I do too, thus far. But you've opened up a lot of doors, and I don't think we'll have time to go through all of them. For now I'll just pick the one that seems most important: Herzl.

First, how'd you land on the beard angle? That's quite a supposition you're making there. I have no problem at all with the Assyrian beard! I think it's kind of cool, actually, and we can hardly imagine him without it, now can we.

Nor do I have any negative feelings about the guy as a person -- and more broadly, I don't see my characterization as ad-hominem. The reference to his nationality was simply to showcase the obvious fact that whatever one may make of his ideas, they were in both substance and origin utterly alien to the actual people living in the place he wanted to set up his utopian colony in. (We'll get to that later).

As for his "scribblings" -- his prose was known to be manic at times, and even in highly sympathetic sources one encounters that description.

As for "weird"? He definitely had some peculiar ideas. His various epithets (Jiden, Mäuschel) for Jews who didn't buy into his program seem to stand out quite prominently. More significant were the strains in his thinking seemed to be manifestations of internalized antisemitism: such as his salient view that Jews needed to overcome the traits that triggered the antisemites' negative perceptions of them -- ironically by adopting idealized Germanic traits. As revealed in random passages such as these:

As early as 1885, Herzl wrote in a telegram to his parents: “Yesterday at grand soirée at Treitel’s. Some thirty or forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. No consoling sight.” (Bein et al. 1983–1996 I: 212; Beller 1991: 12, n. 22) A little later, when he was staying in Paris as a correspondent of the Vienna journal Die Neue Freie Presse, Herzl visited a local synagogue and noted in his diary: “I had a look at the Parisian Jews and indeed I noticed similarities in names; audacious and unfortunate faces, furtive and cunning eyes.” (See, e.g. Kornberg 1999: 16–17.) Moreover, after Herzl’s visit to the Roman ghetto, he wrote: “They do not realize that they are creatures of the ghetto and most of our people are just like them.” (See, e.g. Wistrich 1995: 15.)

But these are side tangents. What was really weird about the guy was his central thesis.

First and foremost -- independent of whether he had genuinely racist, paternalistic otherwise disdainful attitudes about the Arab population (there are indications that he did, but they are also comparatively muted and ancillary in his writings); or whether he intended or essentially knew his grand project would entail a significant degree of violence and coercion against them (for which there's also good evidence, but also conflicting indications) -- it is beyond question that he was deeply indifferent to and profoundly disinterested in this community as a people. At the end of the day, they were a problem to be managed and assuaged - objects and a matter of circumstance in his utopia, but certainly not partners, or even central characters or protagonists.

It is equally clear, in my view, that the forceful expropriation and disenfranchisement that did ultimately occur were not a matter of historical happenstance, but inherently "baked into" his ideology. And that, as acknowledged by the early Zionists themselves, his project would never be realized without a major component of such coercion, and the corresponding negation of their collective rights of self-determination in their homeland.

So that I find weird. Also, and even more deeply: the idea the Jewish people people of Europe could attain a form of liberation for themselves, not just by abrogating the rights of the vast majority of the indigenous population in Palestine -- but by in effect denying their very identity and legitimacy as a people. And not just liberation, but a form of "moral and spiritual perfection", thus forming a society that would become "a light unto the nations".

That's what I find weird.