Quotulatiousness

September 26, 2016

Vikings break Carolina Panthers home unbeaten streak, 22-10

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Very few prognosticators gave the Vikings a chance to win this matchup with the defending NFC champion Carolina Panthers (the oddsmakers had the Vikings as seven-point underdogs), and for much of the first half, it looked like the bookies were right as Carolina ran up a 10 point lead. Then things started to go right for the Vikings, beginning with a safety for defensive end Danielle Hunter who sacked Cam Newton in the end zone and followed by a punt return touchdown by cornerback Marcus Sherels. Kicker Blair Walsh missed the conversion attempt, so the teams went into the locker room at halftime with the Panthers leading 10-8.

While the Panthers had looked unstoppable for the first two drives in the game, a combination of penalties and improved play by the Vikings defensive line and secondary soon had Newton under pressure and unable to consistently gain yards and keep the chains moving. It took rather longer for the Vikings to show signs of life on offense, however. Cornerback Trae Waynes snagged his second interception in as many games to snuff out Carolina’s attempt to score late in the half and the Vikings took a knee to run out the clock.

In the second half, it was almost as if they’d just been sandbagging the Panthers and waiting to spring the trap, as the Vikings suddenly discovered that they could get the ball to Kyle Rudolph, Stefon Diggs, and Adam Thielen and took the lead on a Sam Bradford pass to Rudolph. Rather than risk another missed PAT, Jerick McKinnon ran in the two-point conversion to make the score 16-10. Two Blair Walsh field goals (with every Viking fan holding their breath during the kick) added six more points to finish the game.

As the game wore on, the Panthers offensive line wore down, exposing Newton to heavy pressure and ended up taking eight sacks on the day. Newton was also intercepted by cornerback Terence Newman and defensive tackle Tom Johnson, in addition to the first half pick by Waynes.

It seems like no game report is complete without yet another Viking injury and today’s feature was guard Alex Boone who had to be carted to the locker room with a hip injury. The good news is that he was able to return to the sideline, but did not get back into the game. He’ll get a full evaluation tomorrow, and hopefully won’t miss much more time. His replacement on the line, Jeremiah Sirles, wasn’t mentioned by the TV commentators … which is a very good thing for an offensive lineman. Also not drawing any attention during the broadcast was T.J. Clemmings who was playing at left tackle in place of Matt Kalil who was placed on IR earlier this week.

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QotD: Jewish intellectuals and communism

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

As Eugene Volokh’s sources note, a disproportionately large number of the original Bolsheviks were Jewish. Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish, though his parents had converted to Christianity. It is impossible to study the history of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism without noticing how many Jewish names crop up among the leading intellectuals. It is equally impossible not to notice how many of the Old Left families in the U.S. were (and still are) Jewish — and, more specifically, Ashkenazim of German or Eastern European extraction. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg didn’t come out of nowhere.

It’s not even very hard to understand why this is. There is a pattern, going back to Spinoza in the 1600s, of Jewish intellectuals seeking out the leading edge of certain kinds of reform movements. Broadly speaking, if you look at any social movement of the last 300 years that was secular, rationalist, and communitarian, somewhere in it you would find nonobservant Jews providing a lot of the intellectual firepower and organizational skills. Often a disproportionate share, relative to other population groups.

Communism was one example; there are many others. One of my favorites is the Ethical Culture movement. Today, we have the Free Software movement, not coincidentally founded by Jewish atheist Richard Stallman. There is an undeniable similarity among all these movements, an elusive deep structure having to do not so much with shared beliefs as a shared style of believing that one might call messianic social rationalism.

Anybody who thinks I’m arguing for a conspiracy theory should check their meds. No, there is something much simpler and subtler at work here. Inherited religious myths, even when they no longer have normative force, influence the language and conceptual frameworks that intellectuals use to approach other issues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell once noted that thinkers with a Catholic background like mine gravitate towards universalizing mysticisms and Protestants towards individualist redemptionism; he could have added that thinkers with a Jewish heritage tend to love messianic social doctrines. (One can cite exceptions to all three, of course, but the correlation will still be there after you’ve done so.)

Thus, assimilated Jews have a particular propensity for constructing secular messianisms — or for elaborating and intellectualizing secular messianisms invented by gentiles. But you can’t say this sort of thing in academia; you get called a racist if you do. And you especially aren’t allowed to notice the other reason movements like Communism sometime look not unlike Jewish conspiracies — which is that the IQ bell curve for Jews has a mean about a standard deviation north of the IQ bell curve for Caucasian gentiles.

In cold and sober truth, in any kind of organization where intelligence matters — even the Communist movement —, you are going to find a disproportionate number of Jews with their hands on the levers. It doesn’t take any conspiracy to arrange this, and it’s not the Jews’ fault the goyim around them are such narrs (Yiddish for “imbeciles”). It just happens.

Eric S. Raymond, “Communism and the Jews”, Armed and Dangerous, 2003-11-14.

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