- The On-the-Go Woman's Guide To Travel In Pakistan, Part 2: How To Not Get Raped (Probably).
- Historical quibble: The Jomsvikings, a semi-legendary group of Danish mercenaries and freebooters, did not allow women or children in the camp, for which fact some folks think they had an interest in musical theater and decorated their longhouses with Judy Garland posters. However, many other historical groups didn't allow women or children in the camp, including the 1/7 Marines under Chesty Puller, Legio X Fretensis, and the Oakland Raiders, and none of them are known for statistically abnormal levels of buggery.
- To take a page from Glenn Reynolds, "They told me if I voted for McCain that detainees would continue to be tried by military tribunals, and they were right!"
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Tab Clearing:
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15 comments:
Yup, as you adumbrated in a previous post, just 'cause you're, say, same-sex housemates doesn't mean you are rubbing mucus membranes with each other. I have a same-sex housemate who is quite hetero, but he is about my age and, like me, is old enough not to chase everything in a skirt, or, these days, a tight pair of jeans.
I think anytime you have the same sex living, working, and/or fighting in such an arrangement there'll be accusations of such things Sometimes there's truth in it, such as the Thracian Sacred Band. Sometimes, not so much.
Umm ... that's the Theban Sacred Band.
Regards.
We have two Man Camps to which women are not disallowed but rarely show up, and the frank reality is, the things men get up to on their own are just not the types of things women want to be involved with. The "normal" stuff, like building trebuchet, shooting at garbage dumps, and blowing stuff up, is pretty gender-neutral, it's the flatulence, snoring, scratching, lack of bathing, language, and vision of fat old men with carpet of patchy and grey chest and back hair running around shirtless and in underwear or in longjohns that most ordinary females will not tolerate for long. Worse, that experience has made women choose to eschew men since the beginning of time. It isn't like we're on our best behavior at the best of times, but the bearers of testosterone need some place and times to let loose and be our horrid selves.
We know when to keep women at arms length, lest they choose to keep us at arms length forever. it's not exclusionary, it's preservation of our ability to get the ladies to rub up against us once in a while.
Yup, what og said. The whole "belch-fart-scratch" thing is best left to single-gender groups. Thus IF y'all were to do such things (not sayin ya do and profoundly hopin not)our notions remain intact.
'smore a case of sparing the sensibilities of those you care about, especially in the case of the 7th Marines on the 'Canal
Ooops, my bad.
You sent me to CNN and I found this: Intruder calls 911, afraid homeowner may have gun
And if you vote for Goldwater, we'll wind up in a land war in Asia. For the next 50 years.
perlhaqr, that article was hilarious. I particularly liked the part about the pair of German Shepherds.
Not so hilarious, this:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/03/07/texas.rape.arrests/index.html?iref=NS1
How not to get raped in Pakistan.
Step 1. Don't go to Pakistan
Step 2. DON'T GO TO PAKISTAN
Look, I'm a bit of a prude and think that women ought to dress with decorum while in public, but how stupid is it to demand that women hide their charms to such an extent??? First of all, it rather ruins the scenery. Second, it's a bit of a libel on us XY types because the implication is that the MERE SIGHT of a bare female leg will trigger an irresistable impulse to rape the owner of said leg.
On another subject, I agree with og: while I'm pretty sure that my wife knows that I'm a total pig when she and other women aren't around, I'd prefer that she didn't have complete, intimate details about it. I'm pretty sure most other men would agree.
Quibble back at you. They didn't leave any decendents. Folks can hem and haw about Somerled up in the Hebrides, a displaced Dubliner with a Norwegian grandfather, but grandpa was a shipwright who followed the Vikings to Dublin.
You have to differentiate between Norse and Viking. People back in those days were nuts over geneologies, and there are none for any Viking leaders, quite a few for more peaceable Norse fellers willing to settle down and do business.
The army Hardrada took to England wasn't a Viking army, it was a Norwegian national army, which came into being due to the pressure the Vikings put on the more workaday Norse.
In fact, the Norwegians deserve as much credit in ending the Viking era as the Irish or Scots do. Brian Boru and MacBeth proved that the Vikings could be beaten on land, but the Norskes beat then on the sea. That plus the demographics of a gay society, which don't tend to produce much increase.
I wonder what part of the decline was engendered by that (Oh Christ, that's a pun, isn't it?). It's essentially what finished the Spartans. Every manjack who fought at Thermopolye was as bent as a twig, but they did a pretty good job.
The Spartan Similares (full citizens) were each issued an identical hut to live in, a plot of land, and a woman. The theory was that in any 15 man squad of Spartans there was somebody kinky enough to want women, and it was his job to keep all the unit's ladies pregnant.
It didn't work. By the battle of Leuctra, the entire Spartan army was down to 960 men. They fought with their usual brilliance, but were simply swamped.
A quick aside. The helots in Sparta weren't docile pre-Greek mediterraneans as in the rest of the area, but earlier Achean Greeks, requiring a large number of Spartans to stay behind during wartime to keep down insurrections.
During one particular war, the helots wiped out the home guard, captured all the Spartan women, and headed for the mountains. When the Spartans returned, they found themselves in the embarrasing position of having to offer to buy their ladies back.
The deal was nixed by none other than the Spartan women, who made it plain they much preferred the mountain life and hetero men. The Spartans were forced to buy wives from all over central Greece, to the great amusement of the rest of the Greeks. Aristotle wasn't so happy about it, as he thought it made a mockery of the Greek military class and encouraged the Helots to rebel.
A potentially interesting parallel between two quite similar societies.
Seems like the writer re: Pakistan was trying to make the likelihood of sexual assult sound oh...to be very likely! Why in the hell would you want to go somewhere where many people are not only against your nationality, but your sex?
Ed Foster seems to have sodomy on his mind...
He's created out of whole cloth a division between "Vikings" and "Norse who went a-viking to Ireland, etc" that never existed.
'Nony, push your way through the incredibly depressing but brilliantly researched novel Kristin Lavransdottir to get a feel for the Norse attitude toward the Vikings. The divide between Norse and Viking, especially by the late 9th century, was huge, increasing after the Vikings began recruiting among the Pomeranian Slavs.
Remember, the dudes who went a Viking, or "up the stream", practiced their butchery on the inland Scandinavians until they were forced to look for easier pastures. The attitude of most Scandinavians toward Viking losses and defeats was one of great cheer.
An interesting but dead end culture, that never the less helped form the modern European nation state in self defense. Also a great source of technology spread, though the lapstrake hull didn't scale up to the usable proportions needed for medival trade and the Gaulish roundship ended up making a reappearance.
I'm just saying that a seperate culture predicated only on robbery, blackmail, and fenceing stolen merchandise, populated by sociopaths, and with a death rate far above it's recruitment level, wasn't likely to be a serious long term thing.
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