Extra Credits
Published on 3 Feb 2018Why did we refer to Khosrau’s empire as Iran, not Persia? Did Mazdak really exist, or was his proto-communist movement pure propaganda? Dan (narrator) and Soraya (writer) tackle these questions and address the large issue of how perspective can shape one’s idea of the truth.
February 4, 2018
Khosrau Anushirawan – Lies – Extra History
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Randy Moss (deservedly) makes it into the NFL Hall of Fame on his first try
Randy Moss, with all his baggage, was not the kind of player you’d traditionally expect to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but his record was just too good to ignore:
Randy Moss elected to the Pro Football Hall Of Fame
Randy Moss has found his final NFL end zone. Moss, the former first round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings, has been elected to the Pro Football Hall Of Fame.
Taken 21st overall in the 1998 draft by head coach Dennis Green, Moss instantly transformed the Vikings offense, led the NFL with 17 touchdown receptions, and was part of an offense that scored 556 points, which was an NFL record.
Moss was electrifying on the field, and there had never been a receiver to come into the league with the combination of size and speed that Moss possessed. He utterly dominated games at times, and he saved his best for the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys. In an effort to try and contain Moss, in 1999 the Packers spent their first three draft picks on defensive backs.
It largely failed. Some of Moss’ biggest games came against the Packers, including his 1998 Monday Night Football coming out party, and the 2004 NFC Wildcard playoff game, the infamous ‘Moss Moons Lambeau’ game.
But for all his talents on the field, he could be a polarizing figure off of it. He had run-ins with the law both in college and with the Vikings, and at the end of the 2004 season his distractions came to a head, and he was traded to the Oakland Raiders by owner Red McCombs, who was in the process of selling the team. I’ve said this before and I will maintain until my dying day that McCombs traded Moss out of spite due to his inability to get a new stadium, and that was his last middle finger to the Vikings fans and the state of Minnesota on his way out the door.
He had two lost seasons in Oakland before being reborn in New England, and in 2007 the Patriots, led by Moss and Tom Brady, broke the 1998 Vikings scoring record. Moss had over 1400 yards and a mind boggling 23 TD’s, as the Patriots went 16-0, but lost the Super Bowl in the final seconds to the Giants. In his first Super Bowl appearance, Moss had 62 yards receiving and a touchdown that looked to be the game winner with under three minutes to play.
In 2010, he was famously traded back to the Vikings, but age had caught up with him and QB Brett Favre. They did have one notable highlight, though, as Moss caught Favre’s 500th TD pass. However, head coach Brad Childress famously deemed Moss a ‘programmatic non-fit’ less than a month after trading for him, and released him.
Less than a month after that, Childress was fired.
I loved what Moss could do on the football field almost as much as I feared what he might do off the field. But if we only judge him on his NFL career, this is a well-deserved honour.
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Sword Bayonets – German Casualties – Jerusalem Occupation I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 3 Feb 2018Check our Podcast: http://bit.ly/MedievalismWW1Podcast
Chair of Wisdom Time! This week we talk about possibly fabricated German casualty numbers, the unwieldy WW1 bayonets and the reaction to the occupation of Jerusalem.
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BC versus Alberta – the existential threat of “dilbit”
Colby Cosh on the warlike preparations taking place in Alberta in advance of the interprovincial war over “dilbit”:
The special concern with dilbit [diluted bitumen — the form in which hydrocarbons from the Alberta oilsands are shipped to refineries as a liquid] is a pseudoscientific contrivance designed to allow Horgan to meet, or at least take a step toward, his loud campaign promises to thwart Trans Mountain. Now, even if you don’t believe that, you can understand that Horgan is threatening to conjure an all-new improvised layer of environmental regulation here. Even if you are convinced that it was spilled dilbit that killed Tasha Yar in “Skin of Evil,” you can see the unfairness of Horgan imagineering an infinite regress of scientific panels — each one surely more scientific than the last! — to injure a neighbour’s economy for his own electoral welfare.
The truth, however, is that B.C.’s New Democratic premier knows the hand-wringing about dilbit is B.S. And so does Alberta’s New Democratic premier. And so does just about everybody in Alberta. Yes, we Albertans have been busy this week preparing for border war: there is so much to do, what with the need to make propaganda posters, train commandos for mountain-pass warfare, dig victory gardens, and re-label all the Nanaimo bars “Liberty squares.”
Sadly, it probably won’t come down to a shooting war, but will remain in the crystal blue elysium of political manoeuvring. If it did come to a fight, Alberta would have a pretty big fifth column operating on its behalf across the legal border. I have a running joke with friends that I have occasionally referred to in print: it’s the idea that there exists a “Greater Alberta” that includes sizable parts of Saskatchewan and, in particular, B.C.
The so-called Peace River block that spans the border is one economic unit, and people at its western end, jealous of having ended up on the wrong side of a discontinuity in taxation, have actually agitated in the past for secession from British Columbia. And, as many have pointed out in the feverish climate of interprovincial hostility, the jagged southeast corner of B.C. has significant transmontane cultural and economic ties, too. It looks, on a flat map, like it ought to “belong” to Alberta. (In real-world topography, on the other hand, the Continental Divide is definitely a thing that it is hard not to notice.)
In short, almost everybody is now making my “Greater Alberta” semi-sorta-kinda-joke. But this is not really a Greater Alberta thing. At almost every point of the compass, that B.C. map is full of resource employees who are watching with distaste as their NDP government acts like an NDP government. This is surely a real moral advantage for Alberta in the grand struggle — but, remember, there are genuine practical gains for Horgan from his theatrical eco-rectitude: right now the motivating passion of his life, from dawn to dusk, is to persuade Green voters to turn orange.
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The Winter War: A Soviet Failure
KnowledgeHub
Published on 29 Dec 2017Signup for your FREE trial to The Great Courses Plus here: http://ow.ly/6YHs30b1QVm
In the midst of WWII, Stalin decided to invade the small nation of Finland. It did not go the way he wanted it to. This is the story of the quagmire of 1939 that often isn’t talked about between the Fins and the Russians.
Music:
Russian Slapstick by Hakan Erikson
Dramatic Orchestral Strings by Gavin Luke
Winds of Winter by Yi Natiro“The Great Courses Plus is currently available to watch through a web browser to almost anyone in the world and optimized for the US market. The Great Courses Plus is currently working to both optimize the product globally and accept credit card payments globally.”
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QotD: Modern feminism
Feminism now regularly calls for women to be treated as eggshells instead of equals. And through this, it does something pernicious to the women it claims to advocate for: Feminism has become a movement for female disempowerment, or what I call “encouraged helplessness” (from psychologist Martin Seligman’s “learned helplessness”—the feeling that there’s nothing you can do to escape your fate).
In fact, feminism, bizarrely, has morphed into paternalism — instructing women that they are fragile, passive, powerless victims who need authority figures to advocate for them.
That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it — because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out.
If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me — count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become.
This doesn’t require you to be fearless. You just need to shove your fears aside and do what needs to be done — say, getting up on your hind legs and telling some co-worker, “Stop saying that thing to me” or “…treating me this way.”
Now, if they persist after you’ve told them to stop a few times, that’s harassment and you can seek support to get them to stop. But consider that it’s less likely to get to that point if you simply act like men’s equal—act as if you’re powerful — instead of acting like you’re a feminist.
Amy Alkon, “Are Women Really Victims? Four Women Weigh In”, Quillette, 2017-11-22.
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