Hitler's Vienna Years

Was Young Hitler An Anti-Semite?* is the 5th chapter in a great book, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship, by Brigette Harmon. Hitler arrived in Vienna at age 17 in 1906. He became homeless and lived in men’s shelters, trying to sell his paintings. This fascinating chapter reveals that despite the virulently anti-Semitic character of much of Viennese society at the time, Hitler seems to have successfully resisted the prevalent anti-Semitism of the era. In fact, he had many Jewish friends, and Jewish art merchants sold most of his work. His worst enemy was a virulent anti-Semite, and one of Hitler’s Jewish friends had the man arrested for cheating Hitler. Hitler’s only statements on the Jews were ones of admiration. However, he already hated the Social Democrats. In Mein Kampf, Hitler rewrites his Vienna years as a time of his anti-Semitic awakening. But many autobiographies are dishonest. No one who knew Hitler at the time noticed the slightest anti-Semitism in him. Those who knew him at the time and then recognized him later as an anti-Semitic politician in the 1930’s were flabbergasted – they could not believe their eyes. There have been many silly theories of the genesis Hitler’s anti-Semitism – the Vienna years, an encounter with a syphilitic Jewish prostitute, run-ins with Jewish professors at the Arts Academy, a Jewish grandfather, a Jewish junk dealer who cheated him in Munich, but none of it makes much sense. People are just grasping at straws. Harmon logically decides that Hitler’s anti-Semitism developed during the war and then afterward. Lying in the hospital for three months, nearly blinded from a gas attack, he read about the November Revolution that brought the hated Social Democrats to power. In Russia, the Bolsheviks had seized power in their October revolution. At Versailles, the Allies were were setting about to destroy Germany once and for all – in league with the Jews, the anti-Semitic press charged. Hitler had an epiphany – it was all the Jews’ fault! And he resolved to get into politics. One sure-fire road to political success in those days was to promote anti-Semitism as a politician, because it was very popular with voters. So Hitler’s anti-Semitism was based both on his experiences during and after the war and on the cynicism of a political animal. Later, his anti-Semitism became more and more crazed and rabid to where even his fellow Nazi authors worried that it was his sole, driving and gnawing passion. Towards the end of the war, he sacrificed the war effort to kill more Jews. His suicide note warns of the Jewish peril to mankind. *From the website of the Porges family, a Viennese Jewish family who lost many members in the Holocaust.

References

Harmon, Brigette. 1999. Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship. New York: Oxford University Press.

Commies Killed More Than Hitler Redux

We went over this quite a few times on the old blog, but since this crap keeps recrudescing on the Right, we may as well continue to hammer away at it. From an interesting, but disgusting, article by Steve Sailer, effectively ruined, as are most of his posts, by his inability to turn off the rightwing talking points no matter what he is writing about. Sailer is like the Christian kooks, who, no matter what the conversation is about, always manage to return the conversation to their evangelical bullshit within 10 minutes. Steve just can’t shut the rightwing trap. Here is the poop:

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. And, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the doctrine of “class origins” transformed “egalitarian” mass murder into ethnic genocide since there is no sharp line between family and race.

Boy, rightwingers just can’t shut up about this, can they? Never mind that he’s quoting the fascist Solzhenitsyn (and he spelled his name wrong), but this whole line has a particularly nasty genesis. After the war, in trying to prove that Hitler was no big deal and Stalin was way worse, Ukrainian Nazis (Excuse me! Ukrainian nationalists! Wait. Is there a difference?) developed a lie called The Holodomor, a lie that was originally started by the Nazi Randolf Hearst and his Nazi buddies in Germany in the early 1930’s. The lie stated that Stalin deliberately killed 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, no wait, 7, 8, oh forget it, God knows how many Ukrainians by deliberate starvation. It’s not true. Nobody was deliberately starved to death. There was indeed a famine in all of the USSR, especially the Ukraine, in 1932 and 1933. The number of dead is not known. The state made many errors, including initially denying that it was happening, to a chaotic response to the tragedy. The Ukrainians were rebelling against the state. They destroyed 5 The USSR did seize the grain crop, because the country needed to eat and the Ukrainians were destroying everything in sight. Ukrainians were mass deported to Siberia, and 390,000 died. It was a bad time. The people were weakened by hunger and there were disease epidemics due to primitive sanitation and lack of effective drugs. This is what killed most of the people, not starvation. Most of the pictures of “starving Ukrainians” were faked, and those photos were actually from a famine in 1921. Mark Tauger has also presented good forensic evidence of a wheat rust epidemic. There was also a terrible famine in China during the Great Leap Forward that may have killed 15 million people, mostly due to disease once again. Once again, this was not intentional, unless idiocy is intentionality. The primary cause of the famine was overprocurement by the state. Capitalism kills 14 million people ever year by direct starvation and attendant illnesses all over the globe. Shall we tally up these body piles and compare them to Hitler, Stain, Mao and whatnot? The chips are down, capitalist punks. That means you, Sailer. Leaving aside famines, we really need to look at direct killings.

Leader         Deaths     Period      Years
Hitler          52M*      1933-1945   12
Lenin/Stalin    2.5M**    1921-1953   32
Mao             2.4M?***  1949-1976   27

*Figure from here. Hitler also started a war for no reason that ended up killing ~45 million people. Whether you want to count that or not is up to you. I count 12 million dead in camps and 40 million dead in a war that he started. **See Getty 1993 for the most accurate estimate to date of deaths under Stalin. In 1990, the USSR archives were opened up. The Soviets had kept track of everyone who died due to executions, population transfers and in the camps, year by year. The deaths in the camps include 900,000 common criminals, but I guess the anti-Communists want to throw those in too. There is no academic consensus whatsoever for 20, 30, 40, 43, or 110 million deaths under Stalin. Furthermore, these figures usually include “10 million” for the fake “Ukraine intentional famine” that never happened. As noted below, capitalism starves 14 million people to death every year. If we can’t tally these against the capitalists, we can’t tally them against Stalin. The Sovietologists are currently fighting it out in the academic journals. Those arguing for a higher figure are basically saying, “Commies lie.” There never was any rational basis for the figures of tens of millions killed under Stalin. Those figures were produced by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, the CIA and the MI6. They were just pulling figures out of thin air. By the way, that wonderful 110 million figure comes from the fascist Solzhenitsyn, a man lionized by the West. Peacetime figures for political deaths in the USSR 1921-1953 are:

Executions:                 900,000
Deaths in the gulag:        1.2M
Dekulakization Ukraine:     390,000
Totals:                     2.5M

***2.4 million is my estimate for Mao, and those are just known deaths. The Chinese have not yet opened up their archives, and unfortunately it is possible that deaths under Mao were a lot higher. Mao himself admitted that 700,000 landlords were killed in the early years. The Party allowed the local peasants to put them on trial and the people sentenced many of them to death. Many were horrible criminals who had been abusing the peasants for many years, but one can argue whether they needed to die. There were 1 million excess deaths in the Cultural Revolution. We have no accurate figures for deaths under Mao from 1953-1966, although 700,000 is a good minimum. We also have no accurate figures for deaths in the Chinese gulags. We will have to wait until the Chinese open their books in order to find out the real number who died under Mao. The 77 million figure tossed around lately, the product of a lunatic new book, has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever. Furthermore, it includes famine deaths in the Great Leap Forward, listed as an incredible 39 million. As I note below, capitalism starves 14 million people to death every year. Shall we count these deaths against the capitalists? Ok, as you can see, the evil Commies absolutely did not kill tens of millions of people. Who did? No one, unless you count the European War that Hitler started that killed ~45 million or so. Hitler killed 42 million in 12 years or 3.5 million/year. Mao, Lenin and Stalin combined killed 4.9 million over 59 years, or 83,000/yr. Ok, now who is the worse killer? Who killed more? Hitler. Mao, Stalin and Lenin combined were not able to exceed Hitler’s totals, and they had 10 times more years to do it again. Hitler was 42 times worse of a killer than Mao, Stalin and Lenin combined. The crap like Steve’s above is usually followed by some jibe about “more being killed in the name of equality than were killed in the name of inequality.” Of course, rightwingers, lovable and cuddly folks that they are, just can’t get enough inequality. They consume inequality for breakfast, lunch and dinner and they’re still hungry. What they hate more than anything else is anyone trying to even the score just a tiny bit. Making the world a little more fair than the cruel hand of fate fetishized by the Right supposedly “goes against human nature.” That’s dubious right there, and Adam Smith himself disagreed. In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith noted that capitalism was incapable of providing for essential aspects of human society, such as compassion towards one’s fellow man, sympathy, mutual sympathy , and any type of fairness or justice in society. Since the market could not provide these things, their provision was left up to politics, or the state. Politics is only unnatural; it’s deadly, genocidally deadly. Any attempts to create a little justice or fairness in the human jungle are apparently doomed to end up in mass murder. So don’t you dare mess with that invisible hand of the market. If it’s market versus politics, the market wins hands down. The same market that starves 14 million people every year. The same market that kills 10 million kids a year. The same market that blew up the US economy and is threatening to take the world economy down with it. The blind faith of the Right boggles the mind.

References

Coplon, Jeff. January 12, 1988. In Search of a Soviet Holocaust. The Village Voice. Grover Furr’s website. Coplon, Jeff. March 1988. Rewriting History – How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on High School Students CAPITAL Region. Douglas Furr’s website. Davies, R. W. and Wheatcroft, Steven G. 2004. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Getty, J. Arch, Ritterspoon, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence American Historical Review 98:4, 1048-49. Souza, Mario. Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union. North Star Compass website. Tauger, Mark B. 1991. The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933. Slavic Review 50:1, pp. 70-89. Tottle, Douglas. 1987. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books.

Do I Have Jewish Blood?

I am republishing this post with quite a bit of new information on Henry the Second, King of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Consort of France, and the Lombard tribe and later royalty of Germany, Austria, Hungary and finally Italy. The question has come up because some of the charming local anti-Semites are convinced that I must be part Jewish. They say that I look Jewish too. As far where I got the curly hair, I really have no idea. I think from my Mom’s side. No, I am not Jewish at all, sadly. Though I wish I was;  in a way, I want to be a Jew. I’m just a Judeophilic Gentile. My parents are both extreme Judeophiles who grew up with Jews and went to mostly Jewish schools. A lot of my Dad’s best friends were Jews, and those were some of the family friends that I grew up with. I even went to some kid’s bar mitzvah when I was a kid, and I thought it was really cool. Later I hung around Hollywood and LA for years with the music crowd, the artist crowd, the movie crowd and the writer crowd. All those scenes are swarming with Jews, and Hollywood in general has Jews everywhere. I worked in Beverly Hills for a while, and that place is full of Jews too. What’s weird is that even though I’m a Judeophilic Gentile, lots of folks keeping calling me an anti-Semite. So really, I’m a self-hating Judeophilic Gentile. We have done our genealogy going back a very very long time, and there is not the slightest trace of Jewish blood. I am 5/8 British (English, Scottish, Welsh and Scots Irish), 1/4 German (Swiss German and Bavarian) and 1/8 French. Some of my relatives came over on the 2nd Mayflower boat and others came over from Bavaria in the early 1700’s and became Pennsylvania Dutch. Others were the early French in Canada. The Scottish side comes from the Isle of Uist in the far North. Going way back, I am related to some royalty named Eleanor of Aquitaine who was related to Charlemagne. Eleanor was Queen of the Franks, and her son was Richard the Lionhearted. The Franks were originally a Germanic tribe in far western Germany,  but the Western branch, West Francia, later became the Kingdom of France. She was a Capetian (Capetian Dynasty, Direct Capetians, otherwise known as the House of France), a large French family similar to the Carolingians, and was a Queen Consort of the King of France, in this case, Louis The Seventh, or Louis The Young. Queen Consort is not the same as Queen. The French did not allow Queens, so the high-ranking women had to be called Queen Consorts. He later divorced Eleanor because they fought a lot, and she only gave him two lousy daughters and no sons. He had to divorce the biatch in order to keep the throne, so dump her he did. Eleanor later married Henry II, King of England. This was a good marriage from his POV, since he gained 1/4 of France by marrying her. Henry is known in some English histories as “Good King Henry”, but this is controversial. Henry was a ferocious and hot-headed redhead, who was armed at all times with multiple weapons, moved continuously  and exercised maniacally. Henry had a great sense of humor and did not put on airs. He mingled well with the ordinary people and never acted like he was better than they were. An early proto-socialist, he ordered that 1 Later he conquered Ireland, initiating an 800 year period of English rule over Ireland, so to the Irish, I am sure this guy is evil incarnate. He also conquered all of the forts in southern Scotland, so the Scots probably hate him too. This was during a 200-300 year period (around 1100-1400) in which the Scottish were engaged in continuous wars of rebellion against the English. Robert the Bruce is possibly the best known of the rebels. By around 1300-1400, the Scottish had pretty much secured their independence. The first thing they did was destroy all their southern forts so the English could not reoccupy them. Henry II tried to get rid of trial by ordeal and trial by combat, the standard ways of trying accused criminals, which were not exactly fair trials. He initiated something similar to a Grand Jury as early as the 1100’s. His intemperate language incited his friends to kill Thomas Becket, a priest who had been constantly thwarting Henry’s efforts to reduce the influence of the Church in the affairs of the state. This murder outraged Eleanor and most of Europe, and most people blamed Henry. This famous event was fictionalized in a play and later a movie called Becket, which I have not seen. Late in life, his own son made an alliance with his worst rival and overthrew him. Henry was forced to pay homage to this rival, Philip Augustus. All of his kids except his illegitimate son abandoned him late in life when he was in poor health. Lying in bed, ill, at this time, attended only by his illegitimate son, he noted that his legitimate kids “were the real bastards.” He died in 1189. Eleanor always fought with Henry, but she bore him 8 kids. She  encouraged her sons to rebel against her husband (What a bitch!) early on, and Henry appropriately sentenced her to house arrest for 15 years. Eleanor later assumed the throne after his death and pronounced herself Queen of England, and she expanded on Henry’s “grand jury” trials towards a more “ordinary citizens” type of trials. At her court in exile in France, she reportedly held “love trials” presided over by juries composed of 12 peers, for couples in love. Eleanor was very beautiful, probably a redhead. At one time, a single heir to royalty with an extensive land claim in France, she was said to be the most eligible woman in Europe. Henry and Eleanor were also portrayed in the Lion In Winter, a play and later a movie which I have also not seen. Peter O’Toole played Henry in both movies. Before the Normans and Franks, we trace one of our lines all the way back to the Post Roman Empire to a royal family called the Lombards in northern Italy. This is another Germanic group that left southern Sweden about 2,500 years ago, moved to Germany, then moved down to northern Italy. Initially, the Lombards settled in the Lower Elbe River Valley in northern German near Hamburg. They were pagans, initially having a fertility cult religion (the cult of Vanir), but later becoming worshipers of Odin (the cult of Æsir). Vanir was a typical agricultural society religion, while Æsir was a typical religion of a warrior society. They grew their beards very long, which is where their name “Longbeards”, from Langobards, or Lombards,  is derived, according to Paul the Deacon in his Historia Langobardorum or History of the Lombards. The long beards were apparently a consequence of their Odin-worship, since the God Odin has a very long beard. They were also ferocious and fought with many of the surrounding tribes. The first Lombard migration, from 489 to 493, was probably due to bad harvests. It took them south to the Danube, probably around Austria and western Czechoslovakia, place called Vergundaib (probably the ancient home of the Burgundes or Burgundy tribe). They stayed there for 33 years until they undertook another migration, this time taking them to Western Hungary, to a place called Pannonia. Map of Lombard migrations. In Pannonia, the Lombards came into contact with the Sarmatians, an Iranian people (more probably related to Ossetians). From them, they added an element of religious symbolism, particularly a statue of a bird on the end of a long pole. When a warrior fell in battle and his body could not be returned for burial, his family would put this bird-pole in the ground near their home, with the bird’s head pointing towards the direction where the warrior was presumed to have fallen. In 568, they moved again, this time over to northern Italy, where they quickly conquered most of northern Italy from the Byzantines. When they arrived in Italy, some Lombards were still pagans, while others had adopted Arian Christianity (see post on Arianism). In the next 150 years, most Lombards had converted to Orthodoxy (Catholicism) and had taken Roman names, titles and traditions. Note that even after the Fall of the Roman Empire, it continued to exert influence both culturally and theologically through the Catholic Church. The Lombards were completely converted to Christianity by around 650. Before then, in Italy they had practiced a nominal Christianity with many pagan elements. The Lombards remained in northern Italy until 776, when they were conquered by Charlemagne. In the 700’s, two Lombard kings, Aistulf and Desiderius, conquered almost all of Italy. Fullest extent of Lombard rule under Aistulf. Later the Lombards ruled a territory called the Principality of Benevento, in southern Italy. This lasted from 774-879. Benevento is now a town in southern Italy in Campania, 25 miles northwest of Naples. In Beneveto, Lombard Catholicism reached its apex, shown by the archetype monastery of the period, the Monte Cassino. This abbey was destroyed during World War 2 where it was the site of a huge battle, the 5-month long Battle of Monte Cassino, between Nazis and Allied troops in the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944. The Allied forces thought incorrectly the the monastery had been turned into a fortress by the Nazis. During this time Charlemagne (the Frankish Carolingians) was conquering much of Italy, but he was not able to conquer Benevento. At this time, Benevento was stuck in between two empires, Charlemagne’s to the north and the Byzantines to the east. During the 800’s, Benevento fought a series of wars against Byzantine-allied Duchys in southern Italy, eventually conquering much of Southern Italy. In some of these wars, both sides hired Arab mercenaries called Saracens to fight for them. The Saracens soon went viral, splitting off from the men who hired them and attacking infidels all over Southern Italy. Islam eventually conquered all the way up to Capua, 16 miles north of Naples. In 915, the Pope forged an alliance between all of the Christian forces of Southern Italy and Islam was defeated at the Garigliano River in Southern Italy. The Arabs,  and Islam,  were thrown out of Italy by the forces of the Cross. Once again, mercenaries were to prove deadly. The Lombard states had called in Norman mercenaries to help them fight the Byzantines in Apulia. But soon the mercenaries had gone feral, just like the Arabs before them.  By 1058, the Normans had conquered the Lombard state of Capua. In 1078, the Salerno Lombard state fell. The Capuans rebelled in 1091 and formed their own state that lasted for 7 years until the Normans reconquered it in 1098. The Normans were not very good rulers, and their states were largely independent and tended to decline under their lackadaisical rule. The Lombards regarded the Byzantines as oppressors and the Normans as Northern Barbarians. At around 1100, the saga of the Lombards seems to fade into history. As you can see, with the Norman conquest of southern and central Italy in 1050-1100, a linkage between Normans and Lombard royals becomes possible. Hence, this may be the historical linkage of my Norman line via Eleanor and the royal Lombards of Italy. I believe there is some linkage between the Franks and the Lombards. The Lombards would be considered Dinarics, racially, and so would the Bavarians on the other side, so if you go back 1,500 years, my stock is Dinaric or possibly Noric (in between Dinaric and Nordic). Later on, the Norman branch is Nordic. If you are talking about non-Whites such as Black, Indian or Asian, there is none of that in me either, although there is a 5

What is Arianism?

Arian Christianity is also known as Early German Christianity, because it went over best with ancient German tribes (Gregory of Tours) . Arianism was based on the notion that Jesus and God had not been eternally co-existent for all time. That is, according to the First Council of Nicea in 325, the Church held that when God created the world, Jesus was already there with him, alongside him, “uncreated”. Arianism was officially declared a heresy at this council. The Arians, rationally in my opinion, held that Jesus was actually created by God at some later point. In other words, there was some period, probably a long time, when God alone existed and there was no Jesus. At some point, God created Jesus and probably soon sent him down to Earth. It’s hard to believe that this was one of the worst religious fights in the Catholic Church around the 300’s and that to this day, Arianism is considered a heresy in the Church. However, there is a small Arian Catholic Church in England, with some home churches here and there around the world (website here). Arians also reject the virgin birth, holding that it is a misunderstanding of prophecy. The prophets had merely held that Jesus would be born to a “virgin”, but that word really meant just “young girl.” Due to a misunderstanding of prophecy, “young girl” was mistranslated to “virgin”, hence the Cult of the Virgin and other nonsense. The Arians hold that indeed God can sometimes commit miracles,  but he cannot violate the very physical laws that He Himself has laid down. Seems like a reasonable split in Catholicism. Too bad there isn’t an Arian Catholic Church near me. I might want to attend services.

References

Gregory of Tours. 539-564. Decem Libri Historiarum (Ten Books of Histories), or Historia Francorum (The History of the Franks). Translated by Earnest Brehaut. 1916. New York: Colombia University Press.

The Failure of White Nationalist Theory: The Case of California

White Nationalists (WNs’) like to throw around figures showing that nationwide, few Whites breed outside their race. But those figures are only for one generation. In addition, WN’s counter with various theories like Philippe Rushton’s Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Hispanics, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Sociology, USA, White Nationalism, Whites2 Comments on The Failure of White Nationalist Theory: The Case of California

New Flynn Effect Study

There is an interesting new study out about the Flynn Effect (ecstatic over this very depressing news, since they hate the Flynn Effect with a passion. If ever there was a reason not be a WN or even a hardcore hereditarian, this is a great one. It has to be one of the most atavistic, depressing, misanthropic and pessimistic movements around. They’re overjoyed that people are getting stupider and furious that humans might be getting smarter. This is because WN’s, like all racialists, are all about genes = destiny,  however much they lie and deny it. They hate the idea that the environment can have any positive effect on anything, but I guess they accept that the environment can have a negative effect. Whatever! Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the IQ’s of British teens are apparently 14 points higher than they were in 1942. They’re also higher than the Brits of the 1950’s, 1960’s and even 1970’s. After 1979, there seems to have been a 2 point drop at the high end of age range of the sample. So there must have been a 16 pt. rise from 1942-1979. From 29-66 years ago, British IQ’s rose at a very high rate. The British of today have higher IQ’s than the Brits of 29-66 years ago. Now, since 1979, there has been a very modest drop of less than 1 pt per decade in the very oldest teens. And! In the last 30 years, IQ’s of 5-10 yr old Brits have risen 15 full points! The WN’s are going on and on about how the reason for this is because the UK is increasingly Black. Forget it. Britain is Nor can increasing Black This leaves us with Flynn’s explanation, which seems to explain things well. British teen culture is dumbing down, and race has nothing to do with it. WN’s always says that Flynn refuses to admit that Blacks have lower IQ’s than Whites. Although he is a Leftist, Flynn readily acknowledges that Blacks have lower IQ’s than Whites. Flynn has titled the study Requiem For Nutrition As The Cause Of IQ Gains Raven’s Gains In Britain 1938 To 2008. WN’s are chortling that this means that the entire Flynn Effect is nonexistent, since Flynn supposedly predicated it on increased nutrition. Wrong again, racists. Flynn never stated that nutrition was the sole effect of the FE, and he has always been dubious about that. The Flynn Effect of a secular rise in IQ is a fact. What it means and what is causing it are what is up for grabs.

References

Flynn, James. 2009. contribution to support more of this valuable research.

Go Maoists Go

Well-armed Maoist rebels are rapidly expanding their insurgency in India. It has to be stopped now, or in two years, it will get out of hand, says the state. 22,000 fighters under arms. They mostly operate in the East, especially Chattisargh and Jharkand, but they are expanding all over. They are even starting to form cells in big cities. Good for them. Indian capitalism has failed. Time to try something new. The Indian Maoists have deep links to the Nepalese Maoists, a very forward-looking group of Leftists who are now pretty much running the Nepalese government. Would be great to see a similar-looking group running India. The Indian Left makes sense on Kashmir and even supports separatism in India’s Northeast. I think they could make peace with Pakistan too.

Letter From Mexifornia

Well, the local wannabe Nortenos* just pulled a gun on the local wannabe Surenos* about 30 yards outside my front door, and someone called the cops. Now the complex is swarming with cops. I wish they would haul some of these idiots away. They’re all about 17-21 years old. When a town in California turns from White to non-White, things sure get a lot more exciting. Diversity is our strength! *They are wannabes because none of them have actually “earned their stripes.” There are a couple of levels of gangs here, the wannabe kids and the real hardcores, who are often older.

Typical Muslim Behavior

The Taiba, West Bank, pogrom in September 2005. The Muslims always do this to us Christians, especially when we are small minorities. It’s probably not that bad to be a Christian in Morocco, Tunisia or Libya. I had a Black African friend from Togo, a Catholic, who was living in Morocco for a while, and there were no problems. And I knew some Nigerian Christians who were in Libya. There were no real problems, but they said that the Libyan Arabs were openly racist towards Blacks (typical Arab behavior)  and they really hated Christians. In places where Christian minorities are tiny, the Muslims just leave them alone as unimportant. In places like Lebanon, the Muslims leave the Christians alone too, since the Christians are very well-armed and have lots of political power and numbers. The Maronites, for all their faults, have the reputation for being some of the baddest-ass Christians in the Middle East, and the one group of Christians who successfully fought off the Muslims for centuries. It seems to be ok to be a Christian in Syria and Jordan too. Egypt is definitely not ok. It’s not a nightmare, but there are a lot of problems for Christians. Turkey and Pakistan are not secure for Christians at all, but Iran seems to be ok. The Christians have been ethnically cleansed from Chechnya, and there is ongoing ethnic cleansing in Iraq. In Southern Philippines and the Moluccas, it’s “kill the Christians.” Anywhere you have a jihad against the Christian “occupiers” or “colonists” (Chechnya, Philippines and Iraq) the local Christians really get pounded. There’s typically ethnic cleansing and genocidal behavior of some sort. There are real problems in places like Palestine where the Christians have more than tiny numbers, but not big enough numbers or power to be tough like the Maronites.

The Motto of the Holocaust Deniers

Contradictory agendas are pretty common with humans, conflicted critters that we are. Back in my doper days I used to run across dopers who were adamant about how much they hated dope, but yet there was a punch line at the end. Their song went: “I hate dope! Dope sucks! Only losers do dope! You do dope? You’re a loser! You’re a scum!…Speaking of which … Dope … Hey! … Got any? The Holocaust Denier sings a similar darkly humorous tune: “The Holocaust never happened, but let’s do it again, and this time let’s finish the job!” Yeah right. You guys expect us to fall for that? How dumb do you think we are? You don’t even believe in Holocaust Denial yourselves. That’s just for the consumption of others, huh? You’re lying and you know it. SMH.

Mutual Intelligibility in the Romance Languages

Whether or not I am a reliable source for the question of mutual intelligibility has been questioned in a debate on Wikipedia. It’s been suggested that I am an amateur linguist – that is, I am not a real linguist. This is not true. I am in fact a real linguist. My credentials are that have an MA in Linguistics and have worked in the past as a professional linguist for an Indian tribe in a paid position. Here is an here, that no one can understand French except the French. Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Romanians, no one can understand the darned French. This makes sense to me. I can’t understand a word of the local French-speaking tourists, and I had a semester of French. They always talk like they are holding their noses. This is interesting in light of the fact that Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian have 8 Spanish speakers have a better understanding of Italian. Italian and Spanish have 8 That’s for spoken communication. For written communication, French and Italian can understand each other a lot more. The same is true with Spanish and Portuguese. They can understand the other language when written much better than when spoken. What is interesting is that everyone accepts that Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are separate languages, despite 5 However, in the cases of Austrian/Bavarian, Swabian (spoken around Stuttgart) and Mainfränkisch (Moselle Franconian, close to Luxembourgeois), these three languages are only 4 Romanian also seems to have some understanding of both Spanish and Italian. Romanian speakers say that they moved to Italy, could immediately pick up a fair amount of the conversation, and picked up Italian very fast. Romanians have ~6 Vice versa, Italians living in Italy run into Romanians regularly and say that they can understand Romanian quite well. Spanish speakers say that they can understand a fair amount of Romanian, and Romanians can understand even more of their Spanish. Spanish and Italian have 7 Catalan may be about 60-7 Looking for a nice dialect continuum across Europe where you can keep on understanding people everywhere you go? Try this, starting at Portugal: Portuguese, Mirandese, Fala, Galician, Asturian, Aragonese, Spanish, Catalan, Gascon, Occitan, Auvergnat, Provençal, Franco-Provençal, French, Gallo, Picard, Jersey, Guernsey, Walloon, Romansch, Friulian, Ladin, Lombard, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Venetian, Italian, Neapolitan, Corsican, Sicilian, Sardinian Gallurese, Sardinian Logudorese, Sardinian Sassarese, Sardinian Campidanese, Latin, Moldovan, Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Macedo-Romanian.

References

Jensen, John B. 1989. contribution to support the continuation of the site.

English and Its Closest Relatives

In the last post, we looked at Scots, the closest language actually related to English outside of English creoles. That’s according to Ethnologue anyway. There are only three languages in the Macro-English section, English, Scots and Yinglish, which is Yiddish English. From Ethnologue (note Fishman is Jewish):

Professor Joshua A. Fishman says, “‘Yinglish’ is a variety of English influenced by Yiddish (lexically, particularly, but also grammatically and phonetically). Any good English dictionary will now include 50–100 (or more) ‘borrowings from Yiddish’ (Yinglish)…. These forms are now used not only by Jews but by others, inversely proportionally to their distance from NYC. In the case of non-Jews the original Yiddish meaning may no longer be known and a related metaphoric or contextual meaning is intended…. Since the variety is only used… (by speakers who can always speak ‘proper English’) Yinglish is never a first language acquired by the usual process of intergenerational transmission. French, Spanish, and Russian counterparts (also a Hebrew counterpart) also exist, but are more restricted in nature, both in size as well as in availability to non-Jews”. Jewish. Second language only.

At first I thought this was a preposterous, but a commenter notes that “it is English with a heavy Brooklyn accent spoken by older Jews and peppered with Yiddish words and phrases.”  Ok, maybe that makes sense then. Still, I don’t see how that gets in and Geordie (an extremely diverse English dialect) or Scouse (Liverpudlian, likewise), Scottish English or even AAVE (Ebonics) doesn’t make it. Hell, I’ll take Queens New York English before Yinglish. We looked at Scots earlier. Listening to some Scots tracks, you can pick up a bit of it here and there. It’s hard to say how much you can get. 2 There’s a lot of silly talk around about mutual intelligibility. German and English are said to be slightly intelligible, and if German is, you know Dutch must be. It’s frequently said that the language Frisian, spoken in the northern part of Holland, is somewhat intelligible to English speakers. Frisian is doing ok; it’s relatively secure at the moment. According to commenters at the end of the post, it even has some monolingual speakers. Wow, I never would have expected that. Frisian been separated from English for possibly up to 1000 years, and if you listen to Frisian, this is what languages sound like after they drift apart for 1000 years. That massive dose of Latinate that went into English did not help matters. Nevertheless, English and German share 6 Here is an interview with a top Dutch model, Doutzen Kroes, for a promotional campaign promoting the use of the Frisian language. I believe it is all in Dutch. I could barely make out of a single word out of this 5 minute Dutch language tape. I got a few words, but that is only because I happen to know some Dutch words here and there. Obviously, that doesn’t count. I got about I will say that Dutch has a bit of a familiar rhythm to it, does it not? It’s not Spanish, French or Italian. The prosody has that English feel to it somehow. The next video is an interview with the same top model in which she responds in Frisian to questions directed at her in Dutch and English. Don’t look at the Dutch subtitles, because you’ll pick up a lot more words that way. I got the word for “no” in Frisian and that’s pretty much it. But there was a lot of background noise. Comprehension was around Let’s try another one. In this one two Frisian poets, Tsead Bruinja and Albertina Soepboer, are interviewed about their upcoming books of poetry. All dialect is in Frisian, clear of background noise, crisp and clear diction. Later Bruinja reads some of his poems in a playground. It was shot in Groningen by Omrop Fryslân, a group that produces Frisian shows on Frisian TV. They have Frisian TV! Cool! In the comments there are some English speakers claiming that they could pick out enough of it to get the basic understanding. As for me, I could not make out a single damned word. Comprehension was If Frisian and Dutch are this bad, I’m not even going to bother listening to a tape of German. This bit about English and German having some intelligibility seems ridiculous. A lot of language is about prosody and rhythm. Even if you can’t get a word of that Frisian or Dutch, the rhythm is there. If you have ever heard Old English or try to make it through Beowolf, you will hear that sound in Frisian also. This goes to show you what 6 Keep in mind that Japanese and Korean supposedly have 6 I got a weird and creepy sensation in my body as I watched that Frisian tape. Frisian is a look into our past as English speakers, back to the days before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes got on boats and took off for England long, long ago. There was a fascinating show on the Discovery Channel a while ago in which the journalist takes a crash course in Old English and then tries to use Old English to buy a cow from a Frisian farmer. The Frisian farmer can actually sort of understand the Old English! Weird…

On the Scots Language

The notion that there is a language called Scots, separate from the English language, instead of just a Scottish dialect of English, makes a lot of folks hopping mad. There is a regular reader who is Scottish who refuses to accept this. The reason is that if you listen to Scots carefully, it does sound like they are speaking a grotesquely distorted and bizarre form of English. But the thing we linguists keep hammering away at is that if you can’t understand people, they are speaking a different language. People just can’t seem to accept that. It’s true that Scots is very close to English. Some say that Scots must be more than 9 So, bottom line is that Scots is just flat out unintelligible to the vast majority of English speakers. What does unintelligible mean? According to SIL, unintelligible means you understand less than 7 If you ever tried to watch Trainspotting, you know what I am talking about. I think it had subtitles when released her, and it sure needed them, because I could scarcely make out a single word they were saying. Keep in mind that intelligibility differs by individual. A good friend of mine said he watched that movie and figured out the lect about 1 hour into the movie and then was able to make sense out of it, but I never got it. He’s also a musician, so that may have something to do with it. There’s increasing evidence that musicians are better at language than others. Polyglots are often musically talented. In a lot of ways, language is all about the ear. To make matters worse, the lect in Trainspotting was not even the real deal, hardcore Scots. It’s just basic Scottish English, not even real Scots at all. It gets pretty hard to figure out where true Scots, Scottish English with heavy Scots interference, and Scottish English proper begin and end. There are five main dialects of Scots: Insular Scots (Orcadian/Shetlandic),  Northern Scots, Central Scots, Southern Scots and Ulster. As the commenter below notes, intelligibility is quite difficult among dialects of Scots, and it looks like we are looking at more than one language here. Lafayette Sennacherib,  a Scotsman, writes:

In Scotland, if you go five miles in any direction you encounter a dialect that no one else understands, roughly based on English, but as if there has been little population movement in or out of each little region for 500 years, which is quite possible. There is actually no broad Scots; the poems of Burns are in the dialect of the county of Ayrshire, spoken only there and then. These days, I as a Glaswegian (from Glasgow, though living in London) find it really hard to understand Ayrshire people when they lapse into dialect, even though it’s little more than 20 miles away. The Edinburgh dialect in Trainspotting is also completely foreign to me, again from only 30 miles away. As for Shetland or Aberdeen…I worked with a guy from Aberdeen for a year, and only picked out about half a dozen words in that time – if he spoke to me I’d just look philosophical and utter, “Ay mate.” Funny that although there are lots of accents in the USA, the language is so uniform when there are so many people from so many places. But maybe that’s why – they have to learn a standard dialect to communicate with each other.

Here are some audio samples of Scots from a village called Rosehearty. Here is some more Scots, a 2 minute recitation of a New Testament story. Here are some samples of Ulster Scots, which is pretty much the same language as Scots. This is Philip Robinson reading from a novel called Fergus An The Stane O Destinie. This is clearly a foreign language! This is nothing like Scottish English at all. It’s simply another language altogether.

Mandarin and Putonghua or Standard Languages and Their Dialects

I recently received a comment, which I deleted due to tone, which asked how I could possibly state that Putonghua (Official Mandarin) is incomprehensible with “Mandarin”. Truth is, there are 1,500 dialects of Mandarin. Putonghua is only an official form of Mandarin based on some of these dialects and instituted after 1949.  In time, Putonghua itself has changed so much that it is no longer intelligible with the pure form of the very dialect that it was based on! Furthermore, new forms of Putonghua have already developed that are incomprehensible to other Putonghua speakers! The truth is that forms of a language may not be intelligible with each other. That is why I (with the assistance of some of the world’s top Sinologists) am working to redo the classification of Sinitic and carve new languages out of it based on intelligibility. As it stands, there are 14 Sinitic languages. Based on intelligibility, there are far more than that. The Chinese style of promiscuous use of the word “dialect” for both languages and dialects has been very destructive in terms of our understanding of what is really going on there. Similar things occur in many large languages. Within Macro-Dutch, we probably have 14 different languages, Dutch, 10 forms of Dutch Low Saxon, Zeews and Flemish, and that’s just getting started. For one thing, Flemish is looking like more than one language. None of these lects are mutually intelligible. So there is “Dutch” and then 13 other languages under the “Dutch” rubric. Within Macro-French, there are 4 languages, Standard French and three others – Cajun French, Walloon and Picard. None of these lects are mutually intelligible. Actually, there are quite a few more, but those are the only ones accepted at this time. There are 20 different forms of Macro-German – Standard German, Eastern and Western Yiddish, Lower Silesian, Upper Saxon, Bavarian, Cimbrian, Mocheno, Hutterite German, Walser, Swabian, Colonia Tovar German, Schwyzerdütsch, Pennsylvania German, Kölsch, Limburgisch, Pfaelzisch, Mainfränkisch and Luxembourgeois. None of these lects are really mutually intelligible. Actually, there are more than that, but those are the only ones that are recognized. So we have “German” and 19 different languages inside of “German.” Within Macro-Italian, we have Standard Italian and 13 other languages – Dalmation, Istriot, Neapolitan-Calabrese, Sicilian, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Lombard, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Venetian and four different kinds of Sardinian – Sassarese, Gallurese, Logudurese and Campidanese. None of these lects are really mutually intelligible. So we have “Italian” and 13 different languages inside of “Italian.” These stuff drives laypeople and Internet cranks completely insane, but linguists look at all it and shrug our shoulders. National chauvinists are particularly irked by this stuff. Italian nationalists say there is “Italian” and the other 13 languages are Italian dialects. Dutch nationalists insist there is one Dutch and the other 13 languages are Dutch dialects. German nationalists say there is German and the other 19 languages are German dialects. There’s a tendency among these types to not accept that languages closely related to theirs are actually separate languages and not dialects. This is due to the consolidating, assimilationist, anti-liberationist agenda of the nationalist. You can go around the Internet and see the wild debates ranging over whether Scots is a separate language or a dialect of English. What’s interesting is that inside the field and especially in academia, all this stuff causes is just yawns and shoulder shrugs. But outside of the field, ordinary folks are driven mad by this. This is one reason why people want you to get a degree in a field before you call yourself some kind of an expert. People who call themselves linguists, anthropologists and economists who lack degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Economics have a strong tendency to not know what the Hell they are talking about. Many are hacks, cranks and fringe nuts. Within the fields themselves, especially in academia, there tend to be consensuses about a variety of things, a deep familiarity with the basics of the field and most importantly, a spirit of collegiality and professionalism. I have nothing against autodidacts in principle, but they often lack all of these things. Go to sci.lang on Usenet and look at all the autodidacts calling themselves linguists. They are passing themselves off as the world’s leading experts while having raging debates that you won’t hear one peep about in academia. None of these guys would last 10 minutes at a university. It always pissed me off when people said, “You can’t be a [whatever] unless you have a degree.” But I’m starting to understand what they are talking about. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Interesting Piece on the Shining Path

Here from Al Jazeera. Includes a neat 11 minute minute. Here is Part 2 of the video. It’s basically a bunch of propaganda crap, exactly what you would suggest. I have some serious issues with Sendero Luminoso, to put it mildly (I always supported a group called the MRTA instead), but this time around, they claim to be doing it right. As usual, Sendero is portrayed as some kind of narco-traffickers. Barring the arrival of some sort of Chavez-type on the Peruvian scene, I can’t see why the vast majority of Peruvians have even one reason to support the Peruvian state. It’s a horribly racist society, with a completely evil socio-economic system. There’s only one way to get rid of it, I figure, and that’s through revolution. I don’t think the democratic road to power is going to work. The Peruvian economy has been growing like gangbusters for 10-15 years now, but it has hardly touched poverty one bit. The population in extreme poverty is still around 5 Easily preventable deaths by children from obvious malnutrition are easily around 120,000/yr, minimum. That’s why I yawn when they say that Sendero’s war killed 70,000 people. Hell, the system kills more than in half a year, year in and year out. Why focus on Sendero? Who’s the real killer? The Peruvian state! Sendero killed around 35,000 of those 70,000,  and supposedly the overwhelming majority were “civilians.” The “civilians” lie there is shown in the fact that almost all of those people were members of the rondas, press-ganged local militia that the state had directed to take up arms against Sendero. Sendero says it realizes how it screwed up, and this time they are going to do it right and not kill the people (they did kill the people a lot last time around). The US military is there, flying into poor villages and doing civic work, but that’s all counterinsurgency. The problems with the US military’s counterinsurgency civic ops is that they do some civic work here and there, but they never advocate the kind of deep structural changes that society really needs. It’s like a guy is starving, you have loaves of bread to give him but instead you tear off a few pieces and throw them to him so he will shut up and put away the gun for a while. As soon as he puts the gun down, you won’t even give him crumbs and he gets to die. That’s what civic ops is all about. Once the guys with the guns put them down, the counterinsurgency civic ops guys pack up and move on the next rathole threatened with armed socialism. The whole enterprise is just fake to the core. If the civic ops people were pressing the state to make deep structural changes to ward off revolution, that would be one thing. That might even make the guys with the guns put them down. But of course they never do it. That would be bad for business. If Sendero proposed to fight an NPA-style war and advocated a project similar to the Chinese state or the Nepalese Maoists,  I could go along with it. But they were always so radical and extreme!

Response To Mike Campbell on Chinese Language Classification

An autodidact named Mike Campbell has issued a long critique of my Chinese language classification. There are problems with his analysis. First of all, Campbell says we need to defer to the Chinese on what is a dialect and what is a language. But top Sinologists in the West are saying that the Chinese are falling down on the job and not working according to the modern scientific definition of what is a language and what is a dialect. The Chinese linguists operate, like Chinese medicine, according to a completely different format that is pretty much at odds with the one used in the West and in much of the rest of the world. One element of this format is the fangyan. A fangyan has many meanings, but in Chinese it tends to mean “dialect,” or better yet, “topolect.” It also tends to mean the speech form of a given county. But the Chinese definition of the word “dialect” differs radically from the definition used by linguists elsewhere in the world. For one thing, questions of intelligibility with other lects are left out of the definition of fangyan. Chinese linguists also use hua, which means something like “speech.” This tends to be more expansive than fangyan, but at the same time it can occur down to the level of dialect. Examples include Putonghua, Shanghaihua, Beijinghua, etc, but also Pinghua and Tuhua. It tends to be geographically based – the speech of a particular geographical location, however that geographical location can be expansive or very restricted. But this is not the case in Putonghua, which is just “average speech”, and is spoken all over China. The third category is yu. Yu is probably the category that Western linguists would most commonly associate with “language” or even “language family.” Yu only refers to separate languages within Chinese. Outside Chinese, the word wen tends to be used. Examples are Wuyu, Minyu, Huiyu, etc. No one seems to quite know exactly what the Chinese classification is at any given time. According to Campbell, we must not do anything until the Chinese act first, but they only make a new language maybe once every few years, and they are failing even at that. Campbell states that Scots and Bavarian are dialects, not languages. He says that Scots is a dialect of English and Bavarian is a dialect of German. However, Ethnologue says that Scots is a separate language and so is Bavarian. The intelligibility of Bavarian and German is only 4 Ethnologue is run by SIL. SIL has been granted the task of assigning all of the new ISO numbers. An ISO number means that a lect has been officially recognized by the world linguistic community as a separate language. So SIL are the linguistic scientists who world community has given the task of deciding what is a language and what is not. Campbell is saying that SIL does not know what they are talking about. Campbell states that mutual intelligibility cannot be determined by talking to speakers and simply asking them whether or not they can understand “those people over there.” According to Campbell, this is inaccurate. He says the only way to determine intelligibility is through scientific testing methods looking for On Ethnologue’s Mexico page, extensive tests have been done on various lects spoken in small villages determining intelligibility between one lect and another. Intelligibility testing is commonly done by simply sitting a speaker of Lect A down in front of a recorded corpus of Lect B and see how much they can understand. Campbell says that intelligibility testing on human informants is inherently erroneous because as speakers of Close Lect A hear more and more of Close Lect B, they can understand it over a period of time (the exposure factor). This is the problem of interdialectal learning. Interdialectal learning (the tendency of closely related lects to hear each others’ lects and quickly learn to speak them and hence muddy the waters of intelligibility), trumpeted by Campbell as a reason that intelligibility testing cannot be done on human informants, is regarded by SIL as different from inherent intelligibility. Inherent intelligibility is best regarded as a test of the ability to use the mother tongue. In other words, when two lects are said to be “inherently unintelligible” this appears to be referring to “virgin” speakers who have not yet had the opportunity to learn each other’s dialects. Similarly, members of Lect A may simply be bilingual in Lect B, which also invalidates intelligibility testing. However, measures have already been developed to determine bilingualism and the degree of it. A favorite one is SLOPE. SRT is also used in bilingualism testing. Like other intelligibility testing instruments, they have been subjected to tests for reliability and validity over the years. Further, testing has evolved to the point where we can begin to ferret out bilingualism from inherent intelligibility. In Casad 1974 the author describes testing done on speakers of Mazatec, a Mexican Indian language. Intelligibility testing was done to see how well they understood Huautla, a related language. Three female speakers had scores in the 50-6 At any rate, in the survey, the figures were averaged together so that Mazatec speakers had 7 Campbell also throws out a red herring in the notion that certain members of a group may simply refuse to hear the language of another group and insist that they do not understand it. Although existent, this problem has little relevance in intelligibility testing. SIL does testing with cross sections of communities. Furthermore, SIL notes that intelligibility is typically distributed evenly across a community with regard to sex, class and age. The SD’s for inherent intelligibility in a community are narrow, less than 1 This should throw out the notion that females, the aged, the young or the old, the wealthy or the poor, will automatically give us false data on intelligibility. Campbell hints that intelligibility is poorly defined. However, SIL has listed a hierarchy of intelligibility. SIL says that intelligibility below 7 Campbell recommends throwing out all intelligibility testing with informants as inherently inaccurate and focusing instead of measures of language similarity. However, SIL notes that linguistic similarity is not an adequate single predictor of intelligibility. For instance, testing in the Philippines revealed pairs of lects with vocabulary similarity of 52, 66, 72 and 7 In testing of Polynesian, Siouan and Buang, it was found that the higher the level of lexical similarity up to a certain point, the lower the intelligibility scores were. This is counterintuitive, but it shows once again that lexical similarity is poor measure. Morris Swadesh was the founder of lexicostatistics, the study of lexical similarity. Lexicostatistics has its uses, but determining between closely related languages and dialects is apparently not one of them. This myth seems to be dying a hard death. Robert Longacre and Sarah Gudschinsky were involved in long debates with Swadesh about the validity of lexical similarity measures, and they seem to have been proven right. The latest findings calculate that any study that uses lexical similarity alone to determine intelligibility of lects has a 4.5-1 chance of failing to do so with any reliability. Word lists still have their uses. Where word lists show similarities between lects below 6 Vocabulary similarity below 6 Intelligibility is usually asymmetrical. In other words, Lect A can understand 8 Campbell also points out that it is not uncommon that people speaking the same language cannot always understand each other. He asks how often we have heard a fellow English speaker of the same dialect say something and we did not catch what they were saying for some reason or other. The implication is that we need to throw out all testing with informants due to this. SIL has actually examined this, and they often include a test called “home-town” in which people are presented with narratives within their own dialect and an intelligibility score is given for that. It is true that sometimes this is lower than 10 One thing to do is to throw out all sentences or questions that score less than 10 Campbell suggests that there are no tests available to use on human informants that pass the smell test of empiricism. This is not the case. One test, the Sentence Repetition Test (SRT), has been used for decades, subjected to many papers and studies, and criticized and modified in many ways. In this case of SRT, testing of group members individually has been shown to be superior to testing them in groups. The reason for this is because when you do intelligibility testing in a group of say eight people, you can run into a strong personality or high-ranking male in that group who might say he understands much more than he really does for some reason or another,  possibly to show off. The other less dominant group members then follow his lead and give false high readings on the intelligibility test. Many linguists, led by SIL, have been leading the way in intelligibility testing for decades now. Some of the top figures in in this subfield are the couple Joseph and Barbara Grimes of SIL. Joseph Grimes is a retired linguistics professor from Cornell. In addition, a number of computer programs have been created that help the researcher to test intelligibility. Another charge, that intelligibility testing lacks adequate controls, has been shown to be false. Bias in both experimenter and subject has been shown to be a problem, as is the case in most or all science, and measures have been undertaken to deal with it. The notion that this subfield of Linguistics, intelligibility testing, is unscientific should be laid to rest. Ethnologue seems to place tremendous importance on mutual intelligibility, however defined. Mutually unintelligible lects are assumed to be separate languages by Ethnologue. Their criteria for splitting off a dialects into languages seems to be 9 In conclusion, Mr. Campbell’s principal contentions in his critique are all incorrect. First, he suggests that the very concept of mutual intelligibility between lects is impossible to define or prove. SIL has shown that the concept can be defined and tested by reliable instruments. Second, he says that the use of human informants in mutual intelligibility testing is so prone to error that it cannot guarantee satisfactory results. This is not the case. SIL has proven, through decades of testing, that mutual intelligibility is best done, or possibly can only be reliably done, through intelligibility tests with human informants. Third, he throws up a number of red herrings that supposedly prove the inherent unreliability of human informants in intelligibility testing. All of these are shown to be the very red herrings that I claim they are, although it is true that unrecognized bilingualism is a problem, but it can often be ferreted out. Fourth, he says that the only way to reliably test for intelligibility is to compare lects via tones, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. This is an extremely complicated process utilizing math and computer programs and can only be undertaken by practiced linguists. In truth, such elaborate testing, while interesting, is entirely unnecessary. Fifth, he suggests that any Western reformulations of Chinese language classification need to first defer to the Chinese. The problem here is that the Chinese have completely fallen down on the job. We cannot defer to the Chinese without upsetting our entire system of language classification. The Chinese are entitled to their system, but it is at odds with that used by the rest of the world.

References

Casad, Eugene H. 1974. Dialect Intelligibility Testing. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields, 38. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma. Casad, Eugene H. 1992. “State of the Art: Dialect Survey Fifteen Years Later.”‭ In Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Windows on Bilingualism, 147-58. Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 110. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Grimes, Barbara F. 1992. “Notes on Oral Proficiency Testing (SLOPE).”‭ In Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Windows on Bilingualism, 53-60. Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 110. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Grimes, Joseph E. 1992. “Calibrating Sentence Repetition Tests.”‭ In Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Windows on Bilingualism, 73-85. Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 110. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Grimes, Joseph E. 1992. “Correlations Between Vocabulary Similarity and Intelligibility.”‭ In Eugene H. Casad (ed.), Windows on Bilingualism, 17-32. Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 110. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.

Bring Em Young

Ee gads. I swear this is bordering on child abuse.
Ee gads. I swear this is bordering on child abuse.
Little kids are so cute! Eeek. The Nazi virus is a terrible illness, and it even strikes young children. Of the kids in the photo, focus on the two on the right. Notice the alien, Vulcan-like red eyes. The red eyes are a sure sign of an infection of the Nazi virus, an indication that any last shreds of humanism have long departed the hollow Nazi soul of the afflicted child. From Finland. Those are three young Finnish brothers, posed by their neo-Nazi mother. I was starting to get worried about why so many Finns were going to look at that famous Russian neo-Nazi video on the old site. Now some of my worst suspicions are being realized. The USSR was so damned aggressive in WW2, attacking Finland and the Baltic states, attempting to annex Finland and actually annexing the Baltics, that it left a long-term bad taste in the mouth of these blond and blue northerners. Hatred of Communism and the USSR often goes along with seeing Nazis as liberators, if only from the hated Soviets. I always thought the Winter War (USSR vs Finland) was retarded. Anyone want to try to justify it for me?

A Look at California Street Gang Structure

According to the FBI, there are 1 million gang members in the US, an increase of 200,000, or 2 That 1 million figure must be far too low. Who is and who is not a gang member is very hard to determine. For instance, in this area, there are three levels of the gang. There are the real hardcore Nortenos – level 1. Those are older guys and they are actually allowed to have Norteno tattoos on them. They have all been jumped in, probably in prison. Then there are younger guys who have “wannabe” gangs, around here wannabe Norteno gangs – level 2. The one around here is called something like 601 Kings. They claim territory, spray a little graffiti and sometimes fight with the other young wannabe gangs. But I told my neighbors about this gang and they started laughing and said, “That’s so stupid!” They said that’s not “the real Nortenos” and if these kids went to jail or prison and tried to claim Norteno, they would get beat up just like that. Plus no way are they allowed to be caught dead in jail or prison with an unauthorized tattoo. I’m dubious if you even have to be jumped in to be a member of a level 2 gang. These level 2 gangs are best thought of as just the local neighborhood kids from wherever forming a set, calling themselves the whatevers, and then trying to “make a name for themselves” so to speak. But the real hardcore Nortenos will just ignore them, laugh at them and have nothing to do with them. Level 2 is like the upstarts. No way are they the real deal. I know a lot these characters around here, and some of these young guys are actually sort of ok in a gangsterish way, but others are no good. Mainly, no way can you openly insult their gang or support the opposing gang. Some of them, if you respect them, they respect you, pretty much. Even below level 2 is level 3, which probably represents most of the characters around here. They wear Norteno colors and gangster attire, sometimes spray graffiti, and sometimes they fight with opposing gangs, but they aren’t really even level 2 gang members as far as I can tell. I guess they are what you call associates. Truth is that just about all the young Hispanics around here “claim” or “represent” Norteno. That doesn’t mean they are in any gang. This is a Norteno hood, so everyone here pretty much claims Norteno by default. That is, they sort of root for them at least or if not, at least don’t support the Sureno enemies. It’s sort of like rooting for the Dodgers if you lived in Brooklyn. They support the home team. Heck, I practically claim Norteno on that basis! The level 3 group represents a vast number of people, and if you include them, the figure must be dramatically higher than 1 million. Furthermore, I believe that most of the graffiti crews around here are at most these level 3 kids. As far as what crime they are involved in, level 2 gangs sell dope sometimes, possibly deal in stolen property, spray graffiti, and sometimes fight with rival gangs. That’s about it from what I can tell. You can actually live in a place like this, as long as you don’t get involved in the gang crap yourself and avoid making friends with these characters. Just choose your friends very carefully. For the most part, they don’t bother people who are outside the gang thing. These levels of distinction are not represented very well outside of gang insider clique circles, certainly not in the media.

Finn Joke

Lots of ethnic groups get insulted, but no one ever insults the Finns. This is grossly unfair. They have very high rates of depression and heart disease, never smile, hate Russians pathologically, like to dive into freezing cold water in the middle of winter like lunatics, have no gourmet foods to speak of, and have an insanely difficult language that is frankly incapable of being learned by anyone not a native speaker. It’s time to dog on the Finns! Hey, did you hear the one about the Finns? They were Finnish before they even started. Har har. I used to date this 1/2 Finnish, 1/2 Russian girl named Tami, and damn was she beautiful! Blonde hair, blue eyes, smart, happy, friendly, oh yeah!

An Inquiry Into Roman Antisemitism

In the following excerpt from the great historical novel, Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, we see the so-called anti-Semitism of the Romans. Super-Jews usually interpret this sentiment as an example of the age-old mindless genocidal hatred of the Jews. As we can see though, the pragmatic Romans had their reasons for their anti-Semitism, and they were not really mindless reasons at all. The Jewish New Year celebrations were banned because they were causing violent riots every year. For similar reasons, probably because it also led to violent riots, the authorities also forbade the public reading of the Story of Esther, the basis for Purim holiday, but which the Romans regarded as a perverse celebration of  horrendous mutual massacre on the part of both the Jews and the Persians. Jewish paranoia is already evident, as a harmless logo of a Roman legion, a boar, is interpreted as a deliberate insult to the Jewish religion’s prohibition on eating pork. In a spirit of universalism, the Roman governor forbade circumcision. The reasons are not quite elaborated, but apparently he wanted to assimilate the Jews into the rest of the Empire. We see already the Jews’ refusal to assimilate. This refusal has been the cause of a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism over the centuries, but anger over refusal to assimilate is hardly mindless. Furthermore, it appears that the Romans regarded circumcision as a barbarism along the lines of castration, which they had just previously forbidden. In this the Romans mirror movements, some of them even regarded strangely as progressive, to outlaw or at least discourage circumcision, especially in the West. These movements have actually managed to attract a lot of support from physicians. Keep in mind that the Romans considered themselves the ultimate in civilized folks, and regarded many of their subjects as barbarians of one type or another. Along the same lines, the Romans required little of their subjects beyond taxes, but they did request that the subjects, whatever their religion, also accept the Roman Gods. Almost all subject peoples just went along with this as one of the prices for being a vassal state. The Roman elite, it should be noted, were very secular (and nearly pre-scientific) folks, and many of them hardly even believed in the Roman Gods themselves, regarding it instead as some sort of opiate of the people thing to keep the peons satisfied. The Romans also accuse the Jews of hatred and contempt for non-Jews. This is an age-old charge, and obviously there must be something to it or it would not be repeated endlessly. Hadrian wished to turn Jerusalem into more of an international city, mirroring the progressive efforts of today to make it an international city under the auspices of the UN as part of a peace settlement of the Middle East conflict. The Jews, mirroring the Zionists of today, seemed to want to keep Jerusalem as a Jews-only city. The Romans introduced classes in Greek literature to Jerusalem (the ultimate in civilized standards of the day). The Jews reacted with violence to this, or any other tainting of their Jewish city and lives with “foreign influence.” One famous Jew even allowed his child to die rather than to be treated by a famous Greek doctor sent to try to save his life. The Romans tried over and over, exasperated, to mollify these fanatics, but were thwarted at every turn. Eventually the famous Jewish Bar Kokba Rebellion erupted around 150 AD, the result of which was the razing of Jerusalem to the ground. So we see here that Roman anti-Semitism was not based on irrational hatred or evil, but with the frustration of the uber-civilized Romans with a religious-ethnic group whom they regarded as steeped in barbarous fanaticism. Looking at it from a more pro-Jewish POV, we can see the Jews as the ultimate rebels who would never submit to any other outside authority, especially in matters of religion.

The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts), mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel. The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and ram’s horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine (Easther) who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king of Persia (Iran), and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy (a feast of Purim). Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel’s traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch). He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind. I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria (Egypt) and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums; and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves. I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel. As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so. In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods. The most primitive Dacians (Bulgarians) know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hands, and whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother of Apollo. No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars. I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand. The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens, but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered  his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day or night, since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus.

References

Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1954-1963. Memoirs of Hadrian. Translated from the French by Grace Frick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2005 Nobel Prize in Economics Winners

Two nasty Nobel Prize winners. The two men, Thomas C. Schelling and Robert J. Aumann, won for Game Theory, but unfortunately, they applied much of their Game Theory to wars, especially the most immoral wars, cold and hot, of the US and Israel. Mr. Schelling was long involved in trying to win a nuclear war against the USSR, then with the collapse of the USSR, advocated for the overthrow of other nations the US wants to regime change, often through nonviolent revolutions. His theory was most recently used in the “color revolutions of Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine. Mr. Aumann is most unpleasant. A Super-Jew and Super-Zionist, he opposed the withdrawal from Gaza and has long advocated the annexation of Gaza into Israel, although I assume that the Palestinians will not receive any state benefits, nor will they be able to vote. His game theory was used in the recent blockade of Gaza intended to force the Gazans to overthrow Hamas. Nice people, these Nobel Prize winners!

Why Were There Survivors in the Concentration Camps?

Some charming Holocaust Deniers in the comments threads (They are nicest people!) have mocked the Holocaust, asking why there were survivors at all from the death camps. The answer is complex. The camps were not necessarily set up for immediate extermination. Even at the death camps, some were selected for the gas right away and others were selected to remain alive at least for a while. These were worked as slave labor, given very little food, and packed together. Many died of starvation and disease, but that was the idea. The idea was to torment them, get some work out of them, and slowly kill them. Other camps were full on labor camps. Auschwitz was pretty much a gigantic factory. At some of these camps, people managed to stay alive for a long time, possibly years. Some also become favored Jews, kapos, or developed relationships, including sexual ones, with camp staff, and stayed alive that way. The guards needed to have some inmates on their side, kind of like in a jail where they have trustees and whatnot. As you can see in the photos on liberation, many of the inmates were not in very good shape, to put it mildly. At the end, they emptied the camps and made them go on death marches, where a lot of them died or were murdered. I suppose they could have just lined them up and shot them in the camps, but they did not do that. There was a large element of sadism, perversity, torture, torment and slow death to the whole enterprise. Further, the Nazi project regarding the Jews was of two minds. Part of the project dealt with killing Jews immediately, and another dealt with keeping them alive, but usually slowly killing them, in the camps over a period of time. And some Jews were just left alive – kapos, girlfriends of guards, etc. The Holocaust was not so much a master plan but an act of madness. As such, its purposes frequently clashed, and in many cases, were poorly developed and even contradictory. The Shoah also seriously hampered the war effort, especially towards the end when trains needed for the war effort were diverted in order to kill Jews, seriously harming the military. So the Jew-killing was not even rational from a military POV. The Nazis were almost afflicted with a Jew-killing psychosis. The notion of exterminating some, leaving others to perish of starvation and disease, and packing others in camps to work them to death until starvation and disease took them over can be seen in the Generalplan Ost intended for the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus. So the Shoah and Generalplan Ost were actually similar, and in Generalplan Ost we have a model for the Shoah, though a much more merciful one. A better analogy would be that Poland and its quisling General Government were Generalplan Ost in praxis.

About Those Tunnels

The tunnels in Gaza are supposedly being pounded by the IDF because they are used for smuggling weapons. However, most of the tunnels are just being used to smuggle food, medicine, household appliances, cooking gas, etc. The tunnels are run by underground business concerns in Rafah, and are quite lucrative. Each of the armed groups has their own smuggling tunnels for smuggling weaponry and whatnot. I find it hard to understand why tunnels that smuggle goods for the civilian population of Gaza must be bombed. The whole idea here, as from the very start of the blockade after Hamas won the election, is about punishing the civilian population for voting for Hamas. As soon as Hamas won, demands were placed on it by the Group of Four, apparently the US, Israel, the UK and the EU (So much for the anti-Semitic Europeans!). These demands were quite unreasonable. Among them were the recognition of Israel and the renunciation of violence. It should be pointed out that no one is demanding that Israel recognize Palestine or renounce violence. Anyway, an occupied people have the right to armed resistance. Since Hamas refused to obey, a cruel embargo was slapped on them, intended specifically to punish the people of Gaza for electing Hamas. This embargo resulted in over 5 The power plant was bombed – the plant which ran the sewage treatment plant – so raw sewage has been pouring out into the ocean and is now seeping into the aquifer, threatening to contaminate the water supply. The rocket attacks pretty much started when Israel refused to lift the embargo. After Israel pulled out of Gaza, it retained control over Gaza’s borders, including the borders at Egypt and the sea. Israel even retained control over Gaza’s population registry list. As a starting point at working towards a cease-fire, Israel could have offered to lift the blockade in return for a halt in rocket attacks. In Operation Cast Lead, it looks like Israel bombed that American school in Gaza, the crown jewel of Gaza’s education system, on purpose. Once again, the reason here is just to punish the civilian population for electing and supporting Hamas. There were no rockets being fired from anywhere near that school. The superb Norman Finkelstein has an excellent roundup (long) of the issues surrounding Operation Cast Lead 2008-2009 and the Lebanon War 2006, the real reasons for both of which were to “restore Israeli deterrence capacity vis a vis the Arabs” and to head off a potential peace settlement on terms that Israel considers to be unfavorable. The piece also deals with many issues surrounding the events leading up to Operation Cast Lead. Dem Arabs gittin a bit uppity, have to put dem in dey place.

Why Egypt Cooperated With Israel on the Gaza Operation

This question has probably mystified many people. The Ikwaan. And, in the Egyptian context, specifically. Hassan al-Banna. What does this have to do with Hamas? It is not well-known, because the MB is unpopular, along with fundamentalist Islam (yes, it is true, forget the Zionist lies), in Palestine, but Hamas is nothing other than the Muslim Brotherhood-Palestine (see 2nd paragraph). Also see here, under Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. MB-Palestine is nothing other than a wing of MB-Egypt. The MB connection makes Hamas’ very close alliance with Syria all the more perverse and odd. Lots of hard feelings, shall we say, between MB-Egypt and many successive regimes. MB-Egypt has a necessary and sufficient relationship with Al Qaeda itself. Al Qaeda’s leading philosopher (deceased) was a member. One of the philosopher’s most ardent followers is this man, still alive and broadcasting regular videos, including one in which he proudly claims the 9-11 attacks and castigates those who blame the US and Israel as underestimating the great capabilities of the Sunnis. This man is not well-liked by the Egyptian state. This war with the Egyptian state has been pretty much resolved. Egypt mass-arrested most of the members, took them out to the desert, tied them to stakes with no food or water, and requested that they talk. Those who did not give in to interrogators experienced the wrath of the desert met with a man armed with neither food nor water. Death in a day or two. 1000 or so were killed in this charming way. We see how the Arab conducts counterinsurgency. Can you imagine the outcry if Israel deigned to emulate the hated Arabs? Saudi Arabia is one half of the Al Qaeda equation, in terms of its birth anyway. MB-Egypt, etc, etc, is the other half. Failure to understand this essential aspect of the Al Qaeda birth process and continuing influence results in a failure to understand AQ. Why should Americans understand Al Qaeda? 9-11 is an emergency phone call number.

References

Wright, Lawrence. 2006. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Highly recommended; great read!

Some Thoughts on Central Planning

Project Cybersyn. Fascinating stuff.

It consisted of Telex machines located in workplaces communicating information in real time to a central control system.

It even had a control room! And supposedly it worked pretty well, too. Surely, with Moore’s Law and all and the advances in software and programming theory, not to mention various forms of AI, computing is now vastly more advanced than it was 36 years ago? Via Eastern Star, a link to a book called Towards a New Socialism (1993) by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. From the site:

Update on computer speeds: One of the themes of our work is that the speed of modern computers makes a real difference to the feasibility of efficient economic planning. In Socialist Planning After the Collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, we assess the time-order of the calculations required for planning in detail a ten-million product economy. We use for reference the figure, at that time on the cutting edge, of one billion calculations per second for an advanced multiprocessor. Such figures date quickly. IBM recently announced (Feb 12, 1998) the signing of a contract with the US Department of Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the delivery, by the year 2000, of a computer capable of 10 trillion calculations per second — 4 orders of magnitude faster than our 1993 benchmark.

Their argument is that the new computer speeds means that the argument over the inefficiency and unworkability of central planning in an economy is now in a whole new ballpark. This is said to be an answer to the Economic Calculation Argument by Mises, Von Hayek, Friedman, etc. that says that a centrally planned economy can never work. The free marketeers actually have some interesting arguments to throw out there, and you can argue that they have history on their side. At the collapse of the USSR, it was said that Gosplan was only able to calculate prices for some 500,000 of the 3 million products (!) being produced by the “failed socialist state”. First, I wonder how a failed system even produces 3 million different products a year, but anyway…it’s clear that Gosplan was overwhelmed. Socialists who agree with the free marketeers’ argument have countered with “market socialism”, which I am not necessarily opposed to at all, except no one seems to know exactly what it is. One way of doing this, according to a journal article I read, is to devolve control of the workplaces to the workers, but with control over investment versus profit-taking left to the state. Plants that started losing money would simply close, thereby avoiding the problem of money-losing state firms. Control over workers’ investment decisions was necessary because the Yugoslavian experience showed us that workers, given the chance of reinvesting profits in plants versus taking them home in their pockets overwhelmingly preferred to take them home. This resulted in deinvestment in the plants and resulting breakdown of the infrastructure, eventually making the plant unable to function competitively, or at all. In the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain, plants are owned by workers technically, but actually they are owned by large regional banks. The banks make the decisions of whether or not to take home profits in workers’ pockets or to reinvest in the plant. This non-capitalist form of ownership has worked very well! My father always counters by saying, “Ok, so then why isn’t everyone doing it?” Hey! It’s a non-capitalist form of ownership. Capitalists run the planet. They don’t like non-capitalism forms. They can’t make money off them. Duh. In China, there is already something like this. The #3 producer of TV’s in the world is actually a Chinese publicly-owned firm , and it’s competing quite well, if I do say so myself. China has devolved many public enterprises to the level of local municipality and labor collective, the forms that actually run these plants. Much of China’s explosive economic growth in the 1980’s and early 1990’s was actually coming out of these publicly-owned firms. In China, I believe that Chinese firms still must technically be owned by the workers. This is described by Time Magazine as a “Maoist-era anachronism” (Mao insisted, evil bastard that he was, that workers actually own the firms – evil seems to know no limits) that the capitalist roaders (yes, that is what they are) in China are chafing to get rid of. I don’t want them to get rid of it. Worker ownership in China is a good thing. Now many plants are actually run by municipalities. Cities run them either well and make lots of money or poorly and don’t make much money, so there is competition within the socialist sector in China. The ones that do well can expand, pay and house their workers better, so workers flock from all over to these cities to try to get jobs with the firms that are doing well. In one city that was written up, control of profits versus investment was run by the municipality, and they required that workers plow back in 9 Cuba has recently found that there are some efficiencies (!) in large state farms for certain crops (sugar cane, potatoes, beef and poultry) versus having them grown by small farmers in plots of 10 acres. Cuba is now making plots of up to 10 acres available to any small farmers who wish to take them up, and there has been a flood of applications, but the small farmer way is not necessarily Utopian. Back to Cockshott and Cottrell’s book again, although they claim to have solved Hayek’s “calculation objection” (see the Economic Calculation Argument link above) which theoretically makes any planned economy doomed to failure. That’s a good step forward right there. C & C argue that socialism was able to overcome the calculation objection by the mid-1980’s due to the increase in computing power. Nevertheless, the planned economy still has problems, many of which are economic and hence nearly beyond the reach of the average reader. But we will go into them nevertheless. C & C offer no plausible solutions to any of the following dilemmas: The problem of lack of incentives in a socialist society remains. Che Guevara’s famous “moral incentives” crusade never really worked out very well. Innovation, lack of it, or lack of incentives for innovation are also a crucial problem in socialism (in my view, nearly fatal). I would argue that assuming that the state has to money to do so, persons making critical or groundbreaking innovations in society should be rewarded warmly – possibly with awards of say 1 years salary for each significant breakthrough. There is a problem in that economic planning and centralization seem to engender social planning and political centralization, making the planned economy almost automatically undemocratic in praxis. They offer a plan to allow regular citizen referenda on all sorts of things, done via touch-screen TV’s in every home. The problem of the nearly inevitable development of a capitalist black market in any planned economy remains. As does the problem of an inevitable brain drain of the best and the brightest to capitalist countries where the labor rewards are so much better.

Anti-Semitic Chicken Nazis Threaten Jews

Prior to the latest Gaza War, one of the worst threats facing the Jewish state today was a tribe of Islamo-Nazi super-chickens being raised in Gaza by a suicidal chicken death cult to be suicide chickens and kill every single Jew in Israel. According to the Chicken’s Founding Charter, “not one Jew will be left in Israel.” The chickens had recently taken over Gaza in a chicken coup (hehe), killing many moderate chickens in the process and instituting a chicken dictatorship over other animals. Lately, the chickens had been launching chicken poop rockets at Israel on a daily basis. Although there were no casualties, the chicken poop launched at Sderot caused many cases of shock in the Israelis living near the Chicken Terrorist Haven of Gaza. Further, it is said that two Jews, one 85 and the other 87, forgot to take their heart meds and nearly had fatal heart attacks when the chicken shit was really flying over southwest Israel. The chickens refuse to accept any past agreements with Israel and refuse to recognize the Jewish state, since it grants no rights to chickens. Further, the chickens say that Jews stole the land where they used to strut and fluff their feathers. The chickens have also refused to renounce violence, and the roosters have been fighting a lot lately. There aren’t any Jewish chickens around to kill, so they turn on each other in a fratricidal chicken war in Gaza. Israel has blockaded the chickens, putting them on a starvation diet and making for some awfully slim boneless fryers. One of the great things about Israel is the US gets to use it as a testing ground for new weapons. Chickens, unlike humans, have proven impervious to most of the techniques yet developed by “USreal” to kill them. However, in the latest Gaza War, Israel used new weapons called “chicken hawks” to decimate the chickens. From the article:

Samir Sawafiri pointed at several dozen hungry chickens scavenging for food between the crushed bodies of nearly 65,000 other birds strewn across a destroyed farm in Zeitoun in Gaza City. “They are all that is left and I have nowhere to put them,” he said. The poultry farms around Zeitoun used to be the Gaza Strip’s main provider of eggs, according to Oxfam. Little but twisted metal and crumbling concrete now remains of the poor suburb on the eastern outskirts of Gaza, one of the areas hit hardest during the war. “I evacuated on January 9,” Mr Sawafiri said. “Three days later, on January 12, tanks came with bulldozers and leveled the fields. They wanted to spoil the economy – that is the only answer. There is no justification for what they did.”

In the war, at least 65,000 Palestinian terrorist jihadi chickens were killed by the IDF in just this one raid. All of the chicken counterattacks killed only 13 Israeli birds. Operation Plucked Chicken was declared a success by Ehud Olmert, though there were worries that the chickens would rebuild their coops and try to re-arm to fight another day. The questions that remains is why the chickens turned into anti-Semites. It seems that not only have the Jews been hated forever by all other humans, but they have also been hated by most other animals, not just humans. It was a matter of time before Euro-weenies, the Far Left and radical Islam roused the chickens to join in the world’s oldest sport, hatred of and war against the Jews.

The Morgenthau Plan

I can’t believe that we actually did this. Reading this Wikipedia article, one assumes that the Wiki piece must have been written by neo-Nazis. Surely that could not be the case. The truth, then, resembles neo-Nazi propaganda about US aims and behavior in the first half-decade after the war. It’s funny because you go looking for research on the case and mostly all these neo-Nazi sites come up. You read through them and think, “Yeah, but their Nazis, so you know they’re lying.” I think they are definitely exaggerating, but I was blown away by how close the neo-Nazi sites’ descriptions of this plan mirrored its actual implementation. Not that I sympathize with Nazis. My general rule is when you start reading neo-Nazi stuff and you have to nod your head and say, “Wow, these guys are definitely not good for the Jews, but how can we deny that what they are saying is true,” that means not that Nazis are cool but that something is rotten in Denmark. When you read Who Rules America, and nod your head at the Nazis’ analysis of Jewish media power, that’s not good. When you read William Pierce on Russian Jews bleeding Russian dry and participating in a White slave trade of East European Orthodox Christian girls to Israel and nod your head, that’s not good. It’s not good when the Nazis are right. Not good for the Jews. Not good for anyone. Same with this Morgenthau Plan. Not that Nazis, or Germans (What was the difference, anyway? Most Germans, but not all for sure, were Nazis all right) didn’t more or less deserve it. Yeah, paybacks are a bitch and all that. But I also think you should give people a good reason to surrender. Surrender to we can enslave you, starve you to death, let you die from disease, de-industrialize your country and maybe kill 20 million of your countrymen is not a very good reason for me to put down my gun and quit shooting. If there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to kill me anyway, why not die on my feet, gun blazing, like a man. That was the mindset of the Warsaw Ghetto, a tragic but noble one. Give people a reason to live, for Chrissake. Same reason I’ve always opposed beating up people who are arrested. Having been cuffed a couple of times and manhandled by the cops, I figure the cops want to beat up everyone they arrest. What’s the point? Getting arrested is bad enough. Being imprisoned is bad enough. Losing in a war is bad enough. You should treat your former enemy kindly enough so he does not want to take up arms against you again. I also think that there was something just intrinsically wrong about starving all those Germans to death and raping all those German women. Whether they deserved it or not, I still don’t think it was right to do it to them. As above, there’s no point to punishing the defeated in war. Defeat alone is punishment enough. The neo-Nazi sites claim 13 million excess German deaths 1945-50 via this plan. Wiki doesn’t give a figure, but you wonder if the Nazis are right on that one too. Remember. Anytime Nazis are right, it can’t be good. Ross Vachon’s Semitism Run Wild is an excellent exploration of the Morgenthau Plan, drawing analogies to the neocons as latter inheritors of the Morgenthau throne.

The Whole Place is a "Settlement"

An pro-settlement Israeli commenter on Ha’aretz, the voice of Israeli liberalism (see comment 7 by a transplanted Dutch Jew in far northern Israel):

Settlement on the land, Hityashvut, has been the backbone of the Zionist endeavor since the first colonies were begun over 120 years ago. In the time of the British, it was especially necessary to create “facts on the ground” in places where the British discouraged settlement, in order to ensure that these locations would remain part of the state of Israel. Today however, the government is us. Settlers who create illegal “facts on the ground” in Judea and Samaria help our own government and our own IDF – us. It is constructive to assist the Israeli government and the IDF with establishing settlements in places that have a large and hostile Arab population. Large parts of the Negev and the Galilee remain sparsely settled and it is also important to invest our efforts in developing these lands. Facts, arguments and reasoning based on moral and historical rights are never obsolete and are still valid today. As to our historical rights: see here.

Sometimes there is no need to put words in their mouth. The horse’s mouth opens and speaks for itself. Not much to add here. This is my beef against Zionism. “The settlements” and “normative Zionism” are properly conflated. Truly, they are an extension of one another. Focusing on “the settlements” while ignoring that the whole damn place is really a gigantic settlement creates a false distinction and whitewashes the Zionist project while legitimating it. Note the comments about the Galilee and the Negev. Israel has been engaged in something called “the Judaization of the Galilee” for many years now. This involves refusing to allow Arab cities and villages to expand, while surrounding them, as if they were bacterial infections,  with the antibiotic of government-funded Jewish communities. The Judaization of the Galilee is discussed even in liberal Ha’aretz as if it were the most normal and proper thing around. The Israeli Left, those who decry “settlements”, seem to have nothing to say about the Judaization of the Galilee. Couple of questions. Suppose the US government regarded the Black areas of the South with alarm, refused to give Black towns and cities the permission to grow, shorted them on government aid, and surrounded them, as if to isolate them, with lavishly funded all-White towns and cities. Who would not call this out for the White Supremacism that it is? It is this staunch anti-racist banner that I lift high when I oppose Zionism. It’s the only reasonable position for any anti-racist or non-racist to take. Unless someone can make a case that Jews get to be super-racists while this project is denied to everyone else. Anyone takers?

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