Archive:

Day: September 1, 2016

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

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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 […]