War on Terror on film

Posted by Matra on September 27, 2006, 07:02 PM | #

From the third link:

if Hollywood is to be believed, it was the Americans who captured the Enigma coding machine from a German submarine; never mind that the Brits were there and accomplished that six months before the Yanks entered the war.

This is something the British never stop whinging about. They were so angry about it they made a film of their own called Enigma to set the record straight. Yet (from what I remember) this movie never mentioned the Polish role in cracking the code - the ‘baddie’ in the movie had a Polish name though!  The Poles were as invisible to them as the soldiers of the white Dominions.

Mel Gibson may be finished. He’s being ridiculed everywhere from TV sports commentaries to (I’m told) ‘lad’ magazines.  Many blacks, including the actor Forest Whitaker, are also angry at him for not having a black Jesus in his movie. Now the Bushbots will be out to get him. If he’s not strong enough to stand up to them all perhaps he’ll save his career with a teary-eyed appearance on Oprah talking about child abuse (exposure to holocaust revisionism) and how he’s now seen the light. Something like the now famous Sixteen Volts apology.

Posted by Andy on September 27, 2006, 08:23 PM | #

If he’s not strong enough to stand up to them all perhaps he’ll save his career with a teary-eyed appearance on Oprah talking about child abuse (exposure to holocaust revisionism) and how he’s now seen the light. Something like the now famous Sixteen Volts apology.

  That was an incredibly bizarre situation Did they have to take him to Room 101 to get that out of him? How many years before they really are taking thought criminals to Room 101 in the Great White North?  At least three apologies that I read, and in each one he seemed to grovel more and more.  The comments on the blog you linked to just confuse me even more. He’s not even listed as a faculty member?

In describing its portrait of a civilization in decline, Gibson said, “The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again,” drawing parallels between the Mayan civilization on the brink of collapse and America’s present situation. “What’s human sacrifice,” he asked, “if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?”

  My understanding of Mayan civilization was that they always practiced human sacrifice?

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on September 27, 2006, 08:40 PM | #

Many blacks, including the actor Forest Whitaker, are also angry at him for not having a black Jesus in his movie.

Whitaker should thank his lucky stars Hollywood selects its black actors exclusively from the extreme left end of the black testosterone curve, take his checks, and STFU.

Posted by Andy on September 27, 2006, 09:01 PM | #

Many blacks, including the actor Forest Whitaker, are also angry at him for not having a black Jesus in his movie.

  I don’t think that even the white multiculturalists take the Jesus-was-black Black Nationalists seriously.

Posted by Alex Zeka on September 28, 2006, 04:53 AM | #

My understanding of Mayan civilization was that they always practiced human sacrifice?

I think the Aztecs certainly did. The Mayans on the other hand only started doing this when their strip farming methods began to depopulate their livestock. Obviously, we know none of this for sure, as amongst other things they failed to think up themselves was any sort of written alphabet, leaving us rather in the dark.

Posted by karlmagnus on September 28, 2006, 03:56 PM | #

You imply that the Mayans were illiterate; this is not true; they had a well developed system of hieroglyphics. The reason we know less about the Mayans than the ancient Egyptians, 4000 years earlier, is the god-awful climate in central America; everything turns to rot there in about 5 years whereas in Egypt things are preserved.

The Mayan ecological disaster and downfall can be compared to that caused by the US Homestead Act of 1862, which caused 80 years of agricultural misery, by offering ignorant immigrant peasants free land in areas where the rainfall was in most years insufficient to support farming. Not all stupid people are non-European!

Posted by JB on September 29, 2006, 12:41 AM | #

Q&A with Mel Gibson, 30 min audio file

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30187

direct link:
http://www.aintitcool.com/images2006/mel-ff.mp3

Posted by Alex Zeka on September 29, 2006, 07:03 AM | #

Yes, karl, the Mayans did scribble varius symbols on the walls of their temples and cities. However, nobody has yet managed to decipher any of these satisfactorially, leaving us with the question of whether they are hieroglyphics or just pictures.

Leaving aside this minor historical controversy, I find it surprising that you should express such wonderment at the existence of stupid Euros, even punctuating that statemnet with an exclamation mark. Unless of course you are attempting to imply that I should find that insight surprising, in which case I will have to disappoint you: I don’t.

Posted by karlmagnus on September 29, 2006, 02:19 PM | #

There’s been a fair amount of satisfactory work done on Mayan hieroglyphics, certainly enough to confirm they’re not random doodles.  It’s very difficult indeed to decipher a new language completely from scratch, with no links to other known languages.  Even Ancient Egyptian took 30 years, and there we had the Rosetta Stone.  We have not yet succeeded in deciphering Cretan Linear A, even though we’ve had examples of it since 1900 and it preuambly bears some relationship to the wring of later Cretans, which we can read.

Mayan mathematics and astronomy were remarkably sophisticated, given that they started from ground zero. The Mayan civilisation can reasonably be ranked above the Incas and the Aztecs, somewhere around the Egyptian New Kingdom in its sophistication. That doesn’t mean they were as “advanced” as the 16th century Spaniards who first intreracted with MesoAmerica, far from it, but one can learn a great deal from any human society which rises above the level of savagery, and achieves this independently.

Posted by Rnl on September 29, 2006, 02:22 PM | #

Alex Zeka wrote:

The Mayans did scribble varius symbols on the walls of their temples and cities. However, nobody has yet managed to decipher any of these satisfactorially, leaving us with the question of whether they are hieroglyphics or just pictures.

That’s misleading. The Mayan glyphs were deciphered decades ago, and as a result historians have a good idea of the outlines of Mayan history. On the other hand, the glyphs are, like the writing systems of the ancient Near East, very hard to read. The average Mayan could not have read them any more than you or I could. Many modern historians of the Mayans can’t read them either. An archeologist may have to summon a specialist on the glyphs to interpret any writing he uncovers. Reading and writing among the Mayans would have been an advanced information technology which only a few experts understood. There is a substantial difference between our own alphabetic literacy, in which almost everyone can learn to read and write, and the much more cumbersome literacy of most non-alphabetic scripts, which require highly skilled experts.

It’s plausible to conjecture that the complexity of ancient writing systems encouraged increases in intelligence, since these systems demanded existence and maintenance of a class of readers and writers who possessed much higher than average intelligence. You couldn’t be dumb _and_ literate.

Posted by Boris on September 29, 2006, 03:54 PM | #

One fascinating piece of history, regarding the New world and ancient Egypt hasn’t received enough attention, IMO. And that is the finding of coca leaves and ground tobacco on the toomb of a faroh. Maybe they(scientists) are taking their time and dating the findings just to make sure items are as old as the toomb? If this turns out to be true it’s nothing short of a bombeshell which should make us re-write history books. Nowhere in them is there an article about commerce between this two worlds.