New wordpress posts

[dolorosa_12]

I bring you not one, but two new posts on my various other blogs: this one, on Longvision is about the community of escaped slaves at Holzarta, while there's a post on Geata Póeg na Déannain about life, graduation and all that.

ETA a great post on Tiger Beatdown about the film Gingersnaps, being a teenage girl, and feminism. I haven't seen the movie, but the post makes me want to, if only to write a post locating it in the general Buffy-related landscape...

Also, this post on the RiotACT makes me sad. As far as I understand it, the Chaser guys were making a point that clambering all over Uluru is as offensive to the indigenous community as clambering over a church in climbing gear might be to some Christians. That seems a valid point to me. But some of the comments make me despair. The thing that irritates me the most is some commenters' inability to call Uluru by its proper name. It hasn't been called 'Ayers Rock' for 20 years, and continually, pointedly doing so is just increasing the level of offensiveness in each comment.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well I didn't read all the comments, and some of them covered this, but I want to mention this:

While it was an interesting idea, the analogy is not great because climbing a church is not all that offensive (as a Christian I take no offense at it) while climbing Uluru is, which is just about the different religions ideas of the sacred I suppose. It is annoying to climb a church while a service is being conducted if they are disruptive. Apart from that I don't think it has the same significance. Interesting point all the same.

And yay new blog posts! Congrats on graduating :)

-Catie

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree with you that the analogy is not perfect, since a church in and of itself is just a building, and so climbing it is no different to climbing up the walls of a block of apartments or something (I don't really know what a perfect analogy would be). The point I think they were trying to make is that people who walk over Uluru are refusing to accept that the rock is sacred to some people. They had to make this particular analogy because they needed something visual to make their point (ie a church).

I don't really know what else they could've done to make their point, as it's very difficult to make visual analogies between a belief system which sees the sacred in physical things (pantheism?), and a belief system which (correct me if I'm wrong) sees the sacred as omnipresent.

What I was appalled about was the refusal on the part of some commenters to accept that Uluru was viewed as sacred by some people. Whether the Chaser skit made a good analogy is another question, but it certainly achieved its aim in making people think about the implications of climbing Uluru.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, you put things better than me! But in short, I agree. Although I don't think I read as many of the comments as you did...

Catie

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

That's probably for the best. They made me lose my faith in humanity (or at least Canberrans)...