Arnold Schwarzenegger

Schwarzenegger’s messages are almost always clear and to the point. This talk on fascism is no exception.

I found this thanks to the Daily Kos.

Why Purim upsets me

I first heard of Purim while serving in Gafsa, Tunisia, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a lycée (high school).

Gafsa still had 13 Jewish families at the time - 1965 - and another Peace Corps teacher had a Jewish student that I knew slightly.

One day I learned that the Jewish students weren’t in school because they were celebrating Purim.

The Story of Purim

Not knowing anything about this story, I opened my Bible and read The Book of Esther. Here’s what I learned, in brief:

The King of Persia ruled over different groups of people. The villain in the Book of Esther belongs to the Amaleks. The original Amalekites were those who attacked the Israelites as they fled from Egypt, cutting down the weakest and most vulnerable stragglers. Meanwhile, the villain of the Purim story, who plots a genocide of Persia’s Jews, is Haman the “Agagite,” a descendent of Amalek.

Haman got permisssion from the king to destroy all the Jews in Persia. The Jews would have all been killed if the king had not fallen in love with Esther.

I’m glad that the King spared the Jews from Haman’s hatred. That strikes me as worthy of celebration during Purim.

The problem for me is that the king does not simply cancel the decree calling for the genocide of the Jews; instead, he authorizes them to fight back. Over the course of two days, the newly-empowered Jews slay 75,000 of their enemies.

I could understand the idea of killing people who threaten you, but didn’t understand how the Jews in Gafsa would celebrate the killing of the Arabs in Gafsa, which is how it felt to me although no one ever said that. This is about my feelings.

Reclaiming Purim from the supremacists

The following are excerpts from an anti-Purim article that I found online. It is written by a Jew. I believe that this supports my feeling that Purim does celebrate and, in fact, encourages violence against non-Jews.

On Feb. 25, 1994, the American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, armed with a rifle. He opened fire on the hundreds of Palestinian Muslim worshippers, murdering 29 and injuring over 100 before the survivors overpowered him.

The timing of the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre wasn’t incidental: it took place on Purim, the Jewish holiday celebrating the averted annihilation of the Jews of ancient Persia by the evil royal vizier Haman. Hours after the massacre, in synagogues across the land, congregations concluded the special Purim Torah reading with a verse from the Book of Exodus declaring “a war for the Lord against Amalek from generation to generation.” Many of Goldstein’s far-right allies suggested he was doing just that, presenting the ethno-nationalist massacre of an occupied people as an act of holy war.

In the years since the Goldstein massacre, Jewish children have dressed as Goldstein for the Hebron Purim day parade, where settlers dance through the streets, spray paint Stars of David across the city like threats, and chant “Death to Arabs” while the city’s Palestinian residents are forcibly confined to their homes. People visit Goldstein’s grave — located in Meir Kahane Park of Kiryat Arba, the settlement next to Hebron inhabited by many of the most extreme Israeli settlers — as a type of pilgrimage. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a fellow Kahanist from Kiryat Arba, only recently took down a portrait of Goldstein from his living room wall.

Many settlers have used biblical language to frame Goldstein’s act of violence. They have conflated him with Mordechai, the hero of the Purim story, who was pivotal in averting the Jews’ destruction, and commemorated him as a symbol of the destruction of “Amalek.”

A pogrom to destroy Amalek

While Haman is the last explicit mention of these people in the Tanakh, the motif of Amalek recurs throughout Jewish history. Rabbinic literature and later mystical traditions render their name synonymous with a mythic, existential enemy: a nation that preys on the weak and is utterly committed to the destruction of the Jewish people.

Jews have since ascribed the label of “Amalek” to Romans, Nazis, and many oppressors in between. In the Torah, Jews are commanded to wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens; the only way to avert Jewish destruction, the thinking goes, is to destroy Amalek first. And today, settlers and leading Israeli politicians routinely ascribe this label to Palestinians; just last weekend, settler groups called for a follow-up pogrom in Huwara to “wipe out the name of Amalek” by destroying the village.

I was a Programmer Who Swore Constantly

Abstract

One of the most fundamental unanswered questions that has been bothering mankind during the Anthropocene is whether the use of swearwords in open source code is positively or negatively correlated with source code quality. To investigate this profound matter we crawled and analysed over 3800 C open source code containing English swearwords and over 7600 C open source code not containing swearwords from GitHub. Subsequently, we quantified the adherence of these two distinct sets of source code to coding standards, which we deploy as a proxy for source code quality via the SoftWipe tool developed in our group. We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.

PDF and discussion found here

I perceive new things as my nerves slow down

I walked into our living room just now holding a check in my right hand to ask my wife if she had an envelope. She said she did and started walking to her office.

I passed the check from my right hand to my left and took a step to follow her.

An instant later I felt something in my right hand and turned my head to see what it was. It was then that I realized that the message telling me that the check had left my right hand had just reached my conscious brain.

I don’t think I would have noticed that sort of thing while younger.

B&N’s new president

Ted Gioio has an interesting article on substack: What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?. He claims that B&N is doing surprisingly well since “[James] Daunt was put in charge of Barnes & Noble in August 2019.”

The bookstore business since 1976, as I see it

We all miss the bookstores of old, small places whose owners were former English majors or people with specialized interests such as sci fi. Pre-Internet, we had few other ways to find books that might interest us. (Libraries helped, of course.) Many stores could simply stock their shelves with good books and people would come.

In 1976 I got a job as a publisher’s rep for St Martin’s Press. My job was to educate myself about St Martin’s books for the upcoming season and then go out and meet with book buyers for independent bookstores in DC, MD, PA, western NY state and eastern Ohio. I learned a lot about telephone books, maps, bookstores and motels. (BTW, my sales manager seemed perfectly happy with the way I worked. I told my buyers what books St Martin’s was going to promote each season and encouraged them to buy a few or take advantage of available ad money if they wished. Buyers liked my approach. One buyer in Rochester panicked my by pushing her order sheet over to me and telling me to fill in her order!)

In 1976 B&N was a fabulous bookstore on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I especially loved it because it had a basement of textbooks as well as upper floors of trade books.

1976 was also the year that Kramerbooks, one of DC’s most serious and prestigious bookstores, located a couple of blocks from the White House, opened a much smaller bookstore with a café near Dupont Circle.
Every book buyer I met wanted to know what I thought of Afterwords and find out how they were doing. Answer: very well.

In addition to Afterwords, bookstores everywhere were experimenting with ways to increase their business.

• Special orders. These are usually not profitable, but they build loyalty and traffic.
• Work with schools to bring students to stores
• Author readings
• Play areas for children
• And, of course, cafés

And we should never forget that bookstores have always provided refuge from our urban landscapes.

It’s fashionable in my circles to disparage B&N, as Gioio does when he criticises B&N’s book selection and coffee. I disagree with those friends.

I see B&N as a company that saw how bookstores could apply all these new methods to get people into stores buying books on a grand scale.

Ted Gioio must be young because he’s apparently unaware of the fact that pre-Amazon B&N stores had fabulous, deep inventories. Moreover they brought books to many places in America where people had no bookstores or didn’t patronize them. I’ll never forget driving from New Orleans, where I had sold books to a wonderful bookstore in the French Quarter, and stopping at a phone booth in Metairie, LA, to look for bookstores in that city of half a million residents. They had one Logos (i.e., not a real bookstore) and a B&N. Good on B&N for being there.

BTW, Gioio seems to believe that people want to buy good books in order to read them. If he’d ever been in the book business he’d know that about 2/3 of bookstore sales come at - you guessed it - Xmas! That’s why we sales reps worked hardest during the summer to make sure that bookstores had the books that would sell and keep them in business later in the year. (Many of the books I sold in the summer didn’t arrive until late in the year.) I’ll never forget selling 2000 copies of James Harriet’s book, All Things Wise and Wonderful to a department store in Philadelphia; you can be sure that all of them sold.

B&N has suffered immensely from Internet sales, of course. Giono condescendingly remarks that “… the digital age caught the company by surprise” as if B&N was unique in that regard. They weren’t the only bookstores to suffer. In hindsight, we can join Gioio in criticizing the reduced book inventory and all the cards, gifts etc. that replaced them, but are we all certain that we could do a better job?

I do agree with Gioio that James Daunt sounds fantastic. B&N wasn’t the only corporation that didn’t listen to employees or allow them to guide a business, but it sounds as if it’s one of the few to do something to rectify the culture. More power to ’em! I can’t wait to go visit our local B&N and see if I notice any difference.

(Local B&N websites don’t seem to work, but that could be my so-called security at work. Or it could be Daunt at work.)

• ge

Learning French with the FSI Method

In late summer of 1964 I entered Peace Corps training in Carbondale, Illinois.

What I want to describe here is the greatest learning experience of my life: learning to speak French.

The trainers at Carbondale use the Foreign Service Institute’s training materials.

We learned in small groups of around 6 volunteers. This was an optimal size for learning our dialogs.

Each lesson began by memorizing a dialog in French. We were told what the dialog said. This might have been in English, pantomime, etc., I don’t remember. The point however is that we were not shown how the dialog was written in French. I’m forever grateful for this because if I’d seen the written dialog, it would have taken me much longer to learn to hear and pronounce it correctly.

The first dialog

Here is the first dialog that we learned:

Notice that the dialog has two participants, perfect for learning back-and-forth oral dialogs. We repeated the dialogs over and over until we reached a satisfactory point.

Although we could repeat the dialogs, sometimes after a whole morning of work, we still didn’t understand how the words were written or the sentence’s syntax. But we could repeat the words.

I’ve circled the last line in the first page of the dialog: « Je suis heureux de faire votre connaissance, Mademoiselle. » We will see it again soon.

The exercises

Now the real learning began. Each sentence in the dialog was used in oral exercises that taught us to internalize its syntax. It did this by substituting new words, transforming the sentences, etc.

Here’s how we began to internalize the syntax of the sentence we saved above:

The teacher would walk us through this exercise, explaining the pronunciation and meaning of each word. We did this over and over again until our brains learned that we were dealing with two entities:

Subject + copulative verb + « de faire votre connaissance »

In other words, we learned a bit of grammar here without being taught “grammar”.

You can hear what the teacher did in this recording of drill Lexical A-1. About 14 seconds into the recording, you will hear the exercise. You will hear a prompt followed by a pause for the student to replace Je suis heureux in the example sentence. Finally the woman’s voice gives the correct answer.

We did this for 5 hours per day (I can’t remember if we did it on weekends) for 11 weeks. It should have been longer, but the school year had already begun in Tunisia and we had to get going ASAP.

We also had language lab each day after class.

What I learned in those 11 weeks

At the end of training I had internalized most French grammar except for the subjunctive, which I never learned well, or the passé simple, which is rarely used in spoken French but is usually easy to understand when reading. My vocabulary was still small and my pronunciation was very heavily accented. (It took a “zen” moment in front of a class of 45 Arab students to make me realize that I had to learn to pronounce the French “u”. Another story.)

What I don’t understand.

Think about this method. At the end of each exercise, I knew how to say a little bit more French than before. Everything that I said in the exercises was correct French.

I’m puzzled by language learning methods that emphasize immersion because in Tunisia I learned to make myself understood in Arabic, very bad Arabic. Once I made myself understood, I had internalized a mistake. Why would I want to learn mistakes?

As far as I can tell the FSI method was never used extensively. I think it may be used at the Monterrey Language School in California, and I’d love to have the year needed to learn Arabic there. It is very labor-intensive. Nevertheless, it should be available.

I will say that even the FSI’s own Spanish course is not as well done as the French one. I never learned to make myself u