Morning Ed Society {2016.08.29.M}
From Jaybird: Yet Another Article That Doesn’t Make The Point It Thinks It’s Making. It’s about someone who quits drinking. She happens to be female.
Matthew Walther attended the Ark Encounter museum in Cincinnati, and has some nitpicks. He previously attended and did a write-up on Aaron Sorkin’s screenwriting course.
How chimpanzees work together and deal with freeloaders within their social apparatus.
Clay Travis is gonna Clay Travis, and the jury is still out on what we should think of the LochteMess Nonstarter, but he is not wrong about the divergence between ESPN and its viewers.
Well, this is one way to keep tabs on your players.
Less than clear: How much should we penalize movies for the (alleged) sins of their creators? As has been pointed out, Roman Polanski skilled the country for child rape, and won film awards abroad.
As Chandler said in Friends, “It’s soap! It’s self-cleaning!”
Doobadoobadoobadoobadoobadoobadoobadooba BATMAN!
"so I found this Batman remake with a Latino Joker and a black Catwoman. Can't wait to see it break the internet." pic.twitter.com/so6jfci3vY
— Thomas Pluck (@thomaspluck) August 26, 2016
I would have never have guessed the Democratic skew of the WWE viewership.Report
That kind of surprises me as well. Is it because fans skew younger than they used to?Report
Or the fans have always been young and we got old 🙂
Another hypothesis (which is not mutually exclusive, so both can be true) is that the audience for wrassling is in the same parts of the country where voter registration still leans Dem, though they actually vote GOP more often than not.(e.g)Report
It’s been the case for as long as I can recall. I remember when they made JBL be a Republican* and how that was supposed to make him unpopular and had the opposite effect I thought “Don’t they even know their audience?”
It wasn’t a couple years after that I saw a chart like this which suggested they knew it better than I did, even if Republican Heel was a flop (at first**).
* – Well, John Layfield *is* a Republican, as I understand it. But you know what I mean.
** – It’s kind of ironic that they got him to be hated by basically turning him into a Donald Trump kind of character (manicured New York dude).Report
True enough, and you and Michael Cain make good points… but I always thought that the WWE audience and the Nascar audience had significant overlap.
And, more than that, these people would be booing JBL just as loudly as anybody.Report
Not just young fans. Big business has been a heel for decades. Daniel Bryan’s biggest pops came when he played out protest scenes. Lots of closet anti-establishment hippies in those crowds.Report
@jaybird @kolohe @will-truman – Basically, the WWE audience is poorer than normal and is more African American and Hispanic than the general population, thus the general lean. In fact, during the height of Guerrero’s run, Smackdown regularly was among the top 10 shows for Hispanics.
Also, the fans actually skew older than ever. The average age of a RAW viewer in ’97 was 26 if I remember correctly. Now it’s 45-ish and other promotions such as Lucha Underground skew even older (mid 50s).Report
The first link is blank.
Adam West Batman: Everybody looked like they had a lot of fun on the show. Not only was TV Batman Joker Latino, he had a Latin mustache that they hid under the make up. Black Catwoman latter went on an played Black Viking woman.
I think your sentencing on Roman Polanski needs work.Report
Theresa May ‘acting like Tudor monarch’ by denying MPs a Brexit vote.
Why should she given that the public voted for the Brexit? Sounds like a desperate last gasp by the Remain crowd.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/27/theresa-may-acting-like-tudor-monarch-in-denying-mps-a-vote-over-brexitReport
Besides the fact that from a (UK) constitutional point of view the referendum is just advisory, because the Queen in Parliament (not the people) is the sovereign; and besides the legal question of whether exiting the EU is a Royal (that is, Prime Ministerial) or Parliament competence, a question currently being currently litigated; there is the fact that neither Theresa May nor anyone else has any idea today of what a post Brexit relationship with the EU and with the current EU trading partners will look like.
I think that the democratic thing to do would be for the government to put in black and white before triggering Article 50 what the SPECIFIC (did I emphasize the word enough?) objectives and end results of the negotiations (*) with the EU are (a Norway deal, that will include most EU related obligations including free movement? A mere trade agreement like NAFTA or the much mentioned EU-Canada deal? A complete breakout?), what’s the likelihood of success, and what happens if the negotiations fail. Then call a snap election and have the new parliament vote on that black and white SPECIFIC plan and let the new government trigger Article 50.
To keep saying Brexit means Brexit is meaningless, because no one in the Leave camp has ever described in detail what the post EU Britain will be like(**), so no one knows what the people voted for
(*) Hopefully, but not certain, after engaging in talks about the talks with the EU.
(**) Well, it’s clear everybody is against rules on the proper bending of bananas. Good thing those rules do not exist. Should we now declare the only known goal of Brexit accomplished and move on?Report
Wrong, the voters voted not to be in the EU so the left and right boundaries are set. The Brexit vote was only on the question of in or out, not what will it look like after they leave, so it wasn’t really incumbent on the Leavers to articulate what the future would be.Report
Kaepernick will sit through the national anthem until there’s change.
Apparently he won’t face any penalty or fine from the team or the NFL. It’s odd that the league will insert itself into the actions of players in other areas but not here.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FBN_49ERS_KAEPERNICK_ANTHEM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-08-28-17-45-33Report
What rule did he break to warrant a fine or a suspension?Report
Failure to participate in a social construct.Report
If a player hits his wife/gf or says the N word, what rule did he break to warrant a fine or a suspension? None really, right? Yet the NFL chooses to be a nanny in some areas but not others.Report
If he hits is wife, he’s broken a law, which is not nothing. Rocker situations are an interesting question. And the difficulty parsing what actions we’re going to accept and not accept leads me to generally believe the NFL ought to take a hands-off approach until or unless laws are broken.Report
Yes, if found guilty he would have broken civil law. Is that really any of the NFLs concern? Does the NFL even wait till a conviction? Adrian Peterson got benched on mere allegations of child abuse, using a wooden switch. Recently the WNBA was going to fine players for wearing BLM t-shirts but turned tail, pretty quick.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/adrian-peterson-child-abuse-charge-adds-to-nfls-off-field-trouble/
http://newsone.com/3489948/wnba-reverses-fines-against-players-for-black-lives-matter-protest-shirts/Report
It falls under the personal conduct policy. There’s a whole section in the CBA about it. And racial slurs on the field is an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, similar to if you do a throat slashing motion after a play. AFAIK, there is no rule about off the field use of racial slurs. For example, there was no official punishment for Riley Cooper, aside from the scorn of his teammates.
https://nfllabor.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/personal-conduct-policy.pdfReport
I guess disrespect of our country doesn’t bring the NFL into enough disrepute for them to care. If enough folks objected I’m sure they would change their tune.Report
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.Report
Why don’t you educate us all, smart guy?Report
Not standing for the national anthem is disrespecting the country? :eyeroll: If anything, the hissy fits and forced conformity people have over things like the national anthem are more disrespectful of America’s principles than anything Kaepernick or Gabby Douglas did.
So companies should fine people for engaging in unpopular speech? Keep in mind the penalty for racial slurs on the field is, like the throat slash or taunting, to prevent fighting and additional unsportsmanlike conduct in game.Report
Shades of when flag lapel pins were a hot campaign topic. Say what you will about Trump: at least we don’t have to go through that bullshit this time around.Report
Failure to participate in the loyalty ritual must be punished. It’s the American way.Report
Yes, I understand respect is an outdated concept to liberals and us folks on the right just keep clinging to it along with our guns and religion.Report
I want to see your respect.
I want to see it after midnight on the dark streets of Pittsburgh, with some black guy pointing a gun from their porch into your face, and telling you to move along.Report
This is the same thing we see in religious circles, where people fixate on the trimming and trappings of piety, like covering ones head or not, yet are willfully blind to the more serious impiety and wickedness that goes on.Report
Nice, you just assume that respectful folks like me willfully ignore the things our country does wrong. How charitable of you!Report
Well, do you?
I mean, scan issues of National Review, or blogs like RedState and Powerline, or influential cable news hosts, and where are the scathing criticisms of American wrongdoing?
To exaggerate just a little, according to the conservative spokesmen, the only thing America has ever done wrong is allow gay people to get married.
And we got smote with hurricanes as a result.
Is it really unfair to say that conservatives often equate criticism of America with lack of patriotic fervor?Report
Scathing criticisms, really? Kind of like the celebration/praise of the US that I find in the left press? You know it is possible to acknowledge problems without being scathing, or is that not possible in your liberal universe? Or do equate being scathing with honesty and transparency?Report
I mean, scan issues of National Review, or blogs like RedState and Powerline, or influential cable news hosts, and where are the mild criticisms of American wrongdoing?Report
What is your point and what does it have to do with the original issue?Report
Is it really unfair to say that conservatives often equate criticism of America with lack of patriotic fervor?Report
It’s 2016. Democrats are saying America is great and Republicans are wearing hats implying it is not.Report
It seems to depend on who the President is, I find.Report
Isn’t quietly not participating the respectful way to protest? He wasn’t going out of his way to call attention to himself by shouting, holding up a sign out running around making a ruckus. I did not realize respect meant forced participation. All this time I thought sitting there quietly while my wife’s family said grace was me being respectful, turns out I’m pooping all over their religion.Report
If it were released to the public that “notme” was actually person X and your employer decided that your political opinions didn’t afford enough “respect” to the office of the President of the United States, would discipline at work be appropriate?
What’s the dividing line between legitimate political opinion that offends people who disagree and inappropriate disrespect that requires censure?Report
I don’t take my politics to work and I expect others to do so as well, however respecting the flag and standing for the anthem is something I expect everyone to do regardless of their politics. To me, it’s part of the mark of our civil society.Report
Actually, I agree with this.
The player’s protest is kind of a dick move, even if I agree with his politics.
But “professional athletes acting like dicks” is a pretty target-rich environment.Report
I think the first part of that makes for a very reasonable assessment. I’m not bothered by the content of the political statement at all. It’s not particularly outrageous and his opinion isn’t particularly radical. But I can definitely see objections to it being done on the company dime using company airtime to spread it.
But it seems that’s best handled with a policy-neutral rule about political/social statements on the field while you’re in uniform using cameras funded by NFL owners and partners.Report
The WWE has a similar thing going on. They’ll terminate a contract if you get arrested. Just “sorry, you broke the policy” and whammo. They did it to Emma, they did it to Jerry “The King” Lawler, and they don’t care if it turns out that you didn’t do anything. (For example, Jerry Lawler got beat up by his girlfriend when he didn’t give her the keys to her vehicle when she was drunk. The cops showed up, arrested everybody for a “domestic disturbance”, and the WWE let Jerry go. When everything got resolved, they re-hired him… but they still let him go within hours of hearing of his arrest.)Report
That’s sounds awful.
Maybe they should form a union…Report
There have been multiple attempts.
The front office usually is able to short circuit this sort of thing by finding key players and offering them sustained pushes and more money if they defect.
The biggest example involves, hey here’s that name again, Hulk Hogan stabbing Jesse Ventura in the back in the 1980’s.
https://youtu.be/5Hmur5NxUysReport
I would say something nasty about Hulk Hogan, but I am short on cash this month.Report
What was your opinion of Tim Tebow hijacking post-touchdown celebrations to make a divisive political statement? Showing a lack of respect for the US Constitution, which, unlike the flag, is not just a symbol.Report
Chimps: “But given enough time, it appears they can work together to stifle competition, police freeloaders and cooperatively accomplish a task. Doesn’t that sound familiar?” All except the policing freeloaders part. Hell, we seem to be encouraging it.
Football: Another reason not to be on Social Media and why I have my account fully locked down. “Cute girls” are directed to my fake profile.
Movies: There’s a difference between alleged and guilty. Polanski plead guilty.
Bar soap: I don’t seem to fit the demographic, as I’m not over 60. But those damn Ivory bars are shrinking, the cheap bastards. And now I can thank millennials and women for hashing my ride re bar soap, cause they want liquid. Whiny gits.Report
So why give the guilty person a pass while punishing the accused person?Report
The moral failing of our celebrity elite?Report
Teams spying on their players: Back in the day, some baseball clubs hired Pinkertons to tail their players and report back on the players’ drinking.Report
Roman Polanski committed an act of evil, but he did direct the greatest american movie, Chinatown. Much like Hemmingway or Picasso, his art rose above his personality.Report
Rose above, or was just disconnected from?Report
Someone over at LGM used that very movie to make the point that movies are highly collaborative efforts, requiring hundreds, or even thousands of people.
Should Robert Townes, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway to see their brilliant work dismissed because of the actions of the producer?
There may be a few occasions where the art is so integral to a single author, and so tightly connected to his evil that its impossible to disentangle them, but for the most part I prefer to keep them separate.Report
You can make that argument, but I am of the opinion that it falls down due to the need for one person to harness the energies (acting, writing, etc.) of the others to make the whole. We don’t look askew when Hemmingway doesn’t do the printing and binding or cover art, or that Picasso doesn’t frame his pieces or manufacture the canvas that it is painted. Nor do we look askew at an artist who uses found objects to create a piece, calling them out for not crediting the manufacturers of each portion as collaborators.Report
The ESPN piece: I am always bemused by the Received Wisdom that MSNBC is the liberal cable news network. It has both liberal and conservative hosts. The fact that this makes it the liberal network, as contrasted with the “fair and balanced” one, has fascinating implications.Report
I’ve never had a problem finding bars of soap for sale. The CBS article seems to be a trendy Millennial bash for the sake of it.
Re: ESPN. Why is ESPN beholden to how their viewers see things? Why does the author assume that ESPN fans are conservative manly men who like conservative manly men things? Does he think liberals dislike sports? Isn’t part of a media organizations (especially for the news) to educate and opine or is it to comfort the priors and assumptions of their audience. Suppose a liberal news organization took a conservative tone on an issue. Would you say they are going contra to their audience and that was bad or would you say it was good that liberals were getting the conservative truth?Report
Oh, ESPN has every right to lecture it’s readers as much as it wants. Indeed, if Richard is right then ESPN in particular may be a bad example in sports media anyway.
In other contexts, though, I hear a fair bit about Houle some of the tilt that exist do so because of the audience. Along the lines of “of course the New York Times editorial page leans left, consider their audience!”Report
I can’t recall who Houle is.Report
Willa Paskin at Slate had a good article on the Nate Parker story:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/08/22/nate_parker_controversy_has_a_troubling_contradiction.html
“The criminal justice system is in crisis. The reaction to the Parker case is one manifestation of that crisis. The criminal justice system is so broken that, with regard to sexual assault cases, we have no faith in its ability to deliver a verdict of guilt and no confidence in a verdict of not guilty. The system is seen to be so skewed towards the aggressor in sexual assault cases that it cannot render a fair and just ruling. In the absence of such a definitive decision, accusations become the lifetime verdict. Nate Parker was acquitted of rape charges 17 years ago. These facts have permitted him to become a successful actor and director with a much-anticipated film shortly to arrive in theaters, but they will never free him from the suspicion that he is an unpunished rapist, despite being designed to do exactly that.
In criminal cases that are not about sexual assault, we are also skeptical of the criminal justice system’s rulings. Except in those instances, it is the verdict of guilt about which we have doubts. How could we not? Nearly every day, there are reports of police officers using excessive force and military grade weapons on the civilian population they are meant to protect, harassing and locking up black people as a matter of course, when not murdering them. The courts are overcrowded and backlogged, just like prisons, where corrupt and inhumane practices chew up low-level offenders, disproportionally black, and turn them into lifetime recidivists. The for-profit prison-industrial complex grows, making prisoners a lucrative industry and contributing to America having more prisoners than any country in the world.”
The whole art v. artist debate is one that is personal, subjective, and unsolveable. Lots of artists are really weird people or do really shitty things (just like normal people). Some people are always going to demand that artists live up to a really high moral standard. Others are going to handwave away all shortcomings in the names of a piece of art that moves them.Report
I was listening to NPR this morning and enjoyed the segment on Bob Ross, the painter. I didn’t know that you could now stream his old shows on Netflix. Something to Netflix and chill with.
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/29/490923502/the-real-bob-ross-meet-the-meticulous-artist-behind-those-happy-treesReport
The ESPN article was a little too broad in its ambitions than is in fact warranted by the situation. Of course the optics on misbehaving athletes differs with the race of the athlete. And in this case, Lochte spent years – including a reality show – cultivating an image as an oblivious dudebro whose likeability appears to come entirely from being so oblivious to his own gauche-ness. It always appeared to me that ESPN gets dragged into these controversies kicking and screaming. Sports is often a respite from a nasty and bitter political culture. It does exist in this world, so it can’t be impermeable.
That being said, in the end the author touches on something real. First, a few Twitter eggs, pro trolls or letters to the editor complaining about an athlete of color (Cam Newton, Richard Sherman, Gabby Douglas, Serena Williams) that would normally be ignored as just that much background chatter. Then, the usual suspects hit back much, much harder and these people are said to be representing a bigger constituency than they really do just so the usual suspects can appear righteous in smacking it down.
As part of my job, I deal with people from all over the country, including Trump supporters and even the occasional wacky chemtrails conspiracy theorists. An urban liberal like me isn’t going to make a great impression talking about politics, so I talk sports. A lot. Nobody has ever complained about excessive touchdown celebrations. Or female tennis players being too muscular. Commenting on attractive tennis players, yes, but nobody who cares seems to have a problem with Williams going out there and beating everybody. Bat-flipping? A non-issue. If anything, people – even (gasp!) conservative whites – enjoy the showmanship.
This ties in with Hillary’s attacks on the alt-right. The regular right (ctrl-right?) has always linked mainstream Democrats to ’60s radicals, communists and the nastier identity politics types like Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. It’s par for the course and rarely successful because Republicans live among Republicans and don’t see Trump-supporting Klansmen in their real lives. Compared to National Review, next to nobody reads VDare and Stormfront. Democrats pushing this narrative generally don’t live among Republicans and have been fed a steady diet of the most outrageous rhetoric the right can muster.
In these sports mini-controversies, I challenge any of these righteous anti-racists to find a person in their real lives who has a real problem with Douglas, Newton, Sherman or whomever else.
It expends zero political capital to attack a fringe view. Making people think it’s more common than it is creates a useful siege mentality. But it’s pointless. And tiring.Report
Someone came up with the term “nutpicking” to describe patrolling Twitter to find the most offensive comments to give them a platform to disarm the movement. It’s really kind of obnoxious. @WhiteHorde5051 with 41 followers doesn’t warrant that attention. That said…
I hear this one *a lot* in meatworld.Report
Nutpicking – love it!
When you say you hear about excessive touchdown celebrations, do you mean people complaining about them, or complaining that nobody actually complains about them?Report
People complaining about touchdown celebrations. It’s kind of a fixture among my sports fans. (That said, proclamations that such complaints are at-root racist and directed solely at black athletes doesn’t ring true. There is no doubt racism baked into responses of various athletes and such, but as a matter of hard-to-pin-down tendencies rather than rules.)Report
But, but… if nobody does a touchdown celebration dance, how will I give my “act like you’ve been there before” speech?Report
Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that one in person.Report
Were this widespread, Icky Woods wouldn’t be doing ads a quarter-century later.Report
If this weren’t widespread, we wouldn’t have the celebration rules that we have!
Maybe we can call it a love-hate thing.Report
I thought those were put in place to keep Joe Buck from bursting into flame from outrage.Report
The TD dances are goofy and bad opinion tends to overlap in the concussions are not an issue crowd.Report
There are good reason to curtain celebrations if you’re the league – safety and time management for TV being two.
Then you have the purists, the people who fetishize three yards and a cloud of dust and all that. They’re vastly overrepresented among sports commentators.Report
*curtail.Report
@ltl-ftc Normally I would agree with you re: the alt-right. But doesn’t Bannon’s hiring and the prominence of alt-right on Breitbart make it relevant? It’s less about how Trump may have gotten a loan from a Grand Dragon in the 70s type guilt by association. If Obama hired Louis Farrakhan as his campaign manager, the politics of the NOI becomes relevant to the discussion. This is true even though their beliefs are not widely held on the left and very much on the fringe.
I’ve also heard a lot of Cam Newton complaints, which I don’t get. And I say this as someone that initially did not like Newton (due to the college recruiting related shenanigans), but find him a pleasure to watch now, despite his frustrating moments,Report
I’m gonna hang on to the link to that first article (about the wine and the Enjoli and the first-world problems) to re-read whenever I feel like my life is a mess. Because obviously my life isn’t that much of a mess: I work at a job I don’t need a stiff drink to “wash off” after the day, I don’t have to worry that much about how my make up looks (just wearing lip gloss means I’m more made-up than 75% of the women here), and I never have to walk home past drunks making gross propositions.
Yup. I have it pretty good. I even make the same amount as a man with my level of experience, thanks to a “salary card” set by TPTB.
(I’m not being sarcastic here. I realize upon reading that article that I really do have it pretty darn good.)Report
I wondered about that office she works in, where employees have bottles of liquor on their desks. Really? Even back in Mad Men days they were more discreet than that. Recall also Lou Grant’s bottle kept in the lower desk drawer.Report
Millennials, man.
It’s not enough to do it, they have to do it out in the open and have it celebrated.Report
I figured it was exaggeration for amusement, but I don’t know.
I don’t drink – medication interactions – so I don’t know what’s “normal” and what’s “not” in re: alcohol consumption but I think if you have booze on your desk at work, there *might* be a problem.Report
If I turn around, I can see some nice Japanese whiskey on a coworker’s desk.
Granted, this is in tech, but the company isn’t a startup.Report
At one of the workplaces I worked at – only one – the office consisted of three people and about a hundred computers. We also had a refrigerator, in which we kept lots of soda and a little beer. My boss also had a bottle of single malt. About 3pm Friday, we’d go hang out near the fridge and have a sip of something. We were not millenials, not even the young guy (GenX, he was). The Friday afternoon TGIF is a thing in Silicon Valley. It’s good to get your employees out of their holes and talking to each other. But I don’t know if that’s an issue at workplaces with lots of writers, as opposed to engineers.
Sooo, I dunno what to think.Report
I work on a college campus (a campus that is technically “dry”) and I suspect much in the way of drinking alcohol mmmmmmight lead to some of the behaviors we’ve had to sit through “avoidance training” for.
(I also work in the South. Maybe not *quite* Bible Belt but certainly Bible Belt-adjacent)
then again….set out a pizza or a pot of chili and we will happily gather and talk. Most biologists are pretty food-motivated.Report
I’m amused that nobody has yet made a connection to the whole “consumption of sugary carbonated beverages is falling to unprecedented low levels” yet.
(as in, kids have graduated from soda to alcohol.)Report
Booze still has carbohydrates so the dietary crusaders probably have it in for that, too.
(We have ads running here basically shaming parents for letting their kids drink anything other than water. The ads are paid for by the “tobacco settlement” money. I am wondering how long before Big Sugar gets sued for some of that sweet, sweet cash)Report
Feds: Postal Worker Stashed Nearly 50,000 Pieces Of Undelivered Mail In Her California Apartment
4 thoughts came to mind, 1) how much room would this mail occupy in her house, 2) why is the max penalty for this only 3 years when a late bill/letter /court doc could really hurt someone, 3) why only one count for all the pieces and not one count for each piece of mail and 4) how will the union spin this to fight her dismissal?
http://thesmokinggun.com/buster/los-angeles/undelivered-mail-bust-028934Report
5) Why keep a bunch of unopened mail?
I mean, I get dumping truckloads of mail and taking the day off. I get stealing mail and emptying it of valuable contents. But why hoard it and keep it around in your house?Report
Rationalization. You dump the mail or otherwise dispose of it you are flat out not doing your job and you know it. You stash the mail in your apartment then you tell yourself “I’ll just do an extra hard stint and deliver all this stuff and no one’ll mind” and then it’s easier to live with.Report
Common rationalization. Bites a lot of people in college and high school.
You tomorrow is far more virtuous than you today.Report
Exactly! I do it with laundry. Then at some point the husband starts making snide comments about the Mnt. Everest of dirty laundry in our laundry room and I have to spend an entire weekend with the washing machine spinning.Report
Kaepernick is still making a significant tactical, possibly even strategic error. The other NFL (and NBA) players that have engaged in obervable activity to draw attention to a poltical issue* have done so as a team and/or a unit, but never solo if I’m not mistaken.
QBs already have a reputation as prima donnas, if their personal reputation isn’t already ‘leader’, and going and doing your own thing no matter what its inherent righteousness doesn’t serve the cause or the team.
*a long way of saying ‘protest’, which is either too much or insufficient to describe what some have done.Report
Who could have guessed Kapernick would not be able to properly choose a target or deliver his message accurately.Report
+1
Also, no one had ever heard Kaepernick say anything in public before. If Richard Sherman had said the same things, it would just be “Sherm being Sherm”.Report
The other NFL (and NBA) players that have engaged in obervable activity to draw attention to a poltical issue* have done so as a team and/or a unit, but never solo if I’m not mistaken.
Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets, 1996. He compromised with the league, agreeing to stand during the national anthem, but with eyes closed and head down while he recited Islamic prayers.Report
A French commenter on a different blog pointed out Christian Karembeu, who as a French territorial and thus by FIFA rules tied to France for international football. Unfortunately (per the story), during a disagreement with French authority sometime around WWII, his grandfather was shot by a French soldier in full view of his father. Karembeu didn’t particularly radicalize, and international football makes strange bedfellows(*), but apparently “La Marseillaise” was a trigger for him, and the looks on his face when it was played were epic – to say that he showed it no respect would be Understatement Of The Year(tm).
(*) During the playing of the Irish anthem before a RoI international:
First Irish footballer – “This one goes on a bit, doesn’t it?”
Second Irish footballer – “Shut up, it’s ours.”Report
Maybe this is way of getting attention now that his career seems to be sliding.Report
Only Kaep didn’t draw attention to himself. He quietly sad on the bench between Gatorade jugs. It took until the third preseason game before anyone even noticed.Report
https://www.google.com/search?q=colin+kaepernick+sitting&safe=off&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS677US678&hl=en-US&prmd=inv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiL-rGgz-fOAhVLGx4KHZbPAhsQ_AUICCgB&biw=320&bih=492#imgrc=euZjAdhOSYyJJM%3AReport
I admit to wondering at the whole Wiener thing.
There are so very many gross and silly dynamics in there.
For one, it looks like the person who leaked the most recent photos was a Trumpista. So it was a sting, I guess?
That said, Wiener’s inability to not send pictures of himself indicates that he’s most likely got a problem. Like, he needs some kind of professional help because this is, like, self-destructive.
And with regards to all of the places posting pictures of his junk, didn’t we just have this argument over whether it’s okay to post pictures of people’s junk and Gawker lost it?
I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills.Report
Weiner is gross, leaking the pictures to the press is gross, the Post article (the only one I’ve read any of) is gross, Trump is gross.
Did I miss anyone?Report
The father on Family Ties.Report
I don’t know whether I should be amazed or not that Trump had the chutzpah to criticize HRC on Weiner because of his romantic history.
Though he will probably get away with it because all is forgiven when you are a Republican and the media needs to fill BSDI.Report
I’d be more surprised if Trump showed signs of self-awareness.Report
If he did, it would be like Skynet, with similar results.Report
I wonder if Hillary is giving Huma marriage advice?Report
I doubt it. Huma announced that she and Wiener have separated.Report
Oh no!! Gene Wilder died!!!Report
This almost makes me sadder than this year’s previous famous-person deaths; he was in so much stuff I loved as a kid/teen.
Is it my imagination or has 2016 really sucked for taking people a lot of us out here cared about?Report
It has been an annum horribusReport
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/the-mad-dark-genius-of-gene-wilder
My friend penned this over at VF.Report
That is a perceptive piece Kazzy. He had a face and a talent you can’t teach or learn.
Silver Streak doesn’t seem that widely talked about now but was hugely popular back in the day and was a great movie. Haven’t seen it in years but i think it will still hold up.Report
Rich is a good follow if you like smart takes on various aspects of the pop culture and art world.Report
Stir Crazy was even more successful. The movie was made on a 10 million dollar budget and raked in 100 million at the box office
I think a lot of the Pryor-Wilder comedies are probably seen as horrifically dated and a lot of the gags would fly. Silver Streak started with a conversation about “erotic” books that seems quaint by today’s standards. At the same time, I don’t think the joke with Wilder in blackface would fly today.Report
During the 1970s and 1980s, comedy was at this sort of weird point where the most racist jokes of the pre-Civil Rights Era were no longer appropriate but you get some rather questionable humor by modern politically correct standards in. Academic ideas about privilege or punching up and punching down did not seep into public conscious yet so you could have the rather race-based humor in Pryor-Wilder movies.
Social conservatives were also just beginning to flex their muscles and gain political strength. The “you want me to have an abortion” conversation could happen at the beginning of Airplane because abortion rights were at their strongest. Since a women’s right to choose was not under threat, you can have a comedic routine about it in a movie.
A lot of the humor of the time can be explained by Progressives and Social Conservatives not being in a position to make their displeasure widely known even though Reagan was about to be elected.Report
“The “you want me to have an abortion” conversation could happen at the beginning of Airplane because abortion rights were at their strongest. ”
The film being made by Zucker-Abrams-Zucker probably had something to do with it, too, because they are surprisingly anti-progressive in their sentiments.
This was made by the Zucker Brothers, for example.Report
Haven’t seen it in a long time but i think it would still work. It’s not what people think about when they picture wilder or pryor. Both were more sedate and less off the wall then their more famous movies/stand up acts. I’d assume if people told wilder his blackface gag was the wrong kind of bad he would just turn to Pryor and let him tell the critics to F off. As i remember the gag was mostly on wilder, making him look like a dufus. It was mocking the very button down mild white guy Wilder was playing.Report
edit.Report
My favorite example – one of the most famous one-liners from Blazing Saddles – “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”
Was an ad-libbed riffing off the scripted line. Cleavon Little’s corpsing afterward was real. But it was so brilliant they had to leave it in.Report
I must have watched then movie dozens of times on cable back in the day. I assume i remember every detail now.Report
Sort of hard for me to believe Mel Brooks out lived Wilder. But Brooks is only 7 years older; he is 90 now. He always seemed much older. Take care Mel. Wilder was amazing.Report
The soap scum that builds in the soap tray is most definitely NOT self-cleaning. Those darn Millennials got this one right.Report
Killjoy.Report
Sorkin: I bet if the author had actually taken the class seriously in any way, he’d have been able to write an article that wasn’t shit.
Or maybe he still wouldn’t have been able to write–but then at least we’d have learned something about the usefulness of the course.
ESPN: Are ESPN viewers conservative? Yeah, probably. Can the ESPN brand get away with only pandering to the conservative viewer? Hell no. ESPN can’t afford to be just the sports channel for the stereotypical sports viewer–it has to be the sports channel for every sports viewer. Otherwise it has zero justification for its spot as the crown jewel of the basic cable package. And if it doesn’t get its $2 a pop for every cable subscription, it becomes a money-sink really really fast. Not really sure how that fits with Lochte, but I’d caution anyone who supposes that fans of individual performance sports like swimming are the same as fans of professional team sports and then uses the politics of the latter to approximate the politics of the former.
(Side note: Every Pro-wrestling fan I know is a liberal queer millenial who lives in the bay area, though that may be down to small sample size.)Report
Everyone wondered why the Sci-Fi Channel went so hard into pro wrestling.
Hugely-muscled men in costumes beating each other up? Characters flipping from heroes to villains, allies to enemies, on a moment’s notice in service of some vaguely-understood dynastic storyline that’s half ad-libbed and half market-driven? The sneaking suspicion that the whole thing is the result of cynical exploitation and the rankest carnival showmanship?
Pro wrestling is the live-action role-play for the output of a comic-book publisher from an alternate universe. Hardly surprising that comics fans would be into it!Report