I'm just saying -- again and again

So I have been trying to learn Arabic because there are Arabic versions of Samaritan scripture -- in fact, originally they used Saadiah Gaon's version but it didn't track with the differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah, so now there are at least two standard Arabic versions, both of which I found in a hardcopy edition.

Back to my sheep. I am finding the same problems in Arabic grammars that I found in grammars of Classical Greek. 

And I have to think that part of the problem with learning languages is that the grammarians who published either are lazy and copied from their sources without critical thinking -- which I'm sure is true with Classical Greek -- or they couldn't get published if they told the truth about the language.

And so while some grammars admit that Arabic is aspectual, like ancient Semitic languages and Slavic languages, most of them keep talking about past tense. Even James Price is guilty of it. No wonder the people he tried to work with, fresh off supposedly studying Arabic in college, were illiterate in Arabic.

So if you take Arabic and the instructor talks tense, drop the course and tell the department why you did it.

What's worse, Latin labels like "jussive" and "subjunctive" have been slapped on Arabic verb forms, when they have other functions. 

The laziness comes out in discussions of I'rab. Because it involves nouns that change their endings in certain circumstances, too many grammars call it declension. It's not. If your Arabic instructor talks declension, drop the course and tell the department why.

What's more, if your instructor calls Nasb "accusative", drop the course and tell the department why. Nasb has absorbed pretty much any usage in Arabic that Jarr does not work for. Some of these functions are instrumental in other languages, or comitative, or get the label dative slapped on them. Plus also drop the course if your instructor calls Jarr "genitive". 

It's like what I said on my fact-checking thread about Yale Divinity School; they're grading people on how well they memorize something that is false from the ground up, and has been since the first publication in the field.

Your Arabic instructors are grading you on something they don't even know how to teach properly.

I'm not ready to start a thread on this, I don't know enough. What I do know, is that you have to learn a language as a thing in itself, instead of as a half-assed version of something else.

I'm just saying....

Sooo history -- Cuban Missile Crisis and Ukraine

So last night I watched a movie on Youtube thinking, I know from the title what this is about, there have been other movies about it so how could they possibly find a new take?

Well.

They did a beautiful job of picking what events to show and interleaving them to intensify the message, which is something I'm familiar with from oral traditions studies. And what is it I keep saying? Film is oral literature. So a little about that and then on to the REAL history lesson.

The film has three (!) repeating themes. One is what is going on at the White House, of course, and the three (!) main characters involved. The second is how sidebar events ratcheted up the tension. The best example is, we're in the middle of a nuclear crisis and the AEC picks this moment to test a thermonuclear warhead. The WH was still keeping the crisis under wraps but it points out that unless you know everything people have on their schedules, this kind of thing will happen. 

The third theme gets me to my history lesson. The Pentagon kept pushing Kennedy to make a first strike. It was in the Rules of Engagement. Every last one of them knew that nukes were involved, but they had what I call "nuclear psychosis". They believed whoever has the most nukes wins. That's bullshit. Nobody survives a nuclear war. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCTKcd2Ko98

Kennedy issued an order that NOBODY was to fire off ANYTHING without his explicit order. So when the ship sent to deal with the Grozny cleared tubes by firing star-shells, that was a standard practice and the guy who allowed it got his ass chewed out by McNamara because it could have been mistaken for an attack.

During the movie there is a scene where Kennedy says he read The Guns of August, published that same year, by Barbara Tuchman. And she pointed out that WWI would never have gotten started except that every last government involved operated by their Rules of Engagement. Some years after her book, the BBC series Upstairs Downstairs had a character discussing the 1914 events with "Richard Bellamy" who explains that once the Central Powers declared war on Russia, its allies had to "behave like gentlemen" and meet their treaty obligations. It's another way of saying the same thing. If you don't put your brain in and use it, but follow some old plan, you could be heading for disaster.

Why?

Because every RoE in the world has "lessons learned" from the LAST conflict. And that conflict always involved the weapons OF THOSE TIMES. When the new crisis occurs, technology has moved on. And in this case, everybody involved had nukes, which was not true at the end of WWII. And like I said, the Pentagon had nuclear psychosis.

So Kennedy rewrote the rules based on, I must point out, the work of a woman writer.

How does that involve Ukraine?

As soon as the Russians started digging trenches, I said, that's WWI thinking. WWII showed that an air war trumps trenches every time. So Putin wasn't even using an RoE with lessons learned, his brain was back in 1914. And the drones of Ukraine have been racking up body counts of over a thousand Russian troops (whatever their real nationality) EVERY SINGLE DAY for at least a year and a half. Now Russia has had some 900,000 combat deaths, and up to 500,000 more from causes like rotten logistics.

Which was also what made Russia so unsuccessful in WWI.

No lessons learned. Russian strategy doesn't even qualify as RoE.

Poland and UK leaders also are not using an RoE. I have seen posts where each of them talked "boots on the ground". It's like they're not even reading reports on the Russian deaths in Ukraine. 

It also shows they are lousy managers. When you have a crisis and the boss just throws bodies at it, that is a lousy manager. It never works. You have to analyze the crisis and look for the smart fit or things blow up in your face.

Like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Guns of August is on Internet Archive to borrow free with an account.

https://archive.org/details/gunsofaugust0000unse_m6s1

Youtube has a film version which is not on Internet Archive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4zPg5Kv_ug

The British series The Great War is on Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/the-great-war-1964

Youtube also has the Fall of Eagles mini-series, named for the fact that the three Continental powers all had eagles in their crests and each of those governments was swept away.

Frank Herbert Simonds published a five-volume history of the war. Its table of contents is strangely reminiscent of the one in Winston Churchill's six-volume history of WWII. Simonds' work is here.

https://archive.org/details/history-of-the-world-war-volume-3/History%20of%20the%20World%20War%20Volume%201/

Churchill's work is here.

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarga0001wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarth0002wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwargr0003wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarhi0004wins

https://archive.org/details/secondworldwarvo0055wins/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.536497/page/n3/mode/2up

Somewhere about the middle of the movie, either Jack or Bobby says something that sounds as if they think that the Pentagon's behavior was an attempt at a military coup. They used that actual word in the script. It explained to me perfectly well why the Kennedys promoted the making of Seven Days in May by John Frankenheimer and Burt Lancaster, about an utterly fictional coup attempt.

Which is available on Internet Archive free without ads. I'd post the link but IA is having gateway problems now. If you really want it, check back with me later because I wrote a review and I can find the link quickly by going through my reviews. I think Youtube has it free with ads.

What's important about that scene in Thirteen Days, is that it's repeated at the end where they think Khrushchev has been overthrown in a coup because the back-to-back messages do not match stylistically. Another feature of oral literature is having two episodes about the same issue, looking at it from different angles. It's all over the Tanakh.

I love tightly crafted movies like this. Lancaster's Lawman is another and it's full of things I recognize from my oral literature studies.

OK I've taken up way too much of your time, I can't help it when I write about some of my favorite things. You have a lot of reading to do.

Why Fallacies are False -- 25, summary

I realize a lot of people didn’t stay with this thread this long. I know that some people stopped reading when it turned out I wasn’t doing the funny stuff, I was doing the hard stuff. I know that some people stopped reading when I kicked down the doors of their echo chambers in one way or another.

The same thing happened with my other threads: people stopped reading when they had their favorite urban legends busted.

If you got this far, you now have to think what you’re going to do with the info. You don’t need to use it. I have a case study. There’s a guy who wrote a book called How to Win Every Argument. I never read it, but I read his posts on social media. Don’t read the book. He couldn’t win any arguments. He committed too many fallacies, especially sampling bias. He lived in an echo chamber. Replies to his posts from outside the echo chamber called him out. He can’t win arguments with any of them.

I’d like to offer a chance for you to submit examples you come across, and tell you what’s wrong with them, but the problem of quoting out of context is so prevalent and injurious that I don’t want to go there. OK, I’m retired, but I have a full slate of projects and I’d rather turn you all down now than have one of you submit something just when I start a big project.

I’m going to stop here. There are dozens of fallacies, and you can find illustrations of most of them if you’re willing to study carefully so that you know the difference between them. Use Gary Curtis’ website; he is all about posting contemporary examples of fallacious claims and why they’re false. But again, he’s into the hard stuff.

And learn enough so that when you point out a fallacy, and somebody says that’s just wordplay, you can show them the set theory or the probability calculation that says there’s an objective reason why they’re wrong.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Don’t forget to pick your coats up in the lobby.

 

My posts on fallacies:

Quoting out of context:

            http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2015/05/fact-checking-torah-quoting-out-of.html

            http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2015/05/fact-checking-torah-forgetting-your.html

            https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2021/06/fact-checking-torah-quoting-out-of.html

Weak analogy:

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/06/fact-checking-torah-weak-analogy.html

            https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/06/fact-checking-torah-numbers-222-to-2425.html

False argument from silence:

            https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/06/fact-checking-torah-realistic.html

Ambiguity: https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/05/fact-checking-torah-explaining.html

Redefinition: https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/05/fact-checking-torah-redefinition-fallacy.html

Sampling bias: https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/06/fact-checking-torah-and-sampling-bias.html

Texas Sharpshooter: https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/02/fact-checking-torah-whybray.html

Interpretationism: https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/10/fact-checking-torah-new-fallacy.html

Knitting: another guy who knits -- faster than I do anyway

I was goofing around looking for things to watch while I finished a sock and came across this video, 10 ways to speed up your knitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezoSvVsq9dw

Do they work?

1. Flicking. Haven't tried this but Continental hold does work a little faster than English. Notice he does not use the Norwegian hold that Arne and Carlos teach, his left index finger is too far off the needle.

2. Metal needles. I've always used them. They are not recommended for silk because it's so slippery anyway.

3. Bunch the stitches toward your working needle. Well, yeah, it's faster if you don't have to pull the new stitch from the middle of the needle and bunching the stitches lets you keep more even tension on your working yarn.

4. Use the fingers on your non-working needle to push stitches toward the working needle. Actually, I use those fingers to stabilize the stitch I'm working on, especially with the pencil hold, which is a fast way of knitting anyway.

5. Tension. There's two problems with tension, one which the video discusses, having stitches too tight to get your working needle into. The other is it wears out your fingers faster. Don't take three loops of yarn on your index finger; you'll cut off your circulation. Take a loose loop around your little finger. The friction will be enough to keep the tension even.

6. Knit close to the tip. This goes with (3) above, if you're bunching your stitches they will be close to your working needle.

7. Tension. I just talked about this in (5).

8. Don't freeze the hand on the non-working needle. If you're doing all of the above, this is impossible.

9. Slow motion is something you will naturally do when you knit for the first time ever or when you use a new style or pattern. 

10. Posture. I read once that a lady in the Fair Isles knitted a special order sweater in 48 hours. So you know she was ignoring recommendations to take breaks. But she also had a gimmick: a knitting belt. The belt holds one needle steady and the working needle sort of dances around it. Invented so that the knitter can work with one hand and stir the dinner stew with the other, these belts are available online.

https://ysolda.com/blogs/journal/knitting-belts?srsltid=AfmBOopbexT823e8RrKGiz6-FOMYxImZgOk8DaM2Ukw59xAyJJCUwjBE

My knitting speed recommendations are:

1. Knit in the round, using steeking if possible. What makes it faster is you don't have to sew seams at the end. It also lets you maintain an even tension because you're almost always knitting, not switching back and forth between knitting and purling.

2. Norwegian version of the Continental Hold. The Continental Hold works for both knitting and purling and the Norwegian hold with the index finger always on the needle lets you do things like pushing the stitches toward the point so you can flick them. I don't know why, but I find YOs in lace and brioche easier to do with the Continental Hold.

3. Irish cottage or pencil hold for English knitting. Besides being faster than the knife hold, it goes even faster if you DON'T look at your work. This is great for mono-color knitting because you can watch videos to keep from getting bored by the sameness of the color, and at the same time get through the knitting quicker.

Sooo history -- pharaonic DNA

I've been doing a lot of DNA research recently for a bunch of reasons, and at last I started looking up the pharaohs. What I found was a population transition between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom.

Thutmose III was the father of the line leading to Tutankhamun. We don't have data on Thutmose III, but his successors (who might not have been his descendants, we don't have the data one way or the other) had the R1b Y chromosome subclade (including R1b-M269). R1b is the Siberian subclade which migrated into Anatolia and appears in the Mycenaeans like Agamemnon from the Iliad. It distinguishes them from the Minoans who had the Neolithic J1/J2 subclades. It also distinguishes them from the Chechens of the Caucasus, who have J1 and J2. 

The M269 subclade accompanied diffusion of Indo-European languages across the Middle East and into Europe, but you can't call these pharaohs Indo-Europeans. The R haplogroup originated in the Paleolithic and R1b originated over 10,000 years ago. The real Indo-Europeans originated just over 6,000 years ago. Showing a genetic relationship is not the same thing as ethnic identity.

And ethnic identity involves language. The R1b ancestors of Tutankhamun wholly adopted the native Egyptian language, just like the Hyksos did. Studies of changes in the language like Stauder and Allen ignore influences on Egyptian from Anatolia; scholars of ancient Egyptian are wholly absorbed into the Arabicist/Semitic camp. But it ought to be there. It would be analogous to the way Akkadian changed during Gutian hegemony (the Gutians were the ancestors of the Indo-European Tocharians), losing its gutturals for one thing, such that the scholars convened by Utu-Hengel could not understand the grammar of city king lists compiled under Naram-Sin and his predecessors. Jacobson writes about the evidence of the problem.

UNLESS. Evidence that Middle Kingdom Egyptian had two- and three-letter verbal roots might coordinate with my observations of the true -mi verbs in Classical Greek, which have high-frequency meanings and from that alone, stand to be the oldest verbs. And so eimi, "be", is just a baby step away from Hebrew hayah with the same meaning. Greek didomi, "give", may have affinities with Hebrew titen. Greek oida, found in the Iliad and lately admitted to the ranks of -mi verbs, is a cognate of Hebrew yada. 

My study of Classical Greek rejects tenses in the verb system in favor of aspect. Alan Gardiner's grammar of Egyptian from 1927 describes the language as using imperfective and perfective, although he can't help himself and calls them tenses instead of aspects. (I downloaded his book from Internet Archive and need to go through it in depth.) Hurrian, an Anatolian language, exhibits aspect; it is also ergative and in case you didn't read my Greek thread, there are ergative structures in Thucydides, Xenophon and Herodotus. Ergativity is another subject that neither Gardiner nor the Arabicists would think of discussing, but it would show up as another influence from Anatolia.

The mothers of this line also had DNA primarily found in Europe: Amenhotep III had H2b, associated with the Caucasian Yamna culture which seems to be the ancestor of the NE Anatolian peoples. The others had K, a haplogroup the descendants of which show up in Lola's people from Denmark. Neither H nor K are associated with Arabic peoples and it is hardly likely they would produce a Semitic influence on the Egyptian of the Middle Kingdom -- let alone the substrate in the Old Kingdom.

Before Tutankhamen comes the Hyksos takeover of northern Egypt, while the predecessors of Ahmose who chased them out, still ruled from Memphis south. As Semitic Canaanites, the Hyksos would have had the J1/J2 Neolithic farmer subclades still found in some Lebanese. The "native" Egyptians did not impose some kind of iron curtain; they bought wheat from the Delta to feed pigs. But it's hard to imagine the priests and nobles engaging in trade. The evidence of literate commoners begins with about the 600s BCE with the development of demotic, not in the Middle Kingdom, so traders aren't going to influence Middle Kingdom language much -- and the Old Kingdom not at all. The Semiticists among scholars of ancient Egyptian look more and more wrong.

And then another turnabout. The Ramessids had subclades from the E Y-chromosome haplogroup. This developed in northeastern Africa. It persists among Copts and in Christian Palestinians, suggesting that the latter originated from Coptic Christians. (Muslim Palestinians have the J1/J2 subclades.)

Specifically, the New Kingdom pharaohs had E-M96, a subclade associated with Bantu expansion to the northeast. And again, nobody who examines pre-Greek Egyptian looks at Bantu languages for influence. The best known Bantu language, Swahili, is aspectual.

As for their mothers, the mtDNA of Ramses II is H1b1b1, while Ramses III has E1b1a. Ramses II descended, once again, from the Pontic steppes, while the mother of Ramses III was pure African.

So once again, scholars can only build on what their sources say -- but those sources may be prejudiced or outdated -- or ignored by scholars who are pipelined, which has been a serious problem for centuries. Before we learned that humans originated in Africa, who would ever have studied the Bantu languages seriously -- and who is studying them seriously now? 

The wheel keeps turning. What we thought we knew must forever be re-examined in the light of what we learn, to correct misconceptions. 

Why Fallacies are False -- 24, your mission....

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to know how to run a discussion with somebody who backs conspiracy theories, uses fallacies, or relies on bad sources.

It starts like a fight in a movie. The hero always lets the villain take the first swing. It lets her see what the bad guy has going for him. Let the other guy make his statement.

It proceeds like a court case. Whoever starts the case has to prove they’re right. The prosecution bears the burden of proof in a criminal case; the claimant bears the burden of proof in a non-criminal case. Keep asking “How do you know?” Point out every fallacy the other person uses.

Have a dictionary on speed dial. Remember when I talked about the redefinition fallacy? Along with strawman arguments and red herrings, redefinition is a favorite way to slip past you in an argument. Don’t fall for it. Show the dictionary entry. Ask "which of these definitions is the one you want to use?" When you get the answer "none of them", then say, "then we can't define it that way. Pick another word."

Maybe you have a whiteboard handy. Write down each statement in the claim, making the claimant dictate the exact wording so you’re not making a strawman argument against them. Write the name of the fallacy, like Texas Sharpshooter, next to it, or the name of the data source.

With a data source, make the claimant give you the exact wording it used and, if that doesn’t prove that the claimant misrepresented it, such as quoting out of context, show that it’s unreliable in one way or another, such as appealing to misleading authority. Provide your countervailing sources.

Draw a line through every statement as you debunk it.

At some point, whoever you’re talking with might get frustrated and challenge you to prove the negative. Your answer is, “You started this, you have to prove it, I don’t have to prove anything.”

At some point, whoever you’re talking with might complain, “But you’re rejecting all my arguments.” Your answer is, “I told you why I rejected them. Go find different arguments.” This is usually impossible because the claimant has no real depth in the subject, but is only repeating things other people have said.

At some point, if the other person mutters, “I can’t talk to you,” your answer is, “You can talk to me all day long, but you’ll never convince me of anything as long as you use fallacies or unreliable information.” (They may be more explicit: “Don’t be such a tight-ass.” Your answer is, “That’s an ad hominem argument. Name-callers always lose.”)

I had one person say to me, “I didn’t mean for this to be a debate.” Your answer is, “You expected me to agree with everything you said. Well, I don’t, and it would have been a lie to stand here and let you think I agreed.”

I got a comment on my blog from somebody who was excited about Egyptian archaeology, but who never read what I posted. I said more than once on my blog, you have to use post-1995 archaeological data because it has revolutionized our understanding of Mediterranean cultures. The commenter recommended a book to me – that was published in 1930, before we knew that humans originated in Africa, before we knew about radiocarbon, before we knew what DNA did let alone started the Human Genome Project. People who get excited about a subject, are not necessarily people who study it in depth or keep up with the latest information. You have to study in depth or keep up with the latest info and show them that they are using debunked or superficial data.

Never assume that somebody who starts a debate with you, knows who you are and what your expertise is. Usually they won’t, and they won’t ask. And even if you say you’re an expert, they’ll probably run right on ahead with what they were going to say anyway. Keep questioning what they say, keep feeding them bits of information out of your own expertise. At the point where they admit they don’t understand what you’re saying, they also admit that they didn’t know what they were talking about in the first place. Been there, done that.

It can, however, go to extremes. Somebody who knows about my debunking blog nevertheless went ahead and tried to teach me something about the Bible. And got terribly upset when I told them they were teaching their grandmother to suck eggs. You’ll see what I mean if you read my debunking thread.

People will bring up old discussions again and again. My debunking thread got started because of an Internet discussion group, where the same questions got posted more than once. Sometimes the same person posted the question more than once. People forget what you told them; sometimes they even forget they asked. But sometimes they come across a new piece of information. Unless they have learned how to evaluate sources in the meantime, it will probably be just as bad as any source they used before. Debunk it.

Lots of people are one-issue wonders. They ignore that nothing exists in a vacuum. When JAMA recently posted a questionable paper on fluoridation they properly attached it to an introduction saying they were just trying not to exclude information. The fact is the review of the literature which they posted:

a/ admitted that 2/3 of its sources were likely to be biased, that is, they were not performing proper clinical studies, they were performing advocacy research;

b/ failed to address malnutrition which can result from bad teeth and affects learning and intelligence; 

c/ failed to assess the likelihood that two Chinese studies showed the effects of lead and mercury release into the atmosphere through coal-burning;

d/ failed to show that the IQ tests used were equivalent, never mind that IQ tests are tests of acculturation, not actual intelligence.

And in fact less than 2 IQ points were gained on a scale that goes from 60 to 120. Are you willing to risk malnutrition for your children for 2 IQ points?

This is why you can’t just be an in-depth expert on a subject: that is pipelining and how many times have I slammed that in the last few months? 

You have to drag in those side issues, because the person who is stating a false case to you never will. It looks bad for their argument. For example, tooth decay causes inflammation and this is a promoter of cardiovascular disease. So not only does eliminating fluoridation promote that worldwide deadly scourge malnutrition, it also promotes fatal heart conditions. To gain less than 2 IQ points.

It took me half an hour of Internet research to come up with scientific papers documenting the side issues that invalidate the anti-fluoridation paper. But because I understand fallacies and have fifty years of combatting them behind me, I had the nasty suspicious mind that looked into those side issues.

You’ve only got a hundred years to live. See what you can do.