i hate it when u have to get up early so ur like “oh im gonna go to sleep at reasonable time!”…… but it always ends in u listing around……. at 2 in the morning…….. like an unfortunate ghost wailing for something they lost………….
Every single year the same things happens in Greece, every damn summer our country is burned, people lose their houses and families, then no one cares and the cycle repeats.
Its not just a weather issue, there is always a greater evil hidden behind all of this and nothing changes.
Last year my house almost burned, we were lucky on the last minute but I can still remember the fear of the people around me, running around and trying to help, the panicked animals and the sickening anxiety that I might lose my house and my cat.
Funny how when people think about Greece all they talk about is our economic crisis and shitty politicians (and even dare to act like they know everything about those matters), yet for some strange reason, when it comes to the refugee crisis, the tensions with Turkey or the fire catastrophes, silence ensues.
I’m positive that if it were a stronger country or a “popular” one getting burned, everyone would magically transform into Mother Teresa and pray, cry and reblog everything they can.
But no, this is Greece, the “joke of Europe”, or, as all fandoms here know it, “that one ancient country with the really cool mythology and gods”. No future or innocent people to worry about, right?
This is so true. I did a test yesterday: I reblogged posts about the Fire in both my blogs (one of them being a Greece travel blog, fancy that), overall potential of 6000 followers. The number of reblogs I got was disheartening. And the vast majority was from Greek followers.
Had I reblogged something pale in comparison about USA, or at least UK or at the very least France, people would be all over it.
Had I reblogged an idiotic headcanon about Apollo or Athena or an 100% accurate analysis of
Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship, people would reblog like crazy “oh wow how cool that is” .
I had photos of Santorini island and Ancient temples in my queue and they were posted, obviously getting more attention than the people and houses being on fire, right NOW. Because bucket list goals, duh.
Speculations about if it’s Alexander’s tomb found in Egypt these days got like 300000 notes.
No one gives a shit about Greeks nowadays. No one gives a shit about small or weak countries. No one gives a shit about something that doesn’t affect them personally. I saw a Portuguese person reblogging the post because they said last year when Portugal was on fire, nobody cared and they didn’t want the same thing to happen to Greece. I feel terribly sorry and I salute that person.
And one more thing: those of you who claim you love Greece, Greek mythology, you are Philhellenes, you can explain in detail how Leonidas’ sacrifice affected the invasion of the Persians in the European continent or you even eat Gyros and dance Syrtaki, here’s a secret, you don’t know shit about Greece. Literally nothing.
Many of you might wonder “okay what is this sudden outburst, where did all this come from”. But I don’t care if it seems out of place. I know where it comes from and fellow Greeks know where it comes from. And that’s enough for me right now.
And you might wonder: “Ok are we obliged to love Greece?”. Of course not. You don’t have to love Greece. So don’t claim you do either because you do not really know shit about her. (it’s a she.)
In case anyone cares, there are more than74 people dead, over 150 severely or critically injured and more than 600 houses burnt to the ground.
I mean this as a honestly legit question from a non-greek European to you, the people affected by it:
What do you think are the best ways to help?
Other than simply caring (although what I get from your posts is that this too is a rare thing and I’m sorry to hear that). Because, caring about something is important and good, but for me what matters most are the actions caring leads to.
So, what actions can I take that would help you and the wildfire situation?
reblogging for the second reply. here’s what can you do:
If you live abroad
Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World)
Use your web banking for a wire transfer to their Greek accounts :
National Bank of Greece IBAN: GR27 0110 1410 0000 1412 9611 217
Alpha Bank IBAN: GR06 0140 1990 1990 0200 2002 401
Piraeus Bank IBAN: GR03 0172 0180 0050 1800 5706 640
Hellenic Red Cross
The Hellenic Red Cross has opened an account where people can donate.
Eurobank IBAN: GR64 0260 2400 0003 1020 1181 388
Municipality of Rafina-Pikermi
The municipality of Rafina-Pikermi, one the zones hit hardest by the fires, has announced the opening of an account in collaboration with Piraeus Bank, accepting donations for those wishing to contribute.
Piraeus Bank ΙΒΑΝ: GR20 0172 1860 0051 8609 2291 418
Donate basic items (London)
St Mary’s Hospital — Praed St, Paddington, London W2 1NY — Maternity Ultrasound Reception — Cambridge Wing
Queen Charlotte Hospital , Du Cane Rd, White City, London W12 0HS- Maternity Ultrasound Reception
vulcan naming conventions are inconsistent, but the surakian tradition is generally two-syllable names, men’s s____k, women’s t’p___. so, yeah, t’pose is a completely reasonable english transliteration of a traditional vulcan woman’s name
to expand on this a little, the original memos actually say that vulcan mens’ names should be five letters, s???k. this is where you get “shrek is a vulcan name” discourse.
however, that doesn’t really scan. vulcan names aren’t meant to be written with the latin alphabet, after all, and vulcan script looks like this —
— if you can find anything that’s clearly a letter here, never mind delineating five of them, you’re a better man than me.
rather, i’d like to suggest the typical transliteration of a vulcan man’s personal name will most likely fit a {C}CVC.vc format, transliterated S[VC.v]k, assuming a traditionally minded family as well as modernity not fucking with pronunciation too much—remember young diot coke, born 1379? her name written today would probably be denise cook.
assume for a moment that surak is a good example of a traditional name; sarek, then, is uncorrupted in modernity. [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] and [ˌsaɹˈɛk], i guess? ipa will be the death of me one day and i’m absolute shit at vowels. but both of these names are S[VC.v]k, if you’ll accept some very ad hoc use of standard symbols.
there are names that don’t fit this model, though. spock; tuvok; stonn. we’ll throw shrek in here too.
tuvok is the easiest one to consolidate, of course: CCVC.vc, and the name [ˌstʊvˈɒk] drops its /s/ over time to simply [ˌtʊvˈɒk]
spock, stonn, and shrek are single-syllable, five-letter romanizations. immediately a problem becomes apparent, though; spock’s romanized /ck/ is the same as what is elsewhere romanized simply /k/ — the generalization of {C}CVC.vc as “five letters” throws off what would otherwise be romanized as “spok”; similarly, stonn is… presumably not displaying gemination, as romanizations typically drop it (see óðinn -> odin or the names of the dwarves in lotr for examples of consonant reduplication denoting gemination being dropped); as such we should probably see his name romanized as “ston”.
spock and stonn, normalized as spok and ston, are both CCVC. shrek is CCVC as well; remember /sh/ is /ʃ/ in ipa. so you have, in order, [spɒk], [stɒn], and [ʃɹɛk].
i would argue that spock and shrek are names which, over time, experienced vowel reduction; they’re not invalid names, they simply aren’t the original forms of them. diot and denise.
spock, then, would be derived from the name [ˌsʊpˈɒk]. the vowel loses prominence until it’s no longer pronounced at all, or only barely pronounced.
possibly this is due to a slight complication of the guidelines; not simply {C}CVC.vc, but {C}C’VC.vc. that is, not [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] but [ˌs’ʊɹˈʌk]; not [ˌsaɹˈɛk] but [ˌs’aɹˈɛk]. [ˌst’ʊvˈɒk] becomes [ˌt’ʊvˈɒk]*, and spock maybe originally was [ˌs’ʊpˈɒk].
see, /p/ really loves turning into /p’/; it probably happens in your speech all the time. so [ˌs’ʊpˈɒk] maybe gets functionally pronounced as [ˌs’ʊp’ˈɒk], and that’s a lot of ejectives in one syllable, so down the line it becomes simply [sp’ɒk].
shrek experiences a similar, but not identical, vowel reduction, with the likely protoform [ˌʃ’ʊɹˈɛk] becoming [ʃ’ɹɛk].
stonn is a bit of an odd case, obviously, as it doesn’t end in /k/ at all. i might argue that it’s diminuitive; like naming your kid joe or joey instead of joseph, you might name your kid [st’ɒn] instead of [ˌst’ɒnˈɛk]. this may be especially common if it’s typical vulcan pronunciation is actually [st’ɒŋ] and indicative of a dialect shifting word-final /k/ to /ŋ/; in a dialect where [ˌst’ɒŋˈɛk] is being pronounced [ˌst’ɒŋˈɛŋ] anyway, fuck your _# /ŋ/, who needs it? thus, stonn still feels complete as a name despite technically being a diminuitive.
*note that ipa /t’/ and the element /t’/ in traditional vulcan women’s names are not the same thing; /t’/ designates what in ipa is written /tʔ/ or /t’ʔ/. t’pose is [tʔpoʊz] or [t’ʔpoʊz] and, structurally, i suppose, C’.CCVC, where women’s names are likely constructed C’.CC{C}V{_C}; that is, T’P[{C}V{_C}], allowing t’pau ([t’ʔpaʊ]), t’pring ([t’ʔpɹɪŋ]), t’pose ([t’ʔpoʊz]).
if none of that made any sense, don’t worry, it’s not you it’s that ipa is the actual worst. the tl;dr is basically,
traditional—that is, common and to some degree often culturallyexpected—vulcan men’s personal names are usually (but not necessarily always) derived from a pattern where there are two syllables; the stress is on the first syllable, which starts with ejective S or S and another ejective consonant, has a vowel sound, and then ends with another consonant; the second syllable starts with a vowel and ends with a K.
because of certain traits of languages as they change—a tendency for P to become ejective (“pop”), vowels to “weaken” over time, and the last K in a word to often become a kind of N(g) sound—i think it’s reasonable to say that “spock” is the modern version of a name you could transliterate as “supok”, “stonn” is a nickname for “stonek”, and “shrek” is a valid vulcan name but its original form was probably “sharek”.
additionally, because many names follow a pattern that goes “S, vowel, consonant, vowel, K”, a general rule that expects five-letter vulcan men’s names caused spock and stonn’s names to be spelled so that they would have five letters, despite an inconsistency with spelling rules which would in-universe suggest “spok” and “ston”, respectively.
The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit,
a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades
of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of being called
“an idiot” by Elon Musk on Twitter, when he pointed out that Musk’s
Boring Company tunnel proposals could not possibly work due to their low
capacity.
Walker’s overarching thesis is that city transit is undermined by “elite
projection,” where rich people pretend that the way they like getting
around – in private vehicles that go from door to door – can possibly
work at urban scale, despite the fact that simple geometry shows that
this is a physical impossibility.
As in, “It doesn’t matter how tightly you pack self-driving Ubers
together on our roads. If all the people who make your coffee and empty
your wastebin are in private vehicles rather than on buses and trains,
the roads will be at 5 or 10 times their physical capacity.”
This emphasis on private vehicles leads people to seize on technological
fads to defend the indefensible – hence the vogue for describing the
smartphone as the key technology for transportation, or self-driving
cars, or data-driven custom shuttle routes that re-route themselves
based on demand signals from riders’ phones.
These all share the geometric flaw: even the smallest cars, packed as
tightly as possible, multiplied by all the people who rely on buses and
trains, will overflow all the roads we have now and all the roads we
could ever build.
There is another flaw: when you make it cheaper to ride private vehicles
(rather than public transit), you siphon transit riders out of the
buses and trains, and put them on the roads, increasing congestion: so
adding “efficient rideshares” actually makes transit worse, not better
Walker tried to explain this to Elon Musk on Twitter, discussing how his
proposed Boring Machine tunnels’ narrow bores meant that on the one
hand, they couldn’t carry enough people to make an appreciable
difference in traffic, and on the other, that his proposal for allowing
private cars to run through the tunnels is nuts: “The amount of the city
that you would have to level to create enough of those elevators to get
everybody’s car into the tunnel at 5:30 in the evening, it’s
preposterous; it cannot help being. Anything that is that inefficient
has to be only for elites.”
In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed militaryaged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”“When I learned about signature strikes, that was incredible,” Faisal says. “If the criteria is being armed or having a beard – that is everyone in Yemen.”
[…]
With Reprieve’s help, Kareem did what the system asks a law-abiding American citizen with a grievance to do. He sued, filing a complaint in district court in Washington, D.C., on March 30th, 2017, asking the U.S. government to take him off the Kill List, at least until he had a chance to challenge the evidence against him.
This is an amazing Rolling Stone article about a U.S. citizen and journalist who has survived five drone strikes and is suing the U.S. government to try to get them to remove him from the Kill List.
“So [your] argument is that if, A, we didn’t have anything to do with it… but if we did, we did so only because of a determination that – and I’ll talk about Mr. Kareem, because he’s the one with constitutional rights – that Mr. Kareem was a grave threat to national security and the executive gets to make that determination, not a court.”
A Middleground 