Darkenblot
MAGAshew Mania!
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Great game in the Champions League Semifinal. Going to extra time on CBS.
Funnily enough, I'm working in Liverpool at the moment, but haven't moved to the city cos the job started in lockdown and I'm pretty settled where I am, and my girlfriend's got a good job nearby. So I'm travelling at the moment, though I might get myself a wee place in the city centre for midweek to save myself the travel. Anyway, from what I've seen of it, Liverpool's a decent place. It's been nice seeing the LFC flags sprouting all over the city and all along the terraced streets as the Euro Final approaches. And the manager Jurgen Klopp seems a really good bloke. Plus, the right-wing in Britain are all down on Liverpool fans for having booed Prince William and the English national anthem at the start of the FA Cup last weekend. That made me laugh.
So it's funny, but I've become a wee bit more of a Liverpool fan (or better disposed towards them) than I ever have been in the past. Still a Leicester City fan obviously, but wouldn't hate it to see Liverpool winning next weekend.
The odd thing in Liverpool is, there's another massive team in the same city, Everton. But it never feels like a rivalry. I spent 18 years living and working in Glasgow. Rangers and Celtic - that's a football rivalry like no other in Europe, and the only one in the world with a centuries-old armed conflict in its name. Pretty ugly stuff but if you are lucky enough ever to go to an Old Firm game, it's pretty exciting at the eye of the storm.
Why did they boo Willy and the national anthem?
I am a Tottenham fan.
What is the conflict?
I imagine they booed William because he's a symbol of the establishment. And they boo the anthem as it is resonant of a country and establishment that much of the city feels at odds with, not just for political reasons but also because for many years the Hillsborough disaster was shamefully mis-represented by the London-based press, the nation's police forces, and many southerners.
The conflict is the 350-year old religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Started with the catholic James II being deposed from the English throne by protestant William III, of the House of Orange. Which culminated in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the utter defeat of the Catholic cause. Then a century or so of the King over the water and all that shite, culminating in the Scottish tragedy of the 1745 uprising, led by that drunken oaf Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the destruction of the clans at Culloden. Then, for a century or so the catholics endured enclosure, the Irish Famine and people thrown off the land in Ireland and Scotland by landlords wanting the land for cattle, forcing people either across the world to find a home or into the big industrial cities like Glasgow and Liverpool.
Then a couple of centuries of repression and refusal of rights for catholics in Ireland and Scotland, the battle for Home Rule for Ireland from the late 19C onwards, blowing up into the 1916 uprising, vicious reprisals by the British Black and Tans, the division of Ireland and the creation of Northern Ireland, and an Irish civil war in the 1920s. Throw in 50-odd years of further repression and sectarian employment practices for catholics in Northern Ireland and Glasgow. No Catholics employed in many ship-yards in either city (the Titanic a protestant-built ship, which makes Celine Dion's dirge a wee bit less romantic). And then, in the midst of it all, Celtic Football Club emerge in Glasgow (and Hibernian FC in Edinburgh, and Dundee Harp FC too, but the big city club were the successful one), set up by an Irish man of the cloth as a symbol of Irish defiance in a foreign land. And to open the stadium, a Republican Irishman brought a square of turf over from Ireland to plant at the centre-circle for the new pitch, and the Scots-Irish nicknamed Celtic's new ground 'Paradise', for 'twas home and the only flag that flew over the stadium in the East End of the British Empire's Second City was the Irish Tricolour (honestly, I've seen the photos). And by the 1920s, Glasgow Rangers FC, whose ground was just outside the shipyards on the south-side of the city, became the focal point of Protestant hopes to turn back the Irish horde and match the Irish success.
And from that day, Rangers vowed never to field a Catholic footballer and the two teams went to war, four or five times a season. And Rangers never did play a Catholic, from the turn of the century, right up until the European Union found out about it in the early 1990s (!) and told them to sort their fucking selves out.
So today, you go to a Rangers - Celtic game in Glasgow and you'll hear English and Irish voices all around, see Union Jacks and Irish tricolours everywhere, and also banners with a centuries-old King still sitting on his white charger with the numbers 1690 emblazoned beneath, or rebel flags commemorating long-killed IRA soldiers. Because they are two teams for whom hatred is not about football but about life and identity and religion and they just know the other side are the very spawn of the fucking devil.
This scene in Trainspotting 2 sums it all up pretty well.
Well, true. And of course Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant thinker and brilliant writer. But I think in his twilight years he became a little too fixated with religion and his writing and analysis suffered as a result. And maybe his analysis is understandable, given what he could see with fundamentalism in the Middle East and in America, and in living in New York after 9/11.
But I think his analysis was skewed as a result. He talks as if religion was the organising force and catalyst for change. Whereas it's not; it's merely the narrative, the honeyed words and clothing in which those catalysts like to cloak themselves. And Hitchens did address this and acknowledge its truth but still couldn't help himself in focusing on religion and its manifestations.
The struggle for wealth and power; political and economic, are what drive change and create tensions in societies. Just need to look at religious figures of the past: look at the popes (for christ' sake) - they were often not religious but they were always political. Look at the battle between Church and State in Britain. The control of land, ability to levy taxes (or tithes) in your own right, the ability to maintain power bases loyal to your own people; whether kings and lords, or archbishops and bishops, it's all the same motivation and the same competing factors. When the Pope threatened to excommunicate Henry VIII, I'm pretty sure the King and his advisors didn't give a shit about not being able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven or some such. And what happened after the Pope did boot him out? Henry destroyed the huge catholic monasteries of England, seized their lands and transferred all of their accumulated wealth to the Crown. The English monarchy became infinitely more wealthy and powerful in European terms.
Well, in that sense and for very obvious reasons, pretty much all of the western world's left wing movements are capitalist, and Hitchens was fine with that. He was in and out of love with Labour in Britain, but was back 'in' at the end. Wonder what he'd have made of Corbyn, the leader Labour had in the post-Brexit era. Would have liked his politics but hated his lack of pragmatism and his foreign policy approach I'm guessing, but who knows.Like anyone with expensive taste in Scotch, a wife, and bills to pay, Hitch was a capitalist. T'wasn't always so. But, when he and a few others found there was a market for that type of content, they cashed in on it. I can't knock him. Hitch had a talent and a passion for it.
Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation" and Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus" are quality as well.
Good ol' Hank the 8th. Say what you will about him, and there's certainly plenty to be said, he did what I'm sure countless European monarchs only dreamed of doing: He told the pope to go fuck himself. I have to respect it.
"I do not choose anyone to have it in his power to command me, nor will I ever suffer it."
Sure, the man had commitment issues. But that was part of his charm, right?
Quit posting soccer threads.Quit derailing my soccer thread with good talk on history.
Word. Makes me check for NBA chat unnecessarily.Quit posting soccer threads.
So, in 'sahker' news, Wales have qualified for the World Cup. When they get there, in the group stage they'll play England (boo! hiss!) and a couple of diddy teams in Iran and the USA.Uncultured oafs.
The French instantly surrendered and begged for mercy?Fun fact - when Iran and USA played in 1998 in France