Yawrehto

Fun fact about World War II Albania: pretty much uniquely, especially in the region (Yugoslavia had a death rate of over 80 percent, with some regions having death rates closer to 90 percent[1][2][3]) they came out of it with more Jews than they started with.

[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-los...

[2] Technically Montenegro had a death rate of 93 percent, but in practice that was 28 out of 30 Jews, so I'm not counting them.

[3] Long digression: That was not the worst, by the way. The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them, and killed many of the survivors who tried to return home. A quick estimate, putting Poland's death rate at even 80% and 3 million Jews, means that if you said 'death rate for Europe except for Poland', i.e., pretending Poland wasn't in Europe, the overall death rate drops to 40%. Without that, i.e., including Poland, it is at 66%. All six death camps were located in Poland. They were 10% Jewish before the war and roughly 0.02% of it today even by generous estimates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country#B...). By literally any measure--even the most generous possible for Poland and least generous for others--all three of their total population (10,000), percent of the world Jewish population (0.048) and numbers per million Poles (267) are lower (or equal to) than those for such famously Jewish countries as Panama, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, or Mexico. If you're ever told you're going to be teleported to some German-occupied country in World War Two as a Jew, don't pick Poland.

Comment · 1 year ago

By the way, of students who have heard of ChatGPT, 32 percent have used it.

But more importantly, this feels like a broad thing. There's a huge difference between 'hey I have to write a paper on the Roman economy, what are some sources about that' and 'write a paper about the Roman economy'. Similarly a difference between 'crap, what's the formula for the volume of a sphere' and 'calculate the volume of a sphere with diameter 12 feet'. Personally I would rank the 'cheatiness', from less to more, as sources < formula < writing a paper/calculating.

This whole study feels like it hinges on what students consider 'help', since it was self-reported. If you try to get it to help but it only turned up sources you knew, does that count as helping? If you tried but it spat out an awful paper and you got a really bad score, does that count as helping? If you wound up having to spend more time correcting its output than you would've just writing the paper, does that count as helping? It's just so variable depending on individual standards the study feels kind of worthless as an actual indicator of stuff.

Comment · 1 year ago

Until last year, when it broke, I had a Dell that seems to be from 2012 (Latitude E5530, but I might have gotten one of the numbers wrong), albeit refurbished and with more RAM. It was bulky and didn't have a lot of RAM (half as much as my current laptop), but it had its advantages over my current, newer, laptop, like feeling sturdier and more secure (my current laptop has a little grate over what looks like part of the motherboard, which feels weird; doesn't that make it super easy for stuff to get in?), a DVD drive, and that beautiful middle-click button, which also makes it easier to figure out the dividing line between left and right click.

Comment · 1 year ago

Another bonus to World War II intelligence efforts was the relatively high number of German-speaking American Jews, some refugees from Nazi Germany, who had both the linguistic ability and motive to help. Second and third generation Japanese Americans, eager to prove their patriotism, also helped, as did the famous Navajo (and at least one other less famous tribe, I believe it was the Comanche) Code Talkers.

The bureaucratic nature of the military did lead to misclassifications, though. For instance, my great-grandfather, a German-Jewish refugee whose first language was German, was originally assigned to fight in Japan; he wound up interrogating German captives, presumably more helpfully.

Comment · 1 year ago

Oh yes, how did I forget about that?

Comment · 1 year ago

Because Democrats continue to play by 'the rules', which only works if everyone else does. And Republicans don't.

Quite frankly, this is starting to remind me of the lead-up to the civil war.

Comment · 1 year ago

Why is my brain blanking on all possible puns about TikTok's time running out?

Anyway, this feels early. Especially in California; they're banning four and a half hours before they need to, and I assume it's even earlier in Alaska and Hawaii. Even here in the East Coast they banned an hour and a half before it was needed.

Comment · 1 year ago

There are different types of merge.

There's the 'look at it! It just makes sense!' type. There's the 'we wanted to do this thing but you're already doing it' merge. There's the 'let's be a monopoly!' merge, and its sibling, 'you are getting in the way of my aspirations to be a monopoly' merge. There's the quiet merge to deal with debts, the making-it-formal-but-functionally-we-were-already-merged, the hey-that-collaboration-went-well merge, and many more.

And then there's this merge.

Comment · 1 year ago

>fabrication

Electronic Intifada as a source: The EI is...quite the source. It has argued Hamas is akin to the ANC of South Africa,[1] quietly ignoring that the ANC did and does not do many of the horrific atrocities Hamas commits against its own citizens[2] (let alone Israeli citizens), glorifying Hassan Nasrallah[3], declaring without evidence that Israel is not a nation that is deeply traumatized (the majority of its citizens having been genocided for 2,000+ years) and also evidently not knowing the first thing about epigenetics[4], advocating against posters that simply state that people have been kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza and declaring such a thing to have 'genocidal sentiment'[5], defending and glorifying October 7 at least five times[6] and even referring to Hamas soldiers killed because...um...they were soldiers attacking civilians as martyrs[7], arguing Zionism--a Jewish idea from the start--is rooted in antisemitism, showing a drastic misunderstanding of what that implies (that a Jewish state is needed because the world simply cannot be trusted with Jewish safety)[8], do something effectively equivalent to asking the general US population what counts as transphobia or racism or Islamophobia, rather than the trans, Black, and Muslim communities respectively[9]. But I will humor them.

>["all" of Israel being built on land Palestinians were expelled from in 1948]

This claim is easily and demonstratably falsifiable. Much of Israel was owned by Jews in 1945[10]. And much of the rest of it was 'public and other' land, no more Palestinian than Jewish (and the public land could be transferred to the Jewish country by the UN or Britain, of course).

>[genocide claim]

This is a genuine question that I have asked people many times and never gotten an answer to - is this genocide or simply the high (and horrific) death toll that comes with urban warfare? Gaza, after all, has a population density higher than New York City. It would be difficult for even the most humanitarian army imaginable to wage war in New York City without many civilian casualties. Among urban warfare in similarly-dense areas, or projected death tolls for those (I'm sure the US government has done some report on the projected civilian deaths from a war in NYC), is Gaza exceptional?

Of course, there is much more to a genocide than the death toll -- but that is what outlets like EI tend to lean into, although a death toll does not a genocide make.[11]

>[rape as a lie]

This is a disgusting claim. The rapes have been corroborated by the UN (as the Electronic Intifada has noted). Furthermore, much evidence cannot be gotten, because the witnesses are dead, and the bodies themselves, one hopes, quietly buried. There was massive rape, and Hamas at least seems to have been lax about punishing it, if not encouraging it top-down.

They treat deaths by Hamas of fleeing fighters as somehow Israel's fault because Hamas was waiting for Israeli soldiers. By this logic, most if not all of the adult male Palestinian deaths in Gaza are actually Hamas's fault; Hamas, after all, is little-distinguished from the civilian population.

[The baby]

Their defense is that...er. They were trying to kill adult civilians? That's not a good defense.

[Hannibal Directive and civilian deaths]

Haaretz has published a thorough investigation of the deaths here: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-18/ty-article-st.... (If you can't read it, they accept email accounts generated with email services like Temp-mail or 10minutemail.) Very few of the deaths are attributable to the IDF, simply because the IDF was occupied defending its own bases and responding.

> history didn't start on October 7th

For hominids in that region, it appears to have started about 1.5 million years ago (https://www.persee.fr/doc/paleo_0153-9345_1988_num_14_2_4455), although they didn't have writing. Some of the earlier historical records we have (historical here construed to mean non-Biblical) are interesting because they appear to affirm a Hebraic presence three thousand years ago[12]. Other historical records confirm Rome's forced exile of Jews, the discriminatory policies Jews suffered under, the 1948 attacks by everyone around, and the 1948-67 failure of Jordan and Egypt to set up independent Palestinian states in the West Bank (including Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter, which Jews were expelled from and prohibited from entering to pray at the Western Wall, the holiest still-standing site; but that's another story) and Gaza respectively. There is a long history, and starting the clock in 1967 isn't accurate either.

[1] https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-west-wrong-about-...

[2] eg 44 (!) summary executions (https://www.btselem.org/inter_palestinian_violations/death_p...), torture (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...), summary punishment and more torture (https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/10/03/abusive-system/failure...), prison terms for exposing corruption (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/02/gaza-journali...), et cetera, et cetera.

[3] https://electronicintifada.net/content/hasan-nasrallah-died-.... For reference, Hezbollah is widely despised by Lebanese as well.

[4] https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-holocaust-tra...

[5] https://electronicintifada.net/content/kidnapped-posters-ser...

[6] https://electronicintifada.net/content/what-did-7-october-ac..., https://electronicintifada.net/content/myth-israels-invincib..., https://electronicintifada.net/content/just-another-battle-o..., https://electronicintifada.net/content/hamas-fighters-gaza-s.... See also citation 7.

[7] https://electronicintifada.net/content/tearing-down-gazas-ir...

[8] https://electronicintifada.net/content/anti-semitic-roots-zi...

[9] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/c...

[10] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Palestin...

[11] Genocide requires intent. To take two examples - suppose Australia decides to attack Nauru, a small island nation of about 1,100 people. They embark on a campaign to systematically exterminate every Nauruan for some inexplicable reason, and succeed. This is a clear-cut case of genocide. But suppose on the way, Australia acquires a nuclear bomb and plans to detonate it over Nauru, ensuring no survivors. Unfortunately, the plane gets derailed, and the confused pilot accidentally detonates it over Singapore, killing 100,000 Singaporeans. While this killed many more people than Nauru, it was not a genocide itself; it was an accident (and an attempted genocide of Nauruans). The proportion of the population is also iffy. If Australia's plan was a small land invasion (which killed 2 Nauruans before being repelled) and then, if that failed, dropping five nukes on the island, but all five went off track and dropped on poor Singapore, killing 1,000,000 Singaporeans, despite the fact that that killed many more Singaporeans both in absolute numbers and proportionally than Nauruans, it could still be described as an attempted genocide of Nauruans and not one of Singaporeans.

[12] https://web.archive.org/web/20160304045731/http://prophetess...

Comment · 1 year ago

Bonus, since you apparently subscribe to the Khazar conspiracy theory: https://forward.com/israel/175912/jews-a-race-genetic-theory..., https://www.jta.org/2016/05/03/global/prominent-scholars-bla... (debunking a paper that 'supported' that), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234157950_Highlight..., and most critically this paper (https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/BeharEtAl2013-HumBi...), which is literally titled "No Evidence from Genome-wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews".

Note also that this applies solely to Ashkenazi Jews, the ones the conspiracy theory generally applies to and the most reasonable (a 1,000 foot pile of bullshit rather than a 1,001 foot pile, to be clear). However, this doesn't even matter, because most Israeli Jews are Mizrahim, from the Middle East and North Africa. I fail to see how a kingdom that was roughly from the Caucasus and extended into southern Ukraine could manage to get its genes into those of Jews whose ancestors lived in, say, Libya for centuries or millennia (and were expelled following Israel's independence, if you're wondering how they ended up in Israel. The whole exodus of Jews from Muslim countries was roughly equal to that of Palestinians from Israel. The reason you don't hear about the plight of those refugees is that Israel, at the time a young new state still working things out, accepted them quickly and without delay, often proactively getting Jews out to safety.)

Comment · 1 year ago

From trying to research Jewish folklore, I can tell you there are a ton of books and archival materials (eg at YIVO) that have never been translated from Hebrew or Yiddish (or, occasionally, Ladino and other Jewish languages).