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Monday, January 29, 2018Catholic taqiyaIf you're a Catholic, or a near-enough Catholic like High-Church Protestants or Nestorians, a bonus (to use the Latin) is that you get to join the nonbelievers and think for yourself. You live by the Separation Of Information And Security, and the Information is yours for your own use. Unfortunately thinking for yourself is also really hard. And sometimes it can run against (current) Church doctrine. I was discussing some historical points with my parents a few weeks ago and I ran into such a point - I forget which point, and it doesn't matter. So I had to step back. As a Catholic your "hermeneutic", which I understand to mean paradigm-of-reason, is going to derive from several competing impulses:
I side preferentially with Reason - always have. My beliefs stem from my longstanding position that I don't want to be forced into assent in an untrue proposition. The Bible (and Qur'an) consist of documents, not of G-d Breathed Inerrant Tablets. They are going to make mistakes. I reserve the right to recognise those mistakes and to route around them. Catholicism lets me do that - to a point. I cannot reject the Nicene Creed, or Chalcedon, or the filioque formula of Toledo. But then, I would not want to; they're what brought me here. Still, I am going to be asked, or ask myself, even now, what do I think about - say - The Virgin Birth or The Resurrection. And to that I must separate what is knowable (that the "Virgin Birth" did happen... possibly not in ways Catholics would like) from what we profess in a Church setting (which is what we read in Luke). Just from the metamathematic of Gödel, I accept that I will not know everything. If G-d is not going to tell me directly, and I'm religiously retarded so, yah, G-d hasn't told me anything directly, then I have to accept the more-difficult Catholic doctrines as sacred Mysteries (to misuse the Greek). I am not certainly about to disrupt a service when the priest says something about which I'm currently reserving reservations. So taqiya it is. I pray this post will serve as my deposition for the Day Of The Dîn. posted by Zimri on 15:38 | link | 0 comments Sunday, January 28, 2018Could the Arabs have saved themselves from the Satan?Catholicism since Toledo in the sixth century AD has chosen a dyotheletic theology, of two Heavenly minds and natures in harmony. Rather, Catholics would say, their Church has discovered it. I am unaware of any other religious dên which has, at its core, the Separation of Information from Security. Certainly Islam doesn't have it today. Maybe Islam almost did, though. The Mutazili caliphs (like the Arian emperors of the fourth century AD) attempted to subordinate the Qur'an, a dead letter, from the Godhead. Unlike Constantius and Valens the caliphs Harun and Ma'mun gave a lot of leeway to proNicaean popes like Timothy. If they had worked better together, perhaps that ninth century Theodosion, Baghdâd, could have agreed upon a formula to introduce true dyotheletic theology to Islam. Perhaps by elevating the archangel Gabriel or the Jewish Metatron next to "al-Malik, al-Jabbar". Or maybe the Iranians could have ruled like this centuries before. I'll interject here I am not as well-versed in the Sasanian ideology. Still, what I've read about shah Yazdegird I in the early 400s suggests he might have considered it. Perhaps between Bâg as God and Ahura-Mazda, His Wise Spirit. (Oh my, have I just rediscovered Mazdakism...?) Anyway, these what-ifs are interesting, but I expect they would have failed even if tried. The symbol of the Cross was etched in Christian and Muslim minds alike, like it or not. Also there's that human need for a final human sacrifice on Earth, per René Girard. This requires a Lothian, at the very least. (And not an Aroden. Aroden was no born-again Christ. Aroden was Imam al-Husayn - a G-d damned failure.) And, since we observe G-d's actions on earth as irregular miracles, and not as clearly-defined clerical magicks as in Dungeons-and-Dragons: the Christian "Lothian" has to be as apparently-arbitrary as G-d Himself. Our Christ has to be G-d. posted by Zimri on 14:36 | link | 0 comments The post-Christian Gospel of ThomasHere is a fine article from a decade ago arguing for Thomas' use of (authentic) Pauline material: Galatians, Romans, 1 Corinthians. These were also used by Clement's Roman bishopric, and by Ignatius and Polycarp, and possibly by "Barnabas". So Paul's letters were popular very early. A few notes I find intriguing: Thomas doesn't care for the Old Testament. He will cite Paul but will reject Paul's suppositions, which came out of his respect for the Torah. Thomas 53 rejects circumcision as entirely silly, far beyond Romans 2-3 which knew it as a mark of a real covenant just not one currently valid. I do not see Thomas' hermeneutic anywhere else in the New Testament, largely Jewish in assumptions if sectarian. So Thomas' author was assuredly a gentile, not a post-Jew. Although Thomas survived with the Egyptian Copts, this hostility to circumcision could hardly have come out of an Egyptian milieu; the Egyptians practiced circumcision themselves (and may have predisposed them to Paul and the Christian Bible in the first place). Instead, some scholars say that Thomas is Syrian. But I am unsure of that too; the Aramaic Peshitta is quite Hebrew-aligned. I am very sure, however, that Thomas came from the Hellenistic coasts. And that it has a sharp divide from the NT books. The Jesus Seminar erred in including it with the Five Gospels. posted by Zimri on 13:19 | link | 0 comments Argument from authorityThere's a reason that "argument from authority" is a fallacy. The grain-based Food Pyramid is, now, dead. I wonder what Expert Opinion will be thrown off kilter next... posted by Zimri on 11:07 | link | 0 comments Joshua Cuevas deserves what he getsJoshua Cuevas is getting that Warfare Tactic from /pol/ as Dr Hendel got from TPUSA. And like Hendel, Cuevas is now complaining about it in public. Among the claims from /thoseguys/ is that Cuevas is an unethical and biased professor who cannot keep his political struggles out of the classroom - that Cuevas started this war. Cuevas of course dindu nuffins and is a good boy. Like Hendel last year, Cuevas this year reveals in his statement he has no sympathy for the other side, which he views as an enemy. Actually Cuevas is even worse. He claims the Rethuglikkkans are just butthurt at hearing the truth when they go to college. Muh Evolution! The /pol/fags' allegation is in character for Cuevas. Which makes my interest in defending Cuevas roughly, oh, zero. posted by Zimri on 10:54 | link | 0 comments How to conquer a planetI found a bevy of excellent links from hbdchick's twitter so I'ma try an' digest them into an analysis. Much of what I see on the Internet today - not on blogs so much as on social-media - consists of the antifa Left and the /pol/ Right using warfare-tactics against their enemies. (I prefer these terms to "the cultural Marxists" and "the alt right" because the latter are now just terms of abuse - that is, they are now tools of war themselves.) Scott Alexander discusses mistake theory versus conflict theory. To sum up Alexander's verbosity: the well-meaning liberal and conservative, like Scott Alexander or, I dunno, Jonah Goldberg, can share a civil discussion; the leadership of Google and Vox Day probably can't. Because Google is fighting a war, if a fourth-generation "peaceful" war. Diversity of ideas and/or ethnicities allow for highly cohesive, extensive, and populous tribes. On topic of conflict theory put into practice, this spins up when an elite of men band together and seek to increase their share against others, and by "share" I mean "pussy". Within a network, a tribe can become an elite when it seizes a central node in a network, the tipping-point being 10%. One wonderful example is that horror called "Gay Marriage": when the rest of the population decides it's done caring, the 10% who either do care or else find it personally advantageous to pretend to care will drive it into the only acceptable opinion. And then they can declare Current Year and call the rest of us "alt right". As to who these elites are, /pol/ would say (((elites))) with (((echoes))), but I don't think this suffices. I think the elite is our Upper Middle Class (disclosure: I am in this Bourgeois class, or at least can "pass"). This class now contains 20% of the population, and it has pulled up the ladder behind it, so has an interest in protecting itself, like a mediaeval guild. Of course, 20% is well-within that range which allows a class to rule a nation as its elite. As to what gives that class cohesion: it came out of four years of painful Higher Education. To improve the value of their equity, they go transnational and leave the rest of the country uninhabitable. Those who have accumulated debt in college have even more interest in improving their equity. Meanwhile the Democrat Party elite has convinced its voters to sign on to its own civil war against the American population. Here I really don't see the Democrats' elites convincing the residual born-here American population of the justice of their cause. So, war. posted by Zimri on 10:38 | link | 0 comments Why simplify the D&D rules...?I've posted that Hasbro's dumbing-down of D&D's rules in 4e and the Current Year cant we're seeing in 5e has nothing to do with bringing in females. At least not adult females. I think it has to do with bringing in children, mostly boys. As for why male designers supporting Gay Pride should be keen on recruiting children, I leave that as an exercise to the reader, and to people following Hasbro (and Disney) generally. posted by Zimri on 01:42 | link | 0 comments Saturday, January 27, 2018Michael Mearls: architect of decadenceThe House Of David has mentioned Mr Mearls exactly once in its almost-16-year history. This reviewed an experiment Mearls had performed, working under a Monte Cook imprint: on whether, within a moral-relative setting, it was possible to draw up an adventure which was also morally relative. I conceded that his experiment was of interest (the best in that imprint in fact), but I also deemed it a failure in its stated aims. Mearls didn't learn from his mistakes but instead Failed Upward. Having a Monte on his resume got him insinuated into Hasbro. So he was involved in that colossal disaster Fourth Edition. And he's in the Fifth, too. Most recently I've run across Mearls when he has made abominably sexist assumptions about what women can, or cannot, handle as gamers. I interpose here, I don't think The Quartering is being fair when he goes over Mearls' resume during the 2000s; Mearls did take risks back then, and I respect Mearls for taking those risks. But I do agree with Quartering that Mearls has gone far out of line when posing as a Male Feminist Ally. There was never "gatekeeping" against women concerning the rule and lore complexity. (Especially not lore; that's just laughable. Anyone check out the demographics of the fanfic archives lately?) There was only gatekeeping against idiots. posted by Zimri on 20:40 | link | 0 comments Good-versus-evil epic in antiquityClaim here is that existential philosophical struggle - such as Gondor versus Mordor - is recent. Someone hasn't been reading George of Pisidia, nor the Qumran texts detailing the Last Battle. Nor Faust Buzandaran from Armenia. Nor the Muhammadan Maghazi. Nor the multitudinous Near Eastern sagas of Marduk (or whoever) against Leviathan. To name some examples off the immediate top of my head. I expect arguing the claim here to descend into semantics in (very) short order. Still, I'm probably right about this in broad strokes. If It Happens Now - that we consume epic fights against Eeeviiil - It Happened Then. It is common for local tribes to declare themselves Righteous men who dindu nuffins; and they especially dindu nuffins against their rival tribes, who are always orcs. Imperial ideology (okay, "imperialism", we can use that term here) tends toward Anshar Worship. When you add a tribal self-righteous elite with their struggle to maintain an empire, you get an existential fight against Tiamat. Because hey, it is such a struggle! - for the empire. One combatant or the other will probably sing about it. posted by Zimri on 12:19 | link | 0 comments Friday, January 26, 2018The origin of Malikite SpainI've argued for the Andalus as - initially - the Latin-speaking German elite of western North Africa; later, I've discussed the Andalusi reconquista of Visigoth-held Spain, but this time as Awza'ite Muslims. Consider this post the third in the trilogy: when did the Spanish amirate switch to Malikism? Muqaddisi tells that in the ninth-century, nothing but Malikism was accepted in Spain. This contrasts starkly with what the Hispanic Chronicles of the eighth century tell us, which is that various "Arures" sects threw the peninsula into chaos. The incoming Umayyad amirs' doctrine from Awza'i was an improvement in that it got the most violent Muslims to direct their energies against the amirate's crossborder foes. But this, long-term, didn't make for stable treaties. Especially once the Muslims started losing wars their amir had to get them to quit starting wars. I am reading Anna Akasoy (2016), on the old 'Abbasi-era meme of a conquest from the west, by "Andalus". She mentions a revolt against amir Hakam I (r. 796- AD)... which failed. Hakam exiled many thousands of the losers east, which mess caliph Harun (r. -809 AD) then had to clean up. (Harun in the end dumped that lot onto Crete.) It appears to me that Hakam, circa 800 AD, made the call to rein in his overly-pious (read: violent) amirs. I don't know how serious the revolt was - it might have been like that bungled coup in Turkey a couple years back - but Hakam was able to use the situation, to secure his authority. posted by Zimri on 13:59 | link | 0 comments Wednesday, January 24, 2018We're losing GermanySeveral news stories are coming out of Europe's core pan-European nation. Almost two hundred Turks and Kurds brawl at an aeroport. Unlike them the German Army cannot fight. Also, a high Alternative politician converts to Islam. This is in a historic German pattern wherein extremism is a sentiment, not a policy: an extremist more-easily jumps from one totalist ideology to another. Frau Merkel, having made it impossible in Germany for Christians to defend their women, has forced those Germans who care to turn to a religion which can. posted by Zimri on 11:11 | link | 0 comments Marg bar Ursula LeGuinA science fiction author I didn't ever read died last night. Because I didn't ever read her, I have nothing to say about her writing style, except that it bored me when I picked up a random book and glanced at random prose. I did find comments on blurbs about Ursula Le Guin, like Bradley an early pusher of the gender-fluidity opiate, was such a powerful man. When she threatened to resign from science-fiction associations, those associations caved; thus corrupting the likes of SFWA to the point it cannot carry out its stated mission, that of advocating for speculative-fiction authors. Razib Khan can get past all this; he maintains that Le Guin's lies were at least well-plotted, so he was able to get past those to the story and the prose. He also weighs Le Guin's evil against Le Guin's advocacy for the genre amongst the rest of the public. I counter that once one has taken the citadel, of course that one will defend the citadel. If Le Guin had been told, no, we are not changing how we do things based on your threats; would she have continued to defend the genre? Le Guin is in the underworld now, so beyond my prayers. May her memory be accursed. May her supporters come to understand her legacy in time. posted by Zimri on 10:15 | link | 0 comments Tuesday, January 23, 2018Rule by SpeminI was considering titling this post "Gamma Males in the deep-state", but that's a little too jargoney, even for me. The Reason website used to make fun of cant like this when it was neocons doing it. So instead I'll dredge up jargon from the gaming world of three decades ago! Because Current Year. So: Starflight. This game featured several alien races painting, in broad strokes, satires of human personalities. It also (like Reason) had made jokes against cant-spewing self-important wankers. (You can play this excellent game for yourself by the way - DOSBox still works in Win10 I believe.) One such race was the Spemin, an amoeboid race of braggarts with very little to brag about. The Spemin even prefixed all their organisations with "SS-", for "Secret Society of -"... yes, in English (or in Romance, whatevvs). The Spemin were allied to, or perhaps subject to, the Gazurtoid, para-Mormon fanatics. So, here's the "secret society" in our Three Letter Agencies. And James Comey's self-serving Biblical Twitter-posts. The leaders whom Obama installed into the Three-Letter-Agencies are quivering slimy tools. They are no match for a strong and resolute Oval Office with the Congress behind it. Behind their bluster they are weak and brittle. They are Spemin. posted by Zimri on 17:00 | link | 0 comments Monday, January 22, 2018The aboriginal AmericansGreg Cochran has posted evidence of skeletons from 9500 to 5000 BC in Brasil that look Melanesian / Aboriginal. There survives, today,
a 2% trans-Sunda "Sahul" component in Brasilian native populations. The Sahullikes were demonstrably not as powerful a population as the local "Native" Americans were. When the two met, the Sahullikes were already there in large numbers - but they lost. Cochran concludes that the Sahullikes To constrain that, we also have genomes and skeletons from Beringian-descended populations all along that side of the Pacific Rim. Recently we even have the American genetic equivalent of Hittites in linguistics - a 9500 BC, dead (so, fixed), breakaway population of cousins to the base of that next split down the line, before those others took their own splits. This has got us to triangulate a genome and even dates for that second split (PDF). The Tocharian equivalent here is the Northern-North American "First Nation" population: Algonquin to the east and - later - contributors to Athabaska in the west. Everyone else runs from the American Southwest on south. That latter population, basal to the Karitiana, left the north 13700 BC. (Clovis is 11500 BC.) I do not hear of trans-Sunda DNA in any Native population from west of the Andes or north of Colombia. These regions contain some serious linguistic Residual Zones - like Mesoamerica, where if any such population did exist, it would have survived. Pending new evidence I do not think the Sahullikes took the Pacific Rim route. A tribe of Melanesians fleeing a war in the islands seems possible. (So Thor Heyerdahl was right! just wrong about which islanders, and when.) They had the means to cross - say - the Sunda Strait, but they lacked Polynesian navigation. So they missed all those Polynesian islands and just - kept going, and going. They would have landed around Panama and hit the Caribbean forests, and then the Amazon. As Melanesians they were (initially) better suited to jungle life than were the coast-and-cold-adapted North Americans. The Melanesians were, still, from a bottlenecked founding-population now in a strange jungle. So when the Americans learnt Melanesian jungle tricks, which given the dropoff of the latters' skeletal remains was probably in the 4000s BC, the Americans outmuscled the Melanesians. Easily. As for when the Melanesians got there: I'd go with around 10000 BCE, after the Americans were already well-entrenched along the Pacific and Andes. The only place the Americans - then - weren't happy was the rain forest. The Melanesians (I hesitate to call them, sentinels) once there blocked the Americans from Brasil for the next five thousand years. They would have done the same to any errant Africans. UPDATE 1/23 - there's an anonymous detractor in the comments pointing to "Evolutionary population history of early Paleoamerican cranial morphology" published eleven months ago. Unsure that this disproves Cochran's analysis, upon which my explanation depends. posted by Zimri on 11:04 | link | 0 comments Sunday, January 21, 2018Was India first colonised from Burma?This piece on L3 isn't just about Ethiopia. It's also talkin' ABOUT MY MAMA. Ahem - about M33 among other M cousins. They find that M33 is among the oldest female lines of India. It will, then, predate the Dravidians. However I've long known that it clusters to India's east. And then there's Watson's The Great Divide on deep-mythology, which argued for western Eurasia's flood legends originating from Sunda Strait. It turns out that the M lines prior to M33 are - also - not found west of India, but east of it: Q and M27 are Melanesian. The east-to-west flow along the Indian Ocean seems atypical. (We do see it in Central Asia, but not here.) Since the Bronze Age the general push has been west-to-east. Perhaps this was Toba too. Or maybe the much-later sinking of Sundaland? The source - Marrero P, Abu-Amero KK, Larruga JM, Cabrera VM: "Carriers of human mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup M colonized India from southeastern Asia." posted by Zimri on 15:48 | link | 0 comments Into AfricaThrough the 2000s, when the DNA revolution started getting going, the conventional-wisdom went that we were born in Africa and that, 70000 BC or so, we left. A lineage close to the founding non-African lineages was brought, the "L3", which is commonest in northeast Africa. Around 2011 I started hearing of dissenters, like Dienekes. These mavericks proposed that humans had already left Africa long before, and that L3 was born in Arabia alongside M and N and then migrated to Africa. Adding to this is a drumbeat of modern genetics: Neander and Denisovan being cross-breedable; other examples of Arabian intrusion into Africa not least the Semitic Ethiopians; basal modern-human DNA found intruding into Neander / Denisovan genomes; and recently some modern human DNA in Iran. On this topic a hobbyist wrote and published a book last year - Bruce Fenton, The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution. Unfortunately the mainstream publishers didn't want it, and it ended up on the selfie route, like my stuff. Graham Hancock stuck a foreword on it but Hancock is... not highly regarded. Recently the geneticists Vicente M Cabrera, Julia Patricia, Marrero Rodriguez, Khaled K Abu-Amero, and Jose M Larruga have done some serious work: "Carriers of mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup L3 basic lineages migrated back to Africa from Asia around 70,000 years ago." I expect that this ends the argument in favour of Dienekes and Mr Fenton. Score one for Mr Hancock. We would then have to answer why L3 went "back home". Fenton thinks Toba. That's about as good a hypothesis as any other. Additionally, if L3 is Arabian and not the base population of M and N, I'm interested in what African cousin populations can be associated with the base population of L3-M-N together. Cabrera et al. points to L4. posted by Zimri on 15:32 | link | 0 comments Into ScandinaviaThe Solutrean toolkit allowed, at last, the settlement of Scandinavia. Something can now be said on how this was done. To that, the geneticists are looking at corpses from 7500 to 4000 BC - all prior to the Indo-European intrusion. These cadavers... don't much look like modern Scandinavians today. They also don't - even then - look much like each other. One set has a founding population from Holstein-area European hunters around 9700 BC. That founding population at 9700 BC implies that, after this, there wasn't much cross-breeding between that population and the rest of the Continent. The geneticists deduce that this population had, at that time, ceased to cross the Baltic - so there was, then, a barrier. Their fathers in Europe were already Conanlikes with dark skin and blue eyes (blue eyes, last I read, developed after Solutrea, but still before 10000 BC). They liked to fish, like all good Swedes. So far, as expected. Mostly. I question the century of the split, which looks late. I get that the Younger Dryas might have nuked whoever was in Scandinavia from - say - the Hamburg Culture. But what happened to the Ahrensburg Culture? Perhaps the Ahrensburg remained where it was - but bifurcated. 9700 BC coincides with the Yoldia Sea with a barrier between the Continent and the Scandinavian mainland. Here's the fun part! - this strait didn't separate Denmark from Sweden; but a Danish-Swedish peninsula, still in Europe, against central Sweden and some islands. There wasn't a lot of coastline on that northern mainland - it was icecap. Later on, the Yoldia closed off again and there was a Baltic lake (the "Ancylus"), not a sea anymore; until, finally, the new strait opened up at Denmark. To me it looks like the people this strait stranded north had, over centuries, become an ethnic group. Upon the lands' reunification, the people did not join in; the northerners defended their hunting ground and, perhaps, their lake from their estranged cousins back in the Continent. The piece reports that, implicitly after the Yoldia closure, another crew came to Scandinavia. These didn't come through the Baltic at all - they came from northern Russia. Here around 8300 BC they invented a new toolkit, an improvement over Solutrea for the Arctic and North Seas. Thence the easterners skirted the polar edge of the peninsula, ending up along coastal Norway. These were the fair-skinned Norse; eye colours, variable. We don't have the language for either of course. I don't think the latter were Finns or Lapps yet. Although they did take the Fenno-Lapp route. posted by Zimri on 13:00 | link | 0 comments Saturday, January 20, 2018So, on that 26th Amendment...Torygraph: adulthood begins at 24. I escaped the Mumandad Caliphate at the age of 23 - a fairly late 23. This was to an apartment, not far from the family palace. I wasn't lord of mine own manor until cinco-de-mayo three years after that. 24 is, honestly, pretty damn generous for Americans. I'd kick the suffrage to 26 here, except for veterans of course. Older for citizens of Yurop nations. Like maybe never. posted by Zimri on 21:57 | link | 0 comments Why the West gave the suffrage to womenDave from Indiana questions, on Twitter, why the Mountain West gave the vote to women first. He doubts it was to lure women over there. To be blunt, women hate it up here. Every map of male/female ratios by county I've seen have these mountain states totally rockin' the cock. Brokeback Mountain and Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding - an actual thing. For the chicks, I'd need to head on down to Louisiana and Mississippi. (Of course, I'd mostly be picking up black chicks, but...) For non-Denisovans and (now) non-Tibetans, high altitudes mean difficult pregnancies; for vain white women, the desert and ultraviolet mean a swift aging process. Historically women have come to the Rockies when their husbands and fathers dragged them here. Otherwise single women didn't come here - until economics lured them here. And by economics, in the period we're discussing which is the late nineteenth century, I mean whoring. So when Suffrage was first mooted, women in the West were generally tied to a nuclear family and, because they were isolated, they followed that family. Many others were prostitutes, also tied to a master. So giving the vote to these women did not challenge the patriarchy (the word applies, to cite Inara from Firefly). Suffrage did, however, bolster the relevant states' population-figures; and it raised their profile in the Electoral College and in the House of Representatives. posted by Zimri on 21:35 | link | 0 comments The Huns were wiped out from PannoniaOnce upon a time, a Pannonian Sea covered parts of central Europe, and it dried up and left behind a plain - the westernmost steppe in Eurasia. It is now a state called "Hungary". I don't know whence "the Hungaria" gets its name. The people there speak a Finno-Ugric language, closest to Mansi and Khanty I recall, and they call themselves Magyars. They do have a folk tradition that the Huns had been there as well, off those steppes to the east. So today you'll often find Magyars who've accepted the German name "Attila" by which one of the more famous Huns was addressed. Anyhoo, some graves in Pannonia have been exhumed. Tenth century AD. They are, indeed, steppe - a third central Asian (which they're saying is the purest "Xiongnu" like in Mulan, but I'd prefer the Hephthalites of "Late Antiquity"), two-thirds Ukraine ("Pontic Steppe"). They lived in the Ukraine for some time before getting up on their high horses. Men like this contributed to the Magyar genome as it exists today - but not many men; Hungarians are (much) more like Slovaks and Romanians than they are like Ukrainians. (UPDATE 8:30 PM MST: Razib (now) has more on that.) But I'm not really a mediaevalist so much as a Late Antique guy, so I'm more interested in how this finding can form a template for Pannonia under the Huns many centuries earlier. So - for what Huns were like, before Attila: I invoke If It Happened In 900 AD, It Happened In 400 AD. I submit that the fifth-century Hunnic language, if Attila ever spoke it (his own name is, again, German) was probably not Hungarian, either. The territory of the steppe from Ukraine on east circa 200 AD was Scythian (north Iranian, west edge: ancestor to Ossetic) - had been for thousands of years. Once the Huns got into Dacia I expect they'd have run into a lot of proto-Romanian Vlachs, Goths, Slavs, and maybe even the odd Gheg Albanian. To me it doesn't look like the Huns cared enough about Scythian to keep using that tongue, unless they just foisted, upon their new language, Scythian loanwords for horsework; like the Bronze-Age Mitanni came with Vedic when they slipped into the Hurrian palaces. Best I can tell, the Huns switched to Gothic. And when the Avars and Slavs drove off the Goths, they drove off the Huns with them. Those Huns who landed amongst Germans (once more, they shared a language) regaled their new hosts with tales of Etzel. I dimly recall that early mediaeval Germanic has some Iranian words and features in it. Some Estonian / Finnic for Baltic needs. Don't recall it's got any Mansi / Khanty / Magyar, any at all. The Pannonian plain wasn't easy to defend if you didn't have a cavalry. So when the first Magyars rode in, it's possible they booted out a complacent crew of Avars or Bulgars. Also possible they rode into an empty prairie because no Dark Age band wanted the hassle anymore. The local Germans, though, have always remembered Uncle Etzel. As the Magyars settled in and forgot the Urals, they adopted the Germans' memories of Attila as their own. Perhaps in part because the Magyars' khagans were, distantly, related to Attila . . . As for how and when the Mansi-Khanty speakers first got to Pannonia: I dunno. UPDATE: Originally posted 4:20 PM, but botched it. So, reposting to now, 8:30. posted by Zimri on 20:30 | link | 0 comments Opposing homosexuality is Current Year!Get with the times, brah. It's 2018. Nobody thinks homosexuality or other deviant behaviours are equal to a monogamous relationship with a different-sex spouse; that's soooo Clinton-era. At least, not in Russia. Unless you're saying that our culture is superior to Russian culture. But that's cultural chauvinism and, like, not okay. posted by Zimri on 20:22 | link | 0 comments Rotten Tomatoes' narrativeUsually 'movies opening this week' has five movies lined up, with the others off to be clicked - so you won't see 'em at the site, and won't watch 'em at the cinema. This weekend: two. They're I, Tonya and some movie for paedos excuse me, for LGBTQIAP+, Call Me By Your Name (about an under-18 boy). I got no complaints about I, Tonya. Angry Joe and his crew are right: it's an 8/10. And (to cite another youtuber, RLM) it's F@#$ You It's January, that time of year when high-revenue-projected movies are scarce on the ground. Still. As I look at movies opening, I see many that have 70% or higher, even among critics. 12 Strong (56%, war movie) and Phantom Thread (92%, period-drama romance) look like they'd belong on the top five in any other week. I have seen 12 Strong, by the way, yesterday afternoon; and I'd rank that a 7/10, easy. I have Conjectures on how it didn't make the top fi - er, two. Oh yes indeedy. posted by Zimri on 15:37 | link | 0 comments Locked arms against TrumpTrump has tweeted about Korea and Iran. Since then, I read that Korea is to field a united team at the Olympics, despite that Goguryeo remains a plantation state (and, by some definitions, a "shithole"). Iran had anti-Guardian demonstrations but those seem to be dead now. The Palestinians meanwhile are now less eager to join with the Israelis. It all reminds me of what NFL teams did in response to Trump's tweets against them. Maybe long-term there's a chess move that I haven't caught yet. In the meantime Israel Shamir raises another possibility. Shamir suggests that Trump's comments push moderates over toward his enemies, who - since Trump is our Tribune - are our enemies. So instead of bringing Goguryeo down, Trump is aligning the southern Koreans toward it; instead of improving the lot of secular Iranians, he is reinforcing the Islamist side of the 1979 revolution. Shamir as a reflexive Israel-hater and opponent of US moves overseas generally approves all these events, including the failure of Oslo; because (he thinks) they weaken the US abroad. Overall I scent that he's gloating. Which isn't to say Shamir's wrong on the facts. On the short term. posted by Zimri on 10:56 | link | 0 comments Friday, January 19, 2018Colorado's candidates for governorI've been getting spam from Doug Robinson on my Youtube, and recently I've got a prospective (Turnpike / 36) employer who supports Jared Polis. So it's time. One point I note is that, when a business sees growth under a given candidate, and puts real money down (i.e., bribes the process) it often signs on to the candidate's other positions, even if said positions do not affect that business directly. Sure, if a given candidate's policy promotes alcoholism or opiatism (if that be a word) or other such working-class pathologies, the business'll support immigration; if the policy lowers workers' salaries, ditto (more on the visa and outsourcing side, in my field). I expect all this. I don't - starting out - expect comments like "hey, Polis is going to make Colorado energy-independent as of 2040 through renewables!" because that is, by this thing called "physics", not scalable. By nuclear, sure. If Polis and his supporters aren't simply lying to voters, that's even scarier: the aim is to get just enough power to work the elites' own offices and the ski-slopes, with the rest of Colorado's servile workforce shivering in The Slums Of Aspen. And I care not if that employer reads this post. I found out about their endorsements when they made that public, so it is only fair that I make my views public as well. Moving on: the other guys. This post started with Doug Robinson. So: Robinson is a loser. His ad-spots are earnest and that is the problem. As a Tancredo Rightist, I already know I'm voting for some Republican or other. So I am looking at the identitarian voters - on the Left. Them'a the voters who say "what about the pandering to white nationalists" (As An Asian) or "they don't care about education" (As A Woman With A Master's). As commenter "To The Point" writes, earnest dialectic does not work. Identitarians will just dismiss your evidences out of hand because those evidences didn't come from their tribe. On topic of identitarians - I repeat that I like Tancredo, and enough agree with us that he has a real constituency; but Tancredo cannot win, so he should find a candidate to endorse. Of those on the October list I'd linked, treasurer Walker Stapleton and DA George Brauchler both look like real candidates. Stapleton has the more-professional webpage. Also I distrust "parental choice in education" from the latter. Usually that is code for vouchers, a loser in the Good Schools districts; and for charter schools, which tend toward the Little Red Schoolhouse model. Especially since State-level candidates don't have Common Core anymore as An Issue To Run On. On the other hand, Brauchler's twitter has a statement supporting the rule of law in immigration. Stapleton's site doesn't mention immigration at all! So I recommend that Walker Stapleton lift Tancredo's core issue, as Brauchler has already done. Before Tancredo sends his endorsement to someone who will. posted by Zimri on 09:10 | link | 0 comments |
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