Month: December 2016

Difinitely: that’s clearly New Zealand and not Australian.

Windeeeeeye: that sounds exaggerated Antipodean, and Brian Collins may well be on to something (as others were) about this possibly being faked.

I’m unfamiliar enough with New Zealandish to call it New Zealandish, but the diphthongs are not quite right.

In some ways, Greekdom is a different culture to me. And Dimitra Triantafyllidou has been my patient reacquainter with what has happened in Greece for the past three decades.

Pegah Esmaili teaches me many things; Iran and Azeridom have been only some of it.

I have learned a lot about Turkey here, but you know, I can’t single out just one Turk for it. Ayse Temmuz, Cagatay Ata, Alperen Erol, Erdi Küçük, Serdar Yalçın, Erkin Ergüney, Irene Avetyan

Albania/Kosovo is the other neighbour I’m consumed by interest about. Aziz Dida, Athanasios Canko, Ilir Mezini, Kelvin Zifla, Dorian Shkëmbi, Butrim Gjonbalaj

Deaf culture: Don Grushkin, Julie Hochgesang

The just re-deactivated Sam Morningstar on Native American culture and history

Jay Liu on China: Jimmy is gone, but will never be forgotten. He may be scandalised to be included in the same paragraph as him, but: Paul Denlinger too.

Greece: Easter. The tradition involves celebratory gunfire in the churchyard at Easter Midnight Mass. The modern manifestation of that is fireworks being let off in the packed churchyard at Easter Midnight Mass. Both in Greece/Cyprus, and in the diaspora. The news each year reports people being injured (or killed) as a result; my sister has had her hair set alight at least once.

Australia: New Year’s Eve. There’s an attempt to do so on Australia Day as well, but New Year’s is the one that has captured popular imagination. The ABC makes a point of broadcasting shots from each capital city (and some random small country town), and it used to be a station promo.

Sydney’s are the most spectacular. Fond memories of being in a train in Sydney, and overhearing a family saying “we’re gonna go down to watch the crackers!”

Which hometown, Launceston in Tasmania, where I was born; Sitia in Crete, where I grew up; Melbourne in Victoria where I live?

Melbourne feels most like home, but there will be others to do a photo essay. So I’ll do Sitia.

I’ve already posted a bit about it at Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your hometown’s dark secret?

Sitia, Crete; Sitia – Wikipedia.

Almost 10,000 inhabitants. Sleepy, placid, not a huge amount of tourism compared with the rest of the island. Town rebuilt in 1870 (by Muslims who aren’t there any more—it was not always so placid), so the only thing old in the town is the old Venetian fortress you can see at the top of the hill.

That was Wikipedia’s summer photo of the town; this is what I came up with at winter.

This is one of the main streets. Which looked so huge when I was a kid, and we would go out on our Sunday stroll. It doesn’t look huge now.

The town square. With palm trees—Sitia prides itself on the natural palm tree forest down the road. And my dad’s favourite cafe, all boarded up for renovations.

Apartment buildings, as far as the eye can see. This is Greece, after all.

At least we have a pier.

And a passenger terminal at the pier. Placed there just so as to make me look striking, of a sunny January morning.

The fratricidal free-for-all of the Ottoman Interregnum. What makes brothers gladly slice each other’s throats: rich opportunity for psychologising there.

I’m sure there’s something tragic about how Abdul Hamid II lost his empire from under him.

Andrew Baird’s block on me means I cannot reply to commenters to his answer, either.

So, Bill Killernic: Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantes was the person who circulated the notion that Napoleon was Greek. She claimed that Napoleon had proposed to her mother, Panoria Stephanopoli, a Corsican Greek.

Her claims are often repeated by flattered Greeks, but they are not seriously accepted by any historian. I’ve been through all the baptismal records of the Greek community in Corsica, because I’ve had a research interest in it (and published a few papers on it): there was never a Kalomeros family there, and Kalomeros doesn’t really make sense as a Greek surname anyway.

What is true is that the Greek community was an elite in Ajaccio at the time of Napoleon’s birth, and one of the Stephanopolis, Demetrius, sponsored young Napoleon to go to military academy at the age of 10. (See my paper at http://www.24grammata.com/wp-con…, p. 40)

Hahaha! Hahaha!

You know, OP, I was about to post the same question! Because I too have been deluged this week by:

• If you saw someone drinking from a “male tears” mug would you automatically write them off as a bad person?
• If you saw someone wearing a swastika armband, would you automatically write them off as a bad person?
• If you saw someone drinking from a “liberal tears” mug, would you automatically write them off as a bad person?
• If you saw someone flying a “rebel” flag from the tailgate of their truck, would you automatically write them off as a bad person?

My inclination would be, yes, because we get it, already, and they’re also eliciting the same response, and templated questions are annoying after you see the second instance.

And yet! And yet those questions come from the divine, amusing, and highly intelligent Ms Carter Clock herself, Annika Schauer:

• Why has Annika Schauer started asking “would you automatically write them off as a bad person?” questions?

I will not write off Annika qua Annika. So that has been a lesson, to withhold hasty judgement. It’s maybe even the same lesson she was getting at with those questions.

Still don’t like the questions though. 🙂

Do you like Quora’s new “credentials”?

Disaster Girl: works in the Quora UX department.

Can we say music is soul?

As Jae Starr said in duplicate (Hey, answers survive merging now! That’s welcome!)

We don’t know, they don’t tell us.

Hanlon’s razor, however, is always a useful tool in making sense of the inscrutability of Quora Moderation.

Consider:

• Moderation was insourced from its volunteer user mods. This was spoken of in the Corporate Announcement in the same breath as Moderation being Done to Scale. Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog
• Notice the delicious Newspeak of it. Do you think more people have power around moderation now than in 2014?
• Moderation clearly involves an initial tier of bots, an end tier of Quora employees, and (we hypothesise) a middle tier of outsourced contractors with questionable command of the English language.
• Painstaking attention, giving the benefit of the doubt, and debate may have been the hallmark of the volunteers back in the day (as they have themselves said), but it was not going to scale. Quora has therefore scaled up moderation on the cheap. The end tier of Quora employees as mods is expensive, and is used sparingly.
• The less visibility of moderation processes from the outside, the less people have something concrete to attack back with.
• The less detail you give people on why you’re moderating them, the less likelihood they’ll have something to protest back at you with (increasing your workload), or that they can take with them to some other site (embarrassing you with your own words).

Makes sense to me, anyway.

It is only recently that we have seen explanations for why people have been banned at all in their logs. That’s a glimmer of transparency which does not make me optimistic per se, but which I welcome none the less.