re: ape aid. very interesting. i have an interest in this topic anyway, just not enough to properly research it myself, so i'm always happy when 1gm comes to my rescue.

i really liked the simplicity of the experement itself. just to be curmudgeonly, though, how do the scientists know that the chimp didn't help the researcher get the stick hoping he might beat himself to death with it? :)

this quote was strange, given other articles i've seen here:

The roots of human altruism reach back roughly 6 million years to a common ancestor of people and chimps, the researchers propose in the July PLoS Biology.

the other articles mentioned altruism as a characteristic that could be found in many animals, if not all, and even in plants (!)(remember that one norm?), so, what does the author mean by "human" altruism in this context? they are already showing by their research that altruism is not limited to humans and there seems to be some evidence that altruism goes back to the origins of life itself. hell, one crystal will move out of the way (change the direction of its growth) for another one. i just wonder about this stuff. thanks for the brain food.

I think there is a problem with your link to the "Egypt outlaws all female circumcision" article. thanks!

the gwynne-is that a boy or a girl?:)- was written in what i thought was a kind of confusing style. there were quite a lot of "big idea" assertions made, with no background or explanation. many of them, even with such background, couldn't be called anything but opinions. for instance, the idea that the window is closing on the possibility of israeli/arab peace as a result of projected geopolitical realities. i just picked one of the confusing bits:

it will be astonishing if one or more of the Arab regimes does not fall to an Islamist revolution in the next few years. For the citizens of the country or countries in question, that could be quite a big problem...

i mean, islamist revolutions ARE the citizens, no?

anyway, as to whether the author is correct about any of this, i simply don't know. i call conjecture.

Hello.

I haven't been following the comment threads, but that last article made me jump on the opportunity to launch criticism. Sorry if this has been brought up already.

The American and British media have been distorting the facts when it comes to the recent activities in Gaza. They seem to represent Hamas as having performed a coup against Fatah. The true objective was to remove a ganglord who was also a Fatah security official called Dahlan; currently Fatah members feel SAFE and are working with Hamas. Some high level Fatah officials and forces cooperated with Hamas on the attacks.

Portuguese media have sent a lot of reporters on location to gaza, and I've been reading up on the interviews with the locals as well as with local officials from Fatah; the move by Hamas was supported popularly. However, the political relationship with Abbas and Fatah in the west bank has become... corrupted because of american and european intervention.

Proper reporting here:

http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2007/06/15/abbas-hamas-dahlan-and-the-pa-should-go-to-hell/

To finalize: it irritates me to see constant news about how Hamas has made a coup, when in fact it was merely protecting it's people, WITH the locals as well as Fatah. All other factors of terrorism aside (again, I don't support hamas), the news reporting has failed in that respect.

Hello.

I haven't been following the comment threads, but that last article made me jump on the opportunity to launch criticism. Sorry if this has been brought up already.

The American and British media have been distorting the facts when it comes to the recent activities in Gaza. They seem to represent Hamas as having performed a coup against Fatah. The true objective was to remove a ganglord who was also a Fatah security official called Dahlan; currently Fatah members feel SAFE and are working with Hamas. Some high level Fatah officials and forces cooperated with Hamas on the attacks.

Portuguese media have sent a lot of reporters on location to gaza, and I've been reading up on the interviews with the locals as well as with local officials from Fatah; the move by Hamas was supported popularly. However, the political relationship with Abbas and Fatah in the west bank has become... corrupted because of american and european intervention.

Proper reporting here:

http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2007/06/15/abbas-hamas-dahlan-and-the-pa-should-go-to-hell/

To finalize: it irritates me to see constant news about how Hamas has made a coup, when in fact it was merely protecting it's people, WITH the locals as well as Fatah. All other factors of terrorism aside (again, I don't support hamas), the news reporting has failed in that respect.

p.almada, not arguing your points here, even being as close as i am to these events its hard to know for sure whats really going on. but one thing:

The true objective was to remove a ganglord who was also a Fatah security official called Dahlan;

at the time of the "coup", or whatever it was, when i and all israelis were following events very closely, i noticed a thing that struck me as weird at the time: dahlan wasn't in gaza at the time of these events. he was in switzerland or someplace like that, recovering from knee surgery. and he is still the fatah cheif of internal security, as far as i know, only now in the west bank instead of gaza. "ganglord" is still a fair description, though.

unless i'm mixing him up with jibril rijoub, i do that sometimes.

jonathan, no Islamism isn't the monolithic voice of the "Arab street", it isn't even the voice of Gaza, Iran and various parts of Iraq that are under Islamist authority. It's the Maoism of the Muslim world, a petty authoritarian ideology of liberation for petty minded people. Arabs aren't petty minded people any more than Germans or Russians were in the first half of the 20th century.

And P.Almada, you ought to realize that what's going on in Gaza right now is a complex cross section of many things, not merely one action (hitting Dahlan), and to say most Fatah officials didn't race to the border when Hamas took power in Gaza is misrepresenting the facts. Hamas militas are banned in the West Bank now. It doesn't look solely to be a personal battle against one thug.

dionysus, i have to admit to having a soft spot for your "everybodys' stupid" approach to geopolitics. i assume you have similar negative views regarding both palestinian and jewish claims in the current morass. correct me if i'm wrong. but i wondered what you would think of this "analysis lite" of the situation in gaza. it makes some points and comparisons that i haven't seen elsewhere that seem fair enough to me.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/875272.html

Yes, I'm as fervently anti-Zionist as I'm anti-Islamist (two sides of the same coin). Because of that I find that haaretz article to be guilty of what some scholars of post-modern textual analysis call "interference" - seeing more in something than is really there. The similarities between '67 and Gaza today end at auspicious dates (aren't the Hebrew and Islamic calendars lunar and thusly off by a few months here anyway?). Israel in '67 conquered a people they saw as cheap labour that didn't fit into the Israeli power structure as a Nation State where identity was Jewishness. Hamas, however, has won control over their own "people". If anything their victory resembles the '48 Israeli victory. Their next victory could very well resemble Saladin's.

Hamas, however, has won control over their own "people".

yes, finding the differences between the situations is easy. i just thought that the similarities were interesting and instructive and, of the 15 or 20 points of similarity mentioned in the article, i noticed you didn't bother to refute one.

Israel in '67 conquered a people they saw as cheap labour that didn't fit into the Israeli power structure as a Nation State where identity was Jewishness.

i don't know if you intended it, but i'd like to take issue with the implied idea that israel saw the west bank palestinians as cheap labor and that this had something to do with the '67 conquest. this is far from the truth. yes, to our everlasting shame the palestinians BECAME a source of cheap labour, which was even better for them than it was for us (you should see some of the mansions out my way built with money from this "cheap labor"), but palestinian terorism soon put an end to this source of income for the palestinian people, to the point where today they are begging to be allowed back into israel to work. a little perspective, my friend. before the israeli conquest they didn't have ANY work. or schools, or hospitals, or running water, or mansions. or a state, btw, which they still don't have, unless you count jordan (which i do), but i digress. you are so wrong- also about the hebrew calander. but you are so literate and well-informed that to refute you i would have to bore the readers of 1gm to death, even more than i already have. i continue to enjoy your writing.

i just thought that the similarities were interesting and instructive

You can find interesting and instructive similarities (more than 20) in almost any history book. There's one telling similarity between your justification of the source of income for cheap Palestinian labour being their Israeli conquerors and Colonialism of the European powers. "Before us they were nothing, without us they'll just live in squalor". Keep beatin' your meat to that mission civilisatrice instead of beating off to my spectacular writing.

P.S. you're still reading more into things, I said nothing about them being a source of labour as a justification for the Six Day War, because that would be false.

There's one telling similarity between your justification of the source of income for cheap Palestinian labour being their Israeli conquerors and Colonialism of the European powers.

i'm havin' a hard time gettin' it up for that sentence, dawg. it makes no grammatical or logical sense. keep primping, though, i'm lovin' it. :)

any history book? don't be ridiculous. this history is still being written. i am a big fan of that "nothing new under the sun" attitude, though. too bad you can't take credit for that.

oh, i finally understood that sentance. it was just missing a couple of crucial words, i guess you were in a hurry.

you're right, it is a telling similarity.:)

you're right, it is a telling similarity.:)

I'd go one further and compare it to Lebensraum but I'll leave gratuity to the Hadjis and Godwin.

Ecclesiastes has a Greek name, remember that.

actually, the whole torah has greek names, but they came later. ecclesiastes is kohelet in hebrew. but you're good. i was really referring to an amusing kind of circular reasoning where, if nothing is new, than no one can take credit for coming up with the phrase.

are you calling me a nazi? you bad, bad boy.

Are you an Israeli citizen? If so, you're a citizen of a State that identifies itself based on an ethno-religious framework, which I think is preposterous. That you view a conquered people (the Palestinians) from the same perspective in which the French saw the Algerians only compounds your guilt.

actually, the whole torah has greek names, but they came later.

Yes, under the yoke of Greco-Roman imperium.

and you are a citizen of...?finding the preposterous in all human groupings is not difficult, if you'd like to sling mud.

extracting myself from your sticky implication that i share some form of french racial superiority trip would take too much space here. but the simple facts of schools, jobs, hospitals, water, electricity, etc. etc. are simple facts. whether the algerians or the palestinians are better off with those things is a matter of debate. perhaps you prefer your "aboriginals" (smirk) "unspoiled". one thing is for sure- there was no arab "palestinian people" in 1948. the palestinian people were formed in the crucible of conflict with the jews, and by their exposure to education and modern amenities, which many if not most of their arab bretheren still today do not share. again, whether this is a good or bad thing is debateable. but just seeing things for what they are does not make me (or the french) a nazi. you're the one that seems to have the racist attitude toward "indiginous" peoples, forms of government, religions, and in fact the whole stupid world that doesn't see things your way. yet i am guilty simply because of where i live. where do you live, sir?

remember this one, di?

I really don't care about the masses, at least right now. They're a useless tumor on humanity's backside until genetic engineering can make sure we all think like Einstein and fuck like Peter North.

who does that sound like to you?

i feel like i'm arguing with neitzche who, though one of my greatest heroes and influences, was a major prick on a personal level. same thing for bob dylan. neitzche calling me an elitist would be like dylan calling me a songwriter. i suppose i've picked up some elitist prickism from both of them.

anyway, dionysus, smack me around as you will, i remain, your devoted fan and student,

apollo. :)

This is no Birth of Tragedy, and you can't turn anything around into a tu quoque argument. Israel shouldn't exist as a "Jewish" state anymore than there should be a "Muslim" theocratic state, an "Aryan" Nazi state, an "Arab" Nationalist state or a "Zulu" Black Power state. There's nothing personal about me or my country's history that changes that firm belief into hypocrisy. Charles Manson could say that rape is bad and he'd still be quite correct. I'm not Charles Manson, and I say Israel should, and soon will have to grant absolute equality to the Arabs who live there.

That's not to say I have any problem with hunting down and killing every last Islamist in the Levant, nor am I saying either a one or two state solution is preferable. All I'm saying is that identity politics is cheap and ugly.

dionysus, "hypocrite" is one accusation i wouldn't throw your way. now that we've both called each other nazis and lived to tell the tale, i hope we can be friends. in any case:

I say Israel should, and soon will have to grant absolute equality to the Arabs who live there.

agreed.

identity politics is cheap and ugly.

agreed. but this is the world we live in. i think the jews have as much right to a state as everyone else as long as "identity politics" holds sway, but ideally, i don't think we disagree on this issue at all. i'm just not gonna be the first one to put my pistols away. not in this neighborhood.

Sorry to interrupt your discussion but I want to reply do Dionysus.

"It doesn't look solely to be a personal battle against one thug."

Agreed. I may have overstated that. My point was that the COVERAGE by many western media outlets called it a straightforward coup. THAT was my beef; looking back I DID sound somewhat apologetic for Hamas (which I'm not).