What texts and experiences shaped the development of your political views? What were the seminal factors in the growth of your civic sensibilities? What books most influenced you? What events?

I am somewhat surprised to have been A2A’d this by four people. That my politics should be of interest at all, though I haven’t expressed my politics here coherently, is likely more a token of their esteem than my interest.

I am somewhat mortified to have been A2A’d this by four people. Unlike the other answers here, I have not distilled my politics in the crucible of texts and reflection; I’ve inherited tribal politics, identified axioms, and drifted accordingly.

I am somewhat grateful to have been A2A’d this by four people. The Decalogue of Nick was stalled at #8, my politics. So I get to write that here.


I come from a long line of Greek peasants, on both sides. The Left in the Grecosphere did not make social progressiveness its main rallying point (though that is there); the Right in the Grecosphere had no equivalent of the American Dream, to seduce the entrepreneurial poor. There are regions in the Grecosphere that are die-hard right-wing anyway; and they are not where my parents are from.

My father tried to be a union organiser as a nurse, before he was intimidated out of it by management. He kept a belief in social justice, but also a reticence which his boisterous brothers-in-law could not understand. The household was broadly socialist in Greece, though with a touch of cynicism that I was too young to identify.

1981 was a heady time to be a kid in Crete. Our apartment was across the road from the Socialist Party headquarters, blaring out Theodorakis and Loizos anthems: “This soil is theirs and ours”, “We’ll get the sun drunk”, “We took our lives the wrong way, and we changed our lives”.

There was hope, there was ferment, there was anticipation. “The People in Power!” “For the First Time, The Left [in government]!” And when the Socialists were voted in, honest to God, random people were lighting each others’ candles in the streets. Just like Easter. The People had been reborn.

And then there was clientelism and corruption and disillusionment, but I was not around for that. I came back eight years later, shocked to see Andreas a laughing stock, and much of the country bought up by a con-man.

A chubby blunt-spoken first time MP was around for it though, and was surprised when he discovered that his voters expected the same favours and preferential treatment as did the supporters of the party they’d just ousted. Greeks have never forgiven that MP, for proclaiming his conclusion three decades later, “We embezzled that money together”—that the People were complicit in corruption. (So much more blunt in Greek, μαζί τα φάγαμε.) The People are not guileless, and The People are not always right. That’s always a useful corrective to realise.

I’m grateful I wasn’t around for the election of Syriza, “For the First Time, The True Left!” I’m grateful that my formative political experiences were not the sullen betrayal and dysfunction that Dimitris Almyrantis witnessed, a generation later. I’m grateful I got to taste some of the romance that comes before the Fall.


In Australia, first generation Greek migrants were just as tribal about being Labor. The conservative parties were aggressively Anglo; Greeks in the Liberal party are a second and third generation thing. Those first generation Greek migrants were after all, for the most part, labourers. Menzies founded the Liberal party to appeal to the “forgotten” middle class of shopkeepers, but he never tried to grab the vote of the working man. (That was much later, under Howard.) So there was no question of the household aligning with Labor, and yelling “You ape” whenever Howard was on the TV. I don’t think they quite realised that the Labor vision was being traduced from under them until it was too late.

In Australia, Labor had the largesse and vision of Whitlam, who my parents venerated. An appalling manager of his caucus and of finances, I’ve learned latterly; but this was back when people expected politicians to do more than manage finances. It had Hawke, who charmed the people into reform, and it had Keating, the last left visionary the country has seen—though he was the pioneer of fiscal managerialism, he still dared to have big ideas, backed with an acid tongue.

And since then, we’ve had a queue of puny shopkeepers, reactionaries and reactive centrists, poll-spooked functionaries. And myself voting Australian Democrats while they still existed as a third party, then Australian Greens until the Greens were big enough for people to start talking about “tripartisan” consensus, and then the Australian Sex Party for the lulz. (Well, for the left-wing libertarianism. And the lulz.)


So I was formed with a tribal allegiance to the Left, and with a vague notion of ferment and the People.

I’ve realised, gradually and annoyedly, that I’m not Left in the way I’d assumed I am. To the extent any of this crystallised, it was in my 30s and 40s rather than my 20s.

The axioms I’ve come to arrive at are:

  1. Society must afford opportunity and equity to all. The State and redistribution of wealth are an appropriate mechanism of achieving this; and the individual owes a duty to the State, inasmuch as the State is going about this task.
  2. Social cohesion and continuity matter, though not at the expense of opportunity and equity.
  3. Individual freedom matters, though not at the expense of opportunity and equity. (And often not at the expense of social cohesion and continuity, but I concede that as more of a judgement call.)

Of these, (1) is Big Government left; it’s the overt continuation of where I started from, though much more socially aware than its tribal origin. (2) is a social conservatism I’m somewhat surprised by, but it’s there, bolstered by my thinking on nationalism and on my upbringing. It’s the covert continuation of where I started from, which I had not acknowledged because it did not fit the tribal narrative.

(3) is a libertarianism I’m also somewhat surprised by. A Libertarianism by Australian standards, at least, and a reaction to the curtailment of personal liberties that has emerged as a national consensus in Australia in the last couple of decades. (The stuff libertarians decry as the Nanny State.) I don’t think that reaction in me was led by reading so much; but it certainly has been informed by awareness of the American libertarian streak in political thinking (and not just its big-L Libertarian manifestation of wishing to drown the government in a bathtub).

Economically, I have come to appreciate that The Market can be a force for good, so long as it is appropriately shackled and regulated. I don’t look forward to the People’s appropriation of the Means of Production, because The People are not guileless; I don’t rule out a future where technocommunism makes sense (though I think climate catastrophe likelier), but in our current fallen circumstances, a regulated market seems to me the best compromise.

  • Comrade Victoria Weaver, my teacher of technocommunism along with Star Trek, has said similar things to that in her less careful moments.
  • My main intellectual exposure to theories of The Market has been, oddly enough, a historical linguistics textbook: On Language Change, which drew parallels between Smith’s “invisible hand” and the forces driving language change—individual selfish choices converging into a stable equilibrium.
  • As for the shackling, I don’t know where I read it, but I was heartened to find Smith hated monopolies, as disrupting the equilibrium of the market. Preventing monopolies is where the State comes in. The State also comes in with infrastructure, and I’ve retained my faith in the State as the guarantor of collective welfare.

Will Nick Nicholas be touring Europe any time soon?

Bless your cotton socks, my confreres in Albania and Czechia!

As of this writing in 2017, I’m not planning a trip to Europe soon; gotta save up for a house move, gotta tow that barge, and given where we live and our predilections, our next holiday is likely to be Hawaii. I suspect there’ll be a visit to at least some of Europe two or three years down the road though…

I love youse guys #5

An update in the listing of my favourite people on Quora since January:

To: Melinda Gwin, Jennifer Edeburn, Daniel Ross, Vicky Prest, Nikki Primrose, Kat Rectenwald, Peter Hawkins, Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam, Desmond James, Eutychius Kaimakkamis, Alfredo Perozo, Martin Silvertant, Victor Goodwin, Kelvin Zifla, User-13249930999434776143

I love reading you, I love seeing you, I love bantering with you, and I love learning from you.

I love youse guys.

Have Australian politics stabilized or will we see more prime ministers with shortened terms?

  • Polling for the major parties even and low at 37%.
  • Parties eroded both from their radical flanks (Labor by Greens, Liberals by host of right wing parties), and from centrist populists (Nick Xenophon).
  • Liberal Party split between moderates and conservatives, with conservatives openly sniping at Turnbull or breaking away, and several conservative pretenders waiting in the wings.
  • Only the embarrassment of having more leadership spills than Labor is holding the Lib conservatives back.
  • Rudd’s last hurrah as second-time PM was to change the rules for how the leader of the Labor party is voted in, to give the membership a vote, and prevent repetitions of rapid coups.
  • No obvious challengers within the Labor party to Shorten right now; Albanese and Plibersek to his left are being loyal.
  • Labor, after a lot of bloodletting, is currently stable, and have put structures in place to keep them stable; but that may well change again if they’re in government. The Libs are not looking like a happy family in government, and they’ve never had the discipline around factions that Labor did.
  • The fundamentals that toppled all those PMs in a row are still there: neck-to-neck polling, panicky parliamentarians, populace disengaged with the major parties, lack of ideological cohesion or direction in the major parties, personality-driven rather than caucus-driven politics.

How different do dialects of the same language feel to you?

I was brought up in Crete. I read Cretan Renaissance literature as an adult, and was taken aback at the notion that the kinds of conceit you might find in Shakespeare (common Italian antecedents) were being expressed in the language my grandmother used to yell at her chickens.

Greece is a country run on the French model of centralisation. The State did not regard Greek dialect with the hostility it regarded minority languages, but it certainly did not encourage them as competitors to Standard Greek. And dialect speakers internalised that prejudice. When I tried to speak more dialectally while visiting the home country, my aunt scolded me, a scholar, talking like a villager.

Why yes, aunt. A scholar in Greek dialectology.

Dialects feel different because of their social connotations, of course, rather than anything linguistically inherent. I’m biased to prefer islander over mainland Greek dialects, because islander dialects are more familiar to me. (My parents are speakers of the two major instances of islander dialects, Cretan and Cypriot.)

But I’ve already told the anecdote here of my aunt from Thessaly: on the one hand, she commented how much more pleasant Cretan or Cypriot sounded to her, whereas her native dialect “stunk of the sheep pen”. On the other hand, a few days later, we had Cypriot TV on, and she turned to me and remarked how hard it was for her to take Cypriots seriously, the way they talked.

To me as a biased source, mainlander dialects sound rustic and quaint, and islander dialects sound rustic and heroic. To judge from vaudeville stereotypes of course, islander dialects sound just as quaint to Athenians.

Answered 2017-05-09 · Upvoted by

Logan R. Kearsley, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.

If I stop using Quora, will my (obscure) content still be available in forty years?

How much content that you put online ten years ago is still accessible?

Even if Quora lasts forty years (!), why would they bother keeping your content accessible? People complain about being shown three year old content in their feeds now. There won’t be terribly much interest in content that old, which would only be of historic interest. It would get in the way of discovering new content, and there is a cost behind keeping content available on the live site. Quora may or may not keep the content in archives, but I think it unlikely you could pop back in to Quora and read 40 year old answers in your profile.

Even if Quora lasts forty years (!)

We are in an era now of obsolescence, of erasure of our histories. I pity anyone trying to do philology on contemporary texts. Archive your content: your hard drive is the best guarantee of permanence that you have—because you yourself will be motivated to upgrade your computer every few years, and copy your stuff across.

What are the main current challenges in doing Arabic NLP?

I’ve gotten an answer back from “a friend”, which I’m relaying:

Generally, the problems are:
1) parsing and post-tagging must be done in the same time (no good corpora means almost everything is based on rules)
2) severe polysemy if the text is without vowel marks (99.9% texts are without vowels)
3) no capitalization. means, all entity extraction rules are context-based. At the same time, Arab entities have a lot of names like city “City”, village “Village”, guy name “Good” etc

It’s just the first most crucial things which came in my mind.

What do you think will happen if people you have mentioned in your answers see your answer in Quora mentioning them?

It will mean that @-notifications are finally working consistently, which will have meant that the Quora product design/design/UX team are actually paying attention to long-standing user requests. Prioritising them, even.

I think what would happen next is a well-functioning and more granular Stats page, a tamed and sensible Quora Content Review Bot, a Quora internal search with adequate retrieval, and raising comments to first class objects in Quora.

I would also expect to look out the window and see a squadron of pigs fly past in formation….

What language contains the grammatical person case “Us, but without you”?

To answer the question more comprehensively: the distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive 1st person plural (we including you vs we excluding you) is Clusivity:

First-person clusivity is a common feature among Dravidian, Kartvelian, Caucasic, Australian and Austronesian, and is also found in languages of eastern, southern, and southwestern Asia, Americas, and in some creole languages. Some African languages also make this distinction, such as the Fula language. No European language outside the Caucasus makes this distinction grammatically, but some constructions may be semantically inclusive or exclusive.

The inclusive–exclusive distinction occurs nearly universally among the Austronesian languages and the languages of northern Australia, but rarely in the nearby Papuan languages. (Tok Pisin, an English-Melanesian pidgin, generally has the inclusive–exclusive distinction, but this varies with the speaker’s language background.) It is widespread in India (among the Dravidian and Munda languages, as well as in the Indo-European languages of Marathi, Rajasthani, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Gujarati, which borrowed it from Dravidian), and in the languages of eastern Siberia, such as Tungusic, from which it was borrowed into northern Mandarin Chinese. In indigenous languages of the Americas it is found in about half the languages, with no clear geographic or genealogical pattern. It is also found in a few languages of the Caucasus and Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Fulani and Khoekhoe.

It is, of course, possible in any language to express the idea of clusivity semantically, and many languages provide common forms that clarify the ambiguity of their first person pronoun (English “the rest of us”, Italian noialtri). A language with a true clusivity distinction, however, does not provide a first person plural with indefinite clusivity: where the clusivity of the pronoun is ambiguous; rather, the speaker is forced to specify – by choice of pronoun or inflection – whether he is including the addressee or not. This rules out most European languages, for example. Clusivity is nonetheless a very common language feature overall. Some languages with more than one plural number make the clusivity distinction only in, for example, the dual, but not in the greater plural. Others make it in all numbers. In the table below, the plural forms are the ones preferentially listed.