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coffee_enjoyer

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User ID: 541

coffee_enjoyer

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4 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 11:53:36 UTC

					

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User ID: 541

The Amish are not parasitic for the simple reason that they pay more than they take out. This makes them less parasitic than other groups. They pay taxes, except social security, because they do their own thing for that, and they pool money for healthcare expenditures. They don’t really need roads in perfect conditions, they don’t spend a lot of time in jails, they don’t require a lot of policing, they don’t go into troublesome college debt, etc. They have solved the criminality problem without need for the military or police. And what makes them much less parasitic than normal American culture is that they don’t wastefully spend resources on fleeting pleasures. When a normal American makes a lot of money they might waste that money for their own pleasure; when an Amish makes a lot of money more of it goes into their community because they don’t do a lot of consumerism or debauchery.

The military point misses something important. There’s something called IW alternative service where conscientious observers aid the country in non-violent ways and the Amish used this during the Korean/Vietnam war. So the labor they would have spent as soldiers may be spent as factory workers. The economy does not stop when war occurs, even the deadliest wars need people to work factories, which the Amish work without committing to crimes or vice — possibly the best possible factory worker profile.

I found this study on Amish criminality and genetic selection . It argues that the Amish criminality rate is too low to be explained purely by criminal gene outflow and that there is also an element of cultural transmission. Another way we can measure this (which I don’t think has been done) is to search for homicide offenders in Ohio and filter for Amish-associated first and last names, as well as birthplace location. My intuition is that there are not a lot of formerly Amish homicide offenders.

Note that the question of gene outflow must answer to how America receives criminals. The Amish ostracize their criminals; were they the only people in America, the ostracized criminals would have to live in a makeshift criminal colony far away from Amish areas. If America lacks a solution to criminality like the Amish solution, that’s not an Amish problem, that’s again an America problem.

This is visible in the fact that there are very few converts

This is entirely explained by the lack of knowledge about Amish QoL. People don’t move to countries without knowing the job market and quality of life, neither do they buy kale without information about its health benefits. The average American might find the Amish quaint and cute, but they absolutely do not know how successful they are in terms of generating a high quality of life. (I, a 99th percentile Amish aficionado, was myself greatly surprised when I began checking all the metrics of Amish QoL. For instance, that the women are quite happy, feminism not included.)

Re: 5, I imagine the gay Amish can’t have sex and instead have to rely on loving platonic friendships with their male friends. Even so, we can imagine an Amish possible world where the gays get to form couples. My post is not intended to imply “let’s copy Amish 100%”, but rather to imply that all of our social progress since 1710 has not allowed us to live as good as our friends stuck in the past. In fact, it makes us and our progress-worshipping seem pretty silly and backwards. How much money and talent has been wasted on feminism when this does not appear to be a requirement for female happiness?

But think of the data…

Certainly the quality of living well would protect against the desire to cease living. This is historically considered one of the benefits of introspective philosophy, and IIRC there’s even a study showing that reading philosophy leads to a happier old age. If your introspection leads to a desire to stop living, that means you are neither living well nor introspecting well.

As for whether the Amish lack introspection, I’m pretty sure they have a practice of introspecting their sins.

I’m not sure if you can craft any advice for outlier cases, but as someone so preternaturally predestined for success as yourself, you would have to compare to the most successful Amish lifestyle. This would include:

  • Overseeing a huge tourism industry, one of rhe largest Amish businesses, or even directing the Amish to a new industry

  • Acting as an elder to your clan, advising their political and social concerns with loving patriarchal tenderness

  • The formation of a dynasty, which you oversee like a medieval King, sending your Sons to various parts of America to operate and enhance your family name

It is not without its own glories and rewards.

If you mean, “the kind of person who follows advice regarding raising children well will already reduce all problems in their children such that their QoL indicators are as optimal as the most optimal community in America”, that is so unevidenced as to constitute magical thinking. It’s not as if children of the upper class stave off all depression, drug use, etc in their children. Or parents who read parenting guides. I know children of upper class who have had such problems. Jeeze, my (randomly assorted) first roommate in college was a literal heroin addict yet from a 0.01% income household. And if we are comparing top 5% normal households to top 50% Amish, that’s also a bit silly because even though there is less Amish stratification there is still going to be differences in QoL according to income.

Amish exist more than they live

If this were so we would we see more suicides, at the very least depression, and we would see a high amount of leavers during mandatory Rumspringa. They haven’t exactly built a Berlin Wall around Berlin, Ohio.

I wonder what % happiness increase is due to eating ethnic food. I can’t imagine it ever being a prescription for depression (“patient is to the one plate of Chinese, two plates Indian, and one Cambodian weekly”). If ethnic food and the big city were instrumental to happiness we should see young urban white collar people in cities happier. My intuition is they are not, at least not in such a way that is expected given their social status. There’s probably a study on that but I’m too lazy to look right now.

Why do you expect people to hold policy positions they themselves as individuals don't want?

Does the patient want to swallow the bitter medicine because he enjoys the taste or because he knows the results are superior? So it would be for the Amish. Consider: by raising your kids Amish you are vastly decreasing their risk of depression, suicide, drug use, and violence.

It’s not a feasible possibility in the short term, but there’s no reason to assume it isn’t feasible in the longterm. If Real Progress actually consists in going back to an ananaptist 1710 and incorporating such things into modern life, that’s important to know for policy prescriptions, voting preferences, and political theory. I mean, otherwise we don’t really care about progress (making human life better), right?

Which ones did you have in mind?

Do I think I would be happy adjusting to an Amish life? Insofar as the adjustment is gradual, yes (any “clean break” from one life to another is extremely painful). Would I, if given the opportunity? My hesitancy would be that I’m forbidden from reading all day; I don’t want to give this up because I think it can actually promote greater happiness (for instance, the very question of why the Amish are happier may be verboten among the Amish, involving an atheistic framework). For that reason I would probably not join an Amish-like group, even if permitted to; but if I felt like I had done all the reading and sensemaking that I could already, then I would probably try to join.

There are also two significant problems with the Amish that are unrelated to their happiness: lack of military defense and scientific development. If those could be secured, it would be hard not to call the society perfect. I do think there are ways to incorporate Amish lifestyle without sacrificing defense or science. I don’t think they are fully mutually exclusive.

As for why Amish don’t recruit outsiders, it makes a bit of sense, they appear to be preoccupied at all times and have lots of kids. I don’t think this really affects the question though; even if Amish hated outsiders out of racism, we can imagine a non-racist Amish possible world.

Another explanation is that beer and sedentary vices are a poor man’s substitute for whatever the Amish are doing. Because it’s not just longevity, it’s lower suicide rate and lower depressive scores as well, see this overview (and ctrl-f “lower” or “higher”). This is a compelling hypothesis, because we don’t just have more vices, we have more suicide and more mental illness and substance abuse is correlated to both. Does the opiate addict love opiates just that much, or is there also an element of his life missing something which would replace opiates? research suggests social ties and social identity are protective against substance use problems.

But they aren't, and can't be

Why not? We can certainly start government initiatives and charities with the express purpose of promoting this lifestyle. This may be the best choice for increasing the wellbeing of men and women, morally obligatory even. The hardest part would be to get the “social progress crowd” on board, who would be hindering… social progress.

While the Amish do have a higher genetic predisposition to certain birth defects, this is more than compensated for by their -50% resistance to cancer stat and their +10% longevity racial passive. In any case, nothing they are doing now is causing their greater risk for eg dwarfism, that has to do with the founder effect from their original colony, so it is only an aside to the question.

once people have been raised up in the usual environment, they're not going to want to give everything up unless they're crazy

But the studies show greater health and happiness and social life, which are terminal values (goods unto themselves). Certainly it would be difficult to adjust, but it appears to be the rationally preferred lifestyle.

I don't think it's possible to emulate them in any meaningful way

Patriarchy, gender norms, media restrictions, simplicity, social competition predicated on virtue, increased exposure to nature and an emphasis on tradition can all be emulated. Farming is really the only impossible thing to replicate for an entire population, but note that as much as 90% of Amish are not farming today.

How does a social progressive respond to the Amish Question, namely that the Amish have a better quality of life according to nearly all objective indicators? (Including but not limited to: lower suicide risk, greater longevity, lower female depression risk, greater sense of purpose, greater community, lower cancer and diabetes risk, negligible drug and alcohol use, lower carbon footprint, and lower income inequality)

I would immediately put trillions toward requiring citizens to participate in longterm studies. If you are a twin, you are going to be forced to participate.

  • Dozens of twin mothers, one of them works and one of them doesn’t, what are the health outcomes? Dozens more, one with physical contact with child all day and one not, what are health outcomes?

  • Corporations will be forced to hire some percent applicants who lack full or partial college education but appear intelligent from testing, so we can measure how important college truly is for employee quality.

  • Placing normal people around poetry and modern art so we can measure whether there is any benefit.

  • For twins, force one of them to masturbate frequently and the other not, what are outcomes of their children?

  • Feed all kinds of mammals on organic food and measure the fourth-generational effect compared to GMO

  • I read a study once that longterm fasting can cure schizophrenia. Force some schizophrenics to fast because I want the study to be replicated

Are you, “… uh … ”, aware that America and Israel have funded insurgency groups in Iran’s backyards for more than a decade now? Groups that went on to kill civilians in Iran? Iran is no more responsible for Hezbollah as Israel is to the insurgent terrorist groups that attack them domestically.

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/2018-09-08/ty-article/in-syria-israel-secretly-armed-and-funded-12-rebel-groups/0000017f-e2ea-d568-ad7f-f3eb54ff0000

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-usa-syria-idUSKBN1A42KC/

A downside of the CIA programme, one of the officials said, is that some armed and trained rebels defected to Islamic State and other radical groups, and some members of the previous administration favoured abandoning the programme.

Sports are dopaminergic in a way that hard labor isn’t, and dopaminergic pathways compete against each other. So sports players are growing the pleasure pathways of competition and socialization, which compete against the pleasure pathways of food salience, whereas someone digging a hole isn’t having fun at all — and in fact craves pleasure after work, like in the form food.

A completely different explanation is that you are noticing class differences. Adults who do sports recreationally are healthier and more intelligent on average, whereas construction workers are not.

Why is 80s media so upbeat and optimistic? Are there significant reasons besides abundant cocaine?

Those who hate white people are those who have been ideologically captured by a popular narrative; this would also account for some holocaust deniers, but their narrative isn’t popular except in small corners and it comes with no social benefit (actually negative social benefit). I don’t actually believe there are people who hate where people apart from ideological influence. I also don’t think you see amateur anti-white historical research online. Your typical anti-white twitter poster isn’t going through old books and articles and tomes to revise how some moment in white history was fabricated. I mean historians might do this, but that’s because they are in an institution that rewards status from it. Who is doing it anonymously of psuedonymously? I personally have not seen that, which makes holocaust denial unique.

Mechanical dog, Egypt, 1390BC

This leaping hunting dog can be made to open and close its mouth using the lever beneath the chest. Originally secured by means of a thong tied through the hole in the back of its neck and two in the throat, the lever was later attached with a metal dowel in the right shoulder. When the mouth is opened, two teeth and a red tongue are visible.

The very passage from which you selectively quoted two sentences begins with —

It is on faith in God, preserved pure and stainless, that man's morality is based.

These word faith is absent from the alleged Hosenfeld writings, and replaced with a Jewish attempt at thinking like a Christian. From the encyclical:

No faith in God can for long survive pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in Christ

No coercive power of the State, no purely human ideal, however noble and lofty it be, will ever be able to make shift of the supreme and decisive impulses generated by faith in God and Christ

Christ is mentioned something like 50 times, the Son 8 times, the Cross 4 times, yet commandments only 5 times in the encyclical. The encyclical does not address Hosenfeld’s topic:

they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment

This is not anything a Catholic hand would write. When Catholics are talking about why evil happens, and what happens to the innocent, they do not claim that the innocent are to blame for their punishment and “must die”. Again, there’s not a mention of redemption or salvation. In the encyclical you cite we read:

Since Christ, the Lord's Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved

So yeah, as we should expect in the encyclical, things are understood through Christ/faith with “obeying commandments” having secondary or tertiary significance. Hosenfeld would not omit all reference to unique Christian thought when processing why countries become evil, and replace that with an exclusively legalistic dimension of obedience to rules.

This is the third time you’ve flat out misunderstood something. The first two times it was your desire to ignore and move the goalpost on pre-WWII population estimates of European Jewry. This time you are cherry picking two sentences from the encyclical which on the whole proves my point.

If you are intent on believing in this source, please show me an instance of an historian authenticating it. It appeared out of thin air in 1990 for a snappy new edition to the holocaust novel industry.

You have posted a lot of information, so what I decided to do was pick one at random. I looked into your quote from Hosenfeld. This quote would be significant: it is perhaps the earliest admission by a Nazi officer of the conscious mass killing of Jews.

The provenance of the material is... questionable. Hosenfeld’s writings appear to be completely unknown to holocaust scholarship before the year 1999, appearing neither in a book nor in a scholarly article, not even in passing mention. The few book instances I could find on google scholar have the wrong publication date. It may appear, for instance, that page 905 of volume 9 part 1 of the sprawling “Germany and the Second World War” contains the oldest mention of Hosenfeld, but in fact this volume was published in 2012 and seems to be based on the material in the book version of the Pianist. On inspecting the book version of the Pianist, I find the following:

The appendix publishes, for the first time, entries from the diary of Wilm Hosenfeld

The book gives no account of how the letters and diary were ever obtained by the writer, but implies that they fell into the hands of a “Leon Warm”. He has no biographical details that can be found online. His full name is, allegedly, “Leon Warm-Warczynski”, and despite being integral to this story (and ironically a great amateur archivist) I can find no evidence that he ever lived. The book “the Pianist” was written by the 87 year old Władysław Szpilman, who died a year later. I am not sure if an historian has ever touched the documents, let alone examined and verified their authenticity.

We have been presented with documents that have no "authentic transmission", as the Muslims might say. So now I want to post some of the alleged writing of Hosenfeld. Knowing that the material appeared at first in a book which was an enormous commercial hit, we can consider whether they come off as authentic. Just from the writing itself. You know, does it pass the “smell test”. Here's an excerpt from our dear friend Wilm Hosenfeld:

Why did this war have to happen at all? Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it. First of all Bolshevism killed millions, saying it was done to introduce a new world order. But the Bolshevists could act as they did only because they had turned away from God and Christian teaching. Now National Socialism is doing the same in Germany. It forbids people to practise their religion, the young are brought up godless, the Church is opposed and its property appropriated, anyone who thinks differently is terrorized, the free human nature of the German people is debased and they are turned into terrified slaves. The truth is kept from them. They can play no part in the fate of their nation. There are no commandments now against stealing, killing or lying, not if they go against people's personal interest. This denial of God's commandments leads to all the other immoral manifestations of greed - unjust self-enrichment, hatred, deceit, sexual licence resulting in infertility and the downfall of the German people. God allows all this to happen, lets these forces have power and allows so many innocent people to perish to show mankind that without him we are only animals in conflict, who believe we have to destroy each other. We will not listen to the divine commandment: 'Love one another'. Very well, then, says God, try the Devil's commandment, the opposite: 'Hate one another'. We know the story of the Deluge from Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it same today.

What a focus on the commandments! We have denied God’s commandments and we will die as a result, “innocent and guilty” alike, and only have ourselves to blame for our punishment. You would think a Jew wrote this! Let me tell you why I giggled reading that excerpt. You see — and this was probably unknown to whoever actually wrote this stuff — Hosenfeld came from a family of devout Roman Catholics. His father was a Catholic schoolmaster and he attended Catholic school. His family held a strong family tradition of Catholicism. He was active in the catholic social movement “Catholic Action”. Hosenfeld was a pedigreed Christian Catholic, born when this was taken seriously (1895). The idea that a pedigreed Catholic like Hosenfeld would explain the evil of the world in terms of forgetting commandments is comically insane — that is a purely Jewish construct that isnt just missing from Christianity but repudiated. A Catholic like Hosenfeld would never see the evil of the world through this prism. If he were irreligious, which he is not given the “Christian teaching” mentioned (by the way, a Catholic would also never use the phrase "God and Christian teaching" lol), his education would have protected him from the error of thinking that following commandments earns salvation and protects against God's wrath.

We are lead to believe from this passage that Hosenfeld, the serious Catholic, saw the evil of the world primarily in terms of commandments. No early 20th century Christian would claim that the denial of commandments led God to inflict punishment on them. This line of thought could only come from a Jew. A Christian would say that a failure to follow Christ has led to sin and so forth. A failure to confess, a failure to repent, a failure to accept God's love, but never a failure to follow commandments. I can’t adequately describe how alien the thought process in this passage would be to anyone from a Catholic background born in the 19th century. “God is allowing evil to happen to show mankind” that we need God? Yet there’s no mention of Christ, of the Son, of salvation, of redemption? This Catholic believes the “innocent along with the guilty have themselves to blame for their punishment”? Nope. Sorry. This is a complete and utter forgery, I would stake my entire (completely irrelevant) reputation on the line here. This isn't the only thing that gives the gag away -- the other exerpts speak on humans "feeling the burden of our own evil and imperfections" with zero mention of Christ or forgiveness... we read phrases like "on a Sunday, when you can indulge in your own thoughts" with no mention of Mass... No.

This is an example of what we can call gish "yiddish gallop". When there is a discussion on the holocaust, the mainstream narrative supporter can copy and paste some quotes he found within a few minutes on the first page of Google. He can just assume that they are “reliable”. The non-mainstream party has the onus to inspect the material, certainly. But this could take hours if it is even practical. Thankfully there are Russian ebook torrenting sites that permit me to illegally download such lofty and voluminous tomes as Germany and the Second World War Volume IX/I, and such triumphs of creative writing as the Pianist. Alas, I don't know if I can do more research after this one. I relent, believe your holocaust, I lack the strength.

Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43

According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.

absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population

You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.

Bolshevik atrocities

If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it. If you told me that some shellshocked war-scarred Soviet soldiers committed an atrocity after experiencing months of trauma, no I would not doubt it. In any case, we did have whistleblowers of Soviet atrocities.

There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt

I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,

case that knowledge of what would be later known as the Holocaust was widespread within the home front by the summer and autumn of 1941. By that time, he argues, German atrocities on the eastern front involved hundreds of thousands of participants, eyewitnesses, and passersby. While some addressed these mass executions openly in letters, others either referred to them euphemistically or kept their thoughts private in diaries. Stargardt also demonstrates that many citizens were involved in the process of death and deportation, whether as executioners, witnesses, photographers (“execution tourists”), railway men, government bureaucrats, or other functionaries. The author’s case makes it difficult to believe that “ordinary Germans” did not know what was going on

With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?

plenty of Nazis admitted to it

We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony. Neither should we consider the coerced confessions of the leaders of a defeated country who faced the risk of total destruction (Morgenthau plan) particularly reliable.

The moral complaint against the Germans in such a scenario is nowhere near the moral complaint in the official holocaust scenario, even though they may still be ultimately culpable (full culpability and level of evilness are distinct things). Germans reasonably attempted to relocate Jews; any reasonable Germany would have to do something about the foreign nation living on their soil who have a history of revolution including in Germany, and who have compatriots in the rival Soviet Union, and who have never ever assimilated fully and unshackled themselves from ethnic solidarity. A Germany that didn’t place them in camps is a Germany that would likely have their munitions depots bombed. So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow. If you believe that Germany should have “evened out” their starvation so that if affected Germans and Jews equally, okay, maybe from the standard of moral perfection, but there is obviously less evilness here than purposefully taking lives which would not already be lost in a trolly problem sense.

Now if you mean, “America has no culpability because they are allowed to bomb a country to infinity”, okay, but this would have needed to be argued, and Jews might wonder why there was no attempt to negotiate their release in exchange for better terms of German surrender, or whether America even calculated their loss of life when they bombed railways.

we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads).

Yes. You don’t just forget putting women and children to death in your 20s for years. Just like how the demented will at times confess infidelity (many such cases)

but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation

If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.

explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question

Right but you understand that both sides have this problem, because there has been no serious archaeological attempt at quantifying human remains or cremation remains around concentration camps. Which IMO strongly reinforces the revisionist side, because why on earth wouldn’t historians be interested in finding remains and quantifying numbers and so on?

I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.

Counterargument: you are going to die, the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones. The Good is always and forever sovereign over the Truth because it is only via the Good that we care about the Truth, and indeed, we can dwell endlessly on how the Genesis narrative presents this, and how our goal is really a renewal of paradise (from the Persian word walled garden)

The history of art makes the most sense if you consider that its purpose is benefit, and this includes the feelings of awe and reverence. Biblical stories are painted because they are always didactic. Statues of the Virgin Mary are crafted so that women have an aspiring figure. Churches are patterned after nature and cathedrals remind us of the cave and the tree. Prehistoric man contemplated in a cave, drawing the figures of nature, and historic man contemplates in cathedral, with drawn figures of human nature. Prehistoric man cut off his finger at the loss of his child in the first religious ritual; historic man, in the last ritual, sees the Son of God cut, and the Father’s finger extended from the heavens.

All of this has a benefit. Hell is painted in such a way that we ought to fear it. The Last Judgment shows us the most salient image of the eternal and timeless choice of good versus evil, not just occurring in the Life to Come but occurring every day. The problem with “art is about the beyond” is that it is ambiguous (at best) and can excuse art that has no benefit. I’m sure modern architects have used this term while they erect their monstrosities that make everyone unhappier.

Religion, too, should chiefly be understood by its benefit. God is love insofar as love is beneficial. God is fearsome insofar as fear is beneficial. To the proud, God humbles, and the lowly He exalts. To the blind he gives sight, but to those who claim they see perfectly he blinds. God is benefit, the beneficent.

Yet I can’t think of any case in European history where teams of thousands organized for the mass murder of women and children over a span of years. Men who were not made psychopaths from years of starving in war, but men who sat comfortably in camps. That didn’t happen when colonists invaded America. It didn’t happen in ancient history like after the siege of Melos. It is an enormous assertion to make that this occurred.