Nick on Quora

Original Wording: What the fuck are you doing on Quora?

Oh yeah? And the horse you rode in on!

(No, Modbot, that was rhetorical. No BNBR violation here.)

Checking my inbox for interesting questions where I can help, in my own small way, to illuminate the human condition.

And chancing on this question instead.

Next!

Originally buried in a comment at https://www.quora.com/Was-it-app…

In response to:

Well, if you believe what the cast of Hamilton did was appropriate, then you’d be okay that if henceforth every theatrical performance would include the cast’s comments on the political scene.

… When Aristophanes invented comedy? That’s exactly what he did. Using the chorus to do so. That included making fun of Athenian massacres during wartime. And I’m sure people squirmed then.

If it’s a political play (and of course Hamilton is), of course that’s legitimate. And it’s just as legitimate from the right as the left.

I am profoundly grateful to La Gigi, for asking this question, which has brought together three of the most fascinating personalities in living memory:

I am also profoundly grateful to those who have already speculated about why on earth I would be so relentlessly fascinated by Nixon, because if they are, then they’re still talking about me!!

Even if they’re getting it wrong.

Let’s run through the speculations, shall we?

SPECULATION 1.

When I was in Atlanta last year, I mentioned my fascination to one of my wife’s former colleagues I met there.

Note: May not be an accurate depiction of my wife’s former colleague in Atlanta.

When I mentioned my relentless fascination, and that my wife and I would like to make the pilgrimage to Yorba Linda one day, the former colleague asked excitedly:

“Are you a conservative?”

No, sir. No I’m not. I’m Australian, after all.

Do conservatives even claim Nixon as one of their own any more?

SPECULATION 2

Benjamin Thomas:

Besides the fact that he was a great bowler?

He’s looking a lot more informal than I gathered; I thought he always bowled in a tie.

But then, I haven’t seen The Big Lebowski yet, where the first pic features.

SPECULATION 3

I’ve started following Tom Ramsay as an echo-chamber antidote, on the recommendation of Clarissa Lohr. I A2A’d him as an icebreaker.

I might need to revisit my choice of icebreakers.

Well this is the first I’ve heard of this particular, um, passion. So I am completely going out on half a limb with this A2A…

Are you the son of Deep Throat? ;P

To the best of my knowledge, I am not related to Mark Felt.

Now, if all the theories are wrong, and Stavros Nicholas was in fact taking time off from running a fish & chip shop in Launceston, Tasmania to meet Bernstein & Woodward in some garage in DC, well, I admire his stamina…

SPECULATION 4

Uri Granta has done his research, bringing up the Greek angles of Spiro Agnew, and the infamous moneybags Tom Pappas (Τομ Πάπας – Βικιπαίδεια; it is so… weird reading about him in the Greek Wikipedia).

Uri has also done his research with the Nixon–Whitlam collision course, a subject I am infuriated that I know less about than I should.

Uri’s third para of course is the right answer, and I’ll come back to that.

SPECULATION 5

Michaelis Maus, welcome to my nightmare. Mwa. Ha. Ha. And thank you for chiming in!

Your vid was by Flight of the Conchords. I definitely should put them on the list, but alas, I stopped consuming popular culture a long time ago. But bless you for including them in your answer. God they’re good. I’ll delight in taking credit for them, as all Australians do with all good things that come out of New Zealand.

Dr Nick appreciates that Michaelis is, to use an infantilising classification scheme, Chaotic Neutral (Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)), which is why Tricky Dick is a “a real, consistent nihilist after [his] own heart”. (He is also grateful that Michaelis has remembered his little “I’m arrogant enough to demand to be addressed as Dr” aside!) OTOH, I’m Lawful Good, with the Lawful exceeding Good—so much so, that I consciously try to force myself to be Lawful Neutral, all the time.

If you get my meaning.

Dr. Nick, to that effect, seems to appreciate the complexities of oft-caricatured humans.

Yes, Michaelis. You get my meaning. In fact, my first glance reaction was “yeah, but it’s more than that”; but come to think of it, reading your answer again, no, it was that.

Let me though trace my own journey of Nixon appreciation.

STAGE 0

I was 3 during Watergate, and living in Launceston, Tasmania. Little knowing that my dad was couriering information to Bernstein and Woodward, apparently.

My earliest political memory of anything involved Reagan. So Nixon is ancient history to me, in a time that already had the Iran-Contra affair. I did not experience the visceral sense of betrayal that Americans did with Watergate; I took it as given.

So Nixon does not viscerally offend me, the way it might someone who lived through his fall.

What I knew about Nixon until I was 17 was Watergate, and he’d occasionally show up on TV as a pundit. That was it.

STAGE 1

Stage 1 was hearing the premiere on the radio of Nixon in China in 1988. Nixon in China is an amazing opera, with an amazing libretto, that has stood the test of time.

Thing is, though, that the composer and librettist were both stereotypical Berkeley lefties, so they made a point of overcompensating in their depiction of Nixon. They did not want to make him a villain, so they tried to make him a hero. They didn’t pull it off: the real hero of the piece is Zhou En-Lai.

You see a Nixon comically out of depth in the opera, but also a Nixon strategising and reminiscing and nervous and genuinely hopeful. What you see only in passing, though, is the darkness in Nixon; just a couple of minutes, really—“The rats begin to chew the sheets” in the first scene, “Some men you cannot satisfy” in the last. It’s an interesting depiction, but a little too positive to be fascinating.

STAGE 2

1995, I caught Oliver Stone’s Nixon (film) on TV.

That’s what did it.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are your favorite movies and why?

I looked high and low for the DVD for years afterwards. Over a decade in fact.

Yes, it’s fictionalised and psychobabblised and operatic and conspiracy-theorised. And having read a lot of Nixoniana since, I still think that artistically, it is essentially true. It’s not a documentary, but that’s not what it needed to be.

STAGE 3

Stage 3 was getting together with another Nixon fan. Our bonding over Nixon is mentioned in my answer above. One of Tamar’s first presents to me was Volume I of Ambrose’s biography; and propelled by it, I’ve ended up reading most of Melbourne University’s holdings on Nixon.

Nick Nicholas, why are you so fascinated with Nixon?

He was a multi-faceted, complex man.

• Was the smartest man in decades in the White House. And turned the White House into a protection racket, with the dumbest enforcers imaginable.
• Used politics as a cudgel, but genuinely thought he was doing good for the world.
• Did good for the world with detente and China, but also did evil for the world with using SALT as a political football, and undermining Johnson on ending Vietnam.
• Had genuine outreach with Martin Luther King as a Vice President, but invented the Southern Strategy.
• Did great things for Native Americans—by accident, because that was Ehrlichman’s pet project, not his; and Ehrlichman was on his side, so of course he’d defend him against Congress.
• Nursed lifelong paranoias against the elite, but the elite really was out to get him, because of the excesses his paranoia caused.

He had a bushelful of hamartias, tragic flaws. The tragic hero doesn’t have to be Good. He just has to have potential to be better than his hamartias allow.

And I have the luxury of regarding Nixon from a distance, as a tragically flawed president, rather than as a visceral offence to my own polity and founding myths. Because I was 3 during Watergate, and living in Launceston, Tasmania.

There’s some critical nuance being missed in answers so far (though I strongly suspect it’s come up elsewhere here). The closest is in the sources mentioned by Mark A. Mandel, and the answer given by Matthew Carlson.

• The old use of singular they is with reference to an non-specific entity, where the use of gender would be misleading (the gender of the non-specific person is not known, and even if it is known, it is irrelevant). Hence, Shakespeare used:
  There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
  As if I were their well-acquainted friend

  The singular they is not because the gender is not known, but because it’s an non-specific referent: not a man but = every man = any man.

• The grammaticality of singular they was disputed when the prescriptivists came to town, because “not logical”, i.e. “not how Latin does things”. It’s not how most languages do things. But it is how English does things. And it’s an asterisked logic, as language logic is.
• The new use of they as gender-neutral, and the even newer use of they as non-binary may take getting used to—although I find that hard to believe for the former (which after all, is still pretty much used in non-specific contexts). The latter is much harder, because it applies to specific referents; that’s not a “logical” constraint, but a semantic constraint. I know that I keep fucking it up in my correspondence with Sam Murray, just to namedrop. But the linguistic extension is straightforward, and it’s really a matter of familiarisation to get over the definiteness block.
• And as an English speaker, I’m profoundly grateful to those in the genderfluid community who choose to go with they. Singular specific they is nothing. Neologisms like zhe and hu: those are the real linguistic annoyance.
• And yes, if someone uses them, it is polite to respect that too. But thank you to those who use the resources already there in the language.

See Singular ‘They’ for a nice succinct summary of non-binary they.

Don’t read the comments offered via Facebook if you value human dignity. “Social engineering” my tuchus.

EDIT: Thanks to Clarissa Lohr for correcting me on specificity.

1. My doctor said up to 3 weeks. It took me 4. He shrugged that off.
2. Doctor. Talk to your doctor. Do not make any decisions on your own.
3. Be well aware that antidepressants are a roulette. Psychiatrists throw shit at the wall to see what will stick. They don’t work the same for everyone.
4. The usual technique is to switch your meds rather than up your dose, and you certainly don’t up the dose of brand new meds; you’re supposed to increase gently. Because again, psychiatrists are throwing shit at the wall to see what will stick. And the less feces being flung, the less the overall risk.
5. Doctor. Talk to your doctor. Do not make any decisions on your own.

Quite a bit.

I trained around fieldwork linguists. Which was a colossal mistake for someone working on a European language. But useful if you want to be exposed to typology. I hear the IPA horror stories of my peers here, and blanche. Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA?

Now. Fieldwork linguists tend to like the cultures of the people they work among. And they tend not to like people they perceive as working to eradicate those cultures. They are academics, so they’re already on preponderance predisposed against religion. (The most visionary linguist we had was a pastor in training, and eventually moved across to theology—and anti-Islamic rhetoric. Our homegrown computational linguistics giant was a fieldworker, and a missionary. Both were regarded by their colleagues with amused detachment.)

I learned more about typology working as a research assistant than doing a PhD. Just as well, because my PhD wasn’t in typology. I was research assistant for a prof doing a phonological survey of Papua New Guinea.

PNG has, what, 1/8 of the world’s languages? 1/6?

How many academic linguists have signed up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, so they can record obscure languages there?

More than there used to be. We’ve run out of new languages among our Indigenous Australians, so PhDs wanting to write a grammar of an underdocumented language are sent to PNG now. But still, of the 800-odd languages there, I’d be surprised if even more more than 50 are documented to an acceptable scholarly level.

You know who’s prepared to sign up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, to record languages in PNG for their own motives?

Of course you do.

Academic Linguists owe a lot to SIL International. Some of them wish they didn’t. While the SIL missionaries are sometimes linguistic incompetents, sometimes they are brilliant linguists; it’s mixed.

I know one thing, though. Vanuatu has the highest density of languages on earth: 110 languages, population of 300k. Vanuatu, for reasons that a lot of linguists would be sympathetic to, has barred SIL from working there.

And Vanuatu, not PNG, is the most linguistically underdocumented country there is.

Ah, Mlle Demoritto, this question causes me amusement, because it betrays your lack of Anglo-Saxon repression.

The Anglo-Saxon proverbial expression is, there are three topics that one should never bring up for social discussion: Sex, Politics, and Religion. All three are regarded as too hot.

This is obviously a culture-specific judgement, and different cultures and individuals will have completely different opinions. Some cultures, and a lot of people, are quite ok to talk about sex. In countries without a sectarian divide, or where there is long-entrenched freedom of religion, religion will be far less toxic—unless individuals are True Believers, trying to convert everyone at the dinner table.

The same actually goes for politics. In Greece, my childhood memory is that discussing politics was more an entertainment, an excuse for people to gesticulate and mock argue, than something serious and deadly (although there was an undercurrent of that too).

So the answer to your question really depends on the culture of the “we”, and on how much of a True Believer (moral, religious or ideological) “we” are.

In their answer to A celebrity had his assistant call to schedule a date with me. Should I be offended?, Sam Murray details their rather agreeable experience of having their one-time Celebrity Fuck Buddy (CFB) arrange dates through an assistant. After all, the CFB was hardly to be trusted to arrange dates on his own.

In comments, Sam added that they found the prospect of arranging logistics pretty hot themselves:

Haha. I like planning weirdly enough. Making reservations is like a blood sport for me. Party of 7 at 8pm at balena on Saturday night? Consider it done. Coordinating hotel reservations with flight times with restaurants with tours with car rentals? I am getting aroused just thinking about it. Lol.

So…

https://www.quora.com/A-celebrit…

I’m sorry to say, Sam, but the paparazzi have been leaking footage of you with your CFB (celebrity fuck buddy). Only fair you should know:

In this cartoon, the role of the CFB is being played by Tom Selleck. Or Eric Braeden. Since I can’t actually draw, I need all the visual cues I can get.

Yes, reverse engineering the present tense from the aorist passive takes some practice. Learn the major verb classes so you can recognise the tense endings.

The present tense here is τάσσω, “to place, to order”.

Well, both do indeed occur in the New Testament. “Crucify” σταυρόω is the usual verb, but Galatians 3:13 uses ὅτι γέγραπται Ἐπικατάρατος πᾶς ὁ κρεμάμενος ἐπὶ ξύλου “for it is written: cursed is he who hangs from a pole.”

Galatians 3:13 uses hangs from a pole to refer to Jesus, but in fact it is quoting Deuteronomy 21:23: you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Be sure to bury it that same day, because anyone who is hung on a pole is under God’s curse. Deuteronomy is referring to death by hanging from a pole. Acts 5:30 also uses that expression to refer to the crucifixion, and the commentaries explain it as an allusion to the same source.

Greek Orthodox hymns generalise this quotation to refer to the crucifixion, on both Holy Thursday and Good Friday: see Επί ξύλου κρεμάμενοι όλοι μας. But translating crucifixion on a cross into hanging on a tree is hardly rare in different cultures. I’m pretty sure it shows up in Old English, though I’m not finding the source on Google.