Category: Uncategorized

Never a trivial question from you, eh Michaelis?

Something I’ve actually being discussing at some length with Jennifer Edeburn, to whom I seem to have outsourced my superego. (You’ll have noticed I took a day off of that today, Jennifer?)

Nothing I would not have learned from engaging with humanity in general, if I got out more. But some lessons are always salutary, the more so if you learn them ten times running.

• People are wonderful. Randoms have unfathomable reserves of empathy, kindness, and respect. Which I have drawn on, and which I hope to have reciprocated.
• People are awful. Not just the discernible reprobates, the trolls and the bigots: that’s too easy, that’s too fertile a ground for “but I’m above that”. The smug, the judgemental, the unthinking, the bien-pensant. The cliquish, the reactive, the indignant. That get applauded for it.
• And that at times, that can include me. Not a pleasant learning, but a useful one. To be conscious of it is not enough, but it’s an advance anyway.
• People are complex. You can admire one facet of a person, and find another repulsive; or at least problematic. Which makes evaluating whether they are in or out with you difficult.
• People are duplicitous. Or rather, subtle. I hear reports that a lot of people have been unmasked by anonymity fails, under the new regime. I wouldn’t be chortling about it: who among us does not have things about them they’d rather not be broadcast?
• You, perhaps, Michaelis. But you are a nihilist, after all.
• Oh, and I also wouldn’t be chortling, because “upstanding citizens” too can be embarrassed by privacy fails. And they have further to fall.
• Large organisations are stupid and don’t care about you. However many buffets they lay out for you. A relatively easy thing to learn, and I’m astonished that a critical mass don’t seem to have.
• Large organisations have their own agenda, and that’s no more immoral than you having your own agenda. That takes a bit more getting your head around. As I said towards the end of my coming to terms with it: if Quora’s Moloch, then there’s no use getting angry at a furnace. That’s what furnaces do.
• (I’ve taken to calling it a Wall since. Less… incendiary.)
• Communication is possible with people of good will, who let go of their dogmas. That’s a useful lesson that comes with BNBR self-policing.
• Communication is impossible with people who do not share your postulates about the basics. I can talk politics with communists; I cannot talk politics with libertarians. I can talk theology with the undogmatic, I cannot with the self-righteous. There are limits to BNBR.
• Privilege is real, and so is hegemony, and so is complacency. There’s a reason no revolution ever worked on BNBR.
• There is a place for a salon of the thoughtful and the critical, whether Mountain View intended it thus or not. If that’s an abdication from the pressing urgency on the streets, well, let me have it. If Rome is falling, there are worse things to do in its final days than recline on the couch and discuss pentameters.

Tough question, Habib le toubib: I don’t do heroes, I like my critical faculties about me, and I’ve been jaded for a while. And of course, anyone I’d choose would be morbidly obscure anyway.

…

OK, challenge accepted.

• Hubert Pernot. The underappreciated giant of Modern Greek historical linguistics. Not a polemicist, not a tub-thumper; he just got on with it, from a safe distance in Paris. His three volume monograph on the dialect of Chios is an accidental history of all of Modern Greek. His neogrammarian probity in his grammar of Tsakonian is a work for the ages.

• Giovanni Gabrieli. Author of the music of the spheres, the Canzone e Sonate. Thanks, man. It’s music that makes you proud to be human.

• Stephanos Sahlikis. If you don’t count Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the first poet to rhyme in Greek, rhyming about whores and gambling and doing time, in the 14th century.
• Woah! His poems just got published in Panagiotiakis’ long-awaited posthumous critical edition, in 2015! Why didn’t I know about this?! I’m going to have to have words to the maintainer of the Early Modern Greek blog. Thanks Habib, for helping me discover that!

• Helen Waddell. I’ve already written about my teen crush on her: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If you could take one historical person from history as a lover/date, who would it be and why? “If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.”

• Gough Whitlam. Flawed, self-important, chaotic politician (was this guy even Australian?), who built up my country’s pride and dignity, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.

• Charilaos Trikoupis. Taciturn, reserved, orderly politician (was this guy even Greek?), who presided over reforms and infrastructure and a bankruptcy, and made my country worthy of the name. Yes, there’s a reason we won’t see his like again. We still owe him.

• Theodore Metochites. For writing the most obscurantist overgilded Greek ever in his pseudo-Homeric poems, which posed the greatest challenge I faced in all my time at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. For decreeing that the Ancients left us Mediaeval Greeks nothing to say—in a foreword to 120 essays. For commissioning the marvels of Chora Church, while he was the moneybags-in-charge of the Empire. And for retreating into his own church with dignity, with his books and his sorrow, after he lost everything.

I’m just going to leave this statement in support of Quora made by another user here:

Had everyone behaved themselves, it wouldn’t have come to this.

I’ve edited out my BNBR about it. But statements such as these have led me to blocking users. I can have no discussion with someone whose notion of justice works like this.

Quora had a problem with anonymous content, and has destroyed the village in order to save it. What were they thinking? That this will make the problem go away. And that they will be able to keep the lid on fake accounts.

Which demonstrates again that they are in so much denial about being social media, they refuse to learn anything from social media.

As Talleyrand said: It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

BTW, per details:

1. If you make updates, you’re screwed because you’re no longer anonymous and everything is permanently recorded in the log.

If this is true, Quora is compromising its users’ anonymity without warning. And will richly deserve all the negative publicity it gets for it.

Because Quora, at a corporate and (mostly) community level, regards itself as an authoritative source of information, rather than a social forum: it deprecates the “interactivity” you speak of, as detracting from the authoritative tone it aspires to.

You will have seen a lot of answers that agree with this judgement. And a little more critically than that, the advertisers likely to want their ads promoted here will also agree with this judgement. (Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?)

This doesn’t mean Quora, or the harrumphing answers here, are right. It’s all conventions, they all change, they’re all socially contingent. But right now, in 2017, emojis have an association of levity and unseriousness, and non-emojis have an association that Quora and its core audience seek, of seriousness and expertise.

They’ll wrest my emoticons from my dead clammy hands though. 😐

I’ve spoken elsewhere of the Silicon Valley notion of what scholarship is all about: actual scholars can crack jokes. Just look at the terminology used in computer science. But for now, that’s the register, that’s the prejudice, that’s the expectation.

(Oh, and of course you can actually enter emoji in the editor: [math]unicode{x1F61B}unicode{x1F69E}.[/math] Do expect Quora Moderation to come after you if you do, though.)

The intention of the Unicode Regional Indicator Symbols was to represent current countries in existence (as encoded in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), as locales for software; the flags are a lagniappe. (A rather unfortunate lagniappe.)

Hence, no SPQR flag: the point of the codes is to indicate the country you live in, as a two letter ISO code, to be used for software localisation. (E.g. use Serbian rather than Russian italics for Cyrillic.) The Roman Empire doesn’t have such a code, because you don’t live in it—though a bunch of defunct 20th century states do.

There’s a proposal to throw the door open for Emoji flags to regions such as Scotland and California. Per UTS #51: Unicode Emoji, those are still restricted to present-day national subdivisions, and historical states are not in scope for them.

2016–12–04 by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

I have just been contacted by Linda:

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Great job about The Insurgency by the way, if this doesn’t come off as patronizing.

(But no more drawings? [disappointed emoji])

You may or may not remember the answer over which I got banned, but there was an off-Quora exchange with the mods (admin? I admit to not knowing the difference) that I find more offensive than the “faked-an-e-mail-and-maintained-sock-puppets” charges.

So, a few hours after I got banned, Jason Li sent me an e-mail expressing his sympathy and saying he’d written to Quora to protest the ban. I’m not what the exact response he got was, but a while later, he posted in the comments section of a question pertaining to my ban that Jonathan Brill had assured him that they’d tried communicating with me before and that it hadn’t gone well (and that after reading through my edit log, he was more in sympathy with Quora’s position. And, admittedly, that answer wasn’t very nice. But I tried to stay respectful!).

Whether he (Jonathan) meant that they’d talked to me directly after the ban or during the six-odd months I’d been active on Quora doesn’t matter – because there was never, ever any direct contact (other than the reply to a message I’d sent after the deletion of my answer inquiring as to why a certain Power User went unpunished for rudeness, discrimination and plagiarism, which Tatiana insisted – more than once – was faked).

Just thought some people might be interested to know I was swiftly and directly banned over of two BNBRs (the answer and a comment underneath in which I merely quoted the subject of my answer – don’t I get an edit-block first?) and that afterwards some people tried to make it sound as though it was a last resort after reaching out to me and getting a prickly ignore, i.e. tried to make it sound better than it looks—and was.

Eh, maybe this message is a bit rambling and I’m overbeating a dead zebra. Wanted someone to know, so….thanks for reading?

And hi to everyone, if you do publish this 🙂

I have received this from Raden Smith (see Follow up on Reddit trolls), and am posting it here at his request.

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I am Raden Smith from Quora and I am writing this email to you to apologise for trolling on Quora and my online behaviour. I found your email id from your Quora account bio.

I want to tell few things about myself first. I got diagnosed with clinical depression in June, 2016 and I recently failed a major exam for which I was preparing since a year. Things have not been going on too well for me lately. I went to Quora to seek support. Then I got to know about the subreddit ‘indianpeoplequora’. And so I started to troll on quora and cross post it on reddit to gain karma points. My trolling on Quora and cross posting on reddit was simply a means of escapism for me, a way of coping up when things were not going on too well in real life. The Karma points I received on reddit boosted my esteem a bit. It was never my intent to hurt anybody.

Having said this, I have come to realise what I did was wrong. And I apologise for my behaviour and any hurt that I have caused. I have realised that there are better ways to seek support for depression and by trolling I am simply harming myself. I have also realised that failing in exam is not a death sentence and my failure does not give me right to troll others and I just need to prepare better and I too will pass the exam.

When I was small (like 5 – 6 years old) I always thought that I would grow up to be a nice person. However, when I look back on my online behaviour I feel ashamed. My smaller self would never have imagined that I would resort to such means as coping mechanism. I feel very ashamed about the way I behaved and I this is when I realised that I need to apologise.

I have deleted both my Quora as well as Reddit account. (I never trolled on Reddit though). I won’t be back online unless I am going to contribute positively.

I have also, as a means of repentance decided to make a donation to an NGO working in sector of woman welfare or animal welfare. I do not earn much so the amount of donation will be small. But I will donate for sure.

I would be grateful if you can post my apology as an edit to your followup blog post on Reddit trolling as I want to convey to people my apology. Kindly keep the email id anon please. This is my dummy email id but I regularly check it so we can communicate to this id.

I do not have email id of Reddit moderator but if you can pass on my apology to him I would appreciate if very much. I have abused the reason for which that particular sub reddit was created and hence I want to apologise to him.

If there is anything else that I can do let me know. If it is within my means, I will do it.

Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l.

It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I understood enough about language back then; vocabulary was never a problem though—there’s always more Latin where that came from. Never taught it to anyone. Don’t remember a thing about it.

Greeks don’t know the song. Most Greeks barely know about Chameria. And nationalist Greeks who know how the song has become a rallying point for Çam identity may well react with hostility. God knows I read a couple of shitfights on YouTube.

But given the translation and someone who’s not nationalist (e.g. Dimitris Almyrantis: Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?), you’ll get the recognition of something culturally familiar.

To answer the question, I’m going to YouTube, ignoring the typical “Fuck you Greek pederast” “Fuck you Albanian cur” stuff, and translate the comments made in Greek to a different recording:

• Epirot and Albanian, it’s almost the one music.
• We cry and celebrate with the same songs. Whatever they may say, our blood is so mixed together, whether we like it or not.
• Finally a YouTube user with serious and truthful attitudes! Good health to you and your family, sir! Good luck!
• [I didn’t translate Prentas Dimtris’ comments, because I actually didn’t understand them; Greek as Foreign Language, I surmise]

I’m not trying to whitewash anything by quoting those. Just point out that if Greeks aren’t given the political context that the song has acquired, and just listen and read the lyrics, they’ll actually like it.

I did too, although I think I’ve heard ballads that got to the point more directly.

Some celebrity nicknames are funny, and ingenious, and a sign that you have made it big, if you have an instantly recognizable nickname.

On the other hand, some celebrity nicknames show familiar contempt for celebrities, and I like those too. Australian bent in these.

• Madge for Madonna
• This. So delightfully pulling her down a peg.
• Jacko or Wacko Jacko for Michael Jackson
• The Silver Budgie for Bob Hawke
• Silver-haired, short
• The Singing Budgie for Kylie Minogue
• Sings, short
• The Mad Monk for Tony Abbott
• Former seminarian, volatile, social conservative
• Dipper for Robert DiPierdomenico
• Farnsey and Barnsey for John Farnham and Jimmy Barnes
• The rhyme was used as a commentary on the uniformity of Australian rock radio being monopolised by them