Natz
Ravenclaw Alumni
Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Oct 14, 2003 3:38:33 GMT -5
I know you think that they be put off by all the warnings about transmitted diseases. Then again if they kill someone to drink their blood i don't think anything is going to put them off.
Well if blood is avaliable from the butchers why do they have to kill people to be able to drink it?
I'll have to check into that but i think that might be allowed over here as well.
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Post by KoNeko on Oct 15, 2003 2:06:34 GMT -5
Hang on, do they drink the blood straight? I know some people that mix blood with like, wine or something before drinking it. And I heard that if you drink blood for prolonged periods of time, it can have adverse effects on you, besides all the transmitted diseases. Stuff like renal failure and dehydration and stuff.
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Natz
Ravenclaw Alumni
Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Oct 16, 2003 3:48:42 GMT -5
I'm not sure if they drink it straight. I mean how are you meant to mix it with wine. Wouldn't the wine become all lumpy and horrible?
Thats another reason not to go round drinking other peoples blood if it leads to renal failure and the transmitted diseases.
Is there a possibility that you could become addicted to blood?
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Post by En on Oct 18, 2003 12:21:41 GMT -5
Uhh... wouldn't blood literally stick in your craw? I mean, healthy blood has to have a lot of clotting factors in, so that when you bleed it stops up, so 1. it would be hard to exsanguinate someone anyway and 2. you'd have to, like, dissolve aspirin (or another blood thinner) in it and keep it hot and moving so that it wouldn't clot up and even then, do you want blood thinners in it if you're going to drink it? because then they'd work on your blood....
I think the trouble is that altogether too many people think blood is worth something more than any other bodily tissue. It's all about the cultural buildup. Like, if people had talked about having royal skin instead of royal blood... we'd have wacko religions based on flaying people. Nevermind
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Natz
Ravenclaw Alumni
Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Oct 19, 2003 6:14:17 GMT -5
I think you would somehow have to heat it up otherwise it would congeal inside your body which wouldn't be very healthy. But then would you really want to drink hot blood from someelse or possibly even an animal? Personally i think that there would still be a few people drinking blood around because this is more to do with people believing that they are vampires than to do with royal blood. This could lead to all sorts of complications though if you choose to drink someonelses blood
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Post by KoNeko on Oct 20, 2003 2:32:56 GMT -5
What about hair? En, the Chinese imperialist guards all had "queues" (those long ponytail things) and as a sign of loyalty to the emperor they weren't allowed to cut it off.
Hmmm, how effective is asprin as a blood thinner? The vet said that animals can have asprin but not panadol so we give our dogs (and they're really little) those aspro-clear things sometimes when they're sick...
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Post by En on Oct 20, 2003 13:47:01 GMT -5
All I know is that hemophiliacs can't take aspirin because it works well enough as a blood thinner to kill them, and that taking one aspirin in the mornings helps people with certain blood pressure conditions I am a font of discursive data.
Yeah, you're right, Ko, loads of cultures have weird hair crap -- like fundamentalist christianities have rules about women cutting their hair, and some faiths have rules about men cutting their beards too. Then there was that whole scalp-collecting thing during the revolution in France -- that was scary. I never did figure out why people were doing that.
Incidentally, scalping was introduced to the americas by... european colonists in the 1600s. So if people try to tell you that native americans scalped people, tell them they learned how from our forefathers. This message brought to you by an En who is totally not enthusiastic about Columbus Day and prefers to call it "Native Peoples Memorial Day."
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Post by KoNeko on Oct 20, 2003 23:29:58 GMT -5
Whoa, collecting scalps? Wouldn't they fester and start to smell after a while?
And... pardon the ignorance, but what exactly is Columbus Day supposed to celebrate in the first place? (I'm asking because En, I don't understand why Columbus would be scalping Native Americans... ) Is it a public holiday? We don't have half as many "let's celebrate an event/person's birthday" days as the people in the US do.
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Post by En on Oct 21, 2003 10:44:29 GMT -5
Columbus Day is a US holiday that is supposed to be a celebration of Columbus discovering the Americas. For native americans, that means the first time european imperialists showed up and started 1. taking land 2. stripping non-renewable resources 3. spreading european diseases 4. enslaving or killing the local population, sometimes in appalling ways....
I don't know whether Columbus engaged in scalping, but later shipments of european invaders did. And *bleah* if you cure them correctly, you can keep the scalps just like you might a rabbit hide or a bear rug
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Post by Nie on Oct 21, 2003 20:23:29 GMT -5
People believe that blood is powerful because basically blood is life. They know that if you lose too much blood you die, and that blood holds a bond between parents and children and also now know that blood holds your identity through DNA. Blood is considered the key to life and survival in almost all cultures throughout the world. It's the symbolism of blood that holds it's significance. Many cultures believed that drinking the blood of your enemy would give you his/her stengths and such. Blood is just considered the key. It's life, and is precious in that respect.
You can't give asprin to cats. It gives them kidney failure and kills them. But it's meant to be good for most people to take half an asprin a day to help the heart and I assume it's because it's a blood thinner so makes the blood eiser to pump around the body.
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Post by KoNeko on Oct 22, 2003 4:14:26 GMT -5
Columbus Day is a US holiday that is supposed to be a celebration of Columbus discovering the Americas. For native americans, that means the first time european imperialists showed up and started 1. taking land 2. stripping non-renewable resources 3. spreading european diseases 4. enslaving or killing the local population, sometimes in appalling ways.... Aha! Sounds just like "Invasion Day" here in Australia- otherwise known as Australia Day. Every year there's a big protest thing by the Indigenous Australians in Canberra. Indigenous Australians weren't even allowed to vote here until like, 1976 or something, and even 100 years ago they weren't recognised as people, but were catergorised as "fauna". Oh yeah. I am so proud of my country sometimes.
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Post by En on Oct 22, 2003 6:00:01 GMT -5
Yeah, with what Nie said, it totally makes sense that people would have tied blood to life in the past, when medical science was relatively new and they didn't know what all the organs were for yet. But now that we've had a pretty good grasp on that for a century, I just get annoyed with people who are still all on about how blood is everything, kind of like I get annoyed with people who still go around reading Plato and talking about how there's a True Form of Beauty that exists outside any human minds. I'm like, keep up, dudes, even the existentialists were so over that
1976?! That's appalling... ugh, imagine how much of their culture has been lost or misinterpreted to the point that it might as well have been lost... to say nothing of how much garbage they've had to go through, since I imagine they couldn't get decent education or jobs before they could vote?
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Post by KoNeko on Oct 22, 2003 7:58:22 GMT -5
Oh, there were very limited job prospects. When there were colonists, they would be servants and stuff for them. There's also a whole thing about the "Stolen Generation" here, where in the 1940's (Nie? Correct me if I'm wrong ) lots of indigenous children were taken away from their homes so they could be raised by missionaries and stuff, and then they could get fobbed off to work in menial jobs. En, there's a pretty awesome flick out about this, it's called Rabbit-proof Fence. It made me cry, probably more out of outrage than actual sadness about the situation.
En, is that true form of beauty thing similar to the objective truth?
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Natz
Ravenclaw Alumni
Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Oct 22, 2003 10:01:21 GMT -5
I hate my country sometimes as well koneko because it was basically built on slavery which i don't want to be remembered. We have the least holidays anyway. We don't have many celebrating the country/ people. And if we do we rarely get days off for them. The trouble is some people drink blood or scalp people because they get a kick out of it. I hate my country sometimes because not only did they give menial jobs to the australians they didn't give them their own nationality
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Post by En on Oct 22, 2003 10:32:49 GMT -5
There's a new film coming out (with Anthony Hopkins in) called "The Human Stain" about another ugly result of discrimination -- people driven to try to "pass" for caucasian -- and also about the various ways that discrimination is still occurring. It's based on a book by Philip Roth.En, is that true form of beauty thing similar to the objective truth? Yeah, Socrates was a major pioneer in the field of itemizing objective truths. It was an impressive project in its time -- but it belongs in a museum now.
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