Quotulatiousness

April 26, 2018

Britain drops down a league table that really matters, for a change

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mick Hume on the parlous state of press freedoms in Britain:

Britain prides itself on being an historic home of freedom and the free press. So how come we are languishing in 40th place in the international press-freedom table?

Imagine the crowds singing an updated version of Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, about how Britain ‘shall flourish great and free / The dread and envy of them all / Except for the 39 freer nations, obvs’.

According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, published on Wednesday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the UK is now ‘one of the worst-ranked countries in Western Europe in terms of respect for press freedom’.

Its 40th place puts the UK one ahead of Burkina Faso and two clear of Taiwan, and suggests that journalists working in Britain have less freedom to hold the powerful to account than those in such liberal states as South Africa, Chile or Lithuania.

British observers are far more likely to bemoan how far we have fallen down the world rankings in football, another field we claim to have invented. Unlike the glorious irrelevance of football, however, freedom of the press really is a matter of life and death for a democratic society.

The UK’s 40th place is unchanged from 2017. But that is 18 lower than its ranking in the first Index, published in 2002 – and 12 places down on six years ago, before the publication of the Leveson report.

That should give a clue as to the new threats press freedom faces in the UK. Unlike in some other illiberal parts of the world, we are not confronted by old-fashioned government repression and state control of the press. Instead, and especially since the Leveson Inquiry, press freedom in the UK has been threatened by a more underhand assault from allegedly liberal political and cultural elites – backed, to their shame, by the Labour Party leadership and the Corbynite left.

The 2018 NFL draft, from a Vikings perspective

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the time this post goes live (the morning of the first day of the 2018 NFL draft, unless I messed up my scheduling), the Minnesota Vikings have the following eight draft picks to make over the next couple of days:

  • R1N30 (30th overall) – The Vikings lost in the NFC Championship game, so they’re the third-to-last pick in the first round of the 2018 NFL draft
  • R2N30 (62nd overall) – Third-to-last in each of the following rounds except where noted.
  • R3N30 (94th overall)
  • R4N30 (126th overall) – Traded to Philadelphia as part of the Sam Bradford deal in 2017.
  • R5N30 (167th overall)
  • R6N30 (204th overall)
  • R6N39 (213th overall) – Compensatory pick
  • R6N44 (218th overall) – Compensatory pick
  • R7N30 (222nd overall) – Traded to San Francisco for cornerback Brock Tramaine in 2017 (who is no longer with the team)
  • R7N33 (225th overall) – Acquired from Denver in the Trevor Siemian trade earlier this year.

Based on past experience with Vikings general manager Rick Spielman, it’d be foolish to assume that each of those draft picks will be used by the Vikings … they don’t call him “Trader Rick” without good reason. For example, it wouldn’t be any sort of surprise if the Vikings find a trade partner for their first round pick and move down into the second round in exchange for additional later round picks. The consensus among Viking fan sites is that the team’s top need is offensive line help — either at the guard or tackle spots — and the belief is that this is a good (that is, deep) draft for OL prospects. That supports the notion that the Vikings will try to trade down, as Spielman usually tries to gather ten draft picks in any given draft and the best way to do that without mortgaging the future is to trade down.

I don’t follow college football, so there’s no point at all in my trying to predict who the team will end up drafting, but there are certain positions that are clearly higher priority (aside from the obvious OL need mentioned above), so it would be surprising if the Vikings don’t draft players for these roles:

  • Offensive guard (or offensive tackle, if the coaches think Mike Remmers would be better suited to the guard position)
  • Cornerback – Terence Newman is a free agent who may choose to retire, and Mackenzie Alexander is the only experienced backup on the roster.
  • Defensive tackle – Linval Joseph is very good and should work well with off-season addition Sheldon Richardson, but the team needs depth behind these two with the loss of Tom Johnson and Shamar Stephen in free agency.
  • Running back – Dalvin Cook is coming off ACL surgery and Latavius Murray restructured his contract this year, but the team will miss the 3rd down/change-up role that Jerick McKinnon played so well in 2017.
  • Tight end – Kyle Rudolph and David Morgan need at least one good backup behind them.
  • Safety – Harrison Smith is now acknowledged as one of the best in the NFL and Andrew Sendejo would have to really decline to lose his spot, but depth is always a good thing.

Other less-important needs are at wide receiver (the Laquon Treadwell experiment seems to be coming to a close), swing tackle (Rashod Hill did well, but he’s not really full-time starting material), and linebacker (depth, unless we draft someone who can challenge Ben Gedeon for the third LB spot).

Also, for those of you who enjoy getting the real story, here’s Ted Glover’s creative re-interpretation of Rick Spielman’s press conference before the draft. It explains* everything**.

* By “explain” I mean “the closest thing to an involuntary psychedelic trip based — very loosely — on what Spielman said”.
** By “everything”, I of course mean “you’ll never take me alive, coppers!” “certain aspects, as viewed from a dimension where the skies are a remarkably attractive shade of purple”.

George Orwell and 1984: How Freedom Dies

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Academy of Ideas
Published on 30 Dec 2017

In this video we explore why Orwell believed totalitarianism was a great risk in the modern West, contrasting his ideas with those of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.
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Get the transcript ►
https://academyofideas.com/2017/12/george-orwell-1984-how-freedom-dies/

QotD: Drama critics

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nobody loves them, and rightly, for they are creatures of the night. Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? I doubt it. They come out after dark, and we know how we feel about things that come out after dark. Up to no good, we say to ourselves.

P.G. Wodehouse, Over Seventy: An Autobiography with Digressions, 1956.

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