Posts by philipmatthews
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I think dressing up as a Nazi is more about dress ups than portraying Nazis.
What about dressing up as Jews in concentration camps, which we also saw at Lincoln? Is that just about "dress-ups" as well? Or is it about basic stupidity and bad taste?
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it proves you shouldn't believe eveything you read on-line
Basically, the problem was a Wikipedia page with no citations to follow up and check out.
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I think I would have been very offended if they'd done a blackface number mocking the victims of lynchings, but since none of the Lincoln students dressed up as Holocaust victims your analogy doesn't seem very relevent.
No, they did. As it says in Anke's column, some went as Jews, some as Nazis.
This column ran in The Press this morning too, so at least a few of the students will see it.
The key point is how little they seem to know of Germany -- that Nazis and Jews is all they could come up with for a German-themed party. I would have got three other guys and gone as Kraftwerk. Or dressed up as Andreas Baader. Or Werner Herzog.
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Disturbing to see books about birth control, pregnancy and childbirth restricted.
Restricted to 16 and over? Not that disturbing, is it? And none restricted since 1990 so presumably those published since have sailed straight through.
As for the Crowley limericks, I doubt that the ones Emma linked are of the same order as the ones in the banned or restricted book. As that Lashtal page said, those were inscriptions for three children. His regular stuff was much more ribald and/or anti-clerical than that, which is probably what pushed the censor's buttons. But we'd have to ask Tony Hutchins to find out for sure ...
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David Hamilton's Holiday Snapshots -- wonder if Roman Polanski has a copy?
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There's a good MP3 primer on Gnosticism on Erik Davis' Techgnosis site at the moment too. (Backstory: Davis did his PhD -- I think -- on Gnosticism in the work of Philip K Dick. He also wrote a great book about the fourth Led Zeppelin album but that's for another thread.)
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If we're all being manipulated in the manner outlined above - we're all in a giant movie, and those manipulating us have these amazing powers - powers to manipulate reality in ways we can barely begin to comprehend....
...How is it that The Great Celestial Editor didn't leave you on the cutting room floor?
In much the same way that
The Gnostics believed that our world was fundamentally evil, created by an evil god. The good god was utterly outside this world; only the gnostic elect had the divine spark—the knowledge (gnosis)—that enabled them to strike through the mask of evil and attain salvation in the realm beyond the world.
Paranoid belief systems like the one behind EVP is just Gnosticism by another name; ditto, the simulation argument. Only now it has science fiction bells and whistles. And if it all sounds like something that Philip K Dick might have come up with at his most paranoid, no surprise -- he was hugely Gnostic-inflluenced. JW and his or her pals are in the position of the Gnostic elect.
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Those interested in going further into that discussion we were having about the glory days of the British music press etc should look at this piece by Simon Reynolds -- the influence of the "pale theory boys":
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Thought Chris Knox was the odd one out myself.
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True Islander, I should have done my homework. According to Wikipedia at least (and no direct citations for this, unfortunately), the corruption happened this way:
Its original name was 'Otago' but European officials who had learned Māori in the North Island, visiting in the 1840s changed it to 'Otakou', believing that to be the correct form. In fact it isn't and 'Otago' is the correct southern Māori dialect word, as the earliest European records and the oldest Māori traditions both attest. But the myth is very much alive. Many people still believe that 'Otago' is a European corruption of 'Otakou'.