Quotulatiousness

September 11, 2016

Jim Souhan explains why the Vikings are interesting (for all the wrong reasons)

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Later today, the Vikings will kick off the 2016 regular season against the Tennessee Titans in Nashville. The season hadn’t started before they’d already lost their rising star quarterback for the year, traded away a first round pick in the 2017 draft, and just generally been historically Viking-like … at least according to Jim Souhan at the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

On my first assignment covering the NFL, I listened to new Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones gleefully discuss replacing legend Tom Landry with a brash college coach named Jimmy Johnson while promising to oversee every aspect of the Cowboys’ organization “from socks and jocks.”

Later that year in Dallas, Buddy Ryan made fun of Johnson’s hair and put out an unofficial bounty on the Cowboys kicker, and then Johnson traded Herschel Walker to Minnesota for a dozen players and draft picks and 5,000 lakes.

Then, I left Dallas for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and found out that the Cowboys could not match the masters of American sports drama. The Minnesota Vikings are the kings of interesting.

Two weeks ago, the Vikings were inspiring justified optimism while demonstrating organizational stability and unveiling a new stadium that reminds everyone within eyesight of downtown Minneapolis that the NFL dominates American sports.

Then Teddy Bridgewater blew out his knee while making a throw during a practice and without getting hit, and the Vikings traded a first-round draft pick and another high pick for another team’s starting quarterback.

The events were shocking only if you expect normalcy.

Remember, this is a franchise that gave you the Love Boat, the Original Whizzinator, a kicker being accused and acquitted of drug smuggling charges, a coach threatening to sue his owners, Randy Moss’ Book of Memorable Memes, Moss’ Lambeau goalpost butt rub, a coach scandalized for scalping Super Bowl tickets, Brad Childress’ quarterback wars, helicopters circling above Brett Favre’s arrival, excruciating NFC title game losses, the Bounty on Brett, Joe Webb starting a playoff game, Adrian Peterson breaking records and wielding switches and Percy Harvin throwing a weight at a coach.

There are NFL teams that have been relentlessly uninteresting, like the Titans, and those that have attracted interest by winning, like the Packers and Patriots. The Vikings may stand alone when it comes to attracting interest while not winning it all.

Anthony Fokker – Japanese Army – Semi-Auto Rifles I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 10 Sep 2016

It’s time for the chair of wisdom again and of course Indy answering your questions about World War 1.

Sean Gabb – THE IMPORTANCE OF BYZANTIUM FOR THE WEST

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 8 Sep 2016

Professor Sean Gabb, lecturer, political activist and the author of nine historical novels about early years of the Byzantium Empire.

QotD: The fractious coalition that fought the First Crusade

Filed under: History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Q: One of the striking aspects of your accounts is how fractious and fragmented the Crusaders were. They come from different places, they’re following different people, and they have somewhat different motives. The divisions reminded me of the various jihadi groups vying to be top dog today. Do we remember the Crusades as more unified than they actually were? Do these divisions tell us anything about the situation today among the other would-be holy warriors?

A: Particularly with the First Crusade, we do tend to remember it as a more unified movement than it was. We assume that when the pope preached his voice rang out with greater authority than it did, and that it would have been better remembered and better understood than in fact I think it was. We don’t have any record of what the pope said at Clermont except for one sentence [about penance]. All the other stuff is people making it up later.

A goodly number of Crusaders from the north had actually fought wars against the popes. They’re not necessarily on the papal side. A lot of people, particularly from the north were inspired by Peter the Hermit, not by the pope — a very different message. When the Crusaders marched through Byzantium, there was extreme mistrust between a lot of the armies, particularly the ones that got there first, and the Greeks whom they were allegedly on Crusade in part to defend. There was this sense that [the Byzantines] aren’t real Christians, that there’s just something wrong about them. There was no leader of the Crusade once it started marching. There was a council of leaders.

That probably parallels a lot of what’s going on with ISIS and al-Qaeda and the way these groups tend to metastasize. It also points out how powerful and uniting the notion of religious warfare can be — that you can have these different groups suddenly coalescing around this idea and against all odds succeeding. The most mind-boggling aspect of the First Crusade is that it succeeded. There’s no reason that this should have worked, that these armies should have survived and gotten to Jerusalem. They somehow did. They held together. This ethos of holy war, which is a fairly terrifying one, can be powerful and effective at holding groups together.

Virginia Postrel talking to Jay Rubenstein, “Why the Crusades Still Matter”, Bloomberg View, 2015-02-10.

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