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Category: Culture
Sitia, 2023
My home town of Sitia is routinely described as a sleepy kind of place, and sleepy it is. Sleepy enough that I couldn’t write about my time there, until after I’d left it behind, three weeks on: its lazy cafes and brandy bars encouraged nothing so much as more brandy and more coffee. A town […]
Europeans dislike it when Americans say ‘I am Irish’ or ‘I am Italian’. What if Australians and Canadians said that? Would Europeans still dislike it? Or do they dislike it only when Americans said that?
Answer deleted by Quora for violating Be Nice Be Respectful policy. I won’t appeal, but it needed saying. Dear denizens of the Old Continent (Γηραιά Ήπειρος, as Greeks like to call it): You discard your poor huddled masses, and you repay their passed down love and homesickness with sneering, now that you’ve grown fat. […]
How significant is Brooke Burton’s turn as the Australian Bachelorette?
The Australian Bachelorette is about to screen Season 7. Its protagonist is Brooke Blurton, who was a contestant on The Australian Bachelor Season 6. Brooke Blurton is bi, and has has made out with another former female contestant, Alex Nation, on the followup Bachelor In Paradise; so this is her third outing on the Bachelor […]
Dan Andrews, meet Tom Huston
Last week, my State Premier Dan Andrews approved the wholesale transfer of drivers licence photos to the Feds, because terrorism. And he also dismissed any concerns about civil liberties as a luxury (a luxury) that he cannot afford as a leader, because terrorism. Some people have the luxury of being able to have that notional […]
In disagreement with Tuvel
Following on from my defence of Tuvel: I’ve read Tuvel’s article, which a lot more than can be said of many who have criticised it. “My friends have been harassed by TERFs because of this specific essay,” for example. Then those TERFs didn’t read the article either: the article takes the right of trans people […]
On petitions to retract articles: II
L’affaire Tuvel continues to haunt me. To get you up to speed: here’s the dime summary from Wikipedia. The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an untenured assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis. […]
“Why? To What End?”
When I alighted on Medium, almost all the Classics content there was Eidolon. Eidolon is an unabashedly leftist (well, more to the point, identity-politics–driven) Classics online publication. When Eidolon isn’t talking about the collisions of Classics and modernity, it talks a lot about how to stop making Classics complicit in US white supremacist discourse. The […]
On petitions to retract articles: I
De Koine en de Oude Dialekten van Griekland The most interesting thing about Tsakonian is not that it is descended from Doric. That impresses nationalists, but the survivals of Doric are less overwhelming than the nationalists would like to think. The most interesting thing about Tsakonian, compared to other dialects of Greek, is the extreme […]
Just because I agree with you doesn’t mean you get to spam me
I write this with trepidation. I don’t wade into political matters, and I’m a conflict-averse kind of person. I am also discovering I’m more politically moderate than I used to fancy myself, and that is never a comfortable thing. But, having the courage of my convictions is a novel experience; one that drove me off […]
How important are gender presentation and gender pronouns to you as a cis person?
https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-important-are-gender-presentation-and-different-pronouns-to-you-as-a-transgender-person I gather the question is about how I receive them rather than how I give them, given that this question is related to How important are gender presentation and different pronouns to you as a transgender person? I’m a bloke. I don’t want to be told I’m not a bloke, and I’ll be rather […]