Friday, February 01, 2013
The Kansas City Royals made the NRA enemies list somehow
(hardballtalk.nbcsports.com)
posted on February 01, 2013 at 03:01 PM by RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) to gun control, mike torrez, nra, royals
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43 comment(s)
Read More...Thank God, then, for the NRA. A few minutes ago I saw people tweeting about the “enemies list” they apparently keep. In the NRA’s parlance, a list of “National Organizations with Anti-Gun Policies.” Which, sure, if you’re an advocacy group you understandably want to keep a list of people who oppose your agenda, so fair enough. But the list is pretty hilarious, mostly because it goes way beyond actual opposition groups who work to counter the NRA’s agenda and seems to include ...
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< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >Including about 90% of the people on BTF, who were quick to dismiss any alternate explanations for not offering him a contract.
I've heard the one about the Metrodome. I seem to remember the Seahawks were supposedly getting a boost from doors being opened or closed affecting the A/C wind patterns at the Kingdome for field goal attempts.
Or "the Yankees have to win the 2001 championship for 9/11"
Until everything fell apart in the 9th inning, I might have bought the same theory about the Yankees in 2001.
Not nowadays. Maybe way way back in the day.
Pretty far out there. But I could be convinced 1991 didn't exist. I was 21 yet have only the haziest memories of the year.
Well, they fix the playoffs, so why wouldn't they fix the lottery?
Whatever happened with that?
The "missing medieval years" theory is probably one of my favourites. Just so breath-takingly bold and innovative. I mean, this Sandy Hook thing...you knew the second it was reported that the usual nutters were going to have their conspiracy-by-numbers humdrum. But I'd love to be a fly on the wall for the dawn of realization that 500 years didn't happen.
Does this count as a proper conspiracy? It was just the team doing it and trying to keep it secret. If the league office knew about it and covered it up, if the Bengals were paying the Saints to injure members of the Steelers, or even if the groundskeepers somehow made the turf harder where the opposing players were likely to be tackled, then it becomes a proper conspiracy. Otherwise it's just a team being shifty.
Also I think my short lived marriage was a conspiracy though I can't prove it.
Just like Obama was behind Sandy Hook to get public support for radical gun bans, Roger Goodell was behind the Saints Bounties to get public support for the radical safety measures he wants to enact.
how do you think the cheating twins won the series in 87? cuz they were good?
Collusion does not equal conspiracy.
Not even just American, there is a long history of European secret societies and such - the Illuminati, the Freemasons trying to take over the world, the Knights Templar going underground and running the world's banking system, the Protocols of Zion/the Jews who are controlling the world, there are a few plague-related ones as I recall (probably the Jews too), etc. Here is America we have all of those, Area 51 and the various UFO coverups and others. All of those are still around, in the case of the European ones, hundreds of years after they began. People have always believed this stuff (wanted to believe this stuff, for various reasons), but with mass media you can scream louder now and the echo chamber whips it into an even greater frenzy.
That being said I believe every NBA conspiracy there is.
Not even just American, there is a long history of European secret societies and such
God, yes. I wasn't meaning at all to suggest that we have any sort of monopoly on paranoia and conspiracy theories. The Protocols of Zion alone has at last count been translated into several dozen languages that span every continent except possibly Antarctica.
I never did bother to calculate the weather normalized correlation coefficient for called balls and strikes across 2 teams playing a game, though.
Probably every other week there's a suggestion that one bad NFL call or another is point-spread related.
As if that wasn't enough, it turns out that she wasn't a real deer, either!
Crazy people make the crazy. There's nothing else to get about the Sandy Hook Truthers. They are crazy people. Literally, detached from reality, crazy people. A good place to start with the new push for mental health scans around gun ownership in America would be to note that anyone crazy enough to believe that Newtown was a set-up is, by definition, too crazy to own guns.
Like the "way, way out there" idea that sports leagues might bribe local politicians for sweetheart stadium deals, the idea that Major League ownership and management might collude against a player or players is not really the realm of "conspiracy."
I'm pretty sure that one has been confirmed as true, too.
My god, this is getting absolutely zero percent of the love that it should. This is friggin' brilliant!
I'll admit it - I laughed.
Are you saying you believe it's impossible that a multi-billion dollar American corporation would manipulate results and reporting to increase profits?
I'm not 100% convinced the NBA lottery is or isn't fixed (in some years at least) but after Enron, Madoff, Countrywide, Lehman, etc., etc., it would surprise you?
Considering; 1) an NBA "conspiracy" about referees being in the tank for some games was proven true recently, 2) a "conspiracy" about a famous professional cyclist buying off the anti-doping agency has recently proven true, 3) the NFL only reports maybe five players per year for using PEDs, and 4) we're in the middle of a huge "failure to report" story about a famous college athlete, and 5) general history of corporate behaviors, from the S&L scandals through Madoff right up to the on-going NRA meltdown, I can see no reason to assume the NBA is *not* gaming the lottery. No proof either way, but either belief is perfectly reasonable.
On the other hand, the sports media is coming under intense fire for not poking holes in a seemingly innocuous uplifting story about a dead girlfriend who apparently did not exist.
Which would certainly explain away the Middle Ages, to say the least.
On the other hand, the sports media is coming under intense fire for not poking holes in a seemingly innocuous uplifting story about a dead girlfriend who apparently did not exist.
The only thing I can't understand about the Teo story is why anyone would treat it as anything other than a great big joke. Either Teo helped pull it off or he was actually a clueless victim, but either way, so what? The only real "scandal" here is that both Notre Dame and the sports media seem to find a hoax like this far more important a story than Lizzy Seeberg's suicide or Declan Sullivan's entirely preventable death.
It's because it's so ####### weird. The prevailing sentiment is not, "Oh, how we've all been duped, woe is us," but "Can you believe all this?!"
Sports is entertainment. Daytime television is entertainment. The Te'o story is basically the two overlapping. And people are eating it up, as expected.
I agree that it has overshadowed a much more important story, but wasn't there a fund set up in Lennay's name with people donating money to it?
Not even just American, there is a long history of European secret societies and such
I think it is because there is an element - just that - of truth in them. Socieities are divided into classes, with some socieities being more stratified than others. But there is always a "ruling" class and a "moneyed" class (and a lot of overlap between the two). I think, as a general rule, those two classes are continuously working to keep themselves in those classes and others out. I think those not in the two powerful classes know this. I don't think the attempt is done in large, detailed, complicated plans but, rather, as a nod and a wink between powerful people such that the trend of law and culture is toward the status quo. Not being able to find clear evidence of the conspiracy to keep them down, those in the lower classes (everyone not rich or powerful) gravitates toward these more outlandish conspiracies.
I doubt you could miss entire years. Multiple peoples across the globe were tracking time. The Chinese and Egyptians had advanced astronomy.
Events could certainly be mis-dated, but blocks of time missing; not possible IMHO.
Huh? Just labeling something a "conspiracy" does not imply that it was untrue or only believed in by paranoids. I made no claim whether or not Bonds was colluded against. If owners secretly got together and agreed that no one would sign Bonds, that by definition is a conspiracy. And if someone has a theory that this happened, that is by definition a conspiracy theory.
Owners and Lawmakers who have secret illegal arrangements in order to publicly fund stadiums are also engaging in conspiracies.
I'd agree with snapper, "missing years" probably isn't likely, depending on what is meant by that. From the medieval period on (working backwards as it were) you do get into increasing difficulty dating events specifically, and even getting things in chronological order.
One of the more interesting papers I've heard, purely from a detective story perspective, was one on a particular crusade organized by a French nobleman in the 12th century (IIRC). The guy's assertion was that this was a purely "private" crusade (in that it did not have the support or encouragment of the Church), which goes against how it has been understand by historians so far. I don't remember the details, but the basis of that claim was an intense study of tracking the timing of news of a Christian defeat arriving from Turkey, dating the local stops on a provincial Papal tour, and pieceing together where relevant nobles, bishops, etc. were at given times during the relevant months. It was a very technical paper, but fascinating...especially for me coming from a field (the 17th century politics) where we usually know when everything happened to the day, if not in finer terms than that.
After Wilt, what's the fewest number of games fouled out by a player with a career of, say, at least 10 seasons?
The Middle Ages weren't some sort of massive gap in known history or advancement of civilization. It's just a period of time where Europe didn't lead the way. We know the proper accounting of years and history during the Middle Ages, because Baghdad was the Rome/Istanbul of the era.
The fact that Muslims were the primary innovators and civilized folks, while Christians in Europe were mucking about in pig ####, doesn't mean that civilization ended. The "Middle Ages" saw the invention of calculus and physics, more or less. It just too "Christendom" a thousand years to catch up.
I totally plead guilty to making an assumption of Eurocentrism in my question.
After the BCS Championship, a Notre Dame alum and 4 friends created a charity for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in memory of the 'dead girlfriend'. Notre Dame sent a film crew to do an interview with the guy, and posted the video on their website on Tuesday.
To recap, in order:
Notre Dame supposedly knew it was a hoax on December 28.
After the game on January 7, the charity was set up.
After that, Notre Dame interviewed and filmed the guy.
On January 15, 2 weeks after they said they knew the girl didn't exist, Notre Dame posted the video on their official website, evidently to elicit donations to the charity.
Edited because I can't subtract dates.
That's how I read your question. For instance, maybe there was a King that reigned for a couple years in Denmark that's been forgotten? Or a year or two for which no one's found any source evidence of anything happening?
The other thing to keep in mind is that (depending on when you're talking about, the "Middle Ages" covers a very diverse period in European history), Europe wasn't all that "dark". And even when it was just a big pile of #### with barbarian thugs killing each other, you generally had the Church at least trying to keep a tab on things.
This is a big story because her life was a big story. If ESPN, NBC, and everyone else hadn't made such a big deal of Te'o "struggling" with the "twin tragedies" of losing his grandmother and "girlfriend", no one would have knows so much about her, and thus no one would now care that she doesn't exist.
Understood, and somewhat stipulated. Certainly we know less, definitively, about the princes and kings of Middle Ages Europe than we do about the lineages of Roman emperors or the Caliphates. But it's not like we're reading the history of the era via Beowulf or the Irish epics.
"Said to be", "thought to be", "his name is unknown", "otherwise unknown", "again caused confusion", "not known if", "it appears that". That sums up a lot of Medieval history, especially early on and in the geographic fringes. We know some stuff, we can guess at some stuff, and there's stuff that is a blank of something very close to it.
No, the scandal is that no one in any of the media organizations took 5 seconds to look for the girl's obituary when she "died".
Sorry, but all I see there is example #8861 of the overall misdirection of Big Sports Media, as it tries to "reach out to people who aren't necessarily interested in sports". Call it the Oprahfication of sports or whatever you want, but when it blows up in their faces my only reaction is a big fat grin.
This is a big story because her life was a big story. If ESPN, NBC, and everyone else hadn't made such a big deal of Te'o "struggling" with the "twin tragedies" of losing his grandmother and "girlfriend", no one would have knows so much about her, and thus no one would now care that she doesn't exist.
Totally agree there. See my above paragraph. It's too bad we can't take about 80% of the "sports media" and re-direct them to a more useful line of employment, like scrubbing crack house toilets with a toothbrush.
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