Democracy in America

I commented recently on how I considered that the success of the American experiment in democracy had "more to do with its foundations in the English common law tradition than the genius of the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights." Of course, "blaming" the apparent success of American democracy on something other than the Constitution is quite well-founded. Toqueville in his On Democracy in America (nobody dared to correct him that we are not a democracy, we are a REPUBLIC, amirite?) attributed the success of the American experiment on the mores, or habits of the mind, of the Americans rather than, for instance, a superior and magical Constitution.

Other names that are great.

Some names are great, but sound odd to actually have in English, but turn out well anyway because there are great nicknames that work. This list is neglecting common Greek or Russian ways of creating nicknames from these names.

• Paraskevi/Paraskeva. You can use Evi, Eva, Petka, or Friday if you're adventurous and enjoy multilingual puns (or perhaps just translating the story). Pyatnitsa if very adventurous.
• Speaking of Friday, there's Hildegard. Hildy is a very usable shortening of it.
• Winifred is uncommon, but she was a marvelous saint and "Winnie" works well.
• Barsanuphius and Barry/Barney/Bart has already been discussed.
• Photini. I can't think of a way to make this less "exotic" other than making it more common.
• Benedict is somewhat uncommon, but Ben works as a short version that obscures the relative oddness of the name - obscuring it is probably less necessary these days, as certain high profile actors have the name.
• Theodosius, Theoderic, Theodoret, Theodotos etc can, like "Theodore", be shortened to Ted.
• Theophilos, Theophanes, and Theognostos can be turned into Theo.
• Amphilochios, Theophilos, and other -phil- names can be, of course, "Phil".
• Maximos is a little odd, according to some, but "Max" is not unprecedented. Makarios could also be similarly shortened.
• Hyacinth could be Jack.
• Turbo. No modification.
• Gerasimos, Germanos, and other modifications could be referred to as "Jerry".
• Nikon, Nikephoros, Nikodemos, Nikander, Nikanor, Nikitas (the Goth), or even Nektarios could all be "Nick". Nektarios could also be "Terry".
• Wilfred or Wilibrord could pass as "Will".
• Remigius is already commonly abbreviated as Rémy, and I think that sounds fine, albeit French.

These are just musings off the top of my head. Overly Greek or Slavic names can be Latinicized if you prefer (eg, -us instead of -os, 'c' instead of 'k', etc). Frankly, there's a fine long English tradition of giving people obscure, long, and foreign (although in that case, typically Hebraic in at least the 19th century among Protestant) names. So why be shy about it now?

I don't think Barsanuphius is such a bad name

It is one of the prototypical names thrown around as one of those "too wacky" saints names to choose, but I don't think it is so bad. You could nickname the kid "Barney" or "Barry".

"Paphnutios", on the other hand, cannot be rescued. It is unfortunate, though, because it is a fantastic name. It was Chebyshev's name, too, by the way.

Chebyshev (or perhaps better transcribed as Chebyshov) was the man who proved that, for any n, there is a prime p such that n < p < 2n. He was also the advisor of Markov.

Anyway! The point remains, the name sounds odd and there's no good way to obscure it with a nickname (unless you want to nickname the kid "antelope").

When looking for more stuff making fun of libertarians...

...I ran into some good mockery of Less Wrong, which is really just about the same thing, right?

It's probably about time I went back to making fun of something other than libertarianism, because I'm running low on content (libertarians just don't have enough ideas to sustain continued mockery). Of course, switching to this entails undertaking the existential risk that I will be tortured for all eternity by a superintelligent AI for not doing everything in my power to bring about superintelligent AI. Still, going this way is tempting. If I could just list every logical fallacy, I would be, like, almost completely rational. On the other hand, though, I like discussing politics and, particularly, making fun of libertarians a lot, and this is literally mental suicide.

I think that's about all, really.

What's the first thing you talk about...

...on an Orthodox discussion site when some inquirer discusses wanting to visit some local parishes?

If it's ever something about schismatics, Old Calendarists, or anything like that, please stop doing that. Even if they mention "Old Calendarist" in their initial thing, as the odds are that they don't know what means. Introducing any sort of discussion about "legitimacy" only gives the following impression:

1. There is a legitimate and substantial schismatic movement.
2. People converting to Orthodoxy have to consider carefully where they will end up.
3. People on the old calendar are likely to be Old Calendarist.
4. Their friendly local parish might be schismatics they should be careful of.

Getting through to people that Greek and Russian are really the same is hard enough, confusing them by discussing the 1% that are schismatics doesn't help, especially if they're so socially backward as to be using the internet (apart from The Facebook) and posting on web-logs and such.

I only bring this up because I saw on some internet somewhere some guy wondering about what the true Orthodoxy is and how to choose and mentioned an "Old Calendarist" parish nearby. Based on what little he said, it seemed highly likely that the parish was likely to be "Normaldox" on the Old Calendar, not a member of the 1%. Discussing the 1% would not alleviate his existential concern, but rather only add to the distress. And it turned out that, yes, they were indeed Normaldox. So all the discussion of "Old Calendarists" could only serve to do what? Libel a nice local parish and reinforce the false notion of schisms being commmon things you have to look out for.

Running into "inflation truthers"

Hey man, shadowstats says we've been at 10% for ages! Don't you remember paying half as much for everything as you do now just, um, 7 years ago? You know what, calculators capable of doing logarithms are just another statist conspiracy. The point remains, whether the facts bear it out or not, we have a 10% rate of inflation because my axioms say so, as I am an Austrian economist. I mean, like, I'm not from Vienna, I follow the axioms of a guy from a few decades ago who was from Austria, but, really, that's beside the point, the point is that we need to have a gold/bitcoin standard because my axioms say so, whether or not empirical evidence suggests I am right because of LOGIC. Which I am aptly demonstrating here.