The last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing.

[alexsarll]

This one goes out to anybody who ever lost an election to RON.

Because we don't have enough religious groups complaining about things being 'disrespectful', a bunch of pagans have decided to get in on the act, complaining about Trinny and Susannah giving the Long Man of Wilmington "temporary pigtails, breasts and hips". Look, you imbeciles, he is the Long Man of Wilmington. He may not be the Cerne Abbas giant, but he is close enough to the male principle to be entirely secure in his sexuality. Think of all the mythic heroes who do their time in drag! He will get over it, and I suggest you follow suit. And if we're talking "disrespectful", then you so-called 'druids' and the impostor who dares to take the name 'Arthur Pendragon' ought really to start looking a little closer to home, don't you think? Oh, I hate special interest groups. A twin pressure group complaining that Big Brother is being twinnist, apparently failing to spot that the twins were not made this way by Endemol. That retarded screed doing the LJ rounds about supposed racism in Doctor Who. The world is drowning in a swarm of tiny minds who can only process any stimulus through whether it fits their own cast-iron agenda as it affects their own tunnel-vision area of interest.

Rome's second series was losing me for a little while, but has regained my attention by the simple expedient of going totally bugfvck insane. Gratuitous lesbian org1es! Octavian suddenly replaced with another actor who looks not the slightest bit like the last one! Torture scenes all over the place! A sustained challenge to what had always been assumed to be Oz's lifetime hold on HBO's bumrape crown! And above all - Mark Anthony's spectacularly unflattering beard! I can increasingly see why they had to stop after this series - there would simply not have been anywhere loopier to go short of recasting Britney Spears as Cicero.

Comments

Rome

[(Anonymous)]

Can't wait for this new series of Rome after that build up. Wonder when/if it will make it to Australia.

Re: Rome

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The internet, while illegal, is your friend.

[exmoor-cat.livejournal.com]

What on earth have you got against druids that you seem to think that the warband speaks for them?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Whenever I have seen modern 'druids' interviewed, they deny any association between their faith and human sacrifice, claiming that the one contemporary source we have on the druids, Caesar, was lying for propaganda purposes. Which seems slightly odd given it wasn't that long since the Romans had themselves gone in for human sacrifice. I've seen similar attempts made more recently, to deny the existence of cannibalism, claiming that it was only a Western attempt to demonise tribal cultures - all this in the face of copious evidence to the contrary.
In both cases, people are complaining about a supposed Western moral hegemony demonising other cultures - but doing so by themselves bowing to that hegemony, in that they are attempting to prove that said cultures never breached fashionable Western morals in the first place.
And that, quite frankly, is beneath contempt.

[exmoor-cat.livejournal.com]

It must be a very prevalent fashion, being abhorrent to Roman writers onwards....

Sins of the ancestors is not a valid argument. That those modern interpretors and practitioners should be held to account for an ancient practice two thousand years ago is definitely beneath contempt.

So, because the Romans did it previously, it must therefore lead to the credence to human sacrifice?
Research on the subject shows that it was a form of public execution, something that is a lot more prevalent in society - the point I have known Philip Carr-Gomm repeatedly make.

That Julius Caesar wrote it doesn't make it fact, after all he was writing to justify his actions that were above and beyond his remit, therefore to demonise his enemies as much as possible would help his case. It is therefore not odd at all that he and his Roman supporters would use it as propaganda.

Such a "those without sin, shall cast the first stone" logic fallacy would therefore condemn any person or movement that changed its practices and turned around to condemn that practice elsewhere - anti-slavery abolitionists, child labour campaigners originally funded by mill-owners, Labour and clause 4, etc.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Even leaving to one side the question of whether there is indeed any genuine line of descent from the original druids to the modern variety - something I've never seen convincingly argued - I'm not condemning the modern druids for dropping human sacrifice (though it does make them a bit CofE and pathetic), or for their predecessors having practised human sacrifice (my beef with the Aztecs was the sheer insane scale of theirs). I'm condemning them for denying that the human sacrifice ever happened in the first place in a manner which (as with the denials that cannibalism ever existed in tribes elsewhere) seems to me a rewriting of history in capitulation to judaeo-christian-derived moralities to which they should be paying no heed, or offering an alternative.

[rentaghost31.livejournal.com]

The world is drowning in a swarm of tiny minds who can only process any stimulus through whether it fits their own cast-iron agenda as it affects their own tunnel-vision area of interest.

You really are marvellous, you know. :)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Today's installment - church complains about use of cathedral as scene for a violent computer game (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6276460.stm). Now, if we were talking a gunfight with a rogue vicar in a Grand Theft Auto-type game, I could see their point. But this is a game in which humanity is fighting to survive an incursion of giant killer bugs. Would it be preferable to let them have the cathedral for a hive? Or should we instead remove all churches from the world of the game, itself a possible opening for a complaint about the marginalisation of religion?
Though of course the real pros remain Iran (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/padraig_reidy/2007/07/cartoon_villians.html) (complete with guest appearance in comments from our very own thermaland, I now note).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

WHERE IZ RACIST WHO SCREED PLS

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

http://community.livejournal.com/lifeonmartha/268192.html#cutid1 and upon your own head be it.

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

Just don't...seriously!

LONG MAN OF WILMINGTON

[(Anonymous)]

Of course the Long Man of Wilmington is also a scheduled ancient monument, and trampling all over him for two days is hardly a good idea on a slope subject to soil erosion.

But I guess that doesn't make for a good rant huh?

Re: LONG MAN OF WILMINGTON

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Castles so scheduled can be dressed as sets for television productions. And castles are, of their nature, static-cum-eroding monuments, as opposed to the Long Man and his kin who are living, growing monuments with which some degree of interference/maintenance is absolutely obligatory.

And the day on which any holy site is placed under a dome and forbidden any interaction with the people of its nation is the day it dies.

LONG MAN

[(Anonymous)]

From one of the "imbeciles"

The Long Man of Wilmington is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and very prone to soil erosion. This kind of stunt can only encourage more idiots to go trampling all over it.

Before telling others to look closer to home, maybe do some research next time before commenting? Or is that not entertaining enough?

Re: LONG MAN

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Maybe once you've done some research like, say, reading the response to the nigh-identical (albeit slightly more substantial) comment above?