Twilight Bark

Not necessarily. The closed border is a great blessing in disguise. Unfortunately the window of opportunity it provided has not been used in the wisest and most efficient way. If it is to have an independent future, Armenia has to avoid being dependent on Turkey for any significant economic activity. Think Georgia instead. There is only one problem, and there is no need to negotiate. Turkey will remain unreformed in its self-image, its view of history, what it views as "virtue" and "vice", and its cultural values in the forseeable future. Given the decline in Armenian cultural strength, "kitch"ization of the society, and the considerable strength of the Turkish pop culture machine, even "opening the border" for purely cultural "exchange" (likely one way) is quite dangerous. While the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is used in the context of competition, I think in this case it actually would kill us. I am not against open borders per se. I am against opening borders unprepared, especially when we have the better alternative of Georgia. Actually, I would. Armenia would become irrelevant in 10-15 years following the opening of the borders, and worse in the longer term. If we don't recognize our weaknesses and be weary of the many strengths of our adversaries, and act accordingly, we are doomed to end up in the evolutionary dustbin.

Engineering and law, while requiring similar intellectual level, thrive on almost opposite character traits. If you are to become more than a patent attorney or some grunt worker taking care of details, I think you would often need to use your logical reasoning in ways that favor illogical outcomes. You would need to be in tune with the illogic of the individuals making up the jury, or the absurdities of the law. An engineer, by temperament, finds comfort in the rational workings of things. If you find you are technically oriented, I advise strongly against becoming a patent attorney. It is not an intellectually rewarding path. To each his/her own of course. If you are simultaneously interested in law and engineering, you are probably blessed/cursed with ADHD (a very Armenian condition). If that's the case, read books on how you can actually leverage it to your advantage while building a support system that takes care of the "details" for you. Basically a "secretary" of some sort; normally a family member (mother?) that is willing to embrace that role without undue nagging and guilt-tripping. Oh, and you do need to decide what to do, when you can get around to it In general, greater rewards come with greater risks. If you value security over the pursuit of something extraordinary, you need to take some chances, and accept that you may have to live with the negative consequences of failure. One last thing: you often learn more from talking to failed people than "successful" ones. The former are a sure source of information about mistakes to avoid. The "winners" often don't really know why the heck they became successful, don't know that they don't know, are typically unaware that their success was in good part due to luck and circumstance, and can give you tragically misinformed guidance. Good luck.

I may be partly to blame for the discrepancy, although it was not intentional. Although "Ո ո", being the only "O" sound before the introduction of "Օ օ" later, as it stands today, it is not an unambiguous "O" sound. At the beginning of words, it is pronounced "Vo". To my mind, pronouncing the "Vo" at the beginning of a word as "O" sounds colloquial, at least in WA. That's why, to me, "Ո" is the "funny O", and "Օ" is the "straightforward, unambiguous O". As for the transliteration errors, when you go back and forth using a single table for both directions, they are bound to happen as long as multiple characters are used when such character combinations also occur naturally without the implied phonetics. The most satisfactory method is to use different tables for the "forward" and "backward" directions. That way, you can use some exotic character like "`" (backquote) that rarely if ever gets used in a natural language setting, or a run-of-the-mill everyday computer usage, except in programming, to signal a character combination that is meant to produce a specific letter in Armenian. From Armenian to English, you just use whatever character combination produces the closest sound without worrying about what would happen if you fed it back to the same table (since you won't be using the same table to go back).

Sound shifts, or lost sounds are quite normal in the evolution of dialects. For all we know Western Armenian phonetics might have been actually around when Mesrob developed the alphabet. He might simply have used the dialect that he was familiar with. As for top-to-bottom dictating of language, only "dirigiste" states such as France and Turkey have such policies. More successful cultures let the users of the language converge on an ever-evolving "standard". The latter is more freedom-oriented, and thus desirable. I respect your energy in learning and disseminating nuggets of information about the Armenian language. However, I have to finally register an objection to your hatred of anything to do with Western Armenian. You are obviously embarrassed, if not disdainful, of being Western Armenian. In that sense, you remind me of Baliozian, your favorite "thinker", who also mixes in unreasonable, blatanly unfair statements into a soup of truisms. In your self-hatred, and a very very Turkish way of looking at things, you two are like two sides of the same coin. I am not happy with Istanbul Armenians either, and I know that the Western Armenian has lost its intellectual tradition after the genocide, and is no longer a properly cultivated flavor of Armenian. But then, I am not particularly happy with the "vulgar" version of any flavor of Armenian, be it the language or the culture. But there is no point in cursing at the speakers of an established dialect with a literary tradition to change the way they pronounce their own names for example, and how they transliterate them. Ayb-ben-gim is Ayp-pen-kim in Western Armenian, and that's settled. It's going to be "settled" more permanently when the last speaker/writer of that dialect dies in some alien land. Until then, Turkish style "There are no Western Armenians, and there is no Western Armenian dialect, they are just Confused Armenians, and they speak Confused Armenian", or some such heavy-handed nonsense is unhelpful. A true Armenian cultural and linguistic unity will not be achieved by cursing, insulting, belittling, and bullying. We don't have the physical setup for that even if that repugnant solution were desirable. I know that you mean well, and that you are urging Armenians to embrace the dialect of the only state we have. However, the way you are going about it is akin to a cave man dragging a woman by her hair to conduct the business of procreation, as opposed to wooing her with flowers and compliments. As I said above, Armenia is not in a position to dictate anything to anyone. If they piss Western Armenians off, they will simply assimilate where they are, thank you very much. And the rare Western Armenian individual that has arrived at your position on the matter will not get anywhere by acting as the enforcer of the culture of a state that doesn't actually bother to attract the audience in question. In any case, learning proper Western Armenian, the language of their parents and their institutions, takes them quite close to the official language anyway, notwithstanding a month or two of adjustment period when and if necessary. In an ideal world, the Armenian state would encourage immigration of Western Armenians, and actually help them preserve their dialect within Armenia, as a local, vibrant dialect within Armenia, rather than the sad, dying dialect of a dying breed. If we are going to act or think like Turks, there is no point in preserving anything, Western or Eastern.

Creation Museum http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2...s-now-an-excuse

Of course not. So those who are arguing against your assertion that LTP is the way to salvation are "justifying all the mistakes committed by the authorities"? That is breathtakingly disingenuous. Dishonest is the appropriate adjective. And who here advocated that? Who are you discussing this with? Ghosts? But that was exactly your point when you returned to the forum after a long break. That LTP was the way to salvation. Your entire point was about individual personalities. You even confused "personalities" and "ideas" so much that, after we spent a day or two telling you about ideas and principles, and the fact that none of the candidates offered the right vision and ideas, you complained that "nobody seems to be for anyting", when you meant "nobody seems to be for SOMEBODY". Guess what, most people here don't see anyone on offer that's worth making a storm about. Otherwise, we have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, thank you very much. To set the record straight, your proposed "solution" to fixing the status quo was basically a violent revolution in favor of installing LTP as the new "ruler". Complaining about the status quo without a proposal to get there is as useful as complaining about the weather. As it stands, you either get an umbrella or get soaked in the rain and curse at the weather gods. Until we figure out a way to change the weather. Yeah. Well, that's what we have been saying here, haven't we? The rest is the familiar lamentation. Yeah, the weather sucks. We can wait for some sort of a "messiah", or work with the system we are dealt and help it evolve from the ground up. It will take big investments from enlightened and rich Armenians, and NOT "benevolent" foreigners, in the form of money and vision to get there. At that point, a great "leader" would be largely redundant anyway, but is much more likely to emerge all the same. Until then, either get an "umbrella" or become a rich and enlightened Armenian who is willing to give his material and intellectual wealth to Armenia.

One almost wishes that the government had that type of competence and control, and then worry about its intentions. Neither was LTP, according to his track record. He has shown nothing but cynical disdain for Armenians. He, perhaps with a little justification, seems to think that they are a bunch of morons. We need someone who is much deeper and full of love than that self-centered cynic. The elections were not perfect, and Sarkisyan probably would need to go to the second round to win. But from all indications, LTP would not win in the second round. In any case, in a country where the intellectual level has gone down so much, and political maturity is nonexistent, "fair" election is not only impossible. It's an irrelevance. Don't you understand, without rational thinking and intellectual discussion, an election is only a tool to give the masses only the illusion of the control of their own destiny. This is true not only in Armenia, but also in most, if not all "democracies". In fact, LTP's actions show that he is determined to make Armenia look like a pariah state. The government is doing its best given its limitations in intellect and vision. There is no such thing. It means a few big players whose interests do not align at all with Armenia's. And the vast majority of the real "international community" (not the usual euphemism for the few big, bullying countries) either doesn't care (or know) about Armenia, or are deeply islamic societies that wouldn't mind seeing Armenia disappear as a distinct force. Some of those "sins" were a legitimate reaction to an attempt at violent revolution. And overall, they represent a perfect summary of LTP's rule as well. So where does that leave us? Your answer to all the ills of the country is: bring back LTP. In that context, you have not provided one reason why people should support your agenda.

No, that's clearly not true. There are many many things wrong with the political culture in Armenia. However, being Orwellian is not one of them. Kleptocracy, lack of vision or creativity, thuggery? Yes, to varying degrees. But Orwellian? Not really. The state is simply not powerful or ominipresent enough for such a label to make sense, apart from whether they would love a "1984" sort of power (which I don't think they would, for all their faults). LTP and his boosters are a lot closer to Orwellian "Animal Farm" than the government is to "1984".

And why are those the only two choices? Is the choice really between violent revolution and totalitarianism? There is not a longer, truer path to improving the nation? And LTP is the answer? What kind of track record does he have to deserve a violent revolution advocated in the name of installing him as the new ruler in place of the current rulers? What evidence do you have, other than some speeches, that he will bring such a profound change, and in the right way? A superficial "improvement" can indeed be brought in at the expense of selling the country's and the nation's soul. That doesn't mean the so-called improvement is worth it. Is the right time for a revolt right now, before LTP gets too old? Is that it? Does anything you say have anything at all to do with the sincere wishes of an intelligent person? Or are they the words of a party hack that perhaps is excited about a position that he might get if LTP comes to power? Since you are in the mood to cite Shakespeare, Beatles, etc (no Yogi Berra?), perhaps it is time for you to read or re-read Orwell's "Animal Farm".

But that's the truth. I am sure you know the phrase "running on vapor".

Oh, I just got sucked into posting here because of the propagandistic posts on shenanigans in Armenia. I really should stop too.

The Phrygians. Not Hyes. And those extremely warlike tribes stayed dormant and unrecorded under Urartu while Urartu arose, got recorded in the Assyrian archives, and when the Urartu state collapsed, they all of a sudden became the dominant group? And not before? Hayasa means "Of Hyes" or in the context "Hyeland" in Hittite. Azzi is screaming at us as the word "Az(k)" in Armenian, which means "nation", or "clan" (as in azkagan). They were neighbors and rivals with indo-european speaking Hittites. That's all I need to know. Well, the word Turk in Gok-Turk may be a "coincidence" too, but nobody, least of all the Turks, take that kind of silly "probability" seriously. Nor should they. King Aram fits right into Khorenatsi's recording of the oral history. If the carriers of Armenian oral history reflect the fact that Armenians regarded Aram as one of them, that's much more important than which anthropological tribe Aram may have descended from 20000 years ago. And this kind of demand for unnecessary proving the obvious should be left to those with hostile agendas. In your narrative, there is no explanation for the sudden appearance of Yervantuni dynasty, with a fully dominant Armenian population in the Urartu domain. If Armenians were a nonentity before then, how come they replaced the supposedly different "Urartu people" so thoroughly after the collpase of the Urartu state? They would have to stay dormant since the time of Phrygian invasions, and then must have risen up and completely exterminated the "Urartu people" so as to completely erase any memory of an Urartu nation. Such a cataclysmic event might have gone unrecorded in subsaharan Africa, but not at the center of civilization of the time. On the other hand, the non-Persian part of the Behistun inscription refers to Armenia as Urartu or some variation of it. Clearly, the two were synonymous at the time. The "change" from "Urartu" to "Armenia" was nothing more than a change of dynasty, and not a major event. Anyway, I have really real things to attend to right now. It's your choice whether you think independently or not.

Only a few isolated tribes can claim to descend from a single clan. Most nations absorb different groups as time goes by. The important test for self-consistency is how that nation sees itself, and how they relate to other nations, particularly the neighboring ones. If they see themselves as Turkic, they can't see themselves as "just caucasians that changed their language". The Irish choose to identify themselves as celtic, which perfectly reasonable and honorable. It would also be alright if they chose to identify themselves as Anglo-Saxon or Nordic or whatever, based on the language that almost all of them speak. The Azeris cannot be simultaneously be Turkic and Caucasian. They need to make a choice. Or they can choose to identify themselves as some sort of a "mulatto" or hybrid people with no coherent ties to anybody else. They are all fine. They just aren't fine when they are chosen according to whom they talk to or what they want to extract from their counterpart, depending on the day. Armenians hopefully are not in that business. As for Phrygian, I am sure whatever could be deciphered has been deciphered. I don't think people are holding back. It's not up to Armenians to decipher the undecipherable in order to disprove the unproven. In any case, similarity to Phrygian does not by itself preclude the Armenianness of Hayasa or the fact that Armenian has been spoken by a coherent set of people and has been evolving separately since 3000 BC.

Yes, Ashot, it is the same study. I read your response after I wrote mine. I put a link to that paper in this forum at the time, the day it came out. It put a number on what I was beginning to conclude based on reading, comparing and filtering what I had read through a test of logical consistency and common sense. I take offense at the suggestion that I have to be some wild propagandist, comparable to the fabricators of azeri fairy tales or the racist sun-language theory of the official turkish history. The obvious fundamental difference is that the Azeri and Turkish fantasies violate logic and common sense, while extending the date of Armenian ethnogenesis further back than 550 BC is necessitated by logic and common sense. To those who ridicule Armenian attempts at correcting their hijacked history: I fail to understand why defending, based on sound logic and evidence, something as fundamental as the ethnogenesis of Armenians and how firmly native we are to Asia Minor and the Armenian Highland is counterproductive in the context of Azeri fabrications. So all they have to do to stop us from defending the history of our origins is to make a lame attempt to extend their presence in the same lands to 1 zillion BC? Is that how quickly we should fold?

You know I like you Domino, but you are simply wrong about Armenian ancient history. In fact, you are often wrong about history when it comes to make sense of things. I know you'll be hurt to hear this, but it's true. Western narrative of Armenian history has so often been so wrong or wrongheaded that it would be more efficient to dismiss it altogether and start all over again. I won't make up Germans' or Hungarians' history for them, and will be grateful if they don't try to fit their prejudices into my history. I am advocating no more than critical thinking, respecting hard evidence, respecting lack of hard evidence, reason, and common sense. If one follows a reason-dictated path, there is no way one would arrive at the Western-dictated narrative. At the end of one of Samuel Noah Cramer's books on Sumer, you'll find a glossary, where Sumerian "ururu" (an obvious cognate of Armenian "Oror", and for all we know "ururu" might have been pronounced "oror", given the limitations in deciphering vowels) is given as "lullaby". It's hard to believe that he was unaware of the connection. He probably used Armenian to decipher that and some other words. It's useful to know that he spent a lot of time in the archaelogical museum of Istanbul, and no doubt made good friends there. You see, it would be rude of him to connect Aratta to the Sumerians . He said it was a city in "western persia", oh darn, just short of Armenian highland, yet gives no reason for such placement, even though the known location Ararat-Urartu is screaming at both him and the reader. You don't have to take such "coincidence" at face value either. Sumerians had no reason whatsoever to have special dealings with some obscure place "in western persia". They had ample reason to travel upstream the two rivers that brought life, quite literally, to their country. And they in fact revered the northern highlands as the place that brought them life. As far as when to date the start of a coherent beginning of an Armenian nation, you must know that there was a very scientific study (Gray & Atkinson) that, among other things, assigned the "split" of Armenian from the Indo-European tree at about 5000 years ago. If a coherent Armenian "nation" (group, tribe, whatever) was forged from a soup of diverse peoples at 600 BC, it would have left a profound linguistic signal that would have been screaming the date at us. Guess what? There isn't such a signal. The only "signal" we have is the split 5000 years ago. On the other hand, to me, the oldest "written" record of Armenian presence is Hayasa-Azzi (circa 1400 BC, and it's not surprising that they would take many centuries to become a distinct and serious contender to the Hittites, the more dominant fellow Indo-Europeans living on adjacent lands, and Hagop would say they were one and the same, and I am open to the possibility). Any serious doubt about the full Armenianness of Hayasa-Azzi is indicative of extreme bias, innocent or otherwise. As far as I know, Phrygian is a poorly attested language. There is simply not enough of it on record to make any specific inferences. That was also why it wasn't included in the Gray & Atkinson study. There simply isn't enough of it there to support an unbiased, scientific analysis. Whatever the case may be, a similarity, borrowed or otherwise, between two indo-european languages spoken by two nations living in the same vicinity for a while is not particularly shocking and does not necessiate cooking up stories of Armenians being Phrygian colonists and an Armenian nation beamed into existence and utter dominance in eastern Asia Minor, completely displacing the "urartu" with no record of their "arrival" from the west at anywhere near the time in question. And complete eradication of an earlier culture so completely in a few decades is a feat that few if any of the "aggressive" nations have ever accomplished, and is completely out of character for Armenians as attested by their entire history whether you start it from 3000 BC, 1400 BC, or 550 BC. It's laughable if it weren't regarded as the "orthodox" view by lousy academics that live in industrialized and powerful countries. All of this were discussed in this forum before for the benefit of those readers with ability to reason. To no avail it seems. Revise your thinking.

Thanks, Knight.

I don't know why you are lumping the two of us together. Anyway ... I assume you mean "do they see themselves different from European Armenians?". I am not a spokesperson for them, but I am sure some do, and some don't. I don't see the relevance of that question to anything I wrote or indeed thought. See above. See above. I don't know that I ever did. And where did I indicate that I "still" believe in miracles? Strange. Really strange. Absolutely not. And I make a point of it in my private interactions. I cringe when I am put in a situation where people somehow attach some significance to where I am from or where they are from. To me that's nothing more than a potentially interesting trivia and an excuse for small talk. And I have no patience for prejudice about such things. It's dumb. It's poisonous. It's counterproductive. Having said that, one doesn't have to shy away from making certain observations. That should not prevent one from starting with a clean slate whenever they meet a new person. As far as my lamentations about the analysts in Armenia being not so bright, or that so-called political activists being an offshoot of homo sovieticus, thay are made because Armenia cannot afford its "elite" being foolish brutes, whereas most of the diasporan B.S. artists don't carry much national responsibility with them. So that's what I focus on. To finish this point, to me there are three kinds of Armenians. Foolish Armenians, wise Armenians, and clueless Armenians. Aww. And I thought we were allowed to lie. Now you tell me.

Dear person with citizenship paperwork, Your current warning is duly noted. Even if it is unjustified, it is understandable. However, I was unaware that you warned me about such a thing before. If I expressed a dim view of an idea, it was your choice to take it personally. Or you could have chosen to prove or demonstrate, if you could, why it was such an intelligent view, as part of a "productive argument". As for my "personal attack" in the last message, if you had any objectivity left, you would see that it was more a lamentation over an obvious degeneration than a "personal attack". But clearly there is something rather personal at stake here preventing you from seeing your evolution as the regression that it is, so there is no point arguing the point further. And you are in no position to pretend that you are in search of "productive argument". You chicken out any time you are presented with one, and go back to a dour soviet attitude and slogans dressed in new and crisp euro-clothes and euro-speak. That's also your choice, and you are entitled to it. Good luck building a civil society, however sterile and soulless it's certain to be, given the ideology behind it. And realize that "good luck", if you stumble on it, will be the only thing that you would have going for you. Getting rid of one set of thugs by bringing another set of thugs, I must admit, must be so brilliant that its wisdom is beyond my comprehension. However, in the unlikely event that you do accomplish what's professed in your purported ideology, just don't expect your creation to be a "magnet" for anyone but for euro-pretenders and those in search of cushy EU-subsidized jobs. It will be the equivalent of an agrarian, sparsely populated economy with some euro-luster sprinkled on it. And yes, it will be a Turkish colony or protectorate for all intents and purposes. Don't worry Azat, I'm not going to drag this out any further.

It's fascinating to observe alpha's metamorphosis from a measured contributor about economic and (if I remember it correctly) energy-related topics to "this". A junta? Imprisoniong 3 million people, presumably all throwing themselves onto the streets for their beloved prophet Levon? Putting them on trial? Presumably because they behaved a lot worse than LTP? And so much worse than LTP that they need to be put on trial, and the entire population of the country is about to rise up against the "junta"? This has nothing to do with exploring with "what should be done". This is just crass, melodramatic propaganda. The work of a party-hack, not a thinker. I hope this does not reflect the "best and the brightest" the homeland has to offer. If it's anywhere close, we are in deep doodoo.

We are not passive Ashot jan, we are apathetic. We have no expectations. OK, here goes one: What are his plans for opening transportation routes through Georgia? Can he find a way to finance a highway to the Black Sea Coast and secure the support of the Georgian government? Or does he see it as a pie-in-the-sky project, and a detriment to his friends' legalized smuggling business? OK, strike the last part of that question.

Actually, an argument can be made that where one has chosen to establish a life is much more important than a piece of official paper. For at least two reasons, in principle. A diaspora-born Armenian has never made an active choice of leaving the homeland, although presumably many would have done so just as many Armenia-born Armenians have. However, that is a hypothetical probability. When a person born in Armenia, with all the nice paperwork documenting it, makes the decision to leave it for greener pastures, we are no longer talking about a probability, it is a definite decision made that reflects one's preferences and price. Where you are matters especially when it reflects one's decisions and priorities. Second, the personal interests of a person living in Armenia is much more likely to be aligned with that of the country. So that favors the person living in the country as more relevant. However, there is a third point. Now, whether that person has developed the capability to spot and evaluate what those interests are, and whether the culture in the country is conducive to the development of such skills is another discussion, and an extreme case might end up favoring those living outside of it as more visionary or sober-minded. I don't pretend to know the answer. That is unlikely, but alright by me. People here should be grownups, and should be able to get over it. That sounds like a straw-man argument. I haven't read all the posts in detail, but I haven't had the impression that anyone was suggesting disqualifying ethnic minorities from official office. However, to have an ethnicity-blind view of a nation is silly. Acknowledging that people of Armenian ancestry are vastly more likely to (compared with , say, former residents of Jewish, Azeri or Georgian extraction), and have the moral right to care about Armenia regardless of their paperwork is not incompatible with the acknowledgement that all persons choosing to live in Armenia should have an equal opportunity at official capacity based on their merits. It seems you are using one legitimate and rightful idea to advance a wrongheaded one by making them somehow linked. The carrier of the message is important if we are to continue with our silly, personality-based political system. We are not talking about a referendum here. We are talking about a real person who would have vast powers over the country. And his track record is so odious that the purported ideology is irrelevant. And if he does mean what he says, and that he actually acquired the competence in the interveneing years of rest, it's even scarier. His ideology is little more than declaring the "end of history" for Armenia. I wonder if people really get this: "end of history". That is the best possible outcome of an LTP rule. The alternative is more of the same cleptocracy we have seen under his and Kocharian's regime, continuing under Sarkissian, but without an ideological determination to end Armenian history. So I'll take the devil I know. And I don't want an end to Armenian history. True, but irrelevant to the discussion, really. You would find many very-well-read people that passionately disagree with you about Lusavorich. In many ways he was an absolute disaster. Christianity did not have to spread the way he did it by violence and destruction. Would a native Armenian behave more mercifully and preserved pre-Christian heritage better? We can only speculate, but I think that is more likely than not. He had every reason to be vengeful. Most Armenian kings sucked, empirically speaking. Even native ones looked for ways to attach themselves to foreign cultures that they regarded as superior. We don't produce, or even import, good leaders. We should stop searching for modern-day equivalents of benevolent and glorious kings. We don't have a good track record with them. Indeed. I propose doing nothing. Actually a capitalized Nothing. Until the end of the state of emergency anyway, which was declared according to the powers given to the government by the constitution. While it imposes inconvenient restrictions, it is "legal" and "constitutional" nonetheless. And I propose working on the intellectual infrastructure that I mentioned before, instead of looking for the next king. Just for today, I am giving away my proposals for free, and I am not even asking for the keys.

Thanks for the kind words. The respect is mutual, although I am not sure I am fully deserving. I have nothing to do with the latest burst of emotion here. I usually let ideas take care of themselves, and don't take things personally. I also have this naive notion that people (including me) can be persuaded by intellectual argument. As for ignoring Alpha, or rather the ideas he presents here, that's not something I would recommend. I for one cannot ignore ideas that I think are wrong and yet come with a soundtrack of a siren call (i.e. a mythological fame of attraction, though leading to no beautiful mermaid). However, discussions usually exhaust themselves with no persuasion achieved, because the superficially rational arguments are in fact rooted in irrational emotions, prejudices and insecurities. I fear it's usually too messy to untangle by polite long-distance argumentation. Good luck and best wishes to everyone.

A general point: We cannot afford to be foolish. Big and powerful countries with a variety of "insurance policies" can afford and continue to do stupid things, but by virtue of their "indispensible" positions in one way or another, get away with it for the most part. Armenia is an eminently disposable country for the rest. Regardless of how much some people jump up and down shouting "we should be a normal country!", "dammit we ARE a normal nation", we are not, and we will not be in the foreseeable future. We either wise up really fast or we choose between extinction or indefinite obscurity. A "comparative" point: The recent events are worse for two reasons: 1. The parliament shootings could be viewed as an isolated incident due to one crazy man. When tens of thousands of people do something that makes no freaking sense, it reflects something about the deteriorated state of the culture itself. 2. 1999 was less than a decade after independence, and could also be "forgiven" as part of growing pains. Nine years later, and we get orders of magnitude more people acting stupidly in a very public manner shows that, at least by some measures, we are going backwards, not forwards. Furthermore, such collective stupidity has a poisonous effect on diasporan assimilation rate. Who wants to go through the considerable effort and time it takes to resist assimilation just to keep an association with a country and culture that cannot even show some special cohesion. Yes, in addition to not being able to afford being stupid, that means we cannot afford to be "normal" and "ordinary". We can find "normal and ordinary" in our respective host cultures, and assimilate. Much easier. And without its diaspora, Armenia would be an insignificant ex-soviet republic in well-deserved obscurity.

About tourism: It's fine to have a thriving tourism industry, but Armenia can never be anything other than an "unusual"or "exotic" destination for a relatively small, elite part of the traveling public. As such, tourism's economic potential is not significantly higher than what an "agrarian economy" can achieve. This is about the "traditional" forms of tourism. However, in line with the "intellectual infrastructure building" I mentioned earlier, one can create high-value-added sectors that could loosely be lumped in "tourism". By reforming medical schools and the health care system, Armenia can become a destination for affordable health care. By nurturing and reforming the universities, it can be a destination for hard-currency paying foreign students. By having a vibrant arts scene, it may even keep some of that brain capital in the country. When a country has a good number of relatively well-off and well-educated foreigners who want/need to stay for extended periods and having a stake in the true well-being of that country, it has the best form of "protection" from the "west". Much better than getting stuck in a "protection racket" paid for in tangibles and intangibles as well as the future of our children. And remember, as you indicated, tourists can disappear overnight, not that we would ever attract enough of them to be a (however fragile) locomotive of the economy.

Hi Boghos, I was hoping you would chime in. I agree with you about the "benevolent thieves" scenario being a significant improvement on the current and past government. As I indicated before, I think the ordinary republican form of government is a poor match for Armenia. A parliamentary system (republican-lite?) with strong elements of direct democracy would avoid a lot of the mess, patronage, and corruption. Unfortunately with the tragic degree of brain-drain from the country, the initial state of a direct democracy would still be superficially pathetic if implemented tomorrow because of a population and intelligentsia that apparently aren't used to dispassionate, analytical thinking except for perhaps during the escapist activity of chess. That's why I think those with resources should engage in improving the "intellectual infrastructure" (schools, think-tanks, publishing, the arts, etc) of the nation, all the while rigorously avoiding explicit politics. Change must come from the ground up, but the ground needs to be watered and fertilized from the "top", by wealthy and visionary individuals outside the current political system. Armenia doesn't need a revolution in terms of political personalities. It needs a quick evolution. Looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts, TB