Quora for the most part relies on users to write questions (hence their frequent absurdity). On occasion, they have hired freelancers to write questions in areas they think are underrepresented. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?
As Albanians here know, I am intrigued by Albania, to the extent of filling a few Albanian Quorans’ feeds. That was triggered in the main by an interest in Balkan linguistics, plus Albanian being the local isolate branch of Indo-European.
I didn’t have a particularly negative impression of Albanians before I came to Quora. Unfortunately, what little contact I had with Albanians was in the context of the influx of Albanians as workers in Greece in the 90s: they were somewhat guarded, quite busy trying to make ends meet, and treated with contempt by Greeks. (The grudging respect came later, and it needed the next wave of migration to come through. Just as has happened with Greeks in Australia, in fact.) And of course Albania had just come out of the dead years of Hoxha, chaotically.
I knew from reading that there were intellectuals in Albania, that they were proud, and that I’d have a lot in common with them culturally. I just didn’t really get the opportunity to explore it that much until now.
I have had a very positive experience of Albanians in my two years of Quora, just as I have had of most Turks, and of most Iranians; I just regret I haven’t had the chance to interact with as many Bulgarians or Macedonians. I don’t think my perception has changed, but it has certainly filled out somewhat.
My maternal grandparents (Crete) had five (1940–1953). John, Helen, Maria, Georgia, George.
My paternal grandparents (Cyprus) had nine (1926–1947), of which one was still-born (Angelica) and one died of smallpox as a toddler (Kostas). George,† Helen, Chris, Stavros, Dora,† Andrew, Savvas. As Savvas once said to me, “the machine kept going, until it stopped.” The first child migrated when the last was six months old; I think they all were in the same room only once after that, when Dora was dying of cancer in ’81.
Every once in a while, I take offence at the possibility that any Unicode script might not be rendered on my Mac—even if I never use the script, will never see the script, and will have no idea what the script even is. And I go hunting for free fonts.
There are five cuneiform blocks in Unicode: Ugaritic (Unicode block), Old Persian (Unicode block), and three blocks for Sumero-Akkadian: Cuneiform (Unicode block) , Cuneiform Numbers and Punctuation, and Early Dynastic Cuneiform.
These are the fonts sitting on my computer, and the blocks they contain. Fonts containing Sumero-Akkadian are in boldface.
The Akkadian and Aegean fonts are by George Douros, and the world owes him gratitude for his Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts, including his typographically meticulous fonts for Greek.
This phrase is a false friend.
In Modern Greek, it sounds like “eternal hell”. In Modern Greek it would in fact be αιώνια κόλαση: the word order is slightly more fixed, adjectives before feminine nouns must have an -a and not an -o ending, and the third declension has been merged into the first.
In Ancient Greek, it is not eternal hell. It is eternal punishment, eternal chastisement. That particular word for punishment was used a lot in the New Testament and Christianity for what happens to sinners after death; so it was transferred across to the place where that punishment happens. Lampe’s dictionary mentions that meaning in a couple of passages in the 4th century AD, but they still look like meaning just “punishment” to me. The earliest examples Kriaras’ dictionary of Early Modern Greek has meaning “hell” are from 16th century Crete.
A semantic dictionary of late mediaeval Greek remains a desideratum; Trapp’s Lexikon is wonderful, but as Trapp himself admitted to me, it simply doesn’t do semantics. (In fact, it skips words that existed already, because it’s about new words; there is no entry in Trapp for kolasis.)
Chad Turner, Classics PhD, specializing in Greek tragedy and Greek/Roman mythology
In my experience, Perth by far. Enough that the South African presence in Perth is very visible: it’s one of the largest ethnic subgroups there. (Perth has not had the same level of Mediterranean or Asian migration as Sydney or Melbourne.) South African restaurants are common there, and very uncommon in Melbourne (though I’ve still found a couple of places that had biltong.)
It helps that Perth is so much closer to South Africa, of course.
As all the other answers have said, there is just too broad a spectrum of views within the American Democrat party for us to speak of an average Democrat. Unless, of course, that is code for “moderate Democrat” or even “blue dog Democrat”.
Australia too has two big tent major parties.
As with much of the West, the two major parties’ fervour has hollowed out, and they have bled votes to populists:
So the landscape is just as messy as America, and the two major parties are fractious coalitions just as in America. But third parties are slightly better established, and of course the social consensus is to the left of America, both socially and economically.
A social conservative Republican might make their home grudgingly in the Conservative wing of the Liberals, and the newly bellicose Conservative Liberals have certainly been borrowing rhetoric from America. But they would be bothered by the abundance of RINO equivalents, and may eventually flee to a more principled party. One Nation, possibly, if they’re anxious about culture and race; Family First or Rise Up Australia if they are Christianist.
A libertarian Republican might make their home grudgingly in the Moderate wing of the Liberals, and the newly supine Moderate Liberals have certainly been borrowing rhetoric from America. But they would be bothered by the abundance of big government statists even in the Moderate flank, and may eventually flee to a more principled party. The only real alternative is the Liberal Democrats—which by Australian standards is horridly right wing (Why Ridiculously Stupid White Man David Leyonhjelm Will Lose His 18c Racial Discrimination Case – New Matilda)—simply because Australians are really not used to libertarian rhetoric. (Yes, New Matilda is left wing.)
In terms of sentiment, a Sandersnista would gravitate to the Greens, who are the only somewhat mainstream voice against refugee demonisation and for gay marriage. (Labor has been riven on both, because of its big tent.) A Clintonista would gravitate to Labor, and Labor functionaries do apprenticeships in Democrat campaigns.
In terms of actual economic or social policy, a Sandersnista would probably find themselves somewhere in the Labor party (more to the left socially, more to the right economically). A Clintonista would find themselves freaking out at the overt power of Unions in the Labor party, and hopping between Labor Right and Moderate Liberals.
Just as outsiders can see American politics more clearly than those caught up in its culture wars, so too I trust that an American Clintonista can actually make out some sunlight between Labor Right and Moderate Liberals…
None. From memory, that didn’t happen before Berlioz.
Bit of a big question there, and nihilism is a big concept—that often gets used quite loosely, to mean “relativistic” or “cynical”.
We are in a time in the West, of course, when a lot of longstanding moral absolutes have been increasingly questioned or scrutinised, and the outcome has been called nihilistic by both proponents and adversaries. (Adversaries more than proponents: the term is something of a cudgel.)
Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods: for example, Jean Baudrillardand others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch; and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.
So one primary point of relevance is that it is a shorthand for the modern-day questioning of absolute values, which is prevalent, and which you need to be aware of to work out how the modern West ticks. Or fails to tick.
The second primary point of relevance is not as time-bound. Nihilism, like solipsism, is a useful intellectual exercise. It is a useful phase to go through, if you like. The teen or undergrad who stumbles across solipsism in their intellectual development is something of a cliche: “Woah, man, like what if I told you everything was, like, an illusion!”
But it is useful because, when you come out the other end, you acknowledge better the contingency and fragility of your construction of the world: you know to be on the lookout for misconstrual and bias better.
Same with nihilism. It’s good to have values. It’s better if you’ve scrutinised those values, and worked out why they are a good thing, rather than to just passively accept what you have been handed down. And a phase of questioning everything, of early nihilism, is useful to help you build them back up again—and convince yourself that there are things really worth holding on to, after all.
It depends on where the Greeks are.
Greeks in the diaspora loved it. It is a movie that pokes caricatured fun at the antiquated notions that the first generation of migrants had, and how they did not assimilate and retained a rural worldview. That kind of caricature is a commonplace of second-generation members of diaspora when they get into comedy; it’s hardly unique to the Greek diaspora. (Compare for example the comedy done by the Indian and Pakistani diaspora in the UK.) Greeks in the US, Canada, and Australia were in on the joke, and they lapped it up.
Greeks in Greece and Cyprus… dunno, and I’d be interested to hear. What’s critical is that the worldview caricatured in the movie is a worldview that has long died out in Greece itself: the first generation of migrants remained in a 1950s rural timewarp. Greeks in Greece are likely to feel extremely detached from it: it’s not their modern-day reality, and its not their country. There’s that underlying truth at work, painful for anyone in the diaspora: those who left and those who stayed behind are no longer the same people.
For what it’s worth, the Greek title of the movie was Γάμος αλά Ελληνικά, “Wedding, Greek-Style”. It was a title reminiscent of the madcap comedies of the Greek comedy film industry of the ’50s and ’60s, and that was not a coincidence.
The most interesting reaction, which I monitored at the time, was that of emigre Greeks. I’m using the distinction between migrant and emigre Greeks on purpose: by the latter, I mean the much smaller, much better educated, affluent and urbane wave of Greek professionals who have moved to work in Western Europe and America over the last 20 or 30 years, as opposed to the peasants who moved to become factory fodder and small-businesspeople in the early to mid 20th century.
The two waves have very little in common, and don’t particularly associate. The clash has been most prominent in Canada, where the “emigres” are earlier, political dissidents from the ’70s, and in much greater numbers. The ’50s migrants and the ’70s migrants have formed separate community clubs: they can’t be in the same room with each other. There’s a wave of Greeks coming to Australia now, where Greeks are into their third generation (they are most of the waiters in Greektown, where I live). I’m not paying attention, but I’m sure there’s some cultural friction here too.
Anyway. I was subscribed to the HELLAS-L mailing list at the time, which was the mailing list for those emigres, in Greeklish: it was the main vehicle of Greek online until the Web became a mass presence in Greece and Cyprus.
Many of the emigres on the list were dripping with contempt for the film, and not a few of them demanded that it should have been called My Big Fat Greek-American Wedding. Because they wanted nothing to do with the hicks that film depicted. (I was gratified to see the main complainer being needled by someone else: “You’ve already been in the US for a decade; watch out you don’t get de-Hellenised yourself!”
The vehemence is because the film does not depict a reality the emigres have grown up with—but it does depict a reality they are adjacent to, living in America and Canada and Britain; so they couldn’t feel the same detachment I imagine Greeks in Greece would have experienced. It was more pressing for them to dissociate themselves from it.
Some of the threads on that mailing list are available here: Google Groups—provided you can read Greeklish.