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Would you want to see a list of everyone who has ever secretly had a crush on you?
I mean, what would I do with such a list? Just more regrets about what could have been?
Two secret crush stories.
Story the first.
I had a tutor working for me, that had a crush on me. Male tutor, as it transpires.
At the end of semester, he worked up all his courage, and confessed his crush. It was actually heartbreaking: he was really in quite a state about admitting it to me, and he didn’t know how much of a risk he was taking.
I smiled.
Well, I replied, nothing will come of it, I’m afraid. But pray tell, Tutor! What was it that excited your interest in me? My sparkling wit, no doubt?
Tutor just stared at the ground, and mumbled embarrassedly. “No… I just think you’re hot.”
Hah. He fell in love with me for my body. I felt so cheap!
🙂
He was into bears, I guess, and sure enough, he’s since moved to Sydney, and become a bear himself. And good for him.
Did I need to know it? Or want to? Probably not, I couldn’t do much with the information. But I was touched that he trusted me enough to tell me (or was foolhardy enough to: ultimately, same difference). It was nice to know.
Not the bit about him only falling in love with my body, of course. Cheap, I tell you! 🙂
Story the second.
I had a crush on someone I studied my PhD with. I’ve mentioned her already here. She had a cover story about being married, which she wasn’t, precisely to forestall being importuned. And by the time she confessed to me that actually there was no husband, I’d got the message that she did not want to be importuned. So that got put aside.
We met up two times after that. The first time, I went all moon-eyed, and she got the message that I was still interested. She still didn’t want to be importuned; by then I’m pretty sure she had moved on to someone else.
The second time, I crashed at her dad’s for a few days. Her, her dad, her partner, her two kids. She was quite overwhelmed with the kids, she welcomed me being around so she could actually get a break from the kids. (The dad disapproved of the arrangement, and the partner, well, the partner was sweet, but not dependable.)
I don’t know that I should have, but I did have to know. And by the time I could get her to focus on the question, it was the wee hours. And yes, it turns out, she had felt something for me at the time.
… And that both refutes and corroborates the first line of this answer.
It was a missed opportunity, it’s sad to know that. Do I want to know that? I shouldn’t.
But there was something there on the other side, however tentative. That… that was nice to know. That gave me a little smile.
Would Australia have been a better place had the French stayed?
I read a uchronia once where Tasmania was French and the rest of Australia British. It got very lazy very quickly, and turned Australia + Tasmania into Canada + Quebec, complete with Quiet Revolution and Vichy France rule.
I can’t imagine Australia ending up that much different from Canada, in fact. The Brits would have stuck around, and would have likely wrested overlordship from them. Canada’s a cool place, there’s worse outcomes than that.
The vague notion that French rule might have held back a spirit of enterprise and sophistication in the colonies is not that absurd: France was more centralist about its colonies than Britain ever was. And multiculturalism wouldn’t have happened, for better or worse: Trudeau Snr invented multiculturalism as a reaction to Quebecois nationalism, not as an outgrowth of it.
Agree about far better food, though. I mean, poutine!
Do you consciously live your life as “Being-towards-death” (or any comparable idea)? How does it affect your daily life, if at all?
Ah, Desmond. I am a philosophy dolt, and I take no pride in that. But I have dreaded death since I associated Alice Cooper with the Boogeyman when I was 6, and I’ve had different responses to it. Fear, denial, self-aggrandisement. (That was my twenties: “I’ll write the definitive grammar of mediaeval Greek”, “I’ll get all my papers laminated and sent to Spitzbergen.”)
In my forties, I have reverted to a verse I wrote in my teens, in Esperanto, about what the apocalypse might look like, and which features here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If Earth were to explode in 10 hours, what would you do?
Ni iris — laborejen. Malkontraŭ la malbeno.
We went — to the office. Un-against the un-blessing.
I won’t fight Death. And I won’t allow Death the victory of overawing me, or paralysing me, or making me have one last riotous spree, or doing any goddamned thing differently. I will go about my business.
Or as that Greek folk song put it (a little less morosely):
Alas I’m forty by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
και από τσι χάρες τση ζωής τσι πλια όμορφες θα πάρω,
να αφήσω αποδιαλέουρα στον κερατά το Χάρο.
I’ll sample all the best life has to give.
The leftovers—that bastard Death can have.
Are the characters in “reality” TV shows usually all real people, or are actors frequently used?
They are indeed real people, who interview for the privilege, rather than professional actors. The whole point, after all, is that “real people” are cheaper.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they are media innocents, of course, and I’m quite happy when I find they are not. There are people who have done repeat appearances in various reality shows. There are also bizarre outbursts of outrage in Australia, when participants on The Bachelor or Married At First Sight or The Block turn out to have been strippers or to have acted in ads. I’m actually relieved the latest Bachelorette in Australia was a former news anchor.
Why did Trump just harangue and hang up on the Australian Prime Minister?
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Americans agree that the Prime Minister of Australia should have been treated the way he was by President Trump during their first phone call? In retrospect, that was more an answer to this question than that one.
TL;DR: Trump did it, because he’s not remotely interested in being a statesman, or preserving the delicate balances of the American World Order. He’s interested in being an alpha male who delivers to his base. (Or, per Scott Adams, he’s a Master Manipulator and Paradigm Disruptor.) And the point wasn’t haranguing Turnbull; it was being seen by the American voting public to be haranguing Turnbull. Which is why Bannon (presumably) leaked it.
As to the question details:
why would an American president go out of his way to alienate an ally whose soldiers fought and died alongside Americans in every war of the past century—including Vietnam?
ANZUS was founded in “We fought together in the Coral Sea! We were brothers! We would die for each other.” Except (as I wrote in my answer above), the Coral Sea did not motivate the US to deploy a single GI in support of Australia in Malaysia. And conversely, the Coral Sea meant for Australia that it wanted America stuck in the morass of Vietnam, because that made it more obvious that America would defend Australia.
Alliances are about self-interest, not glorious shared history. It was ever thus with Athens. It was ever thus with the US. It should have been ever thus with Australia.
Do Americans agree that the Prime Minister of Australia should have been treated the way he was by President Trump during their first phone call?
So, we’re kicking back at the office, 2 PM, and my COO flicks his phone as I’m coding, and says “hey, the Aussie dollar’s up 1 cent!”
And I look at him, and I look at my colleague, and she says, “OK, what’s Trump done now?”
And I pop onto The Age newspaper, and Donald Trump tweets he will study ‘dumb’ refugee deal with Australia
I am going to do something that I don’t particularly want to do. I’m going to channel my inner Scott Adams (Scott Adam’s Blog) and assume that Trump is being a rational agent, and try to work out what’s in it for him.
(And then I’m going to take a shower, because I don’t want to have an inner Scott Adams.)
So. Background:
Our own Australian government has been treating refugees in a very… by now mainstream fashion, involving detainment and abuse, and has done so on a bipartisan basis for the past decade and more. The Australian government has decided to deal with its refugee responsibilities by exporting them to Pacific islands. And now that the Pacific islands are turning against this, it has signed a deal with Obama to export the refugees to America.
So, no honour there from our side.
The phone call involved Australia trying to remind America that “we had a deal”, which we had—with Obama; and Trump saying “screw your deal, and screw you”.
Turnbull our PM is what would have happened to Arnie Vininck, had he actually been elected in The West Wing. He’s been hostage to the right wing of his party, and he has been unable to act as the Great Moderate Hope he did while out of leadership. (The left have been massively disillusioned. But the left weren’t really going to vote for him anyway.) He is, in all too many ways, a pussy cat. So the notion that he provoked Trump somehow brought up many a chuckle in our office at 2 PM.
There’s a strong suspicion that the details of the phone call were leaked by Bannon: Bannon, Spicer, Flynn and Trump: who heard Malcolm Turnbull’s phone call?
So. Let’s go all Scott Adams, folks. Why would Trump do this, apart from reasons of his ego?
Trump needs to send a strong message to his base that he will keep all “bad guys” out. If “bad guys” includes Muslim migrants with green cards (or without green cards), and “bad guys” includes refugees from Syria, then “bad guys” certainly also includes refugees grandfathered in from Syria via Australia.
Trump needs to send a strong message that he is undoing everything Obama ever did, like this deal. He needs to send a strong message that America First, and that all US deals and obligations are back on the table, because America First. And he needs to send a strong message that he is alpha, oh so alpha, and he doesn’t do diplomatic nicey-nice talk.
And he doesn’t send this message by yelling at some random country’s prime minister. Oh no. After all, Turnbull didn’t say a word of this after it happened.
He sends this message by yelling at some random country’s prime minister, having Bannon leak it, and tweeting about Obama’s dumb deal afterwards.
Does this kick America’s most loyal lapdog ally to the curb? You bet. And you know what? I’ve been reading about the clash between Whitlam and Nixon back in the day; and before Whitlam, Australia was lickspittle to the US, and it still got kicked to the curb. Australia was expected to support the US in Nam; the US would not send one GI to support Australia in any entanglements it had in Malaysia. ANZUS was only a one-way obligation. That’s what happens when you’re dealing with the 800 pound gorilla.
Trump has political reasons to rip off the mask. But it always has been a mask. Of course any American administration is ultimately going to be America First. They’re just not as arseholish about it.
So. Should Trump have treated Turnbull thus? By the standards of valuing longstanding alliances, preserving a viable world order, honouring your government’s existing commitments, and you know, statesmanship: no.
By the standards of the world we’ve just alighted on, with Trump running the US (as Scott Adams gushes) like a Silicon Valley disruptor, throwing all the existing rules out the door and bamboozling the world so he can get himself a better deal: well, yeah. Sure. The Hon. Malcolm Bligh Turnbull is just a prime minister of a bunch of kangaroos, who gives a shit.
That… was not fun to write.
Are we done creating great works of literature?
Something more complicated has happened than that. We have left behind a world where there was a well-regulated Canon of literature, and where the masses paid attention to scholars who would identify that Canon. We live now instead in a world where taste have become democratized, and more subject to market forces than to elite judgement. So even though I am told great literature is still being written, most people don’t get to hear of it, because most people aren’t listening to literature specialists.
In the other direction, and strongly correlated to this, high literature, just like high art and high music, has withdrawn from the conventions that helped it make sense to the masses for millennia, in favour of more experimentation, and in the case of the visual arts, philosophising about the nature of art. That’s not intrinsically a bad thing, but it has happened to the extent that it has, because the market forces of popular taste no longer have much sway over it. Admittedly such hermeticism (for want of a better term) is most severe in the visual arts, decreasing in music, and I think least pervasive in literature.
Greatness in art is something we like to think is inherent in the artistic expression. But greatness is just as much, and arguably much more, about the reception of the art, and what sense a mass audience makes of it.
Hermeticism does not prioritise the mass reception of art, and usually seeks to undermine the very notion of great art. So greatness does not come naturally to it. And conversely, without a mass audience for high art, and with a body of scholars and critics who themselves question the very notion of greatness, people or not as invested in identifying greatness in Contemporary Art as they used to be.
Tl;dr: there is still great literature being written. But you have to look very hard now to find someone who’ll tell you what it is.
Who, in your opinion, is the most dangerous person alive?
Ah, Mez. I was going to dodge this, but I won’t.
What’s the danger I care about most? Not the planet blowing up, and not what happens to America in isolation from the rest of the planet. (I mean, of course I care, but not most. And boy, will there be a bunch of isolation from the rest of the planet for the next four years.)
The danger I care about most is the dissolution of our civilisation—of life as we know it. Even if we survive it, I don’t think life will be worth living as cavepeople.
What are the biggest threats to life as we know it? The rise of the robots (Tom Higgins, I never did read your “bring on the Singularity” answer; sorry!) And global warming.
The rise of the robots could go well or it could go very very bad. Global warming will only go very very bad.
Who made sure that we couldn’t stop global warming when we had a decent chance to? Who’s working to make sure we still don’t?
Plenty of people who are going to find life even more unpleasant than their neighbours, when shit goes down and their neighbours look for scapegoats. Including lots of ex-presidents, and lots of reactionary and (sadly) libertarian pundits. Lots of political strategists (Frank Luntz might “accept the science” now, but he targeted the science back at the time of Kyoto). Lots of “sceptics”.
But you know, if I had to pick one guy, I’ll pick the most influential denialist politician, and he’s the most dangerous because he’s still in office, and he’s still influencing environmental policy in the US—which is where leadership has had to come from. I give you the Gentleman from Oklahoma, the king of snowballs: Senator Jim Inhofe.
Yeah, yuk it up, Jim.
See you in hell, buddy. Don’t bring your snowball there; it won’t last. Won’t last up above under global warming, either.
Why is Iran one of the most hated countries?
I love questions about Iran, Anon. I actually know very little about Iran, and much of what I do know is through people right here on Quora. But I know enough about the neighborhood, as their neighbours’ neighbour, that I can make intelligent guesses.
They may be very far from correct guesses, of course. But you did choose to A2A me.
In this answer, I will try to be fair. I have my own ideology and opinions, and they will become clear. But neither Iranians nor Americans are my enemy.
The West is under American hegemony. Now, hegemony is not necessarily a bad thing (although I do need to read a lot more about what Gramsci originally meant by it). Hegemony involves a way of thinking that gets adopted by the many, and that benefits a privileged group. That doesn’t mean that the privileged group is wrong. And that doesn’t mean that the many aren’t sincere in their agreement with the privileged group. Whatever Gramsci says.
Some of the American hegemony’s ideology include secular government, constraint on mob justice, distancing from terrorism (a notion the US has not been very consistent about), acceptance of American dominance, and social freedoms.
The Iranian theocracy has over the years done several things that run counter to this ideology. Again, just because they are challenging a hegemon does not make them right: sometimes Goliath is the good guy after all. And conversely, just because their government rejects Western ideas of what a good country is, doesn’t automatically make them a Bad Country. Ideologically, however, America and Iran are opposed.
That is enough to make Iran call America the Great Satan, and the US to reciprocate the demonisation.
There were a few other factors that cemented the perception of Iran as part of the so-called Axis of Evil.
- The humiliation of America with the hostage crisis.
- Proxy conflicts with America in Lebanon and the Iran-Iraq war.
- The interregnum between the Soviet Union and modern day Russia and China, and for that matter Al Qaeda and ISIS, when Iran was seen as the major Challenger to the American World Order.
- The challenge Iran poses to Israel, which is always a factor in how the US, if not Europe, views regional players.
- Conspicuous challenges to the Western model of social liberalism, including the veil and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
- Of course, the fact that both demographically and militarily, as well as by virtue of geography, Iran is well positioned to be a thorn in America’s strategic interests.
- Fear of Islam as a challenge to the West overall.
Readers will have different opinions about which of these concerns are merited and which are not. Alert readers will be aware that some of those challenges are more acute in Saudi Arabia than in Iran.
If history had played out slightly differently, and America had made some better informed decisions early on, Iran could have been an arms length ally of America, instead of Saudi Arabia. And if that had happened, even with Iran a theocracy, I doubt it would rank as high up on the list of hated countries as some now place it.
Is the employment of rhetorical tropes dishonest?
You come to me highly recommended, Melinda Gwin, by the Magister, with a very ticklish question. You ask me a question that the Magister has already answered exhaustively, and morally, and Stageritically. What then may I say? Τί σοι προσοίσω, δέσποινα;—What shall I offer thee, lady? (Though you may not be that familiar with Comnenan Byzantine poetry: cf. Theodore Prodromos, Ptochoprodromos I 1…)
Of course the Magister is right that metaphor and other such devices are inherent in our conceptualisation of the world (and not just in language). I’ve read my Lakoff! But that’s not where you were going with this.
Of course the Magister is right that morality inheres in the agent, and not the vehicle. Words are a tool, just like guns are; and not that I have much sympathy with the NRA, but words don’t kill people, people kill people. Sometimes, employing words.
Yet I don’t think that’s where you were going with this either.
I’ll go around the way I suspect this question was intended. Of course, it doesn’t matter how you intended it, Melinda, I’m going to answer it according to my suspicion.
The ideal behind this question I suspect, which is not that absurd or unreasonable an ideal, is that there is dispassionate reason and logic and cost/benefit analysis underlying an argument—which gets distorted by the introduction of emotion into the argument. And that whether that emotion is used for good or evil, it misleads the persuadee. They are not making their own evaluation of what is to be done, working through the arguments and evidence presented them; they are being swayed by beautiful words.
And not having read the Stagirite, or, well, anyone, it occurs to me that, on the one hand, there are illusions about this. Dispassionate analysis is a construct, and evidence can be selectively presented. Emotive appeals help one empathise with the options being laid out, and the heart does have a role in decision making. Appealing to logic instead of reason can itself be a distortion and partisan. The preference for logic and away from emotion is itself a bias that favours a particular kind of arguer and a particular kind of argument.
And yet, there is something to what you’re asking. There is the notion of someone making their own mind up based on data, and shutting out external influences. Data is an influence, and influence is data: the dividing line between data and influence is not as clear as we hope.
Yet there is something to be said for an individual, calmly, sine ira et studio, working their way through the arguments put before them, and prioritising their own interests in coming to a conclusion. Someone else’s rhetorical devices are going to get in the way of you pursuing your own interests in that ratiocination, because they inevitably facilitate someone else’s interests. In a way that raw data (sometimes—sometimes) does not.
And the most important equipment a citizen can have is training in recognising rhetorical strategies (that, and statistics). Not so they cannot be moved and persuaded by rhetoric. But so that at least they can recognise it when they’re on the receiving end of it.