I feel tired and upset

[fpb]

What do you do when the Livejournal of one of your best friends on the net - in this case, dustthouart - hosts a person whose every feature you loathe, but who happens to be a childhood friend of your friend? I like and admire user, but I had to defriend her rather than having to do with this person again. This is something I have been forced to do only once before, and It makes me feel frustrated, angry and depressed.

Comments

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

I was afraid you might be writing something like this.

Would you very much mind making this post private for 24 hours, during which time you read my message and consider if you really wish to do that?

If at the end you decide that it's what you want to do, that is your decision, but I hate to see you doing such a thing when I know you are really upset and angry.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sorry, it's not that I decided not to take your suggestion and screen this post; it's just that it was evening in Britain when I posted it, and I just did it and went to bed, and only found this response when I woke up in the middle of the night.

I would do a lot to avoid defriending you, but that debate has been one of the most unpleasant things I have suffered in years. It was a mix of "when did you stop hitting your wife"-type loaded questions and being used as a lay figure to feed someone's vanity, with no real interest whatever in who I might be and what I might think. I'll have to think about it.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

Just checking: you got my private message, right?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have.

[8bitbard.livejournal.com]

I can relate - I just saw someone call Saint Patrick (my namesake) a "huge douchebac" - on Saint Patrick's Day. This is someone who I've been a friend of of (not particulary close, but a friend nonetheless) for several years, but ideologically he's a pure enemy.

[8bitbard.livejournal.com]

Er, "douchebag".

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Link the jerk to this: http://www.facesofarthur.org.uk/fabio/book4.htm - and tell him to get an education. You might like a look yourself, actually.

[cheyinka]

I'm glad I stayed up a little later than I meant to and read that (except for chapter 2, which wouldn't display for me) - it was very interesting reading! You keep teaching me things I hadn't known and it's delightful :D

(Seriously, as a Catholic in Montana, even though the co-cathedral was St. Patrick's all I ever heard about him was that he was the first bishop in Ireland, having returned there after escaping as a slave. That and because he taught about the Trinity using shamrocks, people wore green on March 17th. :p
Actually, I think the CCD textbook I use might call him the first bishop there, too; I'll have to check tomorrow.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, what you read is actually advanced research - part of my Big Fat Book on British history between 407 and 597. It is well beyond a textbook, and a lot of it is in disagreement with many other scholars. So there is no reason to complain about your textbooks - in fact, in cases where the history is disputed or uncertain, it is better for textbooks to say too little rather than too much.

[8bitbard.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'm not too far into it yet but so far it's fascinating. I will link him to it.

He's under the impression that St. Patrick banished Druids on pain of death, btw.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am no expert in early Irish law - that's a subject in itself - but I do know that, in at least one code of laws, druids were listed among the servile classes. This does not mean that they were slaves in the modern sense, but that they were deprived of the privileges of the so-called free classes. Bear in mind that in the hierarchical Irish society, both pagan and Christian, nobody was free in a sense we recognize, and indeed nobody would want to: to be free was to be loose, a random atom with no dimension, no character and no protection. Everyone was part of a tuath, a people, led by a king (although most of these tuatha were smaller than modern Irish counties). It was a tightly knit society, in which the worst crime was to revolt against your lord after you had chosen him (although most men had the right to choose a lord, not necessarily the one they were born under) and the worst doom that of being made an outlaw without a country. What this means is that, at least in the area and at the time when that code of law obtained, druids had neither been expelled nor wiped out. They were still members of the society, but they had lost caste quite badly. (That, of course, could happen to all sorts of people for all sorts of reason, not only religious. History records the fate of miserable clans such as a Kavanagh sept, eking out a miserable existence in a bog, but remembering that once their leader had claimed the High Kingship of Leinster.)

At any rate, this certainly happened a long time after Patrick.