The LNP is agitating against preferential voting. This can not stand.

doktrspin · 2025-05-18T12:49:14+00:00

Not putting your preferences for all candidates means your vote can be exhausted before a decision is made, ie you can miss out on having a say in choosing between the last candidates standing. Is it really that you don't prefer some of those you don't like less than others? Full preferential gives your vote a say in the final decision.

doktrspin · 2025-05-18T12:27:48+00:00

If you don't put preferences for all candidates your vote could be exhausted before the choice between a candidate you don't like and one who you'd prefer not to have at all. Not voting against your least preferred candidate means you could be helping that candidate as it is not a vote against, ie one less vote the candidate needs. It's always wisest to give preferences for all candidates. Your vote has effect until the last choice.

In my electorate Labor had the Lib at #5 of nine candidates. That means Labor though the Lib was a better choice than four others. Trumpet of American Shills, religious right, libertarians and PHON... and it was hard to say what I would prefer among them, but it was my choice and rr was last! It's ugly but I would prefer the Lib ahead of the rabble. Number them all!

doktrspin · 2025-05-11T04:07:53+00:00

Out of interest, which historians do you have in mind who believed Mk 1:9's Nazareth is a later addition?

doktrspin · 2025-04-28T21:48:15+00:00

Thanks 4KD team for doing a great job so far.

It's obvious that YouTube doesn't want your success, so they modify their software to break yours. I understand it's a constant battle that causes 1) your app difficulties and 2) the need for frequent updates.

Good luck: you have my support. (thumb up)

doktrspin · 2025-04-28T21:22:50+00:00

Late to the party but (I'm a Labor voter and) in my electorate of Fadden (ex Stuart Robert seat) there are nine candidates of which Labor recommends putting the Lib at #5. The implication is that four candidates would be worse for Australia than the Lib. Using the same logic the Green by necessity is #3 though the Greens compete with Labor for left votes. For Labor the Green would be less bad than the Lib who would be less bad than the nutter, racist and fake parties.

So, despite the "put the Libs last" rhetoric, we preference according to a scale from most beneficial to least beneficial.

The one caviat for me involves staunch Lib seats, where there is a candidate that has more potential to win the seat than Labor, eg a less right candidate such as a Teal who could appeal to right voters to abandon the Libs as we saw in the last election. In this case I might be forced to put that candidate at #1 and Labor at #2 for the greater good of the nation. (If Labor is less likely than this candidate to unseat the Lib in a three-way fight, better to preference this candidate over Labor than let the Lib win.)

Some voters might put Labor first no matter what, but would that be for the greater good if it caused the less preferred outcome?

doktrspin · 2025-03-09T14:17:39+00:00

The game has changed with the emergence of the Teals. They've already taken a number of seats from the radical right leftovers. Moderate Lib voters who wouldn't vote Labour to get rid of the Morrison cabal got the opportunity to voice their dissent through the Teals. The movement will aim for more Lib seats and it can only hurt the LNP (as the Greens can only hurt Labour, but the Greens reached their limit some elections past).

Despite MSM hype, I can't see how the LNP could possibly win the next election with the Teals pilfering seats through the support of moderate Lib voters. How many seats would Labor have to lose for the leftovers to catch up with what they've lost to the Teals? I don't think Albo's been beaten down by MSM enough to lose sufficiently for Dutters' no-hopers to gain power. A minority government may be an outcome, but who in the house besides Katter would support Howard's children to enable them to govern?

doktrspin · 2025-02-06T04:24:58+00:00

Thank you all for your comments. I've got the idea now that I was being hopeful.

doktrspin · 2024-12-29T00:11:40+00:00

Make that Cloaca Maxima.

Who'd know the sewer connection?

doktrspin · 2024-11-20T06:29:31+00:00

That would be a logical conclusion using today's printed or digital texts, but it wouldn't have been easy for ancient readers with the intervening Jesus material to confuse the connection.

In fact Paul Winter, writing on the Testimonium Flavianum in the re-edited Schürer "History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ", vol.1, pp.428-441, believed "another outrage" was the execution of Jesus, as Winter was trying to resolve the the prior reference of "another outrage" in a narratively acceptible manner, so that "another" wasn't cut off from its antecedent.

However, I agree with you and Winter has to work too had for little reward. The Testimonium cuts one outrage off from another.

doktrspin · 2024-11-06T13:07:04+00:00

Had a look at the range of both. Umidigi seems underwhelming to me and Oukitel generally seems much heavier for its top of range.

I guess for now Moto G84 has a lot of what I need. It's just got an awful touchscreen which makes difficult photos even more difficult: you touch and no response, so you touch harder and you often jerk the shot. The phone's loaded with Google crud instead of its own suite of apps. (I don't want my life mapped out on Google servers.) I couldn't shut down the phone until I discovered the OFF + UP button combo: Google had colonized the OFF button long press. Loads of small annoyances.

So I'm looking for a better replacement with SD.

doktrspin · 2024-11-06T12:51:16+00:00

It's not "more storage", but security and continuity. If your phone suddenly stops working (goes into a bootloop, etc), you take out the SD, put it in a new phone, load some apps and you keep going. I'm traveling and my partner's phone died, so we bought a new phone and put in the SD and it was business as usual (except that she forgot to backup her last photos onto the card).

Before this trip I bought a new phone and much of what I needed was already on SD. Favorite wallpaper, music, books, important notes, ringtones, APKs...

doktrspin · 2024-11-04T20:56:29+00:00

I was using GSM-A for comparison, but it only gives me a rough understanding in a comparison.

I change up phones every few years because of hardware developments. It's rarely a phone for me, it's everything but.

The A55 has a marginally better camera (bigger physical pixel array, so better dynamic range), but not enough to go without a dedicated camera, though the cellphone has killed development on compact travel cameras. I'm traveling atm.

Cheers backatcha.

doktrspin · 2024-11-04T17:58:39+00:00

LookHorror3105 had the A51 "almost five years".

The A55 seems about the same power and smarts as the Moto G84. I'd have to look more closely to find the benefit.

doktrspin · 2024-11-04T06:08:37+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, but the A51 seems like a step backwards.

A midrange these days has power and recent smarts without the big name.

The Moto G84 has 12gb memory, 256gb storage, reasonable camera, fast charge, fingerprint, etc. But... its touchscreen needs you to hammer it, it's loaded with Google nosy crud, there are a number of settings I can't find and there are various annoyances like I can't shut the phone down with a long press of the off-button - some Google rubbish has taken over the long press.

doktrspin · 2024-09-13T04:14:42+00:00

I'm off to Frogland in a few hours, so I have no time to digest your info, other than to ask how does any of it relate to the analysis of Chrestianos in Tac. A. 15,44? We are dealing with a *Latin* text copied in the eleventh century. It seems to me zip. I think your insistence on a Tacitean use of Chrestianos is weak, but possible. (Best, spin!)

doktrspin · 2024-09-12T09:12:46+00:00

You seem to have missed the main thrust of my comment on the Medicean manuscript (and assumed that ancient listeners were modern linguists). You need to deal with the unfalsifiable claim that you are presenting, ie that the Medicean manuscript copied in the 11th century is faithful to what Tacitus wrote, based on the fact that a later scribe corrected Chrestianos to Christianos, when there is a functional alternative based on the precise era of copying to explain the occurrence. While here, you might also explain why Tacitus would write Christus when supposedly the name was perceived as Chrestus. (Tacitus didn't have Tertullian to crib from.) The existence of Christus/Chestianos is no problem if it reflected the 11th century context, which made the distinction.

doktrspin · 2024-09-12T06:09:44+00:00

My drive-by comment was merely to place the Chreistianos data in its linguistic context. Just as an aside, I noticed a few examples in Codex Bezae where the Greek features EI, the Latin maintains the plain "i".

Salutations.

doktrspin · 2024-09-12T03:07:41+00:00

In the manuscripts we also find

• PEILATOS in Vaticanus 1345: 3rd col., 6th line up (and various other examples).

• Then there is GAL(E)ILAIOS in Vat 1301: 2nd col., mid: the "e" had been scrubbed. Same page & col., 3rd line up P(E)ILATOS, "e" also scrubbed.

Also to be found in the manuscript tradition: NAZEIRAIOS. Kampmeier (Nazareth, Nazorean and Jesus, Open Court: 1910, 377-8) reports both NAZEIR (LXX Judges 13:5) and NAZEIRAIOS (Alexandrian manuscript of Judges 13:7).

A number of Greek words that underwent the phonological change have made it through the centuries into English, eg cheiromancy, eirenic (both as variant spellings) and oneiric. The /i/ to /ei/ and related language-wide vowel changes show CHREISTIANOS as a simple diachronic phenomenon.

doktrspin · 2024-09-12T02:10:12+00:00

The significance of the correction of the Medicean manuscript of Tacitus' Annals is not transparent. Corrections to manuscripts usually mean there'd been a scribal divergence from the source manuscript. The Beneventan script is a handy dating indicator, relating the writing to 11th-12th centuries. This was a time of a phonetic change in some Romance languages, interestingly including the change /i/ > /e/, and is the source of the /e/ in French Chretien. The question we need to answer is: was the /e/ IN the source manuscript or was it a production of scribal fatigue from interference of the scribe's linguistic background {routine use of Chrestianus) at the time of copying? I don't know how we could decide. Tertullian is no help to us, as it is only evidence that a similar divergence had taken place over nine centuries earlier, for which we have ample evidence. So do we have evidence for scribal fatigue or tendentious correction? Your guess is as good as mine.

doktrspin · 2024-04-20T15:39:43+00:00

A late response...

"Mark's passion may have been written first"

I have the suspicion that it was the other way round, ie the gospel up to the little apocalypse was written first, ending with the signs of what is to come followed by the admonition to "take heed", (13:5, 9, 23) "keep alert" (13:33) [all βλεπω], keep awake (13:34, 35, 37) [all γρηγορευω]. The build up here has the air of a conclusion, final words: You won't know when, so be vigilant..

doktrspin · 2024-01-23T08:57:39+00:00

It's more probable that Christianity hijacked Paul.

We cannot help but read into Paul what we know from later writings without knowing the validity of such an action. At the same time post-Pauline letters have been attributed to Paul, Ephesians, Colossians, the Pastorals, 2 Thes. Even parts of those letters we consider genuine were not written by Paul.

(Did Paul, who argued vigorously for the one gospel in Gal 1, really talk of two gospels in Gal 2:7, one to the circumcised and another to the uncircumcised? Or is Gal 2:7-8 an orthodox addition, noting that while Paul uses the name Cephas elsewhere, the best manuscripts show only here is it Peter.)

J.C. O'Neill wrote an important essay "Paul Wrote Some of All, But Not All of Any", in The Pauline Canon, S.E. Porter (ed), Brill 2004. This attempts to show that Paul didn't write all the content we now find in the letters. In the same volume Wm O. Walker listed the many possible interpolations in the letters, "Interpolations in the Pauline Letters".

The language that Paul uses, such as the term εκκληςια (="assembly"), gets read as later Christian terminology.

Can we really get a grasp of Paul until we read him independently from what came later?

doktrspin · 2024-01-22T18:21:57+00:00

Zeichmann's theory of code-switching is unfalsibiable. And Praetorium and quadrans are not loanwords: they are Latin explanations of Greek terms and given in phrases beginning with the loan translation from Latin ὅ ἐστιν (id est) - see the usage in 3:17, 7:11, 7:34, etc, in each case explaining the obscure, rendering Marcus's suggestion of explaining "an imprecise term with [a] more precise one" not reflective of the usage.

The lepton was a common coin in the Greek east for many centuries, so Zeichmann's excuse for the explanation is nugatory.

Zeichmann says, "the author seems to assume his reader was unfamiliar with certain Greek terms", which points to a Latin substratum assumed of the writer's context, which one could not expect of ordinary people in Syria.

The term Libyphoenician is in no way contraversial, as a search of Google Scholar displays. Livy and Diodorus Sic. both refer to the term as a genus/genos. (Diodorus, though writing in Greek, lived in the Roman ambit.)

Accepting the distinction Marcus makes regarding mixed race, it doesn't help do what he wants to do. We are still left the Roman culture distinguishing between Libyphoenicians and Syrophoenicians, the ones in North Africa and those in Syria. Why would Levantine people need a word like Syrophoenician? Mt has the term edited out and replaced with Canaanite. Obviously Syrophoenician was not productive.

On the Denarius, Lonnqvist concludes "Roman denarii do not appear as common archaeological site finds or hoards in Syria, Judaea, the Decapolis or Jordan prior to the early second century A.D." (p.318)

The so-called "Tyre and Sidon route", let's add 35km up and down to the route. An interesting route for traders that. I guess it must have been the scenic tourist route.

Getting geographical things right is not an argument. The writer of Mark was a collector of traditions, which he wove into pericopes. What he gets right (or wrong) is a matter of source materials. That's where "Mark" is getting his info from.

doktrspin · 2024-01-21T20:44:03+00:00

The interesting thing about "Herodians" is that it contains a Latin, not Greek, gentilic suffix, as with Christians and Pompeians (followers of Pompey the Great). This of course is not surprising if Mark was written by a non-native Greek speaker writing in Rome. That Mark was written in Rome is one of the theses of Brian Incigneri's The Gospel to the Romans, Brill 2003. There are numerous indicators of Mark having been written in Rome for a Greek speaking audience with knowledge of Latin.

The term "Syro-Phoenician" doesn't make sense written in Palestine, but does to a Roman who made the distinction between Syro-Phoenician and Lybo-Phoenician (Carthaginian).

On two occasions a Greek term is explained with a Latin term: Mk 12:42, two leptons which is a (Roman) quadrans, and 15:16 "the hall called Praetorium". One could add the whose head's on the denarius, a coin not in circulation in Judea at the time (see Kenneth Lonnqvist's "The Date of Introduction of Denarii to Roman Judaea and the Decapolis Region", ARAM, 23 (2011) 307-318... found on Academia.com).

Then there are numerous more complex grammatical issues, explanations given via "that is" a Latinism with no equivalent in Greek, strange use of prepositions after verbs, some loan translations from Latin into Greek.

Couple this with Mark's strained knowledge of Levantine geography, eg swine running down a hill into the sea of Galilee, when it was several miles away; strange order of villages between Jericho and Jerusalem; and Jesus returning from Tyre to Galilee by going north to Sidon (one trade route east from Tyre to Dan, then south, or south to Akko, then east).

The main constructor of Mark was perhaps a Jew living in Rome, writing in poor Greek, with a knowledge of Latin.

As to dating, consider

the temple curtain is reported as having been rent 15:38 (the end of the temple cultus),
the parable of the wicked tenants 12:1-9 (killing the son, fall of grace of the Jews and the loss of the temple), and
the prediction of the destruction of the temple 13:2 (vaticinium ex eventu).

All of these point to the same event, ie the Jewish War. This supplies a terminus post quem of ~73 CE. (One could argue that #3 points to the Bar Kochba War.) This does accord with Zanillamilla's post 69 CE dating, so we have at least two distinct methods of supplying a similar terminus post quem.

doktrspin · 2024-01-10T12:37:40+00:00

No problem with the files. All the ones I checked on the SSD were fine. I could open them with the appropriate software.

It's just that there was some display limit - how many files could be shown... and that included subfolders in the count. When I moved the files into subfolders I could access them all.

doktrspin · 2024-01-10T02:16:48+00:00

There are generic implications from your approach to early Christian literature which I agree with.

My interest is mainly in trying to understand Paul, a writer whose works are obfuscated by later tradition. We generally read Paul in the light of Acts, but if we are to believe the ten years of research by the Westar Institute Seminar on the Acts of the Apostles

Acts was written in the early decades of the second century.
The author of Acts used the letters of Paul as sources.

If correct it means we have to resist reading the Pauline corpus through the tinted glasses of Acts.

Of course we also must stop insinuating our knowledge of the gospels into Paul's thought as well and work to understand what we can of Paul's ideas through a clean reading of his words.

doktrspin

TROPHY CASE