GREECE'S NEW FAR RIGHT - DRIVEN TO EXTREMES OR A FEW HANDOUTS SHORT OF A FASCIST?

Loyal readers may remember past posts in which I've referred to the European Values Survey of 2008 (see here and here).

2008 is an impossibly long time ago in Greece. But to me, this is an important study because, based on a large-ish, representative sample, it provides a snapshot of the values and beliefs of pre-austerity Greece, with an extensive focus on immigration, identity, politics and trust, combined with detailed personal information on interviewees and their background.

It's a valuable tool for understanding what unseen undercurrents in Greek society may have anticipated the developments of the last few years, in particular the rise of Golden Dawn. Certainly, if you believe as I do, that austerity is not a necessary and sufficient condition for the mass emergence of fascism. Or at least if you believe in testing your hypotheses.

Which, of course, brings us to the heart of the matter. I've rarely spoken to anyone in Greece who didn't 'know' for a fact what led to the rise of GD.

To probe the matter further, I've finally managed to download the full dataset from here. It's available free of charge to people with a genuine, non-profit research interest, although unfortunately this does not extend to a licence to share the dataset with you on this website.

Anyway, I'm working on analysing it as we speak and will report on my findings shortly.

THE TWITTER ACCOUNT IS GONE, THE BLOG LIVES ON

Dear Friends, 

I cancelled my Twitter account Tuesday morning. A forgotten auto-feed might re-activate it temporarily, but rest assured it is down for good. 

I had thought of this many times over the last year, and increasingly in 2013. On Tuesday I simply found a moment of clarity in which to do so. I am very pleased with my decision, as it's already brought me a great deal of peace of mind and given me back an average of two hours a day to do whatever I want with.

I thoroughly enjoyed having a well-read account on Twitter. However, the debate on the Greek twittersphere has long moved away from facts and figures, which I know and love. I thought at first that it had moved on to politics, which I was still happy to debate. But it's not quite that. 

Over the last two years, the Greek twittersphere increasingly became more enraged, less spontaneous, and more self-referential. It's now packed to the gills with party-affiliated propagandists, nihilist trolls, and people on the lookout for ideological enemies. Most importantly, it is a closed system, drunk with its own heady mixture of adoration and hate, in which pundits fail to realise how unrepresentative they are of society at large, and yet pretend to speak for the people, or common sense, or something or other that they don't. 

Worse still, I don't think my own behaviour on the platform was miles above the level of the aforementioned. I had an advantage over a few of them in that I was not mentally ill or on someone's payroll, but like many users, I sometimes went in to pick fights, sometimes revelled in aphorisms, and often preferred a loud round of applause to a meaningful contribution.

Maybe Greek twitterers will get their civil war in the end, but I want nothing to do with it. It's just not a medium that can help promote the generation of ideas, or reconciliation of any kind.

It also took up a lot of the time I could have spent blogging - the instant gratification of retweets and reactions can motivate you more than the slow buildup of an appreciative audience. In this regard I let my natural audience down - the quality and quantity of posts suffered and it's not hard to prove this. I apologise to early and loyal followers of the blog who must have at some point thought I'd picked another audience over them. They were right, too.

Privately, I also needed to end this constant drain on my own time and attention span. I joined as a young professional with no commitments and tons of time to waste. I am hardly in the same place right now and to maintain this level of activity for the sake of my own vanity would be plain stupid. 

As a parting gift, I downloaded from Twitter my entire history of Tweets. You can download it, unedited, from here. 

Stay tuned for proper posts without further introspection.