Displaying 0 To 0 Of 0 Comments Michelle Bachmann Meets the “God Helmet” Really enjoying your well considered comments here. Thanks! » Posted By zampano On June 13, 2011 @ 2:37 am Great question. I’ve wondered that too, and my personal view is this: since “paradise”, etymologically, simply means a garden, and an enclosed garden at that … in earlier times it presumably represented a place of plenty (at least in terms of nourishment) as well as a place of calm and shelter. In that respect, it is a place that meets all our fundamental needs, and where all the toil and danger associated with meeting those needs in earlier times are excluded. So it’s not difficult to imagine how the notion of being comfortably provided with all our basic needs could evolve into a more materialistic view in the modern age, as those basic needs came to be taken for granted. What a pity it seems so unattainable as to have become a mythological / religious concept. » Posted By zampano On June 12, 2011 @ 3:21 am Trojana Huffington: Queen of Progressives? “This is not what HP started out as…” Too true. Once upon a time it was really refreshing to be able to exchange views even with people of divergent opinions. It all seemed so civil – and so unusual to find such a mix all in one place. » Posted By zampano On May 1, 2011 @ 11:55 am Not an entirely fair comparison. The Brits hardly held back at Gallipoli (unless you go with the cinematic version) » Posted By zampano On April 27, 2011 @ 2:33 pm Oh well — he was blown up off some remote Scottish island shortly afterwards anyway… so I guess that was the end of that. You country needs WHO? » Posted By zampano On April 27, 2011 @ 2:30 pm Thanks, waving — not drowning :_) » Posted By zampano On April 27, 2011 @ 12:51 pm Yes — but Kitchener bungled just as much as Churchill in the Dardanelles and didn’t lose his job over it » Posted By zampano On April 27, 2011 @ 12:22 pm Those “hard feelings” are misdirected. » Posted By zampano On April 27, 2011 @ 12:01 pm I’ll vote for you. » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 1:01 pm The casualties on ALL sides in the Gallipoli campaign were unspeakably horrendous. » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 12:40 pm Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t trying to downplay it. It just seemed very odd. » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 11:45 am Hookay – I’m just curious: what exactly was it that upset you most about this exchange? » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 8:21 am Thank you for the welcome — just testing the waters here. 🙂 » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 6:27 am tee hee — oh, well then I’ll just have to wish you Happy Atheists’ Day as soon as I find a spare moment to get around to it… » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 6:21 am Well, that’s a relief. Not for want of trying though. Without a hint of irony (nor any apparent awareness of the incredibly rich aesthetic and artistic tradition of Japanese culture), YWAM Tokyo proclaims: » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 6:16 am I’m with you on that! » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 6:03 am Thank you, Kesmarn… very well said. I have no problems whatsoever with people of “faith”, as long as they, too, are willing to respect the different faith or spirituality or atheism, as the case may be, of others. Nor do I have any problems exchanging holiday greetings with friends, colleagues and neighbours — whether it is Eid or Hannukah or Easter or Divali or Beltane. So the sheer fury of that exchange suggests to me that this may simply be a case of two commenters who have clashed over something in the past. It sounds personal. » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 5:53 am No, sadly, it isn’t. But labelling people as “left” and “right” in such matters is not always helpful. While we concentrate on the very obvious danger of the fundamentalist right, we ignore at our peril the strong evangelizing / prosletizing movement that professes to be “liberal” or “left”, and yet does just as much harm in the world (“reaching the unreached”) as any right-wing fundie movement. A recent newsletter from one such supposedly “liberal” Christian organization (YWAM — look them up if you haven’t heard of them) for instance, even described the Japan crisis as an “opportunity”: http://www.ywam.org/News-Stories/news/Opportunity-amid-the-Crisis-in-Japan » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 5:39 am Yes, remarkably visceral. I can only imagine that these two posters do indeed have some “past history” of which we know nothing — perhaps on an entirely different site. Otherwise it makes no sense. Most people are happy to exchange these kinds of greetings at the appropriate times, even if they have a different faith, or none at all. » Posted By zampano On April 26, 2011 @ 5:29 am Secrets From Beyond The Emerald Curtain – PART 3 – Not just the headlines — sometimes there were very misleading photographs as well. One article about the Jewish community in The Netherlands, for instance, was illustrated with a photo of people draped in Israeli flags. An article about banning the burka showed women dressed in salwar kameez. And yet another article, about Bradley Manning, had a close-up shot of Julian Assange. A picture tells a thousand words… » Posted By zampano On April 17, 2011 @ 3:03 am “battlefield” is exactly the right word to describe the comments section at times. That atmosphere seems to have been what drove away so many of the very best, most articulate, thoughtful and informed commenters, leaving only a skeleton crew of shouty, sound-bitey folks with little to add to the discussion but “RandomRepublicanName is RandomInsult”. I’m not entirely convinced that it was HP policy alone that led to it, though. » Posted By zampano On April 17, 2011 @ 2:55 am Secrets From Beyond The Emerald Curtain – PART 2 – I used to be puzzled too. Now, not so much (I opted out of the badge system the moment it was launched). There’s definitely been an increase in the openness with which some community mods clearly express their preferences for/against certain posters, to the point of even boasting openly about their abiity to get people banned (or their ability to intervene to prevent them being banned). » Posted By zampano On April 14, 2011 @ 11:46 amComments Posted By zampano
Couldn’t agree more with your “carrot and stick” theory
And now? “The scrubbing of THOUGHTS….arbitrary, capricious, personal” – again I could not agree with you more. Sadly, that seems to be something that the proud owners of “community moderator” badges indulge in with a vengeance (in every sense of the word). I can’t figure out whether this is HP policy or whether it is just a replay of high-school, where power-hungry bullies are elevated to head girl / head boy status and patrol the corridors in search of victims… “apparatchiks, dilettantes and sycophants [with] delusional, misguided feelings of “superiority”.
Is this what they wanted all along? Or have the foxes taken over the chicken coop?
Divide and conquer is, after all, the MO of the MIC.
They rub their hands in glee at such nationalistic resentments.
FWIW: 21,000 Brits were cannonfodder at Gallipoli too. Not to mention the French and the Sikhs and the Gurkhas. Not to mention the fact that the Ottoman “victory” cost almost twice as many lives as the Allies lost (and triggered Ataturks metoeric rise to power).
It’s CLASS warfare, Haruko — but as long as people still buy into such divisive nationalistic crap, shored up by historically inaccurate Hollywood movies, there will be cannonfodder galore for as many wars as they care to make
That debacle cost 80,000 Turkish lives, 44,000 British and French lives,8,500 Australian and almost 3,000 New Zealand lives.
To this day, the Turkish army has no 57th regiment — out of respect for the fact that every man in 57th was killed.
For the people of any country to “despise” each other a century and several generations later serves none of us.
We should have moved on — but clearly, as we merrily bombard Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, rattle our sabres at Iran and star Mel Gibson in truth-warping blockbusters from Gallipoli to Braveheart — we haven’t learned a thing.
Maybe somebody just didn’t get enough chocolate bunnnies…
Was it the use of strong language?
Or was it the disrespect towards religion?
You don’t provide a link or name the commenters – which is fine. But part of the exchange (“..for just once in your miserable fucking life- stop…”) strongly suggests an ongoing animosity between the two commenters, so “Happy Easter” – innocuous as it sounds – may just possibly have been a deliberate provocation or a trigger referring to some argument we know nothing about.
For instance, a few months back, I saw an exchange on another site where a commenter merely said “Hi, how’s your best friend?” – and it provoked a similarly visceral response, which seemed totally over the top. (Unless of course, you had witnessed the previous exchange on another thread: the seemingly “angry” poster had spoken of losing his/her best friend in the 9/11 attacks, and the seemingly “friendly” commenter had mocked him/her – and was now taunting him/her again).
Sometimes exchanges on these forums get very heated for reasons we cannot discern.
So, although this did provoke some interesting comments, I wouldn’t read too much into it.
“We believe that God wants to release a generation of Japanese who know the deep affection that Jesus has for them… We believe that worship, prayer and the arts need to be joined to communicate God’s heart to those who have lost a sense of beauty in their lives.”
http://www.ywamtokyo.org/
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All in all — not a good development.
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