Upvote Upvoted 0
2 responses
1. Go Eskimos! I started watching the CFL when Moon led them to 5 consecutive Grey Cups, so I became a fan even though I was and am a Canadiens and Expos fan. 2. Andreychuk isn't a hall-of-famer for me (I'm not outraged though). Not sure Kariya is either due to his injuries. 3. Hope you found go eats in Hamilton. I haven't been to the Hammer in 49 years and even then I was 6 months old. 4. I think part of the reason pitchers pitch less is because they are more prone to injuries. They pitch harder, etc. Also (and others have said this), it's all they do from childhood. They don't really play other sports. They focus in. Which means by the time they get to the big leagues, their arms are already starting to wear out. Teams know this. Would you want to pay 5 million to a pitcher who's injured? No, so they reduce the chances they will get injured. 5. Not related to your discussion, but I just wanted to say that the closer is the most overrated position on a baseball team.
— Steve "DocPinko" Cloutier
6. I put this separately because it's long (and I hope it makes sense). War and propaganda is one of the things I teach on. So this is in my wheelhouse. This one is a bit longer so I submit it separately. I'll try to be brief. We have to separate the sniper event from how it is used in the media/government. As Dave said, the sniper is just a guy doing his job. BUT the way in which it was used by others was subtly to strengthen support for the support. Let people get lost in the math and it allows us to forget that the person killed was a human. This quote may be apocryphal (it's been associated to many people including Stalin and Adolph Eichmann) but has relevance: "A hundred deaths are a catastrophe, a million are a statistic" I do a lot of work in WW2 history/lit/culture, and I know that not every German soldier in 1944 was an ardent Nazi. Some were, of course, but some were there out of a sense of duty to country, to their homeland; some were coerced. Was the ISIS soldier a rabid lunatic? He may well have been, but maybe his family was killed by a drone. Dropping bombs radicalized people. The English didn't really hate the Germans until the Blitz. They were willing to go to war against them, but there was no real hate...until the Germans bombed them. This is going to sound weird, but I mean this seriously (and I'm not the first to point it out). What is that plot of the first Star Wars movie? A farm boy who has no quibble with the Empire becomes radicalized by the violence of an foreign power (the aforementioned Empire) and joins an old religion. That reading of the story does work (see this is what we do in Cultural Studies - I can't refute that reading though I've tried - it works). Am I say the ISIS soldier was like this? Of course not. I don't know. Maybe he was like Adolph Eichmann who showed no regret even when he was being led to the hangman. A friend of mine is in the service (he's a helicopter pilot). He usual response to such things (as a guy who deeply believes in service to his country) is "I wasn't there, so I'll reserve judgement".
— Steve "DocPinko" Cloutier
Add Website URL »