Author: Nick

Sports “Heroism”

http://jezebel.com/5991504/we-need-to-outgrow-our-sports-legends

 

Doug Barry writes a great piece about our culture’s worship of sports heroes using the real-life inspiration for The Natural as his starting point.  He doesn’t make the obvious next step of connecting that hero worship to the kinds of attitudes that enable a thing like Steubenville, though.  And he’s so close!  I kept waiting for that leap, but he never took it.  

The way we whitewash the actions of these dues is both surprising and saddening.  Athletes aren’t, and shouldn’t be, heroes.  They’re good at playing a game and that’s fun to watch.  It’s fun to root for your team.  But let’s not hold up skill at a particular task as a referendum on a person’s character. 

Steubenville

Henry Rollins has some musings about the Steubenville verdict.

It’s a lot of musing and thinking-out-loud, and Rollins hits on a lot of interesting points while he works through his reactions to the case.  There’s no one real answer to a lot of the questions he finds himself asking because, as he puts it, there’s failure on so many levels here it’s hard to know where to start.  From my own perspective as an educator, though, I think there’s one really, really important lesson we can impart to kids at just about all levels, and it’s this:

YES MEANS YES.

I know, I know; no points for originality.  Fuck originality.  I was talking to some dude about the verdict yesterday and the kid started going on about how you can just never be sure when someone’s consenting when they’re intoxicated.  I thought he was going to take it somewhere profound, but instead he wound up shrugging it all off by suggesting that, well, you just never know, so sometimes people are gonna get raped.  He phrased it a little differently–“You just never know.”  “It’s hard.” Dude, it ain’t that fuckin’ hard.  Did she say yes?  Awesome!  Go for it!  Did she say no?  Hands the fuck off.  Did she say maybe?  Well, that’s not yes, no hands the fuck off.  Did she hint yes?  Be sure, and make sure it’s an unequivocal yes, or you’re an unequivocal shitbag.  

If kids can internalize that, you’d reduce the chances of dudes making the terrible decision to rape another human being, and you’d reduce the shitshow of people making excusing for rapists.

“It was a curious period.”

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/03/abigail-fisher-university-texas/63247/

 

What you have here is some ginned-up bullshit between (white) wiseguys aiming to preserve segregation because, you know, it’s unfair that non-white people should ever have to be considered alongside whites.  

 

The problem we all live with

Angry white people are the reason this little girl had to be escorted to school by the Feds.  White people angry that they had to share.  But I’m sure our contemporary assholes think it was either all an exaggeration or since we have a black president racism is gone away forever and shutupdon’ttalkaboutitlalalalalacan’thearyou.  They might be able to keep a straight face about it, but without laws like these the country will drift even further back on all the important measurables of racial justice in this country–we’ll just follow the slower, poisonous Northern model instead of the atavistic Southern strain we’ve done such a good job of stigmatizing.  

But really, this is the part that made my simmering pot of anger boil over.  Get a load of thisfuckingguy, the smarmy-ass fuck.

But when asked why the drafters [of the 14th Amendment] created programs targeted to black Americans if they did not intend the Constitution to allow the government to use race to help minority groups, [senior constitutional studies fellow at the Cato Institute Ilya]Shapiro said, “It was a curious period.”

 “It was a curious period.”

Thanks for giving the game away, fuckhead.  If you find yourself on the same side of the argument as thisfuckignguy, well, you deserve more scorn than even I can humanly heap upon you.  But I will by-god-dammit fucking try.

Gygax!

gygax

 

Oh, shit yes!  I had a subscription to Dragon Magazine back in the day, from sixth grade on through until I think my senior year of high school. Seven years?  That sounds about right…seven years of dungeon mastering tips and ideas, story seeds, plot devices, sweet pictures, monster ecology articles (loved them!), cartoons, short stories, and reviews.  The reviews were another favroite of mine.  It took a lot to push me out of my comfort zone into trying something new, but they had excellent reviewers who managed to prod my curiosity.  They recommended–or just referenced, which could be good enough for me!– lots of stuff that I’d only really discover years later.   I loved that magazine, and I’m really excited to see this coming back.

 

Saturday 1/26 1:30 PM

The Brooklyn Strategist

333 Court Street, Brooklyn NY (F, G to Carroll St)

A FULL DAY OF GAMING: DnD, Savage Worlds, Marvel RPG, more!

Fuck.

FREEDOM.

Added: 18 kids are dead. 18. Eighteen. Kindergartners. “Currently, at least one entire classroom of children and teachers is “missing.””

 

But, y'know, guns had nooooothing to do with this. Nothing at all! Don't you dare mention it and politicize this tragedy that our lobbyists are working hard to help us forget by next week! Don't you love your country? Why don't you jump on the team and come in for the Big Win?

Sensible Things

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5