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If Americans have Niagara, Koreans Jeju-do and other people come to Greek Islands for this reason,what is the place for honeymoon in your own country?
Australia:
Depends on your budget. In order:
- Bali
- Far North Queensland (Port Douglas)
- Hawaii
- Europe.
Yes, to Australians, Europe might as well be just one country.
6 countries, 6 weeks. Or, as we said to each other at the conclusion of it: “we’re too old for this shit.”
What do you think about people of Iran (not politicians)?
A2A by Pegah Esmaili, who is Iranian. And not Persian. So I’m not going to say “Persian”.
Iranian #1: I am an avid follower of Pegah Esmaili, and her combat boots. And of course I am going to say nice things about Iranians, and Azeri Iranians in particular, because when Pegah starts wiping out all men, I want her to get to Lyonel Perabo before she gets to me.
Pegah and Lyonel’s mutually assured destruction by Nick Nicholas on Gallery of Awesomery
Iranian #2: I have a crush on Somi Arian, and really, do you blame me?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Do6nh6SPSH8
Fierce! (The lyrics are somewhat unsophisticated, but that’s the curse of Metal in general.)
If I am to judge on the basis of Ms Esmaili and Ms Arian, Iranians are proud, independent, intelligent, fierce, and very very scary.
Of course I would not generalise about all Iranians on the basis of two people. That would be silly.
Iranians #3, #4, #5: I hanged out with some Iranian linguistics students while doing my Master’s, 20 years ago.
They were very different to each other. Like, crazy different. Like, every time I got together with them, it was like
From right to left, the Iranian linguists of Melbourne in the mid 90s: Mohammed, Hussein, Ghodrat…
… hang on, there was noone choleric in the group.
Oh yeah, silly me:
Though Ms Arian’s thesis on Kant & Nietzsche was a decade later.
(I could start adding photos from Pegah Esmaili’s answer to Can the wonderful people of Quora upload a picture or two of themselves?, but then she’d kill me before Lyonel.)
So, Iranians are different from each other. What else?
Well, Nick Nicholas’ answer to What comes to your mind when someone mentions Turkey (the country)? was: “the neighbour”.
Iranians? They’re the neighbour’s friend. Or the neighbour’s mentor. Or the neighbour’s coach. Or something.
Which means there’s some things about them that are familiar, and they come as a pleasant surprise. Azeris have an unfair advantage over other Iranians, because they actually speak the neighbour’s language. Persians have an unfair advantage, because they’re Indo-Europeans, and I actually learned two or three words.
Eh, خُدا حافِظ? Did I copy paste that right?
Their vast pride in their history is something I understand, at least intellectually, as a Greek. And they have a majestic culture; they were worthy adversaries to have had 25 centuries ago,
and it’s pretty cool that Greeks (via Ottoman Turkish) use farsi to mean “speak a language fluently”. The Shahnameh is the only epic poem I’ve been able to read all the way through. Their drawings have a filigree delicacy, even if they look strangely Chinese.
There are some things that are alien about them too, sure. The theocracy is scary to me. The mandatory hijab ditto, although the clear halfheartedness with which it is worn in Tehran is a source of ongoing mirth.
Skater Girls Seen in Vanak Sq. in Tehran, Iran
Their kabobs can be amazing—but they seem to think that poultry and pomegranate syrup work together (Fesenjān).
(Pomengranate on poultry? Really?)
Even more scary is the whole open necked shirt thing, which they horrifyingly have in common with the Greek ruling party: Why did neither Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, nor most of his entourage, wear ties during his recent visit to Iran? Is it fashion or politics?
But OP did say “not politicians”.
So here’s a non-political shoutout, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr… , to the non-politicians of Iran:
So! Dostānam! We can use raki/arak for the toast, right?
Geez, it was just a suggestion, Ms Arian…
If the Louvre was on fire and you had to choose between saving an unconscious person or the Mona Lisa, what would you do? You are a scholar and curator at the museum and nobody will know who or what you saved. You are not in harm’s way.
Thx4A2A, Linda.
I’ll go with the painting too. Even if I’m not a visual arts kind of guy.
I won’t do a long justification of that; others have, pro and con, mostly jocular.
Some have been less jocular. But you know what? Doodles do matter.
And even though Tom Groves meant it jocularly, well, when he says:
People die all the time, You can’t save ’em all. The real world is not like Pokemon.
… he’s not wrong.
It’s from a very different context, but see Yannis Makriyannis quote from Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Greeks in the Ottoman age feel Greek or Roman? Why was Greek identity chosen and not Roman when fighting for independence?
I had two fine statues, a woman and a prince, intact—you could see the veins on them, that’s how perfect they were. Some soldiers had taken them and they were going to sell them to some Europeans, for a thousand thalers. I went over, I took the soldiers aside, and spoke to them. “These statues, even if they give you ten thousand thalers, don’t you stoop to letting them be taken out of our country. These are what we fought for.”
EDIT: Oh, and to encapsulate some other points made by Tom and Linda?
How many people now mourn Morosini blowing up the Parthenon?
How many people now mourn the soldiers Morosini blew up along with the Parthenon?
How is Mahler’s 7th Symphony different from the others?
People pretty universally say the 7th is crap. I think the reason is only the last movement.
The first four movements are great. They are quite not as great as the 5th or 6th, which seems to say what they say better. In fact, each of the first three movements seems to be quite close to the corresponding movement in the 6th symphony, and to be outdone by it. But the middle movements are still all wonderful, and the 4th movement has a delightful urbane wistfulness about it, much more human-scaled than the Adagietto of the 5th. (It is after all meant to be scene-painting a night stroll around Vienna.)
It falls down in the last movement. Exegetes say that it’s deliberately meant to be bathetic, that Mahler is poking fun at the carefree style of the Strausses, just as Shakespeare made the problem comedies problematic, and Mahler himself made the finale of the 5th a study in anticlimax.
I buy it for the 5th. I don’t buy it for the 7th. It does sound to me like someone who’s trying to have a happy ending and failing; it does not sound to me like someone who’s doing that on purpose, to make a larger point.
Do you enjoy Mahler’s 8th symphony? I find it to be one of his most boring and least exciting or moving works after the initial shock at how many performers are involved.
The 8th is a barrage and a tour de force. And it has some amazing moments.
But… IMHO you’re on to something there. It is something of a step backwards for Mahler. It is not less competent, but it is less personal, and musically more conservative than what he did before or after. I love the relentless first movement, which is Mahler’s kind-of Mass, and is loud and energetic enough to match anything else he did in that vein. (Hostem Repellas!) The second movement, which is his kind-of Opera, relies on Goethe for its structure rather than internal logic, and I think it sags.
And some of his aesthetics in this piece has not survived the test of time, where I think most have. The harmonium and the whole Ewig Weibliche thing is too much of the 19th century.
At what tempo do you feel the Mahler 5 Adagietto ought to be played?
Slower than the Mengelberg Andy Anderson linked to, faster than Bernstein’s dirge.
Mahler may have played it that fast, but geez, what does the author know about his own text?
As Curtis Lindsay said, it is meant to be a song, not the slow-mo ringing of the spheres. Embarrassingly in fact Mahler did make lyrics for it, as a love song to Yoko Ono… er, Alma Mahler.
In general though, and with the exception of this instance, Mahler’s own advice holds when it comes to conducting. When you sense the audience is getting restless—go slower. There’s a lot going on in Mahler: taking the time to let it play out is normally good advice.
It’s just that in the case of the Adagietto, there’s somewhat less going on. It doesn’t need that much time to play out.
Which author have you lost respect for, whose works you once enjoyed reading?
I’m all about the style in literature.
When I was an early teen, I read all the Isaac Asimov I could. Sci-fi and Science. And there was a lot.
By my late teens, I discovered stylistics.
And I realised that Asimov could not write.
Oh, he could come up with great ideas; on occasion, even plots. But there was no beauty to his prose. I haven’t forgiven him for that.
What are the libertarian parties in Australia?
Supplemental to the other answers:
David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democratic Party (Australia) is the most prominent voice of overt libertarianism in Australia, the way Americans would recognise it. He gets to be that by virtue of getting a Senate seat (through people confusing his party name with the Liberals, as he has cheerfully admitted).
Libertarianism is not mainstream in Australia, which rather likes Big Government. In fact, my realisation that I’m sympathetic to prioritising more individual liberties puts me out of sync with the Australian mainstream. (And in sync with groups I’d rather not be in sync with.)
Of the other parties David Caune mentions, I’d have thought (though I haven’t particularly researched it) that social conservative religiously driven parties are palaeocon, and not visibly libertarian. That includes Democratic Labour Party, Rise Up Australia, Family First, and the Shooters and Fishers Party. The populists of One Nation and the erstwhile Palmer United Party don’t count either. The Sex Party are socially liberal (including pro-euthanasia). I don’t know how libertarian they actually are, even though they are the default recipients of my protest vote.
But beyond that, as David Caune has pointed out, the Institute of Public Affairs think-tank has yielded significant influence in the Liberal party, and its rhetoric is libertarian. A recent book on the whole Abbott debacle, Battleground, was a moment when the scales fell from my eyes: explaining the ideological split within the Liberal Party, Peter van Onselen pointed out that the best way to describe the Liberal moderates was a word that never had occurred to me: libertarian.
All of a sudden, a lot about George Brandis (attorney-general) and Christopher Pyne (education minister, defence minister) made sense.
Who started democracy in Australia? How did this benefit the Australians?
Blame Canada!
(And thank you, Gareth Jones, for pinging this in my brain.)
Been reading Geoffrey Blainey’s Shorter History of Australia this week. I have serious gaps in my knowledge of Australian history before… oh, before I was born.
Australia in the 1850s had de facto universal male suffrage, which made it one of the most democratic countries in existence. There was a minimum income constraint in place of £10 a week; but once the gold rush drove inflation through the roof, just about every household in the country made that threshold.
As with much of the boon this country enjoys, Australians didn’t fight for democracy; they got lucky. (There’s a reason the book The Lucky Country was titled the way it was.) Britain had learned its lesson from 1776, and learned it even better in Canada, after the Rebellions of 1837. The Report on the Affairs of British North America that Lord Durham drew up in the aftermath recommended giving the colonials (at least, the white colonials) self rule. Britain sat on its hands about the report for a decade, but then set up legislatures in Canada—and in the Australian colonies. Per Wikipedia,
The general conclusions of the report (Report on the Affairs of British North America) that pertained to self-governance were enacted in Australia and New Zealand and other mostly ethnically British colonies. The report became a sort of Magna Carta for representative self-government even for remote places like Saint Helena. The parallel nature of Government organisation in Australia and Canada to this day is an ongoing proof of the long-enduring effects of the report’s recommendations.
As Blainey winks, there was a revolution to gain Australia democracy, after all. The revolution, though, happened in Canada.
If Stephen Hawking were incredibly racist, would people still call him smart?
Geoffrey Sampson is a very good scholar in Natural Language Processing. One of my .sigs quotes him.
He’s also a UKIP member who got kicked out of the Tories after saying he was an unashamed racialist. Protests at his university wanted him kicked out, saying no person of colour could comfortably sit his classes. And some protesters cast doubt on his academic record.
For me to consider Sampson a good scientist does not mean I endorse “racialism”.
People are complicated. Caravaggio was a thug and a killer; he also was the first man in the West who made painting an art. Ben Carson, by all accounts, really is a brilliant surgeon, who thinks strange things about pyramids.
The notion that politicians, or sportspeople, or teachers should somehow be moral exemplars is absurd to me. It’s not relevant to their job, and it’s not their job. If racism is bad, it’s bad in everybody, the sanitation worker no more or less than the professor. If people have talents and expertise, those are not diminished by their prejudices, even if we consider that their humanity is.
Some would allow a hypothetical Hawking’s racism to call his work into question, just as they did with Sampson. I won’t. I read Sampson’s books to get a grounding in pronoun resolution, not to learn about the hierarchy of the races. Not, in fact, to engage with Sampson as a person at all. And anything valid I learn about pronoun resolution from his books remains valid, whatever his political opinions.