Gregg R Thomas

Jake,

I just checked and English and Arabic don’t belong to the same family, so they are put together very differently.  English and Hindi are in the same family.

The root system sounds a lot like Sanskrit.  Many of the Sanskrit roots exist in English, like the sc- sound for cutting, e.g., scar, scythe, scissors; and str- for long thin things l…[Read more]

Jake – ruby, rust, russet.  In Europe we’re surrounded by a bunch of related languages, all with the same roots.

Apparently though Finnish is a strange outlier that doesn’t bear any relation to the other European languages.  According to Wikipedia it’s Uralic rather than Indo-European in its family.  I went to Norway for 10 days once, and they se…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Is this lack of evidence about danger to Jews in America? You’ll want to tell that to the Jews in Boulder, CO, the Israelis in Washington, D.C, and PA Governor Josh Shapiro.

The most conservative estimate of dead Palestinians is that of the Israeli government: 17.000 (give or take). At the other end, the Gaza Ministry o…[Read more]

Jake – yes, Rus, rose, rouge, red, etc.

jakelafort wrote:
Vikings went all the way into Russia

Apparently Russia is named after the red hair of the vikings.

TheEncogitationer wrote:
If Jews are not safe in Ivy League Academia in America, the most educated and intellectual in society, that says something very telling about how much safety there is among the hoi-polloi. That’s no dance.

Any campus is likely to have a lot of politically-energized and -committed individuals whose politics can spill o…[Read more]

@Jakelafort – Is this the video version of the same podcast?

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Unseen,

Can anyone rationally maintain that we’d be in a worse position had meddlesome outsider politicians not decided to redraw the Middle Eastern map? On what basis?

We’d be in a different position, but not better. Christianity and Islam would still be at holy war, even without the presence of Crusaders. Both of the…

[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Jews aren’t safe anywhere and Jew-haters still regarded them as vermin, but at least with Israel, they are the mouse that roars.

The average American Jew is far safer than the average Israeli Jew. You danced around that fact. And not all that deftly to boot.

Can anyone rationally maintain that we’d be in a worse position had meddlesome outsider politicians not decided to redraw the Middle Eastern map? On what basis?

Late edit: Has Israel even served its purpose? Which Jew is actually safer, one in Israel or one in the United States?

What we need is a state for every disliked or hated minority. Nor just one for Jews, but one each for Roma (gypsies), LGBTQ, liberals, conservatives, females, etc. In other words, a complete partitioning of the world. And who better to take on the assignment than Donald Trump?

Alternatively, we could work harder on getting along with each other.