Author: opoudjis

What do you think of Cory Bernardi trying to dilute the racial discrimination act?

By: | Post date: September 1, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/cory-bernadi-leads-coalition-push-to-change-18c-race-hate-laws/7796356 I think it puts me in a strange uncomfortable place. On the one hand, I am a libertarian in many things; I am more libertarian, certainly, than my fellow Australian latte-sippers (as opposed to American latte-sippers). And my position is that Bernardi’s dilution is right: there is a difference of threshold between “intimidate, humiliate, […]

Is your Quora avatar an image of you, or something else?  How did you choose it?

By: | Post date: September 1, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal, Quora

My answer is the same as Philip Newton’s, which is the same as KP Wee’s. I do have photos of me, but whenever asked for an avatar, I rummage in Spotlight for “Nick Jpg”, which is rather slimmer pickings. My avatar picture, courtesy of my wife, is me doing something uncharacteristic. Lying down in the […]

Is it wrong and strange to like Richard Nixon?

By: | Post date: September 1, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Countries

Stephen E. Ambrose wrote three volumes of biography on Nixon. At the start of his undertaking, he loathed Nixon, like most academics that had lived through Watergate. His wife, as it happened, was a Nixon supporter. By the end of the three volumes, they had swapped: Ambrose had developed a grudging respect for Nixon, his […]

Have you ever overheard someone talking about you in another language?

By: | Post date: September 1, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

Originally Answered: Have you ever caught someone talking about you in another language? A2A. How many gajillion squintillion answers are there here already? No, not reading the thread. OK, answering to be neighbourly, Sofia Mouratidis. I was in Crete. I was not on my nice, cosy familiar native easternmost neck of the island, where the […]

Can I get a Greek tattoo when I’m not Greek at all?

By: | Post date: September 1, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Greece

I live in Greektown, Melbourne. Which means I see a lot of Greek tats sported by Greeks. And I do plenty of looking down on the cookie cutter nationalism of biceps with inked Molon labe, and Maeanders that look a little too close to swastikas. But of course, I’m a cultural conservative, so I would […]

What’s the single most beautiful image you have from your country?

By: | Post date: August 31, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

I am not a visual person. And though my attachment to this image is quite predictable—me being such a homebody and desperately attached to a sense of home, it’s only grown on me gradually. The view of the central railway station of Melbourne, across the beautiful brown Yarra river (its brownness mitigated by night), from […]

How many shots does it take to get you drunk? What does it feel like, when you’re drunk? How do you see around you? How do you talk? What do you do?

By: | Post date: August 31, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

We will never find out. My father conducted a scientific experiment at 19, to determine his answer to this question. He vaguely remembers passing out. My control issues are much too deeply embedded for me to recapitulate my father’s empiricism. Once I realise that I am affected by imbibing booze, I get annoyed enough at […]

Why are all Quora moderators Satan?

By: | Post date: August 30, 2016 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Quora

I wished, my A2A’er and True Quora Master Scott Welch, to give you a well-informed theologically-based answer to this question. So I googled: “Satan does not”. Because there’s a lot of things that Quora moderation does not do. I got this from the Agape Geek blog as my first Google hit: Six Things Satan Doesn’t […]

What would your Quora followers be surprised to learn about you?

By: | Post date: August 30, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

Others on this thread have spoken to their impostor syndrome. I won’t answer with that: we are all, as Michael Masiello once put it to me, broken toys here, which correlates with us falling into our knowledge rather than training for it. I’ve never formally studied Ancient Greek, for example. I don’t say anything online […]

What city in your country do you feel would give a foreigner the best idea of said country’s culture?

By: | Post date: August 30, 2016 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

So. Mate. Maaaaate. Youse wanna hang out in a ciddy where youse’ll get the bestest idear of some dinky-di Aussie culture, mate? Tough question, because of our parochialism, and because our culture has been shifting noticeably over the last fifty years. For the old Australia, a regional city. Tamworth, New South Wales, because they play […]

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