Football - WTF? Ayn Rand is destroying the game?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Carol.

Some universities are free market. Others are not. Where did you get the assumption that I think differently?

I find yous question way too broad, but it shows a mind that is accostomed to thinking in terms of boss and underling as a metaphysical given. Meaning, one Bigass Boss--with boss and underling in government being the same thing thing as boss and underling in the free market.

I don't see the world that way. Freedom flows through my veins and my life--as disorganized as it has been--is proof if it.

But, let's address your question at face value. Should a person get fired over anti-American or anti-government views? I believe he should if they conflict with the organization he works for, but I also believe this is the decision of the myriad of bosses in the market--even in the government. But, as per my different world-view, I do not believe one Bigass Bossman should hand down a decree that all other Mediumass Bossmen have to obey. And your question seems to imply this kind of approach.

You ask should xxxxx be fired for yyyyyy? I ask, fired by whom?

There's a lot to my question.

But even on the Bigass Bossman level, I believe the Bigass Bossman should be able to fire an employee for not aligning with the organization's policy. If, for example, Obama's Secretary of [fill in the blank] starts expressing extreme libertarian views, calling for the end of big government, calling Obama's big-government views wrongheaded, and saying the USA is the most evil country in the world. I would fully expect Obama to fire him. I might agree with the employee on some of his points, but I would not find Obama out of line for getting rid of him.

Michael

[caroljane]

I find yous question way too broad, but it shows a mind that is accostomed to thinking in terms of boss and underling as a metaphysical given. Meaning, one Bigass Boss--with boss and underling in government being the same thing thing as boss and underling in the free market.

Michael

No. I see the government as a remarkably inefficient boss, sometimes like a harassed building manager in charge of an ever-changing maintenance crew, sometimes like an absentee landlord. I don't see it as the boss of the tenants, the citizens.

[caroljane]

Michael,

I see in you a mind accustomed to thinking in terms of American and Randian exceptionalism, that only Americans can truly understand and experience freedom, because only in America do the true philosophical preconditions for freedom exist.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Carol,

I'm way too individualistic for that.

If I want to do something, I just do it, illegal or not. (I do weigh my chances.)

I rarely ask for permission unless it is totally unavoidable.*

Don't forget that I spent 32 years in Brazil.

I do believe the USA has a shot at freedom, though.

Michael

EDIT: * Which is why I find the question, do you think so-and-so should be fired for such and such outside my worldview. If anyone fires me, it's their loss, not mine. I don't understand the mentality of pegging my life and dreams to the whims of a boss.

[caroljane]

Carol,

I'm way too individualistic for that.

If I want to do something, I just do it, illegal or not. (I do weigh my chances.)

I rarely ask for permission unless it is totally unavoidable.*

Don't forget that I spent 32 years in Brazil.

I do believe the USA has a shot at freedom, though.

Michael

EDIT: * Which is why I find the question, do you think so-and-so should be fired for such and such outside my worldview. If anyone fires me, it's their loss, not mine. I don't understand the mentality of pegging my life and dreams to the whims of a boss.

I understand that. But you are exceptional. In the work world most people have a boss, or a client, and their livelihoods are pegged to the whims of the employer. The question of "can" and "should" around firing for professed or suspected ideologies, involve issues of free speech and can become legal issues.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Freedom is not for people who like to be slaves.

Michael

[Mikee]

Unfortunately slaves don't like other people to be free...

[caroljane]

Unfortunately slaves don't like other people to be free...

Oh, we don't really mind it.

The Slaves

[caroljane]

Some of my best friends are freedmen.

[Southern Capitalist]

He probably thinks we don't need to keep score. Everyone gets a participation award. No one better, smarter, creative than the other. We are all equal. These socialist type remarks in politics and the media always gives me a headache. But hey a Alabama Crimson Tide fan here, and an Objectivist. Don't think Rand is destroying football Campos. How did he even come to that conclusion is beyond me.

[caroljane]

He probably thinks we don't need to keep score. Everyone gets a participation award. No one better, smarter, creative than the other. We are all equal. These socialist type remarks in politics and the media always gives me a headache. But hey a Alabama Crimson Tide fan here, and an Objectivist. Don't think Rand is destroying football Campos. How did he even come to that conclusion is beyond me.

If Ed Snider and Tim Thomas can't destroy hockey, Ayn Rand can't do much harm to football.

[Brant Gaede]

Freedom is not for people who like to be slaves.

Michael

Too bad for them, then, if they get it anyway.

--Brant

not sympathetic

[Brant Gaede]

He probably thinks we don't need to keep score. Everyone gets a participation award. No one better, smarter, creative than the other. We are all equal. These socialist type remarks in politics and the media always gives me a headache. But hey a Alabama Crimson Tide fan here, and an Objectivist. Don't think Rand is destroying football Campos. How did he even come to that conclusion is beyond me.

If Ed Snider and Tim Thomas can't destroy hockey, Ayn Rand can't do much harm to football.

You Canadians don't know the power of the Rand

--Brant

embrace it before it embraces you

[caroljane]

He probably thinks we don't need to keep score. Everyone gets a participation award. No one better, smarter, creative than the other. We are all equal. These socialist type remarks in politics and the media always gives me a headache. But hey a Alabama Crimson Tide fan here, and an Objectivist. Don't think Rand is destroying football Campos. How did he even come to that conclusion is beyond me.

If Ed Snider and Tim Thomas can't destroy hockey, Ayn Rand can't do much harm to football.

You Canadians don't know the power of the Rand

--Brant

embrace it before it embraces you

You Americans don't know that the pen is mightier than the sword and the puck is mightier than both of them.

[Brant Gaede]

Canadian hubris. Take away your cities snuggled up to US and what do you have? Hockey puck.

--Brant

if we moved the border 100 miles south, Canada would die, and 100 north: nothing would change, economically, especially for the north poles

[william.scherk]

Brothers and sisters in war, brothers and sisters in peace. Land stretching from high arctic to bounteous plains to rich forests coast to coast. Boring hellholes like Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, so close and so far. Busy, very busy exchanges across our long border.

I live two miles from this thing, the Peace Arch. Incised upon it, Children of a Common Mother.

When we are not busily interchanging and trading and visiting each other, we still operate firmly in the First World, rich and resourceful. Oil, gas, minerals, rails, transport, sophistication and world-spanning culture, cousinly nations whose relationship is deep and stable. A mutual thing. Allies.

Quite a package, Brant. Would you could visit us wee northerly cousins more often, at least for a wild week-long weekend in Quebec.

Or a taste of my town, Vancouver, a kind of snotty, expensive Seattle:

Edited May 25, 2013 by william.scherk

[caroljane]

The longest undefended border in the world is no longer undefended, the guns and dogs are commonplace on the southside of the 49th parallel, yet still every year in my hometown the borders open for the International Festival and I can walk across the bridge again as I used to, a friend and relation.

[Brant Gaede]

I've been to Ontario. I've been to Quebec. How come the invaders from Massachusetts in the mid-18th C. failed to conquer the latter is beyond me, but I feel relieved.

--Brant

Windsor is attached to Detroit by that bridge sucking its lifesblood north to be dispersed upon the mooses--that explains what happened to Detroit!

[william.scherk]

The longest undefended border in the world is no longer undefended, the guns and dogs are commonplace on the southside of the 49th parallel, yet still every year in my hometown the borders open for the International Festival and I can walk across the bridge again as I used to, a friend and relation.

I often put my ass in the saddle and cycle past the Peace Arch along the ominously-named Zero Avenue. This is the actual delineation depicted below (from Google Maps). It is a bit of fun to imagine crossing the un-fenced ditch to the world of northern Warshington state, pull tabs, native casinos, creaky old bridges and full-on marijuana decriminalization.

<>Of course, the invisible rays from the motion-detectors, heatmaps, zonal trip triggers and so on make the border patrol computers ping like crazy and any stupid person crossing north to south will be seized forthwith, all things being equal. Further east along 0 avenue a few resourceful croppers have attempted ye olde catapult to avoid the controls and tripwires ... with little success.

Canuckistan on left, land of Hope, Glory to the right.



Brant, my part of the world has one of those unusual border features -- an exclave. This is Point Roberts, where the forty-ninth parallel leaves a chunk of stars and stripes surrounded by the crown and maple leaf.

I've been to Ontario. I've been to Quebec. How come the invaders from Massachusetts in the mid-18th C. failed to conquer the latter is beyond me, but I feel relieved.

--Brant
Windsor is attached to Detroit by that bridge sucking its lifesblood north to be dispersed upon the mooses--that explains what happened to Detroit!

It strikes me odd that you seem to have some lingering martial ambitions towards my big country and its First World inhabitants, that you seem to have a lingering bad taste in your mouth vis a vis Canuckistani history Care to correct my misapprehension, or expand upon your seeming distemper?

I know which side of the border you are on, but not that being onside there means you disdain the other side, further north, on rational principles. What difference rankles, if difference does? Do my and Carol's transnational notions not enter into your calculations of value or antipathy?



Who are the 'invaders' from Massachusetts circa 1750, Brant, in your script? In the lands north of the present borders of New England, it was the French who were about to be vanquished for good (save St Pierre and Miquelon and the cursed Lousiana), not 'Canadians,' you see -- unless you make sure to note that the Canadiens (frenchies) had been subject to the French Crown at the time.

What you USA types call The French and Indian War(s)** were not driven solo by a military run by "Americans" (who were not quite yet to be) but by the British/Crown, and in the real world, the (not-Americans yet) British military was having a Seven Years War.

Which side of that scuffling were you on, Brant? Seems like the same side as Carol and I ...

________________________

** Expressive graphic from Wikipedia

Edited May 27, 2013 by william.scherk

[Brant Gaede]

Keep your hands off Pt. Roberts, William. Don't give US a because bellie!

--Brant

I got my date wrong: I was referring to The Battle of Quebec (1690)

[BaalChatzaf]

Football - WTF? Ayn Rand is destroying the game?

I've seen Rand bashers and Rand bashers, but this one is just too weird for mere words to describe. You have to read it to believe someone is boneheaded enough to preach that Ayn Rand is prompting the demise of the pigskin.

Look below at this splendiferous stash of raw rare reason. This perspicacious professor of the profound. This sleuth of the heinous hidden agenda.

(All right, all right. I stink at being Howard Cosell... )

Enjoy.

You can't make this stuff up...

How Ayn Rand is wrecking football

Paul Ryan's beloved Packers were robbed last night -- because the owners are putting the "moochers" in their place

by Paul F. Campos

September 25, 2012

Salon

From the article:

If you want to know whom to blame for the surreal officiating fiasco that robbed Paul Ryan’s favorite football team of a win last night, the answer is Paul Ryan’s favorite political thinker. As improbable as it sounds, Ayn Rand’s lunatic brand of Marxism turned on its head is to a significant extent responsible for Lingerie Football League castoffs refereeing America’s most popular and profitable sport (with predictably catastrophic consequences).

. . .

Ungrateful “moochers” like NFL referees – mere laborers who, unlike the captains of industry who deign to pay their wages, have failed to climb to the top of our ruthlessly meritocratic social pyramid — need to be shown their place. Although locking the refs out and replacing them with utterly incompetent substitutes is a nonsensical decision from an economic perspective, there’s a higher principle to be vindicated here, which is that the Heroic Businessman is responsible for everything good about America, and the lesser orders had better not forget it.

That, at the deepest ideological and psychological level, is why the NFL owners are insisting on doing their best to wreck the sport, in much the same way that their political lapdogs, like the Rand-worshiping Ryan, are dedicated to wrecking the nation.

All you can do is laugh. Not mocking laugh, either. This shit is seriously funny.

But on the mocking side, when the Progressives have to go to this outlandish length, it's an indication that Paul Ryan is scaring the holy bejeezus out of them.

We certainly are getting a rash of nutcases in the news recently. And their common theme is political, usually from the Progressive side.

But I have to give it to this Campos guy. If you're gonna be a nutcase, you might as well play full on and go whole hog in.

After all, who wants to be a second string nutcase?

Michael

That fellow is utterly bonkers.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[caroljane]

I've been to Ontario. I've been to Quebec

I hereby invite you to revisit them. . \I am still determined to foist an OL social upon poor Michael and Kat somewhere, and \I know you are a very experienced long distance driver and you would love to see the beautiful Maritimes or at least interesting \Toronto.

Carol

Shameless Opportunist and current non car owner

[Brant Gaede]

I've been to Ontario. I've been to Quebec

I hereby invite you to revisit them. . \I am still determined to foist an OL social upon poor Michael and Kat somewhere, and \I know you are a very experienced long distance driver and you would love to see the beautiful Maritimes or at least interesting \Toronto.

Carol

Shameless Opportunist and current non car owner

Will I get safe passage or be feasted on? (I know what "foist" really means here.)

--Brant

Canadians are best avoided; if they didn't get over France they didn't get over Great Britain which is why they can't get over America, Canada being its hat and all

[caroljane]

I've been to Ontario. I've been to Quebec

I hereby invite you to revisit them. . \I am still determined to foist an OL social upon poor Michael and Kat somewhere, and \I know you are a very experienced long distance driver and you would love to see the beautiful Maritimes or at least interesting \Toronto.

Carol

Shameless Opportunist and current non car owner

Will I get safe passage or be feasted on? (I know what "foist" really means here.)

--Brant

Canadians are best avoided; if they didn't get over France they didn't get over Great Britain which is why they can't get over America, Canada being its hat and all.

Its hat? As the brain is the "hat" and the lower regions the suit - yeah,guess you're right.

[caroljane]

Will I get safe passage or be feasted on? (I know what "foist" really means here.

--Brant

lf the Kenyans did not feast on our ex=|Mayor Lastman and his plump tasty wife, as he feared aloud, I think your sunbaked sinews are safe from us. I

\We used to wring our hands at what an embarrassment Lastman was as the "face of Toronto." But all he did was live most of the time in Florida, take kickbacks, call out the army in a panic at the first snowstorm of winter (about a foot of snow), and turn out to have a second "wife" and children in addition to his legal ones. As wss would say, yawn.