Category: Uncategorized

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I am a popular Quoran.

Let us further assume that there is a substantial subset of my followerdom that I do not want to give gratuitous offence to, for one of sex, politics, or religion.

Assuming these, things, one would also be right to assume that, though I’m a pretty open book in general, I do use the Anonymity facilities of Quora, rather than give gratuitous offence.

One would also assume that I would be a little more judicious about my comments and upvotes to follow suit.

I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided against it. I’m reluctant to go over the top in what subject matter I upvote and comment on, but I have decided not to refuse to upvote and comment anything but cute fluffy bunny rabbits.

Obviously there’s an inconsistency in that, and I think I’ve lost a friend over it, but… *shrug*. It’s a difficult balance to strike.

If any of my followers know what the hell I’m talking about and are in fact unhappy with me, well, we can take it up in messages; but I’ve drawn my dividing line.

Can we say that the Australian accent is a blend of the American and British ones?

Albanian and Greek are related, though not as closely related as their geographic proximity would suggest. So it could be a common inheritance, or it could be a loan.

*Goes to his copy of Vladimir Orel’s Albanian Etymological Dictionary*

*Finds that the page where thrime would appear has been misscanned*

*Bugger*

On that basis, I can’t answer the question with an informed opinion.

My uninformed opinion is that, if the word in two languages looks pretty similar, the default assumption is that it’s an old borrowing, not a native cognate (related word). If it was a common inheritance from Indo-European, you would expect it to diverge more.

How can we say that our constitution is designed futuristically?

Jimmy Liu for me too, Habib le toubib, and Jimmy Liu for a lot of us. Proof positive that gadflies don’t survive long here.

Dimitris Almyrantis was reminiscing about a banned user, and I asked him: “So, [whoever it was] was your Jimmy Liu, then.” He retorted “No, Jimmy Liu was my Jimmy Liu.”

We don’t know we are sleeping while we are. So how can we say we are awake?

Aw, come on. No Canberra hate from you people? That’s positively UNAUSTRALIAN!

I admire the methodicality of Ben Reimers in his answer. In fact, do look at it: Ben Reimers’ answer to Is Canberra the worst city in Australia?

The emotive definition of a good city to live in, that OP is presumably after, is not intrinsically about access to a beach. Or at least, I don’t think it is, being not much of a beach-goer. (That’s un-Australian too.) But it is critical mass of population, to sustain a vibrant cultural, entertainment, and gastronomical life; good amenities; and nice landscape.

To some, it needs to be “a good place to raise a family”. Mila Karmacharya has said it, just as many say it about Perth.

That criterion is not necessarily antithetical to “critical mass of population, to sustain a vibrant cultural, entertainment, and gastronomical life”. But, well, if it is, that decides me on it. And decides everyone whole who lives in Sydney or Melbourne on it too.

The way out is to say that Canberra is too small to be a city to begin with. It certainly feels that way. Especially if you’re trying to get a cab in the afternoon, to get to the airport to escape Canberra.

It is true that the restaurant scene has improved radically in the last decade. There are even honest-to-God bars in Canberra now. (I hesitate to say pubs.) And I did see a homeless mission wondering about the CBD at night; so it’s not as Stepford as I’d thought it is.

But of the capitals of states and territories, it is certainly the sleepiest. And that weighs heavily on anyone who lives in Sydney or Melbourne.

As Pieter van der Wilt said in comments:

Well nothing really very outstanding. The great achievements of mankind during the last 200 years come mainly from highly industrialized nations (UK, France, Germany, USA, etc…). Greece is a small country with a fairly high level of creativity.

All nations are great, because humanity is great. The literature and music of Modern Greece have unparalleled depth and diversity and lyricism, and are a gift to the world. (Though that is just as true of the literature and music of Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, and Bolivia, and Vanuatu.)

As Pieter said in his answer, Byzantium preserved ancient Greek scholarship—but didn’t build on it: that was left for the Western Renaissance. I could add Orthodox Christianity; but as theology rather than ritual, all the work had been done by 800 AD anyway.

If you’re after technological achievements, well, there are individual Greeks who have done things; overwhelmingly and inevitably, they’ve done things in the UK and the US.

We’ve made much more of a recent impact on our immediate region of the Balkans, as anyone in the region will tell you. But you spoke of the world, not of our neighbourhood.

From your comments to Pieter, OP, it looks like you’re reaching at a comparison with the Muslim world. But the game now in advances for humanity is a globalised game. The Ummah doesn’t get its own Golden Age any more; we’re much too interlinked for that. The Ummah gets to contribute to the advances for humanity, by taking part in the research and the stewardship spearheaded (for now) by the West. The West will likely yield its mantle within our lifetimes to China. The part of the Ummah that has relied on oil will have to work out what to do once oil no longer matters—and how to work with the West and China on the cleanup.

And I should hope that over a billion Muslims don’t need to draw lessons by comparison with a small bankrupt country of 10 million.

The opposition Nixon was truly worried about was the China Lobby, who determined US foreign policy for a couple of decades. But by 1972, the China Lobby seems to have been spent.

There was certainly opposition from conservatives, which is why it took Nixon to go to China to begin with. But their voices were drowned out in the applause.

From MacMillan, Margaret. 2007. Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World. New York: Random House.’

p. 297

[Taiwan] had counted, too, on the ability of the of the China lobby to keep American governments in line. They had failed to see that it was slowly fading away, although they should perhaps have taken notice when its chief organizer abruptly resigned in 1969 and moved to London to start producing plays and when the New York Times referred to the “once powerful China Lobby.”

p. 321–322.

At 98 percent, Nixon’s trip to China registered the highest public awareness of any event in the Gallup poll’s history. The right wing fulminated to little apparent effect. A furious Buchanan threatened to resign from the White House staff on the grounds that the United States had made a deal with a Communist regime and sold out its ally Taiwan, but in the end he did not carry out his threat. The conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who had been brought along on the trip in an attempt to win him over, publicly condemned the Shanghai communiqué and went off to support John Ashbrook of Ohio, a little-known Republican congressman who was trying to stop Nixon’s reelection.

Like Dylan Sakic, I’d need a lot more context, but here’s a stab.

Καθώς πρέπει is a calque of French comme il faut, “as it should be done”. It refers to social propriety, observing social etiquette, but it has an intense connotation of hypocrisy and stuffiness; it’s the kind of thing that “bourgeois” gets inevitably prefixed to.

Why are you picking up a Greek Orthodox angle to it? Presumably because the Orthodox Church is the repository of social conservatism in Greece, especially now that Greece is no longer a traditional society.