Halfway down the Danube

Strengthening our Nerd-Fu

Claudia brought home the Battlestar Galactica series on DVD, and we watched the pilot last night.

My, that was dark. Claudia left the room for the bit with the baby, but it didn't get any more cheerful afterwards.

But, you know, not bad. I missed several years of must-see nerd TV, from Babylon Five to the later seasons of Buffy, so my expectations were frozen somewhere around Deep Space Nine. This was better than that. So now we're only three years behind! Go us.

In other news, Armenia got 10 more cm (4 inches) of snow this morning. That's on top of the 15 cm already on the ground. But that was nasty crusty old snow, and this is fluffy lovely new snow. So, all good there.

Cultural note: if you borrow a snow shovel from your Armenian neighbor, you are committing to at least twenty minutes of conversation over coffee and pastries. The complete absence of a common language has no relevance whatsoever.

Intermarriage and tolerance

There's a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I've always liked.

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

Me and Carlos, rotate that a hundred and thirty five degrees. We sometimes have conversations where we start talking past each other. Then I get to wondering, is he just three steps ahead of me and having trouble talking down to my level? Or is he assuming I'm keeping up, when I'm really not? Or is he saying something very clever, but not quite germane to my original point, because he's lost interest? Or is this one of those rare occasions when I'm right and he's wrong?

Well, I don't know. But we were talking about intermarriage.

I don't think postwar Yugoslavia is a good comparandum for the modern US. No. But I don't think it's a completely irrelevant comparison either.

Intermarriage rates between Yugoslavia's different ethnic groups in were lower than in the contemporary US: certainly. On the other hand, they were high by regional standards, and astoundingly high by historical standards. (Royalist Yugoslavia, we don't have numbers, but all evidence is that the different groups were oil and water.)

After the war, the new Communist regime worked hard to legitimize intergroup relationships, including marriage. And over the next two generations, they had a startling amount of success. Intermarriage become, if not typical, at least common enough not to attract attention. (Albanians being the interesting exception. It was always noteworthy if an Albanian married someone who wasn't.) By the 1980s there were hundreds of thousands of children of mixed marriages; and not even the most crazed and odious nationalists would publicly claim that this was a bad thing.

(The numbers were still much lower than in the US, yes. But very few places in the world have ever shown rates of intergroup marriage comparable to the US in the last forty years. The US is the outlier here.)

So, 1980s Yugoslavia, huge change in two generations, wide social tolerance -- whatever the numbers were, the level of tolerance for intermarriage was very high -- trends all going in a good direction.

Then it all went to hell.

Yugoslavia worries me. Lots of smart people, lots of decent people. Poverty not a major factor -- it was a middle-income country, most families had cars and TVs. Nor was it a provincial backwater; half the country had travelled abroad.

But it all went to hell anyway.

To answer Noel's question: I don't think the US is going in anything like the direction of Yugoslavia. But I'm less sanguine than Carlos about the long-term prospects for brotherhood and friendship. I don't think we're going to start slaughtering each other along racial lines. But I'm not convinced that large scale demonization of a constructed Other is going to be limited to a handful of militia types, either.

...The Chechens. The Chechens are quite something. Even the Armenians -- who tend to look down the length of their magnificent noses at their various Caucasian neighbors -- are impressed by the Chechens. I almost wrote "intimidated" there. It's striking how carefully everyone in the region avoided taking sides there. 600 lb. gorilla vs. amphetamine-crazed pit bull, who cares who wins? Just stay right clear.

Day Seventeen (unexpected)

So Claudia is not back yet.

She flew into Munich... and they promptly closed the airport; heavy, heavy snow.

She's now in London, trying to catch the afternoon flight to Yerevan. If it works, she'll get here tonight... 18 hours after her scheduled arrival, most of which will have been spent in planes and airports.

The boys took it hard this morning. Alan didn't want to go to sleep last night, and he was up in my room looking for her first thing this morning. David wailed at her on the phone: " But I MISS you, Mommy!!"

Well-oh. In the meantime, I have learned to make pancakes. I am no sort of cook, and they're strangely flat and crepe-y, but they are recognizably pancakes and the boys eat them with gusto.

Oh, and we had a burst pipe last week, with water pouring through the living room ceiling all night and half the house without electricity for a couple of days. But that's so last week. We're over that now.

More soon.

Intermarriage, Yugoslav versus American style

How did this discussion start? Doug was down because some people he cares about are still drinking Walker Bush's yellow Kool-Aid. I tried cheering him up by e-mail. Not my forte, as Poppy might say...

The wingnut lifestyle is not a complete counterculture, not even the evangelical portions thereof. And as long as they're interacting with the larger culture -- the extremely latitudinarian sensibilities of a large majority of Americans -- they will internalize some of that sensibility. I've seen it happen close up.

In this sort of tolerant wider cultural environment, only the people who can continually redefine an external enemy according to their own internal mental needs, who must needs [sic] define themselves in terms of combativeness -- the psychologically damaged, in other words -- are able to carry this sort of attitude to the grave.

It's a novelty, me being on the ebullient side, and Doug being morose. Doug replied, in part:

I think that's too optimistic. 1970s Yugoslavia was a tolerant cultural environment, no?

I answered,

Cultural tolerance in the U.S. for most of the wingnut types does not represent a psychological reality. To them, it really does seem like a bad government policy which many bien-pensant whites have gone along with because of their ingrained leftism and dhimmitude, and which the coloreds naturally support because they get bread and circuses (affirmative action, the Cosby show, et cetera). Should the legitimacy of the goverment fall, all this will quickly unravel. Just like Yugoslavia!

As is sometimes said elsewhere, fap fap fap. The psychological reality on the ground, outside of the wingnut enclaves -- which are strongly regionally and generationally defined, among demographically shrinking subgroups -- is very different.

Doug replied,

Um. Go back and look at the [Yugoslav] intermarriage rate.

(So I did. But that's a bit later.)

It was shallow-rooted, I'd agree. But I don't think it was that dependent on government policies, other than in the purely passive sense of the government discouraging nationalism. (Up until the early '80s, anyway. Man, that one went into reverse fast. But it was a reversal.)

Everyday personal interactions: with the notable exception of the Albanians, the different groups got along just fine. Lived together, worked together, hung out together. I'm thinking in particular of the thirtysomething Slovenes I met who were deeply mournful about Belgrade ("we used to pile into the Zastava and drive down there every weekend, party aroud the clock"), but it was pretty pervasive.

I don't think it's a good model for the US, but I don't think it's completely irrelevant either.

So I looked the Yugoslav intermarriage rate up.

Yugoslavia, a steady 12-13% overall from 1962-1989. Highest in the Voivodina: 23 rising to 28% by 1989; lowest in Kosovo: 9% falling to 5% by 1989. Slovenia started the lowest, 8%, but rose to the national norm by 1989. Serbia proper was low -- 9%, Croatia a little higher -- 16%. Compare the Soviet Union, with a 14.9% intermarriage rate in 1979. There's a pretty large literature on nationality intermarriage rates in the former USSR, pre-, during, and post-Soviet. Summary: low to nil before, reasonably high during, and sharply falling off afterwards, except in cases like urban Ukraine and the Baltic countries.

Upshot: the legitimacy of Communism legitimized cross-nationality intermarriage; and the fall of Communism largely discredited it. Unless you're a Yugoslav exceptionalist -- and not yet, you aren't, Doug -- the likeliest hypothesis is that the same type of legitimization applied there as well.

(Keep in mind that Communism made crossing confessional lines much more acceptable. How difficult was it to have cross-confessional marriages in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes?)

And (I forgot to add) Russian-Jewish marriages under the Tsars? Eeeee.

Between US white ethnic groups in 1979 -- most originally further apart than Serb and Croat, or Russian and Ukranian -- it's hard to even get a consistent ethnicity for whitey from the data, the level of intermarriage is that high. Some groups, it's literally over 90%.

Doug was vexed, especially by that last throwaway comment.

Dude. Do not palm cards with me. An Italian-American and a German-American, of any generation beyond the second, are not "further apart" than a Serb and a Croat.

But it was a trap! Heh-heh-heh.

Actually, this is me being obnoxious, because I wrote it after I double-checked the data, knowing you would have this reaction. Turns out that historical exogamy rates were incredibly low in the US for new immigrants and even Nisei until the postwar period. Even lower than Kosovo in Yugoslavia, lower than Armenia in the Soviet Union, for many groups. So it is actually rather striking.

Thus chastened, Doug asked me to post this discussion to benefit all mankind to continue it more publicly. So I did. In the meantime, I looked a few more things up.

In 1979, nearly thirty years ago, most ethnic whites born in the US still had a measurable tendency to marry in-group somewhat greater than random chance (after correcting for other factors), with the exception of German-Americans, who had a slight preference not to marry other German-Americans. The endogamous tendency of the "old ancestral" core of British, Irish, German, and Scandinavian-Americans, taken as a group, was only slightly greater than random, maybe one-and-a-half times. The highest rate was with Americans of Jewish eastern European descent married before the Depression, who were over ten times as likely to have married within their ethnic group as without. Poles, southern Europeans, and French-Canadians fell somewhere in between.

Let's compare. Doug brought up those cosmopolitan Slovenians, who missed partying in Belgrade. (And I can't blame them.) Well, in Belgrade, they would have been eight times as likely to marry another Slovene than random chance would indicate. That's actually better than Slovenes in Slovenia, where the rate was nine times greater than chance. In fact, it's greater than the preference Bosnian Muslims had for marrying each other (seven times).

The only groups in former Yugoslavia which come close to the American pattern of ethnic intermarriage would be Croats and Serbs in Croatia, Serbia proper, and (interestingly) the Vojvodina, where they had in-group marriage preferences only two to four times greater than random. That would be around the amount of Italian-American endogamy when the Godfather movies were produced.

It gets worse when you consider the ethnic enclaves in the other republics. Serbs in Kosovo? Five and a half; not so bad, right? But Albanians in Kosovo, seventeen times. Serbs in Bosnia? Eight times. Croats in Bosnia? Seventeen times.

Now let's look at Russia in 1989. (I think you know where this is going.) Going by passport nationality, only the post-1953 generation of Russians and Ukrainians in Russia (and not even Belorussians) have anything like the ye olde American pattern, and that only in the central urban core of Russia itself. In fact, endogamous preference rises in western Russia by a factor of at least three for the eastern Slav groups, bringing us to Godfather-slash-elderly-Jewish-couple rates of in-group marriage.

Then we start getting into real ethnic enclaves. Younger Tatars and Chuvash of the cities in the north Caucasus region were only around ten times as likely to marry within their group than what random chance would predict in 1989. They were the hip wild carefree ones. The Chechens, on the other hand, were several thousands of times more likely to marry another Chechen, all else being equal.

Sources:

Alba and Golden, "Patterns of ethnic marriage in the United States", Social Forces, 1986, 65:1, 202-223.

Botev, "The ethnic composition of families in Russia in 1989: insights into the Soviet 'nationalities policy'", Population and Development Review, 2002, 28:4, 681-706.

Botev, "Where east meets west: ethnic intermarriage in the former Yugoslavia, 1962 to 1989", American Sociological Review, 1994, 59:416-480.

Fisher, "Ethnic consciousness and intermarriage: correlates of endogamy among the major Soviet nationalities", Soviet Studies, 1977, 29:3, 395-408.

Pagnini and Morgan, "Intermarriage and social distance Among U.S. immigrants at the turn of the century", The American Journal of Sociology, 1990, 96:2, 405-432.

Silver, "Ethnic intermarriage and ethnic consciousness among Soviet nationalities", Soviet Studies, 1978, 30:1, 107-116.

And some others which I forgot to write down. Hey, this was e-mail.

Hello Mütter!

Yesterday I went with Peanut and Bad Mama to Philadelphia's Mütter Museum. It's a respectful museum devoted to medical anomalies, utterly fascinating if you like that sort of thing, which all three of us do.

I was deeply struck by a unique method of tissue preparation devised by Werner Spalteholz, not a name I was previously familiar with. One of the great German anatomists -- his Hand Atlas is still regarded as a classic -- he devised a method to render tissue transparent, which is still used to this day. The trick is to permeate the tissue with chemicals of the right index of refraction, such as oil of wintergreen, which 'clears' the tissue, like a grease spot on a paper placemat. You stain or dye the things you want to highlight, and they appear like a floating three-dimensional hologram in the preparation.

Spalteholz's method was used extensively in Dresden's German Hygiene Museum, the original home of the Transparent Man which freaked so many members of my generation out as children. Between Hitler trashing the Otto Dix murals, the Billy Pilgrim incident, and the Soviet aftermath, eighty percent of the museum was destroyed. Interestingly, the Soviets thought highly enough of the museum to rebuild it.

Spalteholz patented his method in the U.S. (#1021952), after being given an honorary doctorate at the University of Wisconsin a few years before.

Not a whole lot of information on the history of this sort of innovation out there.

Single Parent, Day Four

We're okay.

The house is warming up. We got all the radiators put in yesterday. The new ones had a horrible chemical smell from the special paint (did you know that radiators needed special paint? Nope, me neither) but by today it had mostly passed.

The weather has been pretty miserable: snow, cold, more snow. Days are around -5 Celsius (low 20s Fahrenheit), nights get down to -10 or -12. It snows every day... not much at any time, but it adds up. I've shoveled the driveway twice, and am not sure I want to again.

Still, we're all okay. Keeping the boys in a pretty rigid routine, which helps.

Of course, now comes the weekend... two full days of unstructured time. How we'll get through this remains to me seen.

More in a bit.

The Hospital Ship Armenia

The worst maritime disaster of all time?

Armenia.

Well, maybe. First, a shout-out to the new Armenia Blog , which is just full of interesting tidbits, and from which this story comes.

Next, the disaster. The Armenia was a Soviet passenger ship. It was built in 1928, and had a capacity of 4,700 tons. In August 1941, the Soviet Navy converted it to a hospital ship.

On November 6, 1941, Armenia's Captain, one V. Playshevsky, sailed the ship from Sevastopol to Yalta. In Yalta, we are told, the Russian Naval Command ordered the ship to remain at port until 7PM -- after dark -- or until escort vessels were available.

On November 7, at 8AM in the morning, Captain Playshevsky ignored his orders and left Yalta with over 5,000 refugees and wounded soldiers. At 11:25AM, somewhere between Yalta and Gurzuf, the Luftwaffe caught up with him. Heinkel He-111H bombers dropped two torpedoes on the helpless ship. (Soviet sources are very firm that it was clearly marked as a hospital ship.) One torpedo hit the fore section and that was that. The ship sank at 11:29AM.

Only a handful of men (either 3 or 8, depending on the source) were rescued by an escort vessel. This incident became the U.S.S.R.'s greatest naval disaster ever. Armenia now lies at 44°15'N, 34°17'E, just a few miles off the southern tip of the Crimea, some 1500 feet below the sea.

Years later, the number of deaths remains unclear. The original sources say "between 5,000 and 5,500". Later, it was suggested that as many as 2,000 more people may have been on the ship without paperwork, refugees desperate to escape the German attack on Sevastopol.

Okay, so. Some questions.

1) On the scale of world maritime disasters, how big was this?

Pretty big. Even if we take the low estimate of deaths, the sinking of the Armenia still makes the top five. If we take the high end -- which I doubt, but let's say -- then it's a plausible contender for #1.

Interestingly, the other big disasters were all similar: ships full of troops or refugees fleeing disaster on the Eastern Front. The Wilhelm Gustloff is probably the strongest contender, but the Goya is in there too.

I note that 5,000 people would have been very, very crowded on a ship this size. As for 7,000... well, it's possible, but it would have been like the Staten Island Ferry at rush hour.

2) So, what exactly happened here?

I don't know.

The story as given has some serious holes in it. Why would the captain disobey orders and take a ship full of refugees and wounded out onto an ocean full of hostile planes and warships in broad daylight, without escorts or air cover?

At this point Sevastopol had been under siege for about a week. But the ship had already slipped safely in and out of Sevastopol, and moved on to Yalta, 150 kilometers further east. Was Yalta under imminent threat of German capture too?

Or perhaps the ship didn't have enough food and water? 5,000 people... maybe Captain Playshevsky was just desperate to reach his destination before order on the ship broke down.

My tentative guess: it was a profound bureacratic screwup. The captain got wrong or confusing orders, followed them as best he could, and went down. Then blame was dumped on his conveniently unavailable head.

That's not very satisfying, I know. But I find it a bit less implausible than a ship commander, in Stalin's USSR, just plain ignoring orders.

Then there's the sinking itself. I have no problem imagining the Nazis attacking a clearly marked hospital ship. I think that's probably exactly what happened. On the other hand, I also have no problem imagining an overloaded ship foundering in the rough waters of the Black Sea and going down by itself, with no help from the Luftwaffe required. I don't think that's what happened, but I don't entirely trust the official account, either.

Finally, there's some confusion as to the status of hospital ships on the Eastern Front. I've found one page that claims the USSR, early in the war, sent a note that it would refuse to acknowledge German hospital ships as per the Hague Convention. Unfortunately that one page is on a holocaust revisionist site. Usenet googling finds several people raising this point in discussions over the years, but I can't find a solid cite. So, it's not clear to me whether being a hospital ship made a difference.

3) So what's the status of the wreck today?

Obscure. Apparently some Ukrainians lay a wreath every year. But it doesn't seem to have been visited by wreck divers yet... it's too deep for Scuba; salvage submersibles would be needed. (By way of comparison, the Goya and the Wilhelm Gustloff were not visited until the last five years or so.)

Also obscure in the sense that nobody seems to know about this. Oh, it has a wikipedia entry and all that. But it's even more obscure than the Baltic wrecks, and they're not that well known. There are very few online references and -- as far as I can tell -- no English-language articles or books.

If there's anyone who knows more, I'd be very interested to hear.

Meanwhile, R.I.P. Armenia.

Single Parent, Day One

So, single parenthood.

Claudia is gone for the next sixteen days. It's just me and the boys. Well, me and the boys, and Karine (who comes in the morning), Narine (who comes in the afternoons) and Xenia (the cleaning lady, three mornings a week). Cheap help: the dirty little secret of expat life. That's what makes this remotely possible.

Still, when the alarm clock goes off in the morning it's just them and me.

This first morning was complicated by the fact that we were up late last night looking for a small but utterly vital document that had mysteriously gone missing. We found it, but it took several hours. So I started a bit short on sleep. What can you do.

Jacob, bless his little heart, tends to sleep late. But David is an early riser. An early and almost unbelievably cheerful riser. I have no idea where that comes from. Certainly those are no genes of mine.

Meanwhile Alan has to be awakened and made ready for school. Alan's approach to mornings is much more like my own, viz., blurry but generally negative. "No, Daddy! I want to sleep more! Nooooo!"

(It is a good idea to keep David and Alan separate for the first half hour or so. Even at the ages of not-quite-five and three, the dynamic is well established: David doesn't understand why his big brother is so... nonresponsive... while Alan finds his little brother's chipper greet-the-day burbling entirely unbearable.)

Anyway. I got Alan dressed, fed, and off to the bus stop. And myself dressed, sort of fed, and off to the office. So, one morning down.

When we decided to do this, I thought to myself, "Hey -- I will keep track of the number of times I hear 'where's Mommy' and 'I want Mommy'! That should be interesting! Sadly, this slipped my mind in the morning bustle. But: about thirty, and about ten. I'll try to do better.

Next up: bedtimes.

Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Groundhog Day

It's Christmas today.

Armenian Christmas, that is. The Armenians do things a little differently. So their Christmas is on January 6.

It's Christmas tomorrow, too! Russian Orthodox Christmas, that is. So, Christmas all weekend long.

I won't even mention the three New Years.

In other news: snow, snow, snow. It gets cold and snowy in the Caucasus, who knew? The pipes in the house burst while we were gone. You can find details over at Claudia's blog. We got about half the radiators replaced before the long Christmas break, so the house is currently cool -- the kitchen is around 15 centigrade -- but habitable. We wear sweaters and woolly socks, and wait patiently for the long holiday to end so we can get the rest of our heat back.

Otherwise, no great news here. How are you guys doing?

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Thoughts so far:

1. Cheese curds freeze really well.

2. The Negroni is a very classy way to drink a lot of gin.

3. I have to get an accordion.

New Year's Resolution:

To get Claudia to remove this blog's malware 'free counter' whose embedded pop-ups keep on crashing my browser. Argh, nudge.