Non-Existent Books that I'd Like to Read

I'm reading Borges's Ficciones. Some of the stories there are about imaginary books. These are more thought experiments than books that anyone would ever write. And unfortunately they're boring thought experiments. But they did make me think about books that could be written and that I would love to read, but that, to the best of my knowledge, do not exist. They are much more pedestrian than the ones Borges wrote about.

1) A book about the origin of current international borders. Each chapter would cover an individual section of the border between two countries. If the section was drawn by a treaty, you'd get a description of the intrigues and motivations behind it. If it was drawn by a war, you'd get a discussion of why the armies involved stopped at that particular line and not at some other. This would be repeated for every section of every border in the world. I'd read it. I've been following the neocons' and Putin's struggle to partition the Ukraine since early last year and it's a fascinating process.

For example Mariupol, an overwhelmingly pro-Russian city of almost half a million people, could have been easily taken by the Novorossiyan Armed Forces last year. Why wasn't it? Rinat Akhmetov has factories there. He was pre-war Ukraine's richest man. The things that these factories produce have to be certified as having been made in the Ukraine, in Russia or in some other internationally-recognized country for them to be sold abroad. The Donetsk People's Republic isn't internationally recognized. So Akhmetov did not want Mariupol to become a part of it. His cooperation must have been valuable to Novorossiya in other matters because Borodai (the Donetsk prime minister at the time) has admitted that Mariupol was not liberated because Akhmetov was against it. At least this is the story I got from reading Yegor Prosvirnin. It does seem plausible to me.

2) A reference book on East Indian castes and caste-like groups. For each group you'd get a population estimate, geographic distribution, economic, occupational and emotional profiles, history, self-image, relations with other groups, demographic trends, genetics, languages spoken, typical physical appearance, typical surnames, etc. The Wikipedia does not have enough info on this and what it has isn't standardized.

I've been working with Indians for more than 15 years. It's a world of enormous complexity and, for outsiders, obscurity.

3) Grand novelistic epics about the high politics of major countries. You start with the country's founders - this could be Hengist and Horsa in England's case, Clovis in France's, Riurik in Russia's, etc. - and you continue till the present. A project like that would require many writers. It would have to be either run by governments (China could easily do that) or in an open source software type fashion with people submitting chapters and a Linus-like project head deciding what to keep and what to reject. For a very old country you could go for hundreds of volumes.

The chief source of drama would be the struggle to set policy and the main characters would be policy makers. I think that an all-seeing, God-like narrator would be appropriate. Nothing in such books should contradict current historical knowledge, though of course the writers could improvise where history is silent.

There have been examples of people writing series of books of that approximate type about relatively short historical periods - Colleen McCullough's and Dmitry Balashov's works come to mind. This guy writes on a millennial scale. But much larger collaborative epics - hundreds of volumes each - would be cooler.

Review of I, Claudius

I, Claudius by Robert Graves, 1934. Glossy's rating: 3.5 out of 10.

This book is a fictional autobiography. In the beginning an oracle tells the future Roman emperor Claudius, who was famous for his stammer, that 1,900 years later he would finally speak clearly. He interprets this as an injunction to write about himself.

There are many other prophesies in the book and their accuracy bothers me. The oracle also correctly predicts the exact number of years, months and days that Claudius would reign. Another prophesy foretells the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero in addition to Claudius's. An astrologer foresees the death of Jesus and the rise of Christianity. A couple of characters correctly predict when they will die. All of this suggests that Graves believed in the supernatural himself. How silly.

Any book about the late Roman Republic or the early Empire has to deal with Rome's gradual orientalization.

"Soon Rome would have forgotten what freedom meant and would fall at last under a tyranny as barbarous and arbitrary as those of the East."

My ideas about this were shaped by a 1916 article called "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire" by a man named Tenney Frank. He made a statistical analysis of the inscriptions on Roman tombs. The share of Greek names of them rose enormously with time, eventually surpassing 90%. The slaves that the Romans imported from the Middle East tended to have Greek names - a legacy of Alexander's conquest.

Another problem was that the original Roman aristocracy, which was of native stock, eventually stopped reproducing itself. Here Graves has Augustus ranting at a gathering of Roman knights:

"Would they, pray, explain why instead of sharing their beds with decent women of their own class and begetting healthy children on them, they squandered all their virile energy on greasy slave-girls and nasty Asiatic-Greek prostitutes?"

Frank blamed secularism for the fall in the native Roman birth rate. Ancient Greece and Rome were likely the first societies in history where people tried to reason for themselves about the fundamentals of human experience. Instinct and tradition evolved to keep us from going extinct. But what happens if we start questioning them?

"Morals were so loose now that nobody took marriage seriously any longer."

"As for children, who wanted them? They interfered with the lady’s health and amusement for several months before birth and, though she had a foster-mother for them immediately afterwards, it took time to recover from the wretched business of childbirth, and it often happened that her figure was ruined after having more than a couple."

The gradual replacement of native Romans with Middle Eastern slaves (from whom I am likely descended) had an enormous impact on Rome's political culture. A typically European republican setup with debates, term limits and elections was gradually replaced by a typically Middle Eastern one - the worship of an absolute ruler as a God. A typically European religion in which Gods had human flaws and weaknesses was replaced by a typically Middle Eastern one where God is as perfect and absolute as a typical Middle Eastern ruler claims to be.

Tenney Frank documented the disappearance of the great Roman noble houses with statistics. Graves does it here novelistically. Low birth rate was only a part of the problem. They were also killing each other at an unbelievable rate. The civil wars paused after Augustus came to power, but under the other emperors of his dynasty enormous numbers of upper and middle class Romans were killed by the state because they were suspected of wanting to restore the republic or usurp the monarchy or because the state wanted to seize their assets. Heads roll, veins are slashed and bodies fall on swords with great frequency on these pages.

For much of the book the apex predator is Livia, Augustus's wife, and her weapon of choice is poison. Since quite a few of the people she kills are young, noble or idealistic, it's natural for the reader to hate her. After a while Graves turns around and says that she was actually a just and capable administrator and that she killed to prevent civil war, i.e. for the common good. This is a perfectly valid literary device - a competent writer will occasionally confound the readers' assumptions of who's good and who's bad.

The only problem with it here is that the likelihood of a woman being motivated by something as abstract as justice and the common good is as low as the likelihood of astrologers correctly predicting the length of emperors' reigns. In politics, like elsewhere in life, women are almost exclusively interested and motivated by the personal.

I, Claudius gets better as it goes along and some of the deadpan humor with which Caligula's atrocities are related is even good. But for most of the book the style is turgid. A feminine topic (family drama) is presented here in a dry, pedantic male way. Neither of these things improves the other. If you're looking for a good historical novel, I would suggest that there are better ones out there.

My Politics

The thing I root for the most in politics is civilization. This isn't because I'm particularly civilized myself. Old fat guys root for pro sports teams staffed by young, athletic men, so why can't ignorant slobs like me root for science and high culture? You don't have to participate in something to wish it well.

I root for humanitarianism when it doesn't conflict with the advancement of civilization, which is the vast majority of the time.

I'm not nationalistic. I don't have anything against honest, non-violent nationalism in other people, but the main modern expressions of Jewish nationalism - Judaism, liberalism, neoconnery and Israeli nationalism - dissatisfy me.

I've never believed in God. I'm sure that religion in general is beneficial to society and individuals. Atheists don't breed. But I can't unknow basic science and the history of the major faiths. Self-deceit has to be unconscious. My thinking about religion moved up into the conscious sphere long ago.

Liberals deny important biological differences between races and genders, so their view of the world isn't any more factual than religion.

Neocons claim to be American patriots but it's obvious that they aren't. Again, I can't force myself to believe things that I consciously know to be false. Also, neocons use the might of the US government to attack people who haven't attacked them. They start new conflicts and escalate already-existing ones. All humanitarians should be opposed to them.

I wish that the Jewish state had been founded on a previously-uninhabited piece of land that the Zionists would have bought from a willing seller. But that's not how it happened.

Suppose that, determined to ditch my rootless cosmopolitanism, I was willing to excuse all of Israel's wars as self-defense, which some of them actually were. There would still be a problem.

The Israeli definition of Jewishness is essentially historico-religious. But Sephardic, Syrian, Iranian, Yemeni, etc. Jews aren't really my people. I've got nothing against them. But they aren't. And I didn't need any genetic studies to know this.

When they try to be funny, what comes out isn't Jewish humor, which is really just Ashkenazi humor. When they wink, smile, shrug their shoulders, snort, etc. it doesn't look how I and my relatives do it. All the subtle, hard to define but easy to feel commonality that exists within every real people on Earth is missing between me and non-Ashkenazi Jews.

It's natural for a man to want to excuse a lot of negative stuff for his people. But why should I excuse it for a country that's determined to assimilate my people into something different, something that will no longer feel like me? There's even more assimilation in the diaspora, but at least here I don't feel obligated to root for any wars. Humanitarianism IS important to me.


***

The biggest political event of my lifetime was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Westerners are sure that it was welcomed by everyone affected except for a few scoundrels at the top, but the opposite is actually true. The system was abolished from the top and most of the little people who remember it are nostalgic for it. Including me.

Pre-WWII USSR was horrible, but the popular Western view of the post-WWII version is entirely a product of wishful thinking and Cold War propaganda. The minority of former Soviet citizens who badmouth the late USSR mostly do it for ethno-nationalist reasons. This is similar to the Indian, Malaysian, Tanzanian, etc. attitude to the British Empire - "sure we're poorer and not as well-governed as we would have been under the Brits, but independence was worth it."

Well, I already described my attitude to nationalism and civilization. And there is no question in my mind that there was more civilization in the late USSR than in any of its modern successor states. More science and high culture, less crime, ethnic conflict and divorce, no drugs, advertising, gambling or prostitution.

My ideas of how societies should work are mostly taken from my memories of how the late USSR worked. Is it hypocritical to think that way while living in the United States? Yes, but I didn't think that way when I came here. I was a conventional liberal in my youth. And like most forty-year-olds I'm now tied down to where I am by a lot of things, both material and psychological. But yes, I acknowledge some hypocrisy.

A Few Thoughts on Practice

I've been playing the electronic piano almost every day for some time now. I do it at a very primitive level because I started late and have little natural talent for it. But it's fun nevertheless. 

Just like weekend golfers sometimes watch the majors on TV, I sometimes listen to famous pianists on YouTube. Would I be able to tell them apart if there was no video? No. They all sound equally great to me. Very rarely I think "he's going too fast" or "too slowly". Nothing more complicated than that criticism-wise. 

As everyone knows, YouTube always flanks the video you're watching with a column of related videos. If you're listening to a piano performance, some of the related videos will show other pianists playing the same piece, some will show the same pianist playing different pieces and some will show the pianist talking about his work or whatever. I've got low attention span, so I click related videos all the time. 

A while ago I noticed something. Daniel Barenboim, one of the most famous piano players and conductors of our time, speaks a surprisingly large number of languages. Here he is giving an interview in German. Here he is speaking French, Italian, English and his native Spanish. And here he is giving a speech in Hebrew. I remember someone saying, in a YouTube comment I think, that he once heard Barenboim talk to his half-Russian kids in Russian at an outdoor cafe. Unfortunately I did not find any videos of the maestro speaking Russian on YouTube.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always assumed that top-level piano playing works a lot like golf, tennis, chess or ballet. Meaning that success in it requires two things: a very high level of natural talent and an enormous amount of practice. Having just one of those things will make you a mediocrity in the field because there will always be some people with both talent and work ethic. And they will overtake you if you're missing either one of them.

Since millions of kids start paying the piano every year, the best players of their generation presumably have levels of natural talent and hours of practice that are very close the maximum attainable by humans. And, if sports is any guide, the performance level at the very top would be similar. Even at their peaks Federer and Tiger Woods routinely lost big tournaments to rivals.   

So how could Barenboim have had time to learn five foreign languages? I see two possibilities:

1) Perhaps the maximum amount of piano practice one can do in a day is not the same thing as the maximum amount of practice in general that one can do in the same period. I doubt that over long stretches of time anyone practices any musical instrument (or any sport) more than, say, six hours a day. Why do people stop? Mental fatigue. There is a maximum level of monotony that each person can take. Obviously it's lower for lazy people than for hard-working ones, but everyone has a limit.

Perhaps after maxing out one's ability to continue practicing the piano one can practice something else. Would it break the monotony just as well as vegetating in front of the TV? Probably not, but it could still break it. And maybe that's what Barenboim did. By the way, his English, German, French and Italian (I can't judge Hebrew) are accented, though very fluent. That means that he must have mostly learned them after the age of 13. Which is more difficult than learning languages in childhood.

2) High-level language study (and fluency in 5 foreign languages is very high-level) can be fundamentally different from high-level music learning. You can't get good at the piano without effort. I think it IS possible to learn languages without much effort, just by talking to people. I'm a big nerd, so I mostly learn languages by reading. That does take effort. But a naturally-talkative person could probably learn them without it feeling like practice at all. 

If I had to guess, I would pick a combination of 1) and 2) in Barenboim's case. 

The Most Archaic Slavic Language

Everyone who is interested in linguistics knows that Lithuanian is the most archaic modern Indo-European language, that Icelandic is the most archaic modern Germanic language and that Sardinian is the most archaic modern Romance language. These facts are frequently stated anywhere that European historical linguistics is discussed. But what about the Slavic languages?

A few months ago I decided to look for online discussions covering the question of which modern Slavic language is closest to proto-Slavic. This is the most thorough such discussion that I found.

The most knowledgeable poster in that thread seemed to be ahvalj, who hailed from St. Petersburg. He argued for the "it's really, really complicated" position. And he brought up a lot of really complicated examples to support it. Some modern Slavic languages have relatively archaic conjugation systems, others have relatively archaic vowel systems, others have relatively archaic declension systems, etc. There's no non-arbitrary way to say which feature of a language is more important. And proto-Slavic is an imprecise reconstruction anyway.

"As we can see, no modern Slavic language approaches the sounding of the late Common Slavic of the 6th century. Very-very approximately, for purely introductory purposes, I would say it sounded as something between Slovak, Lithuanian and Latvian." 

By the way, everyone is very sure that Lithuanian is the most archaic modern Indo-European language even though proto-Indo-European has got to be a much more imprecise reconstruction than proto-Slavic. So one lesson I'm taking away from this is that, with the possible exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, the various Slavic languages have changed to roughly the same amount since they split.

Then a Bulgarian poster named Christo Tamarin proposed an experiment:

Text. The oldest texts in Slavic are Gospels, presumably of the end of the 9th century. Select an excerpt of a Gospel in Old Slavonic (preserving original vocalization, the older one than Church Slavonic). Avoid commonly known texts (such as Matthew 6:9).
Speaker. Assign a person who can read the selected text. Should not be native Slav. Make an agreemant about the exact pronunciation keeping it as conservative as possible. Also, make an agreemant about the speed of reading.
Public. Native speakers of all modern Slavic languages which are considered. Exclude those related to the religion (they could know the text by heart). Exclude those related to lingustics. Exclude those fluent in more than one Slavic languages.
Experiment. The speaker reads the text. Each person of the public writes down the translation into his/her native language. 
Appraisal. Exact translation will be appreciated and scored.
My expectations. The Russian team wins. Russian is the most conservative. The Macedonian team qualifies last. Macedonian is the most innovative.

To which ahvalj replied:

Russian is conservative in the sense that it has largely preserved the Church Slavonic vocabulary, so indeed, a Russian speaker will win in your experiment, but other aspects of the Russian language will be averagely advanced, some more, some less, plus the Church Slavonic vocabulary is not Common Slavic, and a great deal of these words never existed outside the Orthodox tradition. 

I was surprised that Russian was even in the running. I guess I expected Polish to be the most archaic. It probably had the least amount of non-Slavic influence upon it historically.

I didn't take into account the conservational effects of Old Church Slavonic liturgy (Polish liturgy was in Latin) and of Russia's remoteness. Why are Icelandic, Lithuanian and Sardinian so archaic? Because they are remote. The medieval Novgorodian dialect was archaic for the same reason and I guess that logic also applies to Russian in general.

With Apologies to Three Dog Night

This is awful, but I just couldn't resist:

Jebediah was a Bushman.
He warred with Hillary.
I never could believe a single word he said,
But she's even worse than he.

Woe to the world!
They'll drone more boys and girls.
They'll nuke all the fishes in the deep blue sea.
Woe to you and me!

Here's the original song and here are its lyrics.

23 and ME!

A few months ago I got tested by 23AndMe. Here are the results:

I'm not surprised that I'm almost entirely Jewish. I look like my parents, who identify as Jews. And they look like their parents, who were also Jews. What surprised me is how good technology has gotten at this. The precision level is 0.1%, yet East Asian, Sub-Saharan and Amerindian categories are still 0%. Which they undoubtedly are in my actual genome, but I guess I expected the test to produce more random noise.

I wonder how many people of my background get more than 99% Ashkenazi. Does anybody get more than 99.5%? That could shed some light on the question of whether or not the 1.7% of my ancestry that's not Ashkenazi represents real admixture into the Ashkenazi gene pool after it was established or, alternatively, definitional fuzziness. All of this 1.7% comes from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. I assume that it would be much easier to neatly fence off, say, the Ashkenazi and Korean genetic categories than the Ashkenazi and the "broadly Middle Eastern" one.

I've read that latest research shows us to be an almost 50/50 mix of Middle Easterners and Europeans, and that the European portion comes mostly from Italy. This makes historical sense. Jews could have come to the center of the Roman Empire to do business. Or they could have been brought there as slaves or prisoners of war (often the same thing in antiquity) after one of their failed revolts against Roman authority.

However, I don't think that in terms of personality we're more like Italians than we are like Greeks, Spaniards, Lebanese, Armenians or other Mediterranean peoples. The things that distinguish Italians from other Mediterraneans - an amazing feeling for visual beauty, a deep concern for the culinary arts - are very different from the things that distinguish the Ashekenazim from them, things like bookishness and neuroticism. Word and image, anxiety and confidence: pretty different things. So if tomorrow it turned out that the early studies were wrong and that we aren't part-Italian after all, I would not be surprised.

Another thing that recurs in the studies of Ashkenazi genetics is that there's relatively little genetic variation among us. That may well be true, but there's definitely a lot of visual variation. I have a feeling that outsiders underestimate its size because the only times they think "that guy must be Jewish" is when the guy in question looks really, really Jewish. A lot of Jews don't. I don't, yet look at the screenshot above. Based on a lifetime of observation I would say that the amount of facial variation among the Ashkenazim isn't lower than among the average Middle Eastern or European ethnicity.

23AndMe asked me hundreds of questions after I signed up with them. Do I have astigmatism, do I exercise more than once a week, have I ever had kidney stones, etc. They're obviously tabulating the responses against people's genomes. Sadly, the rules of PC would not allow them to ask folks to measure their nasal and cranial indices, orbital heights, head circumferences or anything of that sort. Lots of fascinating data is not being collected.

Colonel Cassad's Predictions

I still follow the war between Novorossiya and the Ukraine daily. I figured out early on that the best source of public info on this subject is a guy named Boris Rozhin who blogs as Colonel Cassad. Not all of his predictions have come true, just a larger share than other commenters'. He runs an organization that supplies humanitarian aid to Novorossiya, so he visits the war zone and talks to the military and civilian authorities there. This gives him inside info. On the big-picture level he whole-heartedly supports Novorossiya, but he seems unbiased about the day-to-day happenings of the war. If both sides are claiming that they're holding some town or hill and you want to know who is BSing, Cassad is the guy to read. He calls the Novorossiyan officers on the ground and interprets their statements in a way that's usually confirmed after the fog of war blows away.

Cassad regularly makes medium-term predictions. In the summer of last year many pro-Russian observers thought that the Kremlin had betrayed Novorossiya and that the junta would soon win. Cassad always argued against this. He was the first pro-Russian commenter I'm aware of who hinted at the participation of the Russian military in the war - this was when the junta's troops were trapped along the Russian border last summer. He confidently predicted that the first Misnk ceasefire agreement would be broken. It was, but quite a bit later than he first thought. When the second Minsk agreement was signed Cassad said that it would be broken by early April. He was again wrong about the date, but only time will show if he was right about the bigger issue of whether or not that settlement is permanent.

He had a question and answer session with his readers yesterday. Here are his current predictions:

The frontline will move again in 2015. It hasn't since February, when Novorossiya captured Debaltsevo and the second Minsk agreement was signed.

New people's republics will appear in the Ukraine. The most likely ones will be in Kharkov and Odessa.

The Donbass will not return to the Ukraine, at least not while Putin is in power in Moscow.

Cassad does not know when the war will end, just that it won't be in 2015.

He also stated that the war killed between 300 and 350 people in June alone - much more than I would have thought.

Review of Rousseau's Confessions

Les Confessions (Confessions) by Jean-Jacque Rousseau, 1765 - 1770. Read in French. Glossy's rating: 3 out of 10.

Rousseau's Confessions give a pretty good idea of the kind of person he was: a grumpy, wimpy nerd who enjoyed being humiliated. So why did I finish this book? At a far enough remove almost any work becomes mostly about its time, and I find history interesting. Les Confessions can give a modern reader an intuitive feel for relations between Protestants and Catholics, intellectuals and their benefactors, hookers and johns, Frenchmen and Italians and many other kinds of persons of its time.

For example, I was fascinated by the extent to which Rousseau, a French-speaking citizen of the city-state of Geneva, considered himself non-French. Whenever he wrote that the French had a way of making him feel this or that, I wanted to shout at him, Elaine Benes-like, "YOU'RE French!" While describing his sojourns in the Venetian Republic and in the southern portion of the Kingdom of Savoy he had no problem calling the locals Italians. This must have been partly because distance increases our desire to generalize, but also because the existence of a state called France made the popular 18th-century understanding of Frenchness more legalistic and bureaucratic than the popular understanding of Germanness or Italianness.

Unlike the bulk of the French, the Genevans of that time were Protestants. The Reformation arose as a Germanic reaction to typically Mediterranean political corruption and inequality. Scandinavia, the most Germanic region of all, accepted Luther's ideas so enthusiastically that hardly anyone there was killed over them. The most culturally Mediterranean regions of the West (Italy and Iberia) rejected these do-gooder reforms with no less zeal. Most of the violence occurred in the middle of the Med-Nord continuum, in the areas that could have conceivably gone either way. And it makes perfect sense that there was more enthusiasm for the Reformation among the Czechs than among the Poles - the Czechs are genetically and emotionally more like Germans than the Poles are.

With all of that in mind I expected Genevans, pillars of French-speaking protestantism, to sound somewhat Germanic. But Rousseau didn't. There was a typically French sensuality in his tendency to analyze the minutia of feeling. And he displayed the generally Mediterranean liking for hyperbole, invariably telling the reader that no one had ever felt as thankful, betrayed, lonely, in love, etc. as he did during whatever episode he happened to be describing at the moment.

The early portions of this book feature a lot of regret over missed chances with women. Why do men obsess over those much more than we do about missed chances to get rich or professionally successful, which, if realized, would have naturally led to, among other things, increased popularity with women? I guess men, even rich ones, don't like to admit to themselves how important money and power are in the romantic sphere. We'd rather be loved for ourselves than for our status or possessions.

The most aberrant feature of Rousseau's sexuality and of his psychological makeup in general was his need to be humiliated by women. He was normally too embarrassed to flat-out ask them to spank him, so that particular fetish of his was only satisfied by a couple of females early on in his life. In adulthood the usual outlets for his pathology were inviting women to boss him around and constantly asking them for forgiveness for various slights. He admitted that these were poor strategies for attracting female attention, but was simply unable to change himself.

There's no doubt in my mind that both the nature of this book (confessing to poor behavior is humiliating) and the wimpiness of Rousseau's philosophy had their roots in this aspect of his personality, which already began to express itself in his childhood.

He was't latently gay though:

"She was very thin, very fair and with a chest as flat as my hand. That defect alone would have been enough to freeze me; for neither my heart nor my sense have ever been able to think of one without breasts as a woman."

And he was utterly disgusted as well as morally outraged by the few homosexual advances he received in his youth. Two of those happened in Lyon, contributing to his judgement that that city was subject to "the most dreadful corruption in all of Europe". I wonder how true this actually was.

In general it's a lot of fun to quote giants of the Enlightenment being epically illiberal by modern standards. With regard to an organization that only accepted aristocrats ("gentilhommes") and doctors of the Sorbonne as members Rousseau wrote that "If there is one justifiable source of pride besides personal merit, it's that which is derived from birth." I fully agree.

Much of the pleasure of reading a book like this comes from things said in passing which only started to sound remarkable with time. For example at one point, while surreptitiously drinking his employer's wine, Rousseau realizes that it would probably go down a little better with food.

"But how could a fine gentleman with a sword at his side go to a baker's to buy a hunk of bread?"

Think about THAT next time you go to the store. And he was working as a tutor then, practically a domestic. And was a son of a watchmaker.

While describing his stint as a junior tax official he mentions in a very matter-of-fact way that he was working 8-hour days. Was that normal for office workers at the time? If so, where and in what period did that practice originate? When 19th-century industrial workers fought for an 8-hour day, were they simply demanding to be treated like bureaucrats?

I found it interesting that Rousseau called an acquaintance who was born in Surinam an "Américain". He also talked about an uncle of his who left Geneva for Carolina ("Caroline") to help build Charlestown, for which he drew up a plan. And given my background I can't resist mentioning Rousseau's passing reference to a Genevan of his acquaintance who had once been employed by Peter the Great ("Pierre le Grand") "at the court of Russia."

The number of clergy in ancien régime France was simply stunning. When Rousseau strikes up a conversation with a random stranger, half the time it turns out be a priest or an abbé. The proportion of clerics among his neighbors, another mostly random category, seems scarcely lower. Yet the society described wasn't exactly prudish. Adultery and prostitution flourished.

The most shocking to modern Western sensibilities episode involves the purchase by Rousseau and a friend of an 11 or 12-year-old girl from her mother. This happened in Venice. The two men planned to raise the girl for future use as their exclusive disease-free concubine. In the age of syphilis prostitution carried enormous risks, and this was one strategy for avoiding them. Rousseau left Venice before the plan produced results.

By the time he started working on his autobiography Rousseau's writings and music had already made him an international celebrity. Wealthy, aristocratic people competed with each other to become his benefactors. Yet Complaints would have been a much more apt title for this volume than Confessions. Sure, his books were occasionally burned and he was exiled from a few places. But that seems to have only raised his reputation in others. And you've got to expect some conflict if you're going to write about politics.

He described an endless stream of eye-glazingly boring squabbles and grudges in the most excruciating detail while regularly repeating that he was the most uncomplaining man who had ever lived and that he was constitutionally unable to remember any wrongs that anyone had ever done him.

The end feels sad. I don't think old age necessarily has to be a swamp of defeat, depression, and extreme irritability, but if you suspect that it does, it would probably be a good idea to skip this book.

The War in the Ukraine

For the last few months I've been spending at least a couple of hours a day following events in the Ukraine. I'll start this post with a summary of the players and their motivations.

Putin is very much not a Russian nationalist. He started his political life as a Soviet patriot. It's easy to see why such a person would have been attracted to the KGB. He now governs as a patriot of the multiethnic Russian state. In comparison Western presidents and prime ministers are neither ethnonationalists nor patriots of their multiethnic states. The ideology now reigning in the West condemns both of those things.

The February coup in Kiev threatened the interests of both the Russian ethnos and of the Russian state. Predictably, Putin only reacted to the latter set of threats. The Russian ethnos was threatened with further Ukrainiazation. It was clear that the new government would redouble its efforts to reeducate ethnic Russians living in the Ukraine into identifying as Ukrainians, speaking Ukrainian, accepting West Ukrainian cultural heroes and hating Russians. Not being an ethnonationalist, Putin was not particularly concerned by that.

The military and therefore political clout of the Russian state was threatened by the possibility of the eviction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea and by the possibility of the entry of all of the Ukraine into NATO. Putin quickly sprung into action on the first of those fronts. He annexed the Crimea, saving the fleet. And he will do his best to prevent the Ukraine's entry into NATO.

The neocons hate Russians and Ukrainians equally, but they are supporting Ukrainians, more specifically West Ukrainian nationalists, in this fight. This is because both the Ukrainian ethnos and the Ukrainian state are smaller and weaker than their Russian counterparts. If you're aligned against many opponents, you'd rather see them fight each other than unite with each other to fight you. And if you're playing divide and rule, you have to support the weaker enemy against the stronger one. If the stronger one wins, the internecine fighting will stop. The neocons don't want that.

West Ukrainian nationalists would like to continue their Ukrainization campaign. Hitler famously wanted to change the human hardware in the Ukraine, i.e. the people themselves. Ukrainian nationalists mostly just want to change the software. Unlike Hitler, they consider Russians to be suitable raw material for their nationalist project. They just want to brainwash them into identifying as Ukrainians. This item on the West Ukrainian nationalist wishlist is quite compatible with the neocon program of divide and rule. Ukrainization decreases the size of the larger of the two ethni whom the neocons want to fight each other. Ceteris paribus a less lopsided fight can be expected to produce more fighting than a more lopsided one.

Like all nationalists, the West Ukrainian kind would like to improve the standard of living of their people. And again, like all nationalists, they favor cultural conservatism for their own. This is sharply at variance with the neocon program for the Ukraine. The economy will not improve while oligarchs continue to loot the country. The neocons want the oligarchs to have even more power. And of course the neocons are extremely inimical to social conservatism for anyone but themselves. Since West Ukrainian nationalists are weaker than the neocons, the things which they want but which the neocons do not want are not being achieved. In summary, West Ukrainian nationalists are a junior partner in the alliance, little more than dumb tools.

Russian ethnonationalists (as opposed to the patriots of the Russian multiethnic state) see Ukrainization as a major threat. Millions of their people are being reeducated into becoming their bitter enemies. A major goal of Russian nationalism is the gathering of all the lands which are primarily populated by ethnic Russians (a category into which they include Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Belorussians) into the Russian state. I think that Strelkov, the commander of the most prominent group of armed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, is primarily motivated by that goal.

Putin doesn't share that goal. On top of that he is actively hostile to Russian nationalists. He has jailed large numbers of them over the years because he thinks that they threaten interethnic peace in Russia. Nationalists have hated him for a long time because he has not stopped the influx of Muslim migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus into Russian cities, especially Moscow. They now also hate him for his relative lack of support for Russian Spring, the ongoing revolt in Eastern Ukraine.

His material support has so far been either non-existent or very tepid. I would not be surprised if it turned out that Strelkov's group came to Slavyansk on its own, without an authorization from anyone in the Russian government. It seems that their strategy was to start a fight and then wait for public opinion in Russia to force Putin to support them against Russophobe West Ukrainians and their oligarch and neocon sponsors.

How can this conflict develop and how would this affect the major players in it?

Scenario 1: A seemingly interminable, multi-year war in Eastern Ukraine. This will surely send a very large number of refugees into Russia. Perhaps millions. They will have to be housed and fed and they will be angry at Putin for not having defended their homes in Eastern Ukraine by intervening the way he did in the Crimea. So this is not a desirable direction for him. It is for the neocons though. Divide and rule, enemies fighting each other. West Ukrainian nationalists would lose some of the people whose children they were trying to convert into being enthusiastic Ukrainians, and the land itself would still be in dispute. So they wouldn't be happy with a prolonged war.

Scenario 2: A military defeat of the Novorossian insurgents. This will probably produce more corpses than the first scenario. There have been reports of organized massacres, mostly of adult men, in the couple of small towns that were taken by the Ukrainian side so far. It's scary to extrapolate that to the entire Donbass region. Plus there will be a very large number of refugees flowing into Russia.

A lot of people in Russia will blame Putin's lack of support for the massive death toll and for the indignity of defeat. The neocons have tried to organize a color revolution in Moscow before and they'll definitely try it again. If Novorossia is bloodily defeated, many Russians (a number exceeding that of conscious ethnonanationalists) will not see much difference between Putin and a neocon-sponsored alternative. I think Putin would still be better, but many, including people in uniform (I'm talking about the rank and file) would become indifferent to his fate. Without public support he could be overthrown like Yanukovich. So this is probably a very bad scenario for Putin.

Due to the violence perpetrated by the most hot-headed in their ranks and due to refugee flows West Urainian nationalists would lose some raw material for making new West Ukrainians. But they will have victory. That's always worth a lot. The neocons and the oligarchs will gloat from the owner's box.

Scenario 3: With a lot of help from Putin the insurgents throw the Ukrainian army out of the Donbass. The refugees would go back. Putin would escape the stench of defeat. Russian ethnonationalists would be emboldened by the victory to go further into southeastern Ukraine, to start a reunification-with-Russia movement in Belarus and to kick Central Asians and Caucasus natives out of Moscow and other historically-Russian cities. As I said before, in spite of being ethnically Russian Putin has always been hostile to Russian nationalists. So there are negatives for him in this scenario. Of course he could change. Stalin made a turn in the nationalist direction and he wasn't even Russian.

Obvioulsy, scenario 3 would be quite bad for the neocons and especially for Ukrainian nationalists.

Scenario 4: A full-scale Russian intervention. Maybe I'm biased, but I think that this choice would produce the fewest deaths of all. The Ukrainian army would offer only token resistance. Many units will surrender. If the Russian army does not go into Western or Central Ukraine (and it shouldn't), there will be no lengthy terrorist campaign afterwards. Those need support from the population. Who would want to hide Right Sector guys in Donetsk or Kharkov? NATO wouldn't fight Russian troops directly because it's afraid of MAD. The Russian economy will be hurt by new sanctions, but public mood will shoot up to the stratosphere anyway due to victory. Europe will simply be hurt by sanctions, and it's already in bad shape. Some Euro governments might even flip to the Russian side due to economic unrest.

Neocons and Ukrainian nationalists would be reduced to impotent rage. Georgians sided with the neocons in the 08/08/08 war and are widely seen to have lost. If West Ukrainians end up being seen by the international community in the same light, the supply of groups that are willing to side with the neocons against Russia, China, Iran or any of their other rivals will decrease.

So why hasn't Putin pursued scenario 4? I could be wrong about some of my assumptions here. Obviously, he has thousands of times more info than I do. He might be unwilling to embolden Russian nationalists. Or maybe he thinks that Scenario 4 is the only one in which any part of the Ukraine could be admitted to NATO. I'm not hearing any noises about NATO admission at the moment. Maybe that's because the neocons know that if they do it, Putin will definitely intervene, simply to take away from NATO as much of the Ukraine as he can, in other words as much of the Ukraine as Russia can take without creating a long-term terrorist problem for itself. But if he makes the first move (intervention), NATO will swallow up the west and center of the Ukraine in response. Which will weaken the position of the Russian state, the thing that Putin cares about most.

Of course there could be other reasons that I'm not seeing.