Tom Hollard made a convincing argument that Islam didn't exist per se till the Ummmayad caliphate, when the need to give better structure to the Arab Empire made it more important to differentiate between what Muslims believe and what Jews and Christians believe.

I think we should make sure that our secret service agents are graceful in their movements and not clumsy. It might be safer that way.

Shazbot, the American and Canadian governments didn't want to take the survivors because many Americans and Canadians saw the Jews as being too Red because they were Jewish. British Prime Minster Clement Atlee thought that the Jews should rebuild their lives in their home countries, who didn't want the Jews anyway and tended to greet returning survivors with pogroms. Stalin was actively planning to deport the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union to labor camps in Siberia but luckily died before it could be implemented.

I think its also too much of a mistake to associate the creation of Israel too closely with the Holocaust. The movement for a Jewish state started in 1881-82, with the Bilu Settlers and the formation of the Hovevei Zion. By 1939, there were already 450,000 Jews in Eretz Israel. This rose to 600,000 by the end of WWII. The Holocaust gave new meaning to the movement but the push was already there.

The Khazar Kingdon wasn't in Turkey, it was in the area South of the Don River and north of what he now call Georgia the Country. Historians debate the extent that the Khazars became Jewish. Some thing it was only the elite who became Jews, others the entire masses.

I think genetic studies revealed that 40% of all Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of four women who lived a thousand or so years ago. The same studies show that most Jews are basically cousins on a genetic level. An Eastern European Jew and a Yemeni Jew have more genetically in common with each other than their neighbors. The closest non-Jewish genetic cousins are the Levantine Arabs, Greeks, and Southern Italians.

There were various different proposals for where to build a Jewish state. This including setting up some farm colonies in Argentina by the JCA, the Jewish Colonization Association but most Jewish immigrants to Argentina settled in Buenos Aires. The British proposed giving the Zionist Movement part of Uganda for settlement in 1904 but this ended up being a fiasco because nobody wanted it.

Eretz Israel was always the primary focus of the Jewish National Movement because it was the most logical place. It had more emotional pull than any other alternative. It was also the most logical focus for Jewish nationalism since its place where nearly every Jew could relate to.

I differentiate intelligence and intellectualism. Intelligence is the ability to analyze the situation, think strategically, etc. Intellectualism is thinking abstractly about different subjects like justice, romance, and art. A lot of intelligent people aren't necessarily intellectuals.

This pretty much reflects my isssues with fan-fiction. A lot of fan-fiction writers aren't exactly the world's best thinkers when it comes to what is necessary for writing fiction. Even some really bad authors think a lot more about the implications of nano-machines or whatever than a lot of fan fiction writers. This means that fan-fiction authors tend towards using somebody else's ideas to fuel their fantasies. There is nothing wrong with that in a moral sense but I wish that people would put more effort into creating their own fiction rather than relying on work laid down by others.

I also tend to be something of a canonists when it comes to literature. A lot of fan-fiction involves fans correcting "mistakes" made by the author. Usually this comes down to fans being match-makers and changing the canonical romantic relationships. I'm not really fond of this, people do not have to like the choices an author makes but it takes a certain amount of unpalitible arrogance to correct an author's mistakes.*

*This is more true when a work as one authors and is more or less limited in scope. I make something of an exception for long-term collaborative projects, i.e. comic books. There its a bit more reasonable for fans to complain about author's messing up relationships becase the multiple-authorship means that nobody's vision is being violated.

I prefer to see myself more as an archipelago.

And what would should the Jews have done? Stay in Europe and be slaughtered by the Far Right and Far Left? Go to the Americas when the United States, Canada, and other countries were putting up immigration quotas at the worst possible time? You aren't exactly providing us with viable alternatives. Or maybe you think that Jews alone of the persecuted groups should just take their beatings and be quiety about it.

Furthermore, if you think that the Jews of the Middle East would have been incorporated into the polities of the Middle East if Israel did not exist than you are a moron. Its not like the other minorities of the Middle East are being successfully incorporated into the various states. The Jews would have been just one more minority for the majority to persecute and the Juan Coles of the world would ignore it.

Also, if the reaction if the Arabs really only hated Zionism and not the Jews per se than why did they go off the deep end into the deepest conspiratoral forms of anti-Semitism? Article after article, book after book, lesson after lesson, and sermon afte sermon shows deep hatred of Jews in Muslim-majority countries. Do you think that they might be serious? Its not like they are exactly shy about it.

The fact that people like Digby continually ignore or find justifications for the vast amounts of Jew-hatred in the Muslims world from the end of WWII to the present among other things. I can go on a truly long rant about this but I think that a lot of people who are otherwise very good at identifying hatred and racism are horrible when it comes to Jew-hatred.

I'd be much more impressed with the people who feel tremendous empathy for the dispossessed if they were capable of feeling even a slight percentage of that empathy towards Jews when we need help. We always get lectured about how we should feel so much empathy because of our horrible history but when bad things happen to us and we need help than we get abandoned. Its worse when our persecutors are not white, than people actively find excuses for them.

I never thought that George W. Bush was dumb. Incurious and not prone to question himself or his beliefs, yes. Dumb, no. He knew what he wanted and thought strategically about how to achieve it. He often succeeded in getting what he wanted. That requires intelligence.

Why do you want to make life hard for urinologists?

Oh damn it your right, I forgot about the income tax. Thats an important but not necessary one to keep since I don't think that an amendment really was necessary to give Congress the ability to tax income but for the Supreme Court being political and stupid. I think that most post-New Deal Supreme Courts, even very conservative ones, are going to find that Congress can tax income without an amendment.

Before the 16th Amendment pased, most of the Federal government was funded by excise taxes on alcohol. I'm assume that it will be similar if the income tax were to disappear. We might get tolls on interstates and taxes on internet porn.

I'm not a libertarian and I don't think that the "Protestant Work Ethic" is exactly foundational for libertarianism as I understand it. However, man of the less philosophically-inclined libertarians*, that is those who treat libertarianism as holy writ, do have a tendency to rant a bit about moochers when it comes to talking about social safety net programs. You see this more in the people who derive their libertarianism from fiction rather than intellectual trestises. From this you get an impression that one reason why libertarians think that the welfare state is bad is because it provides goods and services "unearned" to people who didn't work for them. These libertarians might recoil with some kind of horror at the post-scarcity future.

To use the obvious example, Ayn Rand and her fans often get into long rants about moochers and takers. It might be better to rephrase Jason's questions in terms of Objectivists rather than Libertarians becausee even though they are offically atheist, Objectivists do have a "Protestant Work Ethic".

*Another way of putting this might be people who are libertarian without thinking too much about it.

Do you have any evidence that the old system giving the states more of a say
beyond Southern Senators defending slavery or Jim Crow. The good senators always acted as super Representatives. The bad ones as representatives for the corporations. People wanted direct election for a reason.

I think the obvious reason why things had to stop there was that Neil Stephenson and a book to write and couldn't think about the full implicatiosn of nano-machines without hitting writer's block.

I realize this, my question is was more general. A lot of people are devoted to both the Electoral College and indirect election of Senators. They feel that the direct election of Senators was a big mistake and that abolishing the Electoral College and having direct election of the Senate was even worse. My problem is that neither the Electoral College or indirect election of Senators worked even close to as envisioned.

The people who wrote the Constitution believed that the states would elect Electors and that the Electors would decide who would be the best person for President amongst themselves. It didn't turn out this way from the first real contested election, which gave us our current system of Electors just nominating who ever got the most votes in their states. The indirect election of Senators never worked as envisioned either. So why the devotion?

Isn't this kind of the scenario in the Diamond Age where nano-machines could provide things cheap, practically free? The solution in the Diamond Age was that there was a base minimal life that everybody was entitled to but if you wanted more you needed to work. This solution should be acceptable to nearly everybody except the harshest reactionaries.

Why? When the States legislatures elected Senators, the election was very prone to corruption and you usually ended up with Senators who represented corporate interests rather than states. Direct election of Senators isn't necessarily much of an improvement but at least it helps a little.

I'd keep the First Amendement because it creates one of the necessities of our democracy. I'd keep the 5th and the 14th to protect people's rights and ensure at least theoretical equal justice under the law. I'd also keep the 13th Amendment and one the giving women the right to vote because we have too many reactionaries and I want guarantees against slavery and for female sufferage/equality.

Burt, I agree with you that there should be something resembling a public culture so that we can have a commonality of identity and that its bad when too many people and groups isolate themselves from the public culture. My issue is that whether its really popular to have a true mass culture anymore because of the diversity of our society and becasue of technology. Even without getting into the intricacies of race and religion, most Western societies are incredibly diverse in their tates. You have the various nerd fandoms like anime, comic book, and video games fans, and more. You have the fans of Mad Men and other premium TV television shows. You have opera fans and pop fans, etc. Modern technology allows each access to their own cultural preferences more than in previous times. During the Golden Age of American mass culture (roughly from the 1890s to the Vietnam War), people with different tastes where forced into niches with limited access to thier forms of entertainment. This isn't the case anymore.

How do you determine what should be common knowledge and what should be part of the mass culture canon? What should people be expected to know. I'm a dork and really don't like a lot of pop culture but I still try to know whats kind of popular. I've been shocked at people who are much more mainstream than I am being unaware of things like who Pink Floyd are. I wouldn't expect people to know eveything about Pink Floyd but the Wall made enough of a cultural impact that I'd expect them to know it, especially since they knew who the Talking Heads were.

Some of my lawyer friends and I occasionally try to come up with polygamy laws as an intellectual exercise. We can't think of any legislation that is both equitable and workable. The real problem comes with the dissolution of marriage and the resulting division of property and custody battles. Determining if their any limits is also a problem.

With Eddie Murphy's voice? I don't think so.