Rome
This has always been one of my favorite scenes in all television: talk about sweeping the bums out.
In Britain, the establishment only produces bums like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron. It is grossly unfair to the Meroviginians, who were descended from warriors, to compare them to EUnuchs in the mold of Gordon Brown, who have set a new world historical standard in sheer uninspiring venality and corruption.
This corpse of a society literally has no greater vision than a death wish of being ravished by jihad on its own funeral pyre. At least the Bourbon monarchy had a bit of class. King George III, though crazy, wasn’t nearly this bad.
You would have to spend years in the library searching through the annals of world history to find a group of people more undeserving of power than these guys.
Octavian’s enemies were great men: Cicero, Mark Anthony, Brutus and Cassius. Maybe you could compare David Cameron to Nero who fiddled while Rome burned? Æthelred the Unready who paid tribute to the Vikings?
In the grip of madness, Nero plans to crush his enemies by weeping and singing to them. His plan is to win their hearts and minds. He starts to assemble an army of prostitutes to perform with him before the enemy.
Nero threw Christians to the lions.
Elagabalus was a transsexual (LGBT) who prostituted himself in the Imperial Palace. He would have loved Lady Gaga.
Imagine Nero, who was a diva before the term was coined, with an iPod, lipstick, and television … oh man, he would have put on one hell of a show!
If I remember correctly Nero married a guy, then consumated the union publicly- Nero being the bride……. That seems like a good comparison for these guys.
Doesn’t Iceland have a Prime Minister like that?
nero married sporus, a male slave that resembled his dead wife who he had killed.
Okay, Nero might have done all that — but did he ever invite barbarians into Rome and give them free housing, food, medical care, etc. while they committed crimes and terrorism against the native Romans? Now THAT would be the sign of a truly mad ruler.
I would probably be saving up as much money as possible if I was a Muslim in Europe then getting out before the Counter-Jihad wipes me out along with the Establishment.
Nero wasn’t nearly as deluded as David Cameron.
Among the Ancients, there were individual emperors who were moral degenerates or who were crazy (Caligula and Nero being the most famous examples), but Roman society was too reality based to succumb to fantasy ideology.
Back then people could see that Nero was crazy and out of control. Now, thanks to fantasy ideology, which pervades entire societies thanks to television and movies, and the general detachment of “symbolic engineers” in office parks from the physical creation of wealth, lunatics can sound completely normal and mainstream.
Compare David Cameron to Nero. The former thinks that Muslims can successfully be integrated into British society. Nero plan’s was to weep before his enemies in order to impress them.
What about Caligula’s great victory over Poseidon? Isn’t that like LBJ’s War on Poverty?
Caligula! Yep, “Lil’ Boots” was a total whackjob… Keep the good stuff comin,’ Hunter!
Is this from the HBO Rome series? I never watched it; obviously I missed something.
“Is this from the HBO Rome series?”
Yes. Great series.