The Ethno-Zionist-Revisionism-Old Testament-Bashing Megathread

[The Brain]

I saw the Tel Dan Stele when it was loaned to the Met.

I saw the Remington Steele.

[CountDeMoney]

lol, the purity of the TV/Movies Megathread must be maintained. 

That's right, pal;  Europeans want to enjoy their favorite pastimes of ethnicity fetishism and religion bashing, they can do it without fucking up Ide's movie reviews.

[Eddie Teach]

I give this thread a B+

[derspiess]

And because German is "cooler" than English. Though not as cool as Irish.

I guess professional proficiency in modern general staff structure and combined arms doctrine isn't nearly as cool as being an angry drunk.

Also it seems that Eyetalian is even cooler than Irish.  Do something with that.

[katmai]

Yo Seedy, pray tell how does one fuck up Ide's movie reviews. Pretty sure he does it all on his own.

[Syt]

On the topic of name changes, a 1948 article of from a Jewish journalist in Manhattan who changed his name to something less obviously Jewish. It's long, so I only post parts.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1948/02/i-changed-my-name/306252/?single_page=true

Toward July of 1945 my kid brother's V-mail began coming home scrawled all over with odd pseudonyms. If I knew David, he was after something—just what, it wasn't impossible to guess, even before the final letter that rounded out his campaign. He wanted to change his name.

We are Jews, and our name was forthrightly Jewish. As his letter gingerly put it, the decision to take a new name was related to a taste for travel he had picked up in the Air Force. He had seen New Orleans, the Rockies, the Pacific, Manila; he wanted to see more after the war, and now he sought this means of assuring pleasant globe-trotting.

I think I knocked him out of his cockpit when I wrote that the step he contemplated had been on my mind a good while, and that it appeared advantageous from most angles. Somehow, halfway around the world, and busy with a B-29, he had arrived at my own well-matured conclusion as to one sine qua non of the good life in the twentieth century.

When David came home we got out our Manhattan phone directory, pored through the section of names with our initial, and compiled a list of three hundred choice surnames. When it came to making a decision, when we uttered those unfamiliar syllables aloud after our own given names, the project faltered; mutual embarrassment turned us cold. Without our old name we felt as anonymous as a couple of blades of grass.

But at last, having winnowed our sizable list, testing and rejecting, we settled on a name both neutral and euphonious. It might be Protestant or Catholic, it might be French, English, American. It might be anything. Crusaders had borne our name; street sweepers no doubt still do.

Good enough. The less your name says, the louder your actions speak. We hoped ours would do us credit.

Our idea was to find a name soothing to the greatest possible number of preconceptions and prejudices we were likely to meet. Our choice, we had agreed, was not to be pure Anglo-Saxon (although that's such a marketable strain) because we are both dark, resembling our father rather than our mother, a blue-eyed blonde. No telling what shade our children might decide to assume. So, clasping hands in enthusiasm over our own shrewdness, we steered clear of a number of British pitfalls.

Then we paid a lawyer (funny how you always pay for what the court of justice decides is yours by right) and became legal owners of the name of our choice. Incidentally—a tip for careful shoppers—the fee was about the same for both as it would have been for one. Entire families may enjoy this wholesale arrangement.

The required thirty days passed. We put a fine bright new name plate under our letter box and went out curiously into a world that had now and then turned a suspiciously stony face to our effort. Immediate results were gratifying. For those who hesitate, the answer to "Can I get away with it?" is "You'd be surprised." In my case, though I'm dark, I got the benefit of the doubt. Events showed that most Christians accepted me as just another guy—extended their cordiality without misgivings or reservations.

The right name, I congratulated myself, is a great buy at only sixty dollars.

Later I found that not everybody was fooled, that a small, militant minority penetrated my bunion disguise and were not averse to showing it; but on various counts these were mostly obnoxious birds anyway, with whom it would have been small thrill to deal—not the impressive people in my field, which happens to be journalism. Make things smooth and comfortable for the latter, and they don't give your origins a second thought.

It was the more bigoted who were apt to spot me. Seemingly they nourish a psychological set to which large portions of their waking time are dedicated: eternal, nervous separation of sheep from goats. Such specialists appear condemned to an unsleeping qui vine, like Argus. Even among the specialists, however, there were many who took me, and my sixty-dollar name into blood brotherhood, confiding how the continued existence of Jews (and/or Negroes, Italians, etc., etc.) added considerably to their burdens. Well, I didn't have to live, with them. I just wanted to fool them into the impression that I was human, and I was succeeding.

But while I went around aglow at having joined the human race, fire and brimstone were storing up for me in an unexpected quarter. It was my friends calling me a coward and deserter—literally, with just not quite enough humor to make it casual—that wiped the grin off my face. Surely there was nothing cowardly about invading what might reasonably be set down as hostile territory? But my accusers were drawing on centuries of stored-up polemic; I was groping an uncharted way to new ground.

Weeks went by before the vague complex of annoyance, logic, and intuition that had been my motivation settled into words. Then my muttering friends found themselves pinned by the lapels and flailed with my rationale of name-changing.

Those very friends who decried my change of name are in the main agnostics; the supernatural has long since departed from their world. Yes, they do sometimes attend services. To worship? The idea would embarrass them. And they were honestly angry with me. Why? What made their eyeteeth show?

I think I know. They have reacted passionately to injustice. They feel passionately that as an Irishman may have his reel, his green, his St. Patrick's Day parade, as each national group in America is entitled to its history, costumes, dishes, songs, colors, so Jews as a matter of simple justice have the right to their traditions. And they will in self-respect defend that right, to the last drop of blood. I am determined to keep my blood, every drop, for more personal ends.

[...]

So far I have glossed over the experience of my younger brother, who was the one to set our experiment in motion. David's story is the story of a bit of cartilage. Now and then my brother comes up against someone so keen and infallible that by looking at the tip of David's nose he recognizes the disguised pawnbroker. My brother may invest still further in his own humanity. He may decide to pay a surgeon to remove enough of that tiny but fatal cartilage to haul him up out of the pawnbroker race—washed sinless in the modern equivalent of baptism of the heathen—up to the shining precincts of individuality, honor, good breeding, ability, personality, talent, and ethics. We don't know—it's a question of percentages; and each month the offending cartilage loses some of its treacherous power. It may stay.

[...]

[Agelastus]

 

Three pages and no-ones mentioned the really big issue with the film.

I studied the trailer several times and I could swear that some of the riders can be seen using stirrups!

[CountDeMoney]

And because German is "cooler" than English. Though not as cool as Irish.

I guess professional proficiency in modern general staff structure and combined arms doctrine isn't nearly as cool as being an angry drunk.

Also it seems that Eyetalian is even cooler than Irish.  Do something with that.

They do "Jersey Shore" better.  You think anybody would watch "Jersey Shore: County Cork"?

[The Brain]

Who the fuck uses V-mail? Except CdM.

[Ed Anger]

MAH RIDLEY SCOTT CRITICISM.

Cast into a religious faggotry thread. 

[celedhring]

I sort of liked the film. It was long and a bit plodding, but I think it took an interesting angle re: the whole god thing. Exodus' god comes across as a vengeful unrestrained child punishing Egyptians far more than what's reasonable, tainting what is a just cause (the liberation of an enslaved nation). I thought it was a commentary on the whole mess currently going on that neck of the woods, and a valid artistic approach.

Or maybe it's just my personal perception of the whole Biblical episode coloring my interpretation of the flick. I always thought god was a bit of a git for hurting so many innocent Egyptians for the crimes of their ruling class.

[crazy canuck]

It is only with the rise of the Israelite kingdom that there is anything approaching history. Even then, the actual amout of "hard" information we really possess is ludicrously slight - until a couple of decades ago, there was not one single non-Biblical mention of King David. Now there is one - a mention of the "House of David" from the reign of the son of King Ahab (found on a broken stele celebrating a victory over said king).

Anything alleged to occur prior to that is not really "history" at all - it is legend and myth. (Much of what is alleged to occur after that is of course also legend and myth, but increasingly verges on the historical - or at least, historical facts are mingled with the legendary).

Lots of information we have about events before, say, 1400 or so is like that--it all comes from one source or maybe two.

And nobody expects them to be literally historically accurate.  For some reason literalist wingnuts make an exception for the Old Testament.

B.S.  Lots and lots of stories are taken at face value.  I don't know of any biblical literalistic who refuse to believe in say, Spartacus or the Pharaoh Sneferu.  While lots of people will go on about "sky fairies" rave about "wingnuts" who believe in parts of the bible but, for some reason are incapable or are unwilling to use that same skepticism on other parts history.

I dont think you understood my point.

I am certain I dont understand the point you are making.

[Razgovory]

I dont think you understood my point.

I am certain I dont understand the point you are making.

What part tripped you up?

[alfred russel]

Sure, but without more evidence it may prove impossible to determine what that grain is.

Also, don't get me wrong - I'm the last to insist that absence of evidence = evidence of absence. The actual historical information we do know is very, very spotty. That business about King David only being mentioned in one place indicates that (before this discovery, the 'absence of evidence' folks insisted that King David was also pure myth - that POV is now looking somewhat less likely, but is still around).

Another, similar example: the only unequivocal evidence for the existance of Pontius Pilate is a single inscription, discovered in 1961, dedicating a provincial ampetheatre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate#Historicity_of_Pilate

Thus, a high official of the Roman Empire (both relatively recent, no doubt a generator of tons of official documents during his lifetime, and famous from the Biblical account) is almost totally unknown - yet did exist.

It is interesting what you say about King David. As you know, I got back recently from Israel. While there, I visited the archeological site near Silwan from the first temple period that is billed as "the city of David". The tour started with a movie that credited the Bible stories being the guide for the excavations and the tour was very heavy on pointing out how the excavations matched up with Bible passages.

My impression has been that the Bible starts out as pure myth (the Garden of Eden, Tower of Babel, etc) but as it goes along gains historical accuracy to the point it is probably as accurate as any other source from the time period (ie, not very, but somewhat grounded in reality). From what you write, and I think you would know, I suspect that the tour guide was reaching a bit to please the typical audience that I suspect are Jews or Christian pilgrims. I had the impression the David stuff was fairly well substantiated.

[Valmy]

B.S.  Lots and lots of stories are taken at face value.  I don't know of any biblical literalistic who refuse to believe in say, Spartacus or the Pharaoh Sneferu.  While lots of people will go on about "sky fairies" rave about "wingnuts" who believe in parts of the bible but, for some reason are incapable or are unwilling to use that same skepticism on other parts history.

If you say so.  Seems to me lots of historical debate exists about basically everything, to the extent that there are people spending their careers studying Sneferu.  Further I fail to see the proof that the scholars studying ancient history are the same people going on about "wingnuts" and "sky fairies" so that seems like a completely bizarre criticism to level at them.