Another great blog – Crispus

The first person to leave a comment at the Great Auk is another great blogger: Crispus.

Here an example of what s/he writes:

Yesterday religious and city leaders rallied on the steps of City Hall in support of school vouchers, saying it's the best option for their kids' future. The Black Ministers' Council of New Jersey head calls public schools a "fraud." The head of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders calls school choice a "moral issue" where blacks and Hispnics must unite.

School choice advocates say tax dollars should follow a child to the schools of their choice, not the school itself. They say school choice would drive reform in public education through competition. The Black Ministers' Council says what stands in their way are the Democrats, who have strong ties to teachers' unions. Advocates are right on all three counts.

In my opinion compulsory education without school choice is a form of slavery. We force children to go to a particular building at a particular time, and sit and listen to a particular person telling them what to do. The only way to get out of bondage is to buy your freedom, if you can afford it. It is immoral, and should be illegal.

Of course, like many immoral activities, it has serious negative consequences from a practical point of view too. For example, you cannot have a state education monopoly and still have separation of church and state. The national education system has created a state religion, one which advocates a broad religious agenda. What am I talking about, I hear you say. Let me ask you this: If the schools aren’t teaching religion, why is it that so many religious people are against it?

UPDATE: Just in case I didn’t make myself clear: Something that contradicts a religious principle must also be a religious principle, at least according to the religion in question. For example, you can’t teach sex-education without conveying some kind of moral attitude toward it. What kind of moral attitude do you teach? That’s a religious question. Of course, schools try to avoid the issue by trying not to teach morals at all, just teaching “the facts”. That raises a couple of questions: First, do you really want your children not to be taught morals? Most parents, given the choice, would choose to teach their kids some kind of moral system, but of course they have no choice. Second, by avoiding teaching morals, you in effect teach children to have no morals – the message they get is that morals are optional, and that they can choose to do without. After all, the school apparently does without.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that the same case can be made for regarding compulsory education as slavery even with school choice. I suppose that’s true, however, the justification for compulsory education is that it is in the best interests of the child. Children are not free; they are wards of their parents or guardians, and to lesser extent wards of the state. I agree that in extreme cases the state should be able to intervene for the good of the child – but such cases should be as extreme as possible. Telling the parent that the child has to go to some school, that the parent can choose, is less extreme than telling the parent that the child has to go to a particular school, and therefore is without question more correct. (It remains a question whether parents should be told at all – I think they should be.)

Icelandic blogger

Just discovered a great new blog (via John Ray): Great Auk, by Bjarni Ólafsson. He’s from Iceland – a country even smaller (in population) and more exotic (in my opinion) than Israel.

Welcome to the blogosphere, from your alphabetic neighbor!

The Freeholders

I had a eureka moment reading this essay by John Ray. Not that I agree with his conclusions, though I do share his revulsion for the elitism that he describes. I disagree with his conclusions on no evidence other than my own personal experience. I grew up among a population that was overwhelmingly liberal, and I feel that I know those particular people quite well. I think that their views were primarily formed by a lack of understanding of feedback systems – an unwillingness to believe that secondary effects can in the long run be more important than primary effects, what is sometimes called the Law of Unintended Consequences. In other words, if there is a problem, then we (the government) should solve it.

Not that conservatives have any more understanding of feedback systems. What saves them from error is an abhorrence of government interference, a love of liberty. This is a moral stand which I find eminently justifiable, but there is no denying that liberty inevitably leads to inequality. Inevitably, given the liberty to choose, some people will make mistakes, and others will succeed. The beauty of this from a systems point of view is that as a secondary effect (the primary effect is success or failure) negative behavior results in negative feedback, and positive behavior results in positive feedback. (As an aside, I think that parents tend to be much more aware of secondary effects with respect to their children – they don’t want to spoil them.)

However, I am uncomfortable with the words “liberal” and “conservative”, “left” and “right”. With respect to policy, the American left and right have switched sides several times in its history. I have argued before that the real split is between the forces of ferment and stasis, and that those groups will switch sides every two generations. In the 1970s the left wanted to spread democracy, and in the 1870s the left wanted free trade…

That’s when I had my eureka moment. Why did the left want low tariffs in the 1870s? Because the average American was a farmer (agricultural subsidies were not yet invented), and knew very well that free trade enriched him – he could buy more, more cheaply. Tariffs enriched big business. It wasn’t until the average American became an employee of big business that he began to see free trade as a threat (at least in his own industry), which put him in agreement with big business. Who then is left to support free trade? Only those, of whatever background, who feel sure enough, and entrepreneurial enough, to value the opportunity of free trade more than they fear its hazards.

Historically speaking, the most unique thing about the United States is that the average American was a freeholder – someone who farmed his own land (Hawaii is the exception, which in this case really does prove the rule). In Europe, indeed in most of the world, the average person did not own the land he worked. In other words, the pre-industrial European economic system had more in common with big business and big labor, in contrast to the pre-industrial American economic system which empowered the individual and encouraged entrepreneurship.

And I think maybe that’s why Israel feels so much more like the US than like Europe. The cultural background of most Israelis is not as freeholders. Jews in both Europe and the Arab lands were outcasts from the agricultural system. They were, of course, barred from the aristocracy, but neither could they submit to being tenant farmers. Thus they were driven to the economic margins, they were the shoemakers, the tailors, and the petty merchants. A lucky few were doctors and bankers. But in poverty and in wealth, they were masters of their own fate – virtual freeholders.

The overall impression I get of Europe is of a kind of docility – Europeans expect to be taken care of, and exploited. Israelis, on the other hand, are known for their chutzpah (huspa). Americans are known for being brash. Europeans are afraid of conflict and chaos, knowing how easily it can degenerate into death and destruction. Israelis and Americans have developed cultural norms of a freeholding society – norms that protect individual freedom while preserving order.

Only a tiny fraction of the Western world now works in agriculture. The vast majority work in business big and small, whether in Israel, Europe, or America. But it seems to me that the cultural memory of our freeholding or peasant past is a major determinant of our worldviews today.

Trackback from trying to grok, CLASS:

My class this weekend was pretty good. We all thought it would focus on the current terrorist events, but instead the prof mostly lectured about terrorism in the 70s and 80s. It was interesting because I didn't know that much...

Sports objectives

Steven Den Beste answers a question about playing fair in sports. Specifically, how should a parent teach his children to play sports. He answers this question first by asking the parent what his objectives are:

Objective 1: Win as many games as possible. Nothing else matters.

If this is the objective, then Greg's question is easy to answer. You use whatever tactics are necessary to win. You instruct your players to play dirty whether the other team does or not. You encourage them to game the referees and teach them the fine points of doing so, and make them practice it.

Objective 2: Turn your kids into saints, who always act correctly irrespective of the consequences. Motives and choices are more important than results. The goal is to raise kids who never sin. (We'll call this "idealistic honor".)

Again, the answer to Greg's question becomes obvious. Tell your kids to not do those kinds of things, no matter whether the opponent does them or not. That will probably mean they'll lose more games, but winning and losing are unimportant. What's important is that they act correctly.

Objective 3: Teach the kids lessons about life so that they grow up to be honorable men who survive and prosper in a world where many are not honorable. (We'll call this "practical honor".)

Surprisingly (to me) Steven chooses Objective 2. Since I am a parent, I think about these kinds of questions. Here are my objectives (with respect to playing sports):

1. War is usually not the right model for viewing life. A transactional model is usually better: neither side should play unless both sides feel that they “win” something. In business this is called the win-win scenario, in economics it’s called a Pareto-optimal solution. Lesson: Look for the win-win scenario – if you can’t find it, walk away.

2. Don’t take things too seriously when they’re not. Lesson: Playing sports is not serious enough to merit cheating.

3. The truth will out – anyone who cheats will lose their reputation, even if they win the game. Lesson: Don’t cheat unless it’s the right thing to do. (Which it’s not, in sports.)

As Steven says, you won’t know what to do unless you know your objectives. I want to teach my kids to always remember their life objectives, and not to get caught up in the formal objectives of sports, or the transient objectives of their current circumstance – in other words, to keep things in perspective.

How odd of God to choose the Jews

Amritas takes on Cynthia Ozick’s article about the new anti-Semitism: The Modern ‘Hep! Hep! Hep!’. I’m impressed by his stamina; it is something of a mystery to me why someone so unconnected to the subject should nevertheless take it on. I, much closer to the subject, thoroughly share his reaction:

I honestly didn't want to read this article. My reaction to it was like my early reaction to Little Green Footballs. Too much anti-Semitism concentrated in one place.

I have a long list of should-reads and should-sees on the subject, which I never seem to get around to. I have never read Diary of Anne Frank, for example, nor have I seen Schindler’s List. (Though I did see Life is Beautiful, one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. I saw it in Italian with Hebrew subtitles.) Although three generations removed from relatives who perished in the Holocaust, I still have trouble approaching the subject.

Among other things, Cynthia Ozick asks the eternal question: Why the Jews? I know the answer to that question, but before I answer it we should ask a related question: Is there anything unique about anti-Semitism?

The Holocaust was unique. Not that genocide is unique, by any means, but never before or since has one people taken as its existential mission the extermination of another. Nor has one people ever taken such pains to document its inhumanity toward another, or pursued its homicidal mission with such methodical efficiency. The number of Jews murdered by the Nazis was more than the current Jewish population of Israel.

You could argue that the Holocaust is a unique case, as indeed it is, which says more about the Nazis than it does about anti-Semitism. You could say that bigotry and prejudice are more than common, they are universal – the world is full of oppressed peoples. Not just oppressed peoples, but the bones of extinct and dying peoples – the Caribs, the Tasmanians, the Cornish, etc., etc. We Jews have no monopoly on suffering, but there is something unique about anti-Semitism. The Jews are persecuted not as loathsome underclass, but as a rival power – despite the fact that our numbers are microscopic, and our power is tiny.

Why is that? I do not like to dwell on our history as a persecuted people. I do not believe that it is good for us to define our identity negatively. We Jews were not put on Earth to be oppressed, but to play a positive role in the world. What makes anti-Semitism unique, and the answer to the question, “Why the Jews?” is that despite the odds, throughout history, Jews have picked themselves up after burying their dead, and not only survived, but thrived.

UPDATE: The name of this post has been attributed variously to Ogden Nash, and William Norman Ewer.

Reading Hebrew

The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 consonants, vowels being indicated by “points” – diacritical marks that appear under or around the letters, when written. But usually, people don’t bother writing them at all. How then is Hebrew read, without vowels?

One answer that I often hear is that in Hebrew, vowels aren’t important. This is often corroborated with an example from English: ts nt vry hrd t ndrstnd nglsh thts nt wrttn wth vwls! The sentence would get even easier to read if English had a letter for a glottal stop, which in English, like Hebrew, begins every word that starts with a vowel, and if we used “y” and “w” to indicate “i”, “o” and “u” sounds.

The reason for this is that English words typically have a lot more consonants than vowels, and the chances of two different English words having the same sequence of consonants is low. When it does happen, the words can usually be distinguished by context. But for Hebrew, this is much less the case. Take a look at some Hebrew text, and you will see that the ratio of vowels to consonants is much higher. In fact, it is worse than that. In Hebrew morphology, one word can usually be changed into several others, just by changing the vowels!

How then can Hebrew be read without vowels? Part of the answer is that when Hebrew is written unpointed (without vowel diacritics), the letters “y” and “w” are inserted for “i”, “o”, and “u”. Also “h” is used at the end of a word to indicate “a” or “e”. This still leaves a high degree of vowel ambiguity. The real reason that the system works is that only two things are needed to uniquely identify a Hebrew word: root and pattern. You can always identify a word’s root because roots consist of consonants alone. And it turns out that the degree to which vowels are indicated is enough to disambiguate almost all patterns – the little ambiguity that remains can easily be determined by context, much the way English speakers disambiguate the words to, too, and two.

I was wondering about all this in relation to my last three posts on dyslexia. Does the Hebrew writing system make it easier or harder to read? A lot of people seem to have jumped to the conclusion that it’s harder. But look again at the list of potential problems. Hebrew is written phonetically, it’s just missing some (redundant) information – the information that is written is not misleading, as it sometimes is in English. On the other hand, leaving out redundant information results in words that are significantly shorter, facilitating whole-word recognition. In addition, the nature of the Hebrew language itself works to keep words short. Hebrew compounds are written as separate words, and there are no morphological processes that result in infinitely expanding words, as there are in English. In fact, every new Hebrew learner has had the experience of struggling to figure out a particularly opaque word just to discover that it's English. Today, when I read Hebrew, foreign loan words stick out like sore thumbs – they seem like long strings of random letters.

Non-dyslexic orthography

What would be the ultimate non-dyslexic orthography? Taking the opposites of the list below, it would:

1. Have very different shaped letters

2. Have phonetic spelling

3. Result in short words

4. Result in graphs that facilitate whole-word recognition

5. Be written top-down

It would seem to me that Korean addresses all of these issues – except, perhaps, the first. Each graph represents a syllable, which would tend to shorten words. But the graphs can be sounded-out – they are constructed from phonetic elements. The arrangement of the elements within the graph is two-dimensional, creating a kind of picture that capitalizes on spatial perception (as opposed to putting the characters in a single line, which is one-dimensional). Finally, Korean can be written top-down, avoiding potential left-right problems.

I wonder if there are fewer Korean dyslexics?

I wonder if a Korean-like writing system can be devised which corrects its one problem, the similarity of many of the graph elements?

It would then be no problem to write a program to display any English text in this orthography. In fact, it can be encoded as a font and use existing software!

Dyslexia and fonts

Here’s another interesting article about dyslexia and fonts. I’m surprised at how difficult it is to find concrete information about dyslexia on the web. It seems that some scripts and fonts are easier than others for dyslexics – such a problem is easily addressed with software, and easily applied to online sources.

These are the potential problems that I’ve gathered so far:

1. Similar shaped letters, especially those that differ in orientation e.g. p, q, b, d

2. Non-phonetic spelling

3. Long words (short-term memory problem)

4. Non-phonemic graphs

5. Writing Direction (left-right, right-left)

Dyslexia and scripts

I have just discovered a fascinating (short) article on dyslexia. The gist of it is that dyslexia can be caused by any of several difficulties, and that different writing systems make use of different areas of the brain. The result is that a person can be dyslexic in one language but not the other – and that no one writing system is best for all dyslexics.

Chaos and the herd instinct

A few posts down, I wrote about the herd instinct – how it’s a rational response to limited knowledge. I would like to write a little now about how that intersects with chaos.

What I mean here is chaos in the mathematical sense – which is different from randomness. Randomness means that things aren’t predictable. Chaos (in the mathematical sense) is predictable on the micro scale – each subsequent event can be predicted from previous events. But unpredictable on the macro scale – you can’t predict the future by making generalizations about the past. Chaos occurs when “small” events have “big” results.

Life is chaotic. I met my wife at a lecture – if I hadn’t gone, and I almost didn’t go, I might never have met her, and my whole life would be different.

The blogosphere is also chaotic. There are a lot of great blogs out there, but I don’t know about their existence. There are a lot of great blogs that I know about, but I don’t have time to visit them. As you can see, the blogs I read most are USS Clueless and Amaravati: Abode of Amritas. Why is that? It’s not that I think they are the best, rather that for whatever reason they are the ones that I most want to read. (I could spend another few posts analyzing the reasons for that.) But up until a few months ago, I didn’t know about either one of them. In fact, I discovered Amritas only a couple of weeks after I discovered Steven Den Beste, when he linked to him.

Which brings me to the chaos-herd intersection that I wanted to talk about. I entered the non-professional blogosphere quite randomly. My first discovery was Jon’s Radio, a technical blog about the computer industry. I found that through a Google search, when I was looking for the answer to a technical question. Jon frequently links to other technical bloggers, and somehow through them I entered the blogosphere. I wandered around aimlessly for a while without a lot of enthusiasm for the idea, until I discovered the Instapundit. I became an immediate fan of Glenn Reynolds, and started to come to him as a news filter. Somewhere along the line he linked to Steven Den Beste, and that’s when I really entered the blogosphere. Evidently, Steven’s tastes are similar enough to my own that I’m very often interested in things that he links to. He doesn’t link to much, but it was enough – three or four a day. I quickly found Amritas, and many more.

Why am I telling this story? Because I think it’s about a lot more than blogging. It’s a parable for life. Along the way it also demonstrates the importance of freedom in finding the truth. The path I followed in getting to my current blogging habits is a kind of Newton’s method – not exact directions for getting from here to there, but an heuristic algorithm for getting closer to your destination with each step. (Since it is heuristic, it doesn’t necessarily work all the time, but because it is repeated with each step, it only has to work most of the time.)

What are the characteristics of the system? It’s an organic system with three rules:

1. Each blog entry is linked to related entries. How are they related? It doesn’t matter, as long as some of those relationships are important to me.

2. I sometimes follow the links.

3. When I find a blog that I like I remember it and go back to it.

That’s it! Substitute people for blogs, and friends for links and you get the same sort of system. Or substitute businesses and customers. Or even ideas and associations. Following the herd isn’t such a bad system after all, as long as the herds overlap, giving you the chance to switch – that’s when you get to be free.

UPDATE: Evolution works the same way.

Clever Chomsky

I found this remarkable Chomsky quote on Diary of an anti-Chomskyite (via Amritas)

The Hebrew press is much more open than the English language press, and there’s a very obvious reason: Hebrew is a secret language, you only read it if you’re inside the tribe. Like most cultures it’s a tribal culture. I don’t want to exaggerate, but the English translations on the internet are very revealing and very interesting.

I had to look at the original. What secrets are we telling in our secret language – that only Chomsky can understand? (The idea that we may be saying different things merely because we have different concerns seems to never have occurred to him. Ditto for the idea that the Israeli press is large, diverse and free, and many different things are said, only some of which reaches his eyes.) This is what I found:

Remember Israel is virtually a US military base, an offshoot of the US military system. The same reporter quoted a General as saying: ‘Israel is no longer a state with an army, it’s now an army with a state.’ If you’re talking about the Israeli government you’re talking about the military. The top political figures are almost always ex-Generals, chiefs of staff and so on. It’s not a small army, according to the IDF and analysts their air, naval, armour forces are larger and more advanced than those of any NATO power outside of the US, and as an offshoot it certainly is. So we have an army with a State, the army’s basically a branch of the Pentagon.

It reminds me of the Grimm’s fairytale, Clever Elsie:

“Elsie, why weepest thou?” asked the maid. “Ah,” she answered, “have I not reason to weep? If I get Hans, and we have a child, and he grows big, and has to draw beer here, the pick-axe will perhaps fall on his head, and kill him.” Then said the maid, “What a clever Elsie we have!”

This is the kind of reasoning that appeals to conspiracy thinkers everywhere. Chomsky would like to think that Israel is ruled by its army. It’s an absurd conclusion to anyone who knows the country – I think that Sharon is the only ex-General in the government at the moment, for one thing. For another thing, he was elected. The US also elected generals in the aftermath of war – but then, Chomsky thinks that the US is also an “army with a State,” ruled by the Pentagon.

Nuclear mullahs

David Warren pens the scariest article I’ve read in a long time, Nuclear mullahs:

That it is close to success [in completing its nuclear weapons program – DB] is indicated by every particle of information reaching the West -- and indeed more noise on the subject is being made currently by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency than by the Bush administration, which would rather not have it as an election issue. The Iranians have been caught red-handed with at least two large undeclared nuclear research facilities, and have stonewalled IAEA inspectors in the Saddamite manner. They also occasionally gloat that they will soon be members of the "nuclear club", and ought to be accepted.

…

Alternatively, I'm fairly certain the Israelis, this time, aren't up to the job that they performed in 1981, taking out Saddam's nuclear reactor at Osirak in time, to a chorus of world outrage. It is too large for them -- the Iranian nuclear programme is dispersed over too many sites, and most of them are out of range of the IAF's strike aircraft, which would anyway have to overfly too many hostile or uncooperative countries. And yet the very survival of Israel must be brought into question, once the ayatollahs have The Bomb.

The US would be able to survive a nuclear first strike, even if Iran could somehow deliver its nuclear weapons halfway around the world. Israel, however, is within striking distance, and it couldn’t.

The herd instinct

Steven Den Beste pointed me to Clay Shirkey’s commentary on Power Law distributions. Very interesting. I have long pondered what I think is the same phenomenon under a different name – the herd instinct.

The interesting thing about the herd instinct is that it’s rational. If somebody is doing something, saying something, thinking something, the chances are greater than 50% that that person is doing it for a good reason, so if you don’t have anything to base your choice on, the most rational thing to do is follow the other person’s lead.

There are two problems with this. The first should be obvious – that “greater than 50%” is not particularly good odds, just better than the alternative. But people tend to fall in love with their choices – for a good psychological reason, that being indecisive is also bad. The best strategy for dealing with this problem is to continually re-evaluate your choice without becoming indecisive – but only when you have the option of changing you mind!

The second problem is more subtle, because you have to think about it from a systems point of view, where second order effects can become more important over time than first order effects (but actually, most things in real life are like that). There are some things where even if the first person made the right decision, the fact that everybody follows the leader makes it the wrong decision. You can’t make money on the stock market just by being right. You have to be right when everybody else thinks you’re wrong. So, knowing nothing about a particular stock except that everybody’s buying it, the best choice you can make is not to buy it.

I often make choices precisely because I think that most people wouldn’t make them – in those areas where crowds are distinctly negative, like finding parking spaces. On the other hand, I don’t take that strategy in choosing a car to buy; I want one that has a good reputation! As a general strategy, I think that it’s probably best to follow the herd in areas that are unimportant to you, or in which you don’t want to bother to educate yourself.

But I would hope that there’s something important enough to you – for you to find your own way.

Bio added

Just added a bio. It’s the link in the upper left-hand corner. The picture is me with my kids, taken next to the house. That’s a fig tree in the background.

Hebrew colors

A while back Amritas led me to a page by Cecil Adams that discusses words for colors. It concludes that while different languages have words for different colors, “there is a remarkable degree of uniformity in the way different cultures assign color names”:

1. All languages contain terms for white and black.

2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.

3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).

4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.

5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.

6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.

7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these.

My Hebrew dictionary (Even-Shoshan) classifies words as originating in four periods, according to the earliest attestation. They are: Biblical, Talmudic, Medieval, and Modern (It also has a class for foreign words.) I thought I would look up these colors and see if Hebrew fits the theory. This is what I found:

Attestation	Translation	Transcription	Hebrew
biblical	black	shahor	שחור
	white	lavan	לבן
	red	adom	אדום
	yellow	sahov	צהוב
	green	yaroq	ירוק
	brown	hum	חום
	light blue	takhol	תכול
talmudic	blue	kahol	כחול
modern	purple	sagol	סגול
	pink	varod	ורוד
	orange	katom	כתום
	grey	afor	אפור

It almost fits. Of course, attestation is not the same as origin – a word might have existed in a certain period, but we don’t know about it because it wasn’t used in any of the surviving literature.

Notice that almost all the colors have the pattern XaXoX. This is the pattern for colors. The modern colors were clearly created on the basis of this pattern, for example pink is from the word “rose” (vered).

I added to Cecil Adams’ list light blue, since this is an important color in Hebrew, though it is lacking in English.

Can you figure out which colors are out of order?

Continue reading "Hebrew colors"

Jews fleeing Europe

Joe Gandelman reports that Jews are fleeing France to Israel.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency said a report compiled by the agency had found 30,000 out of France's 575 000 Jews were considering leaving for Israel and he characterized French Jews' situation as increasingly "difficult." This comes on the heels of French Justice Minister Dominique Perben reporting that 180 anti-Jewish acts had been recorded so far this year.

It should be noted that as citizens of the European Union, they can move freely to any European county. They choose not to do so.

Israeli Arabs

In light of the previous post, I want expand on an issue I saw briefly addressed by Benjamin in DIARY OF AN ANTI-CHOMSKYITE. He says:

There is no question that there are issues with Israel's Arab citizens and their place in a Jewish state. There is racism and there is discrimination. It is not Apartheid by any stretch of the imagination. It is also nothing particularly unusual in states with large national minorities. Particularly when, as in Israel's case, that minority considers itself an inseparable part of a hostile regional majority.

The critical sentence is the last one. I would like my readers to be aware of the enormous lengths Israel goes to treat is Arab citizens right. Israeli Arabs openly identify with Israel’s enemies, nevertheless they have equal democratic rights, and indeed there are several Arab parties in the Knesset (parliament), which reflect their views. It is impossible to go to an Israeli hospital without meeting Arab doctors – in fact, Arabs are well represented in most professions, though it’s true that they are over-represented in low-skilled jobs.

Let me give an example of “racism” and “discrimination”. As I said, Arabs tend to be over-represented in low-skilled jobs (which, I know, some people would consider absolute proof of discrimination all by itself), but there is one job where you don’t find them: cleaning services. I’m thinking of the people who come into offices after hours to clean up. This particular low-skilled job is usually 100% Jewish labor. (In the US these jobs are usually held by immigrants.) Let me ask you: would you want someone who sympathizes and identifies with your enemy to have unsupervised access to your office (or your home)? Yes, I know we can’t be sure that it’s true, but we know that statistically it is much more likely to be true than not.

But that’s the beauty of the free market. Opportunities naturally flow around any obstacles. I, myself, not being born in Israel, am discriminated against by the Israeli government: I cannot get security clearance for a wide variety of jobs, unless there is something that makes me immensely valuable and worth the extra effort of the security check. Do I feel discriminated against? No. There are plenty of opportunities available to me. The same is true for Israeli Arabs.

Now let’s take a look at a self proclaimed paragon of virtue: France. France is a large state with almost 60 million people (Israel has 6 million.) It faces no existential threats (unlike Israel). Its population is about 10% Arab (Israel’s is about 20%). Its per capita GDP is $25,700 (Israel’s is $19,000). Which of these countries bans its Arab students from wearing headscarves in school? France.

Let’s look at things from the Arab side. Every Arab country (there are 22 of them – 23 including the PA) persecutes its own people, even the most moderate: Jordan and some of the Gulf States. Some regimes are simply hells on Earth – the Palestinian Authority and Syria, for example. An Arab who is suspected of sympathizing with Israel or Israelis (this is interpreted very broadly) can expect to be murdered by his brethren, even in Israel, even in US administered Iraq. It’s not easy being an Arab. I don’t know what I’d do in their circumstances. But I know what to do in mine: defend myself.

For those who want to compare the morality of Israel to that of the Arab states, the bottom line is this: How many Israeli Arabs emigrate to Arab countries? Essentially none.

A View from the Eye of the Storm

Steven Den Beste discovers a well-written talk/essay (I will link to the original if it turns up) purportedly given by professor Haim Harari to an advisory board of a “large multi-national corporation” in April, 2004. Steven did some research on Google to trying to verify the claim, but came up empty-handed, so I decided to try the Hebrew Google, on the assumption that this avenue was unavailable to him.

I came up with even less information than he did – Israeli academic writing is mostly in English. But I did find this, from a summary of a seminar given by Haim Harari:

המחקר עקב אחר רפורמת "מדע לכל" בישראל מתוך 'עין הסערה' מרגע הולדתה ועד היום.

The research following after the “Science for All” reform in Israel from out of ‘Eye of the Storm’ from the moment of its birth until today.

Of course this may be spurious, but people do tend to favor certain phrases in their speech. From its context in the seminar description, what he means by “Eye of the Storm” is not what you would expect from reading the essay Steven found – that Israel is in the eye of the storm engulfing the Middle East – he means that Israel has had to deal with its “normal” problems, e.g. education, while simultaneously fighting for its survival. The implication being that these problems have never gotten the attention that they would otherwise deserve – which is very true.

As a fellow inhabitant of the storm’s eye, my reaction is: “Of course.” Even Israeli leftists wouldn’t dispute much of this – though their ideas are almost indistinguishable from the European and American left. They simply choose not to see a relationship between the facts presented in the essay and the Israel’s “sins”.

The ideological background of both Israeli Left and Right is somewhat different from the US’s. The United States has the capability to solve its problems with Middle East terror, hopefully by inducing the Middle East to reform itself, but as a last resort by waging war against it – and winning. Israel doesn’t have either of these options. It is a very stark reality, human nature rebels against the idea that we are powerless to solve our problems, that the best we can do is find a way to live with them – or hope that someone else (the US) will solve them for us. The continued strength of the Israeli Left springs from this source, though it has been significantly diminished by Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton peace plan, which Barak accepted. (I am continually amazed and appalled that this episode has been forgotten and ignored by the media, since it is clear proof of Arafat’s unwillingness to make peace on any terms other than Israel’s destruction.) The Left claims that Israel is responsible for its problems, a very comforting thought since it implies that it can therefore solve them. In contrast, the Right offers only the possibility of perpetual war – a future too depressing for many Israelis to confront.

I’ve often heard the war on terrorism referred to as asymmetrical warfare. I get the impression that what is meant by this is that the “strong” governments are fighting against a “weak” foe, who uses the only means available – terrorism. But the author of “Eye in of the Storm” points out the real asymmetry, morals:

Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.

The immorality of the terrorists is appalling. But personally, I am far more appalled by supposedly moral people who aid and abet them by condemning Israel – for going to extreme lengths to maintain its moral standards, while defending itself against an immoral foe.

Hebrew vowels

Modern Hebrew doesn’t distinguish vowel length; therefore I usually don’t indicate it in my transcriptions. But pre-modern Hebrew did, and it is part of the Hebrew writing system. The table below illustrates the Hebrew vowels. There are six vowel sounds: i, e, a, o, u, and schwa; and three vowel lengths: long, short, and ultra-short. I have also taken care (this time) to indicate vowel length in the transcriptions of the vowel names.

Hebrew vowels are not independent: they are always associated with a consonant. In the following table, I have used the consonant aleph for this purpose.

	long		short		ultra short
value	name	graph	name	graph	name	graph
i		אִי	hiiriiq	אִ
e	seeyre	אֵ	segowl	אֶ	hataf segowl	אֱ
a	qaamas	אָ	pataah	אַ	hataf pataah	אֲ
o	howlaam (haaseer)	אוֹ   אֹ	qaamas qaataan	אָ	hataf qaamas	אֳ
u	shuuruuq	אוּ	qubuus	אֻ
ә					shәvaa' naa`	אְ

Notes:

Except as indicated below, I have used double letters to transcribe long vowels, single letters to transcribe short vowels, and superscripts to transcribe ultra-short vowels.

The letters ', h, h, ` (ע, ח, ה, א) cannot take a sh<sup>ә</sup>vaa' naa`. In places where a sh^әvaa' naa` would be expected, they take one of the h^ataf vowels.

There is also a “vowel” sh^әvaa' naah which looks exactly like a sh^әvaa' naa`, but indicates no vowel. There is no ambiguity, because sh<sup>ә</sup>vaa' naa` is only used to eliminate consonantal clusters. (In modern Hebrew, many consonant clusters are permitted. In my usual transcription, I use a single quote ['] to indicate a sh^әvaa' naa`, only in places where it is still pronounced.)

The qaamas which indicates a long “a” looks exactly like the qaamas qaataan which indicates a short “o”. There is no ambiguity because short “o” only occurs in closed unaccented syllables, while long “a” only occurs in open or accented syllables.

The long “i” is indicated by a hiiriiq followed by a yud.

There are two ways to indicate a long “o” – a howlaam with a vav, or just a howlaam. The latter is called howlaam haaseer. In my transcriptions I have used “ow” to transcribe the former, and “oo” to transcribe the latter. It could be that “ow” is derived from a former “aw”.

Amritas and Almavet and Ben Nesah

Amritas posts about his name. What would Amritas be in Hebrew? That’s easy: Almavet. It comes from “al” meaning not, and “mavet” meaning death, and it means immortal. It even looks and sounds a lot like Amritas – a twofer! The only problem is I don’t like it.

The use of “al-” as a prefix meaning “un-” is very new and foreign to the spirit of the language. There is a Hebrew equivalent to compound words, which is very similar to English. For example, “workplace” in Hebrew is “m’qom `avoda” from the words “maqom” – “place” and “`avoda” – work. Like English, it is accented as one word, not two, which is why the “a” in “maqom” becomes a shva “’”. Unlike English, though, the words are written with a space between them, and the accent is on the last word, not the first. However, since the word order is reversed, both languages end up accenting the same word, “work” in English and “`avoda” in Hebrew!

But compounding in Hebrew is only for combining nouns, and even then they are not bound as tightly as they are in English. For example, “the workplace” in Hebrew is “m’qom ha`avoda” the word “the” (ha-) is inserted in the middle of the compound! That’s why this construct is often translated with the word “of”, i.e. “place of work”. I use either one – whichever feels best to me. In pre-modern Hebrew there were no affixes like “un-”, “bi-”, “inter-”, etc., as there are now. “Immortal” in Hebrew would have to be translated whole, not as “im-” + “mortal”.

Well, it turns out that there are lots of ways to do this in Hebrew. As one of God’s attributes, it is a continual (dare I say immortal?) theme in Jewish prayers.

Some expressions:

l`olam va`ed – for ever and ever
`adey `ad – for ever and ever (lit. ever of ever)
hayey `olam – eternal life (lit. life of eternity)
hayey nesah – eternal life (lit. life of eternity)
hay `olamim – eternal life (lit. life of eternities)
eyn sof – infinity
eyn qes – endless

The word “`ad” is an adverb, and “`olam” has an additional meaning of “universe” when standing alone, “eyn sof” and “eyn qes” have meanings which are not quite right. That leaves “nesah”. To this I would add the word “ben” which means “son” but is also used to express something that has the qualities of something else.

Ben Nesah – Son of Eternity – Eternal One – Amritas

That’s my choice.

UPDATE: This post should answer a certain question about my sidebar.

UPDATE: Amritas responds to this post. He also includes additional information about Hebrew, along with the name written in Hebrew letters. I didn’t intentionally try to make the name sound “cool” but I do think it does. Almavet, on the other hand sounds to me like calling water “hydrogen hydroxide” – accurate, but unpoetic.