Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Predictions, Old and New

I made some predictions here on March 12th of last year. Here are the ones that pertained to 2016, with a strike through the one I got wrong:

Hillary will not be prevented from appearing on the ballot in November by legal trouble stemming from her e-mail scandal or from anything else: 100%.
Hillary will be the Democratic nominee in 2016: 99%.
Trump will be the GOP nominee in 2016: 80%.
Trump will not be assassinated or severely disabled by an assassination attempt before the end of 2016: 85%.
Hillary will win the 2016 general election: 70%.
I also predicted that the UK will not leave the EU as a result of the 2016 referendum. It now looks like it WILL leave, but that hasn't happened yet.

And here are a few predictions for this year, starting with politics:

Trump avoids assassination: 92.5%.
Trump avoids natural death: 97.5%.
Trump avoids impeachment: 97.5%.
Anti-Trump protests lead to fewer than 50 deaths: 75%.
Putin is alive and in power at the end of the year: 97.5%.
The Ukraine fails to retake Donetsk and Lugansk: 99%.
The Ukraine keeps Mariupol: 97.5%.
The Ukraine keeps Kharkov: 99%.
The Ukraine keeps Odessa: 99%.
The neocons have probably convinced themselves by now that Trump's victory will lead to Russia re-taking the Baltics. That's paranoia. Forget the places that hate Putin, he won't even take the places that like him unless he's provoked, like he was after the Maidan coup. Trump won't provoke him.
ISIS keeps at least some territory: 75%.
Marine Le Pen fails to win the French presidency: 65%.

Predictions related to this blog:

I will review more than 10 books in 2017: 75%.
One of last year's serial murderers, a BLM-related fellow if I recall correctly, bragged on his web site that he read something like 150 books a year. I'm not even 100% sure that was BS. Some people do read that much. Not me: last year I only finished reading 8 books, all of which I reviewed on this blog.
I will record at least 1 piano piece and post it on YouTube: 80%.
I will write at least 10 new quatrains for my Credo poem: 60%.

Monday, January 2, 2017

Review of The Age of Agade

The Age of Agade by Benjamin R. Foster, 2016. Glossy's rating: 7/10.

This is a book about the Akkadian Empire, which was established more than 4,300 years ago in parts of what's now Iraq, Syria and Iran, and survived for roughly a century and a half before disintegrating.

In Mesopotamia writing was invented by the Sumerians, who lived in what's now southern Iraq. It was very quickly borrowed by the Semitic people living upstream from them, in central Iraq and Syria, who used it to write their completely unrelated language. I've seen several contradictory estimates of when Semites arrived in Mesopotamia, from 3000 BC, right before the dawn of the written record, to the 7th millennium BC, a date which appears in this book.

Early on Kish was the political center of the Semitic north, but then a man named Sargon, who was presumably from the northern city of Akkad, conquered all of Mesopotamia and several adjoining regions, creating the largest state seen in the area up to that time. Akkad was its capital and eventually, as creators of this empire, all Semitic Mesopotamians became known as Akkadians.

I'm very curious about the differences between the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples and cultures. Both regions practiced irrigation agriculture and animal husbandry, but there was somewhat more of the first in Sumer and somewhat more of the second in Akkad. It's natural to expect the tillers of the earth to be tamer and more civilized than shepherds, and the history of this region supports this stereotype. According to this book the art of the Akkadian empire was more martial in subject matter than the early Sumerian art which preceded it.

Akkadian language gained at the expense of Sumerian during and after the imperial period, eventually replacing it completely. Genetics might tell us if this was accompanied by much demographic change, but I'm not aware of anyone having studied this.

Foster writes that "letters composed in Akkadian show a tendency to be more florid than those in Sumerian, introducing oaths, exclamations, and rhetorical questions to an extent unusual in Sumerian epistolography." More than 4,000 years later Semitic speakers still like florid verbal bombast.

Early Sumerian politics and economy were dominated by temples to a larger extent than in the Semitic area.

"In the pre-Akkadian Semitic-speaking world"... "a king ruled like a strong, resourceful, clever, and protective tribal leader, but had no special connection to the gods, as he did in Sumerian thought."

Yet Akkadian rulers claimed intimacy with the gods and divine support. Foster implies that they borrowed this from the Sumerians. By the late Akkadian period Semitic kings were worshipped as Gods.

Foster writes that in Akkad inferiors were more likely to identify themselves by their dependency on someone else, such as "he of..."

Slavery existed but wasn't common. Slaves were mostly used as rich men's servants, not agricultural laborers. The Sumerian word for them was of Akkadian origin, which implies that the practice might have been brought to the south by Akkadians.

This contradictory information makes it difficult for me to say which of these two societies was more egalitarian. Foster says that some scholars have talked about popular assemblies in ancient Mesopotamia, but that they were wrong to do this. He sees no evidence of any democratic institutions in that world.

You would think that Sumerian culture would have had some prestige in the Semitic north, similarly to how Greek culture was looked up to at Rome and British culture is looked up to in modern America, and there is in fact some evidence for this:

"At pre-Akkadian Mari, a significant proportion of the musicians had Sumerian names, as opposed to the rest of the palace population. Perhaps these were professional or stage names, rather than an indication that Sumerian musicians were particularly favored there."

"Their repertory probably included love songs, perhaps the erotic type later termed “bosom songs.”

My opinion of Mesopotamian civilization would have taken a serious dive if its love songs turned out to have been called "ass songs" instead.

This book has chapters on most aspects of Mesopotamian life of that period. A couple of unrelated things that I found interesting:

"Marriage was overwhelmingly monogamous, though men occasionally had more than one wife and concubinage was known among the elite and ruling class, among whom large families are documented. People of lower status, who appear most often in administrative lists of workers, did not usually have more than two or three children."

"Roast pork was an esteemed delicacy served to visiting dignitaries and, in post-Akkadian times, a treat for the gods and for members of the royal family. The first evidence for a taboo on pork consumption in Mesopotamia comes much later, from the ninth century BCE."

Sargon's empire is not the earliest known large state. Egypt was unified about seven centuries before his birth, and there was a trend for progressively larger states in Mesopotamia before Sargon. But through his conquests and reforms he made an enormous impression on Mesopotamian historical consciousness. For more than 2,000 years after him, until the demise of cuneiform culture, Sargon was Mesopotamia's chief hero, comparable to Alexander and Charlemagne in Europe of later ages.

I was surprised to learn that Mesopotamian rulers of the 1st millennium BC conducted archeological digs in the city of Akkad, which was by then abandoned, looking for inscriptions and other artifacts of the Sargonic period. A Babylonian king of the 6th century BC thought that Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, ruled 3,200 years before him, an error of 1,500 years.

An Akkadian king, probably Naram-Sin. All extant likenesses of Akkadian rulers were mutilated in antiquity, after the fall of the dynasty.

The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin.
Besides conquering and ruthlessly suppressing revolts Sargon and his heirs reformed Mesopotamia's weights and measures. Two millennia before China's first emperor and the Roman emperor Claudius, Naram-Sin ordered a spelling reform, making the Mesopotamian writing system more logical and visually attractive. There is a record of one of Naram-Sin's sons, a governor of a province, being literate. I'm always curious about the question of whether or not literacy was limited to the scribal profession in past eras. For example, it's known that the above-mentioned Charlemagne could read, but not write.

"No other medium conveys the calm self-assurance of the period so well as its elegant, elaborate, carefully laid out script."...

"As they did with so many other aspects of Mesopotamian civilization, the Akkadian ruling class took a venerable inheritance and gave it a new form in which a love of beauty and harmony for their own sake was paramount, the first instance of a culture in which the art of calligraphy proclaimed its values and pride."

"For outsiders, the Akkadian aesthetic aroused envy, fear, wonder, and grudging respect. For the Akkadian elite, however, it proclaimed their pride and self-confidence in having reshaped the four quarters of their world and crushed all resistance. This may be why even the closest student of Akkadian arts and letters feels at once near and far from the spirit they convey."

This sort of stuff makes me think of the Napoleonic, Hitlerite and Stalinist visual styles. Empires often go for imperial grandeur in the arts. Nietzsche would have loved this.

The scale of the imperial enterprise was of course much smaller in the ancient world. Sargon boasted in one of his inscriptions that he fed a standing army of 5,400. Foster is inclined to believe Akkadian kings' figures because they swore to the gods that they were true. I'm more skeptical. They never mentioned any defeats or listed their own casualties.

"On the whole, Akkadian notables saw themselves as dominating local populations, rather than working pacifically with them. In a letter sent by one notable to another, the writer addresses his compeer, perhaps playfully, as “The Yoke of Ishtar.”

The royal inscriptions, listed in an appendix of this book, bear this out:

"Sargon, as Enlil revealed, showed mercy to no one…"

"Rimush, king of the world –Enlil verily gave kingship to him –was as many as three times victorious over Sumer in battle! He slew 11,322 men. He took 2520 captives. Further, he expelled 14,100 men from the cities of Sumer and put them in camps. Total: 54,016 men, including the slain, including the captives, including the men whom he put in camps, the campaign is not lies! ? By Shamash and Ilaba I swear no lies but truthfully!

Whoever shall remove the name of Rimush, king of the world, and set his own name there, saying “My statue!” –may Enlil, owner of this statue, and Shamash tear out his foundations and take away his seed."

The style and vigor of anti-plagiarism notices have really declined over the ages.

Foster says that the Iraq and Syrian wars have had a terrible impact on the study of the ancient Near East. Museums have been looted. Archeological sites ceased to be guarded and were excavated by treasure hunters who do not record the context of their finds like professionals do, and who will easily break unique and priceless tablets which they can't read in search of a pretty statuette or vase.

It's enough to make one want to cry out to Enlil and Shamash, imploring them to tear out the foundations and take away the seed of the imbeciles responsible for neocon foreign policy.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

A New Quatrain

Yesterday I wrote another quatrain for my big Credo poem:

There are limits to our powers.
Anyone can quickly tell
Real plants from plastic flowers.
We don't copy nature well.

I'm still trying to versify the idea that I described in this book review. It will probably take a couple more quatrains to do it. The entire work in progress can be seen here.

A couple of cool quotes about poetry:

"Poetry [is] the best words in the best order." Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
"Writing unrhymed poetry is like playing tennis with the net down." Robert Frost.

To extend this analogy, writing poetry that doesn't make any coherent sense is like ignoring the white lines that mark the borders of the court. The old game where you write a line of poetry, your friend writes the second one, you write the third, etc. is like playing doubles. The opponent is the language, the spectators are the readers.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Non-Review of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

I stopped reading this book after finishing the 3rd of its 20 chapters, hence the title of this post.

I first learned about GEB from a Slashdot discussion around 1999. Everyone praised it to the skies, so I added it to my imaginary pile of books to read some day.

The Escher of the title is the guy who drew pictures of this sort:




GEB seems to be mostly about bits of math that confound expectations in a similar way. Things that are true and false at the same time, things that are their own causes and consequences, things that get smaller as they increase, etc.

Now, I think of those pictures as mildly amusing tricks. Hofstadter considers them profound. He claims that mathematical parallels of such trickery can explain consciousness, the thing that separates human intelligence from the artificial sort. My intuition tells me that this is unlikely to be true.

I'd like to learn more math, but only of the sort that's useful in the hard sciences, in understanding the real world. Cute paradoxes for their own sake are boring to me.

I plead guilty to having engaged in some cutesy verbal trickery myself. But I don't think much of it. Hofstadter points out that Bach engaged in a lot of cutesy musical trickery. But that's not what made his music great. It was like Maradona juggling a football with his shoulders for the crowd before matches - a bit of showing off, but not what he was actually about, not why he was important within football.

It's possible that I'm dismissing GEB too easily, but life is short, and there's lots of books I'd like to read that seem more likely to contain interesting to me insights.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Review of The Literature of Ancient Sumer

The Literature of Ancient Sumer, Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gabor Zolyomi, 2005. Glossy's rating: 4/10.

This is a collection of Sumerian texts which, along with early Egyptian writings, constitute the oldest literature that has survived to our days.

It's heavily religious in character. Some of this book's chapters are titled "Love and Sex", "The Natural Order" and "Scribes and Learning", but this is a bit misleading because in reality almost all of these 70-odd pieces are primarily about Sumerian gods.

The mental leap made by some classic-era Greeks which allowed them to discuss history, politics, nature, etc. without recourse to the supernatural seems especially impressive to someone who's just finished reading this book, or just had a long conversation with a low-IQ person.

Yet like all normal religions the Sumerian one must have been enormously helpful to the propagation of its believers. Here is one god describing the underworld to another:

`Did you see him who had one son?'
`I saw him.'
`How does he fare?'
`He weeps bitterly at the wooden peg which was driven into his wall.'....
`Did you see him who had seven sons?'
`I saw him.'
`How does he fare?'
'As a companion of the gods, he sits on a throne and listens to judgments.'
'Did you see the palace eunuch?'
`I saw him.'
`How does he fare?'
`Like a useless alala stick he is propped in a corner.'
`Did you see the woman who never gave birth?'
`I saw her.'
`How does she fare?'
`Like a ... pot, she is thrown away violently, she gives no man joy.'
`Did you see the young man who never undressed his wife?'
`I saw him.'
`How does he fare?'
'You finish a rope, and he weeps over the rope.'
`Did you see the young woman who never undressed her husband?'
`I saw her.'
`How does she fare?'
`You finish a reed mat, and she weeps over the reed mat.'
'Did you see my little stillborn children who never knew existence?'
'I saw them.'
`How do they fare?'
'They play at a table of gold and silver, laden with honey and ghee.'

Almost all of these texts are highly repetitive:

"'What does your king have to tell me, what does he have to add to me? What does En-suljgir-ana have to tell me, what does he have to add to me?" "This is what my king said, what he added, this is what En-suhgir-ana said, what he added."'

This is at least partly because many of them were meant to be sung to musical accompaniment. It's natural for lyrics to have refrains. But even if one takes that into the account, the narratives still sound extremely monotonous in the specific way that annoys you when you hear one modern dull person try to explain something to another. Lots of simple points are made many times over in different ways.

Some of these stories are like modern children's fairy tales with talking animals and sentient garden implements. Except that they're raunchier:

"...after father Enki had lifted his eyes across the Euphrates, he stood up full of lust like a rampant bull, lifted his penis, ejaculated and filled the Tigris with flowing water."

"She placed mascara which is called `Let a man come, let him come' on her eyes. She pulled the pectoral which is called `Come, man, come' over her breast..."

Both of these quotes are about Sumerian gods. There is a description of "sacred marriage", a ceremony where a king copulates with a goddess on a platform in front of the people:

"The king goes to her holy thighs with head held high,° he goes to the thighs of Inana with head held high. Ama-usumgal-ana lies down beside her and caresses her holy thighs°. After the lady has made him rejoice with her holy thighs on the bed, after holy Inana has made him rejoice with her holy thighs on the bed, she relaxes (?) with him on her bed: `Iddin-Dagan, you are indeed my beloved!'"

The editors say it's impossible to know whether king Iddin-Dagan actually did it on a stage with a stand-in for the goddess Inana (a priestess of hers, for example), or whether the ceremony was handled in a more symbolic way in real life.

The preface to one of the stories says that only heterosexual kind of love is ever talked about in Sumerian literature, yet there is a mention of male prostitutes parading in front of the crowd before the above-mentioned sacred marriage performance.

In one story king Gilgamesh, trying to lure out the monster Huwawa, offers him his "big sister" En-me-barage-si in marriage. Huwawa doesn't know that En-me-barage-si is actually the king of Kish and the father of Gilgamesh's enemy Aga. The editors say this is a joke and I believe them - people still joke like that today.

Some of the cultural associations used in these tales clash with ours though. For example, when Sumerians compared a beautiful goddess to a cow or a fearsome god to a donkey, they weren't trying to insult them.

Sumerians' chief name for themselves was "the black-headed people". Black-headed as opposed to whom? Modern Swedes sometimes call foreigners svartskallar (black skulls), obviously in contrast to themselves. In less politically correct times there was some controversy over whether or not Gutians, a barbaric tribe that overran Sumer in the late 3rd millennium BC, were light-haired. And there are statues with blue eyes from the Near East of this period.

In this collection Sumerians call Gutians "an unbridled people, with human intelligence but canine instincts' and monkeys' features..." "who do not resemble other people, who are not reckoned as part of the Land."

I was surprised that none of the stories in this book mention conflict between Sumerians and Semitic Akkadians whose language ended up replacing Sumerian. Most of these texts are known from clay tablets of the 18th century BC and later, when spoken Sumerian was probably already dead. Maybe after Akkadian culture won Sumerian texts disparaging Akkadians were destroyed? And maybe any texts disparaging Sumerians would be in Akkadian, which would put them outside the scope of this book?

My favorite text here was The Instructions of Shuruppag, one of the two oldest pieces of Sumerian literature that survived to our day. It's about 4,500 years old, and its opening line says:

"In those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years..."

It's a collection of advice, which this document (one of the oldest ones on Earth if we disregard accounting tables and the like) already called ancient.

"Although the number of unhappy days is endless (?), yet life is better than death .."
"At harvest time, at the most priceless time, collect like a slave girl, eat like a queen." The modern English equivalent is "work hard, play hard."
"You should submit to the respected; you should be humble before the powerful. My son, you will then survive (?) against the wicked."
"Without suburbs a city has no centre either."
"What flows in is never enough to fill it, and what flows out can never be stopped - don't envy the king's property!"
"When you bring a slave girl from the hills, she brings both good and evil with her. The good is in the hands; the evil is in the heart."
"My son, you should not use violence (?); .... You should not commit rape on someone's daughter; the courtyard will learn of it." A hint that the Sumerians were a shame-based, not a conscience-based people.
"You should not have sex with your slave girl: she will chew you up."

The receiver of all this advice is Zi-ud-sura, the Noah of the Sumerian flood story, which was the original source of the Biblical story everyone now knows. Archeologists did discover evidence of a catastrophic river flood in Sumer around 2900 BC. The Sumerian king list includes a chronological list of cities which led Sumer before the flood. The first one is Eridu, which this book calls Eridug. Archeologists determined that it was indeed the first city in the region - the king list had that right - and that it was founded around 5400 BC. So if you want to know how far back humanity's historical memory goes, 5400 BC is one possible answer. Which I think is pretty impressive.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

The Current Nationalist Trend

For several years now there's been a definite nationalist trend in global politics. I've only seen three explanations for it: the Internet, Putin and the global economic crisis which began in 2008. I'll try to examine each one.

The Internet theory starts with the fact that the Net has cut into TV's near-monopoly on shaping public opinion. For most of the TV age it was very difficult to start a TV station. Public discourse was dominated by a small number of powerful corporations and states which owned all the media that mattered. The Internet democratized this system. The revolt of the comment sections, etc.

Humans are tribal by nature. The left-liberal belief system is an unnatural imposition. If it's removed, politics should be expected to become more explicitly tribal.

The biggest argument against this explanation for the current nationalist trend is that the WWW went big in 1995, more than 15 years before politics started to turn in this direction. Why didn't the democratizing effect of the Internet make politics more populist by 2000, 2005 or 2010?

The Putin explanation says that having watched the neocons and their NGO allies foment color revs all around him, having watched them turn public opinion against him in neighboring countries, Putin decided to try his hand at this too, and succeeded.

One argument against this explanation is that the current nationalist trend seems to affect countries in which Putin has no interest. For example it's my impression that Modi is the most Hindu-nationalist prime minister India has ever had. And isn't Abe the most nationalist post-WWII Japanese prime minister? There's Duterte in the Philippines. I think Erdogan is more populist-nationalist than past Turkish leaders, and he's fought on the anti-Putin side in the Syrian war, even shooting down a Russian military jet.

The second argument against the Putin theory has to do with the Ukraine. We're supposed to believe that it's easier for Putin to change public opinion in Wisconsin than in the Kiev Region. If he can make pro-Russian politicians win in America (and seemingly now in France), why can't he do it in the Ukraine, where most of the population is genetically and culturally indistinguishable from Russians?

The biggest argument against the third, economic explanation is that the countries that were most affected by the 2008 crisis don't seem to be more receptive to populism than the world at large. Remember PIIGS? Spain and Portugal have no far right parties of note, Greece has gone in the populist direction and the others are neither here nor there. If economic misery was the reason, I think we'd see more from that uncharitably-named group.

If Putin is eventually succeeded by a Gorby-like "reformer" (Medvedev or someone else), then one of these theories will be seriously tested. If global populism withers after he's gone, we'll know it was him all along. Lacking that I really don't know what the cause is.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Review of The Golden Empire by Hugh Thomas

The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V and the Creation of America by Hugh Thomas, 2011. Glossy's rating: 8/10.

This is the second book of Hugh Thomas's trilogy about the early Spanish Empire. The most important conquest described here is that of Peru. I will quote extensively from Thomas's comparison of Mexico and Peru, pre-Columbian America's two most powerful states, which according to him knew nothing of each other at the time of European contact:

"Both had settled capital cities—in Tenochtitlan and in Cuzco—something that at that stage Spain had not.

The two monarchies were both absolute ones: The power of the ruler was unquestioned. Both rulers were in constant touch, it was said, with the sun. The popular adulation attached to the monarch was exorbitant, and protest or dissent unthinkable.

Both societies liked alcohol and some drugs: The Peruvians had chicha, a mild beer made from maize, while the Mexica had pulque, made from the agave cactus; the Incas enjoyed coca rather than the elaborate range of hallucinogenic drugs available to the Mexica from mushrooms.

There were, of course, differences between these two indigenous societies. The most important one was that ancient Peru had no commercial life, while Mexico enjoyed a lively one: Mexican merchants also played an important part in informing the rulers, the “Emperors,” about other places, as if they were secret agents. A related difference was that there was no private landholding in Peru. The peasants farmed elaborate, productive, and even beautiful terraces, but they were held in common. Never was there a more pervasive government than that of the Incas. Personal liberty was practically nonexistent. Blind obedience and unquestioning self-abnegation had forever to be accorded. But if much was demanded of the subject, much was done for him. Marxists have talked of “Inca communism,” and they may have been correct thus to designate the Peruvian social structure, in which almost everything was supervised by officials.

Aztec society was much less controlled. Montezuma’s remark about the necessity of dealing harshly with his people if they were going to be ruled effectively is well known.

Another difference was that the Peruvians had sails on their rafts and canoes, which the Mexica and Mesoamerican people, such as the Maya, do not seem to have had. The Peruvians used the sea as a means for trade more than the Mexica did."

This was really surprising to me because Mexico faces the Caribbean with its huge islands. Mesoamericans had places to go, yet didn't. In fact, Thomas mentioned in his first volume that they seem to have never visited Cuba, Hispañola, etc.

"The Inca built magnificent roads and suspension bridges, far superior to anything then found in ancient Mexico—or, thought the Sevillano chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León, in old Europe.
The Mexica had remarkable artistic achievements to their credit: for example, their painting, poetry, and sculpture, monumental and tiny, relief and in the round. In these matters, the Peruvians were more limited, and no pre-Hispanic poetry is known from Peru.

Both had a process for creating metals of quality out of ore. But the Peruvians created more elaborate gold ornaments than the Mexica did.

Based on a straightforward worship of the sun, Inca religion was simpler than that of Mexico. Human sacrifices occurred but on a much lesser level than in ancient Mexico—the victims in Peru being usually beautiful boys and girls, often prisoners of war. Still, the death or investiture of a ruler could inspire the sacrifice of hundreds."

If the Incas achieved more political control over their subjects with less violence than the Aztecs, then perhaps the people of pre-Columbian Peru were tamer than Mesoamericans by nature? And one would normally expect a tamer people to be less artistically gifted.

The Spaniards who went to the New World were the opposite of tame. The number and extent of conflicts among them was shocking. For example, when Cortés set out to conquer Mexico, he was in revolt against his superior, the governor of Cuba. Some time after capturing Mexico City he left it to punish a revolt by one of his subordinates, so guess what happened - the Spaniards he left in charge in the capital revolted against him. And this was typical.

Extremeños, a wild bunch, were the most overrepresented type of Spaniards among the conquistadors. Catalans, who seem to be the most core-European of Iberians, were the most underrepresented.

Of course Indians fought each other all the time too, but on the whole, from the big picture perspective, instinctive loyalties predictably tended to align with genetic distances:

“This was the most dreadful and cruel war … Between Christians and Moors, there is usually some fellow feeling and it is in the interests of both sides to spare those whom they take alive, because of the ransom. But in this Indian war there is no such fellow feeling. We give each other the most cruel deaths we can imagine.”

Except for one familiar pattern: the converso Bartolomé de las Casas consistently took the side of the Indians against the Spaniards. He persuaded Charles V to issue a new set of laws which prohibited the enslavement of Indians and abolished the encomienda system of feudal-like land holding in Spanish America.

It's important to note here that Las Casas was not motivated by humanitarianism. In fact he's quoted here saying that the Spaniards who opposed the new laws should have been hanged, drawn and quartered.

These laws produced a large-scale rebellion of Spanish colonists in Peru, led by Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of the deceased conqueror Francisco. Some of Gonzalo's supporters advised him to declare independence from Spain, marry a woman from the Inca royal house and make himself king.

He was eventually defeated by forces loyal to the Spanish crown. Before Gonzalo was executed, the royal governor reproached him for his ingratitude. The king of Spain sent the Pizarro brothers to Peru, gave them all these honors, etc., and what did they do in return?

Gonzalo answered that Francisco Pizarro and his followers conquered Peru on their own and that the king did not raise them up from dust because "the Pizarros have been noblemen and gentlemen with our own estates since the Goths came to Spain."

I found it very interesting that the Spanish gentry of the 16th century considered themselves to be descended from the Goths. What would have been the alternatives? The Romans or claims of being entirely autochthonous.

Back to Las Casas: he had a public debate with a scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda about the nature of the Indians.

"Sepúlveda’s arguments for the legality of the conquests were, first, on account of the gravity of the sins committed by the Indians, especially their idolatries and their sins against nature; second, on account of the rudeness of the Indians’ nature which obliged them to serve the Spaniards. Here Aristotle could be cited, recalling his observation that some people are inferior by nature. The Indians were as different from Spaniards as monkeys are from men.

Compare then those blessings enjoyed by Spaniards, of prudence, genius, magnanimity, temperance, humanity and religion, with those of the “hombrecillos” among whom you will scarcely find even a vestige of humanity, who not only possess no science but who also lack letters and preserve no monument of their history except certain vague and obscure reminiscences in some paintings. Neither do they have written laws, but barbaric institutions and customs. They do not even have private property."

It must be said that the Mayans did have a writing system, but its use went into decline before the Spaniards arrived. Thomas says that at the time of contact they did not use their characters for writing letters or contracts.

Fray Domingo de Betanzos, another opponent of Las Casas, wrote that Indians should not have been encouraged to study “since no benefit could be expected for a long time … Indians are not stable persons to whom one can entrust the preaching of the Holy Gospel. They do not have the ability to understand correctly and fully the Christian faith nor is their language sufficient and copious enough to be able to express our faith without great improprieties, which can easily result in great errors.” So no Indian should be ordained a priest"...

"He added that he, like Bishop Zumárraga, "longed to go to China, where apparently the “natives were so much more intelligent than those of New Spain.”

Las Casas countered this in a very modern leftist fashion by saying that the Indians were as smart as the ancient Greeks and Romans and more civilized than Spaniards. He even tried to justify their human sacrifices.

Thomas says that Las Casas ended up winning the intellectual argument in Spain but that the situation on the ground in the Indies remained largely unchanged.

The real audience of Las Casas's and Sepulveda's debate was the king-emperor Charles V, a very important figure in this book. I was surprised to learn that the name Carlos was almost unknown in Spain before his reign began. This reminded me of the fact that the Greek name Phillip, born by Charles's successor, was brought to Western Europe by a daughter of the Russian prince Yaroslav the Wise, who was married to the king of France and who gave it to one of her sons, who eventually became king.

Charles V is shown here as an earnest, well-meaning man. He twice challenged Francis I, the king of France, to single combat to settle their differences without war. Unfortunately these duels did not end up occurring.

Charles was by far the most powerful European ruler of his day. In 1522, in an apparent attempt to get into his good graces the cardinals elected his trusted advisor and former tutor Adrian pope. Being Dutch, he was the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II in the late 20th century.

"He caused consternation by refusing to countenance nepotism." A placard placed on a door in the Vatican "denounced the cardinals who had elected Adrian as “robbers, betrayers of Christ’s blood” and asked, “Do you not feel sorrow to have surrendered the Vatican to German fury?”...

Ludwig von Pastor, the historian of the popes, wrote that “Adrian’s single-hearted anxiety to live exclusively for duty was to Italians of that age like an apparition from another world, beyond the grasp of their comprehension.”

Thomas also informs us that Adrian was denounced by Romans for preferring beer to wine.

As always, I was fascinated by all the old ethnic stereotypes mentioned in this book. For example, Thomas says that Greeks were often employed as artillery specialists in Spanish armies, including in the Americas.

The following reads bizarrely today: "Black slaves were thought to work harder than Indians, something especially noticeable in the hot climate."

In contrast to the Indian situation, the question of the morality of enslaving Blacks seems to have never come up.

"If these monarchs gave the matter any thought at all, they would have supposed that a slave in Christian hands would be much better off than a free African in Africa."

At one point Thomas writes that there is no evidence that anyone in pre-Colombian Mexico or Peru "had a sense of humor, whereas the Spaniards were always laughing." This must have seemed especially alien to a Brit like him. I can read Spanish, so I sometimes asked myself "why am I reading about Spanish and Latin American history in English?" Well, it's very hard to imagine anyone but a Brit writing about history with such great style and such subtle humor as Hugh Thomas. I recommend this volume highly.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Thoughts on the Election

First, I'd estimate Trump's IQ to be in the 105 to 110 range. That's below the IQ of the average congressman, governor or past president. Both of the Clintons are probably around 140. I'll be voting for Trump, but it would be silly to claim that he knows a lot of facts, has good taste or possesses a long attention span.

How could someone with a 105 to 110 IQ have become a billionaire? He's a natural alpha and his father's fortune must have given him a head start.

Most of his political opinions are typical of working-class, non-Jewish real New Yorkers - white ethnics whose ancestors came here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the popular imagination these people are Irish and Italian, but reality is, as always, more complicated, and I've known a few with German last names as well.

Why would a son of a multimillionaire be culturally working-class? The above-mentioned IQ issue. Also, his natural machismo.

If you ask an Italian-American elevator mechanic from Jersey or Staten Island about law and order, free trade or immigration, you'll hear the same things that are coming out of Trump. These people were pro-war in the aftermath of 9/11, but turned anti-war in the middle of the Iraq disaster. And they're still anti-war today.

Such people's opinions of Putin and Russia are much more negative than Trump's though. Does that mean that the TrumPutin conspiracy theory is correct? I don't know. It's fun to accuse Hillbots online of peddling a conspiracy theory, but I'll vote for Trump regardless of whether or not he's actually in touch with the Kremlin. Hillary is supported by lots of non-American forces and, what's more important, she'll be much worse for America and the world.

I'm not a pacifist because I sympathize with individuals and groups who defend themselves, but I don't think that America's current military involvements have anything to do with self-defense. In fact, I think that America would be safer if it withdrew from the Middle East.

I like both of the countries in which I've lived, so the idea of peaceful relations between them is very attractive to me.

I don't think that a nuclear exchange or a direct conventional war between Russia and the US is possible because if it was, it would have probably already happened. The USSR acquired nuclear weapons in 1949. Think of all the crises that have happened since then, of all the changes of personnel at the top. What does the absence of direct conflict tell us? That MAD works.

However, Hillary is likely to start new conventional proxy wars with Russia. The Korean, Vietnam, Central American and Afghanistan wars were the largest proxy wars of Cold War I. The Georgian, Donbass and Syrian wars have been the largest proxy wars of Cold War II. These conflicts kill enormous numbers of people, so any humanitarian should be opposed to those who promote them.

Trump is an erratic guy, and along with a large number of dovish statements he's made some not so dovish ones. How do I resolve this problem? First, I go by volume. His peaceful statements have been more numerous. Second, I look at the behavior of the people with the largest stake in this issue. Both the neocons and Putin are acting as if they think that Trump will be a non-interventionist. As I said above, I don't know if the Kremlin is helping Trump with his campaign, but I follow Russian media, and the pro-Kremlin parts of it are indeed pro-Trump.

Even though I'm an immigrant, I support Trump's immigration stance. I freely admit that this is hypocritical. What can I say, I'm comfortable here.

As should be evident from my blog, I'm fascinated by a wide variety of cultures, by their languages, histories, stereotypes and genetics. There are people who spend a lot of energy defending endangered species of frogs or butterflies, and I sympathize with them, but not as much as with the people who are trying to preserve human cultural and biological diversity. I see the prospect of the melting down of humanity into one big, undifferentiated grey mass as a tragedy that should be avoided.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution all of the world's rising powers have had manufacturing economies. England, Germany, America, the USSR, Japan, now China. Deindustrialization is historically linked with declining living standards and loss of international influence. I think that anyone who wishes this country well and who has a realistic, non-libertardian view of economics, would be a protectionist like Trump.

I'm with Trump on the issue of law and order. I think that the Ferguson Effect is real and that national stop & frisk would save a lot of lives.

Finally, and unfortunately, I've never expected Trump to win. Almost the entire power structure hates him, and it's foolish to bet against it. I'm guessing that soft methods will work for the powers that be this time, but if they don't, they'll resort to hard ones.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Euphony

Italian names are famously euphonious. The book about Florentine history that I recently reviewed here contained thousands of them. Did I have a favorite? Of course. Clarice Orsini, the wife of Lorenzo the Magnificent. You have to pronounce it in the Italian way though.

Continuing with the theme of cool-sounding word combinations, I learned from Hugh Thomas's first book about the early Spanish empire that Ferdinand of Aragon, Isabella's husband, signed all his letters with the phrase "yo, el rey". That sounds great no matter what language I translate it to.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Anton van den Wyngaerde

I'm reading the second book of Hugh Thomas's trilogy about the early Spanish empire. He mentions a Flemish artist named Anton van den Wyngaerde who "sketched most of the towns of Castile - so carefully that in 1572 he retired to Madrid with his hands crippled."

That made me curious, so I looked him up. His are the best city panoramas I've ever seen. While reading about Florentine history I naturally wanted to see what old Florence looked like, and the best that I could find on the Internet was this. Wyngaerde's stuff is better. This is just beautiful, as are this and this.

Whenever I look at walled cities or castles, I immediately imagine them being taken by an army. The best cinematic portrayal of that I have seen is contained in Andrei Tarkovsky's movie Andrei Rublev.

There is an album of Wyngaerde's sketches on sale. I'm guessing that there's more stuff there than is available online, but I haven't yet decided if I want to splurge on it.