Genghis Khan didn't much like gays

Legal Precedent

See, our President Bush DOES respect precedent. He is slightly to the right of Genghis Khan; he would APPROVE of digging holes in grassland and setting fires, depending on whose property might be involved.

But seriously.. NAAH, can't be serious about contemporary politics. Second time as farce?

Doesn't actually say that

It says that he was encouraging population growth - something that being homosexual is obviously not compatible with.

So, what is really important in this article is the fact that homosexuals everywhere can trace their movement right back to Genghis Khan.

Isn't that worth thinking about a moment ?

Re: And the IT angle of this story is....

"....what exactly?"

Bugger all, hence its placement in the "Odds & Sodds" category!

Seriously, this ain't rocket surgery here, people.

Moral Outrage

How does anyone know that old GK didn't like gays on moral principal? They are just guessing on the "increase the population" thing so they minimize political damage over their "findings".

Besides, we all know the increase population line is bunk. GK and crew could easily have adopted Chinese babies and raised them in domestic partnership yurt(holds) that everyone knows are just as nurturing as a regular yurt.

Re: And the IT angle of this story is....

"damaging grassland with unauthorized excavations or starting fires"

Obviously he didn't want people digging up fibre, and causing network outages. It's obvious really.

RE: And the IT angle of this story is....

Must be the importance of proper backup routines! Quote: "... historical texts, including Marco Polo's travelogue"...

who won the pool?

I reckon these articles are written just to liven up the El Reg offices with a sweepstake on how long it will be before the first "where's the IT angle"/"You're a bunch of homophobes" commens are posted.

IT angle?

Not only is the IT angle bugger all, but the article is about bugger all, or all buggering anyway.

(Offtopic - how many other people find it irritating that the letters F and G are adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard, causing occasional submissions of code for review with a "screen_bugger" instead of "screen_buffer"? Although thinking about it, maybe that's where the idea for Vista came from - typo in requirements document when some specified that all work shall be buffered.)

IT angle

Personally, I think that all "where's the IT angle" commenters should be sodomised by their mice.

Title

Dear El Reg,

Please may we have a "This post is sarcastic" checkbox in the comments form, and a nice icon displayed in posts, as some people still don't get it!

Thanks,

Steve.

Counterproductive

Sir Kahn may have succeeded in taking on the Chinese even more successfully if his Code contained less capital punishments.

The logical punishment for homosexuality would have been to have intercourse with a nubile woman. (duh!)

Not correct anyway

The Romans had a ban on homosexuality (you got burned at the stake) as far back as AD390, so the story isn't even particularly accurate.

Similarities...

So, GK and GWB have more than a few similarities:

Both are anti-sodomy.

Both are pro-life (as many babies as possible).

Both are war-mongers.

Both rule with fear.

Reincarnation, maybe?

Re: Similarities...

"Reincarnation, maybe?"

Nah. Ghengis was actually good at his job.

Re: IT angle

Bert, how do you know they have all got mice? Maybe some of them have hamsters, or gerbils, or other rodents.

If your suggestion was applied across all rodents owners of mice would be a lot happier than owners with capybaras!

Re: Similarities...

JP, one difference, Genghiz Khan knew what he was doing!

well

GK was actually good at winning wars until his hoard outstretched the limits of its supply lines.

Anyway didn't the church basically outlaw homosexuality 2000 years ago? I'm sure there was something about buggery in there.

There is at least one...

There is at least one ban that predates the Romans. Ancient Israel, under the law of Moses, had the death penalty for homosexuality as well (Leviticus chapter 20, verse 13).

IT angle

Laws limiting download channels.

I'll get my raincoat.

Re: And the IT angle of this story is....

...maybe IT is chock full of homosexuals? Exit stage left...

Romans

Actually, history says that they Romans were quite happy for man love.....

IT angle?

It's obvious. They had to reconstruct documentation from someones notes after the sod had left the building and the only copy went missing. It's a support issue.

You can spot them a mile off

Usually a bit too heavy with the war paint

Sodomy is not gay

Just because someone commits an act of sodomy doesn't make them gay, you can have sodomy performed between members of the opposite sex (though it does tend to be all giving and no receiving) - if you don't believe me there's quite a few google searches you can perform on the subject, just not in the office =D

IT angle?

Oh come on, it's full of IT angles! It's all about code, reassembling it, and a parable on the necessity of proper document retention!

@Sampler

> you can have sodomy performed between members of the opposite sex (though it does tend to be all giving and no receiving)

Err, never heard of a strap-on? They're not just for lesbians, you know, I sell them mainly to straight couples.

One other point, up until the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, it was actually a criminal offence for a man and a woman to engage in anal sex, even though it had been legal for two men for quite a few years already!

@Graham Bartlett

I've seen Java code attempt to instantiate a BuggeredReader object. The fact it didn't compile implied it was living up to its name...

IT angle blah

Would people who're banging on about "where's the IT angle" just go and get their protractor and shove it right up where the sexagesimal subunit cannot be measured.

Seriously, if you don't like The Reg then fuck off.

This post is sarcastic...

Perhaps it has an IT angle because many BOFH wannabes actually seem to act a little like Genghis Khan? Certainly a few I've met have roughly the same subtlety around women.....

Title

Dear El Reg,

Please we shoot all people who use the.. IT WAS SARCASTIC comment to get out of their own insecurities/poor jokes.

Thanks

Andrew

Hackney lot of old bollocks

You can see that the wisdom on crowds is not working, how much mis-information has just been bandied around in the posts above.

1. GK was very successful. So successful he managed to completely wipe a couple of nations from the earth. So, even better than the Nazis in genocide.

The Mongols were also successful after GK, Kublai Khan was the ruler of even more than GK and its actually him that runs into the Russians and scares the shit out of them. Kublai was more Chinese than GK, you have this absorbtion thing going on, there were a lot fewer Mongols than Chinese, and the Chinese were much more advanced. Though not in things like stirrups, but in things like useless fireworks (lol) and soap and water.

The romans didn't burn homosexuals at the stake, but they were not so keen on it as the Greeks. They were also worried that the patrician families were fucking the slaves all day and not getting down to some serious procreation.

@Graham Marsdan - thanks mate - some sanity out there

As for the IT angle ... sigh... there is more to life than a fucking computer. There's fucking for a start ! See how important its been through the ages. If we want geeks in the future, they should start shagging like rabbits now, otherwise rather than the geeks inheriting the earth they will die out and the inevitable rise of our robot masters assured. There will be no one left to stop them.

More often than not..

..those laws spring from the simple fact that huge armies are significantly lacking women.. and discipline was even more important than today.

So, they're mostly motivated by simple, practical considerations rather than anything else..

@ the IT wankers.

I'm sure Google was used at least once in the search for documents.

;)

Not only in Mongolia

Homosexuality is also forbidden on my computer, except for lipstick lesbian images and video's

Levitical Law

Surely Levitical Law dates back around 4 thousand years so, unless I'm making a prat of myself and my brief research to confirm this was wrong, Mr Khan was about three and a half thousand years late on the claim of being the first to have laws against homosexuality.

English anti-buggery laws

@Sampler wrote:

"One other point, up until the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, it was actually a criminal offence for a man and a woman to engage in anal sex, even though it had been legal for two men for quite a few years already!"

I think that the relevant English statute (against men sodomising women) was enacted during the reign of Henry VIII. The law which proscribed "male indecency" only stems from the mid to late 19th Century, and came about as an amendment to an otherwise unrelated bill by a single MP during a poorly attended late-night sitting of Parliament. At the time of the trial of Oscar Wilde, the statute had only been law for a couple of years, and Wilde was one of the first (if not the first) to be convicted under it.

(I haven't checked my facts in detail and am writing from memory, so any corrections are appreciated.)

@Matt

Genghis Khan, or Temujin (to give his true name), NEVER out-ran his supplies. In fact, he had a great obsession about supply dumps all along his route(s) of march. Furthermore, he could split his army into three or more "sub"-units and march them along different routes and only converge when they were near their objective in order not to over-stress the supply situation.

BTW the word you want is HORDE not "hoard" and that word is a Western corruption of the word "Ordo" which meant a "division" of 10,000 men.

And the only reason the Mongols turned back from conquering Europe was that the Great Khan had died and all the generals were rushing back to Mongolia to chose (or be "chosen") the next Great Khan ( a bit like the Republican convention(s) of recent times).

As for copulation, they had the pick of the women from all their conquered territories so they should have no problems in that sense. Therefore, the prohibition is on the actual desire rather than the force of circumstances (as had happened often in European sailing ships of yore).

Having said that, the Spartans were famed for their martial qualities and they made buggery of young into a fine art !! Or could it be that they would rather charge the enemy and die gloriously like men than to be buggered by their superiors (pun intended) !!

Greeks and Romans

The Greeks (notably Spartans and Thebans) used the bonds of man-to-man love as a lever to inspire esprit-de-corps and unit cohesion. The Romans made sodomy *within the legion* a capital offense (though it wasn't illegal in civilian life).