And now for a brief musical interlude while I cook up some new posts on the ongoing project of the Crescentine family of languages and cultures...
I haven't written one of these in awhile, but something just bit me, and I need to. ^_^
To the tune of "Oh l'Amour" by Erasure from 1986 (original lyrics). If you search for it, make sure you find this version, where the chorus has heavier percussion and background vocal harmonies. The first album version is bit slower and not as intense -- which a song about pining-away for lost or unrequited love must be!
* * *
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
Like-baiting you
You were like-baiting me
Always fan-arting you
You wrote it off as just memes
Oh S of my chart,
Don't make me feel own'd
Just scrap me for parts
Like your last-model phone
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
Why close without save?
Why unfollow me?
I just F5 and pray
For at least a subtweet
On ye olde timeline
In my DM's you'd slide:
"Get yours, I'll get mine
But won't be one-guy'd"
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
No recov'rable files
You never bookmarked my page
I'm leaving this site
What's left to engage?
Oh S of my chart
You've chased enough clout
Come click on restart
My system's crashed out
Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?
Heat wave on forth of July weekend and the all American suburbs are DEAD. I walked and drove around and it was like being on an abandoned space colony. Whereas 30 years ago on a hot humid 4th of July night there would be stoners hanging out in front of strip malls at night, random people driving around yelling at randos and playing music, kids on bikes, eccentric types, there is maybe 5% of that at most. It's a ghost world for America's 250th.
ReplyDeleteIs this song dedicated to anybody in particular? I used to remember when you wrote songs dedicated to Holohive girls and before that dedicated to political Twitter girls.
ReplyDeletePolitical realignment update: A lot of the America First MAGA base has turned on Trump and the Republican Party and are calling them traitors. Tucker Carlson has announced that he has left the Republican Party. Nick Fuentes and Casey Putsch and their groyper supporters are now supporting the Democrat Amy Acton against Trump backed Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio governor election. etc. Getting pretty close to the America First MAGA base switching wholesale to the left.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what elite factions are likely going to defect from the Republican Party yet. I guess it's a question of who in the Republican party coalition is getting screwed over by Trump.
Amy Acton will be the easiest Democrat vote I ever cast. Not just to prevent further Republican control over what used to be a nice purple state, but specifically since they're trying to elevate anti-American foreigner Ramaswamy of all people. Some Indian scammer who crashed out publicly on CHRISTMAS about how you goycattle scum don't studymaxx hard enough and deserve your replacement by strivers who'll work for peanuts.
ReplyDeleteHe was a total nobody, no experience in politics whatsoever, just a scammer from the QE era of free money to flim-flam scum with nepo connections, like his mom. Just a dumbass talking head on Fox News -- now suddenly he's supposed to be the governor of a major American state? Get the fuck outta here...
And a warning to the remaining numbnuts who didn't abandon Trump like I did when he bombed Syria in April 2017, proving what kind of country he wanted really wanted to see --
They are absolutely going to elevate this fat 40-something-looking uggo Zoomer gold-digger Leavitt, the press secretary who on the Fourth of July told everyone but especially men under 40, that they were born with silver spoons in their mouths, just need to gold-dig a disgusting old Boomer like she did (even worse, he's probably a closeted fag, and she's a live-in fag-hag, knowing Republican politicians), otherwise we're sending you to Iran so you can die for Israel, and that'll toughen up your moral fiber.
100% guaranteed -- look what they did with Ramaswamy. After that insane audience-berating crash-out, he should've been fed to the wood-chipper (literally, not politically), and yet the party deliberately chose him over anyone else for what they consider a shoe-in race (governor of a fairly red state). Trump personally lobbied for him -- another reason the orange retard belongs in the wood-chipper (literally, not politically).
If they're doing that with a nobody talking-head, imagine what they're going to do with someone who's much higher-ranking talking head, like a press secretary. She's now way better connected than he ever was.
Also look at another former WH Press Sec under Trump: Season One -- who's now the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee. Of course her father was the previous one, so that's a lot better of a nepo connection -- but still, she would've been pushed there no matter who her father was, as long as she was favored by the orange retard.
Leavitt is from New Hampshire -- might be a tall order to push her in her home state, they might try pushing her on some cuckservative Southern state instead.
Just remember -- the only way to stop this scum from taking over is to just vote Democrat. Hope for the best Democrat, vote in a Dem primary so you don't get some Boomer Zionist scum, but someone who'll do at least 1 good thing in office -- but most importantly, to begin draining the nation of Reaganite GOP toxic waste sludge.
ReplyDeleteI will happily be voting straight-ticket Democrat from now on. It's not even a question. It won't save the nation, but at least it'll make it more liveable on the way down, and we can punish at least half of the scum responsible for destroying our once wonderful country.
Same thing for 2028 -- first time in my life I'll vote Democrat for prez (only Nader 2000, and Trump 2016 and grudgingly in 2020, then back to Green in 2024). I won't begrudge someone who votes Green in '28, it'll probably be a holocaust on Republicans regardless, but I just want to make extra-sure the retard cult around Trump gets permanently purged from society.
With all the victories the DSA has been wracking up lately, we might actually get a not-too-terrible Dem on the ballot. I don't count on it, and I don't care if it's Biden again as long as he campaigns on exterminating Trump, locking up his family, expropriating their ill-gotten scammer wealth, shutting down Fox News and the political media posting on Twitter, etc.
Someone has to pay for this country being destroyed -- and we're too polarized to have a non-partisan dispassionate purging of the evil scum on all sides, so it'll be one side exterminating the other side. I don't care which side does the exterminating, and which side gets exterminated -- somebody has to pay, and the Republicans have proven for 10 years that they will look the other way, be absentee, abdicate, and even enable the libtard scum, while throwing their own supporters under the bus.
Democrats will defend literally everyone on their own team, even a straight white guy running for Senate who has a Nazi-coded tattoo, they sicc their dogs against Republicans, and although they're less violent than 10 years ago (good), they still haven't dropped the talk about imprisoning Trump and Republicans and punishing their corruption, Epstein links, starting a new war on Iran for Israel, etc etc etc.
No Democrat Press Sec ever told me I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and that I need to bust my ass to compete with work-for-peanuts foreigners, or else I'm going to die for Israel in Iran. I know that's empty blather from impotent Republicans, who can't get the country to comply with any of their bullshit -- but it's a real slap in the face to their own supporters. I'm not as angry about it, since I voted against Trump last time and cannot be "betrayed" by conservatards this time around.
But looking back at how Biden's press team addressed the nation, it wasn't half as disrespectful, hostile, and antagonizing against *their own people*. Yeah, Biden said "our patience is wearing thin" to Republicans who wouldn't get the jab -- but he didn't talk like that to his own voters (99% of whom are uber-vaxxers). He had 2 female Press Sec's, and neither of them pulled the bullshit that Leavitt and Ramaswamy did against their own side.
All empires go through social-cultural auto-immune diseases when they collapse, turning on the self and waving through foreign pathogens. But one party is infinitely worse about this than the other, and it's Republicans -- the originators of "there is no such thing as society" from the triumphalist days of Reaganism. They're too stuck in their ways, so they will ratchet up this auto-immune disease as they collapse -- sacrificing their own side, while waving through the most anti-social scum from the other side.
Republicans have now degenerated into The AIDS Party, in many cases literally, so guess who's getting the votes of Americans who want to purge AIDS from our once-healthy society? Easiest vote of my life.
One of the ultimate "fell for it again" awards in Trump: Season Three, is the incels who bought into the rightoid meme about "state-mandated goth gfs", if they vote Republican... as though Republicans, rather than Democrats, control the supply of goths or any kind of alt girl or baddie or whatever they're imagining...
ReplyDeleteBest we can do is, a 47 year-old-looking Zoomer HR Karen who sold herself to a literal Boomer mummy, berating you for playing video games in mom's basement all day long instead of busting your ass like she did, and that if you don't unplug yourself from your silver-spoon lifestyle of video games and porn, you're going to Iran to die for Israel.
"Heh, you just don't get it -- we're not going to *ask* for goth gf's. No more Mr. Nice Guy -- we're going to CONQUER them as WAR-BRIDES!"
Yeah, just like how you scooped up all those hot Persian baddies by bombing Iran and getting cucked by Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, right? Or all those Venezuelan thicc-booty latinas, after failing to topple Chavismo yet again, right? Write better fan-fic, you wannabe school-shooter girl-hating trash.
Your own party said, "You're not getting hotties or even mids of any background, and even the uggos who we do control are going to be auctioned off to the Boomers"!
Sorry, but if you fell for that one, you really are too stupid to vote, and are the reason that literacy tests should be re-instated for voting rights.
If you really want a goth gf, write her a yearning, pining-away song, which is not self-pitying or mopey or whatever, but makes it seem like she's a prize, someone who isn't *totally* out of your league, but who isn't a shoe-in conquest either. They will actually listen to your audition if you serenade them like that... success not guaranteed, but nothing worth winning is, right?
ReplyDeleteOn that note, no, I didn't have anyone in particular in mind when writing this last one, I just got bit by the bug and had to. Let it inspire or motivate you, to shoot your own shot... in the same way, don't insult them, don't make it about sex, don't act like you're above them. I know it's crazy I have to say that, but Millennials and Zoomers grew up with their brains and souls turned inside-out, so let a Gen X-er guide you toward the true path of pure love...
If you wouldn't see it in a John Hughes movie, or hear it on the soundtrack, just don't do it. If the girl has her soul turned inside-out, and would laugh or show your song to her friends / the internet for laugh-clicks, she wasn't worth it anyway, and just move on.
Not all Millennials, Zoomers, or Alphas are worthless anti-social trash. And truthfully, they respond to how you treat them first. The worse you treat them, the more they lock in to being haters right back atcha. Be the first to break the cycle, and start serenading them about being princess prizes worth winning over. It's your role as the guy to lead the way forward, especially out of a garbage-dump like the 21st century battle of the sexes.
"Bla bla bla, clueless out-of-touch Gen X-er who still thinks America is in the wholesome high-trust 1980s and early '90s, when sincere yearning serenades will be appreciated or even rewarded, rather than turned against them for global public mockery..."
It's not 2015-2020 anymore -- *now* who's out of touch? The social harmony vs. discord cycle has inflected as of several years ago, as shown by the absence of riots and mass chaos for at least 5 years now. You can't stay stuck in the woketard 2010s forever, like some out-of-touch Boomer who is permanently living through the late '60s and early '70s, whether they loved it or hated it. Time has moved on -- and so must you.
Girls will be more and more receptive of sincerity in the coming years, but including right now. It's a two-way street, though...
Just, for the love of god, close your Twitter feed if that's what you think girls or women are like. Any post that "breaks containment" is proof that it's only being boosted by those who want to stay permanently stuck in the 2010s culture war / battle of the sexes caged death match on steroids. You can leave that cage any time you want, and Just Be Yourself.
Girls out there (not big accounts on Twitter), want to Just Be Themselves, too.
As for which faction of GOP will abandon ship? Possibly energy, like oil and gas producers -- they just got their most expensive investments RAPED TO DEATH by the fat orange retard and the military shit-for-brains who are the primary force in the Republican coalition.
ReplyDeleteThey had billions upon billions invested in natural gas in Qatar and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, took years to build, instantly wiped out due to Trump and rightoid morons bombing Iran, who were quick to strike back at their enemies rather than sit around and take it like a bitch, as America itself would (never got revenge against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab monarchies, who committed literal 9/11 against America).
That infrastructure is never coming back -- just look at the Francis Scott Key bridge fiasco in DC's backyard.
When some kind of infrastructure comes back, it will be controlled by Iran, not America. Either the Gulf Arab states will become clients of Iran, or Iran will continue controlling the Strait of Hormuz, as they already are. Any American energy companies who want a piece of that action will have to pay enormous penalties for belonging to the American political coalition that bombed Iran to begin with. Neutral parties will get better treatment, but not America -- how could they?
And by wiping out double-digit percentages of the global oil and gas supply, Trump and Republicans have set up an energy shortage here in America, which will cause prices to skyrocket. And since most of the world isn't energy-independent, that means American energy producers will prefer selling American oil at the sky-high global prices to foreign nations, like East Asia, rather than sell it for low prices here in America.
Trump and Republicans are already threatening the energy faction of their coalition, to not raise prices in the face of shortages which Trump and the military themselves caused by waging war against Iran. So now, not only are the massive investments wiped out for energy producers, they can't even pad their crash-landing by selling at high prices to the global market.
Oil is not a fake fungible thing like dollars that can just be printed up out of nowhere -- now that American energy producers have irrevocably lost their lifeline to Persian Gulf energy reserves, and their ability to get that stuff out of the Gulf for free, their entire business model has been blown up for no good reason.
That gives them one hell of a motive to defect and switch parties, unless they want to go down with the suicide cult surrounding Trump, the Pentagon, and dumbass Boomer voters.
And it gives them one hell of a re-branding campaign -- "In case anyone is confused, this was NOT a "war for oil", we got wiped out for good after begging the Pentagon to not be suicidal retards. Well, we're not going to go down with the suicide-pact of Trump's cultish Republican Party. The right wing is responsible for depriving Americans of affordable energy, so we must throw our support to the party that does NOT want to vaporize our energy-producing infrastructure, nor wipe out all the American jobs it creates..."
If any faction of the elite goes gangster enough to have Trump and the retard cult executed, it'll be the energy guys. They were the most loyal to Republicans, and got the most skull-fuckingly betrayed and materially ruined by them, now being slandered and berated by the causers of their ruin, just for good measure.
...If I were Donald Trump, I really wouldn't accept any offers to go quail shooting with Dick "The Hunter from Halliburton" Cheney...
Who says the re-make always has to be worse than the original? ^_^
Energy defecting to the Democrats. Would be really funny if the Republican Party eventually become the party complaining about climate change and the oil and natural gas industries causing global warming, while the Democrats become filled with climate change deniers. Climate science gets defunded from academia and blacklisted by the media because academia, media, and the energy industries are now in the same political coalition, and well can't have factions of the Democrats denouncing each other when they have to unite to fight the Republicans.
ReplyDeleteI spoke a nanosecond too soon about Dems protecting Platner, who they've just thrown under the bus in another risible #MeToo attempt. Talk about being stuck in 2015-2020 forever...
ReplyDeleteActually, the original MeToo took out a bunch of Zionists, now it's being turned against anti-Zionists.
Both the DNC types and the leftoids are linking arms to commit suicide in Maine, for the benefit of a Zionist Boomer Republican -- but it's a mostly white state, swing state, the candidate is a straight white guy and not grandfathered in as a Silent / Boomer perpetual power-holder. So what do they care?
He's actually a Millennial, born in '84, not a Gen X-er. For all the talk Dems give about being the party of youth, the future, etc., they'll sacrifice a Millennial to benefit a Boomer, if the Millennial doesn't tick any intersectional boxes, and the Boomer manages to tick at least one -- female.
Vance has not been thrown under the bus, despite being born in the same year, cuz he's a fag. Republicans love nothing more than closeted fags, and even trannies -- can't kick out Bruce Jenner from the tent, over 10 years later.
Like I said, I don't expect the Dems as a whole to be good. Here's one example where they applaud themselves for contracting and spreading AIDS -- they're supposedly the youth and anti-Zionist party, yet they're treating the self (Millennial anti-Zionist) as toxic, and waving through a hostile cancerous pathogen (Zionist Boomer).
I hope he keeps his campaign open, appeals only to Maine residents, not reacting avis on Twitter or even members of Congress, and wins with the people. He's gotten this far, his people aren't going to care about some half-baked and shameless last-ditch smear attempt by Zionist scum. It's not 2018 anymore, especially with voters. He should be a thorn in the side of the scum-suckers, as a reminder that only dumbass Boomer Republican voters in the South will get hoodwinked by Zionist smear campaigns, and not to try that with Democrats and Independents in stubborn New England.
Bernie Sanders is a traitor as well, he called Platner to end his campaign.
DeleteThis underscores the importance for Indies to not just sit on the sidelines, but weigh in on the Democrat power struggles. Overall, Dems are less cancerous than Republicans -- but there are still going to be cases of Dems being cancerous, and that requires as much of a dampening force as possible. If you keep voting Republican, or don't vote at all, then the successor to the Reagan era will be woketard scum Democrats, not Democrats who want to sever America's connections to the Israeli parasite, who want public healthcare like a normal country, etc.
ReplyDeleteI know, I know -- the DNC can literally shut down the internal election if it's not going how they want. Remember when Biden got obliterated during the primaries in 2020, with Bernie far in the lead, so the party just forced out every single candidate right before Super Tuesday, forcing them to endorse the voted-against candidate on their way out the door? I will never forget that -- shutting down their own party's election.
But even worse, forcing the candidate who had already dropped out and therefore received zero (0) delegates at the convention, to be the running mate and eventual VP and eventual prez candidate in the next cycle. Nobody wanted Harris -- so here you are, VP Harris.
Not only does the Democrat party need to win back the trust of their own voters, whose choices they robbed in spring 2020, and didn't even hold a primary in 2024, they need to convince Indies to join their coalition.
If we wanted to get shit all over, we'd vote Republican and ask for seconds.
If Dems don't respond and adapt and accomodate, Indies will just start executing the scum, breaking Flock cameras, and cleaning up the mess this country is in, by themselves. The big picture stuff is out of anyone's hands -- Israel will be stopped by Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, not leftoid activists posting on Twitter. The national debt is too big and exploding for random citizens to retire all those phony printed-up trillions of dollars. But they can pick off greedy CEO's, execute Israeli agents, execute Fox News slopagandists, tear down the physical surveillance network, sabotage the demolition of Midcentury American architecture, break open Boomer storage units and expropriate them and redistribute the good stuff to those who need it, and other such things.
We're such a dysfunctional auto-immune compromised corpse of a country, that it's a real litmus test in 2026 to say:
ReplyDelete"If I win, I will hinder, imprison, and execute my enemies, not my own supporters."
Republicans have been put to this test and failed, over and over.
This should be a lay-up for Democrats, but nobody is 100% insulated from the cancer of imperial collapse and the fraying of cohesion.
Bernie joining the pile-on is no surprise, he let himself get cucked by the BLM girls way back in 2015, and let himself get cucked by the shutting down of the 2020 primary while it was already under way, so that 4th-place Biden could be installed against the expressed will of the Dem voters, who wanted El Bernarino instead.
ReplyDeleteBernie's also a staunch Zionist, so if this is about Israel, that's all the more motive for him.
But the two "Arab" leftoids running in Michigan (Tlaib already elected, El-Sayed coming up) have also withdrawn support, and they're hardly staunch Zionists.
It looks more like an insider vs. outsider thing -- obviously Platner was against the Dem Establishment and machine. But he was not shat out from the DSA intersectionality factory either -- something that most moronic commentators are telling lies about, painting him as the DSA / prog activist favorite. He doesn't owe them his success either -- he won the primary with 72% to under 20% for the Establishment favorite (Boomer woman governor), with a few other candidates who came in with even less.
Contrast that to the Dem primary in the governor's race, whose 1st round saw an even 4-way split -- no clear fan fave there, vs. overwhelming dominance for Platner in the Senate primary.
That means Platner didn't get carried across the finish line thanks to a vanguard cadre of DSA / prog / campus activist / NGO types. He blew everyone else out, and not due to random luck with small number turn-out -- he got 120,000 votes in the primary of a small state that isn't psychotically Democrat to begin with.
That's insane support from the people of Maine, and the progtard activists are just jealous that they are not responsible for that, and therefore Platner and his team don't owe them anything special, should he win -- which he will, against a Republican Boomer mummy who's been there since forever and everyone wants gone.
So that's why progtards are linking arms with the corrupt machine that loses elections on purpose, if they can't get what they want -- they'd rather destroy a candidate who does not owe his victory to the machine or to the NGO / DSA radlibs. He threatens to provide a good example, a desirable role model for what voters want, that would marginalize the machine and progtard activist factions within the Dem party.
Speaking of Israel and Zionism, it's possible that the DSA sniffed out his anti-Zionism not being the progtard-approved brand of anti-Zionism, which must frame Zionism as a "white European" colonialism, and therefore blame white Europeans, prevent white Europeans (who are all white supremacists) from attaining power, and so on and so forth. Maybe he said he doesn't blame white people in general for Israel, but only the Israelis or specifically Jewish colonialists, wherever they came from (including lots of non-European Jews by now).
Progtards are rabid about destroying the Palestinian liberation movement by forcing this "white supremacist" narrative onto it, like it's still the woketard 2010s. Sorry, the global community has moved beyond that -- it's about dislodging the Jewish supremacists who have installed a Jewish state, of multinational original backgrounds, against the Palestinians of various religions and skin colors.
I don't think there was an open war over this issue, but the progtards probably sniffed something out -- that he wasn't minted by the woketard intersectionality factory, so he cannot be trusted, and in fact should be mistrusted, and prevented from taking office.
He and his team NEED to stick to their guns for the next week -- they won well over 100,000 votes in a small purple state's primary, blowing the former governor out of the goddamn water, garnering enough to pass a new constitutional amendment, if this were Congress. The people of Maine have spoken loudly and unambiguously -- and their will cannot be overturned at the eleventh hour by jealous bitter hater progtards, allying with the corrupt Boomer machine.
Stick to it! For the people of Maine!
Correction: Platner got over 156,000 votes, not 120. The largest primary turn-out in the state's history. There's a massive statewide corps of volunteers who are responsible for the historic wipe-out during the primary in June -- which itself was preceded by an 11th-hour attempt at a MeToo coup, which failed pathetically, and he went on to get 72%.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at pictures of the campaign, it looks like the iconic "America" ad for Bernie 2016 -- the good ol' days of New England insurgent populism, before Bernie got hijacked by woketards and the prog NGO network.
Check the Twitter account of someone, and you can see who is and is not being bought off by the NGO network. Abby Martin -- not. Kyle Kulinski -- not. Max Blumenthal -- not. Rania Khalek, Anya Parampil, Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur, Jenin Younes -- not, not, not, not, not. They do get audience donations and some institutional support, but IIRC, Abby Martin was funded by one of the Venezuelan left funds -- not a domestic American woketard NGO.
Not all vaguely left / progressive / etc. institutions are integrated into the sprawling network that includes just about all the other ones, most prominently the DSA, who reveal their membership in The Network by calling for Platner to drop out, despite his historic win.
There's lots of overlap on demographic factors -- race, ethnicity, sex, age, etc. -- so those aren't what's making some people try to hijack the Platner victory, and others stay on the sidelines or even actively call out the hijacking attempt. Where there's no overlap, and what entirely explains the difference -- is who's paying you. If you're in The Network, you're part of the hijacking attempt. If you're not, you're not, maybe even joining the effort to drive away the hijackers, who deserve no credit for the historic win.
DSA's Maine chapter never even formally endorsed Platner, they just "recommended" him or said they were simpatico or whatever. It was not an elite cadre of DSA grad students and law-degree-holders knocking on doors, etc. That's why they're so pissed at the historic win -- such a resounding, total victory, and they can't claim the smallest piece of the spoils, since they were largely uninvolved.
Nor did the big national NGO's send delegations to Maine, so they don't have any claim to the spoils either. Obviously the DNC Boomer machine has no claim, since they ran an oppo candidate in the primary.
Since 100% of the time, effort, and money that delivered the historic victory belongs to local Mainelanders (or whatever they're called!), the Boomer machine and The Network can go jump in the lake. They are in no position to dictate terms, and they hold no leverage, since his voters were not ginned up on either machine or Network rhetoric and themes and hand-outs.
It's just a straight-up hijacking attempt -- now that the local volunteer army wiped out the competition, try to take it over and steer it wherever the machine and The Network want it to go.
BULLSHIT -- tell The Network to go back to Twitter and whine all they want, Maine voters aren't going to let their hard-won grassroots victory get stolen right from under their noses by progtards who can't win a US Senate primary to save their lives, but only local US House races or mayoral races.
That's the other thing that scares the machine and The Network shitless -- this is a race for US Senate, which is statewide, and has to appeal to everyone across the spectrum in the state. They can't microtarget some favorable uber-prog environment, construct a pandering candidate, and make them a shoe-in. So far, that's the DSA strategy -- local prog niche, not statewide, let alone nationwide.
ReplyDeleteThe Platner campaign totally leapfrogged the local-only DSA-esque "movement", and dominated a statewide race with broad support, not microtargeting an already favorable niche demo, like AOC, Mamdani, and the others.
"Heh, cute House district you won there -- now watch this Senate race... ^_^"
Under absolutely NO CIRCUMSTANCES should this broad-based grassroots historic wipe-out victory be allowed to get hijacked by New York City NGO / media flunkies and Boomer machine mummies.
Not even him dropping out but naming his successor -- he hasn't lost! There's no succession! He won! Onward to the Capitol Building!
Dropping out and naming a successor would be totally illegitimate -- outside of the electoral process, robbing voters of their resoundingly expressed will. The Democrat Party has already overturned several elections during the 2020s, and they will only lose legitimacy and prevent their party from having buy-in, compliance, and consent of the governed, if they keep trying to overturn historic victories, just cuz the machine and the Network weren't responsible.
He needs to stay on the ballot not only cuz he deserves it, but he owes it to the vast grassroots army of supporters who sacrificed so much on his campaign's behalf.
Leaders don't desert the soldiers after a historic victory! They lead them toward the spoils, which get shared around to those who fought hard and won on the battlefield!
Especially when NYC media flunkies don't even have an army of their own to conduct this hijacking! That's the craziest thing -- what're they gonna do, whine harder on Twitter? You can't hijack a plane by threatening to slander the pilot on the internet! The attempted hijackers are like clueless children who think just sticking their hand-in-the-shape-of-a-gun into their jacket pocket, and pointing their finger at someone, will make them give up their stuff!
Such a comically inept attempt at a hijacking -- tell them to go point their hand-shaped-like-a-gun or their water pistol with the orange tip painted black, at someone more gullible!
Not in the fiercely indepdendent state of Maine, are people going to fall for that level of bullshit!
Another noteworthy absence in the latest witch-hunt -- AOC. So far, no comments either way. During the previous attempt to destroy the insurgent populist back in June, right before the vote was held, she declined to disavow, saying it was up to "the people of Maine" to decide among their choices.
ReplyDeleteMaybe she's just waiting a few days, like Bernie, we'll see. But she didn't join the insta-coup over the weekend. Aside from the grandfather of the DSA, Bernie, she's definitely *the* face of the Millennial DSA generational turnover in the Democrat Party.
Not like her comments will sway Maine voters one way or another, since the victory was resounding, but still worth noting that she's refraining from joining the party-delegitimizing pile-on to overturn the not-even-close expressed will of the party's own voters across an entire battleground state.
She doesn't even have to openly defend him, to stay out of the witch-hunt, just refrain from joining the fray.
All this BS will blow over by November, which is 4 months away, a lifetime in the propaganda cycle. Trump famously came back from the video-and-audio tape about "when you're a star, they let you grab 'em by the pussy", which dropped as the October surprise. Abandoned by nearly everyone, he stuck it out, and won in resounding fashion a month later.
ReplyDeleteWith the attempted hit on Platner, there's no video, no audio, no bombshell smoking gun texts, nothing. And already today more of the texts are leaking, which defuse the situation even further -- she texted him that she needs her glute massaged. There's surely more stuff like that to come out over 4 months.
And Maine voters will be tired after even 4 weeks of this bullshit will be tired of hearing about it. Let alone 4 months. They tuned out all the other hatchet jobs, they'll tune this one out too, especially after 4 long months of the propaganda cycle moving on.
Trump is going to get the American military wiped out even more disastrously throughout the Middle East.
Trump is going to have to own energy and gasoline shortages her in America, since the Persian Gulf will still be closed.
Trump will send grocery prices even higher.
Israel will be fucking up America's trajectory even further.
The AI bubble will be destroying the economy further, and the cancer of data centers and flock cameras will be spreading even further.
We still won't have universal health care, good jobs for Americans, or less billionaire control over politics.
And Boomer Zionist mummy Susan Collins will own all of this as well, since her party controls the entire federal government.
*That* is what Maine voters will be thinking about over the next 4 months -- not some stale 2010s-ass topic like MeToo, where there's no evidence to ponder anyway.
There is absolutely NO NEED to drop out or choose a successor. To the victor go the spoils!
Democrat Party overturns yet another primary, against their own voters, delegitimizing the outcome of the Maine Senate race, and hastening the party's own implosion.
ReplyDeleteLong-time readers may remember, but when I was doing political analysis, when it was worth half a shit to do so, I always said that the Democrats will be the party that implodes and becomes reborn as some different party, during the next major realignment. That's cuz we're near the Civil War stage of polarization and a realignment of the party system.
Leading up to the Civil War, the dominant party was Democrats (since Jackson), and the oppo party was the Whigs. In order to seize the mantle of dominant party leadership and chart a new way forward, the Whigs were demolished and reborn as the Republicans. The Whigs were thoroughly discredited during the Bleeding Kansas affair, where slavery was allowed to go unchecked into the Western territories, against the Missouri Compromise.
Since slavery was the major issue of the day, and they refused to do anything about it, their party imploded, and a staunchly anti-slavery party replaced it -- the Republicans, who took over the federal government, and ushered in a new party system with themselves as the dominant party, and the Democrats now as the oppo party.
Party realignments don't always result in one party imploding -- the only time it did, was the Civil War, due to the insane degree of partisan polarization. Nobody could possibly cross the aisle to the discredited and self-delegitimizing Whig party, so a whole new party had to be created, without the stain of the Whigs. Such a fresh new clean party, *was* able to attract cross-overs, who ditched the Jacksonian Democrats and joined the Lincoln Republicans, flipping which was dominant vs. oppo for the next many decades.
The last realignment in America was the death of the New Deal era, ushered in by Reagan in 1980 -- the neoliberal era, which we're still in. That didn't result in the death of either party, just some faction of one switching their loyalties, namely the military defecting from Dems to GOP, bringing along with them the Deep South, with its many military bases.
There was no party death cuz 1980 was near the minimum of polarization -- every presidential race was a blow-out for one party or the other, meaning the whole nation tended to vote the same way, one election after the other. If a different party won, it was due to the entire nation flipping. So, neither party had to die in order for a defection and cross-over to happen.
Fast-forward to the insanely partisan polarized 2020s, and very damn few Republican voters -- who may be Indies, or formerly loyal Republicans -- are willing to cross over to the Democrats, to flip who's dominant and who's oppo.
In order for a new era to be ushered in, the Democrats must implode as a party, and a fresh new clean one created in its place. That will not return America to utopia, but it will at least allow the necessary party realignment out of neoliberal stagflation. It will happen whether anyone wants it or not, just like during the Civil War.
Just as a reminder, during the Dem prez primary of 2020, the first four battleground states went atrociously for the machine favorite, Biden. He only won South Carolina, a deep red state that's irrelevant in a national election. In the swing / battleground / bellwether states of New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada, Bernie clobbered everyone else, Biden came in far behind, and literally anybody else was in between, like Buttgag, Klobuchar, anybody but Biden.
ReplyDeleteAhead of Super Tuesday, when dozens of state primaries were due to be held, and Bernie's dominant outcome would be confirmed -- the machine shut down the entire election, forcing out all the candidates, who one by one endorsed Biden on their unceremonious way out the door. With no one left to vote for, since all the in-demand candidates were forced to quit, Biden coasted to victory, against the will of all voters except for irrelevant South Carolina.
Even before Super Tuesday, though, Harris ended her campaign due to her pathetic polling and getting bitch-slapped by Tulsi Gabbard during a debate. She received zero (0) delegates at the national convention, cuz nobody voted for her -- she quit early, before any real voting had begun.
Who did the machine select as running mate? Harris -- the only one to have to quit so early, and not even get to coast through the rest of the shut-down elections like Biden did.
So, the very two candidates who Dem voters thoroughly rejected -- Biden and Harris -- were installed as the prez and VP candidates on the ballot, over-riding the expressed will of zillions of voters, who unambiguously said "HELL NO" to both of them.
This delegitimized their eventual occupation of office, since nobody had voted for them. That's why, even though Dem voters were OK with their party stealing the general election from Trump, they still told Biden to fuck off during his administration. Most notably, the chasm that erupted over the issue of Palestine and Israel, even before October 7 2023, but going crazy afterward.
If the choice of the voters, Bernie, had been cleared for nominee status, Dem voters would have behaved far more obediently toward the White House and government in general during that term. But since Biden represented the robbery and over-riding of their choice, they owed him no loyalty or deference or compliance -- and they behaved accordingly, disobediently.
Then, when the 2024 nomination process began, the machine let Biden assume he was the presumptive nominee, and no primary elections were held whatsoever. This robbed the Dem voters of a chance to express their will -- for the incumbent, for someone else, and if so, who among many potential who-elses?"
ReplyDeleteThere was an 11th-hour coup against the senile incumbent, who was unceremoniously forced to quit the race, and had to endorse the coup victor on his way out the door. That was Harris, the sitting VP, but who nobody had voted for -- not during the 2024 season, since no elections were held at all, nor even during the 2020 season, since she quit before voting began and received no delegates.
This delegitimized her nominee status during the general election, when Dem operatives were either unwilling or unable to orchestrate an election theft like in 2020, with pallets of ballots arriving at 4AM for days, weeks, and months after the election was alread over, skewing 99% Democrat, and only in battleground states.
With no operatives willing or able to pull of a steal, Harris was compelled to win on her merits. And since the party delegitimized her by selecting her without asking voters to vote for her, and indeed over-riding the previous season when voters outright rejected her in the primary, Dems didn't turn out in droves for her, Indies felt slapped in the face and willing to gamble on another Trump term. The result: what should have occurred on 2020, without the pallets of ballots, resounding Trump victory.
For, Trump was not a party insider, hand-selected by elites, let alone representing the over-riding, over-turning, and slapping in the face of the party's voters. Exactly the opposite -- the GOP machine actually allowed the choice of the voters to be honored, and did not alienate and infuriate their own voters. Not during the electoral process, anyway -- Trump betrayed his voters only after taking office and doing the bidding of the party elites (like war against Iran for Israel).
It is not a distinction without a difference -- Trump voters are far more willing to put their faith, even if it's just a hail mary pass, in the next round of Republican primary elections, to choose someone who might accomplish what Trump promised but reneged on. Their party respected their choice of nominee, which gives them faith in the electoral process -- relatively more so than Dem voters, anyway, whose party has repeatedly over-turned their own voters' express will, and given them no reason to trust that the next primary election will be any better, if it is even held at all.
ReplyDeleteTrue, lots of Trump voters feel betrayed and won't vote for him -- he's term-limited anyway, so no loss to the GOP there. If voters generalize this betrayal to the entire administration or party leadership, the GOP still allows its voters to choose new representatives during the next primary cycle. They may not get their wish during primary season, like Lindsey Graham still sitting in South Carolina's Senate seat, but they have not lost hope in the primary electoral process itself.
And that allows for another round of it to go on, and on and on and on, until and unless the GOP starts delegitimizing the process by shutting down elections that are already under way, preventing elections from being held, or over-turning the blow-out results of elections that have already been decided by the voters.
With this latest case of the Democrat Party over-riding its own primary voters, in what was a totally unambiguous election result, they further delegitimize not only the particular race they intervened in -- but their party as a whole. Who wants to obey a party that doesn't let its voter vote, shuts down their voting when it's already under way, or over-turns the result if they don't like it?
Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, and three times is pattern. I may have missed other examples from the 2022 cycle, when I wasn't paying attention.
They did not do this before 2020, but it is rapidly hardening into their new normal for the collapsing stage of the American Empire. However, one party committing suicide is not a stable solution, it only opens up a power vacuum, where some fresh new clean party will take its place, as it implodes under its self-administered delegitimization.
As of 2020, Democrats seem to have given up on acquiring legitimacy by popular participation and assent before their attempt to rule -- which means that, even if they get into office, nobody will obey their dictates, and nothing will get done.
ReplyDeleteThis latest over-turning of the Maine Senate primary is not a nationwide race, so other Dem Senators may be deferred to and obeyed, where they were actually the result of a legitimate election. But 2 of the 3 over-turnings of Democrat primaries, have involved presidential elections -- and that really says where their mind's at, more than dinky little House or mayoral races.
They should have learned how flagrantly they were disobeyed, by Trump voters and Biden voters alike, during the Biden usurper term. That was totally the opposite of Obama's two terms, where they did not shut down elections, refuse to hold elections, or over-turn elections that were already decided by voters.
Therefore, nobody disobeyed Obama during his whole two terms. And no, a handful of Tea Party protesters waving signs is not widespread civic disobedience, or mass non-compliance. They might not have liked what Obama was doing, but they didn't consider it the result of an illegitimate electoral process, to be ignored. So they grumbled and went along with it, hoping to undo it the next time by winning an election for a Republican.
When they shifted to "damn the elections, the elites will impose whoever they want" in the 2020s, they began the process of destroying their own party, since that violates the most fundamental precepts of representative democracy. And no, no amount of noob observations about how money in politics can influence the outcome, or how office-holders may reneg on their campaign promises, can bat those concerns away.
People may be cynical about the array of influences at work during the electoral process, but if it is itself delegitimized, then all bets are off for compliance among the governed when the office-holder takes office. It's not just "Well, they're bought off by corporations, not me, so I don't have to obey them". Nobody actually behaves that way, refusing to send taxes or whatever, just cuz of billionaire donations to campaigns.
But when elections are not allowed to be held, when they are shut down when already under way, or when they are over-turned after already decided by voters -- that strikes at the integrity of the electoral process itself, delegitimizes the outcome, and therefore invites and indeed MORALLY PERMITS the citizenry to disobey the illegitimate office-holder to whatever degree they feel comfortable.
"Elections are just the illusion of choice anyway, the two parties are the same, etc etc etc" -- another observation that does not say the electoral process itself has been subverted. In the view of the critic, sure, but the mass of the citizenry does not believe that big money in campaigns literally subverts and delegitimizes the outcome -- they obey the outcomes of elections with such big-money influences in them, all the time.
It's only when the formal decision-making process itself is subverted, that the masses are wont to disobey, counter-signal, or otherwise withdraw the consent of the governed. It's cheating, it's breaking the rules, it's "heads I win, tails you lose", it's turning over the chessboard when your opponent was about to checkmate you. Everyone can see how unambiguously illegitimate such actions are, and -- unlike when they merely have influences at play against them -- feel emboldened to disregard the so-called authority of the office-holder.
In a different time and place, other formal mechanisms may decide who occupies authority offices -- but in America, we hold elections with the general public. That is the only way to decide the outcome. And whenever the electoral process itself is formally subverted -- no election, shut-down election, over-turned election -- only *then* are all bets off for the masses complying with the wannabe authority figures, who will be unable to govern them, lacking legitimacy in the popular perception.
ReplyDeleteLegitimacy, authority, and such, are all socially constructed -- if we all agree that X is the rightful office-holder, he occupies the office, and we obey what his team says (within reason). If we reject that X is the rightful office-holder, he may or may not occupy the office, but we will feel free to obey his team or not, according to our own individual preferences, not submitting them to a higher collective will embodied by his team -- since he has received no such higher collective assent through the formal mechanism of deciding who gets into the office.
When we had a healthy empire, electoral strategists, party insiders, elites, and even grunt-level door-knockers, all realized this -- and sought all sorts of ways to persuade, motivate, and reward voters to vote for their candidate. It not only strengthened the authority of the particular office-holder, it strengthened the entire system of power, since voters put their trust and blind faith into it, and were not turned away from the voting booth, robbed of their candidate, over-turned, or prevented from expressing their will in the first place.
Now that our empire is collapsing, the power structure will start to give up on the quest for acquiring legitimacy before occupying office. So far, Republicans have respected the sanctity of the electoral process, while feeling callous to slap their voters across the face when they actually take office. Again, that still keeps GOP (and leaning) voters inside the system, since their faith in the system itself has not been shaken. Just vote next time for a candidate with a better track record, or whatever.
Democrats, however, are destroying the sanctity of the election itself, and that leaves Dem (and leaning) voters will no rational reason to hope for and trust that a better outcome may happen next time around. This alienates and frustrates them in a structural, fundamental way -- not just being angry at particular promise-betrayers like Trump-in-office vs. Trump-while-campaigning.
Sooner than later, that spells the implosive doom of the Democrat Party per se, to be reborn as a fresh new clean party, that will respect elections and draw in defectors from the GOP who have given up on Trump and MAGA (but not the electoral process itself).
In the meantime, though, it may actually embolden Democrat citizens to start taking equally illegitimate counter-measures -- if you character-assassinate our widely chosen candidate and revoke his ballot status, why don't we just bodily-assassinate our state Dem party leadership who made that decision? Why don't we set off bombs at their headquarters? Why don't we impose other costs on them, which will not lead to a more legitimate outcome, but will at least keep the score even between the great big delegitimizer and us humble legitimacy-seekers?
ReplyDeleteSince the recent peak of civic breakdown has ended, circa 2020, this is unlikely to take the form of literal assassinations or bombings or riots and property destruction across the Democrat base. But I wouldn't put it past a lone Luigi Mangione or Elias Rodriguez to get revenge at a lone representative of the election-over-turning party elites.
As always, the party has a choice to nip this in the bud, and restore legitimacy to their elections. But given their pattern of escalation -- from shutting down an election in progress, to refusing to hold on, to OVER-TURNING one that was already decided by 72% -- that seems doubtful. In collapsing empires, wicked scum rise to the top. So they will probably only get worse about legitimizing their office-holders, and hasten their party suicide, to be replaced by a (relatively) more honest, fresh new clean party to finally shift America out of the neoliberal Reagan era.
I will still be eagerly voting for Acton, to prevent Ramaswamy from being upwardly-failed into governor of a real state, rather than being sent back to India in exile like the anti-American scammer scum that he is. I'll probably vote straight-ticket Dem as well, just to prevent MAGA-tards from fucking things up here any further.
ReplyDeleteBut that's cuz she is a legitimate candidate, not the result of over 150,000 primary voters choosing someone else by 72% and the party elites over-turning the result and hand-picking her with no input from voters, AKA another election, which was already held!
If Newsom gets the nom legitimately in 2028, that will be another easy vote, against closeted fag Vance who's trying to establish an Indian power base in America via his in-laws and their quest to found an Indian-American dynasty.
But if the Democrat Party delegitimizes another election that I can actually vote in, I'll just vote Green or for an Independent, and happily disobey the eventual office-holder, if it's the illegitimate Dem.
And as of now, every citizen of Maine is morally allowed to disobey whoever their next Senator is -- whether the illegitimately selected Dem, if they win, or Collins if she wins due to the illegitimate Dem being weak. Platner would've wiped the floor with Collins, so if the illegitimate Dem loses, Collins is not legitimate either.
Destroying the sanctity of the formal mechanisms themselves is so difficult to come back from, at this point there would need to be 3 to 4 election cycles (through 2032 at least) where Democrats do not delegitimize a single election, just to expect us citizens to call it even and let bygones be bygones. I don't know that they have the centralized discipline to force that onto their operatives and lower-level branches, or the will to do so in the first place. But that is now the bare minimum requirement for putting trust in them as a party, rather than opportunistically voting for this or that particular Dem candidate, like Acton for Ohio gov.
This is not about feminism or MeToo, but electoral over-turning by the party operating the election just cuz they didn't like the result.
ReplyDeleteBy now everyone knows that politicized feminists, Democrats, etc. don't actually care about women's rights, preventing rape, bla bla bla -- that's just a cover for grabbing power. They enable and protect all manner of rapists, most infamous Bill Clinton, one of the most high-profile visitors of Epstein Island.
And the same is true for right-wing feminists. It just has nothing to do with preventing rape, punishing rapists, and so on. It's a power grab.
Real rape claims are submitted to the police, not the media. They are adjudicated by criminal courts, not the media. And if guilty, punishment is meted out by the prison system (or a fine or whatever), not by the media or political committees. And this criminal justice ball gets rolling ASAP, not years or decades later during an 11th-hour political stunt.
Politicized accusations of rape never follow the pattern of real rape claims, so we can dismiss them as attempts to grab power instead -- duh, that's why they're launched during a political power struggle. Once that struggle is over -- regardless of whether the accuser's side won, or lost -- the claim vanishes, never to be heard of again. That's what will happen with the claim against Platner, too.
And although it may come to a shock to right-wingers, feminists per se cannot grab power -- they aren't an organized political collective unit, they don't meet with each other, they aren't a distinct bloc or faction within a political coalition, and they don't wield whatever power they have as a unit.
Real, actual power blocs are the military, the banks, the media, agriculture, manufacturing, the schools, etc. There could be ethnic blocs, but that depends and is usually restricted to just one or two. Like African-Americans are a bloc, but Hispanics are not -- too diverse among themselves -- nor are Asian-Americans (ditto), or Muslim Americans (ditto), or anything-else Americans, really. Including whites.
It's just African-Americans who behave politically like a bloc, and even that is tied into the sectors of the economy rather than to matters of ethnicity -- they're the former slaves from the plantation agriculture sector, who were brought into the political mainstream with citizenship and political representation of their own, after other sectors like manufacturing defeated the planter sector during the Civil War.
Women, feminists, anti-feminists, mothers, never-mothers, single women, married women, divorced women, boy-moms, girl-moms, butt girls, boob girls, blondes, brunettes, virgins, sluts -- none of these has any political relevance, only kinship and dating/mating relevance, and they therefore do not form blocs within political coalitions, or influence national power struggles.
So, there is no primary power that lies with women, feminists, etc., and gets deployed via trumped-up accusations of rape at the enemy of feminism, knocking them out of the power struggle. Since they have no primary power of their own, they can only be used as attack dogs for some bloc that *does* have real power.
In this case, the best guess is "the Israel lobby", but there could have been others as well, like "Democrat party leaders", who have power over the formal mechanisms determining who gets into offices of the state.
And *that* is what this is really about -- the Democrat Party over-turning an election that was already held a month ago, with historic turn-out and an unambiguous mandate for the victor, with 72% of the vote.
ReplyDeleteThe party elites didn't like the choice that the voters made, so they are nullifying it, plain and simple. Possibly other actors like the NGO Network are upset at the voters' choice, for different reasons than the party elites, but still, they hated the result enough to join the pile-on and try to hijack the already-decided election to benefit a candidate of their own choosing, not the one already chosen unambiguously by the voters.
However, although the motive for election nullification is plain and simple, the communication of that nullification to the public who voted, cannot be so nakedly stated. If they plainly say, "We don't like who you chose, so we're over-riding that, and will pick someone we like instead", their legitimacy as a party is instantly undone. Nobody will participate in a party that behaves like that.
So they need some morally approved way to nullify the voters' choice. They cannot try to frighten voters away from the choice -- they already tried that, on the same topic of MeToo (and the Nazi-coded tattoo), at the 11th hour before the vote took place. It failed pathetically, he got 72%, with historic turn-out, proving Maine voters don't care about this crap. It didn't dampen his support one iota.
Rather, the coup under way now is an 11th-hour stunt before the *certification* of the primary's winner, by the party leaders. The election itself has been decided for over a month. This intervention is to prevent the winner from being certified, thereby blocking his further path to the ballot in the general election.
And now that Platner has dropped out, that much of the coup has succeeded. He won't be on the general election ballot.
If they can't state their motive plainly, party leaders must pick some rationalization that they hope will resonate most with the audience, like voters in an election whose doubts mistrust and anger they're trying to assuage.
In a different time and place, they would've said, "Sorry, we know you like this guy, but we have credible allegations that he was seen cavorting with witches, sacrificing goats, and kissing the Devil's asshole -- so, we cannot as guardians of the process, allow him to appear on the ballot. We will choose someone else instead, who has not been credibly accused of flying through the air on a broomstick".
But in 2020s America, we don't believe in witches or God or Jesus or the Devil, our moral themes are about human rights. And on the Democrat side, especially about the theme of a woman's bodily autonomy -- which has ancient roots, since every culture bans and punishes rape. Notice how, despite being obsessed with ethnic identity politics, the go-to accusation of witchcraft is not "his childhood friend said he used to call people the n-word on Xbox Live in 2007". That's not a primal-brain theme, but rape is. So, rape it is, as the go-to human rights / morality theme, when crafting a rationalization for a naked power grab.
And it is only to this extent that the feminist attack dogs are unleashed, and the media set to work disseminating the claims.
If such claims had power in themselves, then anyone could launch them at anyone else, and they would do equal damage -- like pointing a loaded gun and pulling the trigger. But that's not true -- see Joe Biden, who was the target of a MeToo attempt in early 2020. But since he was the party elites' favorite, the claims went nowhere, and he was installed as the nominee despite coming in 4th place among voters when there were still choices available. Likewise why Bill Clinton has not been exiled or assassinated by Democrats -- he's their party elites' favorite, and therefore has a bullet-proof vest against attempts to accuse him of witchcraft.
More on the theme of "words are not magic" and have no power or force or even inherent meaning of their own, only what we the speakers and hearers socially construct them to have.
ReplyDeleteLooking back for even earlier examples of this election over-turning pattern among the Democrat Party, I was reminded of their last-ditch attempt to over-turn the 2016 election via the Electoral College. That acts as a certification stage, after the election has already been decided. They didn't even think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell of winning, so they had no Plan A -- Hillary Clinton was going to win every single state, so why plan for if she doesn't? That's inconceivable!
When they got caught flat-footed on election night 2016, they scrambled to over-turn the result. And what did all that brainstorming come up with? "Let's start a rebellion in the Electoral College!" Well, they did get their wish -- but it widened Trump's margin even further, since hardly any of his electors defected, but quite a few Clinton electors defected to Bernie or some other figure.
They never tried a stunt like that before, and it was the beginning of their delegitimization of the nationwide electoral process, and therefore, of its outcomes.
But putting aside the Democrats' sabotage of the victories of *the other party*, what about their own, which is the relevant category here? During the 2016 Dem primary, the party elites actually did threaten to nullify the voters' choice -- that's when everyone found out what superdelegates are at the national nominating convention. They are not chosen by voters, but by the party leaders, and they get to cast a vote in the nomination. They are not so numerous that they can over-turn a 72% victory -- for that, you need a fake rape claim -- but they're still numerous enough to over-turn a majority winner.
As it turned out, this was not necessary, since Clinton won with the primary voters, although Bernie came pretty close. But they made it very clear throughout the primary, if Bernie merely got a slim majority, that would not prevent the superdelegates from over-turning it.
Party leaders kept insisting that "these are the rules, and the rules are the rules, and we must all respect the rules" -- no we do not. You can't program people's brains, certainly not by nagging them like that. Legitimacy is socially constructed. If the audience observes a primary where Bernie won 53% of the vote, and the superdelegates form an anti-Bernie bloc, depriving him of the nomination at the convention, everyone sees this as illegitimate. Probably the anti-Bernie people would add, "and who said illegitimacy is a bad thing?!"
But words are not magic -- just cuz you say, "these rules are the way they are, and as long as the process adheres to the rules, ipso facto the result is legitimate, and you must treat the result as legitimate". Mmm... no it is not, and no we do not. A result is only legitimate if the observers perceive it to be, and publicly agree that it is.
What if a chess tournament's rules allow a player, upon seeing that his opponent is going to checkmate him in a few moves, to overturn the table, board, and pieces, and win by default? Hey, it's in "the rules", you can't argue with "the rules". Actually, we can -- the winner is whoever we agree it is, and maybe that coincides with who the referees say it is, but not necessarily. And if we see the "overturn the board when you're about to get got" move, then certainly we declare the flipper the loser and his opponent the winner.
Seeing a majority winner get rug-pulled by unelected party insiders, just cuz the leaders don't like the choice that voters made, is flagrantly illegitimate, not just kinda-sort illegitimate. And it doesn't matter what "the rules" say. Rules are only words, and they don't enforce themselves, not do they force certain perceptions, opinions, interpretations, conclusions, or behavioral responses, from the readers of those words.
ReplyDeleteIf that scenario had unfolded, the party would have failed to construct legitimacy for the nominee, and Clinton would have been treated accordingly. As it was, they didn't need to resort to delegitimizing tactics to win the primary, so most of the Bernie voters swallowed their pride and voted for Clinton in the general. A sizable minority of Bernie voters defected to Trump in the general, but not cuz they saw Clinton as an illegitimately selected Dem candidate -- they just didn't like her platform, so chose otherwise. Nothing to do with legitimacy, though.
Although they didn't end up delegitimizing that primary outcome, they were threatening to do so the entire time, if Bernie should win. Those threats from all over, coming in constantly, were themselves a source of delegitimization -- cuz beyond not commiting illegitimate acts, you're not even supposed to threaten them. Like if a president threatens to drop nukes on a state if it doesn't vote for him -- just the threat delegitimizes him regarding the use of force, and the citizens are then justified to assassinate him pre-emptively, since that's no minor threat to make against your own subjects.
Like so much else in our current collapsing shithole society, the ball truly got rolling only in 2016, although some of the background sentiment had been percolating for longer back into to 2000s and late '90s. Just the threat of over-turing a Bernie victory using the superdelegates, was enough to delegitimize the outcome, which favored Clinton anyway. Not as delegitimizing as if they simply shut down the voting and said "It's Hillary, bitch, like it or leave it". But still, delegitimizing, and a bad taste that never left the voters' mouths.
How does a president come back from threatening to bomb his own citizens? He can't -- it's off with his head. How can a party come back from threatening to over-turn the votes of their own voters? They can't -- off with their heads, fresh new clean party instead!
Also in economic sectors, there is an all out war going on between tech vs news media / entertainment sectors over whether LLMs violate copyright. See e.g. this lawsuit:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_v._Microsoft_and_OpenAI
Platner cannot withdraw. So far, he's keeping the paperwork until the last minute, on Monday -- and he must absolutely not file it, since dropping out means...
ReplyDelete1. Everyone will believe he was a rapist, even though the accusation is totally bogus. "Platner dropped out of the race after being credibly accused of rape," is how his memory will be preserved. By staying in the race, he proves he has nothing to apologize or atone for, that he weathered a hit piece.
2. All other replacements would be illegitimate, since nobody voted for them -- and if it's anyone other than the roundly rejected Boomer governor, no one else was even running and on the ballot. An illegitimately selected candidate, like Harris 2024, would implode all the popular grassroots momentum around Platner, and doom the party's chances in the general.
3. Illegitimacy is a categorical yes/no thing, it's not quantitative / degree. Every single other choice is illegitimate, and would have the same effect on imploding the momentum, tarnishing the party's reputation for pulling yet another over-turning of a popular vote, and dooming the chances of winning the general. "B-b-but, this other guy is somewhat aligned with Platner on some key things" -- sorry, he wasn't running before, it's too late to sub him in. In voters' eyes, candidates are not fungible, that's why they vote for A instead of B. They have rallied around Platner, and only Platner, so it doesn't matter who the replacement would be -- all would be illegitimate.
4. Specifically, one of the potential usurpers is DSA-approved Troy Jackson, who already ran and lost in the Dem primary for governor of Maine this exact same year, with the exact same electorate. He was one of the 4-way tie candidates for the first two rounds, was eliminated after the 3rd round, and did not appear in the final showdown. In percentages, he got 20-25% initially, approximately 50,000 votes -- WAY behind Platner's 72% and 156,000 votes. He'd get wiped, and that's already proven, not hypothetical, given both of their performances in this primary cycle.
5. Selecting an illegitimate candidate over the resounding will of the voters will collapse the electorate's trust in the Democrat Party for the indefinite future. Although most of the blame lies with the party leaders for attempting to over-turn the election, Platner would be complicit as well in destroying the party's trust with voters, if he drops out, by showing the voters that even the person they thought was a hopeful role model, acquiesced to the machine's illegitimate bullshit after all. This would also destroy the voters' trust in supposed populists, outsiders, insurgents, etc. Non-Republican electoral politics would never recover in Maine.
6. Pragmatically, Platner is the best bet for winning, since no one else even came close at the ballot box. The sitting governor got obliterated, the other candidate was invisible, and the candidates in other races like for governor didn't come anywhere close to his numbers either. All others would be untested this cycle. You don't improve your odds of winning by picking people who performed infinitely worse with the same voters, or who haven't been tested with voters whatsoever.
7. The accusations were nothing new, the exact same MeToo / tattoo smears were launched at the 11th hour before the actual vote was held over a month ago -- and it landed with an absolute whisper. Nobody in the fiercely independent state of Maine gives a flying fuck about what New York City media-meisters think is scandalous. They absorbed this avalanche of hit pieces -- and voted for him at 72% anyway, with historic turn-out.
8. Anything primarily pushed by the media will backfire in Maine, since all of New England hates New York City's guts, more than any other place on Earth, and that's where all the media, consulting, NGO's, etc. are located. If anything, media hit pieces will boost Platner's appeal among Mainers, who would love to give the finger to New York City PR homos, the next time they visit their local ballot box, and prevent their hero from becoming martyred by the garbage dump nemesis that is New York City.
ReplyDelete9. Maine is a textbook Bernie-Trump state, rural, rough around the edges, older than average, largely white, not zealous Democrats or Republicans, former manufacturing hub that got destroyed by NAFTA, although a few of the old shoe factories are miraculously holding on there. Maine voters will instantly see through any attempt to revive this pathetic lazy stale hit-piece during the general -- "Ah jeez, Lois, it's like they're tryin' ta do dat whole Pussygate tape wit' Trump all ovah again... When will they evah get a friggin' clue?"
10. The Dem leadership is threatening to withhold funding, or access to the voter file, if Platner remains on the ballot. Well, guess what happens if anyone remotely like him remains on the ballot! That's right, they get bupkis as well. The leaders don't have it in for this one specific individual -- they're trying to wipe out everyone like him, platform-wise. They're already trying to shove El-Sayed out of the Michigan Senate primary. And any replacement, again, has pathetic vote counts, or wasn't even running -- so they would have even less leverage than Platner and his grassroots army to demand anything from the party leaders. They would be all the more easily sidelined by party leaders. And they wouldn't have the grassroots army to tap into for fundraising, canvassing, etc., if the party leaders actually followed through on their threat (which so far is only a threat).
11. There's no mechanism to guarantee the Platner campaign's choice of replacement would actually be the one who the party installs. First the position needs to be vacated, and then a replacement chosen. Since they have no motive to honor their promise after he's formally vacated, they will choose one of their own garbage-dump eaters, and his campaign will have zero leverage to force them back into honoring their promise. Likewise for if they selected some random progressive -- the Platner campaign has no way to ensure that such a replacements gets the funding and voter file access that he was supposedly going to be denied. All of his potential replacements face an infinitely weaker position at the bargaining table, and must be excluded.
So, since all options are worse, the only solution is to stay in the race -- literally, do nothing over the weekend and Monday, and this battle will be settled.
Speaking of Maine shoe factories, Collins voted for the China trade bill in 2000, she's such a Boomer neoliberal Reaganite mummy, she's been there *that* long. She is personally responsible for the de-industrialization of her home state, and of America as a whole.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1062/vote_106_2_00251.htm
She first joined the Senate in 1997, but you *know* she would've voted for NAFTA if she'd been there 4 years earlier. No question.
Sadly, the other Maine Senator in 2000 voted for the China trade bill, but he was a Republican like Collins.
And now that the neoliberal Reaganites have totally fucked up the global supply chains that they worked so diligently to construct since the '80s, they're also responsible for the shortages etc. that we'll be facing going forward, since we no longer have the domestic industrial capacity.
That's a VERY simple topic to absolutely wallop Collins' brains out. "When I represent Maine in the Senate, I will not vote for any bill that would off-shore what precious little remains of our American manufacturing -- thanks to Collins herself."
Manufacturing is the only way to provide comfortable living standards for a broad range of people, the once-prosperous middle class and working class. Collins personally voted to flush that broad-based prosperity right down the toilet just so corporate owners could pinch a few pennies more in profit -- and not even pass that on to consumers with lower prices!
Even if not a single factory returns to American shores, we must still punish those responsible for destroying our standard of living. Grave crimes require grave consequences.
The Lord himself had to overturn the primary election of Lindsey Graham, since South Carolina Boomers were still committed to their Zionist heresy.
ReplyDeleteBurn in Hell, neocon faggot.
God willing, his Millennial replacement, the current VP, will get taken out as well. The last thing America needs is Emo Lindsey Graham...
The way to ensure that the neighbors don't file a noise complaint when you're belting out along to power-pop tunes -- make sure to include some good ol' songs from the '60s and '70s, to make the Boomers feel included, and part of the continuity of history.
ReplyDelete"Needles and Pins" and "Love Potion Number 9" by the Searchers, "Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison, "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies, "I Want You to Want Me" by Cheap Trick, "Cruel to Be Kind" by Nick Lowe.... and so on and so forth.
Then they won't mind a little "Teenage Dirtbag", "Stacy's Mom", and "Just the Girl" from the (otherwise bleak) 21st century. ^_^
My So-Called Life DVD set finally acquired! I've been looking for awhile, and it was only $20 for the whole series, AKA the one and only season... at 19 episodes, it was brief for its time, when 26 was the norm -- and yet, compared to today, that's like 2 seasons jam-packed into 1!
ReplyDeleteThe Zoomer girl at the cash register was on her first day, so I made sure to make some pleasant small talk, like "don't worry, the customers here aren't going to bite". I told her I watched it when it first came out, and even in re-runs on MTV.
"...When was it on?" is how she coyly asked me my age. Hehe. I told her, "'94 or '95" -- not saying "19--" first, cuz when you're talking about *the* century to end all centuries, it's understood. You can just say "the '80s" or "'95".
Then we started gabbing about physical media, and how this series used to be on Hulu like 10-15 years ago, then it was on ABC.com's website, and then... who the hell knows where it is now? Possibly nowhere. She said, "yeah, you always have to keep up with where it's streaming, when it's going to be taken off, etc." Yep, she gets it. Good ol' Zoomers. ^_^
So I said that's why I get "physical media, baby". "Physical media!" she said, surprised, like "did this guy just speak online IRL...?"
Also, how are young girls supposed to use a transaction at the checkout, as an excuse to reach out and touch your hand -- if they're not handing you physical discs from the drawer behind the counter? If we lived in a digital download-only world, nobody would ever make small talk with you, look into your eyes, or touch your hand, at the check-out counter... it makes it more than just an everyday transaction. It makes it a pleasant little memory, and a teeny-tiny connection, which you just can't get by tapping a screen and transfering a file to your memory storage device.
Plus, just the phrase "physical" media -- who doesn't wanna get physical? Even bookworms. ^_^
I just got flash memory of working at the check-out counter at the library during college. The records were already computerized -- no more index cards. But it was still very physical and hands-on. We still used inked rubber stamps, with those moveable type "month / day" wheels, onto a paper slip inside the back cover. Of course the book itself was physical, not a download!
ReplyDeleteAnd the check-out was still in-person, not self check-out.
...If the girls thought you were cute / hot, they would absolutely caress, or even fondle your hand when you handed them back their ID card after scanning it. They didn't pick it up by the tiniest little corner space, like you had the plague. They would reach way back to your main knuckle row, and then stroke your fingers all the way down to the tips, seamlessly sliding the card right out of your hand, like a magic trick.
They didn't even try to be sly about it, and would look you right in the eyes, like "that's right, Mr. Whoever-You-Are, that wasn't your imagination..."
I hate to think of all those tactile memories that might have been, for the check-out desk workers who came after me. It's so impersonal and distant, just watching a file of faces staring down at the scanner, from 10 feet away...
I don't check out much from the library anyway, I mainly go there to browse the books for sale. Much better for making small-talk about the cool illustration on the cover of a vintage paperback. ^_^
It was this one, BTW. Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" (Pocket Books, 1964).
ReplyDeletehttps://postmarkedfromthestars.com/products/the-simple-art-of-murder-raymond-chandler-1964-3rd-pocket-books-paperback
Also scored the DVD set of Beverly Hills 90210, seasons 1 and 2, a little bit ago from the same used bookstore. I already saw season 1 on pluto.tv for free, but got the DVD's just to be sure. I'd started watching season 2 on pluto, but figured I might as well do the DVD's for that season as well -- and wouldn't you know it? There are EIGHT (count 'em, 8) missing episodes from that season on all streaming platforms. Out of a total of 28 episodes, that's 30% of the season!
ReplyDeleteThe excuse is "copyright reasons" about music, but that's BS. Almost all of the hit music from the broadcast has been replaced by generic commisioned bla-di-bla. It's more like they don't want a certain character to appear, or certain themes that are problematic to woketards -- like high school girls pursuing their cute teacher outside of class. But also the Christmas episode, and others that don't seem to have much reason to be deleted.
It's crazy -- and only by relying on physical media can you safely watch, and preserve, these iconic works in their entirety.
I'm really diggin' this show, I always assumed it was just some tawdry soap opera for teens, but it's the original teen drama TV series, John Hughes for the small screen. I would say it's like "normie My So-Called Life", or My So-Called Life is like "Alt 90210", but actually 90210 has far more very special episodes, and its biker bad-girl wild-child is not just eccentric -- she really goes off the deep-end, in a way that Rayanne Graff never would. Emily Valentine, BPD punk rock girl extraordinaire... who winds up dating the wholesome protag transplanted from Minnesota, Brandon Walsh.
Everybody was connected to everybody else in the good ol' days, it really was not fragmented by cliques. I lived it... and this show is a documentary, like all shows. The main diff with My So-Called Life is the voice-over narration from the moody introspective protag girl, kind of like blending 90210 with The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
Anyway... if you never bothered watching 90210 cuz you assumed it was just going to be, I dunno, whatever you assumed -- it's not, it's like My So-Called Life, and made by the same production company, Propaganda Films, who only made a few TV series, but WHAT A FEW -- Twin Peaks, 90210, and My So-Called Life! ^_^
I'm going to post so much red meat about boy-girl friendships, and wade into the gender war slop discourse for a change -- only cuz I'm being vividly reminded of how different social relations were, in general but also between the sexes, back in the good ol' days, after watching 90210 and looking forward to yet another rewatch of My So-Called Life.
ReplyDeleteIt's so crazy how all the gender-slop is always written about "men" and "women" -- when they really mean "Millennial men" and "Millenial women", and maybe Zoomers to a lesser extent. And all the lazy retarded slop about genetic programming / imperative, evolution, Darwin, natural selection, mating strategies, etc. When they're really talking about Millennials and maybe Zoomers in the American Empire during the 21st century.
Thing were very different right here in the American Empire, as recently as the '80s and half of the '90s (I'll round up and just say the late 20th century).
Sorry, dork, your 21st-century deviance and shithole society is not explained by Darwinian natural selection, it's due to hyper-competitive social relations in a harmony vs. discord cycle, not to mention now imperial collapse in the imperial lifespan cycle.
But I'm not going to bother "debunking" the gender war slop -- that speaks for itself. I mean, using it to memorialize the good ol' days ('80s and '90s), when relations were the opposite of how they are in the 21st century.
There's no more surefire way to spray dummy-repellant than to wax nostalgic about boy-girl friendships, and friend groups that were not reducible to "the boy members are dating the girl members", that existed before anyone was dating anyone, and would outlast their dating relationships, although of course temporarily involving some members dating each other -- and several dating outside of the friend group.
Friendship and dating/mating were independent things. They might coincide, they might not coincide.
Mainly the goal is to vaporize all this Millennial bullshit that is the bulk of the gender war slop discourse, in the hopes that it will somehow reach Gen Alpha or later gens, or maybe the Zoomers who are reachable (IDK how big a fraction that is, but Millennials are hopeless).
Gen Alpha will figure this out, and change their minds and hearts away from Millennial norms, on their own. They don't need me to advise them -- but just to set the record straight, and give them some role models from the good ol' days to look up to for "I'm not crazy" validation...
But before that discursive red meat, I need some literal red meat -- shredded lamb shank and ground beef stew, with some mixed vegetables and salsa (and salt, pepper, and garlic). Pretty easy, and turned out great! I *finally* found lamb on sale, it's never on sale. I really missed it, with all this insane inflation that the elites will eventually pay for with their lives...
Timely reminder that a vintage crock-pot from the thrift store is one of the best investments you can make, and they're everywhere, for cheap. Just make sure the crock is removable! ^_^
ReplyDeleteHow audible and tactile the check-out counter used to be! A quick video of the Barnes & Noble check-out in 1997:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lMSOfmFQ-4
I was really thrown for a sensory loop there! Just count how many disinctive sounds there are during a single transaction, which are no longer there, and have not been replaced by any new sounds...
The clicky keys on the keyboard, the crinkle of the paper money, the sliding of the coins against the metal interior of the cash register, the jangle of the coins against each other, the rolling-and-clicking-shut of the cash register drawer, the metal clasp closing on the coin purse section of a wallet, the dot matrix printer head dashing back and forth across the receipt paper, tearing the paper receipt off of the main paper roll...
If someone used a credit card, the clicking into place of the card within the copier, the metallic sliding chunk-chunk, the tearing off of a carbon copy...
Most people in the comments section were nostalgic for the dot matrix printer, more than anything else. Now it's just the barely-there sounds of a thermal printer, where you only hear the rolling of the paper roll that feeds the receipt out to you, but you don't hear the mechanical production of how the ink gets onto the paper. It just gets quietly spit out, fully formed like some uncanny valley newborn page from a digital device-womb. There's no sense of it having been a tabula rasa, with actively constructed ink applied to it in just the right way.
I don't want receipts to feel like they're newborn babies from a digitized womb. It should feel entirely mechanical and technological, just in an interesting and pleasing sensory way -- like the good ol' dot matrix printer.
Same reason I hate touch-screens, which are attempts to make the machine seem like a person with a sense of pressure-sensitive touch, like you and me. It's not a creature with a sense of touch -- it's a machine. It should feel and behave like a machine, by pressing buttons, turning dials, pulling levers, etc., just in a pleasing and interesting way.
The worst are the talky ones, like the self check-out stations that have pre-recorded voices or even worse, AI-generated voice messages. It should never speak to me -- it's a machine. And I can't speak back to it, or else it needs its fake sense of hearing, and takes 30 seconds to process a simple voice input. Its communication should be entirely textual, or if vocal, it should sound like a Speak 'n Spell from 1983, clearly a machine.
Machines, devices, and gadgets can be pleasing to the senses and fascinating to the mind -- but only when they are entirely technological, not uncanny valley attempts to make machines seem human.
The most ridiculous copes about the dot matrix printer (looking over its Wikipedia article), are that the inkjet and laserjet methods that replaced it, are faster and quieter.
ReplyDeleteOutside of professional, dedicated publishing houses, who cares how fast it is? You can see how "slow" the dot matrix printer was for receipts at the cash register -- it took a few seconds, not 10s of seconds, not minutes, not hours. The inkjet or thermal printer does it in maybe 1.5 seconds instead? BFD, totally not noticeable to anyone involved in the transaction.
Quieter is actually a downgrade, not an upgrade -- everyone misses the pleasing sound of the dot-matrix printer vs. the sensory deprivation of the thermal printer etc.
And what about the costs? They're not even more efficient -- which must take cost differences into account. Dot-matrix printers cost 0.2 cents per page, while laserjet printers are 1 to 10 cents per page, and presumably injket somewhere in between. So laserjet is 5 to 50 times more expensive per page than dot-matrix.
The main upgrade is in quality or resolution of the printed material, and possibility of color -- but color printers have always been rare, outside of pro publishing, so ignore the color factor. If you're printing something that's supposed to look visually pleasing unto itself, like a book, then dot-matrix is a hudge downgrade from moveable type or inkjet or laserjet.
But just take a look at your receipt next time -- it's not high-res book-quality letters. The only razzle-dazzle these new-fangled printers ever use, is printing coupons with graphics and varied font sizes and type-faces -- in other words, ADS. The last thing we want when we're checking out. The receipt that tells us what we ordered, how much it was, etc., still looks like it did 30 years ago. So, no improvement in quality, variety, resolution, etc. Also, no need for it anyway -- it's just a receipt, not a book we're going to spend hours looking over.
The other downside of faster printing methods is that it encourage them to print TOO MUCH information. A receipt in the good ol' dot-matrix days had... IDK, a few dozen characters? The thermal-printed ones today have high dozens or even hundreds of characters, for the exact same order. Way too much info about which store it's from, who the cashier / supervisor is, long-ass names for every item, 17 different messages along the bottom about filling out an online survey, bla bla bla bla bla.
Receipts are meant to be kept for later processing, and it's faster to process less info than more info. Thermal-printed receipts suffer from info-overload, and impede rather than aid later processing, assuming you're not going to just instantly throw it in the trash anyway.
It's just supposed to tell me the key points -- not be an Excel spreadsheet with 1000s of cells worth of irrelevant factoids, not a pointless PowerPoint deck full of tedious and idiotic slides with graphics to boot!
Also, dot-matrix had incredibly LOW operating costs, cuz the ink ribbon lasted forever and was cheap to replace, whereas the ink cartridges of the inkjet method were expensive to replace, could easily dry up / sludge up before they were fully used, or get punctured / spill during rough handling to put them in or take them out. Or get damaged while sitting in storage, and something falls on it, it gets dropped, etc., or again dried out before you even open it. The ink ribbons for dot-matrix had none of these problems.
ReplyDeleteDot-matrix was considered so cutting-edge, futuristic, and sci-fi-tier, that it was used as the name of the C-3PO clone in Spaceballs, played by Joan Rivers. Her name was Dot Matrix.
During the (destined to suck) remake, they can't rename this character after a thermal printer, not only cuz it doesn't make for a good-sounding name, but there's just nothing technological about a thermal printer. There's no machine that takes in raw ingredients, actively processes or assembles them into a final product, and delivers it to you. It's a newborn coming out of a womb, fully formed.
Dot-matrix printers let you hear and see the line-by-line application of ink to the blank page, so you could appreciate the construction of a finished product from raw ingredients. Now *that's* hi-tech -- a printer that operates itself!
To the human mind, thermal printers are not even printers, since we don't perceive the printing process through any sense whatsoever. There's just a fully-printed page inside the device, then it comes out like a newborn baby, and that's it. Yeah, we know that there must be a blank roll of paper inside the device, and a separate ink-storage-thingy, and something telling it how to apply ink to the paper... but it all happens internally, with no perceptible actions, so it doesn't seem very tech-y at all to us.
They're trying to make it seem like "magic" since we can't clearly perceive all the mechanical workings of the process. But we're not fooled, and are not impressed as though it were magic. We know it's still a mechanical process. They're just robbing us of the sensory fascination at how a mechanical device operates, and of the sensory interaction with it -- like pressing buttons, flipping switches, turning dials, pulling levers, etc.
They're trying to de-physicalize these devices, to make our world more closely approximate a computer program in some spergatroid's model of what a "mind" is. It's dystopian tech, rather than the utopian futuristic tech of yesteryear.
Barnes & Noble also dystopianified their physical stores during the 2020s. I was surprised it took them that long, most other places began their heritage-hating iconoclastic destruction of iconic Americana during the 2010s.
ReplyDeleteBut as of a few years ago, say good-bye to the hunter green signage and carpeting, creamy beige walls, serif fonts, author portraits on the walls, warm lighting, paneled / finished ceilings (often with recessed or coffered sections), helpful sings of where things are, dark wood shelves, shelves you can see over, and entire sections of comfy furniture groupings for spending some leisure time in the store.
https://medium.com/patternfly/barnes-noble-youre-breaking-my-ux-heart-9bf0bf58cea
Now the background color for everything is shades of gray, with white type in sans serif, the carpeting is gray, the ceiling is high and exposed with pipes etc running everywhere and looking like it's all covered in ash like a bombed-out shithole, harsh bright fluorescent lights everywhere, no signs to guide you, too many random ugly tables in the way, only a handful of chairs that are placed right against the shelves so you feel like you're an inconvenient obstruction to the other browsers and can't actually enjoy yourself sitting down...
What a total nightmare. Who would want to spend 30 seconds in these anti-places? Let alone 30 minutes? Every public space is so hostile and sensory-depriving in this apocalyptic era of anti-places.
Their corporate owners must be expropriated and RETVRN-ed to their '90s heyday look-and-feel. I don't care if people are just gonna stay indoors all day, every day, for the rest of their lives. These structures must still remain identifiably American in style, not the bleached-out, bombed-out, grayed-out destruction that has ruined all public spaces since the 2010s. If they're destined to be ruins, abandoned by their would-be visitors, so be it -- but they're going to look as close to their thriving state as possible, not deliberately defaced like iconoclasts breaking the noses off of statue art.
Execute the entire corporate board and middle-management of every single Fortune 500 company, for their crimes against American culture. That will not restore America to its glory days -- but grave crimes require grave consequences. They must be punished, regardless of the utilitarian outcome of that punishment.
Packs of feral beasts, or even roving hordes of feral humans, could never inflict so much destruction on public spaces, as the elite woketards have wrought since the 2010s. Wild animals might scratch up some furniture, or shove it around from one place to another. They might rub their antlers along a column and wear part of it off. Knock over some shelves -- but not much.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, they're not anti-social, just feral. They're not hell-bent on erasing all culture, or depriving the senses.
They couldn't rip the entire finished paneling off of the ceiling, change out the warm lighting for fluorescent panopticon harshness, bleach all the colors away into shades of gray, use their claws to file away the serifs on the typeface, or any of the other vaporize-it-all iconoclasm that the parasitic elites have deliberately inflicted on all public spaces, during the past 10 years.
And that is why Americans will accept any cohesive band of warlords who show up to overthrow our domestic parasitic traitor elites, who are already so internally fractured. Illiterate hordes from the jungle would be better protectors and restorers of what American places used to look like in our good ol' days, if we showed them pictures and video.
It takes a vehement, heritage-hating auto-immune disease infecting the entire society, to wipe out, hostil-ify, and sensorily deprive the entire population of its public spaces. No foreign carpet-bombing campaign could ever inflict this much destruction on us -- only the internal parasitic elites of the auto-immune stage of the imperial lifespan, who identify the self as a danger to be neutralized, while waving in hostile outsiders.
We won't care where they come from either -- during the dire straits of imperial collapse, it's first come, first served, for the replacement leadership.
Regarding public spaces and bookstores, hopefully someone with a history of literacy and architecture -- but even jungle savages could better appreciate what we used to have, and work to restore it, while executing and expropriating those responsible for its destruction, than our native leadership today, who are still hell-bent on demolishing what precious little of it that still remains.
Imagine being so Puritanically seething, that even hunter green and creamy beige are just beyond the pale, so to speak, of problematic sensuous indulgence, requiring a crusade against even the sub-neon '90s earth tones of Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, which must be bleached into shades of gray.
ReplyDeleteExecute every "leader" who is responsible, at any degree of removal, for the decision to gray-ify all of America.
"Amazon" referred to Japanese women originally! Well, their ancestors on the Eastern Steppe, before they migrated down into the Japanese islands. I just KNEW it!
ReplyDeleteI always said, since investigating the ancient Steppe cultures, that the Amazons had to be Eastern, not Western, based on who has female warriors, women who ride horses, women who can hit a target with a bow & arrow from a mile away, women who are not relegated to low-ranking roles in their culture, and so on.
Well well well, now I can finally connect them to the most famous linguistic label for the Amazons... "Amazon" itself!
Recall that Herodotus says in the Scythian language, they're called "Oiorpata", which he glosses as "man" and "slay", that is "man-slayers". During my discovery that Scythian is Uralic, specifically from the Mordvinic branch and most like present-day Erzya, I gave a Uralic etymology for that term, based on "man" and "pot / cauldron", that is, "man-cookers" rather than "man-slayers", but close enough.
But that's the Scythian word for them -- where does the Ancient Greek word "Amazon" come from? That word became far more widespread than "Oiorpata", so perhaps it is closer to their original ethnonym.
Nothing much turns up from the various Indo-Euro approaches to the name, a few of which are here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%88%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B6%CF%8E%CE%BD
The main problem with them is that they treat the word "Amazon" as an epithet -- a descriptive term for the roving bands of women warriors. And the roots for these descriptive terms are drawn from Greek, Indo-Iranian, Caucasian, and other languages which the Amazons themselves did not speak. They were from the Eastern Steppe, so they didn't speak Indo-Euro unless it was Tocharian, but there's no convincing Tocharian etymology.
And Herodotus says the Amazons and the Scythians spoke languages that were totally unintelligible to each other, not just different dialects, or sister languages of the same family. Given that the Scythians spoke Uralic (specifically Mordvinic), we can rule out any other Uralic language as the native tongue of the Amazons.
Well, what else is there in the Eastern Steppe? In the mid-1st millennium and several centuries before? Only Yeniseian -- but as I've shown extensively, Japonic is a sister to Dene-Yeniseian. So perhaps Japonic, Na-Dene, or Yeniseian could supply some roots -- but not Indo-Euro or Caucasian, which is a bit too far to the Western part of the Steppe.
Since everyone is blind to the widespread prevalence of Uralic languages across the Steppe in ancient times, nobody bothered to ask what kind of Uralic etymology there might be for "Amazon". Maybe it's a Scythian word. It's probably not entirely of Scythian origin, that would be an exonym like "Oiorpata". But they may be relaying the endonym of the Amazons, with some extra Scythian packaging.
The main fault of those other theories is that they don't have an ethnonym of any kind, whether it's an endonym or exonym, and they don't have a toponym either (place-name), which refers to where the people come from. They're entirely focused on the fact that they're women -- which is important, but not the main thing -- and that they're unusual compared to most women.
So, my etymology will provide a far more natural solution, since it has both an ethnonym -- an endonym, in fact! -- and a toponymic word, plus an after-thought word relating to women. It's not a description of the Amazons as women who kill men, who live without men, who are the equals of men, etc. It says they're the women from a certain land, which is inhabited by a certain tribe.
OK, I'll cut right to the chase. Ancient Greek "Amazon" renders a Scythian word, since they were the culture in between Greeks and Amazons, who told the Greeks everything about the various cultures of the Steppe, especially the exotic ones to the East.
ReplyDeleteI'll just say Mordvinic instead of Scythian, since that's what branch it belongs to. The Mordvinic word is something like "wa + mastor + ni", and it means "Wa [endonym] + land + woman". That is, a woman from Wa-land, or the land of the Wa people.
This "Wa" is none other than the ancient endonym for the Japanese, before they entered the Japanese islands and later took up the endonym "Yamato", derived from the place-name "Yamatai", which as I explained earlier, is of Emishi / Ainu origin, and means "chestnut + father", alluding to the land around Nara, where the early Yamato state was centered, being rich in chestnuts, a father or provider of chestnuts, which remain an iconic staple food of the Japanese to this day.
"Wa" is *not* of Chinese origin, although they did record it and relay it to others. "Wa" is the 1st-person plural pronoun in Japonic, like "we" in English, and is a natural endonym -- "we" as opposed to "they". They were using this endonym when they were still living on the Eastern Steppe, long before they ventured down into the Japanese islands.
"Mastor" means "earth / land, country / state" in both branches of Mordvinic, Erzya and Moksha. This word can take ethnonym prefixes, like "Eŕźa + mas(tor)" ("land of the Erzya"), to refer to land of the people named by the ethonym. It can also take suffix nouns, like "mastor + be", where "be" = "edge", that is "edge of the world".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80
"Ni" means "woman, wife" in Erzya, and reflects P-M "ńij", which is inherited from P-Uralic "niŋä" = "woman, female".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BD%D0%B8#Erzya
Alternatively, the "woman, wife" word is from Finno-Ugric "naje", which does not have an attested reflex in Mordvinic, but it does in Finnic, Sami, and Ugric, so perhaps it used to be in nearby Mordvinic circa 1000 BC but has since been replaced. It would've been something like "nai", whose main phonetic difference from "ni" above is the diphthong "ai" instead of just "i". This isn't very important, just noting another possibility.
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=583
Now, how does Mordvinic "wamastorni" become Greek "amazon"? Well, the earliest use of "Amazon" is in Homer, and by that time Greek had dropped initial "w", which continued through the next big mention of them, in Herodotus, and was cemented from that point on.
ReplyDeleteThat leaves "amastorni".
I think the Greeks analyzed the final "i" as a plural suffix, on analogy with their own plural suffixes, which ended in "i". If the Mordvinic word for "woman" was "nai" instead of "ni", that is even more tempting, since "-ai" in Greek is the feminine plural suffix in the nominative case, or dictionary case. The Scythians were using the compound word in the singular, "Wa-land woman", but the Greeks heard it in the plural, since the semantic difference is negligible when you're asking about "who are those people?" You could refer to one of them, in the singular (as in "wamastorni"), or in the plural, as the Greeks heard it. That's inflectional only, and easy to mistake.
So the Greeks deleted the final "i" (or "ai") to get what they thought was the singular form, "amastorn".
But Greek doesn't allow final consonant clusters. Final consonants can only be "n", "r", or "s", and by far the most common is "n", especially for nouns. And it's the closest to the edge of the word anyway, so the "r" was deleted to simplify the cluster, leaving:
"amaston"
In Ancient Greek, the letter "ζ", which we transcribe as "z" in Roman letters, was originally a sequence of 2 consonants, "sd", not "z". Later the "s" absorbed the voicing of "d" to yield "zd", and perhaps later after that, was metathesized to "dz". So, really the phonetic target of the Greek word is "amasdon".
Well, we're just about there already -- we only have to explain why the "t" of "amaston" was voiced to "d", matching the Greek target "amasdon" perfectly. I think this was under the influence of the lost "r" from the cluster -- it's voiced, in the same coronal position, so its voicing was preserved on the preceding coronal consonant "t", which then became "d".
This could have been reinforced by the exotic connotation of the Amazons as a legendary culture from the mysterious Eastern Steppe. They couldn't have had a simple, quotidian consonant sequence like "st" -- they're an exotic culture, therefore their ethonym must have been phonetically exotic as well, so make that sequence "sd" instead.
And there you have it -- from Mordvinic "wamastorn(a)i" to Greek "amasdon", QED. ^_^
The beauty of this solution is that it uses ethonyms -- an *endonym*, in fact -- and toponymic words, and a generic "woman / wife" word, instead of trying to construct an epithet that doesn't relate to where they're from or what they call themselves.
ReplyDeleteThis solution is the only one so far to do that.
Even better, it identifies who the linguistic intermediaries were between the Amazons and the Greeks -- not Iranians, who lived down in Iran by Homer's time, not on the Steppe, not the Greeks themselves, and not Caucasians, who are too far to the West to know about Amazons.
Rather, this points to the Scythians as the intermediaries, and that is indeed who Herodotus links the Amazons with. Although they could not understand each other's language, they still decided to mate with each other, and their offspring were the Sauromatians, later known as Sarmatians, who lived further to the East than the Scythians -- their home turf was between the home turfs of their parents, the Scythians to the West, and the Amazons to the East.
Unlike other Uralic languages, only Mordvinic has a word for "earth / land, country" that has "-to-" after "mas". According to Wiktionary, the "mas" element is of P-Uralic origin, while the "-stor" element may have been borrowed from an Indo-Euro language. That's possible, since Mordvinic is the most Southwestern branch of Uralic, putting it closest to the P-IE urheimat, and in contact with P-Indo-Iranian as it made its eastward trek across the Steppe.
The "st" sequence is crucial, since that's what's needed for the Greek "ζ", which was originally "sd", only a minor alteration of "st".
That's perfect -- I didn't choose Mordvinic cuz it was the only Uralic language that has "st" in its word for "earth / land, country", but cuz that's what Scythian was, and Scythians must have been the intermediaries between legends of the Amazons and the Greek audience. The fact that "st" or "sd" appears in the name "Amazon" is an independent confirmation that Scythian, AKA Mordvinic, was the intermediary language, not some other nearby Uralic language.
Who else might the name have referred to? Well, anyone whose ethnonym -- whether exonym or endonym -- began with a consonant that was dropped word-initially in Ancient Greek by Homer's time, whose nuclear vowel was "a", and maaaaybe a final nasal consonant, which could have been merged into the "m" of "mastor".
ReplyDeleteIt's not "y", since Greek preferred rendering that "ya" as "ia" instead of dropping it altogether for "a".
The only other consonant that Ancient Greek dropped initially was "h", so if there was a group named "Ha" or "Han", that would work. I know, the core of the Chinese are called "Han", but they're way too far down into Southeast Asia to have been known to the Ancient Greeks or probably the Scythians either, and they were sedentary agrarians, not nomadic horse pastoralist archers.
"Hun" / "Xiongnu" / etc. does not work, cuz the nuclear vowel is all wrong -- in all its variants, it's "o" or "u", a back rounded high(-ish) vowel, whereas the first vowel of "Amazon" is unrounded, central or front, and as low as you can go.
I'm open to other suggestions that would fit phonetically, but only if they are also plausible ethnographically -- known to have inhabited the Eastern Steppe during the 1st millennium BC, a horse-taming and horse-riding culture, with women warriors or at least women playing powerful roles of some sort, and so on.
As a reminder, to summarize the case for the Japanese and Wa having originated in the Eastern Steppe, their creation of land myth is identical to cultures from Northwest Mongolia, where the creator god uses his staff to stir the primordial oily ocean water, whose oily foam coagulates into land masses on the water's surface. These people from NW Mongolia spoke Turkic or Mongolic languages by the time they were visited by the Russian explorer Potanin, but in the 1st millennium BC, Turkic and Mongolic did not exist. They would've spoken Uralic or more likely given their affinity with the Japanese, something from the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family.
Since creation myths are shibboleths that do not easily change, regardless of other cultural changes like switching languages, this puts the ancestors of the Japanese near NW Mongolia before they entered Korea and Japan during the late 1st millennium BC.
Generally the direction of the headwinds around the world is east-to-west, so even though the Wa eventually trekked eastward into Japan, when they were hanging out in their original Eastern Steppe homeland, they very well may have forayed westward across the Steppe.
How far? Well, close enough to interact with the Scythians, who were in the Western Steppe, so possibly the Wa ventured into the Central Steppe. But the Steppe is one great big single place, it's no big deal to go from one end to the other -- assuming you're moving *with* the headwinds, not *against* them. And as an Eastern culture, the Wa would have enjoyed those westward headwinds, and could have ventured all the way into present-day Hungary, if they felt like it.
Nobody mentions them advancing that far, so perhaps they were just comfortable roaming into the Central Steppe, where they a group who they found exotic -- light-skinned, dark-haired, round-eyed, sharp-faced Scythians. And the Wa would have been not too different-looking themselves, only having a slight epicanthic fold and black hair. Just exotic enough, in both directions -- they could not resist each other, one nomadic group respecting another, and they fell in love... for a time at least, before the Wa women returned to their man-free lifestyle.
Well, what did the Scythian dudes expect from biker-gang baddies, other than receiving the "love 'em and leave 'em" treatment? Wild nomadic baddies can't be tamed, any more than their horses can be...
Yeah, but wasn't it worth it? To be chosen as the only group of men on Earth who the Amazons were burning with desire to mate with? That alone would establish your undying fame for the rest of all time... ^_^
And so, yet again, we see how Uralic languages are the skeleton key to unlocking so many mysteries of the ancient world at or north of the Steppe. Even when they served as intermediaries, which unlocks mysteries even further into the mysterious East!
ReplyDeleteImagine being ignorant of Uralic -- you'd totally miss out on the origins of this Steppe version of Romeo and Juliet! ^_^
I dedicate this little piece of scholarship to 3 Hololive girls who embody the Amazon ideal:
ReplyDeleteMarine, a master at Touhou bullet hell shoot 'em up video games, and whose character is a female pirate captain.
Aqua, a natural at first-person shooter games -- and all sorts of other games, for that matter.
Okayu, another first-rate gamer girl who immediately mastered the horse archery mini-game in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, as if she were still living in the Altai-Sayan Mountains.
Being able to shoot a projectile and hit a moving target, while being in motion yourself, is a skill that only comes from having ancestors who were horse-riding archers. And contrary to Western images of "women warriors" as big hulking muscular manly sword-wielders, riding a horse and shooting arrows from a bow is something that women can do as well, since it's off-loading some of the strength and stamina to the horse and to the potential energy of the bow.
The Eastern version of "women warriors" -- or "gamer girls" in the modern era -- allows them to maintain a lot of their femininity, or "womanly charm", as Marine is fond of calling it. ^_^
The Scythians were not willing to mate outside their group with a bunch of hulking steroided man-women -- but cuz the Amazons were women warriors who were still very kawaii and womanly. ^_^
Why did Scythians include the toponym morpheme "mastor", when they could have simply used the morphemes for "Wa" and "ni" to mean "Wa woman"? Well, phonetically that would make "wani" or "wanai", and that is not so morphologically transparent -- it looks almost like an atomic morpheme in Uralic, which is of shape CVCCV. You can't tell it's a compound.
ReplyDeleteWhereas when you insert the morpheme for "land, country", it's very clearly a compound. And since it's generic and used in many different compounds, it tells you right away that the morpheme before it, "wa", must be some kind of ethnonym, or other modifier for what kind of land or country it is. "Land / country of the Wa".
That's the morpho-phonological reason. But there could be a semantic reason as well -- to broaden the scope of which tribes are referred to. If you say "Wa woman", that means she must be from that very tribe itself. Whereas "Wa-land woman" or "Wa-country woman" means a woman from the land / country where the Wa are the dominant, central, or majority tribe -- but not necessarily the only tribe. The Wa gave their name to the broad territory under their control, but on the Steppe there are all sorts of other ethnic groups roaming around as part of a confederation.
So, perhaps the Scythians didn't know which micro-ethnicity of the Eastern Steppe the Amazons belonged to -- but they *did* know that they were from "Wa-land", y'know, that broad territory over there, where the Wa are the main ethnicity. They could be from some non-Wa group, what do we know? But they're from that territory, at any rate.
Japanese uses a toponym derived from "English" to refer to all of the British Isles, including Wales, Scotland, and even Ireland -- "igirisu", from Portuguess "ingles", in turn from "English" in English. (The Portuguese were among the first Westerners to contact the Japanese.) So they could refer to a Scotsman, Welshman, or Irishman as "igirisu-jin", where "jin" = "person".
Something similar could have happened with the Amazons. The Scythian intermediaries knew that the Amazons came from "Wa-land", and passed this "Wa" ethnonym along to the Greeks (who obligatorily deleted the "w"). Maybe the Amazons were Wa, or non-Wa, but they came from "Wa-land" in either case, like Scots, Welsh, and Irish coming from "igirisu", along with the good ol' English themselves, in the minds of Japanese speakers.
Odysseus' name is Crescentine, meaning "wanderer", confirmed by Pre-Uralic substrate in Finno-Volga-land. Well, this is rather timely, but this mystery would have called upon me to solve it, no matter what movies are out right now, since I'm knee-deep in Crescentine languages and culture.
ReplyDeleteHis name is not Indo-Euro but part of the Pre-Greek substrate. There is quite a bit of variation in his name. The 1st consonant is found as "d" or "l", and the 2nd consonant as "s", "ss", "x", or "tt". The initial vowel also shows up as "u" in Etruscan and Latin, not to mention Greek variants beginning with "ou", instead of "o".
Beekes reconstructs the name as "Od/lukʲeu", with a palatalized "k", and leaving the 1st consonant open.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%88%CE%B4%CF%85%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B5%CF%8D%CF%82
First, we can put aside the "-eus", which is a standard name ending for Pre-Greek figures -- Perseus, Prometheus, Theseus, etc. Greek prefers "-os", a la Proto-Indo-European, so "-us", let alone "-eus", is a marker of a Pre-Greek origin.
I don't think the initial vowel is prothetic, i.e. not original and inserted to ease pronunciation. There's no awkward consonant cluster after the 1st vowel. And Crescentine languages were fine with vowels at the beginning of words, unlike Indo-Euro.
However, it can't be "o" since Pre-Greek is Crescentine, which did not have "o". So it must have been "u", as in the Etruscan version (from another Crescentine language). Maybe Greek lowered it to "o" to make it sound more Indo-Euro, or under the influence of similar-sounding Greek words of I-E origin, which were then used to give folk etymologies, such as "odússomai" = "to hate".
That makes the root of his name "udukʲ" or "ulukʲ", which sounds positively Sumerian, so we're on the right track.
Although the Pre-Greek scholars can tell this name is not Indo-Euro, they can't tell what it means, since evidently there are no other Pre-Greek words that look similar enough to this name, to hint at its meaning.
And that's where the good ol' Pre-Uralic substrate of Finno-Volga-land comes in. This substrate is also Crescentine, reflecting the spread of Anatolian agriculture into the Balkans and up into Finno-Volga-land, during the Copper Age, as in the Cucuteni culture and others like it. Their language was probably ancestral to or related closely to Hattic, from Anatolia.
ReplyDeleteWhen these Crescentine words were adopted into the Uralic successor languages, they were subjected to Uralic phonotactics, whose preferred syllable shape for a word is CVCCV. Uralic does not like 2 non-initial consonants separated by a vowel, as in "uduk" or "uluk". I'm also ignoring the palatalization on the "k" -- there was no such separate "k" in Uralic, so it would have been adopted as a plain "k". Maybe it was incorporated into the following vowel as "e" or "i", but that's not so important.
Rather, the vowel between the 2 non-initial consonants would've been deleted to give it that oh-so-Uralic medial consonant sequence -- "udkV" or "ulkV", where "V" is some vowel.
Well well well, whaddaya know? There's exactly that word in the substrate of F-V-land, "ulkɜ" (where "ɜ" is another way of saying "any vowel"). It has to do with "far, farther out, distant, outside, exterior", and even "wide, far and wide" in Komi. It includes verbs as well, like "to move farther out".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1662
With the standard "-eus" name ending, I take his whole name to mean, "the one who is far, who goes farther out, who is distant, who is an outsider, who goes far and wide" -- in short, a "wanderer" far from home, with a connotation of "outcast / outsider", which is also apropos for Odysseus.
But wait, there's more! I have an explanation for the uncertainty in the "d" vs. "l" in his Pre-Greek name. I don't think these reflect a single shared form, but confusion over what his name meant, given the presence of a near-homophone with another plausible meaning for him.
That shows up as "urke" in the F-V substrate, which means "to escape, to be set free, to leave, to flee, to set off".
https://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1667
Semantically, this is very much like Odysseus' character trait of being an escape artist, wily and cunning and full of skills and tricks to escape the various traps set for him, not to mention escaping from one land to another on the way back home. And there's also a connotation of "to set off" -- a more deliberate, willful, "charting a course" kind of escaoe, not merely reactive and fleeing like a coward.
Phonetically, this is the same as the one above, except with "r" in place of "l" -- both liquids. But unlike "l", "r" has central airflow, and in its tap form, has a discrete manner like "d" or "t", whereas "l" can be held indefinitely. Crescentine did not have "d", but it did have "t" and "r". Etruscan has "t" in this place, so the other Crescentine point of triangulation isn't much help.
Maybe the "r"-variant of this root was really "rt" or "tr", simplified to "t" in Etruscan, "r" in the F-V substrate, and "d" in Greek.
On the other hand, perhaps it was "r" all along, as in the F-V form. Greek did not like the "r"-variant sounding too close to the "l"-variant, so it dissimilated the liquids and hardened "r" into "d" to make them more distinctive. Then Etruscan borrowed from a Greek "d"-variant, rendered as "t" since Etruscan doesn't have voiced obstruents.
Which of these two near-homophones with highly plausible descriptions of Odysseus' character are original? Both are plausible Bronze or Copper Age descriptions -- they involve his external behavior, not his internal mental states (which is another mark against the theory of "odussomai" = "hateful").
ReplyDeleteSemantically, the over-arching narrative is about him being a wanderer, though, and his escape artist tricks are just plot devices to get from one place to the next, on the way home. Fundamentally, he is more of an archetypal wanderer, than an archetypal escape artist. Being a successful wanderer implies that you're something of a wily, cunning escape artist -- but being a wily, cunning escape artist doesn't imply that you're a wanderer, you could be getting out of all sorts of jams locally.
Phonetically, the earliest attested form is with "l" rather than "d". And given the links to the F-V substrate words, which contrast "l" and "r", that suggests "l" was primary and left unchanged, whereas "r" was a later development, and subjected to a slight alteration, hardening into "d" in Greek. An "l" can be hardened into "d" as well, and "r" kept unchanged -- but that was not the choice the Greeks made. So, they must have viewed the "l"-variant as the original, and arrived at the "d"-variant by some sound change.
Well, Crescentine does not even have "d", so that's another clue that it's not the original one. Still, if it were originally "rt" or "tr", that could've been adopted as "d" in Greek.
On the whole, it looks like the "l" variant is original -- a far-and-wide wanderer distant from home -- and the "r" / "d" variant was phonetically similar and semantically tempting -- an escape artist -- so it entered circulation as well, afterward.
The Greeks couldn't make heads or tails of the semantic distinctions between the two Crescentine variants, so they adopted them phonetically but not semantically. As far as they knew, they were just two different pronunciations for the same descriptive term of the hero, whatever it may have meant.
But the F-V substrate reveals that the phonetic variants were likely semantically distinct as well, and that's how 2 separate variants remained in circulation. Also, which one was likely the original one -- "ulukyeu" = "the wanderer".
^_^
BTW, there's another word "ulke" in Finno-Ugric, but it means "post", nothing to do with distant, outside, far-and-wide, etc. This is of native origin, not the substrate in F-V-land, which is Crescentine.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.uralonet.nytud.hu/eintrag.cgi?locale=en_GB&id_eintrag=1090
So that F-V word about "distant, outside, far-and-wide, etc." must be Crescentine in origin -- since the native F-U or Uralic root that it matches phonetically, means something entirely irrelevant, "post".
I always say that ignorance of Uralic is ignorance of Northern Europe as a whole -- well, now we're seeing how ignorant you will be of the Mediterranean as well, since the F-V substrate is by far the best repository of Crescentine vocabulary.
While ignoring Uralic, you could still figure out that Odysseus is not an Indo-Euro word -- but you wouldn't know what it meant. The substrate in Finno-Volga-land can confirm that it's not Indo-Euro, rather Crescentine -- but it can also tell you what it means! "Wanderer", with a later near-homophone meaning "escape artist".
And of course, Uralic was spoken all across the Steppe in the 1st millennium BC, so you'll remain ignorant of the Steppe if you don't know anything about Uralic. You might hallucinate Iranians in Ukraine, for instance, instead of Mordvinic speakers, who still live nearby and still speak Mordvinic to this day.
About that "d"-variant, and what it could've looked like phonetically, and meant semantically, in Crescentine, let's consult Hattic, which is sparsely attested, but may have an answer still.
ReplyDeleteCrescentine languages are agglutinative, but not subject to Uralic phonotactics... and yet, it's common to see them reduce and delete unstressed vowels, much like Uralic anyway.
We're looking for something like "uruk" that could mean "to set off, to be set free, to escape, to flee".
In Hattic, "ure / uri" means "strong, forceful, vigorous", and "tuk" means "to step". Hattic is a prefixing language, so "ure + tuk" would mean "to step strongly / forcefully". The 1st vowel is stressed, later vowels are subject to reduction and deletion, leading to "urtuk".
This semantically overlaps what "urke" means in the F-V substrate -- "to set off" and "to be set free, escape, flee" in a deliberate forceful vigorous way.
Phonetically, there are too many non-initial consonants, which must be condensed into a 2-C medial sequence. The "k" is distinct from the "rt", so it stays. IDK why the "r" is retained instead of "t" from the "rt" cluster, but it is, and the 2nd "u" is deleted to put the 2 C's in contact with each other, "urke".
Greek doesn't have the preferred syllable shape CVCCV, so it is fine with the 1st and 2nd "u"s remaining where they are, and with the "k" staying. Aware of the "l"-variant, "uluk", it expects a single consonant between the 2 "u"s, though, and simplifies "rt" into "d", preserving the alveolar stop of "t" but also the voicing of "r". It may also want to dissimilate the liquids "r" and "l". That makes it "uduk", QED.
Myrina, Amazon queen mentioned in the Iliad, has Eastern name, probably "horse" with (Greek) feminine name suffix. Mixing the topics of Homeric epics, Amazonian baddies, and Eastern languages and cultural practices, there's an Amazon queen named "Myrina" in Ancient Greek mythology.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrina_(mythology)
The earliest reference to *anyone* by that name is in the Iliad, where she has a burial mound in the region around Troy, and is given the epithet "swift-bounding" -- like a horse, gazelle, etc.
There's a later legend about a Libyan Amazon queen, who commanded an army with cavalry units, by the same name, according to Diodorus Siculus. Since Homer doesn't say anything about her adventuring through North Africa, the Levant, etc., this is probably a later addition that used her name, since "Myrina" had already been popularized in the Iliad as the name of an Amazon queen who was so prestigious that she received a burial mound that future warriors would visit during the Trojan War.
Putting the Libyan figure aside, the earliest one was buried near Troy. But her name does not have a Greek etymology, and AFAICT, nobody has bothered coming up with an explanation for her name in any language, whether Indo-Euro or otherwise. Ugh -- just, like, men, to totally ignooorrrre women, even when they're so famous in battle that male warriors themselves paid their respects to her. Sexist much? Jeez...
But feminazis do occasionally make a good point -- she's hardly a marginal figure, why no obsession with coming up with an etymology for her name? Well, I love Amazonian baddies, so just leave this entire job up to me... ^_^
Since there's no obvious Greek origin to her name, and since she's from the Heroic Age or earlier, there's no way her name is even Indo-Euro.
Phonetically, it's possible her name is Crescentine, since it lacks "o", no voiced obstruents, and Etruscan uses a patronymic suffix "-na" -- in this case, "descendant of Muri", whoever "Muri" is supposed to be. I kinda doubt that, since they'd have to explain who Muri is, in order for the patronymic to pack a punch. Without explaining who her male ancestor "Muri" is, who cares if she is his descendant?
But ethnographically, I don't think so -- Amazons were Easterners, not from West Eurasia, which is where Crescentine languages were spoken.
I don't think it's Uralic either, since only a handful of them were famed as horse-mounted archer types, and not necessarily ones with female warriors. Also, phonetically, CVCVCV is not the best Uralic word shape, which wants to be CVCCV, perhaps with other suffixes. There's no consonant sequence in "Myrina", so it's probably not Uralic either.
But speaking of "Amazon" being a Mordvinic word that meant "Wa-land woman", why not explore some Eastern languages? We've already ruled out Uralic, including Samoyedic.
ReplyDeleteTurkic did not exist that far back, and in any case, Proto-Turkic bans nasals word-initially, so "Myrina" cannot be Turkic.
Very few Proto-Mongolic words begin with "m" either, although several begin with "n". Proto-Tungusic is fine with both "m" and "n" initially.
Proto-Japonic is fine with both "m" and "n" initially.
However, Yeniseian bans initial nasals, and passed this shibboleth onto Proto-Turkic, which is some kind of creole between Yeniseian and Uralic, which formed in the 1st millennium AD.
Neither Mongolic, Tungusic, or Japonic insists on medial consonant sequences like Uralic, in fact P-J bans consonant sequences. Mongolic and Tungusic are fine with coda consonants, though.
Mongolic or even Para-Mongolic, as well as Tungusic, are like Turkic in being "young" language families, probably from the 1st millennium AD, or maybe a bit before. But probably not so far back as the 2nd millennium BC, when the Trojan War takes place.
Still, the best bet is some kind of Eastern Steppe language.
OK, now to the answer -- her name means "horse" in some Eastern Steppe language, phonetically "murin", and was given a Greek feminine name suffix "-a" to make her name sound recognizably feminine to Greek audiences. After all, Amazons defy the typical gender norm, so Greek audiences might not know if "Myrin" had a man's name as well as a man's role as a warrior. Or a gender-neutral name. Well, Greek made it clear she was feminine, and stuck "-a" onto the end of her name.
ReplyDeleteOne of the classic wanderworts of East Asia is the word for "horse", which begins with "m" and comes in several variants. One of them has "r" after the 1st vowel, and it's possible that was loaned into the Western Steppe, where it appeared as the source of English "mare".
But in the East, the 1st vowel is either "o" or "u", and "in" follows "r" in both cases. There's Proto-Tungusic "murin", an exact phonetic match to the name "Myrina" (apart from the tacked-on Greek feminine name suffix "-a"). And closely related is Proto-Mongolic "morïn", and the Para-Mongolic Khitan word "mori".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Tungusic/murin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Mongolic/mor%C3%AFn
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%98%B2%9C%F0%98%B0%A3#Khitan
Koreanic and Japonic are slightly different, where both have "a" after "m", and Koreanic has its sole liquid consonant afterward, while Japonic does not since it bans coda consonants. It's "mal" in Koreanic, and "uma" in Japonic, with unexplained "u" before "ma".
Regardless of which particular language donated this word to the name "Myrina", it was likely a wanderwort in the region anyway. Tungusic provides the best match, since it has every single segment matching the root of "Myrina", and Tungusic has tons of words with initial "m". Mongolic has a slightly different 1st vowel (lowered to "o"), and its native roots do not like initial "m". This word "morïn" is 1 of only 3 listed at Wiktionary, and it could be a loan, vs. 9 beginning with "n".
The point is, this is not just a slightly Eastern word -- it's a pretty *damn* Eastern word, where the best match is further east than Mongolia, from Manchuria to the Pacific coast.
This is the region where horses were first domesticated and utilized by humans, however much Western copers want to split hairs about "taming wild animals" vs. "selectively breeding in captivity". Unlike the West, there is greater diversity of equine species in the East, including some that are still totally wild, whereas wile equines went extinct in the West.
Being named after the name of an animal species is hardly rare -- witness all the variations on "wolf" in Germanic names, "lion" in Greek, and so on. Especially in the heartland of horse domestication, a horse-riding nomad warrior queen could easily have been named "horse" in her own language.
All that the Greek story-tellers added was a Greek feminine suffix, just to drive home that point to their Greek audience that she wasn't a hulking roided-out man-woman, but a kawaii cutie, whose horse and bow allowed her to off-load the demand for strength, and let her keep her womanly shape and personality. ^_^
Homer likens Myrina to a horse by describing her as "polyskarthmos", where "skarthmos" means "skipping", "bounding", etc., and is used by Homer in the same work to describe the literal horses pulling Poseidon's chariot as "euskarthmos".
ReplyDeleteThe only difference is the modifiers "eu-" vs. "poly-". The former means "well, beautifully, etc." whereas the latter means "many, much, a lot". So perhaps he was likening her to a horse that bounded and bounded and bounded some more, she couldn't be stopped or tamed. Or maybe he was likening her to an entire team of horses, that's how much bounding there was.
Mmmm... so much bounding that she was a one-woman team of wild horses, what a baddie. But then, we expect no less from a literal Amazon queen. ^_^
Final thought: Myrina is one of the earliest examples of Eastern horse-riding warrior culture being recorded in the West. It's a very easy trip to make, given the westward-blowing headwinds, and Easterners have been making Westerners eat shit on a regular basis since pre-history, using horses and bows & arrows.
ReplyDeleteThe earliest archaeological evidence for this timeless phenomenon is the abandonment of the Western Steppe by locals, who fled northward and westward, into NE Europe and Scandinavia, just after 3000 BC. This is the Corded Ware culture, from Yamnaya-like people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corded_Ware_culture
Notice that the map lies north of the Steppe -- they had to high-tail it out of there, for some odd reason. Well, it was not so odd at all -- the only reason people from that part of the world abandon the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, fleeing westward and northward, is due to a sudden influx of Eastern Steppe horse-riding nomadic archers, who tear through their settlements like biker gangs doing drive-by shootings en masse.
Sometimes the bikers come all the way over in one fell swoop, like the Huns, sometimes there's a chain reaction of westward-migrating biker gangs that set off a domino sequence that terminates in the East European Plain.
Herodotus says that the Scythians were part of just such a westward domino effect, having been displaced by fellow Easterners who were even further to their east, and then displacing the local Cimmerians of the Northern Black Sea region, who fled westward. The Cimmerians were probably Indo-Euro, whereas the Scythian invaders were Uralic, just like the Magyars of the following millennium.
The Indo-Euro refugees under such scenarios did not spread their language, since Scandinavia spoke either some Pre-Uralic Scandi-specific language, or Uralic, up until the 1st millennium AD, when North Germanic split off from the Germanic branch of Indo-Euro.
We can tell they did not speak Indo-Euro before the arrival of Uralic, cuz there's no Indo-Euro substrate in the Finnic or Sami or Permic languages. There's a local Scandi-specific substrate, reflecting the hunter-gatherers of the extreme north. There's the Crescentine substrate of Finno-Volga-land, reflecting the early agriculturalists. But there's no Indo-Euro substrate, reflecting the Corded Ware refugees from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.
Being a refugee means you usually adapt to your gracious hosts' language, or maybe remain bilingual -- but your hosts will *not* be adopting your language, anymore than Americans speak anything other than English, despite the dozens or hundreds of refugee / diaspora languages spoken here for several generations or even over a century in the case of Cantonese.
Whoever spread the Indo-Euro languages first into the Mediterranean and Caucasus, were not refugees -- they must have been elite, influencers, or other kind of role model. Not everyone is the same from their culture, for all time. Elite specialists in high demand may be deferred to, and their language adopted by locals -- while lowly desperate refugees will be tolerated, but not mimicked culturally, even if they are incorporated into the local genepool.
And that is why, despite Scandinavians having the highest levels of Yamnaya-like DNA in Europe, they are some of the youngest speakers of Indo-European languages, and that language conversion did not correlate with the introduction of Western Steppe DNA into their genepool, which happened 3000 years earlier, during the Corded Ware era, which left no I-E substrate in the later Uralic languages that encompassed Scandinavia.
The westward-dominating horse-riders from the Eastern Steppe didn't always stop at the Danube River either. The Huns fought the Byzantines in Thrace, the Bulgars poured straight down through Thrace and harassed the Byzantines right in Constantinople, and to judge from the legends of Myrina -- who lived so long ago that she was already from a distant heroic era in the eyes of the Trojan War soldiers -- those who displaced the Yamnaya-like types up into NE Europe probably crossed the Danube down into Thrace and NW Anatolia, where Myrina's burial mound is located, somewhere near Troy.
ReplyDeleteIt seems impossible to us Westerners, since the headwinds blow entirely against us -- but for Easterners, it's no more than a typical road trip to open the gates of the Altai-Sayan Mountains, and wind up shortly in Thrace. Especially when you have a cohesive team of people with you, which any expanding group always does.
The name of the Eastern Steppe tribal confederation who displaced the Yamnaya-like people up into the Corded Ware region, did not leave their name to history. But after putting these pieces together, I propose the name "Myrinians", after their perhaps not-so-mythical Amazon queen. If that name was legendary enough for Homer, it's legendary enough for us! ^_^
Amazon "Kyme" had Eastern name, from Yeniseian word for "silver". Myrina was not the only Amazon to have a city in NW Anatolia named after her in antiquity -- so did Kyme (usually transcribed as Cyme), who was later said to be one of Myrina's companions in battle.
ReplyDeleteThe only guess at the meaning of the city's name is that it's related to Greek "kyma" = "wave", and although it is a coastal city, it doesn't have distinctive waves... every coastal city sees waves in that part of the world. As with Myrina, it sounds like it's not Greek, and therefore probably not Indo-Euro at all.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CE%BC%CE%B7
Pursuing the same framework as before -- that Amazons are Easterners, and so should their names be -- I dug around until I found a very fitting origin for her name in an Eastern Steppe language. It's originally "xum" (velar fricative, not "ks"), from Proto-Yeniseian, and meaning "silver". It was borrowed into Proto-Turkic as "kümüĺ", and into Sino-Tibetan languages further east. Clearly an Eastern word, but which got around as a result of nomadic Steppe confederations who spoke Yeniseian, like the Xiongnu.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Yeniseian/xum
Perhaps through an intermediary, or in Greek itself, the "x" was hardened into "k", since there are no velar fricatives in Greek. The "u" and "m" are fine, and an Indo-Euro feminine name suffix "-e" was tacked on to make her name sound more recognizably feminine to Greek audiences, just like "Murin" having "-a" tacked on to give "Myrina". Why not the more common suffix "-a"? That would've created a homophone with "kyma" = "wave", so use the less common but still feminine name ending "-e" instead.
Phonetically, it's straightforward -- but semantically, why would her name or the city name have to do with silver?
All sorts of languages derive names from their word for silver, like the surname "Argento" in Italy, the given names "Gin" and "Ginjiro" in Japan (and Hololive's Noel, whose epithet is "shirogane" = "silver"), and so on. It's a prestigious, valuable, interesting thing.
But is there something distinctly silver-y about the city in NW Anatolia? How could there not be, if I'm bothering to write this down? ^_^
In fact, Cyme was home to the earliest coin mint in Greek-speaking lands, and only slightly behind the very first coin minters of the entire world -- their neighbors, the Anatolian-speaking Lydians (including Croesus). Standardized coin minting goes back to around 600 BC, and silver was one of the original materials used. There are silver deposits nearby in Western and NW Anatolia, but the mint that struck some of the earliest coins in world history -- was at Cyme.
It was a center of maritime trade and commerce, so there must have been silver coins flowing all over the place in that city.
By the 2nd C BC, they even honored their legendary founder by minting a coin with the bust of the Amazon in profile, and a prancing horse on the other side, once again linking Amazons with Eastern culture (horse-riders).
It can't be a coincidence that the site of the earliest coin minting, using silver no less, has a name that sounds like the Yeniseian, Turkic, and other Eastern languages' wanderwort for "silver", and that it was named after an Amazon, who would've been Eastern in origin as well, along with her leader Myrina, named after the Eastern Steppe word for "horse".
As with "murin" or "morin", we may not be able to pinpoint precisely which Eastern Steppe language was spoken by the Amazon bearing such a name. However, we can still narrow it down to the Eastern Steppe, now including Yeniseian, unlike with "murin". Those Steppe confederations always included various cultures, and were polyglot.
ReplyDeleteThe point is, the Amazons were from the Eastern Steppe, not Greece or Anatolia, not the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, not elsewhere in Europe -- and seemingly not from Uralic-speaking groups either. All the burials from the 1st millennium BC of women warriors are from the Eastern Steppe, none in the Western Steppe at that time. Further east, like in Japan, women warriors continued through recorded history, into the 2nd millennium AD, as the "onna-musha" or "woman warrior" phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onna-musha
Very lazy people look at the DNA of those buried near the Altai-Sayan Mountains, see that there's a decent minority of Western Steppe DNA, and the rest from Lake Baikal, and conclude that these were Indo-Europeans. Well, genetically, they're not -- they're only partly Yamnaya-like in their DNA.
And culturally, they are DEFINITELY NOT -- since there's no tradition in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, or Europe, or the Mediterranean, of women warriors, especially horse-mounted archers. Just cuz two cultures fuse genetically, doesn't mean they fuse culturally -- sometimes one culture is more dominant than the other. There was no Indo-Euro religion / myth that spread into the Altai-Sayan region, no Indo-Euro language other than Tocharian, and no Indo-Euro practice of keeping women away from battle.
Rather the cultures near the Altai-Sayan Mountains resemble the Japanese to their east, not the Indo-Europeans of any branch to their west. Not even Tocharians were a Steppe nomad people -- they quickly cut through the Altai-Sayan gate, and fled the Steppe southward until they wound up all snuggled up in the Tarim Basin, where they were sedentary, not nomadic, safely away from the Steppe.
Much like the Indo-Iranians fleeing the Steppe to the south, hugging the same mountain range as the Tocharians, just from the western side, until they wound up all snuggled up in the Hindu Kush mountains and the mountain fortress of Iran, safely away from the open Steppe and its horse-riding biker gangs.
Just as the Huns wound up all the way over in Europe, so must have a group of Eastern Steppe baddies wound up in Thrace and NW Anatolia, which is a very quick road trip across open terrain.
It was so long ago, that Myrina was already forgotten by mortals by the time of the Trojan War, and only the gods remembered her tomb. Still, her name left enough of an impression that it reached Homer. And so must have Kyme's name -- they must have remembered some association with "silver", making it fitting for the city surrounded by silver deposits and nearly the 1st in the world to start minting coins, in silver, no less.
Homer still remembered the association between the name Myrina and horses, calling her "polyskarthmos" as though she were a full-galloping or full-striding horse. So who says other Greeks couldn't have remembered the link between Kyme and silver?
I believe. ^_^
Most of the Amazons with names have transparently Greek / Indo-Euro names, and so are later constructions, at least their names. Like "Hippolyta" = "horse unleasher(ess)". But some of them do not have such clearly constructed Greek names, like Myrina and Kyme, so their names are likely original to the legends, and worth looking into for Eastern Steppe linguistic origins.
ReplyDeleteAnother such one is Pitana / Pitane, which has no known etymology. It's near Myrina and Cyme, in the Aeolis region, so it should pay off just like the other two did. I just don't know yet, cuz I haven't looked into it. But I'll do that later / tomorrow.
Like the other two, it's supposedly the name of an Amazon, who gave her name to the city.
Just glancing at it phonetically and phonotactically -- no voiced obstruents, all open syllables, etc. It just looks like a Japanese word. Or it could have a word-final consonant, with Greek feminine "-a" or "-e" tacked on. And yet, that final consonant would be a nasal -- just like Myrina and Kyme. Japanese, in its Middle and later stages, was fine with coda nasals, but not other consonants.
Phonetically, these could all be Crescentine, especially since they lack "o", but ethnographically that's not likely. Crescentine wasn't spoken on the Eastern Steppe, and the cultures that did speak it had no legends of women warriors.
We'll see what turns up...
One detail about Amazons that is made-up is that they avoided most contact with men. From ancient burials near Altai-Sayan and Lake Baikal, to Modern Japanese onna-musha, they were integrated into the same society as the men. They didn't live apart from men.
ReplyDeleteAnd they knew their fathers growing up -- they were not raised by women in an all-woman society. Few or no examples of Japanese onna-musha have a mother who was also onna-musha -- typically, it was their father who was a warrior, of the samurai class.
So the Amazons were daddy's girls, and the Attila's and Genghiz's of that realm were girldads. ^_^
Japan is full of daddy's girls, too -- including honorary JP girls like Irys. That's why Japanese girls are so high on the cool factor, attracting attention from around the world -- it's not just their feminine looks and womanly charm, it's that they have somewhat male-typical interests and activities. Like riding horses -- or in the modern era, motorcycles (not just motor-bikes or mopeds) -- or playing video games, or falconry!
Even a petite girl like Guutara thought it was no big deal to go for a casual stroll around the neighborhood while carrying a bird of prey on her leather-gloved arm, while looking as kawaii as can be the whole time! ^_^
That's not to say there are no such counterparts in the West, but they are very exotic and niche -- biker baddies, horse girls, girls who shoot guns, etc. In the Eastern Steppe, you don't need to be part of the rural countryside population with rustic tastes, to want to carry a bird of prey on your arm during an ordinary stroll around your liberal, civilized, urban neighborhood.
The spirit of the Steppe will always be reincarnated in the people of Glorious Nippon!
Even having a driver's license is more common in Japan than America, for girls. In Holo EN, famously no one has a driver's license, other than Mumei -- who was always a suspected horse-girl, though she would never admit it! ^_^ She was openly a wolf-girl, and that's very Eastern Steppe as well. Wolf, horse -- some kind of wild roaming spirit animal. That's the kind of girl who 100% has a driver's license and is the driver for road trips.
ReplyDeleteWhereas lots of Holo JP girls not only have driver's licenses, but even motorcycle licenses -- including soft-spoken, kawaii cuties like Luna, as well as racing fans like Chihaya.
In the West and Southeast Asia, you might find quirky girls who want to drive a Vespa motor-scooter a la Amelie, but that's about it, and they're *not* the type to shoot guns or play video games. Biker baddies are very niche here.
Perhaps Westerners got the impression of Amazons being part of a female-only segregated society due to the sex-segregated honor culture of Eastern Steppe people. The onna-musha of Japan, while inhabiting the same society as men, were more likely to live the life of a nun and join a nunnery, just like their male counterparts, who were likely to live like monks and join a monastery.
ReplyDeleteThat's the spiritual, moral, honor-based part of the warrior class in the East, and you can see how it might lead Westerners to believe that the Amazons were a woman-only society -- as though their entire society were one great big nunnery or all-girls' school (which are still common in Japan, but virtually non-existent in America these days).
But the monasteries and nunneries were just two components of the same warrior class of their whole society, not separate societies unto themselves.
Potential solution to the Amazon name "Pitana", who gave her name to a Greek Anatolian city Pitana / Pitane, like Myrina and Cyme. Nothing turned up in Yeniseian, Japonic, Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic, or most of Uralic... however, in the Samoyedic branch of Uralic, which is close to the origin of the family and pretty far east (only Ainu is further east), there's a P-S word "pitmä" which means "trousers, pants".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Samoyedic/pitm%C3%A4
Its further etymology is unknown, and doesn't seem to have cognates elsewhere in Uralic, so it could be an Eastern Steppe wanderwort, especially considering that it's a kind of technology, designed for horse-riders rather than crop-cultivators or pastoralists who don't ride horses. For a quick review of the cultural evolution of pants among horse-riding nomads, see Peter Turchin's posts from awhile ago, which include ancient art of the Amazons wearing pants (like all good Eastern horse-riding folk):
https://peterturchin.com/cultural-evolution-of-pants/
https://peterturchin.com/cultural-evolution-of-pants-ii/
Samoyedic was the oldest branch to leave Proto-Uralic, so this word is pretty damn old, and P-S originated near the Altai-Sayan region, including some languages that used to be spoken right on the Steppe, not just the northern forest zone, where it's confined to now.
It's not of P-Indo-Euro origin, cuz it has 2 "a"s, and P-IE lacks "a". Not to mention, P-IE people were not nomadic horse-riders, they were agro-pastoralists who practiced transhumance pastoralism, with settlements that they regularly returned to or lived in year-round, while minding their herds. Certainly P-IE people did not pass on such a technology to any culture they ever interacted with or provided the seed for.
It's also not Sino-Tibetan, since the Old Chinese word for "trousers" is "ku", and they adopted the technology from Eastern Steppe people, not the other way around.
Semantically, it would make sense for an Amazon to be named as "(she of the) pants", i.e. "the pants-wearer". Not only would this emphasize her being a horse-rider, and an Easterner, but also how unusual it was for a woman to wear pants -- even back in ancient times, that was still rare, for civilized people.
Phonetically, it's pretty close, aside from the nasal being "m" in P-S instead of "n". Due to Uralic phonotactics, any vowel between the "t" and nasal would've been deleted in Samoyedic, so the original wanderwort could've had a vowel between them, including "a".
As for the "m" vs. "n", that could be due to Samoyedic phonotactics as well. There are about 10 words in P-S that have the sequence "tm", including several others whose initial consonant is "p", but 0 that have "tn". In P-Uralic, neither sequence is allowed.
So if the word is originally from outside of Samoyedic, and was "pitana", this would get re-shaped and altered into "pitma" in Samoyedic (delete the 2nd vowel to make it CVCCV, alter "n" to "m" since "tn" is not allowed but "tm" is).
Whatever Eastern Steppe source provided this word to P-S, could've also provided it to the name of an Amazon who took a typical road trip westward across the Steppe, down through Thrace, and wound up in NW Anatolia, where she was remembered as "the pants-wearer". ^_^
Japanese word for "pants" is from ancient Sayan Mountains, confirming again their origin from there! I didn't even notice until reading the entire entry on "pitmä" in Proto-Samoyedic, but there's one dialect in the far south, the Koibal dialect of Kamassian, where it is "pakma". Due to the 1st vowel being "a" instead of "i" (or rounded "i") as in all the others, it's not clear that this is derived from the same source as the others.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the Koibal people currently speak a Turkic language, but Wikipedia says they used to not only speak Kamassian (a now extinct Samoyedic language in the Sayan Mountains), but also a Yeniseian language, and the current culture is a fusion or mixture of these two backgrounds. That's just what I said about Turkic as a whole -- it's a creole of Uralic and Yeniseian.
Unfortunately, there are no words for "pants" beginning with a "p" in any Yeniseian langauge. I was thinking maybe there's one with a labialized "k" or "q", which turned into "p". But the only pants-related word in Yeniseian is "qat", whose 1st consonant is not labialized in any reconstruction, and whose 2nd C is not "k". It originally meant "fur", and was extended to refer to leggings made of fur, then leggings or pants in general, in Arin and Pumpokol. So, no evident Yeniseian connection...
But wait just a second -- "pakma" is just like the Japonic word for "pants", which is now "hakama", but whose "h" used to be "p" in Proto-Japonic. So it would've been "pakama". It's attested very early -- the 8th C, during the Old Japanese stage.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A2%B4#Japanese
But it's also in Okinawan, in the Ryukyuan branch of Japonic, and also pronounced "hakama". Like Japanese, Okinawan turned "p" into "h", including for the homophone "paka" = "grave" from P-J:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/paka
So, this word for "pants" = "hakama" (earlier "pakama"), absolutely goes back to the P-J stage, and was brought with from mainland Asia, before they entered the Japanese islands.
Like the Koibal people, the Japanese have some influence from Uralic people -- and not just the Ainu. Their earlier language, Wa, was put through a filter that stripped out all the voiced obstruents, and opened up the syllable structure, which is more like Uralic than Yeniseian, which Wa is a sister to. Of course, Japonic also has its origins in the Wa-Dene-Yeniseian family, so it's like Koibal in having both Uralic and Yeniseian parents.
But in this case, the similarity can precisely narrow down which part of Uralic, or even Samoyedic, the Japonic language was nearby -- the Koibal dialect of Kamassian. That's the one where the word for "pants" has "a" instead of "i" as the 1st vowel, and where they are otherwise the same, except for the Uralic word having a typical Uralic syllable shape of CVCCV, and Japonic having a typical shape of CVCVCV.
That makes it impossible to tell who originated it, just comparing the two of them. If the Koibal word is original, then Japonic would break up the medial consonant sequence, and default to "a" by vowel harmony with the surrounding vowels, or cuz "ka" is by far the most common "k" syllable in OJ. On the other hand, if the Japonic word is original, Uralic would delete the 2nd vowel to make it CVCCV.
However, it sure doesn't look like the Koibal dialect word is Uralic -- all of its relatives in the Samoyedic branch have "i" as the 1st vowel, not "a", which is a very irregular vowel change. The Koibal word is the one with an "odd man out" look to it -- which means the Japonic word must be the original, and the Koibal dialect borrowed it from the Wa people, when they were still living on the Eastern Steppe, in the Altai-Sayan region, which is where their creation of the landmasses myth comes from.
There's some disagreement about how to reconstruct the P-S word for "pants", including what the 2nd consonant is, probably cuz it was a regional wanderwort in ancient times, with several variants in circulation. One of those was Wa / Japonic "pakama", and one dialect of a southern Samoyedic language used this same word (with Uralic phonotactics squeezing out the 2nd vowel).
ReplyDeleteIt's more parsimonious to assume that this was a Wa / Japonic coinage, and Koibal borrowed it, rather than assuming that they both borrowed from some unknown 3rd source -- only posit 2 actors, rather than 3, unless necessary.
The main point, though, is that this is yet another crucial piece of evidence placing the ancestors of the Japanese smack dab in middle of the Sayan Mountains, before they left the mainland and entered the Japanese islands.
Moreover, it's another crucial piece of evidence that these Wa ancestors were horse-riders from the Eastern Steppe, who had a word for "pants" at the earliest stage of their language -- cuz that's what they wore.
The Japanese did not become pants-wearing horse-riders only during the Kofun era (4th - 6th C AD), when pants are attested in haniwa clay sculptures depicting people of the time. They were wearing pants, and had a word for pants, well back into the 1st millennium BC, when they were still roaming around the Eastern Steppe, with their home base in the Sayan Mountains.
Who would've thought that pants would be such a great big skeleton key unlocking so many secrets of the mist-enshrouded past? Students of horse-riding nomadism, that's who! ^_^
Let's figure out the etymology of P-J "pakama" = "pants", since the entry at Wiktionary is way off-base. The guess there is that it's a native Japanese compound, where "ma" is a vowel-shifted form of "mo" = "skirt-type clothing" that goes over the pants, and where "haka" is a vowel-shifted or irregular conjugation of the verb "haku" = "to pull onto the lower body, as in trousers".
ReplyDeleteWell, when there are 2 major irregularities in a single derivation, it's over. The "mo" to "ma" shift isn't totally unbelievable, but "haku" is definitely NOT an earlier verb which was later used to coin a compound for pants. The full word, "hakama" (rather, "pakama") appears in the earliest Japanese texts, of the 8th C AD. The verb does not.
So instead, the derivation went the other way -- the original word was "pakama", meaning "pants". Sometime later, during OJ, it was reanalyzed as a compound, tempted by the semi-similarity between "ma" and "mo", which is also an item of clothing for the lower body. But since "mo" wraps around like a skirt, then "ma" must be the kind of clothing that is pulled onto the legs. They took "haka" to be a modifier which referred to the "pulling onto the legs" method of getting dressed, and gave it the obligatory "-u" verb suffix, to coin a new verb "haku".
This verb "haku" is not listed as being in Okinawan, confirming it's a later derivation in Japanese only. Both of them have "hakama", from P-J "pakama", so it's the original form.
Ok, that's what it does *not* mean. What *does* it mean?