Click on the one with "+" inside, and you can get the text as large as you like. (It is pure torture to read those tiny letters, in the "original" state!), Cheers, and thanks again, Huldra (talk) 17:16, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Ugh, forgot that, fuckit! Nishidani (talk) 17:43, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Lehi and Italy

There's a story untold on the Lehi page. Much of the time Lehi thought they were negotiating with an Italian representative they were actually talking to a British agent. It was a successful sting operation that Lehi's supporters have long sought to suppress (out of embarrassment, presumably). I don't recall what the best source is, but I'll dig it up. Zero^talk 04:15, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Is that connected to the Pritzker case, that Nachman Ben-Yehuda touched on in his Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice?. If so, I could help out. So many underdeveloped pages, so little time. There's bucket loads of stuff in the Palestine newspapers' daily reports over these critical periods that never seems to get mainstream historical reportage.Nishidani (talk) 09:58, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Nishidani. You have new messages at Al Ameer son's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

--Al Ameer (talk) 06:16, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

French-speaker?

Take a look at Talk:Bardala‎, Cheers, Huldra (talk) 19:06, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Oui, d'accord. Et je voudrais te remercier de ton travail.Nishidani (talk) 19:59, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Damn it! I have forgotten. Terriby busy. Will do it, I hope shortly.Nishidani (talk) 07:21, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro)

User:Yambaram:Incivility, slurs and accusations of antisemitism All that was asked, was answered, fairly, simply and neatly.Nishidani (talk) 14:35, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

It's nice to see things work right over there for once. It didn't look like it was trending that way. I'm sorry you had to go through it. It reminded me of this by Emily:

To fight aloud is very brave,

But gallanter, I know,

Who charge within the bosom,

The cavalry of woe.

Who win, and nations do not see,

Who fall, and none observe,

Whose dying eyes no country

Regards with patriot love.

— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 15:37, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Alf. Wow! Just in 'Patriot love' alone, the sinister use of amphibology to promote a popular conceit only to mock it to bits by making the word it defines, patriotism's antithesis 'love', show the vacuity of the epithet, is magnificent. It effortlessly synthesizes Elegy in a Country Churchyard, while going beyond its paternalistic sentimentalism. Because it made me think of a rush of things, The Habit of Perfection's second stanza, Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (to which also it must be a conscious and sharp riposte) Horace's cant of dulcet decorest . . which Wilfred Owen so savagely and briliantly lampooned, and both Rimbaud's Le dormeur du val and Lermontov's Valerik,(Val in Valerik anticipating uncannily val in Rimbaud (doesn't appear to be translated but there's a description here), wih further analogies even down to the eyes of the dying soldier) which of course reminded me I should do more edits to Imam Shamil. A very good afternoon: decent closure to a smear campaign, a long conversation with a mystic, and your clever use of a poem I don't remember to cap things with a subtle message while offering a gift of poetic genius. Even the canederli whose scent is now wafting up into the study from the hearth will take a back seat to evening thoughts of E.D. Thanks indeed.Nishidani (talk) 17:38, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello

Hello, I'm Anup. I was just moving by recent changes. Thought I would leave you a msg requesting you to remove {{retired|emeritus editor}} template from your talk page. Welcome back to Wikipedia. Cheers! AnupMehra ^✈ 11:59, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

The second sentence is ungrammatical. I do not know what 'msg' refers to. Emeritus means retired but still active. So your request is pointless and I'm sorry but I must disoblige you. It's my page, and you should worry about its innocuousness.Nishidani (talk) 13:16, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank

you! But some people don't think so. I'll be so bold as to predict the outcome of that matter will be: "We told you so". --Shirt58 (talk) 13:38, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi

Greetings, does your (wide) field of expertise extend to Jewish Christianity? Supposed Hebrew Gospels and so forth? In ictu oculi (talk) 15:02, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I've read about it for half a century fairly extensively, but have no pretensions to expertise. My only feeling is that nothing can be known, most of what is said is a POV, and that, for wikipedia at least, we have no other option that to write article according to strict criteria of WP:RS, WP:Due, making them reflect the scholarly consensus, where ascertainable, while allowing leeway for nuancing dissent positions when they are not notably eccentric or fringe. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 15:21, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

That's exactly what we need. In ictu oculi (talk) 17:11, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Question

Nishidani, on the Talk-page of the Gospel of Matthew you wrote: "...the importance for some Church theologians of establishing a Hebrew precedence in an environment where both Jewish and Christians competed for converts vigorously, where rabbinic hostility to Yeshua and ecclesiastical suppression of variant traditions deleted much of the then available evidence." Can you recite any historical documents attesting to this fact? It seems more likely to me that the passages quoted by Jerome, Eusebius, Origen, Irenaeus and Epiphanius from the original Gospel of Matthew (which was written in the Aramaic language and in Hebrew characters), and which Jerome had seen in the Library of Caesarea, is proof that the original text was not tampered with. It simply did not contain the genealogical record that now appears in the canonical text of Matthew (a later interpolation). Some think that these contradictory genealogical records in Matthew and Luke were added in order to counter the claim that Jesus may have been born of illegitimate birth.

According to Epiphanius (Anacephalaiosis 13.1): "The beginning of the Gospel among them reads: It happened in the days of Herod the king of Judea (at a time when Caiaphas was high priest) that a certain John came, baptizing the baptism of conversion in the river Jordan. Of him it is said that he was from the family of Aaron the priest, the son of Zacharias and Elisabeth. And all went out to him. […] It happened that John baptized and the Pharisees went out to him and were baptized and all Jerusalem. And John was dressed in a mantle of camel's hair and a leather belt was round his waist. And his food was, it is said, wild honey, of which the taste was that of manna, like cakes in olive oil.” It is worthy to note that the style of this original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew was similar in style to an earlier MS, viz., the Aramaic Scroll of Antiochus, whose introduction is strikingly similar to the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew, as if Matthew tried to emulate the style of the former.Davidbena (talk) 12:38, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

David, the above is massively confused, if only because in English you are saying that Jerome, Eusebius, Origen, Irenaeus and Epiphanius quoted from the original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew. They didn't.

Consulting primary texts is important. But we can only do so through secondary sources, since primary sources have all sorts of disputes surrounding them. You are careless in your use of both primary and secondary sources: the Anacephalaiosis is a recapitulation of Epiphanius's Panarion, itself a very confusing source, and is not by Epiphanius.

'the style of this original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew'. How did you get to that conclusion? If we lack the 'original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew' how can we say what style it was written in? See?

All ancient Christian testimonies agree that Yeshua died and was resurrected. That doesn't make it a fact. Many of the foundational stories in Genesis come from Ugaritic and Akkadian fairy-tales. That doesn't mean that the authors were translating from the originals in those languages. These methodological considerations are very elementary, and I can see no sign of a sensitivity to them. Antiquity was mainly an oral-transmission world, based also on rote memorization which, in bilingual speakers meant the tales were rewoven according to the audience's primary language. I don't care one way another about this. It is all speculative and unverifiable except if a rubbish dump in Egypt throws up evidence. The only thing that is important is to get secondary RS materials properly marshalled and paraphrased.

The facts I refer to and which you quote are common in the secondary historical literature. Nishidani (talk) 14:26, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Nishidani, you asked me: "How did you get to that conclusion [about its style]? If we lack the 'original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew' how can we say what style it was written in?" The answer is quite simple, Nishidani. I study Talmud (both, the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud), which texts are written in Aramaic, just as Jews have always written their religious works and novellae. The Palestinian Talmud is written in the dialect spoken by Jesus and it is, therefore, quite easy to reconstruct the original text of the Hebrew/Aramaic Gospel of Matthew based on Epiphanius' record in Greek. I have made a preliminary translation back into the spoken Aramaic of the time, and, surprisingly, it is strikingly similar to the Aramaic "Scroll of Antiochus" which I also have in my private library. The "Scroll of Antiochus" begins in this way: "It happened in the days of Antiochus, the king of Grecia, a king who was great and strong and potent in his dominion, and to whom all kings gave homage, etc." The words in Judeo-Aramaic are: והוה ביומי אנטיוכס מלכא דיון, מלך רב ותקיף הוה וחסין בשלטנותיה וכל מלכיא ישתמעון ליה. You see, in the original Aramaic of the Gospel of Matthew (as quoted by Epiphanius ibid.) the wording would have been quite similar: והוה ביומי הורדוס מלכא דיהוד , etc.

As for your reluctance to rely principally upon primary sources, I can understand that. Still, because of the vast opinions in contemporary literature regarding this subject - often divergent one from the other, it is always a good idea to bear in mind the primary sources upon whose axis our entire debate hinges. For example: Jerome wrote (Dialogus adversus Pelagianos, in: Migne, Patr. Lat. 23, Parisiis 1883, III, 2): "In the Gospel 'According to the Hebrews,' which was written in the Chaldaic and Syriac language but with Hebrew letters, and is used up to the present day by the Nazoraeans, I mean that according to the Apostles, or, as many maintain, according to Matthew, which Gospel is also available in the Library of Caesarea, the story runs: 'See, the mother of the Lord and his brother said to him: John the Baptist baptizes for the remission of sins, let us go to be baptized by him, etc."

Likewise did Jerome write elsewhere: "Matthew, also called Levi, an apostle after having been a publican, was the first to compose a gospel of Christ in Judea in Hebrew letters and words for the sake of those of the circumcision who believed. But who afterwards translated it into Greek is not sufficiently certain. The Hebrew itself has been preserved until the present day in the library at Caesarea which Pamphilius the martyr so diligently collected." - Jerome (On Illustrious Men).Davidbena (talk) 19:59, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

'The answer is quite simple, Nishidani. I study Talmud'

I might answer that my first degree was in classical Greek, of which the koine is a very simple dialect. One thing one learns in mastering a classical language is that sources are often garbled. Almost all classical sources save one (Dionysius of Halicarnassus) say that the Etruscans emigrated from southwestern Asia Minor. The majority of scholars subscribe to the theory of autochthony. Go figure. Several hundred scholars with a command of Aramaic and Greek disagree with you.Nishidani (talk) 20:41, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I will be willing to challenge any scholar in a debate on these ancient texts, and I am quite confident that I could win such a debate. I have already noticed countless errors with so-called "scholarship." Some try to use a Syriac-dialect to reconstruct the original Aramaic Gospel, but their dialect is NOT the same as Jewish Aramaic of the 1st century CE. Even Babylonian Aramaic differs from Palestinian Aramaic! Ask any Jewish scholar who has studied the Talmud in Israel for more than thirty years. Also, Jews have preserved written records dating back to thousands of years, similar to the Greeks in that regard. The difference, however, being that Jews are more scrupulous in what concerns the accurate rendition and copying of ancient texts. I know because I also worked in Jerusalem as a scribe.Davidbena (talk) 23:43, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

The problem is not to convince oneself, most of us have that fateful flaw in our characters: the problem is to convince one's peers that 'everyone is out of step but me, Johnny', to adopt my mother's ancient admonition for eccentric ideas. Pilpul's methods, however intricate, are generally not those of historical criticism and textual analysis. Formal source analysis is what you lack: I can see it in the way you marshal evidence.

• 'The Palestinian Talmud is written in the dialect spoken by Jesus' (actually it is written in Late Western Aramaic (i.e. post 200 CE, which has three varieties Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian and Samaritan Palestinian dialects). I am very familiar with two dialects with a written history, and each of them has changed drastically over 200 years.

Having studied the Aramaic of the Palestinian Talmud, it is quite conclusive that the style and dialect were common in Galilee in the 1st century CE. The shortening of proper names (e.g. Yuda instead of Yehudah, Yashua instead of Yehoshua, etc.) are just a few examples of this. The Aramaic in Israel may have also been used by Samaritans and Christians, but this is irrelevant, since the surviving Aramaic texts of the Palestinian Talmud are all quintessential Jewish modes of speech in the Land of Israel at that time.Davidbena (talk) 17:06, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

• Jerome write elsewhere: "Matthew, also called Levi, an apostle after having been a publican, was the first to compose a gospel of Christ in Judea in Hebrew letters

I.e.,Jerome thinks the Gospel of Matthew was written by a direct disciple who knew Jesus, a provincial tax-collector who must have been born around I-2 CE, who set down his impressions in Aramaic sometime after 33CE. It follows that Matthew is the first gospel: that Mark, whom the same Papias identifies as Peter's interpreter, and hence a Greek-speaking intimate of the first apostle, didn't influence Matthew, but Matthew Mark, though every indication tells us the contrary is probably the case (the nativity stories arose after Mark, probably in response to Jewish criticisms that Yehoshua could not be the messiah because his birth data as a Nazarene were not consonant with biblical prophecies about the Davidic line, hence the 'trip to Bethlehem', etc); that typical phrases like ἕως τῆς σήμερον at Matt:27:8 and elsewhere, suggest strongly several decades had passed from the time of Yehoshua to Matthew's writing; That therefore characteristic stock phrases typical of Matthew's style, though identical to those favoured by Joachanan ben Zakai who would have been 3 years old at the traditional date for Yehoshua's death, for one, who would customarily use them after 70 CE are either coincidences or signs that JbZ picked them up from Matthew, rather than a Matthew writing in the 70s and 80s picked them up from JbZ, i.e. like that from Hosea 6:6 כִּ֛יחֶ֥סֶדחָפַ֖צְתִּיוְלֹא־זָ֑בַח = Ἔλεος θέλω καὶ οὐ θυσίαν Matt.9:13;12:7 . One could multiply like a tumbling block of domino pieces sprawling for miles the problematical consequences for the thesis you push, a thesis based on an ignorance, friend, of the standard techniques of source criticism developed over the last 200 years. Accumulation of memes, of repeated statements with their variations in ancient texts, does not constitute an argument, as you and Ret.Prof think. It is only evidence for a failure to understand the methodology of modern scholarship.

For thousands of years everything agreed Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey. All primary sources said so. The thesis crumbled when formal analysis showed there was no such single author behind the text. August Fick was convinced Homer as we have it went back to a core in the Aeolic dialect, and recomposed it according to that dialect. No one was convinced he'd got to the 'real' Homer, any more than Matthew was necessarily a single author as opposed to the final editor of a text part of whose logia or sayings were later said to have been collected by a certain Matthew. What you are doing is Fisking wikipedia, which is forbidden. Publish your results in a reliable academic press, and you may just get past the rules. Good luck! Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 17 February

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If you can automatically detect an error, you can automatically fix it, bothead.Nishidani (talk) 12:17, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Belated MC

more than one year and one month late old chap. better late than never but not if all you are going to do is pen some tired cliches lacking accents (with a weak pun as a sorry bone to chew on). i'm afraid that my grey matter is not what it used to be after firing out a couple of life projects and holding on for dear life lest i lose track of one of these celestially bound bodies whose adventures never cease to amaze me. take care and if some cells should miraculously regenerate with time, i will see you again soon. Tiamut^talk 20:06, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

I began to worry about the symptomology suggested by the pleonasm of tired clichés, until I realized as per some thread above, that the clichés in question must be pneumatically endowed ('tire-d', no gross vulgarity intended) and keep running by sheer inertial momentum. Then of course I thought of Walter Redfern's doughty labours on the subject. I'm a re-tired cliché, as is most of the world, keeping faith with the wisdom of Ecclesiasticus. Don't worry: cells regenerate. Unfortunately, those (Abu Ghraib, Camp 1391's cells etc. ) of the degenerate hegemons, under whose imperial sway we are expected to accommodate ourselves, grow apace as well, and the grey that matters (Graham Greene) is whitewashed by the manichaistic simpletons who would reduce all the niceties of perception into a duelling chess-match of simplistic dualisms. There! I've matched your ellipticism, and my Sunday morning exercise in rhetoric is done! Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Archiving

Nishidani, I've now set up automatic archiving for this enormous talk page of yours. It will never archive the "The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem" section at the top of this page. Some details:

• I've given you a nice fat archive size of 250K. That should put off for a while the evil day when you run out of archives.
• I've set it to keep at least 20 threads on this page, and to keep at least the most recent 180 days of discussion. In other words, the archiving bot will not be too aggressive.
• You can tweak these parameters yourself by editing the top bit of this page (but I think they're reasonable).
• It is possible to prevent, or just delay, the archiving of any specific section. See here, or drop a note on my talk page.

The archiving bot will not bother you with any notifications that it's done its work (none of my doing, that's just how the bot is set up). So don't be surprised when you find bits of your talk page have disappeared down the archive plug hole.

And with a bit of luck, neither of us should have to worry any more (at least, not for a few years) about archiving this page. Regards,

--NSH001 (talk) 12:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, the quiet performer (genius) comes to my aid once more. Thanks mate. I was thinking of you the other day while reading Richard Flanagan' s recent novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which I venture to suggest as a minute token of thanks you might profitably read (in memoriam, etc.) Best Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Flanagan is a lucky man, at least his father talked to him. I never had any sense of love or affection from my father; I think in those days it was the duty and obligation of a macho male to support his wife and children, which he did do, but nothing beyond that. He was so badly affected psychologically by the war that he was an extremely difficult man to live with. I just mostly experienced criticism, with outbursts of fearsome rage from time to time, upsetting everyone in sight, especially my poor mother. It tends to inhibit conversation when you feel you're treading on eggshells all the time, never quite knowing when something might trigger an outburst.

I think I'll leave the book for a while. I did read a few books by survivors after my father died, which left me feeling very depressed (not immediately after - I had my hands full between a demanding job and the large amount of work needed to wind up my father's estate, mostly hindered rather than helped by the Scottish solicitors, who charged the usual outrageous monopoly fee). In very belated reply to a query of yours a long time ago – although he said almost nothing about the war, I do know that he was in the RAF, not the army, and that he rose to the exalted rank of corporal before he was captured. Regards --NSH001 (talk) 15:06, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Flanagan was lucky, and the exception (another was our family tailor, who went through the camps and yeet managed to retain a deep urbane serenity), and my brother's close woman friend, whose grandmother survived Auschwitz, and was subject to the kind of rage your father felt -her grandchild, raised by the woman, managed to survive her own childhood to become one of the most extraordinarily empathetic, helpful persons I've ever met. Most, paralleling Holocaust survivors, Jews and Gypsies alike, could never bear to speak of what they experienced. Without belabouring the point perhaps you might catch the film just done on Eric Lomax The Railway Man. I heard some months ago a very insightful interview with his widow here. Lomax, as an officer, it should be added, was luckier than yours (since as a corporal he wasn't of officer rank). In his memoirs, Weary Dunlop has pretty damning things to say about the officer class among the POW ranks.(I too had to wrest our estate from lawyers who refused to settle it because of the lucrative income they earned managing it. Just in time: the lawyer society crashed soon after and brought down hundreds of families in the ensuing bankruptcy.) Best Nishidani (talk) 15:49, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Lomax's was one of those depressing books. I haven't seen the film, but I did see something on the television quite recently about the film (can't remember which channel it was) and this piece in the Friend magazine (anything by John Lampen is well worth reading, BTW). Incidentally, my father never expressed any anger or resentment expliicitly against the Japanese; occasionally, when the subject of stammering came up, he would joke, "the Japanese cured me of my stammer". On the subject of damning remarks, my father was scathing about two groups of men he encountered in his career at ICI: the public school old boy network and arts graduates. So you'd probably have gotten it with both barrels! --NSH001 (talk) 17:42, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

One Changi POW I knew came back as a cheer-leader for Japan, and couldn't wait for the day they would triumph as a superpower! My father told me, when I started to learn the language, that the most racist anti-Japanese soldiers in his club tended to be pen-pushers who'd never actually fought in the Pacific War, and just swaggered with antipathy as they bullied their way through the country when it was occupied. My uncle, who had fought them, agreed. Your dad perhaps hated Arts Graduates because they stocked the POW uni courses, teaching men obscure subjects like Sanskrit, Malay, Greek history, Latin prose etc. to distract them from thoughts of starvation. Well my reading suggestions were rather inappropriate. It's just that from age 6, I found books enabled me to read myself out of a barrage of put-downs and humiliations - they taught you to disinvest in yourself sufficiently to see the trouble or pain behind the insult. Not much consolation if one missed out on a fundamental, like having a father. I've often noted, initially with surprise, that exceptionally good fathers suffered from bad parentage, and coped by reversing, rather than, as is the class norm, repeating the pattern. Cheers, mate, and thanks.Nishidani (talk) 18:03, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

On arts graduates, I doubt it. He said he was shocked, when he got to university after the war, how little work the arts students had to do compared to the scientists (so he might have let you off if you were putting in 12 hours a day in the uni library). Then you have to remember that ICI was a science- and engineering-based company, and he was infuriated by arts graduates being promoted to positions where they didn't have a clue about what they were managing. Similarly he thought the ex-public school types tended to get promoted beyond their ability. On the other hand, he did have a high regard for Paul Chambers, an ex-public school boy and the first non-scientist to be head of ICI. It's partly why I went for the science courses at school (my choice, not his), plus I could see that my father, as a scientist, was earning a lot more money than most of the other kids' dads. In any case I just enjoyed doing maths and science! The point you make about seeing the pain (or whatever) behind the insult (or indeed, any offence) is true indeed. --NSH001 (talk) 19:45, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Wording

Hi. You are correct on what you wrote in your edit summary here. But I think the wording was used for the whole part, not only that about the occupation. However, all of the points there, except for collective punishment, is undisputed. So maybe it is better to have it like it is now but change to "and what they describe as collective punishment". Any thoughts? --IRISZOOM (talk) 20:03, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi. Well, collective punishment is a subset of 'military occupation' (which no one doubts: it is surrounded on all sides: a few days ago a major clash occurred when Palestinians tried to protest their lack of access to their businesses and residences on Shuhada Street). I always prefer the inclusive term: put the subterm in and someone will ask for a specific source on 'collective punishment' at Hebron. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 07:51, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I take your notes seriously enough to reexamine my own quick reply. The result is I've done an extensive preliminary edit there, with links to several books that would be useful as background. For the moment I'm busy, but I hope the edit wasn't messy and that the passage you mention is improved. One link was broken and had to be replaced. Regards Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Just as a reminder how absurdly ticklish otherwise normal descriptive terminology can appear to some. A Palestinian posted some days back a note on his Facebook page about living 'under occupation'. The Israeli police hauled in him for an interrogation, since this was evidence for 'incitement', i.e. a crime of hatred. Using even internationally accepted legal terminology is now interpreted in some quarters as an incitement to race hatred. Phew!Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

True but when it was separated as before, I think it gives another view. You have formulated it great now. There was some problem with the formatting but I have corrected it now.

I read about the protests and actually thought to add it here but other things took up my time. I had not read about the other case, which is an astonishing one. --IRISZOOM (talk) 20:49, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Almost a first

This is a first indeed. We did come to some good compromises, but I don't think we ever agreed on anything before. Debresser (talk) 00:57, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, I'm not surprised. You do understand the force of rational arguments - that's been clear to me for years. I don't care whether editors' private opinions clash with my own, as long as there is room for reasonable compromises, based on honest attention to what one's interlocutor is saying, and a decent respect for the rules in this madhouse. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 13:09, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Reticent to...

Ah, Nishidani, this time I must disagree. "Reticent to" is attested in English since 1875 according to the OED:

2. Reluctant to perform a particular action; hesitant, disinclined. Chiefly with about, or to do something.
1875 Rep. Sel. Comm. Condition of South (43rd U.S. Congr. 2 Sess.) 15 The State registrar was just as reticent to give us information.
1932 Daily Capital News & Post Tribune (Jefferson City, Missouri) 14 Feb. 11 a/6 They were reticent about leaving it [sc. home].
1948 Jrnl. Amer. Folklore 61 29 Dreams, promptings of the spirit, and peep-stones have all combined to make the reticent girl give in to the proposals of a polygamous suitor.
1959 Times 8 Oct. 13 Having..informed my employer of my impending call-up, he is naturally reticent to improve my position.
2008 F. Kellerman Mercedes Coffin xxxviii. 311 She knows he'd be reticent to hire a lawyer to defend her?

It seems to have begun in America, though, but did make it into The Times by 1959. In all other aspects of the discussion we concur, of course.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 17:31, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Well, screwmecadaverous, Alf, yu've cort me by the short and curlies, ...no!fuckit!

Reticent

• 'reserved, disinclined to speak freely; given to silence or concealment.'J.A.Simpson, E.S.C. Weiner (eds), Oxford English Dictionary,2nd ed. 1989, Clarendon Press, Oxford vol.XIII,p.777 col.2 will admit of no example of 'reticent' in the sense of 'reluctant'. So, stuff that up ya septic tank pipe and smoke it:) Doug's just given me some grief on the Khazar page, and I need a feed and a bottle of Barolo before I come to my senses! Nishidani (talk) 18:27, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Khazar theory of Ashkenazi ancestry

Hi - with this edit[1] I'm guessing that you moved material from another article but didn't put a link to that article in your edit summary (that needs to be fixed with a dummy edit to avoid copyvio). My problem is that you didn't bring over the references, so we have Brook 2009 and Brook 2010 without a clue as to what these are. I've just reverted someone who replaced one of those with a website (which at least was selling his book among others, so some relevance). Can you please fix this? Thanks. And, um, Sheba? Dougweller (talk) 15:44, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Mea culpa on all counts. I've done part of your request. What's the 'copyvio' in copying one's own wiki work from one page to another. Five months late on Sheba, sheba! (/I don't know if any of your dialects uses sheeba in the sense of 'cripes, jeepers, creepers') Work load. I'm doing a long analysis of an obscure oriental book. Will get to it when time allows, unless infarction intervenes. Thanks for the heads-up, Doug, as youngsters here write.Nishidani (talk) 18:27, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

If it's all yours, I guess that's ok, I don't recall our guidelines mentioning what we do in that case. I tend to say something in the edit summary but sometimes forget when I'm copying my own text. I hope your mention of infarction isn't a medical concern. Nope, never heard sheeba used that way. But the US is a huge place, loads of phrases that are only used on one locality, ditto on a smaller basis the UK, the only 2 English speaking countries I know well. Don't worry about Sheba. Dougweller (talk) 19:27, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Passive voice

You may find this of interest.

In the mid-1980s, when I worked at Al-Fajr Newspaper, a friend of mine was teaching English in a village in the West Bank. She wanted to do a lesson on active and passive voice, and for this purpose she photocopied reports of the same clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces, as published in both the Jerusalem Post and Al-Fajr English Weekly. Where the JP routinely reported that "x Palestinians were injured", "y houses were demolished", AF reported that "Israeli forces injured x Palestinians, destroyed y homes". It's a lesson her pupils never forgot!

Happy weekend. RolandR (talk) 21:35, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Roland. 'Old' newspaper hands know these tricks, and it's a pity much of it appears to be lost on contemporary readers. Actually, I don't mind the passive voice in historical narrative. It's not uncommon, but there's no reason why one can't accompany it with the instrumental by. 'z Palestinians were injured by Israeli forces'. Karl Kraus attributed the disasters of Shanghai, and much of WW1, to slipshod journalism with its endemic solecisms, wrote most of the nearly 1000 issues of Die Fackel to hammer away on this point: that the sanity of reality is dependent on extremely precise respect for grammar and usage (pity the poor bugger thought it necessary to convert to Catholicism: it gave his critique, in crucial moments, like his attack on Herzl, an antisemitic edge. He never had the good fortune to listen to Eric Hobsbawm's mother's advice to her son on identity, which I'm sure you're familiar with). Have a good one yourself, Roland. Best Nishidani (talk) 22:41, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

And I wonder what Hobsbawm's mother would have said to the eminent and learned saxophone player... RolandR (talk) 23:45, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Ha!) In any case, Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p.24 (read on through to 25). Nishidani (talk) 18:56, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Your sermon a performative demonstration of your point

...because it could have been preached equally well on Saturday morning as on Sunday. Nicely done.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 23:06, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

		The Socratic Barnstar
		For your wisdom in the analysis of the mess that was the Gilabrand AE case, and the wisdom that your comments continue to show. The Israel-Palestine area needs more editors like you. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 17:56, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

That's deeply appreciated. But your last edit has a summary 'sleep deprived' (the spelling 'derpived' proves the truth of it) and I worry that this might be misread against you, however. Malice or reading between the lines for non-existent fine print to prove an unempirical apriori suspicion, is commonplace in the I/P area, and bad blood is easy to stir at the slightest appearance of administrative appreciation. Admins must, of necessity, keep all us us at an arm's distance (I wanted to write 'yard' to increment the distance between us peons and the neutral board of directors and admins, but didn't because it was the standard term in Shakespeare's day, in the KJB, and current till Dickens' time, for penis!). My work there was not so much about Gilabrand: I have a long term scepticism about the 'readability' of diffs on a subject as evidence for the court. Unless one knows the context, they can prove very very tricky. Though it risks WP:TLDR, we peons in such cases should assist arbs by doing the legwork and contextualizing each diff in an evidence report, because not to do so, is to assume they capture what is at stake. It's particularly important in sensitive areas. To expect admins, who can't be familiar with every topic area, to rake through subtle sequences and figure what is going on, is to expect inhumane energies, and demand that they give up their off-wiki lives. Thanks, in any case, and happy somnia! Nishidani (talk) 18:17, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Amalek edit you made

"Armenians as Amalekites: Fixing an horrendous confusion of displaced sourcing, WP:OR. If you edit in anything, please follow standard principles.". This was not my work. I restored material a new editor deleted without cause or comment. The critique is meant for the prior editor that added that material. Alatari (talk) 15:41, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for any confusion there. You were quite right to restore that material, which should never have been removed. My edit summary referred to whoever did the original compilation. Thanks, and cheers.Nishidani (talk) 15:57, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

You are amazingly fast at reorganizing that to a better form. Your page says you retired. You are addicted... Thanks for all the work you've put in. Alatari (talk) 16:35, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Things to be done/Notes to self (or what pieces are left of that hypothetical entity

• Huldra trans Talk:Bardala‎
• Sabah as per promise to Doug Weller
• Abu Iyad as per promise to Al Ameer
• The Ashkenazi Jews/Khazarian origins theory
• Werner Muensterberger
• 中里介山 and also his 大菩薩峠, which have no wiki article. ('to call him Dickensian would be utterly inadequate, to call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be to flatter him greatly' William E. Naff, The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Tōson, University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 p.4.) Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

(2)'To call Dickens "Kaizanian" would be an over-statement of his considerable gift for for creating memorable characters, while to call Kaizan "Dickensian" would be a seriously misleading understatement. This richness became all the more impressive when set against the national drive towards human standardization.' ibid. p.430

To be kept close to the bottom of this page because I forget the agenda as time scurries on Nishidani (talk) 21:00, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

• • e.g.<ref="Horowitz" /> Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

1517 pogroms

Hi,

You participated to a discussion on that article. A brief opinion would be welcome here. Pluto2012 (talk) 17:54, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I forgot about the word opinion... I will try to take care of this !!! Pluto2012 (talk) 19:25, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Mongoloid Khazars

Although you were right to remove that silly passage about Khazars being more mongoloid in a certain region, I'd like to bring your attention to this. Notice the beginning of page 4. Khazar (talk) 23:19, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for that note. I've added a note re skulls, as you will see.Nishidani (talk) 08:23, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

A piece of sanity on the Ukraine issues for wiki

You get endless bad reportage in mainstream newspapers. Counterpunch is not stricto sensu RS, but this article should be accepted.Nishidani (talk) 17:32, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Un peu de réconfort serait le bienvenu

• XX Amitiés, Pluto2012 (talk) 17:40, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Désolé. Wikipedia souvent me fait penser au proverbe: 'fais du bien à Bertrand, il te le rend en caguant.' I'ìve suggested we draw up a petition here. I'm not confident we can get enough I/P editors from all sides on board, but it's worth trying. This is not an ideological issue: we're supposed to be a community that, even in our disagreements, can see the merits of each other's work. Amitiés.Nishidani (talk) 19:42, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you Nish.

After all that I lived in 8 years I prefer stopping here.

Life is too short. Pluto2012 (talk) 19:36, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

It's not a lifetime obligation. One can always return. Whatever you decide, enough people here recognize the quality of your work to ensure that your edits here are taken seriously and stick. But it is good to also learn how to live outside of wikipedia, which is all duty, and hardly pleasurable. I saw La Môme, two nights ago, and can't get rid of those songs, all profoundly melancholic, but releasing springs of some indefinable joy in those who recall them. Summer is upon is, (Sumer Is Icumen In) and that is all that matters, so fuck/forget wikipedia and enjoy its air, fruits, landscape and lazy afternoons. Un abbraccio.Nishidani (talk) 19:47, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

My comment above strikes me now as frivolous, given your distress. A suggestion. The cost of getting even the obvious onto wikipedia here is extremely high. You have a sufficiently wide and deep mastery of the events of 47-8, and control of the secondary literature either to do a doctorate on the subject, or a book. At least there, one is free of the absurd wastage of time and intelligence which working here exacts on many of us, and, this is the sweetener, one can actually thrive in the pleasure of giving one's own views, meticulously reasoned, without murmurs of WP:OR ruining one's liberty. I would suggest, if this 'defeat' of years of effort rankles, that you exercise that option. If successful, you then become a source for future wiki articles. If not, at least giving systematic shape to your own understanding of events will allow you the pleasures of a private sense of achieved synthesis. A good point of departure would be to map events minutely, after the declaration of the Partition Plan, against the borders outlined in late November 47 until May 14/15 1948, and systematically place each incident, within and without those borders, chronologically, to determine who did what to whom (this is by no means clear from Morris 2004, for example, and in my view his thesis starts to wobble if one does this kind of analysis), listing attacks and casualties. In other words, writing a history of war that excludes all considerations of geopolitics, and outside historical agents, to concentrate exclusively on the struggle between the Yishuv and indigenous Palestinian Arab forces. Of course, please ignore this if, as I hope, you discover that there are better interests to pursue.Nishidani (talk) 21:22, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 6 May

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Sourcing

Hi Nishidani! I would ask you to reconsider the comment with which you reverted my edit at [2]. I know about Aikhenvald as a linguist, but that is not even at issue here. Bibliographies about living persons are not supposed to contain any unsourced information. The entire paragraph was unsourced, so it was appropriate to delete it. And so was your revert during which you added a source. Best, G Purevdorj (talk) 09:51, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

It is a matter of method. If you see something unsourced, you don't eliminate it (unless of course you have the area competence that tells you the statement or facts are absurd, contradictory, or false etc.) Were that the principle, almost 80% of wikipedia's content, if not more, would go down the gurgler. I wrote the passage you cancelled, because I know of her work on New Guinea languages, and even remembered an interview with her I heard in 2008. Editors have two options when they suspect something: (a) do a google search, which in this case (Aikhenvald+tok-pisin+manambu) would have immediately yield the source, or, if they are too busy, post a tag. I admit I was irritated that I had to go back and do that work, even if it cost me only a minute, hence my edit summary. But had I not by chance left that page, which I glanced at and edited just once, on my watchlist, your failure to check for sources and subsequent elision would have impoverished it, cancelled work by another editor, and left the general reader ignorant of a minor, but important detail. The page could be expanded significantly, also: she deserves better notice as one of the most outstanding linguists of modern times. One must always seek to enrich, rather than impoverish, articles in this fragile, randomly edited, digital encyclopedia. Regards.Nishidani (talk) 10:36, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Evildoer

Nishidani, I know you've spent a lot of time and said a lot on this AN/I case, but I hope you go to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Proposed topic ban and either voice your support or opposition. From reading your statements, I think I know your position but right now, the voting could go any which way (topic ban, indefinite block, both) and since you made the original complaint, I think what you say will carry a lot of weight. As an editor who is continually and persistently reverted by Evildoer at every turn, I find myself in the peculiar position of speaking up for him, if he can work on his attitude and sourcing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:20, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

If you saw me doddering down the street, and chumbling at the gums, Ma'am, you would not solicit me! I would have preferred, in any case, not to vote. I've lowered my sense of what is due, because some of those votes seem mechanical. I don't like ganging up, or even the appearance of ganging up. There are a lot worse editors in this area than E.d. On the other hand, he hasn' the faintest clue about how to read what's going on, or how to assess sources, and he consistently 'prevaricated': the point about using one's computer only at work, where he could consult the 4 sources, to gain time, and then saying he had read Dipont (re Romulus/Remus) and that his question was only 'rhetorical' only then to admit he never even looked at the 4 sources (i.e. Dipont). I've seen people permabanned for less (like myself!). Let's leave this up to a completely neutral arb, hopefully two or three, to assess the evidence and make an autonomous call as to what is due. Nishidani (talk) 12:47, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

It's ironic that the two editors he most came in conflict with are asking for a lenient response in contrast to those who are unfamiliar with him. I see this happen sometimes on AN/I. I appreciate his interest in and passion for the subject, he is just so wedded to his POV, in came in conflict with the style of editing on Wikipedia. To be honest, I keep clear of topics I feel that strongly about, because I don't want to spend my time on Wikipedia fighting over these topics. It's easier to remain detached when you're editing subjects that are not tied to ones personal identity. IMHO. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:35, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, Liz, it's no skin off our noses to behave like gentlewomen! I too try to steer clear of topic I know a lot about, if only because it would be boring to just dollop in information. By editing areas one is ignorant of, one's unpaid work here becomes a constant learning experience. As to personal identity. Fortunate are those who have a clue as to who they are, other than what's on the ID card, if one has one. At least that's the psychoanalytic premise, and I underwrite it (though my signature is meaningless). Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:16, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you

		The Socratic Barnstar
		I was meaning to thank you months ago but I forgot to. You've single handedly turned the Khazars article into one worthy of FA status. Not only is it free of edit wars now, but it's nice to be able to read one of my favorite articles without seeing it shrink or inflate with original research. :)))) Khazar (talk) 20:08, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Deeply appreciated, but I couldn't have gotten it into shape alone. I might have done a fair bit of the work, but it was an environment of several posters like yourself, Laszlo, Andrew and Jeepez (I hope I've forgotten no one, but at my age . .), ready to read closely, curb edit warriors, and check that constituted the sine qua non of anything accomplished there. Teamwork by people with a critical independence can do wonders, and no one main editor should forget that debt. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 21:11, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

CFD discussion

Nishidani, since you edit in the broad area of the Middle East, I'd welcome your opinion in the discussion on the deletion of the Semitic peoples' categories. The question about these categories seems to hinge on whether or not the editor believes Semitic is correctly applied to people or if it should be restricted to describing certain topics, like language, geography or history. Please weigh in at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 May 11#Category:People of Semitic descent. Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 14:50, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard

I don't want to be a headache but your experience with fringe theories are needed here. Khazar (talk) 23:43, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Systemic bias or systemic angst

We use only mainstream newspaper sources for the I/P area updates. A half a day ago, Kerry touched on the risks Israel ran of becoming an apartheid state unless progress was made in serious peace talks. Well, in fifteen hours, Al Jazeera noted it almost immediately, as did the Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and Front Page Magazine; it took a mere 5 for Haaretz to note the fact; Ynet registered the news after 7 hours. The NYTs is still twiddling its thumbs, trying to work out how to spin this, on its not-yet-breaking news breaking news page. On the other hand it has the latest updates on sanctions against Russia, and was first off the block to shout that 'Egypt Sentences More Than 680 to Death'. On important I/P information, every dot and comma must be cross-checked, every stylistic nuance, every detail in the ostensible troublesome balance sheet must be calculated. In short, why bother?Nishidani (talk) 13:58, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps they are waiting for the inevitable push back and State Department "clarification" before they go to print. To be fair to the NYT, the only mainstream US publication I can see running the story is The Daily Beast (while all the main European and Israeli media are running it). The other point to note is that it has taken the US government 4 years to acknowledge something that was stated by the Israeli defence Minister in 2010. I guess it speaks to the evolving limits of acceptable discourse on the I/P conflict in the US. From what I recall, Chomsky's propaganda model posits that liberal media like the NYT set the limits of what is acceptable discourse in a society so it is not surprising that they are on the front line of that debate with regards the IP conflict. Dlv999 (talk) 15:08, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Dlv. I noted it here because these things affect I/P wikiwork, which one hopes is the one global medium that, by its intrinsic logic, rebuffs the idea that reportage need suffer from a tactical incompleteness in coverage. Actually, what is odd is that as opposed to the NYTs articles, which are as dreadful as the negotiating imbalance, (protests couldn't get them to change Jodi Rudoren's statement that the Golan heights was in Israel) the New York Review of Books consistently carries very strong statements, in the books it reviews and the reviewing editors' comments, on Israel, books, mostly written by the Jewish or Israeli intelligentsia, that cover far more meticulously the hidden or silenced (what the Japanese call 黙殺, killing by silence) dimension, the facts on the ground, historical and contemporary. Clearly, therefore, the daily print version pitches its reportage to Middle American perceptions and desires an 'even-handedly' pro-Israeli spin, whereas the NYRB knows full well that its highly literate subscribers, Jewish or otherwise, are far more informed about the area than what is acceptable in 'public' discourse, and won't take the usual dose of suburban pabula. I can't quite figure out how this dissonance works for any self-respecting journalist at his newsdesk: commercial elements evidently dictate the distinction, but it sits very oddly. All the news that is fit to print is carefully snippeted out in one outlet, and studiously crammed into the other, depending on the constituency. The right hand knows what the left is doing, and vice-versa. Fascinating.Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Coverage-wise, perhaps things are changing somewhat as a result of people like Diala Shamas and things like the B'Tselem’s Camera Project. Citizen journalism with the added bonus of occasionally getting shot, just like real journalists. Sean.hoyland - talk 16:45, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

True, everything's now covered, but little is still widely reported. While watching the clock to see how long it would take the NYTs to get over the angst and convey the gist of Kerry's remarks, I noted that its most emailed article this week is on Tony Blare's remark that 'the spread of Islamic extremism “represents the biggest threat to global security of the 21st century.' Maybe, but in the meantime, dealing with the real world, I emailed him years ago in Jerusalem to see if he could ensure that one more IDF uprooting of a solar-powered electrical grid for a khirbeh where a few hardscrabble farmers south of Hebron live could be reversed. He had been reported as having visited the area. and, after all, he is paid a reported $million bucks as special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East to improve communication between the parties. Nothing happened. It's not the sort of practical thing than politicians think sufficiently attention-getting, I guess. Give me the Ezra Nawis of this world any day, who merit the Nobel Prize that chap in the White House refuses to bother returning. History is what elites mess with, or mess up: the redemption of modernity is that those who suffer from its consequences can now write what really happens (which of course the elites will never read). Sorry for this blog. Nishidani (talk) 18:50, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, unless I've missed something, the NYTs wasn't waiting for a State Dep. "clarification" but rather for Kerry's inevitable apology fo saying what every analyst in Israel or elsewhere knows as the logical consequence of indecision.Nishidani (talk) 10:30, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

• The New York Times in an instance of being the newspaper of false record.
• Kerry: "A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state." Now, as theoretically each state of the two-state solution could practise apartheid, it would be interesting to know how that is going to be prevented; non-Jewish citizens of Israel become citizens of the Palestinian state and vice-versa? Also, it would be interesting to hear Kerry explain what would be so bad about a non-apartheid unitary state which is the state of all its citizens rather than being "the state of the Jewish people."
• Kerry: Kerry also said that at some point, he might unveil his own peace deal and tell both sides to “take it or leave it.” Oh right! No marks for guessing whether his plan would be taken or left by either side.

    ←   ZScarpia   15:03, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

I hope that my editing is acceptable here, otherwise, please do not hesitate and delete it. In my opinion, a unitary state cannot succeed. Both sides have bad records concerning minorities. The "Price tag policy" criminals are repeatedly evading the law enforcement, which is a shame for Israel. Unfortunately the situation is not improving. The poor Israeli election system give the small parties a lot of political force and the voters majority does not have a say. On the other hand, Israelis are looking at the current Syrian war, and would not accept a solution of a unitary state, which will possibly mimick such quarrels. Ykantor (talk) 18:06, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Please don't apologize for editing here or on other talk pages. We are all equal before wikilaw, and your rights are those of everyone else. This is not a coterie enclave.The PTP incidents are quite acceptable hazing. Having your land systematically and literally stolen as '(foreign)state land' in contravention of the Geneva Conventions is what is intolerable. But this is not the place to discuss these matters.Nishidani (talk) 12:16, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Don't all countries have bad records concerning minorities, with the possible exception of...no, can't think of one. Sean.hoyland - talk 18:10, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Now, come on, Sean. Some countries are run by minorities that have bad records concerning majorities but the minorities are treated quite well, being in charge of everything.— alf laylah wa laylah (talk) 18:15, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Good point!     ←   ZScarpia   19:22, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

So this isn't about the widespread geographical distribution of records by comedians that make racist jokes about minorities. Nevermind then. It would be a bit hypocritical of me to criticize countries being run by minorities that have bad records concerning majorities because it was that kind of shameful behavior that helped to make the country I was born in rich enough so that eventually, many years later, they could pay for my entire education without it costing me a penny, giving me the freedom to live anywhere I want, while a decolonised African peer had to do what they were told for several years to pay back their government grants. No fair. Sean.hoyland - talk 19:55, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

But, unless transfer of nationality or location is being considered, then the two states resulting from the two-state plan would themselves have minority populations.     ←   ZScarpia   19:22, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Should say that I suspect that what is in the pipeline by way of solving Israel's "demographic problem", attempts at turning Jordan into The Palestine State so far having failed, is the creation of a bantustan or two on the minimum territory possible with transfer of citizenship for Israel's non-Jewish population.     ←   ZScarpia   11:12, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

That will never happen. You cannot by an act of parliament strip 20% of the citizenry of their native rights, constitutionally, or before the world, which is ready to ignore most violations of international law, but not a flagrant imposition of apartheid. There has always been a very neat distinction here between what you calculate you can get away with and what you can't. When Obama threw in the towel the other day, remarking:'we haven't seen the political will to actually make tough decisions', he thought he was commenting on the other two parties. He was actually revealing the defect in his, Kerry and American foreign policy: the lack of a political will to make a tough decision. A juridically fair peace requries more of Israel than it does of the disiecta membra we call Palestine, and that is why there will never be a negotiated settlement, except via an act of treason by the reps of the latter, which would carry the death penalty. So, 5 decades on, one will have one state.Nishidani (talk) 12:16, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

In this case, depending on how the selling is done and how many countries supporting the Palestinians go through regime changes before an agreement is reached, the answer to what can be got away with will probably be, quite a lot. Israel is facing a "demographic timebomb" and politicians such as Tzipi Livni are urging the necessity of implementing a two-state solution in order to avoid it. How will implementing a two-state solution circumevent the impending demographic timebomb? For it to work, you would have to increase the number of Jewish Israelis eligible to vote in Knesset elections, decrease or slow the rate of growth in the number of non-Jewish Israelis eligible to vote, or both. Implementing a transfer of voting eligibility of non-Jewish Israelis from Israel to the new Palestinian state would help to achieve the latter options. When it comes to international protests, I should think that those who take the homeland view, that Israel is the homeland of the Jews and the new Palestinian state will be the homeland of the Palestinians, are already well down the road to accepting that ethnic Jews will be privileged in Israel (that is, if they're not already there). That would, of course be to implement apartheid in Israel proper, or, if you prefer to give it another name, "separateness".     ←   ZScarpia   16:37, 1 May 2014 (UTC) (Hope you'll indulge this comment, which was added after you requested people to stop adding to this thread)

Which would be the best solution. The presence of minorities is like a quiet conscience that sits vigilantly in the noisy parliament of that national 'amour-propre' which, otherwise on its own, sounds the death-knell of civility. When Jesus wanted to warn his fellow Jews of the dangers of failing in charity the legend has it he cited the palmary behavior of a Samaritan, the arch-enemy of Judaism. Most of what is great about modern Europe came from its minorities, the most creative being the Jews. And Sean, point taken. But my generation grew up in relatively struggling postwar countries, which could nonetheless afford universal health care and free education to tertiary level, of which you too are a beneficiary. Alf's point was that, nowadays, with the great seismic shift, elites governing western democracies that are tens of times wealthier than they, or our societies were, in earlier decades, now demand that the majority pay through the nose for every service, and cark it if they can't pony up health insurance, while insisting that their failed speculative bets in derivatives be covered by the Federal Bank. In that sense, the elitarian minorities that now are the post-Keynsian default models, insist that governments, almost completely in their pockets, downsize to zero their redistributive functions. Nishidani (talk) 22:02, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

"attempts at turning Jordan into The Palestine State so far having failed". I can understand that the Palestinians want to establish their state between the sea and the Jordan river, and no one has a right to tell them that their country is somewhere else. But how should we call the state of Jordan if "population of Palestinian origin constitutes about 67 percent of the Kingdom's population." ? . It make sense, that after a while, the 2 independent states, Palestine and Jordan , will merge, like the independent state of Texas who merged with the U.S..

- "You cannot by an act of parliament strip 20% of the citizenry of their native rights,". Yes, of course. These people should keep the Israeli citizenship, but what about their newborn babies? there is a precedent of British citizens, that their newborn babies are not inheriting the British citizenship, if the baby is born overseas.(I am not familiar with the details.)

- "Baqa al-Gharbiyye is separated from its West Bank sister city, Baqa ash-Sharqiyya (or Baqa East) by the Israeli West Bank barrier which in this section coincides with the Green Line.[16 As a result, a concrete wall topped with barbed wire runs through one neighbourhood."]. Does not it make sense that the border will move such as both Baqa villages will be united within a Palestinian state? Ykantor (talk) 20:25, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

When I wrote about attempts to turn Jordan into the Palestine state, I really had in in mind Jordan-is-Palestine proponents such as Ariel Sharon. For instance, this says: "Prime Minister Sharon's historical views of Jordan are, to say the least, troubling to those who rule in Amman today. How can it be forgotten that for many years Sharon was the most prominent voice in Israel favoring the proposition that "Jordan is Palestine." During Black September he sought unsuccessfully to win the government of Golda Meir to this view, advocating that Israel withdraw its support for King Hussein in his life and death battle against the PLO. In 1982, as minister of defense in the government of Menachem Begin, Sharon's star-crossed strategy in Lebanon included the relocation of Lebanon's Palestinian population, en masse, to Jordan."     ←   ZScarpia   16:00, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

I respect Nishidani wish to end this discussion here. If you wish to, we may continue in your talkpage or in mine. Ykantor (talk) 18:32, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, but it's probably better to get back to building an encyclopedia. And I've realised that a major part of what I wrote above was based on a serious misunderstanding on my part, so I should shut my mouth before I make more of a fool of myself.     ←   ZScarpia   21:30, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

97 years ago, an Imperial power decided to give a European population persecuted by antisemitism territorial rights in Palestine. 90% of the native population disagreed: the majority of religious Jews were horrified. In 2017, some end to this must take place, if decency is to prevail. Israel must accept that its 78% of a land which it only possessed only 6% of in 1948, is a bounteous historical settlement, and a stupendous achievement, where its population thrives in a booming economy with cutting edge science and technology and a fair life for most. None of this has taken place in the travailled history of the original majority population which has been systematically robbed of its possessions and rights. All the rest is bullshit and details that, in discussion, become an undignified travesty of fundamental notions of decency (because miracles of justice are rare in human history: I know of only one: the British abolition of the slave trade). But this is not what the thread was about, and I think it should end here. Regards Nishidani (talk) 20:44, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

But the incident of the use of "apartheid" by Kerry just points to the fact that the situation is approaching critical mass insofar as the USA can no longer unilaterally support certain intransigent positions of the Israeli government.

There are also internal pressures building in Israel, apparently, but, like Japan, the people put right-wingers in office.

Once the USA has to start abstaining in UN votes regarding Israel, the behavior of the Israeli government will have to change rapidly, or turmoil will ensue.

That, as I see it, is the crux of the matter at this juncture.--Ubikwit ^連絡 _{見学/迷惑} 16:48, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

The Guardian - Chris McGreal - Kerry wasn't wrong: Israel's future is beginning to look a lot like apartheid, 14 May 2014:

• In an interview late last year, Danon told me that there is not going to be a Palestinian state, and that Netanyahu shouldn't worry what the Americans think
• Danon says bluntly that he wants to take the bulk of West Bank land – Judea and Samaria, as it's known in Israel – while ridding the Jewish state of responsibility for governing the mass of Palestinians. "Long-term, I am not talking about annexing the Palestinians. My goal is to annex – or 'apply sovereignty', as I prefer to call it – to the land in Judea and Samaria with the minimum amount of Palestinians," he told me. "So, if I am doing the map, yes, I want the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians."

    ←   ZScarpia   23:28, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Pt 2, strictly on the NYTs coverage

Could any of the young whiz kids out there tell me where the New York Times reported the news that Martin Indyk might resign from his role as Special Envoy, which caused a flurry of articles all over Israel and in many foreign papers? Thanks Nishidani (talk) 15:45, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

According to this Haaretz article, the source for the story was some Israeli officials in Jerusalem.     ←   ZScarpia   00:06, 15 May 2014 (UTC) (you may be interested in this transcipt of a speech and question and answer session given by Indyk on 8 May at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s 2014 Weinberg Founders Conference)

Thanks for both Scarpy. I did get the Indyk leak bit into the relevant article when it came out. In any case, I'm now taking some time to see what the NYTs fails to, or is late in, cover(ing) here, and the pattern is quite fascinating.Nishidani (talk) 12:03, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

On the NYT, but on a different topic, where the NYT is obviously not using its fact checkers, in order to fulfill a propaganda function. --NSH001 (talk) 21:26, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Query

Are there any maps uploadable for the disposition of Yishuv forces on the 13/14 May 1948 set against the Nov.30 Partition plan map? One exists, and can be viewed at 17.15 minutes into Salman Abu Sitta's lecture on the Right of Return here. His argument is that on the day of the 'Arab Invasion' , Yishuv forces were already outside the lines allocated to them. Nishidani (talk) 19:52, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Nishidani. You have new messages at Al Ameer son's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Hello, Nishidani. You have new messages at Al Ameer son's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Hello, Nishidani. You have new messages at Ojh2's talk page. --09:41, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Notes for possible future edits

• New definition of nakba.

a demonstration on Nakba Day—the anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. (Jonathan S. Tobin,'Was Nakba Shooting Another al-Dura Libel?,' Commentary Magazine 21 May 2014.)

• The problem with List of Israeli assassinations is that it is restricted so far to ordered killings, mostly admitted by the state actor. If the 15 May 2014 killings turn out to give the lie to the Pallywood memes circulating, the following data, plus sources indicating the outcome of investigations, should be entered there. It parallels the Mohammad al-Dura incident, given the indeterminacy, save for one element: in the former, responsibility was admitted immediately, only to be denied later. In the latest incident, responsibility was denied, the disinformation on tampered footage deconstructed within days.

Date	Place	Target	Description	Action	Executor
May 15, 2014	Beitunia, West Bank	Nadeem Siam Nawara(17); Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Salameh(16). A third student, Mohammed Aza, was shot through the lungs	Students	Shot dead in the back in two separate incidents (73 minutes apart) after a demonstration involving rock throwing outside Ofer Prison.	Israel Border Police.

Nishidani (talk) 13:31, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Israel - Palestine Conflict

It said at the top that you can only revert once every 24 hours on that page if you Edit it. You might be blocked now, you reverted twice! XD The Toon Disney Guy (talk) 11:51, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

What you did was self-evident vandalism. I/P articles are not disneyland, toon comics or a kindergarten sandpit. If you have legitimate objections that have missed the lynx-eyed gaze of a dozen long-term editors, address the talk page. If you wish to take this to A/1 read WP:Boomerang. Whatever, the mass removal of RS-sourced (4) material without warning is vandalism.Nishidani (talk) 12:03, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

I've checked your record, and can find no evidence at a quick review of interest in anything other than cartoons and television, except one edit to that page which was a drive-by tag plastering edit. Please correct me if I err.Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

No, that is wrong, Dude! Also. Why are you bothered about that? You don't need to be a dick about it. The Toon Disney Guy (talk) 07:34, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Unlike you, I wasn’t born yesterday. Nishidani (talk) 08:55, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Your lovely vandal

I asked Alison if an IP was JarlaxleArtemis and she confirmed and blocked several accounts and another IP. Dougweller (talk) 14:08, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Doug. I fail to see the point of this turpiloquent hyperactivism in my regard. I think the Spanish for 'water off a duck's back' is Por un oído me entra y por otro me sale, so I quack rather than quake. I still owe you that article, - just overwhelmed these months by extrawiki work and life. Will do it eventually.Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Beitunia

The Beitunia shootings incident probably deserves its own article at some point given the coverage, although perhaps it's too soon. Anyhow, you may not have seen a more recent NYT article[3] B'Tselem seem to be keeping track of the media reports.[4] Sean.hoyland - talk 12:40, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. I've a whole file on that, thinking that it fits the criteria for a targeted killing but none of the earlier reports gave it as an instance of the same, until I noticed that, today, Human Right Watch reported its considered view that this consisted of a targeted killing. In that report, HRW lists quite a number of civilian killings that result from targeting practices with live fire during demonstrations, which however never figure in the usual lists of targeted assassinations, where the assumption is that there must be some Israeli testimony that the suspect was a 'militant'. This is just of course bias: one could add a large list of such killings that are not labelled that way ('targeted assassinations'), but they can't be added unless we have independent assessments classifying them that way. To note just another:-

• October (24?) , 2001
• Tulkarm
• Abdallah Jarousha.
• Unknown. A businessman
• Shot by Israeli snipers from Battalion 202 of the Paratroop Brigade, on suspicion of using a nearby telephone booth to regularly report Israeli positions.
• IDF(ref Chaim Levinson 'IDF officer promoted despite role in Palestinian's death,' Haaretz 10 June 2014 ref>)

One can't add that to the list, despite the fact that we know who gave the order (now Brig. Gen.) Roni Numa, who, Ofir, relayed the decision to 'neutralize' a Palestinian businessman (driving in a car with his wife and brother-in-law and children), to the two snipers who then shot him dead. It's the best documented example of the genre, but is not classified yet in the targeted assassinations lists. Indeed no internet search will tell you the day the incident occurred, nor the name of the person. Of the several thousand killed so far, on my reading, several hundred would fit that description of being deliberately targeted, though not militants. But we can't do WP:OR syntheses or draw conclusions.

As to the incident deserving a page, I have extensive downloads of reportage that would make that an easy job. But in the past I generally opposed temptations to follow the habit of using wikipedia to showcase individual incidents (Murder of Shalhevet Pass, The Death of Asher and Yonatan Palmer,Death of Yehuda Shoham,Murder of Eliyahu Asheri, Murder of Helena Rapp, Murder of Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran, Murder of Neta Sorek and Kristine Luken,Murder of Ofir Rahum,Murder of Oleg Shaichat,Murder of Yaron Chen,etc.) because all of those articles were written by editors wishing to make a case, assign historic blame or blacken the other side, and the events mostly fail WP:Notable. I wrote Zion Square assault to test these editors, but the event took on a life of its own and was so widely reported that its inclusion on wiki became obligatory. Sound practice would suggest that a potential article The Murder of Nadim Nawareh and Mohammed Salameh can only be justified if reportage continues over several months, and it eventually is included or noted in the ongoing stream of academic books on the I/P world.Nishidani (talk) 13:29, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

I like articles about individual incidents but rarely have time to work on them. They require so much research to ensure accuracy and balance. Done well I think they can be interesting and informative in the sense that they often encapsulate broader aspects, ripples of the conflict in microcosm, in the events that came before and after the incidents, the causes and effects. Unfortunately it seems to be almost impossible to do anything well in ARBPIA. I worked on Murder of Hatuel family for a while to see if I could make it better, but ended up walking away. I genuinely don't understand why editors would only write articles about certain incidents and not others based on the nature of the victims. What's the difference ? I mean I get it, I understand what is going on and why to a certain extent for those editors, but it doesn't make any sense to me. It's a pity that Wikipedia's coverage of the day to day things that make up the conflict for the people involved is so piss poor. Sean.hoyland - talk 18:42, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I hadn't thought about it from that angle, which I should have, given that I admire the microstory approach to history, as exemplified by the articles and monographs of Carlo Ginzburg, for example. Perhaps I should reconsider an article like that. When I saw what was being done with the Death of Yehuda Shoham, i.e., using a selective set of sources to underline the viviousness of Palestinians (I just noted because someone edited it, the article Deception: Betraying the Peace Process which should be deleted as a non-notable book whose agenda is to ignore what systematic studies show, by the way - same purpose on wiki), I stepped in, and it was a bit of a firefight, but in the end (haven't checked recently) managed to contextualize it historically in the flow of violence on both sides during that week, and the political consequences. I think that it should be obligatory to do this on all articles of this kind. It's not impossible because of ARBPIA, but because of source bias. We know much more from newspapers about Israeli victims on average than we do of Palestinian victims, who are lucky to get mentioned by name, while articles that deal with close background focus tend to be well informed on the Israeli context, and less so on the Palestinian context. Murder of Shalhevet Pass is a good example (I can't remember if anyone has edited into it the fact that Israeli politicians were so disgusted by the extreme media pressure the Hebron settlers put on them to turn up for the burial and transform it into a signature day for Israel's victimization, that several in the end boycotted the ceremony. It's in the sources, but those who edit the page appear to prefer to coast over it.

As for the editors, if I may hazard a remark, restricting my remarks to bad editors from the ostensibly 'pro-Israeli' side, many of them are raised within an ideology dominated by the historical fact of anti-semitism, which is a eurocentric disease, and Zionism which was originally premised on the idea that indigenous Palestinians could be omitted from the picture. Victor Klemperer caught the syndrome back in his diaries in the early 30s when he, if my memory doesn't err, likened what would happen to Palestinians, they would be forced historically to play the role of wild Indians being shot out of history in an endlessly popular Hollywood storyline of the 'conquest of the West', untinctured by Karl May's romantic defence of the noble savage. Both my parents' generation and mine watched endless Hollywood movies where the historical atrocities of the white conquest were ignored, while the indigenous victims of what was a kind of partial genocide by an invader, were depicted as a murderous bloodthirsty savages, always to blame. This scotoma has been revived in the post 9/11 storyline of terrorism (which of course does exist), while dying out in Westerns, and therefore 'it does make sense' to me, that they cannot see the obvious (IOTTMCO as John Lanchester wrote recently in the LRB). It is hard to feel pity if the 'other' shouldn't exist on principle, and her presence is just some dark anomalous blur on the periphery of one's vision, which is focused solely on one's own tremendous stride towards a dazzling historical achievement.

Klemperer's vision was as prophetic as Kafka's was of modernity and Nazism. They are 'sincere' in the worst sense of that word, i.e., they cannot understand that 'sincerity' can obtain in people who disagree with them: it must be bad faith, or anti-semitism. It is a reflex Pavlovian system of group-think, as inexorable in its conclusions as any ideology.Nishidani (talk) 20:11, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

The other relevant point to consider is system bias. For instance, while we don't have an article for the Beitunia killings, there is already an article for an event less than three days old - 2014 kidnapping of Israeli teens (an example of the format described by Nishidani: "using a selective set of sources to underline the viviousness of Palestinians"). A prodigious output of (POV) articles covering Israeli victims of the the conflict while not covering Palestinian victims is a problem. Dlv999 (talk) 10:49, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I actually checked yesterday, wondering how long this would take to get into wikipedia, and, not finding an article, thought to myself that the area was improving. Alas, not so. I think editors should exercise caution in succumbing to the temptation to imitate this pattern (it does look, even if it isn't, retaliatory), even if there is a strong argument for 'balancing' the evident POV-bias. Whether or not an article should be written on the Beitunia murders or not should depend on WP:NOTABLE criteria (such events fail notability (ugh!) in wikipedia terms because their frequency is in inverse proportion to the follow-up attention given targeted Palestinian murders in the RS mainstream press - they occur almost monthly), esp. on the forensic outcome (partially known) and ongoing reports of the Israeli investigation, while keeping in mind that one can't be bound by the latter, since these notoriously drag on and tend to bury such cases.Nishidani (talk) 13:58, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Fuck, bad editors just mean revert wars, false edit summaries, and the burden of fixing crap placed on others' shoulders. 'I provide the POV pushing and you neutralize it, if anyone's looking.' Nishidani (talk) 16:00, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. FatGuySeven (talk) 03:22, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello! There is a DR/N request you may have interest in.

This message is being sent to let you know of a discussion at the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding a content dispute discussion you may have participated in. Content disputes can hold up article development and make editing difficult for editors. You are not required to participate, but you are both invited and encouraged to help find a resolution. Please join us to help form a consensus. Thank you! FatGuySeven (talk) 16:15, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

JarlaxleArtemis

For the record, it absolutely is him - even down to denying his identity (he also denied that he was Grawp until that was proven). He reacts instinctively - any time anyone challenges his edits, he starts making unicode-infused, empty, cowardly threats against them. As if this had ever worked. This has been going on for ten years, since he was 15, and he hasn't changed a bit. NawlinWiki (talk) 14:43, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm deeply appreciative of the work you, and others like Malik, do in keeping this nonsense clear of pages. Jeez, I never really follow this stuff, but from 15-25 he's wasted a decade doing this? - ten of the best years of one's life, when one writes poems, reads impossibly dull tomes that turn out to be memorable for some gem one discovers or page-turning novels, treks through deserts, or along thin pathways in tropical forests, listens to the Beatles and Elvis, learns languages, travels the world, screws around, and up, goes to concerts to hear Richter, or watch Nureyev, works on a kibbutz, plays football and cricket, skulls and runs in long-distance events, almost gets murdered, carouses till dawn in good company every week in hundreds of pubs from London to Toronto to Los Angeles, and this kid's lost himself in fighting an ephemeral nanosecond war seated before a computer screen instead? It's profoundly sad because pointless. The state of Israel flourishes, and will continue to do so, whatever historians write, or angry POV pushers of the eternal panic-button of antisemitism or anti-antisemitism say, or do. I used to laugh when I saw the otherwise dumb message 'Get a life!' on the net. I now realize that it appears to be appropriate. Cheers and thanks.Nishidani (talk) 15:23, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

And a big thank you from me also, to you :NawlinWiki, and Malik and Zero and all the others who help keep the death threats etc off my page, Cheers to you! Huldra (talk) 23:54, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Good grief! I never realized you had that many. Take it as a backhanded compliment, sys(ter). By a quick calculation (no of death threats etc vs number of edits on Palestinian villages) it is empirical proof at last that you remain the most important and invaluable contributor to wikipedia's database on the Palestinian world.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Of course I take it as a big compliment! :D But I really haven´t gotten the larges compliment yet; having socks named after you....I´m green with envy...: NishidaniDoesBadStuffToChildren (talk · contribs)  :) Cheers, Huldra (talk) 20:42, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

IP socks

Hi, regarding your comment at Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement: you seem to have forgotten to sign it. Any full RfC about the matter would be flooded with socks, me thinks. Perhaps we should start finding links to all those off-wiki reports of canvassing, and then show the damage (=huge waste of time) throw-away sock do in the I/P area, and then take it to Arb.com? Cheers, Huldra (talk) 20:35, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

• Btw, have you seen this? Cheers, Huldra (talk) 01:16, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
• I would absolutely love it if you could help me out on Talk:Nisf Jubeil. We need a French and a Latin reader. There are two Nisf Jubeils which have been mixed up, it seems, Cheers, Huldra (talk) 08:52, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Of course. But I will be away for a few days. Nishidani (talk) 09:48, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

SPI case filed

I've filed a sockpuppet case at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Smatprt. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:36, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

For the task ahead....

Have a beer! Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:01, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Btw, one very easy task: on Umm al-Fahm Guerin writes that it has "dix huit cents" inhabitants. Isn´t that 1800? Petersen, citing Guerin, say it is 800? Cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:44, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Strewth. You may have seen me making occasional edits in here, but since Monday I have been once more chopping down trees, chain-sawing wood, packaging 31 large bags of leaves for disposal, loading trucks - backload of tasks I finally could do only on those days because a friend turned up with the equipment to rid the place of a year of accumulated woodstock. Same Friday. I'll do it though, just remind me if I haven'ìt by Sunday night.Nishidani (talk) 07:01, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

User reported me

Hi Nishidani....

Just letting you know :) user Gunrpks reported me for "reverting" his editorial wars on your article concerning the war in the middle east. I am a new user and have never reported some one before but I will try to report him as well. --علي سمسم (talk) 12:35, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

I see. I'm afraid you can't enlist people's help, technically. You are new to this place, unlike User:Gunrpks and, I think, you engaged in an edit-war with him. Your excuse would be unfamiliarity with I/P ARBPIA practices, but any editor should inform himself before hand that edit-warring, even in a 'just cause' sends a bad signal. One must not imitate bad editors. In any case, as you are unfamiliar with these things, I will examine this, if only because I informed that editor that he was violating the 1RR, and he persisted. I refrained from reporting him, but, if my perception is correct about his edits, it is certainly odd that he should report you. That would mean he risks WP:Boomerang, when all of the evidence is examined.

In any case, I would advise you not to report him, it is a bad practice, esp. by newbies, to use this. It looks like playing tactical games to out an 'adversary'. Be patience, calm, succinct, in your reply, and if you check the evidence and find you have made an error, apologize. Above all, do not transform your reply into a long screed. Trust administrators to see into it. They have better eyes than most of us, most of the time.Nishidani (talk) 13:07, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you :)--علي سمسم (talk) 13:16, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

It would be wise to withdraw your complaint. You made an error, since it was not User:Gunrpks who reported you but User:Shrike. I have already noted in his complaint the unsatisfactoriness of his report, and you would do well therefore to withdraw your complaint, and allow admiistrators to examine the whole set of diffs for the relevant pages and make up their own minds. Edit-warring did occur on both sides, and they must evaluate from your respective records what to do in each case.Nishidani (talk) 13:57, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. AlanS (talk) 14:37, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

I find it chills me more than coffee! I think we can work well together, because of, more than despite, our differing POVs. I think most editors misuse or fail to grasp the positives of that dynamic, in many contentious areas. Cheers :) Irondome (talk) 00:22, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, gratefully accepted. Nicely designed cup, though I prefer a mug, because the latter makes me think of myself.Nishidani (talk) 21:30, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Ditto :). With respect, Irondome (talk) 02:04, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks lads for riding shotgun on this page, (NSH001, Sean.hoyland, Sjö and Yunshui)

But now that I see what the removed 150 odd attacks by this Nishidumbass sockster wrote, I wonder at the puerile lack of an ability to connect one's thoughts to real history. Willing death on others in order to defend one's 'ethnic vitalism' is of course a Nazi cast of mind, and therefore, ipso facto unacceptable for anyone with the genocide of WW2 still vivid in recall.

Hitler once said:’ We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.' Manfred Henningsen, ‘The Politics of Purity and Exclusion,’ Björn H. Jernudd, Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), The Politics of Language Purism, Mouton de Gruyter ‎1989 pp.31-52 p.48 Same pathology in the sock who thinks eliminating Christians, Europeans, Arabs and wikipedia will somehow secure the survival of Israel. Even if that happened I would survive, I guess, being a pagan, and only 'European' by adoption. Then again, if wikipedia was killed off, I might just, qua Nishidani, croak with it! Nishidani (talk) 07:34, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Sjö! tack så mycket

Strömkarlen spelar,

Sorgerna delar

Vakan kring berg och dal.

雲水先生,谢 谢 你 的 帮 助.

喜見行脚人

恥茶無兩杯 Nishidani (talk) 10:19, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

That's very elegant - a pleasure to assist someone of a poetic bent. Yunshui ^雲_水 10:29, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

No poetic bent, but a bent for what poets write, reading which keeps me sane when editing in here. The merits of elegance lie elsewhere, I confess. I'd been reading about Ladakh recently, while engaged in a AfD discussion on Nepal, and saw those elegant verses by a Chinese visitor to that wonderful place. Then someone offered me a cup of tea (see above), and I thought of tsampa, and when I saw the 雲 in your handle I thought of the Tümed, and 水, water, by an uncanny coincidence, clicked with the other admin's handle Sjö, which in Swedish means 'lake' and both of you had rid my page of a Strömkarl, who tries to drown people (here by inundating the page with racist hogwash). Thanks again.Nishidani (talk) 10:54, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Your recent editing history shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly.

Wikipedia edit warring noticeboard

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warringTritomex (talk) 11:06, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Notice of WP:ARBPIA

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding the Arab–Israeli conflict, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

This message is informational only and does not imply misconduct regarding your contributions to date.

--Bbb23 (talk) 20:21, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Pursuant to your call that I effectively violated the IRR at Operation Protective Edge, and in lieu of the obligatory sanction, given your discretionary comments, I will observe a 48 hour self-suspension from editing as of this moment. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 21:15, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Early Christian history

Ho, mikado! First, is there maybe a missing "a" in the time since your retirement. Second as someone who knows something about the topic, you might maybe be interested in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Christianity/Noticeboard#Userspace drafts.John Carter (talk) 20:49, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Lynx-eyed, John. Was in a hurry, and, though straining the bean to modify 'donkey's age(s), which would be untrue, as I didn't retire yonks, but a year or thereabouts ago, I thought I'd have to downscale the years in that idiom, and of course a donkey's offspring is a foal, meaning retired less than papa donkey's years. Perhaps it would better be Don Quixote's years? I'm fucked if I know, spending what little spare time I have to give names to history's rerun of a recpetitive tragedy that visits the anonymous, who die under the broadbrush journalistic cant of 'terrorists' every time them furreners shoot into that fish bowl that is the Gaza Strip. Tomorrow's Sunday, so as a gesture to ancient beliefs, I might have a glance at that draft, but I fear the overnight death toll will rise steeply enough to keep my fingers concentrated on the Gaza necrology. Cheers, John.Nishidani (talk) 21:05, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 19 July

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article

Good article, [5] nableezy - 22:56, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Are you planning on sticking around for a while ? I hope so. Sean.hoyland - talk 10:44, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Probably not. Forgive me, but its too aggravating, depressing, ... . nableezy - 16:23, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

I don't blame you. It's definitely depressing. Sean.hoyland - talk 17:04, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

At my age I look on the positive side. Things like this comfort me at the prospect of death. Having lived with exceptional good luck a fair dose of years, I don't see much point in hanging round, though I have to while my ineludible biological momentum insists otherwise, to watch both this slaughter, and read articles, or edit with people, who fail the most elementary standards of objective evaluation or humanity. It'll be good to be dead, and not wake up every day in a part of the comfortable world and have to measure one's pleasure in existence against the larger realities of an engulfing cruelty. This is not a sensible perception for the younger to entertain, of course.Nishidani (talk) 17:17, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps you would enjoy a break from the carnage over at Talk:Samaria#.2F.2A_In_the_header._.2A.2F. Sean.hoyland - talk 19:00, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Just what the doctor ordered for a laugh. Phew, some editors are so badly informed they ought to consider a career in politics, aim for the White House or whatever. You can get away with that level of nescience there at least.Nishidani (talk) 20:08, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. It's nice for people to be reminded of the actual facts of real world scholarship, and get them momentarily off that dripfeed of 'terrorist' reportage that makes life exciting for the dull as they browse the internet for the hollywood version of history or watch TV from the comfort of their barca loungers in the air-conditioned nightmare. You'll recall, Nab, Sara Roy said it all in 2009 after the Gaza War here. But of course since she is the world's foremost authority on Israel designed dedevelopment of Gaza, publishing a premonitory study of the problems back in 1987, no one will care to listen. Some quotes:

Gazan farmers are legally forbidden to reclaim their own land unless they obtain permission from the Israeli military authorities.

Gaza expanded its trade in the late 1950s to the COMECON countries of Eastern Europe. .. Immediately after the June 1967 war, all Western markets were banned to Gazan exporters in order to preclude competition with Israeli agricultural producers and then, as now, to limit Gaza's access to foreign economic and political circles.

Restrictions on export markets also extend to the Israeli market.Presently, Gaza's farmers are prohibited from marketing most fruits and vegetables inside Israel, a measure designed to avoid competition with Israeli products. . .Certain products, such as strawberries, eggplants, and zucchini, which are not competitive with Israeli products, are allowed to enter Israel's markets through the Vegetable Marketing Board . . citrus products are also exported to Israel from Gaza for use in juice factories. Israeli producers, on the other hand, have unlimited access to Gazan markets, exporting substantial quantities of fruits and vegetables at prices with which Gazan farmers are unable to compete.

In light of the critical water problems inside Gaza, the Israeli government, through its affiliated water company, Mekorot, has issued restrictions against the digging of new wells and has limited the amount of water that Palestinian farmers may use, These same restriction on water consumption, however, do not apply to the Israeli settlements inside the Strip, which have installed 35-40 new wells in recent years, . . According to the Israeli Water Commission, in 1985 alone, Israelis living in the Gaza Strip consumed, per capita, 2,326 cubic meters of water compared to an average consumption of 123 cubic meters for every Gazan

Nishidani (talk) 11:52, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

In short 'déjà vu', because the political elites read the New York Times headlines, and have no time for the real details. My advice is, keep away. You've done enough in here.Nishidani (talk) 11:52, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Page protection

Guess you'll be needing that again, then... Yunshui ^雲_水 10:35, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this tedious mopping up. I guess each dull job exacted on the intelligent, esp. to help others, deserves ther elevation of poetry's thank you. For the moment, after thinking these days that work in this area is like wandering into Dante's selva selvaggia e aspra e forte, one thinks of 鮑照's 路難 and thus,

瀉水置平地

各自東西南北流

人生亦有命

安能行嘆復坐愁

酌酒以自寬

舉杯斷絕歌路難

心非木石豈無感

吞聲躑躅不敢言. Best regards,Nishidani (talk) 11:10, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Full protection maybe? Of course, we'd have to make you an admin, and I'm not sure I'd want to that to you. John Carter (talk) 17:30, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Don't think that's necessary, though it annoys me that admin time is taken up sweeping the Augean stables that IP blow-ins, and assorted teenagers with a logorrhoic capacity for dittological repetition of racist graffiti, wish to impose here. You see far more wit and ingenuity in the Latin inscriptions on the walls of the dunnies and brothels in Pompei, which reminds me that Alec Hope once aspired to get the attention of Christopher Brennan, by then a reclusive drunk, by following him into a pub toilet and, while he too pointed his percy at the porcelain, with his free hand wrote down a piece of Latin verse recently published (late 1920s) from excavations in Pompei, on next cubicle wall. Though pissed as a newt, the erudite Brennan, glanced over while splashing his boots, and, buttoned up, corrected an error in the reproduced inscription's grammar. Patience. I edit to ensure that the Palestinian side of this fratricidal conflict is duly and fairly represented, and it is only natural that the place will be bombed, in a petty and insignificant mimesis of what goes on in the real world over there.Nishidani (talk) 18:49, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Agree with your view on the conflict being fratricidal. In fact all human conflicts are fratricidal. One of my favorite WP articles is Mitochondrial Eve. Regards, IjonTichy (talk) 17:25, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps the better word is, psychoanalytically, 'autocidal', given the doubleness of human identity: you kill something in yourself when you murder others.Nishidani (talk) 09:49, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes. And when we damage the natural environment, we are injuring ourselves. When we degrade it, we are degrading ourselves. IjonTichy (talk) 16:12, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Participate the discussion please

Hi! I think you've missed a discussion occurred at here. Please participate the discussion by presenting your ideas about the background section. Best Mhhossein (talk) 21:39, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Give me a proper link. That one took me to the article, which is not a discussion, but the result of editing. I'm not aware of an ongoing discussion, and have been away for two days visiting libraries (not on this issue). If there is indeed a discussion I missed in the meantime point me to it. Or otherwise, raise here the issues you wish to discuss, so I can get back to reviewing the background (at a glance it seems to have been modified somewhat).Nishidani (talk) 22:17, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 24 July

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List of Israeli strikes and Palestinian casualties in Operation Protective Edge

I fixed this up as best I could; please note edit summary contents and hidden text. The list has issues. For one thing, the number of wounded is very hard to specify with any kind of exactitude which is what I think you are (understandably) trying to do. Also, some of the links are no longer active. Best of luck. Quis separabit? 00:45, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

First, thanks for the precision of textual review. All wiki work begins as provisory, and is in a constant state of flux, as sourcing or editors improve. All articles, not only lists, have 'issues': castrate a text by occultation and it will have no issue. Once one begins to hide text because it falls short of perfection, no passing editor will see it and be prompted to improve it, so improvement of the hidden text falls back uniquely on the shoulders of the editor who drafted it and lies under the obligation to check every tinkered contribution. This is just a practical issue of worksmanship. Perfection (exactitude) is acquired festinans lente in itinere, not given. Since this is a working bee, optimally, one thinks of Pliny's community of that species: laborem tolerant, opera conficiunt, rempublicam habent.(HN,XL 9) Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Evildoer187

User Evildoer187, has returned to Wikipedia and has violated his topic ban. This ip belongs to him and he is using it to avoid his topic ban. He states in this edit summary that it belongs to him. AcidSnow (talk) 17:11, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm not an administrator, and as an editor, my general policy is not to report infractions of wikilaw. If this is a problem I'm sure people who follow such things will eventually pick it up.Nishidani (talk) 17:22, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

It is good to see that the article pertaining to the Gaza-Israel situation has been somewhat restrained as of late and is keeping as neutral of a view as is seemingly possible for an article like this. In the mean time, if anything gets out of hand, look at this pretty kitten!

Jab843 (talk) 16:31, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Given the fact that 'having kittens' in British English means 'getting hysterical', I should register that I'm immune to hysteria. My comments can express an undertone of contempt or fatigue or outrage every now and then (every 50 edits) at the idiocy of wikipedia, but I'm not prone to hysteria, since I lack a womb, and even had I one, it would not bear kittens, metaphorically or otherwise, but something more monstrous like a dictionary of etruscan.Nishidani (talk) 17:34, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Your reversion

May I asked what I wrote that what biased and not just the inclusion of facts? Looking at your page you seem to biased and a bit antisemitic, I think I'll consult more neutral parties. --monochrome_monitor 10:24, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Note.

(1) Accusation that I am ‘a bit antisemitic’

(2)'deleted my question, convo with you will get me no where (blatant antisemite),' i.e., deletion accompanied by a repeat of the charge, adding insult to the original offence.

You cannot be 'a bit antisemitic': the term 'antisemitic' is absolute - either one is, or is not, antisemitic. This is recognized in the second edit, with its summary, where 'a bit' becomes 'blatant'. One can be a blatant antisemite, as opposed to a discreet antisemite. T.S. Eliot is an example of the latter, Ezra Pound of the former. Nishidani (talk) 11:17, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

(3) On being reported, and when note was made of these remarks, the editor replied.

'It wasn't exactly a personal attack, I asked him to tell me what I said that was biased and noticed on his page vilification of Israel and contempt of being accused of Jew-baiting. I deleted it in exasperation because I didn't want to get into an argument especially when I read his comments on Jews being like Nazis.'

'contempt of being accused of Jew-baiting.' One can be 'in contempt of court'. One cannot, in English, be '(in) contempt of being accused' (of Jew-baiting or anything else). I guess the meaning is, 'Nishidani is contemptuous of accusations that he is a Jew-baiter'. If so, then, that's true. I view accusation slung my way in this regard with contempt, and therefore this is a compliment. But, given the solecistic writing, the meaning probably was intended to be negative: 'Nishidani, when confronted with complaints that he is a 'Jew-baiter' (i.e., an antisemite), brushes off these serious charges with an insouciant contempt, without addressing the gravamen of the charges. If so, then the statement is wrong. I documented and refuted these charges.

As to my commenting that Jews' are like Nazis, that is a fiction with no evidence in these archives. It's worse than fiction, because I'm on wikipedia also because I am militantly opposed to any ethnic or group stereotypes which brand or categorize individuals who happen to be Irish, Eskimoes, Jewish or Martians as, ipso facto, exemplars of a collectivist identity. There is no such thing as a 'Jew', or an 'Irishman', understood as an identifiable type of ethnic character. There are only individuals. Antisemitism's fundamental premise is that if someone is Jewish, his/her basic identity is defined by that circumstance, and not by who he or she happens to be individually, Like all racism, the abstraction annihilates the individual by its reductiveness of the person to a type. Nishidani (talk) 12:07, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

(4)

person that reverted me is a total tool who advertises the fact that he's been accused of antisemitism as a sort of badge of honor on his page.

Okay, that clarifies what he meant beneath the screwed up syntax. Whatever, 4 insults in the space of an hour, even while under report is a good definition of chutzpah. The problem is not WP:AGF, really. The problem is that the editor doesn't read the sources, is unfamiliar with the scholarship, on pages he fiddles with, and instead, rewrites text according to his personal historical knowledge, which is, to be polite, extremely patchy, and self-evidently culled from hasbara-type sketches of 'positions to adopt' when arguing about Palestine/Israel.Nishidani (talk) 12:51, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

:(5)'he has been called antisemitic many times before. I'm just one of many to object.'Monochrome Monitor.

Nishidani (talk) 18:41, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

As to my commenting that Jews' are like Nazis, that is a fiction with no evidence in these archives. It's worse than fiction, because I'm on wikipedia also because I am militantly opposed to any ethnic or group stereotypes which brand or categorize individuals who happen to be Irish, Eskimoes, Jewish or Martians as, ipso facto, exemplars of a collectivist identity. There is no such thing as a 'Jew', or an 'Irishman', understood as an identifiable type of ethnic character. There are only individuals. Antisemitism's fundamental premise is that if someone is Jewish, his/her basic identity is defined by that circumstance, and not by who he or she happens to be individually, Like all racism, the abstraction annihilates the individual by its reductiveness of the person to a type. Nishidani (talk) 12:07, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

(4)

person that reverted me is a total tool who advertises the fact that he's been accused of antisemitism as a sort of badge of honor on his page.

Okay, that clarifies what he meant beneath the screwed up syntax. Whatever, 4 insults in the space of an hour, even while under report is a good definition of chutzpah. The problem is not WP:AGF, really. The problem is that the editor doesn't read the sources, is unfamiliar with the scholarship, on pages he fiddles with, and instead, rewrites text according to his personal historical knowledge, which is, to be polite, extremely patchy, and self-evidently culled from hasbara-type sketches of 'positions to adopt' when arguing about Palestine/Israel.Nishidani (talk) 12:51, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Your use of the word "Hasbara", which is itself a misnomer, proves your bias. I know nothing about and have zero participation with any activist community, I added facts and figures and dates and clarifying phrases. If you object to any of my points that's on you to say which and why instead of painting a portrait of me as uninformed without actually calling anything I said into question. You did compare someone to a Nazi, which is per Godwin's Law, almost always a gross exaggeration. "Hitler once said:’ We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.' Manfred Henningsen, ‘The Politics of Purity and Exclusion,’ Björn H. Jernudd, Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), The Politics of Language Purism, Mouton de Gruyter ‎1989 pp.31-52 p.48 Same pathology in the sock who thinks eliminating Christians, Europeans, Arabs and wikipedia will somehow secure the survival of Israel. Even if that happened I would survive, I guess, being a pagan, and only 'European' by adoption. Then again, if wikipedia was killed off, I might just, qua Nishidani, croak with it!" I'm not sure what you were addressing here but to mention Nazis is at best insensitive. Looking at your talk page I see that you are "in cohoots" with many other biased editors. For example, you edited the article on Israeli assassinations but were requested to comment on the deletion of "list of Palestinian rockets attacks into Israel." Huldra, a friend of yours, was extremely hostile to me on my talk page, assuming I was some sort of duplicate account because I knew what NPOV meant even though I was new (I had asked another user what it meant). Adding Zero to the list via reporting me just shows this is a witch hunt. I did not break the rule in question and you know it but are looking for something to condemn me for. Go ahead, continue with your righteous indignation. But ask yourself, per occam's razor, is it more probable that you are an antisemite or that everyone else is an "anti-anti-semitic" (ridiculous term) Jew? You called me racist, and I didn't harp on that, because I'm trying to drop the issue. Take your outrage elsewhere, maybe the Electronic Intifada or Richard Finklestein, whose works you have referenced. I have some minor pro-Israel bias but you have an extreme anti-Israel bias, its obvious we wont agree, I'll leave the articles you hound alone even if their neutrality is questionable.--monochrome_monitor 18:50, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

I will remind you that I deleted the comment and you chose to reinstate it.

I HAVE read the historical scholarship.Monochrome Monitor

Take your outrage elsewhere, maybe the Electronic Intifada or Richard Fink''le''stein

HAD you read the historical scholarship you would not have written Richard Finklestein for Norman Finkelstein,evidently confusing Tikun Olam's Richard Silverstein with the historian of modern Palestine, Norman Finkelstein. Please note that Finklestein is written Finkelstein.Nishidani (talk) 19:46, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

I will admit to that mistake though I didn't analyze it that way, it was just the name I was thinking of and it sounded right. I had just read an article critical of that guy for recycling of antisemitic candards (saying Holocaust remembrance serves the the "Jewish elite" and is an "extortion racket". I'm not sure what you think of the guy but I'll refrain from saying more lest you feel otherwise. I have not read either official pro-israel nor pro-palestinian sources. I have read sources documenting the politics of the region in the early 20th century and its important to include objective facts (palestinians are those who lived in the mandate 2 years before the war) instead of just retrospective revisionism. For example the article assumes genetic similarities to mean direct descendence and says Palestinians are the successors of everyone who has lived there. Not objective. --monochrome_monitor 20:10, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

An Apology

Hello again. I apologize for my unfounded libeling of you as antisemitic. I only skimmed your page and decided without credence that you reverted my edit due to an ulterior motive because it was easier than actually debating it. I certainly won't vilify you again. I hope that we can both make Wikipedia a more comprehensive knowledge base while avoiding confrontation in the meantime. Thanks, (and I'll be more careful about omitting my nonfinite verbs!) --monochrome_monitor 00:23, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani. I hope you are not as depressed by the human condition as I am at the mo. I mean everything, Ukraine/Russia, Gaza, the ongoing oppression of Tibet and the Kurds..so I went off-line for ten days, to chill, in an idyllic Norfolk village. Gardening helped :)

I am mentoring MM, I decided to shortly before I left. I should have "publicised" it somehow, or told MM, but I didnt. I think if I had been around, we all could have agreed to put it away days ago. I have spoken to her, and I reproduce fully my initial email, knocked out about 2 hrs after I got home. I trust MM will not object.

Hi Georgia :)

Now listen up.

a/ I am not happy with you calling Nishi d an anti-semite. As a Jew who was 16 in 1978 allow me some advantage here. I can smell an anti-semite at 12,000 miles and no, neither he nor Sean are. I have studied N's writings through a microscope, my anti-semite detector lens. It reads zero. His writing has always been deeply respectful of the Jewish people and religion, and has explicitly and repeatedly spelled out the positive aspects of the state of Israel. He admires its democratic institutions and it's plurality, its scientific and cultural and economic achievements. He just demands from his own POV, a moralistic action-based series of measures from Israel. He is not a existential Israel rejectionist. He holds to the 2 state solution as far as I can see. The same seems to go for Sean. As for user pages, my own handle alone is provocation enough to the inexperienced ;)

b/ I advise you go to N's page and apologise. You can freely quote the contents of these mails. Then we can see what we can do about that scappy mess of a fight that I am wading through. Have you been banned in any way? It does not look like it from my scan-reading so far. I will go to N's page too if necessary. We have mutual repect. Say I was out of town as your mentor and take full responsibility. Never throw the AS charge around Georgia, unless you are DAMN sure, and you have consulted with me.

Apart from that you are doing ok. You will be intellectually roughed up sometimes, but you will grow. IMPROVE YOUR GRAMMAR. LOL

Shalom!

S

Please forgive youth Nish. Anyway, I shall be keeping her out of trouble, and getting her faculties sharpened to deal with the formidible intellectual standard required of contributors to any aspect of I/P on Wikipedia, crucially in the intelligent selection of strong RS. Cheers N Irondome (talk) 02:55, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

A leeuwenhoekian linguist would note that troubling confusing of 'it's' for 'its' in your email, but ignore it because the orthographic peccadillo is expunged by the generosity of the sentiments in my regard. Thanks. It's a wet summer here, but precisely for that reason, my gardens thrive, though, mindful of Shakespeare's fondness for the tender-horned snails that proliferate under such conditions, much of the day is spent picking those creatures, with their gypsy-waggoned, vardo-shells, off the cabbages and lettuce and moving them over to a lush abandoned olive grove where they can feed off weeds, and do less damage. As I harvest and transport upwards of 200 a day, I think it's like editing: one doesn't 'attack' the problematical agent, one just nudges them off grounds where their presence conflicts with the slow growth of life. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:10, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for

your thoughtful commentary here. I know a (very) elderly man who survived the Warsaw uprising and the concentration camps, and he wholeheartedly agrees with you. -Darouet (talk) 19:38, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

May he be blessed with many more of the years denied to those who grew up with him. Some unfortunately think Israel is the Warsaw ghetto (here and here), and fail to see that the more compelling analogy is with Gaza.Nishidani (talk) 21:22, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Nishidani, thanks again for all your work. By the way I recall reading somewhere (don't remember where) that the tactic of inversion, i.e., blaming the (relatively weak) victim as the (overwhelmingly more powerful) aggressor, and painting the aggressor as the victim, was used extensively by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in fact even thousands of years even before the advent of these two fascist, ancient so-called 'civilizations' whose elite pretended they were 'democratic' or 'republican' (respectively) and 'law abiding' and 'humane and peace-loving.' IjonTichy (talk) 17:19, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't think it helps to retroject modern concepts like fascism back into antiquity, or the orient or anywhere else in time. Leni Riefenstahl is one thing, the Athenian tragic theatre another: If people in Sderot, or Cicero, or we in our livingrooms, reacted as Leontius did in Plato's Republic Bk.IV 439ff, or as Seneca did in his 7th Epistle, the world would be a saner place.Nishidani (talk) 20:54, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

IjonTichy You make some rather strongly worded and ill-informed statements here

...the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in fact even thousands of years even before the advent of these two fascist, ancient so-called 'civilizations' whose elite pretended they were 'democratic' or 'republican'

What is it that makes you think you have to perspective to even venture such a ludicrous and overreaching comment? What is it that makes you want to demonize the Ancient Greeks and the Romans?

Apologies to Nishidani for intruding here to respond to that.--Ubikwit ^連絡 _{見学/迷惑} 23:49, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Harry's gaiters.Nishidani (talk) 19:10, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Oops

I forgot about your "to-do" list - so I've set it up near the top of this page, where you can easily find it. It will stay there and will never be archived. --NSH001 (talk) 05:51, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Wickey-nl topic banned indefinitely

This is an amazing decision, The decision says that "Wickey-nl is temperamentally unsuited to editing this controversial topic area", based wholly on intemperate responses on the WP:AE page. Nobody could point to any edit on article or talk pages which demonstrates this. The evidence presented by Brewcrewer was ignored completely (rightly) and most of the evidence presented by Shrike was also deemed not actionable. There was indeed the issue of bias, but who doesn't have bias in I/P area? I certainly do, and a very strong one.

The exchange on the talk page and the spat with admins was indeed wrong. But it is amazing to me that if Wickey-nl had simply made no statement at all, he would probably not have even got a sanction, except perhaps a warning. This shows me that the admins have wholly made the decision based on responses on the WP:AE page and 'social' skills rather than any edits on actual articles or their talk pages.

I wonder how someone can judge whether someone is suited to edit in an area without editing in the area, or even evaluating the content of the person's edits? Four other editors (including myself) who actually edit in ARBPIA talked about the content of the edits, and giving neutral-to-good assessment, but they were ignored. Coming on the heels of the decision to topic-ban Sean.hoyland, it makes me very sad and annoyed about the ARBPIA sanctions process. Kingsindian (talk) 18:32, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I want to point that admins usually disregard additional positive comments by involved editors--Shrike (talk)/WP:RX 21:03, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@Shrike: I do not know much about the process, but what are the comments by editors for, if they are to be disregarded? Kingsindian (talk) 21:11, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@Kingsindian:Lets say that they given much lesser value, editors from the same side usually defend each other so it obvious that their response have less value that comment from uninvolved editor.--Shrike (talk)/WP:RX 21:49, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

@Shrike: There is some truth to that, I suppose, though that is a very "tribal" way to look at it. Anyway, the uninvolved editors (EdJohnston and Robert McClenon) also only talked about the behaviour on the WP:AE page. The discussion was about calling some editor corrupt etc. I do not know what this has to do with topic ban. If this was the criterion, a full site ban or block was appropriate, as Robert McClenon said. Kingsindian (talk) 22:11, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Could you look at

Talk:Israelites. And the article itself. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 08:12, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks

• Sorry, I didn't know. Yours, Quis separabit? 15:42, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

"This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia as of foals' ages." -- glad this is not true at the moment, although I am acity boy and have no idea what you mean by "foals' ages". We need you. Quis separabit? 16:11, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

One of the defects of English is that it has no specific term for a donkey's offspring other than the generic 'foal'. Had I written 'donkeys' ages' it would have been an exaggeration. I wanted it shorter than that - so thought of replacing the aged donkey with its 'foal', hence the neologism. By the way thanks for that assistance. I miscalculated in creating the page, presuming it was unimaginable to think of a modern state killing a more than a thousand civilian hostages with impunity on a petty pretext. Since I intend to press ahead and finish the list, which will take months, and since we are close to 2,000, there's a size problem looming. I think it will have to be split up into a week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4 etc., series. Your technical mastery and suggestions would be most welcome, as always.Nishidani (talk) 16:47, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Ashkenazim

You seem to be the only one who has a considerable amount of influence regarding that page. I'm surprised how people don't understand the policies regarding WP:SYNTHESIS, WP:OR, AND WP:FRINGE. They want to mention "Levantine origins" in the same sentence as "coalesced in the Roman empire" despite the fact that there's an entire paragraph in the lead covering the former topic. Take a look for yourself. Khazar (talk) 19:06, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Didn't notice this (travelling) will examine.Nishidani (talk) 17:53, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

The Tradition

@Nishidani: Yeah, and well, the tradition is wrong. It has been proven incorrect by DNA analysis. The Kuthim from Iraq would not have the Cohen gene, they would most likely not even be from J1a, but from J2, and if they were from J1a it would not be in the same northwest semitic cluster as the CMH. There are many areas where the tradition is wrong. I just do not think that the Israelites sat around deciding to completely make stuff up just to frustrate the efforts of future archeologists. I think that if a very specific, rather mundane, emphasis is placed in the Tanakh on something like the location of Beth Shemesh, or the northern border of Dan, I don't think they would go out of their way, or even have any incentive, to make nonsense up. For one, the people reading it at the time would have said, wait a second, this is incorrect the border of Dan is not over here. It would discredit the Tanakh in the eyes of the people. Even if you assume the entire Tanakh was written in 400 BCE by Ezra, the people living at the time would have a cultural memory of the borders of their land, their lineages, what distinguished them from other ethnic groups, who their actual kings were, et cetera. It used to be assumed there was no real difference in lineage between Celtic and Germanic nations, now because of DNA testing we know they are founded by two totally different haplogroups, one form R and the other from I. The lineage of the Israelites from a man who lived in the late bronze age, and immigrated to Canaan from the Aramaeans in Syria, I think is most likely true, I don't know, but why would anyone make up a story so specific, that is not even very epic? I mean, if you are going to make up a false origin, why not do it like the Romans or Greeks and claim you were founded by gods who fought some mythological beast, why the idiosyncratic and boring origin of an Aramaean traveler?--Newmancbn (talk) 18:49, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

You can't go round picking and chosing stuff you like and discarding stuff you disagree with.::Read the Bible. How do you know the genetic profile of the Kuthim of Iraq? If you want to know the genetic profile of the Israelites, get permission to examine the 700 skeletons from Lakish'0s cemetary died ca.712 BCE., and, if it survives, extract the DNA. Why all this inference from far-flung populations, and zero interest in Israel in examining skeletal remains that survive, but whose DNA is only mapped if it is Neolithic? The Israelites, so the story goes, came from people who were not Canaanites, who ancestors came from all of the Middle East, like Ur of the Chaldees etc. I'm afraid your comments show no awareness of modern historical scholarship on the ancient Middle East, and genetics is not going to fill in the gaps of this nescience. Ezra and co., had it in for the am-ha-aretz, the masses of people the priestly caste disdained, but who inhabited ancient Palestine and set up strict lineage rules. Most of the genealogies are based on a mix of fantasy and mied traditions: they couldn't even resolve the tribal issue of how to name God, since southern and northern traditions had different words and traditions, some Israelitic tribes holding he had a spouse. In high antiquity, as the wives of the Biblical patriarchs show, people fucked around from tribe to tribe, ethnos to ethnos, and there was no such thing, as is also the case to day, of a quintessential genetically marked population, except for the Andaman islanders and other isolates. I've read thirty of the scientific papers on the genetics of this area often used in wikipedia and almost all make an historian wince for the sheer lack of familiarity with historical research. It's all over Harry Ostrer's book, hopelessly out of key with what any colleague in a department of religious or historical studies could tell him over a snifter of whiskey in 2 minutes. Nishidani (talk) 18:56, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

RE: List of Israeli strikes and Palestinian casualties in Operation Protective Edge

Hi, unless my bifocals are acting up, I think the header title for the "Day 12 Saturday 19 July" chart is duplicated. I tried to fix by tweaking but couldn't. Quis separabit? 13:53, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Well with your specs you're picking up more errors than I, eyeglassless on Gaza, manage to note. This is definitely something the quiet unobtrusive genius of User:NSH001 can fix. He watches the page, so let's cross our fingers, hoping he isn't out on one of his marathon runs.Nishidani (talk) 14:09, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Fat chance of running any more marathons any time soon - I had an operation, some time ago, to fix a hernia, but it never seemed to be quite right, and now it's atarting to hurrt again when I move (long story short: I think I got an incompetent surgeon). Anyway, as you can see, I fixed it. --NSH001 (talk) 17:43, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

If only highly paid professionals in medicine, law and politics were as efficient as the unpaid volunteers for wikipedia like yourself. Thanks, N, and hope it heals or the heel that botched it ends up with a truss.Nishidani (talk) 19:35, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Battle comments

I said parts of the text were POV, I didn't say there weren't legitimate comments in there. However, is there were many POV comments in there it is proper to revert it and allow the user who posted it to fix it and put it back. You now just put back POV comments, as I had clearly explained was the reason I did it. I suggest you either fix up his POV comments or undue your revert. - Galatz (talk) 15:23, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Nope. Your call was that there were POV statements, that called for revert, which shows inexperience and lack of familiarity with policy. NPOV is also secured by the balancing of POVs. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a point of view, articles here consist mainly of POVs: we are obliged to see that both parties in a conflict that merits an article get due and balanced representation, and your edit summary ignored this

(b) If you had an objection to a large amount of text, you should not just make a mass revert, but rather address the issue on the talk page, here by giving examples of what you object to. You did not do this, and failed to clarify what you consider to be illegitimate POV statements.

(c) The text was POV before I balanced it. I.e. it discussed the battle as a set of IDF battle moves and details and incidents: there was no mention of what actually was occurring on the other side to thousands of people caught up in the 'hellfire'.

(d) I mention 'hellfire' because if you read Battle of Antietam you will see that 'POV' statement attributed, and given in the text:

The conflagration caused heavy casualties on both sides and was described by Col. Lee as "artillery Hell."[21] Seeing the glint of Confederate bayonets concealed in the Cornfield, Hooker halted his infantry and brought up four batteries of artillery, which fired shell and canister over the heads of the Federal infantry, covering the field. All at once, the cornfield exploded into chaos as a savage battle raged through the area. Men beat each other over the head with rifle butts and stabbed each other with bayonets. Officers rode around on their horses swearing and cursing and yelling orders no one could hear in the noise. Rifles became hot and fouled from too much firing. The air was filled with a hail of bullets and shells.

Lt. Col. Joseph S. Fullerton wrote, "Kennesaw smoked and blazed with fire, a volcano as grand as Etna." Battle of Kennesaw Mountain

All these details are not elidible as POV. They consist of sourced statements made by survivors of the conflict, and are absolutely normative for accounts of war and battles. I could give dozens of examples of this from military history pages.

I suggest in future you familiarize yourself with wiki practice and policy and employ the talk pages before making a mass revert of the kind you just did.Nishidani (talk) 15:44, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

B'Tselem and destruction of homes

Regarding your edit here. I had earlier included it in the section below, though in a condensed form. So might be just duplication. Kingsindian (talk) 22:04, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I intended to remove it on seeing your note, but examined both the contexts. Your earlier edit had it in the house destruction section and reads

B'Tselem has documented 59 incidents of bombing and shelling, in which 458 people have been killed.

My edit was in the civilian deaths section and reads

B'tselem has compiled an infogram listing families killed at home in 72 incidents of bombing or shelling, comprising 547 people killed, of whom 125 were women under 60, 250 were minors, and 29 were over 60.(should read:'According to B'tselem's infogram of 72 bombing/shelling incidents involving 547 people among families killed at home, 125 were women under 60, 250 were minors, and 29 were over 60.')

On second thought, given that (a) I consulted the updated B'tselem count and (b) the issue is not house destruction, but civilian families being killed. On reflection I think the data best suits the civilian death section, and the updated ref is more appropriate, which makes me reluctant to revert, though I should have noticed that you had already used part of that source. I am culpable of reduplication, in a sense, but these two factors suggest to me, I will stand corrected of course, that the edit I made is both updated and relevantly positioned thematically. (?)Nishidani (talk) 10:32, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Nishidani You might be right. A bit of duplication here to examine both contexts, which are important (destruction of homes and the indiscriminate killing leading to lots of civilan deaths), might be warranted. Kingsindian (talk) 10:45, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

We'd probably do well to look for a comprehensive source to get down the best neutral calculation of actual housing damage, total, partial etc.. I'll look into it when I get some time. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:02, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Historicity of Jesus

Not necessarily your cup of tea I know but if you wanted to subject yourself to being involved here it would be appreciated as you are probably one of our better informed people in general. John Carter (talk) 18:18, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually as you know that's decidedly my cuppa, but I'm 1,600 behind in my Palestinian casualties tally, and that alone will take months. I'll look over it and bookmark it though.(Does it really matter if he existed? Oedipus didn't, yet the myth informs human understading. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ethics were profoundly Christian, though I figure from his letters he was in fact an atheist).Nishidani (talk) 19:47, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

It's a fucking useless article, John (what's Blainey doing there? He knows zilch about the subject etc.etc.etc.) It's a waste of time trying to fix crap like that, and there's donkeys' loads of it all over the religious area.Nishidani (talk) 20:23, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't disagree. I think the primary concerns are that the article is currently one of the more prominent links in the Jesus sidebar whether it should be or not and that some organization of the topic of "Jesus and history" is in order. That would include the material relating to the John Allegro pipe dream Jesus and the broader Christ myth theory, the quest for the historical Jesus, the reliability of the sources from the era and a whole mess of other articles. Personally I would love to see an article on the pronounced lack of contemporary sources from the first century CE in Israel as well but have no idea where to even look for such material.John Carter (talk) 20:46, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Allegro! A mate stole the hardback version The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross just so I could read all the details of pseudo-Sumerian etymologies, when the book came out, without having to waste time note-taking rapidly in the library. It's still on my shelves, and makes me feel twinges of guilt over the theft. 99% of the religious-historical articles re Near Middle East are painful to read, and I think the only way around this is to take the core articles one by one and work through one at a time methodically to fix them up according to the strictest wiki quality standards and best sourcing. But that means edit-warring with tub-thumpers.Nishidani (talk) 08:53, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Notice

DRN discussion on Hamas rockets.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 03:11, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for support in the arbitration

Very decent of you, after me not always behaving in the most civil manner. WarKosign (talk) 08:30, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

No need to thank me, though I appreciate it of course. It's obligatory to intervene where an injustice is in the air. I was only tardy because I am reluctant to pitch in at A/I and AE where bad faith is rampant, and admins usually consider all sides delinquent in regard to NPOV, and defences of the accused are taken implicitly as proof of partisanship.Nishidani (talk) 09:49, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Add sign

Hi. You forgot to add your signature here. --IRISZOOM (talk) 14:06, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Whoops. thanks.Nishidani (talk) 18:08, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

ANB discussion

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive265#Move War at History of the Jews in Nepal, and RFC review that concerns you because you were recently involved with one or more of the related Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/History of the Jews in Nepal, Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2014 June 30 (History of the Jews in Nepal), Talk:History of the Jews in Nepal#RfC: Should we change article name to 'Judaism in Nepal'?. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 09:06, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Question

Is there a source to "many of which have resulted in mass civilian deaths"[6]?. MarciulionisHOF (talk) 14:56, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Please don't get topic banned

• I am going to be a bit blunt because I would regard it as a great tragedy if you get topic-banned. If I do nothing except simply follow your edits around to make gnomish changes, WP would be improved greatly. (I sense another great article in the making, about water in the West Bank. Noam Chomsky often talks about the importance of water in decision making, much more than "security".)
• There is no point at all edit-warring on Wikipedia, as you did (slightly) on the 8200 letter. Firstly, it is totally useless in WP:ARBPIA given the numerical realities. Secondly, it is a "bright line" that WP:AE can see very easily. In this regard, I consider the actions of Sean.hoyland monumentally stupid. Again I am blunt because from reading the archives, it is clear that it was a great tragedy that he got topic banned, and then retired. I will show why it is stupid. Plot Spoiler did the same "moving without consensus" stuff in the article 2014_Israeli_raids_on_UNRWA_schools article. Was I infuriated? Of course. But I did not stupidly revert his edit. I left a message on his talk page (he still did not revert). Huldra had the article on her watchlist and she reverted within a few minutes, nothing Earth-shaking happened. Eventually, a mutually agreed suggestion was found. Why couldn't have Sean done the same? No, he had to uphold some "ideal", the result of which was that nothing happened to Plot Spoiler and Sean got topic banned.
• With all the obfuscation carried out nationalists on either side, it is very hard to conceal the facts. Can any amount of blather about "human shields", which has a big section in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict article, conceal the reality? The truth will set you free. It is sufficient to present the facts, even with all the qualifications and garbage which is added. This is the reason I regard the retiring of Wickey-nl, to be a (not so great) tragedy. He had a strong bias, but as John Stuart Mill said, everyone has something to contribute to the truth, even if the world is right and they are wrong. He was clearly knowledgeable about the West Bank, and it was totally idiotic to get topic banned.
• One has to be a consequentalist to a large degree on Wikipedia. The project is so huge, and stuff you add can be so ephemeral, that any abstract notion of justice is meaningless. I saw somewhere that you said that you have some rule that you will not self-revert to introduce some knowingly false edit, even if you break 1RR. This is, again, really idiotic. This is a standing invitation for people to bait you, and it is a much greater tragedy if you get topic-banned, than anything which happens to the edit. Self-revert, wait 24 hours, and revert. Will the world stop turning in the meantime?
• I have been thinking of writing an essay on editing in WP:ARBPIA, inspired by User:Ravpapa/Tilt. I have much less experience, but I think I have other insights which he has missed out. Kingsindian (talk) 23:32, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I like bluntness from serious people, and don't mind at all being remonstrated with. I wasn't doing a Sean-Hoyland, however, and I wasn't 'infuriated'. SH asked to be banned, I guess because he was sick and tired of the normative gaming and the failure of administration to come up with a solution to the chronic IP et al abuse in the I/P area, which he spent years dutifully blocking: he didn't understand that wikipedia, for all its cautions, has no defences against a certain kind of intentional malice and manipulation, because admins are trained to be 'objectivists' (Ayn Rand's puerile attempt to be 'philosophical' transformed pathetically into a cognitive bias, which anyone with philosophical training knows is just dopey, though it has had a far better, expectedly, afterlife in the moronocracy of American political discourse) and read only for diff evidence for technical infraction. This means programmatically, they only evaluate 'behaviour' in an extremely restrictive sense, excluding the obvious and overwhelming evidence of destructive intent that anyone working in a problematical, war-torn area can see at a glance. Whenever there is a real 'war', the pattern of one or two rule-and process-savvy people will turn up, and work 24/7 to defend what is more or less the official government position. With these people, there has never been a problem. They are very careful and are ready to discuss the technicalities and proprieties of method and appropriate input meticulously. Even if one is sure this is the case, one can work with them. But they will be assisted by numerous blow-ins or old hand POV-pushers who make no bones that they will edit as a group of intuively- or otherwise- coordinated mavericks, reverting, making huge noise on the talk page, attempting to stir conflict so their perceived adversaries will make a false step, and be outed at A/I and A/E, and in general making the relevant articles impossible to edit per WP:NPOV, driving serious wikipedians off, so that the page can more or less be dominated by the official editing line. This this has happened three times in my experience, and I have studied the pattern. It is the latter who should not be on wikipedia, but nothing can be done about it.

If you examine these several articles, you will note I have edited them rarely, and have almost never straight reverted (as the others do customarily), because, in commonsense, it is pointless. I did revert Plot Spoiler, one of the most noxious POV pushers on wikipedia, because (a) User:WarKosign opened a query about the edit I made for discussion, as is proper. The bloke with the Lithuanian handle, said it needed a POV balancing statement, within minutes, which WarKosign, immediately provided, while awaiting input. Fine. This was how things are done. (b) Within 28 minutes, Plot Spoiler did what he always does. He walked into the page, reverted my edit, and only then hastened to drop a distracted one line note on the new section saying my edit was 'tangential', a purely subjective view, and question-begging. I.e. rather than adding his voice to the section opened by WarKosign, he preemptively cancelled the edit in favour of one outcome in the proposed discussion, creating a fait-accompli which would not be overturned because there is a consolidated 'voting majority' in favour of Israel's official position working that page. So Plot-Spoiler's revert was an evident abuse, and I used, which is perfectly normal, my right to revert it until the discussion WarKosign proposed could be completed. Shrike, of course, immediately re-reverted with a spurious ((please follow wp:brd)) edit summary. immediately reverted by User:Shrike. That was obvious gaming because, were he to be a dedicated follower of WP:BRD, he would have automatically reverted Plot Spoiler's edit. The relevant, section, applicable to Plot Spoiler's prior edit, reads:

Consider reverting only when necessary. BRD does not encourage reverting, but recognises that reverts will happen. When reverting, be specific about your reasons in the edit summary and use links if needed. Look at the article's edit history and its talk page to see if a discussion has begun.

i.e. Plot Spoiler, unlike myself, ignored the fact that 'a discussion had begun', and the advice specifies that one revert only when necessary. There was no 'necessity' to warrant his abuse of 1R. There was a reasonable necessity for me to protest this abuse by reverting him in turn, because he was patently prejudicing the page by established as a fait accompli the verdict he would prefer in the developing discussion. In this case it was (a) drive-by reverting (b) assisted by a tag-teaming reinforcement from Shrike, in the face of the fact that only WarKosign, and myself, were adhering strictly to the normal procedures.

This didn't exasperate me. I've been round for 8 years and see this malicious bad faith every other day. Indeed, my reaction on observing it was:'of course!'. I fully expected that my edit would see 5, perhaps 8 (7 of whom are plain disruptive) no votes rolled out in the discussion section. I thought to myself, 'I'll leave it overnight', and if this pattern continues, will report PS and perhaps one other there. This is all a cameo of the kind of rigging of the text that's been going on for two months, and I have far too busy a life off-line to get dragged into this nonsense.Nishidani (talk) 09:03, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

• You might be right about the gaming etc., and I was perhaps overly concerned. I do not have much experience in this area, but I have seen enough. The point of gaming is simple but effective: it works, if not always. And I am very unsure that WP:AE would see your point sympathetically.
• Of course Sean.hoyland himself will know better about his own motivations, but the fact remains that nothing good happened by his stubborn refusal to revert.WP:AE is not equipped to handle such issues. From reading the archives, in particular some of the cases involving Nableezy, I can see that often either (a) nothing happens (b) both parties get sanctioned - "a pox on both houses". Given the volume of bad editors and tribalism the area attracts, it is hardly worthwhile and hugely risky going to WP:AE to get rid of one or two of them. It also forever makes one a marked "enemy". It seems that Nableezy has also retired from this area. I see this pattern, which is silly. My own philosophy is Keep Calm and Carry On. Kingsindian (talk) 09:57, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

I trust in a fairly substantial experience in psychiatric wards, and helping 'schizophrenic' or 'narcissistic' friends, to consolidate a phlegmatic nonchalance in crises. The I/P area attracts people with cognitive disorders, and that, like reading the non-scholarly, newspaper accounts of that reality, supplies one with a lot of practice in handling the instinctive reactions of countertransference. The only time I experienced (much to my own surprise and curiosity) a sense of panic was when a man, (neither Jewish nor Israeli: aforeigner) tried to murder me in a wild wooded area of the Negev at 4 am. It only lasted a few seconds, until I got my running rhythm, and knew that he'd never be able to catch me, though I could hear him 20 yards off, trying to, in the darkness. The only thing that worries me in wikipedia is that to edit here, esp. in this area, I have to strain, sift, and distort the spontaneous prose I think in, which is, normally complex, jokey and eudaimonic, to create the austerely dull sanitized drone that passes as a flag for 'neutrality' here. Nishidani (talk) 10:29, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Re Keep Calm and Carry On, now that I have dined, reminded me of many examples of British phlegm, most recently of something reported about soldiers, facing almost certain death, in the trenches of the battle of Hill 235 during the Korean War (in the past war actually required courage, not nerdish computer skills at a quiet desk close to home, picking off shadowy suspects with missiles). The officer checking the trenches around dawn, when the final assault was expected, heard one of the footsloggers say to his mate, in a Bristol accent:

I don't care what you say about your fancy London beer, Jack. As far as I'm concerned, there's no beer in the world like George's Home Brewed' (Anthony Farrar-Hockley, The Edge of the Sword, (1954) 1955 p,54)Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Your standings on Palestine

Why do you engage yourself in such a controversial topic in the most controversial way? I never understood why a man from Japan would care so much about the Palestinians. Khazar (talk) 18:57, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Saeki Yoshiro:). Read Jeff Halper's article. I could list twenty major innovations in Israel's handling of Palestinians, innovations that break customary law, which are forming, in the US esp., precedents for changes in laws that will affect citizens. What happens there will probably happen throughout modern Western societies some time in the future. One example: targeted assassinations without due process. That was invented to kill Palestinians. Obama has adopted it to kill US citizens suspected of terrorism. What happened in Ferguson, Missouri, namely the dynamics of the Shooting of Michael Brown takes place every other week in the Palestinian territories, and has so for 3 decades. Palestine is an index of what lies in the future for Western law, and since the precedents set will affect our civil institutions, egotistically, I study Palestinians to imagine what my nephews and nieces might have to live through, unless one foresees in what happens to others an omen of what might well befall those one knows. To me, what happens to Palestinians is analogous to what happened to Jews in the 1930s, and what might happen to people across the world in the bitter regressive future I expect is waiting around the corner. Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I read the Halpers article. While it's not incorrect to say that the rhetoric of targeted assassinations can be used elsewhere, it is too misleading to give Israel the credit, in my view. Israel is using tactics which have always been used. "Assymmetrical warfare" was also seen in Algeria and Vietnam. Targeted assassination was also seen in Lebanon and Cuba. This is a matter of power. Israel has overwhelming power against the Palestinians, so it is free to ignore the law. And it does so in a familiar pattern, of other colonial powers. Kingsindian (talk) 20:05, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Israel takes the credit for theorizing its legitimacy. I wrote the introduction of that article where this is outlined. Halper's article gives now other examples of legal scholars lending their wits to justify what is, at the moment, a violation of law in order to remake it, and provide the theoretical underpinnings for the new regimen, one that breaks radically with Western civilization's vaunted systems of law. This, the theorization of racial violence as necessary to save civilization, did not occur under the major colonial powers, whatever they did in practice. They acted hypocritically. These folks are trying to iron out the hypocrisy by legislating draconian measures, that Plato's players in The Laws would envy. And, personally, they are all nice decent, smiling people socially. It is, though obvious, chilling. Nishidani (talk) 20:19, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

So you are Japanese! Your name always threw me off. Khazar (talk) 20:37, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't have a national identity, just passports, and I rarely speak my mothertongue. By the way, the topic area is not 'controversial', except in the minds of people who read mainstream newspapers and watch Fox television. Both Shin Bet analysts and way-left libertarians see this very much as it is, which is obvious.Nishidani (talk) 21:45, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

If any of this speculation relates to my saying "ho mikado" earlier, that was more of a smartass attempt at a reference to the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta I'd just seen than anything else. John Carter (talk) 21:55, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Really now? Then what's your ethnicity and mother tongue? I don't identify with my country neither so I understand your point there. Khazar (talk) 22:42, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

I've never empathised with, or understood the attraction of, 'ethnicity', and so can't admit to having one: national identity for me is a sense of primal landscape, nothing else. 8-15% of children are born, unknown to the father, from adultery, and that translates out, over three or more generations into promiscuous origins for most of us. The only friends I made at primary school were immigrants: I instinctively shied away from what others would call 'our kind'. As to my mother tongue, it was a brogue or dialect, different from the 'foreign' language they tweely taught at school. By some freak of circumstances, what Viktor Shklovsky called остранение or as I prefer to translate that, 'de-family-iarization', came naturally to me.

You can't figure much out from handles. Our 'John Carter' only means that he grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom tales, and thinks in Martian terms, which is not a bad perspective to adopt, as long as it's tempered by a yen for Gilbert and Sullivan! Nishidani (talk) 09:56, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Amazing. You've typed this much and still haven't revealed anything important about your ethnicity, genetic ancestry, nor the first language you spoke. D:< Khazar (talk) 00:38, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

There is no such thing as "Palestine." Palestine is a racist colonialist fantasy envisioned by Arabian imperialist powers. Falsely comparing Israelis to Nazis as Nishidani just did is a vile tactic used by anti-Semites to defame Jews and deny the Holocaust. As any intelligent person not brainwashed by the Muslims would know, it is the "Palestinians" who are the Nazis. They are illegal colonist-settlers from Arabia intent on stealing the Jewish homeland to further expand their colonial Arab empire consisting of 21 different countries already. Communists like Nishidani hate Israel obviously because communism is an anti-Semitic totalitarian ideology that is basically the same as Nazism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.91.199.221 (talk) 09:20, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

AE

[7]--Shrike (talk) 22:05, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

• (1)

• (2)

• (3)Nishidani (talk) 09:37, 19 September 2014 (UTC))

Reading and listening list. Contributions only of original and incisive quality will be appreciated

Nishidani, I have transferred the contents of this section to a new sub-page:

• User talk:Nishidani/Reading and listening list on the July–August 2014 Gaza assault.

I've done this partly because your talk page was getting too big (again!) but also because it will be convenient for other editors to be able to refer to a separate page.

Been waiting to do this for some time, until the unbearable horrors of what US-Israeli militarism is doing in Gaza, and commentaries theron, have died down - which may never happen. Anyway, now seems as good a time as any. --NSH001 (talk) 11:44, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks N, as ever. Have retitled to make the content clear. Nishidani (talk) 15:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

ANI

User:CONFIQ has opened an ANI concerning you, but hasn't notified you. I'm correcting that. DeCausa (talk) 11:59, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for that courtesy, which is in short supply these days. Regards Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

I apologize to both. This is something that I know I should do but I did forget. --CONFIQ (talk) 15:30, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Remove of a picture of soldiers shielding a boy

Israeli soldiers shielding a 4-year old Israeli boy during a Hamas rocket attack.

Hi, you removed this picture from 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, and I didn't quite get the reason. Can you elaborate please ? - WarKosign (talk) 18:50, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

See this section in the talk page archives. This was apparently uploaded from the ID flickr account, and constitutes war propaganda. There are serious doubts about its authenticity. Two editors, myself included, gave considered arguments that it looks as though it was a posed photo. Therefore, because of its provenance, because so far no one can track down where it was taken or under what circumstances, because, if it is, as it certainly looks, staged, it is laughably inept (the photographer taking the photo frontally is exposed to the same rocket fire the kid being protected, partially, is apparently exposed to. Note that there is a wall providing a background and, absurdly, the soldiers do not put themselves between the child and the wall: they are holding the boy outwards from the wall, presumably to make the fact that he is a child visible to the photographer, who is standing in the optimal position, despite a threatened rocket about to explode there, to capture the shot frontally. If you've ever protected a child from a threat, the instinct is universal: you grab him in your arms and put the threat to your back, which neither of the two soldiers is doing. Also in the discussion no editor in favour of its inclusion responded to these doubts, it should not be included until much further work is done consensually, if someone can provide the citation asked for. You don't in good practice, add 'stuff' without verifiable sources and then plaster a cit needed tag that might never produce the requested information, particularly when serious doubts exist as to the authenticity of that material.Nishidani (talk) 19:08, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

I particularly like the fact that the sun is overhead but the studio has shadows high to the left and right forming a halo typical of background lighting to throw into relief the central scene, and that the most protective soldier took care to find some paper or a hankerchief to place under his right knee to avoid getting his fatigues dirty.Nishidani (talk) 20:47, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

I hope the child and the two soldiers are safe and healthy and I wish them a long and happy life.

(By the way it looks almost as if one soldier may be pointing at the camera.)

Theodore Postol, the MIT scientist cited in the WP article on Iron Dome, recently gave a long interview (part 1 and part 2) on Democracy Now! where he explained that Israelis - especially soldiers - are well aware of the scientific evidence that shows that in case of a missile attack the best thing to do (if you can't make it to the nearest bomb shelter within 9 seconds after the warning sirens begin to sound) is to lay completely flat on the floor or on the ground, because doing so reduces the probability of serious injury exponentially, compared to standing or even crouching. IjonTichy (talk) 20:24, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks indeed. I didn't think of that, but of course it is true. I'll happily stand corrected, but I think one could write a long essay on what is, unless we have a miracle, wrong about that and screams 'fake' from every pixel. There is no tension in the body of the soldier to the right. The kid's body looks relaxed and intent on some object in his hands, as if this were a game. The rubble is out of place, suggesting a scene where a bomb has already dropped, and the use of the wall to reenact a scenario, rather than anticipating a 'bottle bomb' about to fall, etc.etc.Nishidani (talk) 20:52, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Your comments how it is obviously staged bothered me. As I wrote, I really found the mother's address and phone number. I did not want to bother them, however given her description how they were just entering their neighborhood I was looking for a red wall near their address on google street view and couldn't find one. Finally I understood - the wall is not red, the soldier's vests reflect red light on it.

I believe the photo was taken right behind this wall. On the photo you can see a concrete wall of a matching height, and a yellow strip that is the Plexiglas frame right bellow the dark semi-circle on top. The semi-circle on top that you said is studio light is probably the mother's hand or finger partially covering the lens. If it was light we'd still be able to see something in the corners, given it's harsh sun light (or a studio light). From here you can see sand and rubble under the wall, this is why I think they were on the other side of the wall. Either they were driving there or the kid ran to hide behind this wall after he left the car.

I would like you to re-consider your flat statement that the image is staged.

The argument that this is not the correct procedure to protect children during the attack is valid - I'm sure their main concern was calming down a frightened child, it is possible that the picture was taken after the rocket already fell. The mother wrote that the soldiers remained with them for 10 minutes after the alarm talking to the child. In this case the caption saying that the soldiers are protecting him with their bodies wasn't factually correct - solders were calming a child frightened by an attack, but I see no reason to suspect the picture is not genuine. WarKosign (talk) 13:54, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

The impressions I gave, one after another, are multiple, and several conjectural inferences that confirmed the doubt which my basic sense of the scene gave me, are not necessary to 'prove' them. The light from above coincides with the mother's date or timing of the photograph and I presumed there is some veracity behind her account once you (?) supplied the interview material. That it was posed is irrefutably indicated in her own declaration where she was so happy to see IDF protecting her son that she asked them if she could take the photo. All of the circumstantial detail (her husband, the other child, the siren, imminent bombs, meaning the photographer-mother was supposed to be in a threat situation like the children, is belied by the fact that she requests soldiers to allow her to photograph and, when they agree, she stands there, perhaps as you say, carefully shading the camera, to take the image, which is so constructed that her son is clearly visible. If she hadn't said she asked permission, everything would change of course. Asking permission means not only getting it but suggesting to the soldiers they pose, and presumably they adjusted their postures to that end. Whatever the scene, the body language is wholly devoid of the stress of threat and emergency, and that is what seals it for me. Its claim to be an 'authentic' snap of a real-life situation' is therefore far more fragile than the Robert Capa shot in the Spanish Civil War or the long controversial Rosenthal snap on Suribachi, which, despite the description, was not spontaneous but programmatic. Both served ideological ends ('leftist'/'patriotic'), as does this. Putting an image 'under a shadow' into the text, structurally, which goes out of its way to pin the huge death toll of Palestinian children on Hamas soldiers is ugly. (aside from ignoring what we know about the underside of this national framing of the IDF soldier as a protector of children).

I appreciate your attempts to get at the truth of this, of course. I'm just sceptical by nature, and often feel disgruntled that, in order to adjust a text having an Israelocentric claim, I am constrained to give the other version (about which, as with Shlomo Eldar's piece of Hamas responsibility, to cite one of many examples, I privately remain wary).Nishidani (talk) 14:55, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

If they were hugging the boy and talking to him, they did not need to pose - they were already in this pose for at least a few seconds, surely enough time to ask "may I take a picture?" while aiming the phone's camera. The fact that the top of the frame is covered does not indicate shielding against the sun - it indicates her holding the phone awkwardly, partially covering the lens and not noticing it at the time the picture was taken. There indeed is no feeling of urgency, because at this distance from Gaza the danger isn't high and if they already heard the explosion at a distance practically non-existent, but they are supposed to stay in cover for 10 minutes anyway. You'd have to be here to appreciate it - whenever there is an alarm people dutifully do as instructed, but everybody understand that statistically chances of being hit by a rocket are far less than being injured in a car accident. Near Gaza where mortars fall is entirely different story, as evident by the casualties.

On a totally different subject, given your background and interests - what do you think about this theory ? WarKosign (talk) 16:57, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

My first reaction on seeing the analogy between the symbol of Herod's gate and the Imperial symbol of the chrysanthemum was to recall that in Japanese sexual jargon, 菊 kiku, the name for that flower, signifies anus, clearly one not afflicted by haemarhoids. As to the Yamabushi's tokin 頭襟, or phylactery, miniaturization is a fundamental feature of Japanese art, though the world record for writing a document like the Lord's Prayer is (or so I read a half century ago) held by a gentleman from Shanghai who managed to inscribe it with a steel needle on the head of a nail. It has been argued, not irrationally, that there is an Eskimo component in Indo-European languages, but not for that does one conclude that the two are related (See Louis Hammerich, “Can Eskimo Be Related to Indo-European?” International Journal of American Linguistics 17 (1951): 217–23.) I'd better stop free-associating but, generally, humanity is promiscuous, borrows and travels: then nationalisms arise and appropriate things as peculiar to themselves, forgetting the liens (the Bible is full of this submerged or suppressed mythic and ritual borrowing from pagan cultures), in this case, that the Eurasian landmass was one constant exchange system whose conduit were nomads, many of whom formed one of the core populations of Japan, which is however, despite its national sense of apartness, deeply miscegenated. Great civilizations, like great poets, thrive on theft.Nishidani (talk) 17:21, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

So you are not suddenly overcome with an urge to help your long lost people. Here is another interesting theory, that the Palestinians are one of the lost tribes. There is genetic evidence that supports it, as well. WarKosign (talk) 06:31, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I grew up reading about the Nazis' Rassentheorien and their genocidal consequences, which inoculated me at any early age against anything but a prophylactic wariness about biological claims to a common identity. Most people are 'lost',and the few that aren't are usually told to 'get lost'. I certainly have no attachment to abstractions like 'a people'. All communities are imagined (Benedict Anderson) and I have no desire to be part of any group's collective nightmare. Nishidani (talk) 09:46, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Wow Nish, you're in top form today! "Great civilizations, like great poets, thrive on theft." (and composers, not to mention many Wikipedia editors), and now "Most people are 'lost', and the few that aren't are usually told to 'get lost'." Gold! Johnuniq (talk) 10:10, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Must start the day more often as I did this one, and take a regular drag or two on a rollie made from a recent gift of home-grown Croatian tobacco, and a cup of hot cappuccino to take the edges off a Chivas Regal hangover!Nishidani (talk) 10:20, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Since your compliment flattered me, I must disown, for my own ethical well-being, the implication that my remark was original. Like everything else under the sun, it was a recycled pastiche, i.e. of St.Augustine's De civitate Dei 4:4 and John Dryden's 'Of Dramatic Poesy' (George Watson (ed.) Of Dramatic Poesy and other critical essays, Everyman, (1962) 1967 2 vols.vol.1 p.69), the probable source for T.E. Eliot's famous remark on poets as thieves (which in 'formulating', he himself impudently stole in order to pass it off as his own 'conceit'/or blandish his own 'conceit'!) Nishidani (talk) 10:45, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I wouldn't expect original research from a good editor, so thanks for the refs! Regarding the sun, I prefer The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new and I am sure you won't have to Google that. Johnuniq (talk) 11:06, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah so do I, but of cause (deliberate pun not a lapsus calami!), in adherence to the principle that everything is a 'recycled pastiche', Beckett, like all true Oirishmen, knew his Bible by heart and was only alluding to Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verse 9, as of course it is evident you know from the way you phrased things. (It is Beckett's version of Ecclesiastes you prefer to the original which inspired him) Nishidani (talk) 12:25, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, I'm going to call you on that. If a writer now were to mention "nothing new under the sun" we would not think of Ecclesiastes because the phrase is so well known. Are you suggesting that in 1938 (when Murphy was written), the author and most readers would have had the Ecclesiastes text in mind (no time on research please—just yes/no/dunno)? BTW, a wonderful example of musical theft (and the real reason I'm reopening this) is Recomposed which I thoroughly recommend, although tolerance of Philip Glass and friends is a prerequisite. Johnuniq (talk) 04:14, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Bref. Yes. He and his readers at the time knew it was an allusion.Nishidani (talk) 10:26, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, had missed that. Magnificently enjoyable, and am now midway through a second audition. Reminds me of Schoenberg et al's rearrangement of waltzes, or say Glenn Gould's use of dragging tempo (almost Bachian) to rearrange familiar pieces like The Appassionata, which makes them, after excessive exposure tends to make the ear rebel, once more audible as if for the first time. So, it's an old device of course. Kafka's Das Schloß does the same thing to Božena Nĕmková's Babička, i.e. takes over the piece/novel completely and rewrites it (odd the wiki articles have no mention of this). The operative word in your challenge is now. No one reads the Bible these days, priests, pastors and rabbis included (some exception should be made for the backroom agitprop boys in the IDF who coin names for their wars: they all have a deliberate biblical resonance, and are translated into King Jamesian terms to get that over to the fuindamentalist tubthumpers in the US. cf. 'Operation Brother's Keeper' (Genesis:4,9) But it's all over literature down to the end of WW2 at least. This goes down even to the musical lilt of prose styles. Look at the rhythm of the opening pages of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which I read a few weeks ago). People in those days learnt to read via the Bible and such things like The Book of Common Prayer. As to Beckett, one of his favourite maxims (ostensibly from Donatus) was "pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt" (Let'em cark it, those (buggers) who said (before us) what we (now) say), and it would have been impossible for him to say or write those words without registering their provenance, since he is so thoroughly allusive. The metaphor of theft is of course hyperbole. Theft is clandestine, whereas creative borrowings like the one you mention from Richter are done in the light of day, with the author, painter, musician or (in film, like scenic allusions to Hitchcock) the auteur, expecting the reader/audience to recognize the source, and more often than not, doing so as homage to a master whose influence is thereby recognized. It's only since John Locke and the establishment of the notion of property rights, and the rise of Romanticism's cult of the bardic virtuoso's putative capacity for 'invention' that we worry this. It is even programmatic in postmodernism, and one school of art(citationism/citazionismo) based its whole technique on 'quotational' pastiche. Indeed, part of the pleasure engineered by authors lies in nudging readers to see what to them is the obvious theft: the technique is all over Umberto Eco's Il Nome della Rosa to the point of banality (William of Baskerville =Sherlock Holmes), which reminds me that Doyle's figure provided Kafka with the opening lines of his Der Proceß, which are nothing but a straightforward paraphrase of two lines in A Study in Scarlet (ch.2: para beginning 'It was on the 4th of March . . .'), etc.etc.etc.Nishidani (talk) 10:13, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

On a related note, I can quote Charles Seeger here. "Plagiarism is basic to all culture". Kingsindian (talk) 19:41, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Here is a picture that was taken when the alarm was activated by accident and people thought there was a rocket attack. Reminds of you of anything ? WarKosign (talk) 14:04, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Yep. I think such photos should only incentivate the Israeli government to be far more thorough in teaching parents and people generally how not to hold a child if they really want to successfully protect their threatened progeny from mortars and rockets in the vicinity. If you want to ensure someone's safety you put yourself between the imminent threat and the loved one (not in Strachey's proverbial joke: when asked when on trial for being a pacifist, what he would do if a brutal German were about to rape his sister or mother. He answered:'Oh, I should try and come between them!'(Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, 2005 p.349) (He was homosexual).

Seriously, you appear to think I doubt Israelis were shocked, panicked, and didn't duck as sirens went off. Obviously they did, and there is substantial evidence to that effect. The picture of course reminds me also of This report, and you have to imagine the photo, were such people sufficiently unpoor to have cameras,(remember the IDF banned the importation of tampons into Gaza, to prevent tunnels being built I guess), this, this, and the fact that 13,000 people were killed or wounded in that war in Gaza, not counting those who suffered shock. Almost none of that reality is on film, except in the Unit 8200 film archive studies.Nishidani (talk) 14:46, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

There were plenty of horror scenes in Israel after suicide bombings, with body parts scattered everywhere. A friend of mine was at Park Hotel and his family left unharmed by a miracle. You are not likely to see these horror pictures presented anywhere in Israel because of the difference in culture, but be sure they exist. Sderot people had full right to happy that the terrorists who were firing rockets on them for years are at last handled. They would have more sympathy for Gazan civilians if they hadn't elected Hamas and supported continued rocket fire on Israel. Perhaps popcorn was in bad taste, but so is distributing candies after a particularly successful murder of Israeli civilians. I do not know what is the deal with tampons, but if the terrorists found a way to use water pipes, fertilizers and concrete for murder - perhaps there is intelligence that they are using tampons to make guncotton.

I did not duck at every siren and it was not a matter of shock but of common sense - unless I'm 5-30km from Gaza the danger to be involved in a car accident is much greater than the danger from the rockets. Hugging and calming a child scared by the sirens is far more important than laying flat on the ground reducing the danger from 0.01% to 0.001%. And yes, I know the children in Gaza are scared too. I wish their parents chose a different government that would have some regard for their lives.WarKosign (talk) 19:46, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I've seen almost everything you mention, but in the documentary records of several countries. I have no illusions. Only I don't think in terms of 'it began with suicide bombings'. Anyone can choose a starting point of convenience for their narrative, and spin everything out as a 'reaction' to that germinal event (as I am reminded after rereading Daniel Deronda these last days. You can read it as the heading of chapter 1 'Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning'...(etc). A Palestinian might start with the effects on 30,000 youths of Yitzhak Rabin's order, to put down an unarmed rebellion against the occupation in the West Bank a decade earlier, to 'break their arms and legs' (you can see videos of soldiers doing just that). Playing that game gets everyone nowhere fast.

Gazans can't duck. The universal metaphor for what they have put up with for nearly a decade is 'shooting into the fish bowl'.

As to your final sentiment.It's not our business to wish Gazans voted for a different government. It's a bit like me citing the remark by Uri Avnery (whose two books on the 1948 are required reading for any Israeli):

When I was first elected to the Knesset, I was appalled at what I found. I discovered that, with rare exceptions, the intellectual level of the debates was close to zero. They consisted mainly of strings of clichés of the most commonplace variety. During most of the debates, the plenum was almost empty. Most participants spoke vulgar Hebrew. When voting, many members had no idea what they were voting for or against, they just followed the party whip.That was 1967, when the Knesset included members like Levy Eshkol and Pinchas Sapir, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin and Yohanan Bader, Meir Yaari and Yaakov Chazan, for whom today's streets, highroads and neighborhoods are named.In comparison to the present Knesset, that Knesset now looks like Plato’s Academy.'

Still, that government has a plebiscite, and though I dearly wish Israeli parents voted for a different government, rather than choosing one that has zero regard for non-Jewish lives, and contempt for international law, the reality is otherwise, and I, like the Palestinians, must respect that verdict at the polls. What an occupied people should never be asked to do is accept they are destroyed, turn tail, say 'yes bwana' and allow themselves to be turned into a caricature of the dumb natives that will eventually disappear. What Hamas is, is was the rebels of Judea were from the insurrection against Rome, down to Bar Kochba, led often by sicarii. Their cause was legitimate, even noble, their tactics stupid. Perhaps the same can be said of Hamas: they found themselves adopting at one point Israel's model for statehood (assassination, terrorism, massacres and suffering as a horrendous spectre (holocaust) that will appeal to the world's conscience etc.,) as their own, because PLO politics proved only productive of Quislings. Those who died at Masada or in Jerusalem thought exactly like the Gazans. Better die fighting than yield to foreigners. Israel's foundation (not uniquely, most states are based on criminal foundations) owed much to the effect of those spectacular assassinations and massacres of innocents ordered and executed by terrorists who, once statehood was achieved, became ministers of state and indeed Prime Ministers. It set a bad example for Palestinians. A good part of the political elite descends from Irgun families (even so-called moderates like Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert etc). We really must desist, this is off-topic, though I think it important to exercise some latitude from time to time, so that editors in a difficult area understand where each are coming from. I only accept arguments however that tell me my interlocutor tends to be wary of all sources of information, and sieves it through a sceptical lens, before using it to persuade others. I must see Brad Pitt in Troy now playing on TV this last half hour. As a child of 6, reading it for the first time, I rooted for the Trojans, against all of the evidence of the master narrative. Prejudices die hard, like Colonel Inglis and his men. Nishidani (talk) 20:51, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

You are saying that it's impossible to tell who did a bad thing first, and I agree. Yet you're saying that founding of Israel set a bad example for Palestinians. Arabs populating the land of Israel (sorry, "Palestine") then, even before they came up with the great idea of calling themselves Palestinians, weren't exactly innocent. I do not think I ever said how it began and who's fault it is. I have an opinion and you can guess it, but it's irrelevant. The question is how it can end. Since there are two peoples and one isn't going to kill the other, the only way is to reach some kind of agreement. This agreement cannot be reached while one is determined to destroy the other. Freeing Gaza is a noble goal and it was within reach in 2005. Destroying Israel is wrong and it just won't happen. Open-minded liberals (I believe it includes you) don't understand that by justifying and backing up the atrocities committed by radical terrorists they causing more suffering to their brainwashed but otherwise innocent subjects/hostages. You are right, this is off topic and most importantly pointless.WarKosign (talk) 21:07, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Just a correction. I'm not a liberal. In this area, my model for understanding what is going on is Jabotinsky, the only Zionist who was an unbleary-eyed rational analyst of historical logic. Were I a 'liberal', I'd agree with everything asserted above, which, however, has nothing to do with reality, and everything with feeling comfortable in an otherwise impossibly toxic world.:) Nishidani (talk) 09:28, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

(flippant and silly) Given that Ben-Gurion used to call Jabotinski "Vladimir Hitler", it seems that NMMNG's comments have something to them after all. Kingsindian (talk) 10:43, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

I've always believed that Ben-Gurion was a liar, since reading almost a half a century ago an interview in which he showed a visitor his personal library, of 20,000 books if I remember corrrectly, and, waving his arm over the treasured stacks, added that he had "read them all" (equally flippant reply!). I began to take VJ less ideologically, when I read that he had translated Dante into Hebrew and stated that Italy was the only country he'd lived in where he was never made to feel he was a 'Jew'. He was a rotten politician because he was rigorously honest in his realism. All the rest, the successful pollies, win because they manage to make their inner, often malevolent or puerile dishonesty seem thoroughly sincere and decent (like Hitler, and, in NMMGG's estimation, my ignobly anonymous, self).Nishidani (talk) 11:26, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

[8] I hope you can discern this auto-translation, looks like there is no English version of this article. WarKosign (talk) 06:31, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. You labour under a misapprehension if you think I think Israelis and soldiers don't protect Jewish children. They do. But this is a posed photo after the event. The nation is moved. The nation takes extraordinary measures to protect the soldiers who protect their children, and shoot, bomb, wound, arrest, beat up children on the other side. Nishidani (talk) 11:17, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Not posed, but probably taken after the fact, and mis-titled - the soldiers were calming and not protecting the kid while the photo was taken. Harming children on the other side is not a goal but the unfortunate result of their parent's choices. WarKosign (talk) 16:32, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

We basically agree on the photo then. As to children, that is the standard PR response. It never explains the way courts treat know cases of deliberate murder (Iman Darweesh Al Hams, one of hundreds I know of). Anyway, we can close this.Nishidani (talk) 17:37, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

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User talk:MarciulionisHOF

Nishidani, I can understand you felt the need to post a comment, but please leave it at that, really. Don't put any more pennies in. Bishonen | talk 12:13, 9 October 2014 (UTC).

You're right as usual. It's just that this is, I think, the 5th editor to campaign against me this year to settle some observed score from the past, and it is becoming programmatic. I don't want immunity of course, but clarity, and in repeating decontextualized diffs from the past, all this is lost from view. Admins can't remember everything. Now back to my books, that's that. Nishidani (talk) 12:29, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Systemic bias: he who pays the piper calls the tune

On 'mainstream source bias, and many links to relevant analyses that show the corruption that threatens many of our sources Stephen Walt 'Hacks and Hird Guns,' Foreign Policy 9 September 2014.Nishidani (talk) 08:26, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

As to the recent flutter of insults here and here i.e. 'Listen, you. When I get a hold of you, I'm going to gull out your eyes and shove them down your pants so you can watch me kick the krap out of you,' I much prefer the imagery in that antipodean idiom.’May your balls drop off, bounce off the turf and turn into bicycle wheels that backpedal up your coit.’Nishidani (talk) 10:22, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Let's just let him or them waste their mornings. Who cares, really?Nishidani (talk) 10:41, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good. I'll keep blocking as it's no trouble for me and makes more work for them :)  —SMALLJIM  10:43, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll remove reduplications of the same stuff in the interests of page economy, and hr I'll just add for the record a few more accidentally removed. Sometimes, we need to conserve abuse to document the kind of 'toxic' atmosphere of hostility in which some of us have to work. Nishidani (talk) 11:04, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

(1) Dirty Jap. It was a wonderful moment when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. (2) better watch your back, Muslim. Nazis like you are known to die of asphyxiation; (3) You and George Galloway are gonna get it You'd better watch out; You squinty-eyed yellow menace- I'm going to kick your irradiated ass!/Nishidani loves having anal sex with George Galloway, and together they have orgies in which they rape Palestinian Arab children- The Arabs children's parents love to watch. That's how sick and twisted Arab culture is.Nishidani (talk) 11:24, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Someone with "issues", clearly. Hopefully, he restricts himself to getting his rocks off calling people he disapproves of paedophiles and nazis and imagining himself handing out beatings rather than editing articles.     ←   ZScarpia   22:00, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

Kids Behind Bars

Kids Behind Bars: Israel's Arbitrary Arrests of Palestinian Minors, Spiegel Online International. IjonTichy (talk) 06:48, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Saturday and Sunday

In case you missed it, I agreed that the article needs to be an analysis rather than a list of reports of the phrase. I think the PFLP quote helps a bit. I still don't know how or if I will !vote in the AfD, which I encouraged. And thanks for your support. The AfD is a bit of a clusterfuck right now. Dougweller (talk) 16:04, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Forgot - did you notice I deleted a lot of the new edits to Queen of Sheba? Some interesting stuff had to go but the editor doesn't like or know our copyvio policy and I had to raise a WP:CCI. Dougweller (talk) 16:06, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Doug. I don't know how I would vote there either. I've been busy these days on other things, and still must get round, what is it, a more than a year after promising to do so, to these cluster of articles. Sorry to be so lazy. Cheers. Nishidani (talk) 17:08, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

In some respect you seem to be so offended by my provocative use of the assyrian story, that you missinterpret my actual position. Thats a pity and hindering a possible fruitful cooperation. I ask you to have a look on my recent changes on Eurabia to get a more differentiated perspective. Serten (talk) 16:09, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Given the huge disinformation that accompanies ethnic conflicts and clashing geopolitical interests, editors who subscribe to NPOV must exercise particular care in getting their details absolutely correct, to ensure that anyone, from any side, can see their narrative represented objectively. I am not offended by people. I am annoyed by the amount on nonsense (thanks for the Eurabia edits, but you are, by the way, not alloweed to add 'sic), even if understandably this is 'sick' stuff) one has to wade through in order to establish a correct text on any article. In editorial exchanges, the vice here is to trim one's opponents to fit one's arrows, to borrow a phrase from Karl Kraus. In this case, my opposition to that article is seen as reflexly 'anti-Israel/anti-Jewish' and the arguments against what I wrote, concerning getting the facts straight, seem to be replied to not on their merits, their precise philological and historical focus, but in terms of that perceived animus.Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

I am as experienced as provocative and try to get through always with my POV AND the one or other joke based on quality sourcing. Take Shazia Mirza, Muggeseggele and Men's parking space, the latter caused a major feminist uprising including three lengthy afD attempts on deWP. In your case, I tried to reduce the amount of bad spirit with my notion of the proverb collection AND as well the notion of "the Walfish of ashkelon". „Aussi bini, aussi bleibi, wai Ascalun, ihr grobi Kaibi“ will say, I think the article grew better when it went away from the Jews versus arabs narrative, which is as old as boring and started to include the arab Christian perspective, which is much more interesting. That said, I would like to interact with you based on less distrust and more fun. Serten (talk) 19:23, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

No problem. When I first saw the proverb article, I thought of W.H. Auden's remark that 'if men knew what women said to each other about them, the human race would die out'. I deeply distrust anyone who uses a proverb to sum up an ethnic attitude and make it typify another culture. Were that true, the Italians (l'ospite è come il pesce dopo tre giorni puzza:'a guest is like a fish, stinks to high heaven after three days), Russians (Незваный гость хуже татарина:'An uninvited guest is worse than the Mongol horde ), Japanese (人を見れば泥棒と思え:'Consider any stranger you see to be a thief'), wouldn't be as graciously hospitable as they are in reality (nor, on the strength of this proverb we're discussing would Gazans be so famously generous with guests, even with a Jew walking through their rubble a few days after the most recent catatrophe, with what little their poverty leaves them). The Yiddish proverb An ofter gast falt tsu last,(since you're German there's no need to translate that, I guess) is contradicted by what so many Jews practice as a duty, hakhnasat orehim, etc.

The Egyptians have a proverb that explains the circulation of memes in newspapers, I guess: 'When the imam farts, those behind him have a crap.' I.e. once a lead writer, in this case Bernard Lewis makes the proverb famous in the West in one article, everyone grasps at it and yodels it aloud on every occasion when an incident involving Arabs with Jews and/or Christians occurs. Karl Kraus came to mind for precisely this reason. He thought the world went on with its madness because of slipshod language, and though he was an odd fellow, I think he was correct in this.Nishidani (talk) 20:25, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

I just read your link to Muggeseggele. Australians have the same concept, though since 'blowies' conjures upan unpoetic unpleasantness, they say 'within a bee’s dick', meaning 'very close'. I.e. 'I came within a bee's dick of being kinghit by the mongrel' (I almost got knocked out by some bastard) etc.Nishidani (talk) 20:37, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Lewis commented on the Rushdie issue as well, in that case the fart was a stinky mess :) I think it was in one of the Rabbi Kemelmann crime stories, when one guy said that while the Jews are said to be smart and greedy and the Irish fame is about being hospitable, nice in their cups and friendly, most personal encounters with such persons reveal the opposite. I cannot confirm both issues, as my experience in either case was rather positive. I however need to improve the english Eike Geisel entry, he once used „Some of my best friends are German“ as lede to one of his books. ;) Serten (talk) 20:57, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Please think before posting here, if you wish collaboration or assistance or whatever. The allusion to the fatwa in the Rushie affair is just another swipe. I could easily cite hundreds of similar things (theologically) Lewis and others of his influential stature quietly ignore which were and are still being said by rabbis in the West Bank, or even in Rabbi Shalom Lewis's Congregation Etz Chaim in Atlanta the other day, endorsing genocidal measures to 'exterminate Islam'. I see that crap every other week, and don't write articles in wikipedia about it. It's incitement, as Israeli PMs love to say of the other camp, as they turn a studiously blind eye to crap churned out in their own backyard. One would say:'Thank goodness for paganism,' were it not for the writings of people like Reuven Firestone, most recently his No, Pamela Geller, the Qur'an Is Not Anti-Semitic, The Forward 29 September 2014, which a lot of wiki articles should catch up with.Nishidani (talk) 21:22, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

I have written Im schwarzen Walfisch zu Askalon in the meanwhile. With regard to antisemitism, I prefer to use the auld Austrian definition "it occurs when you dislike Jews more than actually necesary". In a way, your reaction describes part of the problem - I havent planned another swipe, but checked the Lewis issue on google, found the fatwa point first and gave a feedback on that. I think the serious background is about important differences in the history of religions. Jewish interaction with God is rather on even level, take Jacob's Ladder or Job, Christian theology has been dealing with failure much earlier than Muslims - I mean the founder of the religion was crucified at the age of thirty three, thats where others start their career. Islam was so successfull in the start, that some of the adherants still believe it has to go on like that for ages. That said, please take the notion that I am willing to use and take swipes easily, and I love Shazia Mirza for the sort of self deprecating humour (its written in my pilote licence) she provides. There is more like that, take Bülent Ceylan and I am looking forward to see it advanced ;) Best regards Serten (talk) 22:34, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Okay, so you don't like Muslims, and know even less about history and theology, and you can't help yourself (I think you are just not as bright as you think you might be) making a personal swipe again. ' antisemitism "occurs when you dislike Jews more than actually necesary". In a way, your reaction describes part of the problem.' The paranoid trend of seeing communists, Jews, witches, islamists, the Pope, everywhere is invariant in history, and there is nothing unique about its most devastatingly recent recrudescence in 'antisemitism' (see Norman Cohn's works). It has biblical roots, going back to God's advise re the Amalekites, and what to do generally about everyone else being disruptive of theological claims to some real estate. The impact of 1 Samuel 15:2-3, and the Book of Joshua has affected all monotheisms descending from that tradition, which is one reason I am happier identifying myself with pagan Greece, or mixing with 'primitive' or oriental peoples who hadn't the misfortune to inherit in their cultural genes this obsession with a brimstone deity's commandments re Blut und Boden.I have a low boredom threshold. Please don't interact with me, or ask for assistance. Thank you.Nishidani (talk) 09:18, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Among others, I have written Popular image of Native Americans in German-speaking countries was much more fun for me than Unfriendly use of Popular proverbs in, around and against how youever want to call that peace of earth ever would be :) Serten (talk) 18:14, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Compare Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Korean influence on Japanese culture. The long discussion about details fails to grasp the issue with the generic narrative, which is about Nihonjinron, similar as sut/sunday has to do with dual convenant theology. Serten (talk) 17:50, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

No it isn't about Nihonjinron. It's about using the best Japanese and Korean scholarship on each item listed on that page. Most of the bibliography shows that the editors or editor have no knowledge of either. The adage Sat/sunday has to hasn't anything to do with Dual-covenant theology (another unreliable wiki page), for the saying pre-existed for centuries dual convenant theology.Nishidani (talk) 18:53, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Goodness, Dual-covenant issues are as old as Paulus controversy with Petrus on Christians with Jewish respectively gentile background. The point is, as long as Christians could play a role in arab nationalism, the theology was not questioned, that changed with rising "muslim-only" tendencies - similar as the use of the proverb. Serten (talk) 19:24, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

No. That is retrospective interpretation by bad theologians but excellent Zionists like James Parkes. Theology shouldn't trump history: Paul was a turncoat and arguably more offensively anti-Judaic than anyone or anything attributable to/associated with Jesus or his immediate followers, with whom he broke.See Heerak Christian Kim, Zadokite Propaganda in the Late Second Temple Period, p.112 which has just come out, to cite one of hundreds of sources.We discussed bees' dicks earlier on in this thread. Now I'm reminded of the contiguous 'fly's fart' (Tom Sharpe,Wilt in Nowhere, 2004 p.218Nishidani (talk) 20:08, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

AFD "no consensus" result, and how to deal with that other problem

Hey, I've been out of the AFD game for a while -- is it common for AFDs with a pretty clear trend to delete after 7 days to wait for a few late-comers to !vote keep without actually reading the prior discussion? I'm halfway considering WP:DRV in this case, but I guess since no one other than Curtis and maybe Andrew actually objected to my assertion that virtually everything in the article needed to go one way or the other then no harm no foul.

But regarding that latter point -- I wasn't lying when I said the guy has interacted with me three times outside of my initial AFD on his Tomomitsu Taminato article (an equally dodgy "no consensus" close with a 2/3 majority in favour of deletion...), and on all three occasions he has showed up on a page he had never shown any interest in before or since and opposed my removal of blatant POV/OR. I don't wanna go to ANI and ask for an IBAN, since they tend to be two-way and that didn't work out last time I requested it, and the problem with a TBAN is that the "topic" in question is supposed to be something all Wikipedians are permanently banned from anyway...

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 12:47, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

About the Korean influence on Japanese culture discussion -- it does seem to have been closed rather abruptly (even though I suppose it was going nowhere). I find it very difficult to understand why a bunch of people always come along, and just ignore fundamental problems with (non-)articles. Anyway, what you said about the "Coffee table Needham": of course you are right, I should have said "by Robert Temple, with a foreword by and no doube sourced from Joseph Needham". But this might be a demonstration of the same problem: what does Needham say about the Chinese and biochemistry? They discovered how to isolate things with medical effects from urine, but they knew nothing (obviously) of DNA, enzymes, and whatnot, and as far as I know were still stuck with fire, water, wood, metal, and earth to make stuff from. But to call this "anticipating modern biochemistry" seems to me to be just dishonest. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:04, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Shuja'iyya

I highly recommend the series of investigative reports by Eidan Landau on the socio-economic and political impact of the I-P conflict. The website contains a series of well-researched, well-supported pieces of investigative journalism, studying the issues in great depth and breadth. The articles focus mostly on the impact of the conflict on the lives of average people, including both Palestinians and Israelis. The articles also investigate closely related issues, e.g. how Israeli companies exploit the occupation for financial profit, corruption in the Israeli government, etc.

The most recent posting is titled Slow Death in Shuja'iyya: Work by the Artist Sabah Iyad, 18 October 2014, Gaza. Translation of the sentence at the bottom of the page: According to UN figures, at least 1,473 civilians were killed by the IDF during operation "Strong Cliff," including 501 children and 257 women. More than 11 thousand people were injured. During the day of July 20, 2014, the IDF rained on Shajai'yya 7,000 shells, including 120 bombs of one ton each. 72 civilians were killed in Shaja'iyya.

Eidan Landau writes in Hebrew. You may want to use google translate (or bing translate etc). These free online translation services are not good but they are not entirely useless either, and they are constantly improving. And besides, Landau's articles often contain links to YouTube videos in English or in Hebrew with an English translation, or links to newspaper articles from around the world in English.

Best regards, IjonTichy (talk) 23:26, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I found the artwork quite good. As to Shuja'iyya, the rule applies to everything else. Exercise patience until strong RS by independent minds emerge with the wisdom and superior accuracy of hindsight. These articles, written on breaking news, are all infantile. One would never guess reading them what everyone who studies these things knows: that rocket attacks had nothing to do with the decision to go to war. Both Hamas and Netanyahu found themselves with no other option if they were to ensure their political survival.Nishidani (talk) 17:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Your rollback - 20:20, 19 October 2014

FYI: Nishidani's rollback - 20:20, 19 October 2014 --Igorp_lj (talk) 23:19, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

A word on the meaning of English words. 'Rollback' means scaling back down to a prior situation. Therefore your use of the word distorts what I did: I rewrote a passage with outdated statistics, while you and another editor each warred over which version of dated or irrelevant statistics to use.Nishidani (talk) 17:37, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

It's not about English. Pls re-read beginning of my topic:

@User:Nishidani, please explain this your edit:

• diff : Neither version was upto date. Don't edit war. Edit to improve

Sorry, but I do not see any base for your "Don't edit war" charge.

My edit does follow on @user:Dr. R.R. Pickles erasing the information from ITIC with such symptomatic description as "ITIC is a propaganda source, completely untrustworthy for basic facts", so I've asked him to add his info accurately "This is your opinion only, pls add your data w/out deleting other ones"...

and paid attention to the diff's link pointed just to your "'Rollback'... scaling back down to a prior situation", i.e. back to Dr. R.R. Pickles' "Revision as of 07:20, 19 October 2014". :) --Igorp_lj (talk) 20:35, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

The answer to your question is in my original response above, which I invite you to actually read.Nishidani (talk) 20:58, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

And "I invite you to actually read" the title too: "20:20, 19 October 2014" --Igorp_lj (talk) 21:32, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

No thank you! Мне кажется, я со стенкой разговариваю Nishidani (talk) 21:49, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Взаимно. А жаль :(. --Igorp_lj (talk) 21:57, 20 October 2014 (UTC)