Friday, November 27, 2020

Coronavirus and Conservative Cafeteria Catholics

 On my main blog, I've occasionally written about the "CCC," especially combining it in January with the second CCC of the Covington Catholic Chuds.

But, it's time to look at how these modern Conservative Cafeteria Catholics really have followed many of their Protestant brethren to a place where their religious brief plays handmaiden to political convictions and some of what is supposed to be god's still becomes Caesar's. (Another C, even!)

The Cut offers a story of a person seeing their grandfather die, and calling out Dan Patrick and his "duty to die," who actually is nothing compared to the editor of First Things, who this spring dove DEEP into the empty pool of Religious Right wingnuttery, Catholic division, claiming that the degree some people were going to save lives was "demonic." No, really. I hadn't realized until reading this JUST how much Conservative Cafeteria Catholics had sold their souls.

Read:

At the press conference on Friday announcing the New York shutdown, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “I want to be able to say to the people of New York—I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” 
This statement reflects a disastrous sentimentalism. Everything for the sake of physical life? What about justice, beauty, and honor? There are many things more precious than life. And yet we have been whipped into such a frenzy in New York that most family members will forgo visiting sick parents. Clergy won’t visit the sick or console those who mourn. The Eucharist itself is now subordinated to the false god of “saving lives.” … 
There is a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost. … 
Satan prefers sentimental humanists. We resent the hard boot of oppression on our necks, and given a chance, most will resist. How much better, therefore, to spread fear of death under moralistic pretexts.

Reno, as I told First Things on Twitter, is also ignorant of church history. Quarantines existed in medieval times. Of course, that was secular. But? Priests across Europe fled their parishes at the coming of the plague. Eucharists were left unconsecrated and uncelebrated 700 years ago. 

He's also a flat liar. Churches closed in 1918

This secularist knows that, metaphorically, sacrificing one's children to Moloch, to qup

The piece strives for a veneer of deep theological insight. So did First Things founder Richard John Neuhaus, who also often failed at that, for people who looked carefully.

Thursday, November 19, 2020

The Khazar hypothesis is real

 For the unfamiliar, the "Khazar hypothesis" is that Ashkenazic Jews are not Semitic, but are primarily descended from the Turkic people, the Khazars, who ruled the Khazar Khanate for approximately 200 years in what is today's eastern Ukraine and southeastern Russia. A khan converted and, depending on how true the legend is, got his people to all convert.

It surely isn't all true. From Constantine in Rome to Grand Duke Vytautis in Lithuania, the last pagan country of Europe, the populace didn't convert overnight after the sovereign did. But, more and more people would have eventually converted it.

Novelist Arthur Koestler first broached it in modern times. His idea was to show that many Jews weren't "Jews" in hopes of stopping Hitler's persecution. But, Hitler was persecuting on both racial and cultural-religious grounds, first, and second, might have considered Khazars to be untermenschen from the East anyway.

That said, was Koestler right? Are some modern Jews who raise similar ideas right?

Survey says: Yes, largely. The author says that East European Jews probably have some Alan background before the Khazars, but that, otherwise — as indicted by DNA! — a West Asian background for Ashkenazic Jews stands up. Sorry, Zionists.

In an earlier piece, Eran Elhaik discusses the origins of Yiddish. He says that it originated as an Ashkenazi trade language, and ties this to the rise of the Khanate. He said it grew to control Silk Road traffic.

I have a partial problem with that one, though.

Control it to where? Kievan Rus grew in power on the corpse of the Khanate, so it wasn't around to get Silk Road trade. Further west, after the brief Carolignian florescence, further Europe was in the throes of the Dark Ages. And, the Abbasids would have used trade routes running south of the Caspian. Middlemanning trade between China and the Byzantines might have happened, I suppose.

The second partial problem is that genes aren't language, which Elhalk kind of acknowledges in his first piece, thereby undercutting his second. Why don't we have a "Yiddish" more influenced by Khazar words than the real McCoy is? To me, it seems likely that there was back-and-forth pollination between various groups of Eastern European Jews, some of who were in today's Poland at the rise of the Khanate, but without any organized nation state.

That said, Elhaik is, like Shlomo Sand, himself Jewish, so nobody can honestly play the anti-Semitic card against him. And let's introduce that second name.

Or, his book.


The Invention of the Jewish PeopleThe Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Per the editorial blurb, this is a historical tour de force indeed.

The introduction tells Sand’s story and reason for writing. Noting that multiple women wanting to do aliyah were told no because of non-Jewish mothers, I thought that this issue itself could be a full chapter.

Around 150, he talks about Maccabean forcible conversion. I knew it well re the Idumeans, like Herod’s ancestors. Forgot about the Samaritans, and in grokking Josephus, don’t think I’d read about the Itureans in Galilee.

In conjunction, he notes something I already knew in part: That the revolt was purely religious freedom related, and not anti-Hellenism. After all, by John Hyrcanus, Maccabees are using Greek names.

He also notes Hanukkah was originally pagan. And he’s right! And, this explains why it was relatively “low” in Jewish life until modern times. It was too Messianic. See here for more. Yet more here. (Update: See LOTS more at this longform for just what Daniel, First Maccabees and to some extent Second Maccabees, presumably willfully and polemically, get wrong.)

He’s good on describing Judaism’s expansion by evangelism in the eastern Mediterranean, then Rome itself, then down to late classical antiquity Yemen. He also offers plausible reasons why Jews in Palestine declined after the Islamic conquest, including the tax-free Muslim advantage, plus Islam being more congenial than Christianity. (Besides hating Byzantium and “orthodox” Christianity, it’s arguable that Jacobites, if they took the “two persons as well as two natures” far enough, could see Jesus in a quasi-Ebionite way and convert to Islam as well.) He notes that pre-statehood Zionists in 20th century Palestine even presumed that the Palestinians were ethnic kin.

Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv Univ. used philology to conclude that most (now former) Spanish Sephardim were of Berber origin, or Arab-Berber, and not Jewish by ethnos.

Next, he goes to the Khazar Khanate. He does NOT just recapitulate Koestler. First, he notes that both Jewish and Russian historians in the first half of the 20th century did sound work on the Khanate history. In short, it lasted long enough that Judaism surely became the religion of at least a fair chunk of the masses, not just the rulers. Second, at least one subtribe can be clearly shown to have migrated with the Magyars when they left the Khanate and headed to the Hungarian plain.

He also goes beyond (from what I remember) of Koestler to pull in linguistics and philology. Everybody knows that Yiddish is a Germanic language, but one with a number of Slavic words and a few Hebrew ones. Not everybody knows that it also has a number of Turkic words, including the word “to pray.” Oops. (For the anti-Khazar Zionists, that is.) It’s things like this, given that the work on the history side by Abraham Polok is pre-WWII, at least in his earlier work, that has historians like Tony Judt saying the book has little new for the academic.

Related, Sand notes that the number of Rhineland German Jews simply wasn’t great enough to have caused the mass of Eastern European Jewry. Conclusion? Some version of the “Khazar hypothesis” is surely true.

From this, Sand does some speculating on the origins and development of the Yiddish language.

He then goes beyond Koestler in one other way, since such things didn’t exist in the 1970s. He addresses DNA testing, and not just that narrowly and specifically related to the Khazar theory. He notes that DNA testing is still in its infancy, that because it offers inconclusive results in many cases it can be (and is) “spun,” and this:

“Like similar investigations carried out by Macedonian racists, Lebanese Phalangists, Lapps in northern Scandinavia, and so on, such Jewish-Israeli research cannot be entirely free from crude and dangerous racism.”

Earlier, he notes the irony of descendants of Jews who suffered brutally from the race-essentialist ideas of the Nazis now engaging in race-essentialism themselves. He adds that some early Zionists supported eugenic ideas.

He also notes that words like “Sephardi” and above all “Ashkhenazi” are cultural, ultimately religious (and linguistic, I would add) markers, not ethnic ones.

Sand wraps his last chapter by noting the development of “Israeli identity” in the new state, and Ben-Gurion engaging in a mix of apparent surrender to and actual manipulation of the rabbinate. The flip side, he says, is many Zionists refusing to talk about an Israeli people. That may be in part because an Ashkenazi Eastern European culture has not been forcible on other Israeli Jews.

He concludes with a brief response to his critics.

One thing is missing from this book. It’s not huge, but it’s not minuscule, either. Based on his introductory passage about matrilineality, and on things from the Christian New Testament, and other evidence from that time about how this wasn’t always the case, it would have been nice for Sand to spend, oh, half a dozen pages more directly on this issue, especially with the rise of genetic testing.

Sand’s original conclusion, that Israel as we know today cannot stand with its current citizenship definition as the Arab population inside its 1948 boundaries grows, seems too wishful today. Only time will tell.

Why is this book so controversial? In part, from being translated into the language in which I read it, as well as French. Being published in Hebrew, it made only a modest stir inside Israel. But, when translated, Zionists could see a cat being let out of the bag.

Related? I rarely do this, but most one-star reviewers have to be critiqued. They basically fall into two camps. One, on the Khazar issue, claim this is nothing but a repeat of Koestler. LIE.

Another claims that he never talks about the Jewish people. (He notes people raised Jewish, who converted to Christianity, then applied for Israeli citizenship based on Israeli nationality and were denied, with Israel’s supreme court saying a “Jewish nationality” existed but an “Israeli nationality” did not.) Given what I have shown he does in the first chapter, talking about “people” vs “nation” and his recap at the end, this too is a LIE.

LIE is the only word that can be used.


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Thursday, November 12, 2020

Our brains evolved to forget, as much as to remember

Having an infinite, or practically so, memory capacity seems fantastic, no?

No, in reality.

For the few people who have something like that, it's as much curse as blessing.

How does your brain prioritize anything, first of all, if it doesn't have the capacity to forget — and to judge what is forgettable?

Second, how does your brain easily recall anything if it remembers everything.

That's part of why new neuroscience research on the power of forgetting is so interesting.

One interesting subpoint is the importance of dopamine in forgetting. This is another refutation of simplistic takes on dopamine as "the pleasure molecule" or "the addiction neurotransmitter."

Nope, no such thing, going beyond that brain cells have multiple dopamine receptors, all shaped a bit differently.

Subpoint No. 2 in my book? This refutes some of Elizabeth Loftus' simplistic ideas on how the mind works. If we don't totally forget, but do often semi-totally forget, and emotions are involved with that, that shows her quasi-Freudian strawman of "repression," which she demolishes as quasi-Freudian after setting it up as a strawman, is all wrong.

Thursday, November 05, 2020

Maybe the "dopamine" theory of addiction isn't ALL wrong; ditto on serotonin and depression

 Sometimes, science is exciting indeed.

 For years, starting about the turn of the century, dopamine as "the addiction neurotransmitter" became an ever more peddled idea among simplistic and reductionist ideas of neuroscience — both professional as well as lay.

Given the number of brain receptors for dopamine, that alone made it simplistic. Dopamine does a lot more than trigger desire, or even trigger memories of desire.

Indeed.

It turns out both it and serotonin are ALSO involved in epigenetic controls.

As the author of this Quanta piece notes, reflecting on a recent piece in Science magazine and other things, this would explain, or partially explain, a LOT.

On serotonin, if part of its antidepressant effects are epigenetic, not straight neurotransmitter work, that would explain why SSRIs, and antidepressants in general, take weeks to have effect. This also would probably explain why different SSRIs affect people differently.

Finally, it would add new backdrops to the heritability of depression.

On dopamine, it might further add to why addiction "triggers" can be potent years later. And, as with serotonin and depression, it would add material to the heritability of addiction.

The bigger picture, on evolutionary biology and the extended evolutionary synthesis? This could be a further wedge undercutting evolutionary psychology, as well as deterministic thoughts on volition.

Finally, it would probably add more food for thought for evolutionary development of these and other neurotransmitters, or now, neurotransmitters/epigenetic tags.