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Is Australia a constitutionally Anglican country?
The question has gotten much more airplay around the Red Mass (including the West Wing episode The Red Mass). And Catholicism isn’t anywhere near as close to a State religion in the US, as Anglicanism would have been in Australia before Federation.
Ulysses Elias’ answer points out the wording in the Australian constitution. A church service on Parliament is not
- a law for establishing any religion,
- imposing any religious observance (attendance is not compulsory)
- prohibiting the free exercise of any religion
- a religious test as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
It is of course not quite the spirit of what we understand by church–state separation; but it does hew to the letter.
Of course, in reality, while any number of Christian sects kinda coexisted in Australia of olden times, there’s a reason St Paul’s Anglican cathedral is on the central crossroads of Melbourne CBD, and St Patrick’s Catholic cathedral is on the boundary of Melbourne and East Melbourne. It’s aligned to the religion of the head of state of Australia, one Betty Windsor, Fidei Defensatrix . The establishment religion of Australia was the establishment religion of England, which is Anglicanism. These days, of course, that is an historical rather than a living fact.
Why were Jews the money lenders in Christian Europe?
May or not be a comment; but to elaborate on Peter Flom’s answer.
In Byzantium, there was no comparable ban on interest. So Jews were not the money lenders in Orthodox Christian Europe. Jews were driven to do different shit-work that Christians there wouldn’t touch.
Literally shit-work. Jews were predominantly tanners in Byzantium. Before the industrial revolution, tanning involved the use of animal dung to soften animal hides.
Hence the references in 14th century Greek vernacular poems:
- The Book of Birds’ description of the pelican’s bill: “You satchel of Moyshe’s full of dogshit.” (αποθηκάριν του Μωσέ γιομάτον σκυλινέαν)
- The Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds’ description of the boar: “The Jew stinks; and his satchel’s just as smelly” (Εβραίος όζει και βρωμεί και όλη του η θήκη)
Cf. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller who visited Byzantium in the 12th century. He may have gotten a bit mixed up:
For their condition is very low, and there is much hatred against them, which is fostered by the tanners, who throw out their dirty water in the streets before the doors of the Jewish houses and defile the Jews’ quarter. So the Greeks hate the Jews, good and bad alike, and subject them to great oppression, and beat them in the streets, and in every way treat them with rigour. Yet the Jews are rich and good, kindly and charitable, and bear their lot with cheerfulness.
The tanners fostering the hatred are in fact Jewish.
Much more in Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy, and several other sources.
If you were caught masturbating, what should you do?
The great Scots comedian Billy Connolly had a good strategy for this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=a0RqqF62Xac
“THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE!
AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON!
YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BELIEVE THIS!”
And proceed to disarm them with the shaggy dog story that ensues…
If Earth were to explode in 10 hours, what would you do?
I wrote a poem about this scenario. In my teens, which is the right time to be pondering such a scenario.
The final verse of said poem is:
Ni iris — laborejen. Malkontraŭ la malbeno.
We went — to the office. Un-against the un-blessing.
I’d like to think that’s still my answer. But it’s not.
At this stage of my life, there are worse things to be doing than spending 10 hours cuddling my honey.
How will the easy access to Pornography change our culture?
It’s already changed the culture significantly, of course. It has had a change in what kinds of sex teenagers expect to have, since that’s become a primary source of information on sex for them; but I’m not sure that counts as a cultural change. It’s better addressed in a question like What Is the effect of pornography on young teens? , although there’s curiously few responses there; there are statistics around on that question.
For broader cultural changes, I’ll venture:
- Mainstreaming (to some extent) of porn actors. It’s much easier for porn stars to transition to at least B-grade celebrities, without being stigmatised. There’s still a barrier for “serious thespians”; there was a fuss when the porn films Sibel Kekilli had made were unearthed. (And they weren’t really buried to begin with.) But Sasha Grey hasn’t suffered for it, and has probably gotten a lot further in her non-porn career than, say, Ginger Lynn did.
- Public acknowledgement of porn. Not everywhere in everything; “adult topics” are still curtailed for distribution on Quora, for example. But the open discussion of porn is far different to 30 years ago.
- More skin shown in “mainstream” TV and Hollywood. That’s a broader cultural move in the west, and it has run at different speeds in the US and Europe; but the prevalence of porn has something to do with making it less of a big deal.
- Causal use in the vernacular of obscure sexual references (that porn has made less obscure), particularly in metaphorical or non-literal senses. For example: A unicorn bukkake on a canvas is not art.
- The reinforcement of a laissez-faire attitude towards sexual practices, simply by exposing the diversity of sexual practices that people are into.
How many books can an Academic expect to sell?
With monographs, you’re pretty much selling to university libraries. And the books are priced to match: north of $150.
If you still 300 copies, you’re doing well.
What are some examples of translations of literature that are better than the original?
Germans have long thought that the Schlegel & Tieck translations of Shakespeare are better than the original. The conceit of Shakespeare being a translation from the original Klingon is an echo of that.
Not necessarily better, but certainly smoother is the best known translation of Cavafy, by Keeley & Sherrard. A lot of Cavafy is about his precarious linguistic eclecticism. It’s very hard to render in a non-diglossic language without sounding silly. Keeley & Sherrard, after others’ failed previous attempts, decided not to bother.
It’s not a faithful translation in that regard, no. But it is very readable.
How can we build a microservice using Go?
Like you build a microservice in any other programming language, but with the advantage that concurrency is baked into the language.
You’ll need a messaging system as your backend for services, that can talk to Golang. Kafka will, and so will NATS.
You will need a HTTP server front end in Golang, that receives RESTful service calls and passes messages from the HTTP on to an incoming messaging queue, or reads messages from an outgoing messaging queue to HTTP. labstack/echo is an example of that.
You will need a message handler and distributor in Golang, that grabs messages from a messaging queue, invokes one or more microservices on them, and puts the output of those microservices on another messaging queue.
You will need a series of microservices, coded in Golang and all running at the same time, that read in a message and output a different message.
I did not build the base framework of nsip/nias2, the Golang Microservice set I’m contributing to; my CTO Matt Farmer did, and his code is very legible. Unlike mine.
And of course, consult How is Go (programming language) used in microservice architecture?
Why aren’t brown eyes romanticized unlike other eye colors?
Several culture-specific factors, as others have pointed out: scarcity, attitudes towards ethnic minorities, constructs of beauty, yadda yadda.
I conducted the extremely scientific experiment of searching mavromata “brown-eyed girl” and galanomata “blue-eyed girl” on the Greek lyrics site stixoi.info. Brown-eyed win 87 to 20—despite blue-eyed Greeks being rather rare. And there is a definite cultural construct of brown-eyed girls in Greek song: that of the penetrating glance.
And yet, there’s that lovely poem by Dimitris Lipertis in Cypriot dialect: “Hey, blue-eyes, hark! They’re knocking!/ Oh mother, it’s just the pig.” (about a girl trying to cover up her nighttime tryst).
… OK, it sounds better in Cypriot.
Among all the dictators that ever existed, which one would you deem to be the worst and why?
People loathe the pissing contest between Hitler and Stalin that always arises with these questions, but it’s curiously absent from this thread. So:
Stalin.
Because with Hitler, at least you knew who the enemies were throughout his reign. With Stalin, the enemies changed depending on what side of bed he got up on. If both are evil, I’ll fear evil + unpredictable more than evil + predictable.