The truce in the battle of the sexes during peaks of social harmony, 1940s and 1990s, halfway between peaks of social chaos circa 1920, 1970, and 2020

A topic I've been exploring lately relates to the 50-year cycle that Peter Turchin uncovered in social chaos and civil breakdown in American history, with eruptions circa 1970, 1920, 1870, missing one in 1820, and 1770. On that basis he predicted another eruption circa 2020 -- boy, was he right on the money.

He does mention the opposite values of these chaotic eruptions -- low-points for civil breakdown, or in other words, peaks of social harmony. The Era of Good Feelings in the 1820s was halfway between the breakdowns of the 1770s and 1870s. The Gay Nineties were halfway between the breakdowns of the 1870s and circa 1920.

It's misleadingly called the WWII era, since it began well before the war did (certainly before America's involvement in it), but the '30s and first half of the '40s, even the late '20s, were another such period. Woody Allen dubbed the period Radio Days. Also the period in which A Christmas Story is set. Or the contempo setting of It's a Wonderful Life. Whatever we call it, it was halfway between the breakdowns of circa 1920 and 1970.

Well, we just went through another breakdown circa 2020, which leaves the halfway point between it and the previous one before that, 1970, circa 1995. And really, harmony had been on the upswing by the late '70s, lasting throughout the '80s, and peaking in the first half of the '90s.

Chaos, breakdown, disorder, riots, etc. -- far more attention-grabbing for historians. The phases of greater harmony, stability, order, and calm, tend to go unnoticed.

Because this cycle pertains to such a foundational aspect of society -- order vs. disorder -- it affects so many domains of societal life. Riots vs. calmness is an obvious one. I'm interested in surveying how broadly this cycle touches our lives.

A perennial topic of discourse is the battle of the sexes, which has reached a fever pitch in the last 5, 10, 15 years. I think we're past the worst part of it, but it's still raging.

And before focusing on the harmonious phase, it does help to start with the chaotic phase, since its symptoms are so much more intense and easy to discern.

During the most recent chaotic phase, circa the late '90s through the early 2020s, and exploding during the woketard 2010s, there are too many symptoms to list briefly. #MeToo, Slutwalk, toxic masculinity, incels, gay BFFs / fag hags, fujoshi fanfic (girl imagining herself as a male in a homoerotic male-male fantasy), redpill, Game / pickup artists, porn based on degradation or humiliation (for either sex), and on and on down the line. Guys and girls could not have inhabited more separate, and more mutually hostile social environments.

In terms of waves of feminism, this is associated with the Fourth Wave.

During the previous eruption of chaos in the late '60s and early '70s, there was the Second Wave of feminism. Mostly focused on abortion, but also women's liberation in general, free love, bra-burning, equal pay for equal work, divorce, and the birth of what's called radical feminism i.e. the bitter man-hating abolish all gender roles type. That included the SCUM Manifesto, i.e. the Society for Cutting Up Men, by the whackjob who shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas -- this was before feminazis sanctified gay men as their protective cockblocking eunuchs against the forces of toxic heterosexual masculinity.

During the previous eruption of chaos before that, was the breakdown of the late 1910s and early '20s. That coincided with the First Wave of feminism, specifically the Suffragette movement. Along with the chaotic social mood generally, this movement of feminism had been growing since the turn of the 20th century, it just hit its peak circa 1920 (when the US granted women the right to vote).

You may have noticed a skipped-over wave of feminism -- the Third Wave. That term applies to the '90s and the early 2000s, during a period of relative social calm rather than upheaval, as opposed to the other three waves coinciding with civil breakdowns.

Well, Third Wave feminism doesn't really exist, and feminists admit it -- its hallmark was its lack of cohesion politically, and lack of coherence conceptually. It's more of a placeholder term for "whatever feminists were up to in the '90s". And it's premised upon women of the '80s and '90s having won so many things during the previous two waves, so what was left for the '90s?

One of the major books of the Third Wave, Susan Faludi's Backlash ('91), is more about the past than the present -- the backlash against the Second Wave after the peak of social chaos had been reached, by the late '70s and throughout the '80s and into the early '90s.

The other major book, which *was* more about the present than a backlash against the previous wave, was The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (also '91). Like the Third Wave in general, its premise is how many material, legal, and other gains have already been won due to the First and Second Waves. Now with women seemingly having it all, they find themselves searching for that last little bit of perfection that cannot be allocated to them by laws or corporate policies -- beauty, namely cosmetic surgery, fashion victimhood, eating disorders, and the like. The idea was, let's try to liberate ourselves from that self-imposed / mass-mediated oppression, and focus more on our worth as people who are not paragons of beauty.

OK, if that's feminism, then there was a Third Wave of it in the '90s. But it's not a movement, not political, and not seeking to up-end society like the other three waves did. Crucially, it was not man-hating or man-blaming or seeking a redress of grievances from the offending male sex. All feminists are at least somewhat man-hating and man-blaming, but the Third Wavers were pretty tame and calm, relative to the radicals of the Second and Fourth waves on either side of them.

The most you could point to in the '90s was in its second half, after the peak of social harmony had been reached, and the pendulum began to swing once again toward chaos and breakdown -- but had only just begun to shift. These developments were the embryonic forms of Fourth Wave feminism that would rear their ugly heads for real during the woketard 2010s.

Things like The Vagina Monologues ('96) and the associated V-Day ('98) which warped Valentine's Day into a day of raising awareness about violence against women, and even the whole Girl Power phenomenon ("chicks before dicks", to counter "bros before hoes"), associated with the Spice Girls and their Millennial audience.

Also the rise of gay BFFs, gay eunuchs, fag hags, and fujoshi fanfic -- Will & Grace, Sex and the City, and by the early 2000s, the first gay kiss in primetime in an episode of Dawson's Creek (2000), and in the music video for "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera (2002), and the bitter emo girl + messy gay BFF duo in Mean Girls (2004).

Suddenly, boys and girls were beginning to split apart, although this rift would not reach its yawning maximum until circa 2020. But it was quite a gear-shift or phase-change compared to the first half of the '90s, the '80s, and the late '70s.

So, one of the hallmarks of that harmonious phase was the relative absence of a feminist movement, especially of the man-hating and man-blaming and man-lobbying type that we usually require for something to be a true feminist movement.

The last time there was such a relative absence of feminism was the second half of the '20s (after women's suffrage was fait accompli, as well as discredited by their lobbying for the 18th Amendment to ban alcohol, which got repealed by the 21st Amendment in '33), all of the '30s, and at least the first half of the '40s.

You know the WWII era was barren of feminism when all they can point to, desperately, is the Rosie the Riveter ad campaign, or the fact that women joined the military as WACs and WAVES in their cute wool nurse's capes, to support the men in the war effort, in their typical female capacity. This was not man-hating, man-blaming, or man-lobbying for societal upheaval. So women could join the emergency war effort -- big deal, that's not radical at all, and tellingly it was not won by protests, violence, or other forms of coordinated confrontation against the power structure.

Much like the second half of the '90s, the second half of the '40s saw the very embryonic forms that would eventually become Second Wave feminism, like the 1949 publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, followed some time later in '63 by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

I will go into greater detail on other cultural correlates of these harmonious phases, when the battle of the sexes ground to a halt. But for now, just to get the ball rolling, this brief overview of the timeline of various waves of feminism should give you the overall picture.

I promise those details will be more exciting and relatable than the history of feminism! But we have to start somewhere uncontroversial, like organized man-hating, man-blaming, and man-lobbying. And of course, the pair movement of womanizing, woman-hating, woman-blaming, and woman-hectoring. But the male version is not an organized or academic affair, so it doesn't leave as rich of a paper trail as the female version.

And in any case, females are the choosy sex in human beings, so generally speaking, what they say goes, regarding how close or distant the sexes will be with each other. The fine-detailed surveys will also focus more on how women change or cycle over time, although I will note how men change or cycle over time in the same ways.

RIP David Lynch, who mythologized the normies of Edenic Americana, through saturated dreamy naturalism

Following up on a series of comments starting here on the topic of "cool vs. weird," and another series starting here on the topic of the 50-year cycle in social cohesion vs. chaos -- and its cultural correlates -- I explored David Lynch's role in American cultural history, on the occasion of his recent death. I'll just paste the comments here, to get the ball rolling on a new post.

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RIP David Lynch, who produced most of his works during this wholesome period, and was always more cool than weird -- as were his creations.

If Twin Peaks had been weird and normie-shocking and taboo-violating and ugly or anti-aesthetic, there would never have been "Peaks mania". It was so widespread, I still vividly remember the day in 3rd or 4th grade, when a girl who sat at our little group of 4 desks pushed together, spontaneously burst out with

"Have you guys seen Twin Peaks???!??!?!??!!!! :DDDDDD"

None of us had, but her older sibling or parents were into it, and she watched along with them. We could tell how excited she was, so we believed it must be REALLY COOL, so tell us, what's it about? What makes it so cool? She couldn't really put it into words, and looked dejected after awhile, like, "Yeah, my 3rd-grade brain cannot convey the awesomeness of this show to my fellow 3rd-graders..."

But I always took that to heart, and watched it in earnest when it was shown in reruns on Bravo during the '90s or y2k (back when Bravo was like the Criterion Collection cable channel). I think I was reminded of it by some guy in our freshman dorm -- *not* a counter-cultural type, but a boarding school preppy -- was gushing over it, playing the opening theme song, etc. "You HAVE to watch it, whenever you can!"

Artsy-fartsy types loved it, too, but it was a surprise hit sensation due to its immediate appeal to normies. Nor does it depict counter-cultural types, or Bohemian urban niche environments -- exactly the opposite from someone like Woody Allen, who is primarily popular among art-y types.

It pains me to see Twin Peaks and other related works become hijacked by sub-cultures during the "weird instead of cool" phase of the cycle. Yeah, their predecessors liked it, too, but they didn't try to hijack or gatekeep it, or taint the association with it in a way that would repel normies from gushing over it as well, like their normie predecessors did back in the early '90s.

The elements of gore, violence, occult, etc. are played for sublime threat value, not for shock value or taboo-violation value. And they're balanced or heightened with elements of the beautiful -- the total babes he selected for the cast, the stunning locations, the striking rich colors and dramatic lighting, and the rest of it all.

Really his only weird / ugly / body-horror movie was Eraserhead, from '77.

The Elephant Man, from just 3 years later, was not like that at all, despite the subject being a disfigured freakshow attraction. I checked that out from the local library ALL THE TIME in kindergarten, when Blue Velvet had only just come out.

Yes, it was possible to "be into David Lynch before it was cool" back in the '80s, even for a Midwestern kindergartener who didn't even know his name. That movie was just too cool to not watch again and again and again. The things you could have imprinted on as an impressionable child in the good ol' days...

If only that girl in 3rd grade had told me that Twin Peaks was made by the same guy who made The Elephant Man, I would've been sold right away! And not had to wait until nearly 10 years later to track it down on cable -- and later, on DirectConnect.

Along with respect for taboos, goes respect for the holy and sacred and spiritual, which he incorporated into his work like few other art-school directors. And for the same reasons, his being one of the most all-American directors in the history of the medium.

Now that our cultural identity as Americans has largely matured, further down the line the dictionary definition of "Americana" will simply be David Lynch's '80s and '90s channeling of the late '50s and early '60s.

It isn't canonically American if it isn't in a David Lynch movie or TV show!

Very admirable role, to not only contribute so much primary material to American culture, but to serve as one of its main canonizers at the secondary level as well. RIP.

Delving further into Lynch's place in the "weird vs. cool" divide.

Surrealism, dreams / dreaminess, alternate dimensions, paranormal phenomena, etc. -- not weird in themselves. Not ugly, disgusting, disorienting, alienating, sacrilegious, profane, obscene, and so on.

The main way that surrealism *can* be taken in a weird direction is warped perception, hallucinations -- in the sense of trippy out-of-the-ordinary sensory perception, not just "such a thing couldn't exist here" like a person sitting on a wall or ceiling. Lynch never went with blurred vision, melting shapes, undulating lines of perspective within the spatial frame, kaleidoscopic ballets of pure shapes, and so on.

His surrealism is more of an "alternate reality" type, where the rules and nature of sensory perception remain the same as we ordinarily feel them. Perceptual naturalism.

So where does the alternate-ness come from, then? It ties into his pervasive tone of mystery, secrets, exploring the dim hidden crypts of reality. You can't immediately make sense of what you're encountering -- the space is too barren, the space seems to have no entrance and no exit, a person is sitting silent and looking at you but not saying anything, when they speak it's in a language you don't understand, or you understand that language but it's in concealed in cryptic riddles that invite you to solve and unlock their secret meaning, and so on.

Which is not to say it's off-putting or repulsive or dread-inducing -- it can go that extreme, but fundamentally it's more about cryptic meanings, which *can* be solved and understood, but not in the way you're used to determining the meaning of things.

The closest analogy to the sensation these alternate realities produce is discovering a treasure trove of communication in a language you don't speak and can't even decipher just yet, but which sparks your curiosity to decode it and learn to communicate in this unfamiliar language. You're hoping it's something mystical and BIG, not just ancient trade regulations or something boring and mundane like that...

We've all been in situations where we can't speak the language. As long as it's temporary, it's not so alienating -- before long, we'll be back to where we *do* speak the language effortlessly. And while we're in the foreign-speaking place, we can still try to figure out a pidgin to interact with this fascinating exotic world.

That's why he ties it so much into dreams -- dreams are fleeting and temporary. You'll wake up before too long, so even if you're having a nightmare, it's not a chronic condition. You're still grounded in the safe familiar waking world of your everyday environment. You're not permanently crossing over, climbing through the looking glass, whisked away by some cosmic force that may never whisk you back, etc.

Maybe you will -- maybe this is the big sleep, not just a single night's nightmare. But dreams are not inherently permanent, they are typically fleeting acute "conditions".

So, Lynchian surrealism is more about curiosity, exploring, a sense of adventure, going on a quest, solving a mystery, unlocking secrets. Fun, exciting, stimulating, inspiring -- not ugly, off-putting, demoralizing, degrading, or queering / weirding / warping. Especially not at the perceptual level, which would induce nausea and other disgust reflexes. Semantically disorienting, but never physically sea-sickening.

How about his famously "quirky" cast of characters? Isn't quirky synonymous with weird, misfit, etc? No, it just means they're not identical clones of each other, they all have their own distinct fingerprints, voices, faces, and yes personalities.

It's "all the colors of the rainbow" diversity, where each band of color is perceptually distinct, but all are equally natural examples of "color". There's not a standard color vs. marginal, misfit, outcast colors. There's no antagonism between the colors.

So I'd rather use the term "colorful characters" rather than "quirky," which can sometimes be conflated with weird, affected, etc.

That's the other thing -- colors don't strive to construct their own persona as being orange, green, etc. Their colors are just what they naturally are -- not carefully curated constructions and affectations performed for a real or imagined audience of spectators and evaluators. Lynchian "quirkiness" of characters is always unpretentious, naturalistic, and uninhibited. That's why they seem "extra" -- they're holding nothing back, concealing nothing, lacking artifice, uninhibited by anxieties about how they'll be perceived or accepted vs. rejected, etc.

I would call these personalities "highly saturated" if we're sticking with the "colorful" metaphor. They're not phony or affected colors, they just seem out of the ordinary due to how rich and saturated the pigment is -- almost realer than real -- since the artist did not dilute the pigment before applying it to the canvas.

These colorful characters are VIVID, not ostentatious or garish or caricatured or grotesque. Not campy either -- vivid.

So in this way he's emphasizing what is natural, not playing up the artificial. Celebratory naturalism, adulating naturalism -- not warping people into weird caricatured mask-wearers.

And so his characters are the opposite of affected, neurotic, performative theatre kids who curate an aura of being quirky, twee, or le sad and depressed, or whatever else. You've never met LESS neurotic characters in the history of the world's cultures...

Why are they so uninhibited, so lacking in artifice, so carefree inhabiting their distinct personalities? Cuz they aren't misfits, weirdos, etc., but belong to a community that accepts and values them simply for being members of the in-group. Like a great big single family, they are loved and appreciated unconditionally, so they are free to be themselves instead of having to construct a persona based on what will please some conditionally-loving fickle-taste audience or jury panel.

Not just among small-town folk either -- Mulholland Drive shows the same close-knit-ness of Angelenos broadly. Not to say there's never any conflict or antagonism or drama -- there's conflict within any family. Just to say that Angelenos treat each other like members of an extended family, not transactionally (and if a character does behave that way, it marks them as evil, misfit, threatening to the order, etc.).

You might even say Lynch's characters, their environment, and their social communities are Edenic -- Edenic Americana. There was temptation, conflict, etc. in the Garden of Eden, too -- Edenic doesn't imply free from threats or dangers or temptations.

But they live in a primeval, wholesome paradise, and the drama and conflict involves their loss of innocence through temptation and experience with not-so-wholesome elements (perhaps hostile invaders of their paradise, perhaps seductive antagonists who they succumb to through their own sinful free will).

This is another reason why his characters seem dialed-up -- they are more in the allegorical direction than the documentary / verite direction. They're Edenic, mythological, legendary, even though they're portrayed as inhabiting contemporary America. Mythological naturalism, legend-making naturalism.

Brief aside to say that Lynch never indulged in making anti-heroes, or glamorizing threats to the social order. The harmony and closely-knit fabric of the social order represented Edenic paradise, and whatever threatens to tear that to shreds is portrayed as an unalloyed evil, sometimes as a literal demon from a demonic dimension.

He never glorified weirdos, misfits, and anti-social types. At most, maybe gave them a seductive coolness, like leather-jacket-wearing, muscle-car-driving Frank Booth. But that was always undercut by exploring their own seedy underbelly (not just that of the wholesome small town) -- a raving nut who couldn't have fun without taking weird drugs, sexually crippled by perverse taboo-violating fetishes, deeply insecure, and ultimately pathetic, not someone anyone would want to emulate as le dark misunderstood anti-hero. Like other Lynchian characters, he's certainly colorful and vivid and memorable -- but not glorified or shown aspirationally.

You can instantly spot who misunderstands and hijacks Lynch's "quirkiness" by whether, when Lynch comes up in conversation, they chime in with "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" or "A damn fine cup of coffee!"

Agent Cooper is equally colorful, vivid, and memorable -- but not the insecure, pathetic, LARP-y weirdo villain. *He* is the one that's glorified, and shown aspirationally. A modern day role model -- Lynch was a proud Eagle Scout, after all.

There was little in the way of moral ambiguity and other theatre-kid pretentiousness in the tone and themes -- there was good, and there was evil, and the creator was clearly on the side of the good guys. To choose otherwise would make the social order vulnerable to corruption and dissolution. He wanted to uphold and preserve it, and to express his gratitude at all the Edenic wonders that it provided to its dependents.

Another brief aside to emphasize that none of this morality was even crypto-Christian, let alone openly. That would have been too Olde Worlde LARP-y. If anything, it was part of New Age spirituality and morality -- how very American of him, yet again.

Ditto for the sacred music that accompanies this morality and narrative -- distinctly 20th-century American styles like jazz, R&B, blues, gospel, rock n roll, even synth-y New Age. The Twin Peaks theme song *was* included on the original definitive New Age compilation CD, Pure Moods.

I've brought this issue up before, but characters must be likeable and relatable and normie or at least normie-friendly / normie-aspiring, if their plight is to be felt by the audience. We don't care if an angry-at-everyone, self-focused, hyper-competitive brat suffers. All those taboo-violating, filthy-club-inhabiting gay weirdos from Cruising? Hard to feel sorry for them getting serial-murdered. They're already so debased, hardly human anymore.

That's why violence and other threats in Lynch's worlds are so poignant -- they're targeting the relatively innocent Edenic normies, who belong to a community, look attractive (naturally, not as in vain looks-maxxers), love others and are loved by others. THAT is a real loss.

When directors emphasize weirdos, misfits, anti-social types, competers, grade-grubbers, attention-whores, and other self-promoting types, and make them the victims, they're trying to force us into caring about people who don't care about us and would actively cut us down if given the power to. Sorry, no sympathy for the devil or his demonic minions, no matter how hamfistedly a grown-up misfit director tries to hector us into praising those who should be condemned.

Lynch allowed us to bemoan the loss of those who deserved to still be here. Moral naturalism, ethical naturalism, not moral inversionism.

Seduction, allure, glamor, temptation, and sin were other pervasive themes in his work. Ties into the beautiful, and the Edenic, and the loss of innocence, but also the mysterious, the cryptic, the puzzling -- that's another kind of attractive, enticing seduction. Irresistible, possibly to our own downfall, but an all-too-human desire.

Things that are weird, ugly, cursed, warped, unnatural, repulsive, etc. -- are *not* tempting, *not* alluring, *not* inviting us to stray from our normie path. Even when threats to the social order are shown, they have to have a kind of glamor or beauty, at least superficially and initially.

What could possibly tempt us to stray from our already beautiful Edenic paradise? -- something even more beautiful, more concentratedly beautiful, beauty in a form we haven't yet experienced hence exotic.

There is the occasional ugly revolting outsider threat (like the dumpster demon in Mulholland Drive), but those are rare. Ugliness, gore, splatter, filth, scat -- very rare in Lynch's rendering of the evil side of the universe. Also rare in his depiction of their evil effects on the good side -- no torture-porn gruesomeness done to the victims.

This places him in square opposition to the puritanical strain of American culture, especially as it arose during the late '90s and after, with torture porn that originated with David Fincher's Seven (1995), where ugly disgusting gruesome tortures are meted out to sinners in order for the punishment to fit the crime. See this earlier post.

Lynch is part of the Dark Age-oriented empathy toward sinners approach, emphasizing the seductiveness and superficial appeal of sin, understanding and trying to coax would-be sinners away from falling into temptation. As opposed to the puritanical discipline-and-punish approach of the humanist, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment eras, where sinners get what they deserve, reap what you sow, etc., and where they get appropriate torturing punishments (which did not exist in the Dark Ages), witch-hunted (from the Scientific Rev era, not the Dark Ages), and so on and so forth.

There are no revenge fantasies, fan-fic, or other forms of self-aggrandizement in Lynch's work, unlike in many other favorites of the art-y crowd (like Woody Allen, to pick on him again somewhat, but he really is a good foil for Lynch).

He doesn't create these worlds in order to escape the perceived injustice of this world, into a better, just world where he comes out on top of his rivals or antagonists. Not masturbatory.

It's not escapist -- in a way it's embedding yourself even further within this reality, by not treating it in a documentary / verite way, but also not as some horrible unjust prison to escape from. It's dignifying this world, its characters, and its environment -- and even elevating them to legendary, mythological, allegorical significance. That's devoting yourself even more to this world.

So it's really not so fantastical after all, the "extra"-ness or intensity comes from imagining our world to be even more real than it really is, to be more whatever-it-is than it really is. Not "super"-natural, that has other connotations -- ultra-naturalism, maybe.

And again, those brief visits to and from alternate realities or spaces, are treated entirely naturalistically -- you visit such-and-such coordinates on a map, and presto, you're transported to the Black Lodge. It's like traveling via wormhole, in a "heavy on the science" sci-fi space story.

Just as Lynch does not denigrate the normies as enemies of the weird, he does not downplay this world as a bland flavor that should be left behind for a more fantastical razzle-dazzle escape-pod. He mythologizes the normies, as well as their worldly environment. Nobody to seek revenge against, no place to flee or escape from. Somebody to be treasured, and some place worth embedding yourself further into.

The Indo-European-ness of Ashkenazi Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, etc.

I'll get to Christmas and New Year's posting later. For now, to get a new post started, I'll begin with a narrower topic.

Earlier posts this year have reviewed the work of others, and uncovered tons of signs from my own investigations, pointing to Ashkenazi Jews being converts to Talmudic Judaism during the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD, and coming from mixed Indo-European sources -- one East Slavic, the other East Anatolian / Armenian / Iranian -- that eventually genetically merged into a single-mode genepool, after forming a loose cultural coalition based around controlling trade routes in and around the Khazar Khaganate.

So for the Christmas season, I naturally wondered, "How much of Hanukkah came from Christmas, Nowruz, or even earlier Indo-European holidays of this time of the year?"

Before getting to the main topic of Christmas, my investigation led me to stumble upon another highly distinctive Indo-Euro tradition that Ashkenazi Jews practice, but for Rosh Hashanah -- New Year's. They bake a loaf of challah bread for the occasion, but this isn't any ordinary loaf for any ordinary occasion -- the new year is all about bringing good luck, improving over the bygone year. So for Rosh Hashanah, they bake a key -- yes, a literal metal key -- into the loaf. This is meant to be a magic charm that will bring good luck in the new year.

Recall an earlier post that surveyed this very same ritual from Ireland to Iran, including a good luck charm in the dessert for the New Year's holiday. In some of those cultures, it is tied to Christmas, like the "king cake" from Spain and France (and places influenced by them, like New Orleans in America). They bake a figurine into a cake, and whoever gets the piece with the good luck charm will have good luck in the new year!

Well, the Ashkenazi "shlissel challah" (after the Yiddish word for "key" and the Hebraized word for "loaf of bread") is not fully identical to the Indo-Euro tradition, since there's no practice of dividing up the loaf and whoever gets the portion with the metal key has good luck. Apparently, the good luck belongs to the baker of the loaf, regardless of who finds it when eating the loaf. Also, the food item is not specifically dessert.

And yet, it's impossible to ignore the striking similarities. The "baking a key into a loaf of bread" seems to go back several centuries, although perhaps not much further. I think there must be an earlier form that this ritual took, where it was a sweet baked good and not just a typical loaf of bread, and where the good luck only belonged to the individual lucky enough to get that portion of the dessert that contained the charm -- not the preparer of the food.

But somewhere along the way, this ritual was lost, and a diluted form remained in the newer shlissel challah tradition. Needless to say, Jews from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, such as Moroccan Jews, do not practice this tradition -- it's a distinctly Indo-Euro thing. And the fact that Ashkenazi shlissel challah is 90% identical to Irish Christmas pudding and Iranian samanu for Nowruz, is a powerful testament to the Indo-European-ness, rather than Saharo-Arabian-ness, of their culture.

Moving on now to Hanukkah, two of the major features of contemporary Ashkenazi Hanukkah -- gelt and the dreidel -- are fairly recent, going back maybe a few centuries in Europe, so it's hard to infer anything about Ashkenazi roots from them. Maybe they just picked it up from their European hosts, like they did with the dreidel (teetotum). Maybe they invented it themselves, but long after Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken mature form (like the gelt).

However, the most prominent symbol and practice -- lighting the menorah -- is more revealing, since it goes back further.

Here is a good review of the earliest Hanukkah menorahs, whether surviving examples of them, visual depictions of them in old sources, or written accounts.

The earliest accounts of them date to circa 1000 AD in Europe, followed centuries later by illustrated depictions and surviving examples. They do not trace back to Classical times, or Bronze Age times, or anything related to Second Temple Judaism and its account of the past. They're absent for most of the Dark Ages, for that matter.

That is just after the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate, though, when the Jewish converts who controlled the trade routes would have had to migrate further westward into Europe to earn a new living. 14th-century Jewish cemeteries, like the one in Erfurt, Germany, show that they had developed a culture of their own, having their own section of a cemetery, although their genepool was still bi-modal at that point.

But sometime between the fall of the Khazar Khaganate and these 14th-C. cemeteries in Germany, Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken off.

The lack of menorahs during most of the Dark Ages shows that, yet again, there is no evidence showing a cultural continuity from Second Temple-period Judaeans and the Ashkenazi Jews. Most notably, the Ashkenazis have never been documented as speaking a Semitic language (until some of them began LARP-ing as neo-Judaeans, moving to Palestine and reviving Hebrew), or any other member from the Saharo-Arabian family broadly. Only Indo-European ones, like Yiddish.

Moreover, the menorahs from the earliest depictions do not resemble the Temple menorah from the Classical period, which had 7 branches, with 1 in the center, and 3 pairs of symmetrical branches leading out from the center. This verbal description and visual depiction is widely attested in Classical times themselves, e.g. in the Arch of Titus from roughly 80 AD that shows the Roman removal of the Temple menorah after destroying the Temple 10 years earlier.

Re-shaping the Hanukkah menorah to take this form, but with 4 pairs of branches plus a central branch, is pretty recent, perhaps from the 19th C or so, and maybe connected to or pre-figuring the Romantic nationalist movement of Zionism.

At any rate, the early Hanukkah menorahs don't resemble the Temple menorah whatsoever. They don't have a single branch and pairs of symmetrical branches. And the structure is not a pedestal or base, with the light-bearing elements being held aloft by the branching section. Rather, the light-bearing elements were all resting flat on a single horizontal surface, like a shelf or fireplace mantle, with no branching or supporting elements underneath the shelf.

More tellingly, the earliest depictions show candles as the light-bearing element -- a practice that continues to this day, even after the change in the shape of the main supporting structure, from a shelf to a Temple-esque design.

The original Temple menorah did not use candles at all -- the end of each branch held a cup for oil, in which a wick was dipped. Even further back, in the narrative that motivates the holiday of Hanukkah, there is a miracle of oil -- which continued to burn for 8 days and nights, when supposedly there was only enough oil to burn for one. It's not a miracle of a candle that continued to burn longer than it should have -- there's no mention of candles, only oil lamps.

Throughout the Medieval period in the Saharo-Arabian sphere, including our Western contempo depiction of it, oil lamps were the defining way of portable artificial lighting.

In fact, to this day, Moroccan Jews -- who *do* come from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, and *are* documented as speaking a Semitic language historically -- use an oil lamp form of a menorah for Hanukkah, unlike the candle-based form that the Ashkenazis use.

Did anyone in the Middle East adopt candles as much as the Europeans did? Yes -- the Persians! And the Indian groups further to their east. Candles are not so ancient, but they're ancient enough -- going back to the Romans. And yet, their spread seems to have been confined to the Indo-European sphere, with Greeks and Persians and Indians adopting them, but not so much the Arabians or North Africans.

See the article on candles from the Encyclopedia Iranica for the full history of candles in Iranian culture, but the fact that it has its own entry testifies to how central they are to Iranian culture.

And -- wait, what's this? -- Iranians light candles to place on the main table during Nowruz, along with the Half-Seen items. And like the early Ashkenazi menorahs, they are not held on a branching symmetrical candelabra, just on top of the table top. Nowruz and Christmas overlap a lot due to them being "end of the year" holidays, although over the centuries, Iranian New Year's has stayed in the arrival of springtime (when the Proto-Indo-European New Year's holiday was likely held), while the Indo-Euros who adopted Christianity moved it back toward the new central holiday of Christmas, nearly at the end of their calendar year.

Candles have been central to European Christmas traditions for centuries, including placing them on the Christmas tree in the Modern era, until there were electric lights. Or the Lutheran practice of Advent candles, which are similar to the Hanukkah menorah in keeping track of the time during the late December holiday. Candlemas, in early February, is the end of Christmas / Epiphany season, transitioning into the New Year.

Candles on a Hanukkah menorah places the Ashkenazi holiday within the Indo-Euro, rather than Saharo-Arabian, traditions. But maybe it's just the Ashkenazi adopting or assimilating to practices of their Euro hosts? How do we know it goes back further and may originate outside of Europe?

Back to those Nowruz candles! Some practitioners of Nowruz include one candle for every child in the household, making the number of candles variable -- a multiple of the number of children in the home.

Wouldn't you know it? -- the Ashkenazis also tend to increase the number of candles, as a multiple of the number of children in the home! They give everyone their own individual menorah, each of which has 9 candles.

So it's not exactly the same as Nowruz, where each child only gets one candle. But the Ashkenazi child getting 9 candles is due to the invariable nature of 9 in the Hanukkah holiday -- it celebrates the 8 nights of the miracle of the oil, plus the 1 candle to help light the others. Each child must get 9 candles, not just 1, otherwise it wouldn't commemorate the 8 nights.

However, the number of candles does increase as a multiple of the number of children in the home, for both Nowruz and Ashkenazi Hanukkah. I don't know of a similar "certain number of candles per child at home" tradition in other Indo-Euro cultures during Christmas or New Year's. If it exists, it must be fairly marginal, whereas the practice is widespread enough to this day for Nowruz that it's mentioned in reviews of the holiday rituals.

And the good ol' Moroccan Jews seal up the other side of the argument -- they don't have one menorah per child, or anything that varies with the number of children at home. They only use one menorah for the entire household, no matter how many people live there.

So, Ashkenazi Hanukkah rituals more closely resemble Iranian Nowruz than Moroccan Jewish Hanukkah, aside from the indisposable elements like commemorating the number 8, artificial light-bearing things, etc.

Those Late Medieval depictions of menorahs in Europe only show them lighting 8 candles in a place that is probably a synagogue. And in that context, there's no family living there -- so they can't, in principle, vary the number of menorahs with the number of residents. Perhaps as Hanukkah became a popular holiday within the domestic setting, it met an older ritual that involved "increasing the number of lights according to the number of children". And that older ritual came from the Iranian sphere.

This is yet another sign that the source populations for that coalition that would eventually become the Ashkenazi Jews definitely included one in or around Iran.

But more than that -- I think most of their religious and sacred traditions were carried over from that Iranian source, and not from the East Slavic source that also held sway in their coalition.

I've mentioned the divide between Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who seem to have a higher proportion of genetic and/or cultural background in the Iranian source, vs. the Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who have less of it and more of the Slavic source.

The Iranian source seems to have been more cultured, elite, prestigious, sophisticated, with a long history of being administrators, bureaucrats, scientists, artists... and perhaps also priests. Not merely "religious officials," but priests as an elevated specialist elite stratum in society, propped up by the material surplus of a large sedentary agrarian economy.

East Slavs in the Dark Ages simply did not have that kind of economy, nor did the West Slavs for that matter. Only the South Slavs did -- namely, the Bulgarian Empire, who sponsored and spread the Cyrllic Alphabet among the previously illiterate Slavs, adopted and codified Christianity for the Slavs (including the use of Old Bulgarian, AKA "Old Church Slavonic," as the liturgical language, even for other Orthodox Slavs to this day), founded the Orthodox Slav style of churches through their proximity to the Byzantine Empire, and so on and so forth.

East Slavs were semi-nomadic, mainly peasants, no large or powerful central state ever in their history, illiterate, with a folk culture but not much of a high culture, etc. They represented the brusque, pushy, materialistic trader type. That type also exists in a civilized culture like Iran, but there's also the spiritual specialist type, who fill a permanent role of "priest".

So when it came time to come up with rituals for the new converts to Judaism, the Ashkenazis all looked at each other and decided, "Well, you Iranian types seem to know what you're doing with the whole priestly role -- why don't you handle that part of our culture-to-be? As long as we East Slavs don't find anything too fishy about it, we'll just take your civilized word for it."

This ties into the genetic data on Ashkenazi Jews, where there are certain genetic markers for the so-called "priestly bloodline" AKA the kohanim (such as those with the surname Cohen). They are supposedly descended from the temple priests of the Second Temple era, who, after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, continued to play some kind of new priestly-ish role in society, just not the same was as tending to the now-destroyed temple. And they supposedly kept that role within their bloodline, only marrying into other priestly families.

Well, the "keeping our bloodlines priestly" I can buy -- but not them tracing back to the Second Temple Judaeans. We know from all the other evidence that they have no genetic or cultural connection to them, not even religiously -- the Ashkenazis are only documented as practicing Judaism from the Talmudic era, not Second Temple Judaism.

However, if the kohanim within the Ashkenazis were more likely to come from the Iranian rather than the Slavic sub-population of their founders, then they'll at least pass as "Middle Eastern", which is always a weasel-word in genetic studies. Middle Eastern meaning an Indo-European-speaking "fire worshiper"? -- or a Semitic-speaking monotheist? Very different cultures!

And who knows? Maybe there was one actual Judaean priest who wandered into Persia in order to help train the new converts, and he left some of his kohanim bloodline there, where it got preserved through priestly caste endogamy. I highly doubt that, but even if true, it only says there was that one ancestor who was Judaean, vs. 99% of Ashkenazi "Middle Eastern" ancestors being Iranian / Armenian / East Anatolian.

That suggests that, like Iranian bureaucrats, Iranian priests are mainly based on their role in society, not on the specific institution it serves. They were priests under Zoroastrianism, then mullahs under Islam, and some of them as kohanim within the Iranian-derived portion of the Ashkenazi Jews.

That makes me wonder about when Christianity used to be a big deal in Persia and further east ("Nestorians"). That was during the Dark Ages, when Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were all vying with each other for influence. There were certainly Iranian Christian priests in those days.

Maybe there's a common priestly genetic sub-population that they all came from, no matter which religion they performed the priestly role within. At that narrower level, I'm sure there are genetic differences -- Zoroastrian priests wouldn't have married into Christian priest families (knowingly), or with Muslim clerics (knowingly), and so on.

Maybe take the Parsis in India as a convenient example of Zoroastrian priests, although DNA from actual Late Classical / Medieval Zoroastrian priests would be ideal. Muslim clerics in Iran are still around, with some families or bloodlines being well known already, I'm sure. And then use Ashkenazi kohanim as the other comparison.

I'll bet, at a certain level, they all came from the same priestly genepool in Iran! Just like Iranian bureaucrats who were famously adept at serving one empire, or another, or another still. It's the specialized role, not the master, that they preserved. Iran is not an anarchic, tribal, nomadic culture of honor like it used to be way back in the Bronze Age, or like many of its neighbors have been (Turkic, Mongol, Arabian). It's one of the most thoroughly and thorough-going civilized cultures on Earth, for better or worse.

Where else would new converts to Judaism recruit their priests from, if Iranians were an option? For the Ashkenazis, it was -- and they did.

AI slop is stylistically schizo and contradictory, human art is coherent and unified in style

A recent post from Scott Alexander on AI slop vs. human art asked respondents to guess whether certain images were made by AI or a person. If AI could fool enough respondents, was it not real art, a la the Turing test for judging whether a machine was intelligent?

Well, they did not fool respondents -- the average and median score was 60% correct, compared to 50% if they flipped a coin. We just had an election -- 60 to 40 is not a close election. This contradicts the title of section 1, that people had a hard time identifying AI art just cuz it wasn't near 100% correct. Having a hard time would mean they did worse than a coin-flip.

And he admits that he put a massive thumb on the scale by screening out AI images that had the telltale signs of being AI -- which is to say, the telltale signs that are already known about. This experiment revealed, to me at least, other telltale signs, but more on that later. E.g., disfigured hands and fingers, garbled text, "wrestling" poses where there's a lot of interaction between two bodies, and the entire style of the recognizable DALL-E model. Even with this thumb on the scale, people were still not fooled.

Of course, when it comes to computer models, the question is not can a computer program do something, but how much complexity does it cost, and how good is the output? If it has a 137-degree polynomial to connect a line between 7 data points, that's over-fitting the data. How many prompts, with what degree of specificity, does an AI generator require before it gives sufficiently passable results -- plural, as in reliably replicated, not just a fluke success?

The more complexity that needs to be built into the model by these prompts, the less smart and talented it is. The real comparison is, how many prompts or constraints, and with what degree of specificity, would you have to tell a human artist before they gave sufficiently passable results? Not many at all! The computer is a massive downgrade, if you're telling someone or something else what you have in mind.

The real fascination with AI slop is that the turnaround time for results is relatively fast, compared to the labor-intensive work of human hands. And so even though the results are slop, they're at least 20% real-ish, so you're OK with that trade-off -- crappy quality, but fast results for AI, instead of high quality results that take much longer for a person.

So then AI is not superior or equal to a person, it's a different point along a trade-off continuum, and nothing to gawk at as though it were a higher form of intelligence or existence than our own.

* * *

My main interest, however, is in further analyzing what gives away AI art, beyond the already well-known signs like mangled hands, garbled text, and interactive bodies that turn into Mr. Potatohead abominations.

Those are specific to the subject matter -- what is being portrayed. But scrolling through the images -- and I was not fooled by more than a few (more on why they can fool, later) -- I discovered a more fundamental and stylistic giveaway of AI art, which gets to its very nature, or perhaps lack of a nature, compared to human nature.

Namely, AI -- being a program without a mind or spirit of its own -- can easily be of two minds, even in contradictory ways (not just divergent), at a stylistic level. Not what subject matter is portrayed, but the manner in which it is portrayed. Human beings, possessing a single mind of their own, are of one mind about the manner in which they portray the subject matter.

Consider image 4, which I instantly felt was AI (and it is). There is a clear main subject, close to the viewer, and it's a person. I don't think it matters if the subject is a non-human animal, plant, inanimate object like a boulder, or human artifact like a chair or door -- something that is the focus of attention, in the foreground, near the viewer. Then there's a background environment in which the subject is embedded -- not a portrait in a vacuum.

The subject being a person means it takes the form of a portrait, while the environment takes the form of a landscape.

Yet the styles of these two forms are different and contradictory. The landscape is Impressionist, although who cares exactly what period it's mimicking -- the point is, the level of detail is low-resolution, blurry, with blobs and patches and planes of color more than crisply delineated and complex shapes. This applies not only in the distance, where things are naturally more blurry, but right up in the foreground -- look at the flowers directly around the girl, their stalks look like single thick brushstrokes, and the petals are thick daubs of color. Low-detail, blurry.

Then all of a sudden, the girl in the portrait section is rendered in fairly high detail, in focus rather than blurred. It's not 100% photorealistic, but it's far more in that direction than the highly stylized rendering of detail for the landscape section. You can see multiple folds on the fabric of her clothes, with light / shading for sculpting purposes -- which is NOT used on the grass, flowers, dirt, trees, etc. in the landscape. You can make out individual wisps of hair on her head, each tiny curving line inside her ear (with shading-for-sculpting again), and so on.

This detailed focus gets more blurry and Impressionist as you look toward the bottom of her dress and shoes, and I notice in the other images that the trigger for photorealism seems to be a human face or other exposed parts of the human anatomy. So even just her dress -- which is a single garment, not a separate top and bottom -- looks schizo stylistically, with a more photorealist upper region and a blurry Impressionist bottom region, further from the trigger of exposed human anatomy.

The machine doesn't understand that a single self-contained work of art is supposed to be coherent and unified in style or presentation. It has clearly been trained on photorealistic portraits and Impressionist landscapes, one not-so-stylized and the other highly stylized. And so when asked to combine a portrait within a landscape, it figures why not combine the best of both worlds? -- a high-detail portrait in a landscape that is blurry immediately surrounding her, not to mention farther away as well.

This is not just shallow focus from photography or cinematography -- at the exact same distance from the "camera," there are simultaneously a sharp-focus object and blurry objects. That's not physically or technologically possible -- and could only be done by deliberate choice of the artist, in some warped form of artistic license.

But artists never use that license, cuz it violates the fundamental requirement to present the subject matter in a coherent unified style -- all blurry and Impressionist, or all sharp-focus and photorealistic, but not some of one and some of the other in the same work.

To give a pity point to the machine, it at least does the sensible contradiction instead of the wacko contradiction -- it renders subjects in sharp detail (as though we're giving them our attention), while leaving environments in blurry detail (as though they're in our peripheral vision, not as important), rather than an Impressionist portrait set within a photorealistic landscape (akin to animated figures superimposed on a photographed real-world environment, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?).

This schizo clash of styles within a single work is how I identified most of the other AI images.

Photorealist portrait in blurry landscape also told me the following were AI: 7, 10 (again, not a portrait of a person, but with a clear subject taking up much space), 13 (cartoon head, realistic water), 16 (the background being just a fairly uniform color plane), 21 (the environment's flowers are blurrier than the decorative flowers on her clothes, despite both being close to the camera), 23 (background looks like an Abstract Expressionist painting, and even within the mother's clothing, the colored pieces are blurrier than the white pieces), 27, 33, 40, 46, 49 (the wacko contradiction, where the close-up buildings are blurry while the distant water is in sharper focus)...

And the most insane is 26, whose subject looks like he was photographed under pristine studio conditions -- while the landscape outside the window is a highly stylized Venetian type portrayal. Is it supposed to be a painting within the artwork, hanging on the wall of this room? To me it looked like a landscape shown through a window, that ol' trick. There's what could be a decorative frame just below it, but not running up the left side of the landscape... so it's a bit schizo in its subject matter, but also in the style, with totally opposite styles for the landscape and the portrait.

Related, there are some whose subject matter is a bunch of abstract geometric shapes, with no 3D depth cues, no lighting variation, etc. -- and then a single human face or body, with multiple features (eye outline, iris, pupil, lips, individual teeth, etc.), sometimes with shading-for-sculpting. The dum-dum AI doesn't understand that a single work has to be entirely abstract or entirely representational. This gave away 6, 17, 24, and 50.

I could tell that 19 was by a person cuz although there are geometric shapes and a stylized human head, the geometric shapes are not separate abstract objects from the representational head -- they're used to form the lines around the head and its features, or to fill up volume within these features, suggest texture of the features, etc. They are building blocks to render a representational object -- not a separate array of abstract shapes, plus a representational head in their midst.

The Impressionist landscapes with no dominating subject are less obviously AI, cuz the contradictory rendering of subject and background cannot happen. Still, their subject matter or compositions look more like photographs, which were then passed through a blurry / stylized / Impressionist filter. The point-of-view, angle, perspective, cropping objects at the frame's edges, etc. Very photographic in composition, if not photorealistic in detail. And painters or illustrators rarely did this -- they create more of a staged array of figures or natural elements if there's no dominant subject.

This gave away 11, 20, 31, and 43. I could tell 22 was by a person cuz there's a semi-prominent human and plant subject, and they're both rendered Impressionistically along with the landscape. However, 38 and 45 do not look like photographs in composition, and have the same approach to detail throughout. 38 has a little wacky of subject matter, with fairly crisply intact ruins amidst a sprawling pasture, and maybe the level of detail on that building is a bit too much compared to the landscape and figures, but it's not as obvious, and the figures are pretty blurry.

44 was the only one that really got me, glad to know it got everyone else too. Kinda photographic in composition, but could easily be a painter as well. Everything rendered in blurry brushstroke blobs, nothing is contradicting that with sharp focus. The presence of multiple people is not triggering the high-detail tendency for portraits. And the arrangement of them looks somewhat staged for dramatic effect, not a typical photograph. Very consistent and coherent stylistically.

Well, one getting through is just a fluke, as far as I'm concerned. By random chance the algo didn't do the many wrong things it is tempted to do. And if you could somehow spell out what is different about this one, to try to replicate it, it'd need so much more complexity in its instructions, that it wouldn't be worth it -- over-fitting the data.

I also missed the most commonly misidentified human picture -- 25. It has that wacko subject matter that makes you think it's AI. And the insane level of detail on the front of the ship, but far less on the bottom, the blurry / misty right and left sides of the landscape (including the smaller ships on the right), are the common contradictory styles of AI.

I wonder if this one was purposely made to resemble AI. If so, that still proves the larger point -- humans are better at imitating AI slop, than computers are at imitating human art. We are superior to them, so we can understand them and imitate them better than vice versa. Their output is a subset of ours, so it's interpolation and valid when we imitate them. Our output is a superset of theirs, so it would be extrapolation and invalid for them to imitate us.

The only human one I was fairly convinced was AI, was 30 -- there's such insane photorealistic detail on her dress, far less detail shown on her face, almost none on the walls of the room, and fairly low-detail on the scene outside the window. I don't think this painter from the turn of the 19th C was trying to imitate AI -- she was just obsessed with painting the details of a dress, and the rest of the composition was an afterthought. Not a very coherent portrait or mini-landscape through the window.

* * *

So, the main points remain. People are much better at identifying AI from human art than just coin-flipping -- even when the really egregious examples are removed.

And crucially, AI models do not have a single mind of their own, like people do, so they frequently violate the fundamental rule to maintain coherence of style within a single work. It's so fundamental that most of us probably didn't even consider it necessary to spell it out explicitly -- like, what other approach would you take, clashing and disjointed styles? Computers are too analytical and slicing-up and zooming-in, not holistic and gestalt-oriented enough to appreciate what coherence, unity, and harmony among parts are.

Presumably they would do the same with a verbal medium -- parts of it would be verse with a strict meter and rhyme scheme, while other parts were dull drab prose. Or where entire paragraphs are dull drab terse prose, then others are highly ornate and full of figures of speech with sentence diagrams that look like someone smashed your windshield with a tire iron. You'd wonder whether the person had a schizo episode while writing a single chapter / story.

But verbal media are more serial, not as all-at-once parallel in processing. So harmony among elements isn't quite as salient of a property of speech as it is of images. IDK what AI story-slop reads like, but at least on the visual side, it's overly analytical schizo nature really comes through, and accounts for why we reject so much of it as decent or good art. It didn't even fulfill one of the most basic requirements -- stylistic coherence!

And again, I don't care how many trillions of parameters they add to these models to make them less ridiculously off-putting. That's over-fitting the data. And it's certainly a worse model to choose than "give prompts to a human artist" -- way less explicit detail needed there, cuz so much is already built-in to human nature, as well as during their training.

But something like stylistic coherence is too obvious and universal and unspoken to be picked up during training. It's part of innate human nature, and machines will never possess that, without ever more risible degrees of complexity-explosion. Sad!

Unstolen election mega-thread

Just re-posting two initial comments here for now to get the ball rolling, will add to it in the comments as usual.

* * *

Why didn't Dems steal it this time? Well, Dems were promising to steal it -- the state election boards in battleground states, the media, and Obama himself on the campaign trail.

Why didn't they this time? Perhaps the election steal of 2020 was part of the broader civic breakdown of 2014-2020 -- most of which was marked by political violence, hostile rhetoric, etc. Stealing an election is not physical violence, or even heated rhetoric, but it is hyper-competitive, antagonistic, anti-social, etc.

It was also part of the broader hostile crusade by woketards, like censoring and deplatforming everyone during the 2014-2020 abyss. That's also hostile, anti-social, war-like, etc., but not physically violent.

This is part of the Peter Turchin 50-year cycle in civic breakdown, whose last peak was the late '60s and early '70s, then the late 1910s and early '20s, late 1860s and early '70s, a missing explosion circa the late 1810s and early '20s (which was instead the Era of Good Feelings), and another burst around the Revolutionary War of circa 1770.

It's a kind of energy that builds up, and then dissipates, over a cycle lasting 50 years, or 25 years in either direction.

By 2024, it was already clear that the violent symptoms of this pattern had abated -- BLM and Antifa did not burn down half the country in '24, there were no roving executions of cops caught on camera like in the mid-late 2010s, Democrats didn't roam around assassinating Trump supporters for no reason and getting off with no bail, etc. Although there were 2 assassination attempts on Trump himself -- the violence hasn't gone to 0, but it's only 5% of what it was during the 2014-2020 abyss.

Libtards didn't even hold marches when the Supreme Court over-turned their sacred cow of Roe v. Wade in '22. There will be no pussy hat marches when Trump is re-inaugurated.

Twitter allowed itself to be bought out and taken over by Musk, which would not have been allowed in 2014-2020, and they submitted to the new orders about no more crazy censorship and ban waves.

So, the failure or unwillingness of Dems to carry out the steal this time must be part of that general dissipation of policitized zeal from its 2014-2020 peak (abyss). There will be no Russiagate, #MeToo, Resistance, etc. bullshit like there was during Trump's first term, during the peak of politicized zealotry.

I thought since stealing an election wasn't violent or confrontational, they'd still do it -- especially since that's what they were promising for the past few months, right up through most of election night, with Philadelphia halting their vote count early in the evening, waiting for the rest of the state to return their numbers, anticipating a steal. Who am I to second-guess the same message, from the same top-level figures, that was followed up on by a successful insane steal in the very last election?

The energy level declining across all dimensions -- violence, censorship, stealing elections -- is also bipartisan. There was WAY less zeal on the Trump side this cycle, compared to 2015-'16, and even 2020. No one is sincerely posting God-Emperor memes anymore, no one is champing at the bit to lay the first bricks in that Big Beeyooteeful Wall, which never got built the last time. And there's just been far less trolling and teabagging this time than in 2016, and certainly 2020 when it got stolen, preventing the teabagging.

Politicized zeal overall in American society has fallen off of its 2014-2020 explosive peak, and will reach a minimum circa 2045, which will be as non-partisan as the mid-1990s were 50 years earlier. Then the next explosion will happen in the 2060s and early '70s, and the cycle will keep on repeating...

* * *

Also a quick dunk on tech determinist dum-dums, who blamed / credited the explosive zeitgeist of 2014-2020 on newfangled tech (social media, smartphones, "meme magic," online in general).

Well, Americans are even more online than they were in 2016, yet the zealotry has fallen off a cliff after 2020, and will continue plummeting toward a minimum in 2045 -- all while Americans continue to be as online, or even more online, than they were in the 2014-2020 period.

That's the cross-temporal proof. Then there's the cross-sectional proof -- Japanese people have become more and more online since they first adopted the internet. Yet they have experienced no such explosion of politicized zealotry -- whether leading to violence, censorship, heated rhetoric, stolen elections, or whatever else.

All technologies are mere tools, indifferent to how they're used, and impotent to shape, channel, or nudge human societal systems or individual behavior. Rather, the dynamics of society and individual psychology lead to some people using some tech for some purpose in some state of affairs, and some others to use some other tech (or even the same tech) for some other purpose when they're in some other state of affairs.

Americans didn't need social media or the internet or online anonymity to carry out an equally explosive bout of zealotry in the late 1960s and early '70s, or the late 1910s and early '20s, or the Civil War or the Revolution -- or the civic breakdown of the 60s AD during the Roman Empire, most of whom weren't even literate, let alone employing a communicative medium other than speech sounds coming out of the mouth.

When the cycle enters a crazy zealous phase, they use whatever means / media they have at their disposal, and when the cycle leaves the crazy zealous phase, they either use different media that have no stain of the zealous-associated media, or they use the same ol' media for a different purpose.

Technologies are utterly indifferent to how they're used, and they have no deterministic or even probabilistic influence stemming from inherently from themselves, toward human behavior, at any scale (person, group, society, etc.).

Halloween mega-post / thread: horror movies, music, video games, sublime aesthetics, vtuber recommendations, ancient Indo-European origins of trick-or-treating, etc.

Let's just get the Halloween season ball rolling by thanking Holo honey Raora for hosting a watchalong for a classic horror movie, The Thing! (The canonical 1982 version.) Irys also did a watchalong for it last year...

So does that mean that Raora is a daddy's girl like Irys? It's rare for girls to have cool tastes, usually only guys do. Ame also watched a lot of classic "guy's movies," but she's a bit on the tomboy side, whereas Irys and Raora are very girly.

So where do they get their preference for cool-guy culture? From wanting to bond with their dad! Their dad is a guy, and has guy tastes, so if they want to bond with him, they'll have to develop a taste for guy movies, guy music, and so on. Raora has fondly mentioned her dad quite a bit, more so than her mom or her sister, so I think she might be a daddy's girl -- very rare, and very appreciated! ^_^

On the Holo JP side, I'm pretty sure that the Koronator is a daddy's girl -- she's mentioned the two of them bonding over classic video games while she was growing up. Marine must be a daddy's girl -- she has fondly mentioned him quite a bit on stream (he thinks Choco is pretty, he has some rules for marrying Marine, etc.). And it sounds like Lui is closer to her dad than to her mom (who is more like Lui's brother), so I think she's a daddy's girl too. And they all have cool tastes! And they're not tomboys, so they found an interest in cool things so that they'd have something to bond with their dad over. ^_^

And those are only the ones I know about -- perhaps there are others, but I just haven't seen clips or heard them talk about their families on stream before. It seems like there are a lot more daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon than in other countries. And Japanese girls *do* have cooler tastes than girls from other countries.

Probably because their men are cooler -- descendants of samurai, ninjas, pirates, and warrior-monks (yes, Japanese Buddhist monks could marry and have children). In China and Korea, the dominant classes were scholar-bureaucrats and literally castrated eunuchs, along with the military. Girls are more likely to want to bond with their dad when he has an exciting personality, which comes from leading an exciting lifestyle (not the life of a scholar-bureaucrat).

Even among the non-warriors, Japanese men were more likely to be hunters and fishermen than the Chinese and Koreans were, because Japan is so mountainous that arable land is relatively less common, so intensive agriculture is not as common as it is in China and Korea. And fishing is just another form of hunting -- more adventurous, setting off into the unknown, having to fight against hostile natural forces.

If the fish are migratory like salmon, then fishing is more like pastoralism, and the fishermen are tending to a herd of underwater livestock, much like the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes -- which makes them a lot cooler, resembling pastoralists (risk-taking, badass, culture of honor) instead of intensive agriculturalists (boring, predictable, hardscrabble).

Mongolian girls also have cool tastes, like practicing horse-mounted archery for fun! Your daughters would be cool, too, if they looked up to their fathers as the descendants of Genghis Khan! Hehe.

I'll be posting more post-length comments in the comments section shortly, just wanted to get the ball rolling...

Judaism as a Third Way / Non-Aligned religion arising on the faultline between Christian and Muslim empires during the Dark Ages

Second post collecting together related ideas from an earlier comment section, building a model for why there as an explosion of conversion to (mainly Talmudic) Judaism during the Dark Ages, where it happened, and when it happened, surveying a very broad range of Jewish communities.

* * *

As far as I can tell, there was no mass migration of Judaeans out of Judaea during / after the collapse of the Roman Empire. They mostly stayed put, first converting to Christianity, and then to Islam. Their descendants are today's Palestinians, regardless of their religion.

Where did all these Medieval Jewish groups come from, then? They were mostly converts or adopters, a process that happened in many places independently of each other -- e.g., Sephardic Jews in Iberia and the Maghreb, and Ashkenazi Jews within the Khazar Empire (mainly, the non-Turkic subjects of the Khazars).

There's no evidence that any of these Medieval Jewish groups ever spoke a Semitic language, let alone Hebrew or Aramaic, which the Second Temple Judeans did. They kept their language from pre-conversion -- Old Spanish (Ladino) for the Sephardics, Farsi for the Persian Jews, and some Indo-European pidgin (Yiddish) for the Ashkenazis. Most of their culture remained the same as well -- only their religion changed.

Why did so many groups, separated by so much space, simultaneously adopt Talmudic Judaism? I think this was an attempt to forge a Third Way religion, a Non-Aligned Movement of its time, in the broader context of the expansion of Christianity and Islam.

Christianity was spreading via the Byzantine and Frankish Empires first and foremost, but secondarily through the Nestorian Church / Church of the East in Sasanian / Abbasid territory. Islam was spreading via the first Arabian Caliphate, and later successors like the Abbasid, Moorish, Fatimid, and various Turko-Mongol ones (like the Seljuks, Ottomans, Timurids, etc.).

Cuius regio, eius religio -- if you threw in your lot with a certain polity, you had to adopt their religion as a pledge of allegiance. If you wanted some kind of political autonomy, you had to adopt a non-aligned religion -- you weren't siding with any of the Christian empires, nor with any of the Muslim empires. Non-aligned, Third Way -- Talmudic Judaism!

Crucially, though, Talmudic Judaism could position itself as overlapping in interests with both sides, as it was a fellow Abrahamic religion. And its ancient prophets were still being looked up to by both Christians and Muslims. Talmudic Judaism did not precede Christianity, but in harking back to Second Temple and earlier stages, it could claim to precede Christianity and Islam -- hence, setting itself up as a dispassionate, wise elder that could adjudicate between the younger squabbling children, Christianity and Islam.

Forgot to mention the Bulgarian Empire as the other major vector for Christianity's expansion, in Eastern Europe / Slav-dom (Kievan Rus' played little role in this -- Old Church Slavonic is really Old Bulgarian, a Southern Slavic language, not Old Russian / Ukrainian / etc. from Eastern Slavic).

This matches with the geographic distribution of Medieval Jewish groups. They're on frontier zones between Christian and Muslim empires, where the pressure to remain non-aligned would have been greatest.

If the region were mainly Christian, the pressure is simply to adopt Christianity -- there's no Muslim presence that would justify your Third Way religion, as a triangulation strategy. And vice versa in regions that are primarily Muslim -- with no Christian presence, there's no logic to a Third Way religion. At least not where that Third Way is Talmudic Judaism.

The only Jewish empire ever -- the Khazars -- were smack dab in the middle between the Christian and Muslim spheres of influence, around the Caucasus mountains and sprawling toward the north, with Christianity to the west and Islam to the east.

Ashkenazi Jews emerged from the Khazar Empire, as did the Turkic off-shoots of the Khazar elite like the Krymchak Jews of Crimea.

Sephardic Jews came from the frontier between Christian Iberia and the Muslim Maghreb. I consider Maghrebi Jews to belong to the same group, with the only difference being language -- the adopters from Iberia kept speaking Old Spanish (Ladino), while the adopters from the Maghreb side kept speaking Maghrebi dialects of Arabic / Moroccan / Berber languages.

Jews in North Africa vanish as you move away from the Christian frontier of Iberia -- e.g. in Libya, where there were mainly Muslim polities, and no room for a Third Way to emerge.

Likewise as you move toward Northwestern Europe -- no native Jews, since France and Britain and Germany were entirely Christian, no Muslims nearby, hence no way for a Third Way to emerge. This also reinforces the view that the Ashkenazis do not hail from Germany, where there was no way for a Third Way to emerge, but originally from a region with a strong Muslim presence nearby, like the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Caucasus, etc.

Ethiopian Jews lie on a frontier between the Christian parts of Ethiopia (in the north / west) and the Muslim parts of Ethiopia and Somalia (in the south / east). So do the Yemeni Jews, who are just across the Red Sea from historically Christian Ethiopia, but also have Muslims nearby in Somalia as well as all of Arabia.

There's a tiny pocket of Egyptian Jews, at the confluence between Muslim North-central and Northeast Africa and Arabia, and the semi-Christian Levant and nearby Anatolia and Greece.

Mountain Jews reflect the same position as the Khazar and Ashkenazi Jews, around the Caucasus between the Christian west and Muslim east.

Persian Jews come from the old days when Nestorian Christianity was expanding and at its peak in Iranian-controlled lands, which included Mesopotamia and into Afghanistan and the southern part of Central Asia. They were positioning themselves between the early Muslim Abbasid rulers and the Nestorian Christians, especially in western Iran and Mesopotamia. But also further east into Afghanistan (Herat -- not so much further into Kabul, where there were few Nestorians), Samarkand, etc.

However, Nestorian Christianity disappeared during the early 2nd millennium, and Iranian lands became fairly uniformly Muslim, so the logic of the Third Way bit the dust as well, so that Jews from Iranian lands are much rarer than in other places as a result.

A fascinating example are the Cochin Jews of Kerala in Southwestern India, which not surprisingly happens to be the only state in India with both a substantial Muslim population (stemming from seaborne Arabian traders, not land-army invaders from the north), and a substantial Christian population (Nestorian, naturally, having received missionaries from Sasanian / Abbasid empires). In the 21st C, Muslims are about 25% and Christians 20% of the population of Kerala. As always, these Cochin Jews speak the same language from their pre-conversion days -- Malayalam (a Dravidian language), not Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic language.

This establishes the tight spatial correlation between a faultline between Christian and Muslim empires, and adopting Talmudic Judaism (or in a few cases, Karaite Judaism -- also not Second Temple, but very much a modern-era LARP to RETVRN to pre-Talmudic ways, in the same way that Christian fundamentalists are thoroughly from the modern era).

But the temporal correlation is there as well. None of these groups practiced any strain of Judaic religion before the Dark Ages, and crucially, before the rise of Islam in the 7th C. Talmudic Judaism itself was only codefied around 500 AD. But there was no initial explosion of Talmudic Judaism in the 6th or even 7th centuries -- more like the late 1st millennium.

That is, after Muslim empires had expanded to such a broad extent, as well as the broad expansion of Christian empires in the west (which did not happen during the Roman days, or even just afterwards -- the major Germanic polity and culture, the Saxons, didn't adopt Christianity until conquered by the Frankish Empire circa 800 AD, also the time that the Slavs began adopting Christianity via the conversion of Bulgarian Tsar Boris I "the Baptizer" in the mid-9th C).

And we can infer the date of their conversion fairly tightly in some cases, like the Sephardic Jews, whose Romance language (Ladino) is a dialect of Old Spanish -- before the Castilian-led ethnogenesis, and imperiogenesis, during the Reconquista of Iberia from the Moorish Empire. It's not a dialect of Iberian late Vulgar Latin or whatever, so it's not from the early portion of the Dark Ages either.

It's from the late 1st millennium, and it is therefore more similar to Portuguese and Catalan, which were not the leaders of Spanish ethnogenesis, and did not radically revolutionize their language in order to signal that this was a whole new ethnic group being born, with a new set of shibboleths by which to identify each other.

E.g., Ladino, like Portuguese and Catalan, still uses sibilant consonants in the places where Castilian ("Spanish") transformed them into "th" at the front of the mouth and "kh" at the back of the mouth.

Which sectors of society did this Third Way strategy appeal to most? Apparently the merchants, traders, financiers, and the like. They are the least political, wanting to be left alone to hawk their wares, supervise trade routes, move the stuff along trade routes, lend money and collect loans, etc.

This government, that government, this state religion, that state religion -- who cares? I just wanna control the trade routes between them, and not get involved in their military or religious disputes.

It did not appeal to the military, which has the strongest interest in picking one side of an imperial fault-line. They're going to be the ones defending or expanding that fault-line. Jewish soldiers and Jewish jocks are the exception that proves the rule.

Nor did it appeal to the religious officials, for obvious reasons. They're there to serve the existing major religion of their empire, not abandon it for some strange foreign religion, and for no good reason (like accepting their conquest by foreigners). Jews for Jesus are another exception that proves the rule.

Didn't appeal to landed gentry / landowners / cultivators either. Perhaps cuz this sector was heavily intertwined with the military and religious sectors during the Dark Ages. The central state was fairly weak, so most armies were fielded by landed aristocrats, and the church / mosque owned a lot of productive land. Jewish hardscrabble farmer living off the land in nowheres-ville is another exception that proves the rule.

This is why Talmudic Jewish adopters were more urban than rural -- and remain so right up through the present day.

I'm leaving aside the genetic angle for the most part, since we're talking about cultural in-groups and their evolution, not tracking genetic populations over time.

But in any case, the genetic evidence is very weak for the view that Medieval Jews (and their modern-day descendants) represent a demographic migration out of Judaea, i.e. stemming from the practitioners of Second Temple Judaism and perhaps the even more distant ancestors of Second Temple Jews.

There has been a ton of admixture in every Jewish group, which confounds attempts to shed light on who their ancestors were, and especially *when* the admixture occurred. Admixture, when two distinct genetic populations start having babies with each other, wipes out a ton of the historical record on BOTH sides, rendering the merged resulting genome a lot more difficult to decipher for historical purposes.

Just like, on the cultural side, when two languages start to heavily influence each other -- a ton of old words are lost on BOTH sides, wiping out a huge swath of the historical record for BOTH languages. While not making it impossible to peer into their respective histories, it does confound the hell out of the attempt.

I think the general pattern can be seen in this recent article on Medieval DNA from a 14th-C. Ashkenazi Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.

Below the Summary section, is a Graphical Abstract. Note the graph in the middle, showing where the individuals cluster in a simplified genetic space. It shows two distinct sub-populations -- and this is confirmed in the results section by tests of bi-modality, i.e. two distinct distributions with each having a peak of its own, not just one great big happy distribution with a single peak.

In the post-Medieval era, present-day Ashkenazi Jews no longer have a bi-modal genetic cluster pattern, they're a single genetic population, which lies between the two separate ones from the Medieval era.

I interpret this to reflect that at their origins, the Ashkenazi Jews were unified on a cultural basis, like an economic niche of controlling trade routes, developing a pidgin / lingua franca like Yiddish, and being fellow subjects of the same empire (Khazar), who had recently adopted a new religion (Talmudic Judaism). They transmitted these aspects of their culture throughout the generations.

But at first, they were not genetically unified -- that only followed later, after their cultural unification / standardization. They figured, Hey, we're all following the same religion, speaking the same language, practicing similar economic roles, hailing from the same regional roots -- we might as well merge our families and clans, to cement and protect our special status as Third Way religionists and economic specialists.

And so they did -- and nowadays, the Ashkenazis are one single genetic population.

In the Medieval era, one of their sub-groups was more European -- meaning Slavic or perhaps Balkan Greek or West Anatolian Greek, not Germanic. And the other sub-group was more "Middle Eastern" -- a weasel deflecting term to insinuate they're Judaean or Levantine or Semitic without the evidence to back it up. In reality, more of an East Anatolian Greek, Caucasus region, or Iranian strain of "Middle Eastern". Not Semitic, nor any other Saharo-Arabian population.

These two sub-groups both had the same idea in the Khazar Empire -- why don't we specialize in a certain economic role, and adopt this Third Way religion so we remain neutral (but similar to both sides) in international trade routes, diplomacy, finance, and other mercantile and bureaucratic activities? It didn't matter that one was more Slavic and the other more Iranian. Politics makes strange bedfellows -- culturally at first, and later perhaps literally, as in this case.

With other groups of Jews, the story is presumably similar or more extreme.

The extreme cases are unadmixed populations, where we can directly see that they're just converts from the local genetic population. This is the case for Turkic ones, like the Krymchaks of Crimea. And the Yemeni Jews. And the Ethiopian Jews. And the Persian Jews.

The other major case of an admixed Jewish group is the Sephardics, who are a merger between Iberians and Maghrebis, i.e. the two relevant sub-groups under the control of the Moorish Empire, which straddled the Strait of Gibraltar, including much of Iberia and the Maghreb at the same time.

If some researcher discovers Medieval DNA from a Jewish cemetery in Cordoba or Tangier, and compare it to today's Sephardics and Moroccan Jews, the picture will presumably look like the Ashkenazi one linked above -- a bi-modal genetic cluster pattern during Medieval times, and a more uniform one among present-day descendants. Cultural unification and standardization first, then familial mergers and genetic admixture, after they've grown comfortable and familiar with each other within their Third Way cultural enclave.

Forgot to mention the Cochin Jews as another obvious case of conversion among the local genetic population. They look and speak exactly like their non-Jewish neighbors in Kerala.

We have to emphasize all of these extreme cases cuz the propaganda goes that "Judaism does not proselytize or welcome converts easily", as though to suggest that today's Jews are a latter-day Judaean diaspora.

The more examples we find of obvious local converts, the more that propaganda implodes. The main arguments are about the Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups not being Judaean, but there are all sorts of lesser examples from far-flung regions that, collectively, bolster the argument about a wave of conversions across the Christian-Muslim faultline during the late 1st millennium AD, independently of each other but for similar reasons (convergent evolution, not identity by descent). And not a mass migration from Classical Judaea to these many distant lands.

Another major weakness of genetic data is that determining who resembles who else, is highly sensitive to which groups are included in the comparison! Leave out the very diverse genetic populations of the Caucasus region, for example, and you can't conclude anything about Ashkenazi Jews *not* coming from that region. Or don't include many Persians, etc.

Here's an article reviewing these important points, and arguing for Ashkenazis coming from a Slavic, Iranian, and (weakly) Turkic genetic and geographical origin.

When you include a fuller, richer sample of eastern Anatolia, Iran, northern Mesopotamia, and all around the Caucasus, the results returned are Ashkenazis being something like 25% Caucasian, a conclusion that does not appear when this region is poorly and thinly sampled relative to the Levant.

When the Levant is heavily sampled, this makes them the only logical place for Ashkenazis to resemble in their "Middle Eastern" component. It's just baking in the desired result ahead of time, circular reasoning.

And again, admixture confounds the attempt to decipher genetic population history. So even to the extent that Ashkenazi Jews *do* somewhat resemble Semitic-speaking Levantines, we can't infer that this reflects a shared ancient Semitic common ancestor. Caucasus / Iranian DNA began flowing into the Levant well before the Classical era.

So perhaps the resemblance between Ashkenazi Jews on the one hand, and Lebanese or Palestinian Christians on the other, is simply pointing to them both having a very old Caucasus / Iranian bunch of DNA -- in the Ashkenazi case, cuz they're from that very region and didn't migrate, and in the Lebanese or Palestinian case, cuz they received migrants from that region several thousands of years ago.

Clustering graphs in principal components analysis, don't tell us how they came to share their genes, or when their common ancestors lived.

This is where cultural analysis excels, since the record is far richer over history -- whereas finding Medieval or Ancient or Prehistoric DNA is very very rare, in comparison. Especially since the relevant cultural groups here are all literate and from sedentary or semi-sedentary civilizations, with recorded histories.

Ashkenazi Jews are never recorded as speaking Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic language, as their first, everyday language (only for liturgical purposes -- but that no more establishes their deep ancient affinity with Judaeans than the descendants of the Aztecs "preserving" Latin as a liturgical language, connects them genetically to the Romans or Byzantines).

Whereas Lebanese, Palestinians, etc. in the Levant never stopped speaking Semitic or more broadly Canaanite languages, from antiquity to the Dark Ages to the present.

Conclusion: Ashkenazis are not a diaspora that originated in the Levant. Neither are the Sephardics, who also never spoke Hebrew or Aramaic.

What about the genetic argument about "Jews resemble each other more than their local populations"?

Well, first, there are numerous examples against this dum-dum canard -- Ethiopian, Yemeni, Krymchak, Mountain (Caucasus), and Cochin Jews.

This argument really relies on the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cases. Iranian Jews have the lowest genetic relatedness to other Jewish groups, meaning they're another obvious case of local converts.

Ashkenazi Jews resemble each other more than their host populations cuz they are a unique admixture between a Slavic and an Iranian ancestor population -- who the hell else can boast of a similar lineage since the Medieval era? Nobody. Hence why they resemble each other so much, also having been endogamous ever since.

Likewise for Sephardics -- they are a unique admixture of Iberian and Maghrebi source populations, which means they resemble each other more than they resemble the relatively unadmixed descendants of Iberians and Maghrebis, among their neighbors.

So why do Sephardics and Ashkenazis resemble each other, then? They have a different set of source populations that they're admixed from. Well, not so much -- Iberians are western Indo-Europeans from the Mediterranean, and so are Greeks and Southern Slavs. This could be the shared DNA between Sephardics and Ashkenazis, respectively.

They are also highly admixed with a genetic Middle East / North Africa component, unlike Iberians or Greeks or Slavs. So perhaps their similarity is a result of having Southwestern Indo-European DNA, with a notable MENA DNA mixture as well, even if this MENA source is different for Sephardics and Ashkenazis -- it's still a point of commonality between them, which is lacking or less intense in Iberians, Greeks, and Slavs.

Likewise, the Iberian component of Sephardics separates them from other Maghrebi-derived groups, and the Slavic component of Ashkenazis separates them from other Iranian-derived groups. Both of these exceptional sources is Southwestern Indo-European, so the specifics of their exceptionality is also similar.

So, they don't have to come from the same source populations to bear a resemblance, or even more of a resemblance than they do to their neighbors. It's just that they're both highly admixed, within a relatively recent time-frame, and whose source populations are semi-related in being southern and western Indo-Europeans. That's it!

Bearing in mind all the numerous cases of obvious local converts, including the major "Mizrahi" group, Iranian Jews, this means there's no mystery to solve! They were all converts in the late 1st millennium AD, and they only differ in the degree to which they admixed with other converts from other genetic populations -- not at all for most cases, but they did for Ashkenazis and Sephardics. Moreover, one half of the sources for each of those admixed groups was semi-related (Greeks or Slavs, and Iberians, both being Southwest Indo-Europeans).

Unlike the very sparse genetic historical record -- meaning, DNA from various eras over time, not trying to decipher history from present-day DNA -- the rich cultural historical record bears this out. No mass migration, no diaspora, no preservation of Hebrew or Aramaic as the native language.

And the true descendants of Second Temple Judaeans largely became Christian, then Muslim, staying put in the Levant, amply confirmed genetically and culturally / historically.

Why the hell would anyone expect a mass migration and diaspora out of Judaea after the Roman Empire fell, and why would they have abandoned their purported native language of Hebrew or Aramaic, when the whole point is that they were an endogamous ethnic enclave that did not just melt into their host societies?

The Roman Empire included all sorts of territory -- and yet none of them are purported to have been sent scattered to the four corners of the globe as a result of the collapse of their imperial overlords.

In fact, the only recorded -- historically and genetically -- mass migrations after the Roman Empire fell were from *outside* of its territory, and outside of their Persian rivals' territory, for that matter. Namely, the Germanic and Slavic migrations in Europe, and the Turkic and Mongol migrations in Central Asia. The subjects of the Roman and Parthian empires more or less stayed put during the Dark Ages, struggling to defend themselves against these nomadic barbarian invasions.

Nobody else from the Levant, Southern Europe, or North Africa is claimed to have been sent on a mass-migrating diaspora journey after Rome collapsed. So the Judaean purported example would be without contemporary counterparts who shared the same purported causal pressure.

And no, just destroying the Second Temple and expelling Jews from the single city of Jerusalem doesn't force them into a diaspora all over the Old World. It means they hole up in the nearby Galilee instead. Sedentary people tend not to want to roam all over the place and leave their homeland behind forever to live in the wild or among strangers.

Crushing a regional revolt doesn't do that either, a la the end of the Roman-Jewish Wars -- Syria seceded during the Crisis of the Third Century (under MENA baddie Queen Zenobia), this revolt was eventually crushed as well, but it didn't send Syrians scattering all over the place.

And even if there were a Judaean diaspora post-Roman collapse, the purported direction / destination is totally backwards! When your imperial overlords and sponsors and patrons collapse, the LAST place you want to go is their home turf, cuz it's becoming more unstable, impoverished, and socially fragmenting by the day.

This is confirmed in the Roman case, where there was tons of "Eastern Mediterranean" DNA from sites in Italy during the imperial heyday of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Once they began disintegrating during the 3rd C, who the hell would want to migrate there? And who the hell would want to remain there, if they were of recent Eastern Med immigrant background? They'd want to bail off of that sinking ship, and return home -- or to some other, more promising empire.

I like empires that didn't get disintegrated...

And so, by the mid-1st millennium and after, there is *comparatively* very little Eastern Med DNA in Italian burial sites (there's still some, cuz again we can't infer history from a snapshot, and Italians have had an Eastern Med DNA component for thousands of years previously).

The only places you would want to journey to after Rome fell, would be the Frankish Empire in NE France, the Byzantine Empire around Constantinople, the Bulgarian Empire nearby in Thrace, the Sasanian Empire (counterpart of the Byzantines, as the Parthians were the counterparts of the Romans), the Abbasid Caliphate in the same place as the Sasanians later on, the Seljuk Empire that replaced the Abbasids for that matter, the Khazar Empire around the Caucasus, the Moorish Empire in the Western Med, and maybe the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt.

What do you know? These are exactly the locations where major Jewish groups suddenly appeared in the post-Classical era.

Forgot to mention the Romaniote Jews -- a group of local converts from the Byzantine Empire, who are Greeks that adopted Talmudic Judaism in the Dark Ages, and speak Byzantine-derived Greek, i.e. after the Byzantine era erased much of the case system from Ancient Greek. (In a typical process of imperiogenesis eroding inflection of its language, to make it easier for the shitloads of L2 learners that now must speak it, as the empire expands out from the founding ethnic group.) They are not Second Temple Jews, whose Greek dialect would've still had a fair amount of inflection in it.

The dum-dum argument about the Ashkenazis having "Roman" DNA is that they poured into Italy during Rome's heyday, and also after its collapse as they fled Judaea. Maybe during the heyday -- everyone else did so as well, it was the place to be. But when it collapsed, they would not have moved onto Germany, since that place was a backwater, not a rising prosperous empire (which was further to the western side of the Rhine, in the nascent Frankish Empire). They definitely did not pour into Italy during / after the 3rd C, when it was disintegrating.

If the story was they picked up some Italian DNA from visiting Rome during its 1st and 2nd C heyday, then fled back home, or to some other rising empire where they are documented to have been, after Rome fell, OK. But that's not the argument, which is instead that the Ashkenazi left Italy for Germany, where they later emerged as Yiddish-speakers, and only after that, a portion of them migrated east into Slavic lands.

Bzzt, wrong direction! There was no rising empire in Germany to attract far-flung strivers looking to make a quick stable buck. The only direction could have been from Italy back to the Eastern Med, either remaining in Greece / Anatolia, or wandering through the Bulgarian Empire (Slavic) or the Khazar Empire (multi-ethnic, not Germanic though), or the Sasanian / Abbasid / Seljuk empire to the further east (even less Germanic). And only from these empires, migrating to the north and west to eventually wind up in Germany -- last.

This "follow the money" argument agrees with Wexler's argument about Yiddish not being an entirely Germanic language originally, let alone one from the Rhineland. But beginning as a Slavic language that was later re-lexified to a Germanic vocabulary and perhaps some morphology, while retaining Slavic syntax and phonology.

There was plenty of money to chase in the Bulgarian Empire, as well as among Slavic subjects of the Khazar Empire -- but comparatively far less among the Germanic groups to the east of the Rhine. If they had joined the Frankish Empire, they wouldn't speak a Germanic language anyway -- the Franks quickly adopted a Romance language, leaving behind their Franconian dialect of German. But the Ashkenazi have never spoken a Romance language as their native tongue, so we can rule out an early stay among the Franks as well.

As I said before, Yiddish has very little inflection compared to other Germanic languages, or languages in general. Even less case inflection than Standard German, which is already somewhat lacking in inflection cuz it became an imperial language with lots of L2 learners, during Germany's imperiogenesis.

So either Yiddish began as a lingua franca in a multi-ethnic context, with lots of L2 learners -- in the Khazar Empire. Or it was adopted very late, after German had already gone through the loss of much of its inflection system, and because the Ashkenazi were L2 learners at the outset, it served as a lingua franca and so lost even more inflection by the time it solidified into Yiddish.

In either case, they did not have a Germanic language as their native language in the 1st millennium, when their ethnogenesis took place.

The earliest recorded use of Yiddish is 1272 -- very damn late into the Dark Ages, well after the other major Jewish conversions. And they were literate! This wasn't their first exposure to literacy, and they're just expressing a language that was previously only spoken for centuries.

We know they're in Germany from those 14th-C burials in Erfurt, albeit still genetically separated. They're culturally unified -- buried in the same cemetery, with no spatial segregation within this Jewish cemetery. But they may have only very recently adopted / constructed Yiddish.

What language did they speak during the cultural unification of the previous several centuries? Either some other language that was re-lexified into a Germanic vocabulary and some morphology, or something else entirely. But presumably a Slavic language, given how much Slavic influence there is in Yiddish.

If that Slavic language came from illiterate Slavs from the Khazar Empire -- and not the literate Slavs from the Bulgarian Empire (and adjoining Slavic cultures near Kiev and Moscow and etc, where Cyrillic spread, or Western Slavs where Roman letters spread), then the lack of a historical literate record is not surprising. It was a spoken lingua franca among a multi-ethnic group that had a lot of illiterate Slavs, and official records were kept in Arabic, Farsi, Turkic, etc., as the main bureaucratic and administrative languages.

The whole logic of (purported) diaspora Jews being an ethnic enclave is that they were endogamous, so did not genetically intermix very much with their hosts, and were culturally apart as well -- different religion, attire / grooming, food taboos, residential living areas, and so on. They are purported to be an ethnic enclave of migrants into the host society.

That is contradicted by the absence of the purported ancestral language, in every single one of these Jewish communities outside of Judaea. When migrants show up and form a semi-enclosed enclave, they maintain their native language! Sometimes it's the *only* language they speak, and even if they also pick up the hosts' language, they retain their native one alongside for awhile -- until they start assimilating. But the Jews never did assimilate, they kept their distinctive religion, clothing, grooming, food taboos, and the rest of their purported cultural heritage.

When Chinese migrants leave China, they form Chinatowns -- and they continue speaking Chinese. Before Italians assimilated into America, they kept speaking Italian languages. So did the Germans, Greeks, and everyone else who wasn't already Anglophone.

Languages are hard to sever over time because there are such huge switching costs to adopting a new native language -- a second language, OK, but not replacing the old native one with a new native one. Very rare, and usually not voluntary, but related to imperial conquest.

So it's damning that no Jewish group is recorded to have spoken Hebrew or Aramaic outside of Judaea, when there's so much inertia behind keeping your language, yes even in a diaspora situation. And if you do give up your native language for that of your hosts, you also give up the other cultural distinctions, in a broad process of assimilation. But we know that Medieval Jews were culturally separate from their Christian or Muslim hosts in all sorts of readily identifiable ways -- not the least being their religion.

Genes and language are correlated, if not perfectly. So isn't it strange that the one cultural component that could most strongly bolster a claim for a Judaean origins of Medieval Jews, is the exact opposite of expectation? They speak the languages of their "hosts" -- because they originated from the exact same culture! They're converts, not migrants.

They are like Euro-descended Americans who speak English while adopting Zen Buddhism, yoga, feng shui, green tea, kimonos, flip-flops, vegetarian diets, and other cultural markers of Buddhist East Asia. These cultural markers are easier to fake for converts, compared to learning a new language -- no white American Buddhists speak fluent Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc. They speak American English! And their community always will!

Language, more so than the relatively easy-to-fake markers, is the main place to look as to a group's history. It's not perfect, but it does shed light.

And in the case of Medieval Jews, and their modern descendants, they are clearly local adopters who altered their religion, clothing, grooming, diet, etc., to fall in line with Talmudic Judaic precepts, while not adopting a Hebrew or Aramaic or other Canaanite language. Just like white American Buddhists.

It's morbidly ironic that the present-day Jewish state is filled with migrants (or their children), NONE OF WHOM can claim a genetic *or* cultural heritage stemming back to ancient Judaea. And that the people they've spent their entire society's history wiping out -- the Palestinians, and at times other Levantines -- are those who have stayed put in that place this whole time!

Genetically, this is settled.

But even culturally, none of the Zionists or their ancestors spoke a Semitic language. The Palestinians and their ancestors did.

The Zionists are not a diaspora which is RETVRN-ing to its ancestral homeland -- anymore than Aztec-descended Catholics who invaded and occupied Rome, or perhaps Toledo, would be RETVRN-ing to their ancestral homeland. Or white American Buddhists who laid waste to Thais in Thailand. It's such a sick obvious joke!

I know, I'm not retarded enough to believe that historical dynamics are shaped mainly by ideas or anything cerebral and nerdy like that. It's material, including social cohesion that is shaped by material militarized invasion near one's physical home turf.

The Jewish state has been propped up by various empires in various states of stagnation and collapse since its inception -- the moribund Ottoman Empire at the outset of settlement, then the British care-takers after the Ottomans bit the dust, then the Americans after the British bit the dust yet only during the late 1970s. America bitchslapped Israel out of the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez phase of the Arab-Iraeli Wars, in 1956, by threatening to annihilate Israel's British imperial overlords economically.

Really the only time Israel had to fight for itself was after 1956 and before 1978, during which it won one war (in '68) and then stalemated in another (in '73), before giving up its autonomous fight and agreeing to vassalage to the American Empire (in '78).

But with America collapsing now, and with new people becoming unified in their struggle against the Zionist invasion -- mainly in Southern Lebanon and Syria -- Israel will have no external sponsor to back it up in reality, and will face ever-mounting forces from their rising-asabiya neighbors, Hezbollah.

These material dynamics are what shape history, not academic debates and evidence about whether or not the Zionists truly have a legitimate claim to that land.

It's just worth emphasizing, for the sake of the truth -- if not for anything that affects the course of history -- how totally upside-down the entire project has been about restoring the Jewish homeland.

Luckily for the true descendants of the Second Temple society, this sick joke is rapidly coming to an end.

The geographic origin of Talmudic Judaism was Iran, not the Levant. The standard Talmud is the Babylonian one, i.e. written near historical Babylon, but administered by Iranian empires ever since the Achaemenids of the mid-1st millennium BC, right up until it was conquered by the Mongols, and then winding up in the Ottomans' possession, a British then American care-taker relationship, etc. Baghdad hasn't been under true local autonomy for 2500 years.

The Palestinian Talmud composed in Jerusalem is *not* the standard one.

So even at the very outset of the Talmudic / Rabbinical era in the mid-1st millennium, before the mass conversions of the last 1st millennium, the source of innovations and standardizations within Judaic religion and culture had decisively left the Levant for Iranian-controlled lands.

If Zionists wanted to RETVRN to Baghdad and restore the glory of original Talmudism, that would be one thing. That's where their particular religion actually comes from, not the Levant. And as it turns out, that's where a lot of their genetic and other cultural heritage comes from -- although more on the Iranian side proper, not Iranian-administered Iraq. Still, closer than their connection, genetic or cultural, to Judaea.

More on Yemeni Jews and the pretzel-twisting nonsense that academics and propagandists talk themselves into, in order to promote the overall grand narrative of a vast Judaean diaspora in the late Roman or post-Roman era...

Autosomal DNA shows that present-day Yemeni Jews are the same as other Yemenis and Arabians, not genetically distinct at all.

Even without this genetic evidence, they don't resemble other Jewish groups culturally, but do resemble their non-Jewish neighbors.

For example, their wedding ceremonies don't have a bridal canopy, they don't walk around anything or anyone ("circumambulation"), and their costumes don't look like any other Jewish group's wedding costumes (highly decorated and elaborate, and really emphasizing the color gold).

Without any blood evidence, I can tell they do not share a common *cultural* ancestor with the Ashkenazis (who are, instead, Indo-European from somewhere near the Caucasus).

Their seder ceremonies are also unique, neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi.

They don't play egg-tapping games or decorate eggs for their springtime renewal holiday (Passover), which is an Indo-Euro thing that Ashkenazis do (and in some very weakened form, Sephardics do outside of Passover, due to their Iberian heritage).

These three have nothing in common within the past 2000 years, culturally or genetically. Three separate groups who adopted Talmudism, while retaining much of their pre-existing local culture (and genepool -- the only innovation there being admixture among Jewish adopters of different sub-populations, but within the same geographic region, e.g. Slavs and Iranians near the Khazar Empire to yield Ashkenazis).

There is also a risible attempt to portray the rulers of the Himyarite Kingdom which controlled much of southern Arabia / Yemen, as converts to Judaism as of circa 400 AD. If true, this would go against my claim that major conversions to Judaism appeared only after the rise of Islam, and where Islam and Christianity cohabited, opening up Judaism as a Third Way / Non-Aligned Movement.

The only concrete conclusions we can draw from Himyarite religion in the late 4th through 5th centuries, is that it became monotheistic, or maybe henotheistic (emphasizing one senior god above other lesser gods within a polytheistic pantheon). And that this was influenced by both Jews and Christians from the Levant -- they came under Byzantine pressure to adopt Christianity, but they wanted to remain politically autonomous, so rejected Christianity.

But they didn't "adopt Judaism" -- what would that even mean in 400 AD? There was no Talmud compiled until a century later, so Talmudic Judaism is out. The Second Temple was long destroyed, so Second Temple Judaism, with its priestly caste that oversaw the sacred ceremonies of its focal religious site, is out as well. This was a limbo period for the descendants of the Second Temple people -- nothing very defined and elaborated for anyone else to adopt.

References to the "Lord of the Jews" or "Lord of Israel" are epithets that non-Jews use as well, like Christians. Did they have material copies of the Torah or the entire Hebrew Bible? Or at least orally transmitted "copies"? Nope. Did they follow kosher dietary laws? Who knows, probably nope. Did they circumcise their babies? IDK, but no reference that they do. Did they celebrate Passover? These are the kinds of things that would identify them as specifically Jewish in religion, not merely "vaguely Jewish-influenced or Jewish-inflected monotheism".

This was a time of all sorts of syncretic religions showing up, typically with some Abrahamic influence, whether Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, or otherwise. Like the popular Manichaeism. So the most accurate term, given the evidence, is not "Judaism" but "Himyarite monotheism" or "Jewish-influenced Himyarite monotheism".

This was a time of all sorts of syncretic religions showing up, typically with some Abrahamic influence, whether Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, or otherwise. Like the popular Manicheanism. So the most accurate term, given the evidence, is not "Judaism" but "Himyarite monotheism" or "Jewish-influenced Himyarite monotheism".

Even then, this does point to the crucial role of Christianity as the state religion of empires, and the desire for polities seeking political autonomy to adopt some Jewish-ish religion as a cultural marker for their political autonomy. It's just that there was no Islam, let alone Muslim empires, to serve as the other pole, with Judaism being a triangulating strategy. Perhaps Old South Arabian polytheism served as this other pole, but I doubt it. I just don't think the Himyarites were Judaic in religion, just monotheistic and influenced in some ways by Judaean religion.

Soon after this Himyarite monotheism, though, it was conquered by the Christian nation / empire of Axum from Ethiopia, which crossed the Red Sea. Then it became Christian, even as it eventually became administered by the Sasanian Persian Empire -- much like the way they tolerated Nestorian Christianity within the core of their empire.

The island of Socotra, to the south of Yemen and to the east of Somalia, was an outpost of Nestorian Christianity as well.

So in the Dark Ages, Yemen had Christian pressures primarily from the expanding state of Axum from Ethiopia, then internally within Yemen, and from a nearby major island. We think of that whole area as nothing but Muslim today, but it was fairly Christian back then. And of course there was a major Muslim presence after the rise of Islam -- it was near ground zero.

So, the perfect place for a group of locals to adopt Talmudic Judaism as a Third Way, which is exactly what happened. Wikipedia's entry on Yemeni Jews has a timeline that is only legendary for ancient times, overblown BS for the early Dark Ages (equating Himyarite monotheism with "converting to Judaism"), and then absent until the early 2nd millennium, when they become part of an international body of Jewish groups, e.g. corresponding with Maimonides.

So that's a good indicator of their date of conversion -- in the late 1st millennium, well after the rise and spread of both Christianity and Islam within their region.

Worth reviewing the extent of Christianity in Iranian-controlled lands during the Dark Ages, since it was huge. It was Nestorian Christianity, or the Church of the East, headquartered near or in Baghdad, and covering much of present-day Iraq and the western half of Iran proper, then extending in pockets off toward the east, covering the western part of Afghanistan, up into southern Central Asia, including Merv, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent.

And notice the outposts in Southwestern Arabia & Socotra, as well as Southern India. Once Muslims showed up in these places, it opened the door to Yemeni Jews and Cochin Jews as a Third Way religion.

Eventually it reached into China during the Tang, Song, and Yuan periods. Along the way some Mongol tribes adopted it, including the Kerait clan, who made up the wives of Genghis Khan's sons, and their sons as well.

But it began very early, in the 5th C, in present-day Iraq -- under Sasanian rule, whose state religion was Zoroastrianism, but which tolerated Nestorian Christianity as a counterweight to their Orthodox Byzantine rivals. They were not necessarily Semitic speakers, it stretched up into Northern Mesopotamia which would've been more Indo-European and Iranian. The common factor is -- at the core of the Sasanian Persian Empire. Hence one of its nicknames being the Persian Church, not the Iraqi or Arabian Church.

As Islam spread throughout these Iranian-controlled lands during the Abbasid and later eras, this opened up Talmudic Judaism as a Third Way between Nestorian Christianity and Islam. And that's exactly where Jews are in Iran and to the east.

However, Christianity was late to arrive in the more eastern lands, and so was Islam. Nestorian Christianity went into decline during the 14th C, and was more or less wiped out by Timur, to be replaced solely by Islam. This dried up the Third Way logic in the eastern parts of the Sasanian Empire and beyond.

And so "Persian Jews" have remained more of a presence in Western Iran, where the Nestorian Church had existed since a far earlier time and up to a later date -- and where Byzantine Christian pressures were not so far away to the west, along with Frankish Crusader pressures in the Levant. These two were not exactly right along the frontier, as the Nestorian nucleus in Mesopotamia and Western Iran was, but still a powerful and looming Christian pressure, unlike the void of Christianity to the east after the rise of the Timurid Empire.

Needless to say this Mesopotamian and Western Iranian region was also home to many Muslims as well -- Persian Jews sprung up, and have remained along a local Christian-Muslim faultline, where Talmudic Judaism offered them a Third Way / Non-Aligned religion.

The next big question is -- does this pattern exist elsewhere or at other times? Not where Christianity and Islam are the two poles, and Judaism as the Third Way. But say, Hinduism and Buddhism as the poles, and some other minority / niche religion being the Third Way.

I don't know enough about niche religions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, or Southeastern India, but those are all places where Buddhism and Hinduism should have opened up a niche for a Third Way.

The Parsis in India, maybe? That would be with Islam and Hinduism as the two poles, in western / northwestern India. They're the only group practicing that religion, though -- not a whole series of converts from across the Muslim-Hindu faultline in South Asia. They arrived with a Third Way religion already, as a fairly well documented diaspora / migration, not local adopters.

The problem with looking for other examples is that perhaps there's something unique about the relationship between Christianity, Islam, and (Talmudic) Judaism, where the niche Third Way is not just any ol' Third Way -- it's one that overlaps decently with each of the two major poles, and in some sense can claim to precede each of them.

That's the ideal Third Way -- it's non-aligned, compatible with both sides, and can demand respect from the two majors, as the elder religion of the trio.

Maybe in other times and places, the Third Ways available are not as ideal -- only similar to one pole, not the other, or maybe not similar to either side. A recent invention rather than preceding them both. Etc.

Hinduism precedes Buddhism, and is related to it, but Hinduism did not spawn another major religion that is territorially close to Buddhist lands, to serve as the other pole, with Hinduism acting as a niche Third Way. Rather, Hinduism is a major pole in its own right, not like Judaism.

Could be something going on in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Americas, I have no clue.

One thing I don't think works, though, is a fusion of the two poles into a Third Way. That's not non-aligned, which is "neither/nor" -- fusion is saying "both/and". Fusion is clearly trying to please both sides disingenuously, while non-aligned is saying I have no dog in the fight, leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, not I'm trying to pledge allegiance to two rival sides at the same time, which is unsustainable.

Judaism really hit the sweet spot in the context of rising Christian and Muslim empires. It's its own coherent religion, not a transparently fence-sitting, both-sides-ing fusion. And yet it's not any ol' non-fusion religion -- it is still similar to each, making it palatable to both without being a deliberate ass-kiss. And it at least partly precedes either side -- so it wasn't recently invented for the purpose of diplomacy, making it more trustworthy. And being older, at least in some sense, it gets respect for being the wise elder.

A looottt of traits had to line up in a single religion for it to see such an explosion of growth in conversions, for a religion that doesn't prosyletize or easily welcome converts. And all doing so independently of each other, at the group level. A very rare event indeed, so that it's the only religion where -- purportedly, but not really -- the majority of its practitioners are in a diaspora, not near where it began.

But that's no great mystery after all -- it's so widespread cuz of adoption, not migration! But to be widely and independently adopted, so many favorable traits had to be working in its favor, within its historically contingent political and cultural environment.

It's miraculous!