jonottawa

The only side I see making demands and threatening consequences (isn't that what we mean by extortion) is the 'give Israel whatever the hell they want' side. And yeah, avoiding bad precedents is why this is a fight worth having. For example, here's Warren Spector: "We need all the teams in the US, open, women's, seniors, to refuse to go. Maybe our Canadian friends will join the protest. Add the Israeli's and a couple teams from Europe and we've destroyed the event in Bali. It's time to stand up and be counted: let's show some solidarity in response to this outrageous act." (Emphasis mine.)

At last! That explains everything. I can't stand people who abuse authority. Austin police (some of the best paid in the country) are notorious for shooting unarmed (usually black) people from the East (poor) side of town. The shooting in Toronto was a travesty (18-year old kid armed with a pen knife on an empty streetcar completely surrounded by police, shot 3 times, 5 second delay (he's been knocked down,) shot 6 more times.) That officer should spend the rest of his life in prison. He probably won't even be charged. That doesn't mean you don't give them SOME benefit of the doubt (and that benefit of the doubt is already built into the jury selection process, just look at the Rodney King verdict,) but my overwhelming impression is that no matter how ridiculous and clearcut the abuse of force, unless it's captured on film and the film can't be intercepted by the police before it's made public, the investigation invariably gets whitewashed and the cop gets away with murder.

I agree, history may well remember Obama as the president who put the final nail in the coffin of 'the American dream'. History will also remember his immediate predecessor as the guy who kidnapped the American dream, tortured it, molested it, shot it in the head, and started working on the coffin when his time expired. Obama is a terrible president (if he were a Republican, he would be a 'pretty bad' president, but I hold Democrats to higher standards) not because he's a socialist, which he's not, but because he governed so much like Dubya in his first term and now he's a lame duck 6 months into his 2nd.

Certainly truer in my case than yours, but touché. Playing bridge is insane in the more traditional definition of 'Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,' at least once one hits a certain age/experience level.

Gracias, Señor.

In many topics like 'General Bridge Discussion' I only see threads (other than 'Pinned threads) from the last month. When I click on 'My Content' I only get results from the last year. Is there any way I can get at stuff that's older than that or is that working as intended?

Societies have come down hard for centuries on people who don't buy into the commonly held 'crazy ideas' of the day. My guess is that 10,000 years ago the 'skeptic gene' was relatively common in humans and a long succession of bullies, tyrants and 'confederacies of dunces' mostly eradicated it.

I agree with Jerry Seinfeld on golf: "It's challenging trying to throw a tic tac 100 yards into a shoebox. That's not a reason to devote thousands of hours to a game that even at its highest skill level is basically Whack! Where is it? Oh dammit."

Did I not get anyone? Yes, Rickrolling is pretty lame/dated, but under the circumstances I couldn't resist.

Here's an excellent lecture by on the topic. He actually makes a great deal of sense.

I for one don't believe that congresscritters are overpaid. Just underqualified. As for their ideology, their faith seems to lie in the great God 'gerrymandering' and his track record is pretty good.

I don't have much to say about the actual topic. But if Congress started hearings against me for targeting 'conservative' (that's one of MY pet peeves, the appropriation of the term 'conservative' by a bunch of oligarchical, corporatist, or neo-fascist people) groups, and I don't immediately make it clear that we targeted ALL politically active groups more-or-less equally, that's on me. If instead I do little more than waffle and equivocate, I can't blame people for assuming that I'm expressing culpability. As for going to a phrenologist when suffering from brain cancer, I once went to a chiropractor when I was experiencing chest pain (and suspected I had experienced some sort of heart 'event'.) Being born in Canada and spending the first 18+ years of my life there apparently didn't make me Canadian enough to qualify for free medical treatment. (I am a man of means by no means fwiw.) Ironically, I left that visit to a health care professional, for one of the first times in my life, NOT thinking to myself 'That guy is a quack.'

My faith in MikeH is restored. All is right with the world. I apologize for butting in.

I guess that's as close as you're going to come to an apology for your 'arrogance mixed with ignorance'?

History will have PLENTY to condemn modern-day America about. I don't have to go back 200 years for good material. But as to your specific example, I would never consider condemning a country with a history of slavery. It was a commonly accepted practice, condoned by 'holy books', that had been around for thousands of years. About the only useful comparison imo is 'Were you among the first or among the last to abolish it?' In modern-day America you still have people toiling at full-time jobs who live below the poverty line. Maybe not technically slavery, but surely the next best thing to it. In other countries you have children toiling 10 to 14 hour days in wretched poverty. Essentially indistinguishable from slavery. I feel somewhat similarly about Native Americans. Was Alexander the Great a war criminal? Or Genghis Khan? Or the various Roman Caesars? Should we mock Greeks or Mongolians or Italians because of them? Would it be funny if we did? I try not to judge cultures from prior historical eras by today's standards. I'd much rather judge cultures from today's era by today's standards. Also, I gave the caveat 'unless the country still romanticizes or condones what happened'. I think that a great number of people do romanticize the founding of America, and in response to them it is indeed fair to bring up slavery and the genocide of Native Americans as a gentle reminder that maybe it wasn't so terrific after all. Anyway, that's my take. I like Germans (not every single last one of them, of course, but enough of them that it wouldn't occur to me to smear them all.) I'm sorry to hear that you don't.

Thanks, much appreciated. I did get one very nice piece of 'fan mail' over there and it kept me going when I was feeling isolated. To be fair, I had some pretty 'outrageous' things to say myself. I was certainly deliberately needling people who I thought deserved it based on their own behavior. But if one side is throwing around hateful epithets and deliberately disingenuous arguments and the other side is 'needling' them for it, I fail to see how the appropriate response is to blast the 'needling' side after the issue has been settled. Anyway, I shouldn't have steered the conversation in that direction, sorry. If BW moderation or behavior wrt this issue is to be discussed, probably best for me to do it over there.

I'd like to see tournaments go online (with monitors) for a whole host of reasons. Cost, less cheating, disease, vugraph, timers (for slow play and for appeals cases,) # of entrants, entry fees, self-alerts, ability to ask questions without worrying about your partner drawing inferences, anonymous appeals and for some, physical security. It seems like a no-brainer. But if the powers that be are working towards that, they're being awfully quiet about it. Maybe 'misclicks' are an insurmountable obstacle, I dunno. For me, the tradeoff between misclicking and never missorting your hand, revoking or leading out of turn is fair. If I misclick more than twice a year it's been a busy year. Late edit: I guess they'd also have to decide on a fair way of deciding what 'time zone' to pretend we're all in (I'd imagine it would have to rotate from tournament to tournament.) I hadn't considered that. It certainly wouldn't be much fun to start a day of bridge at 2:30 AM. Also, what to do if the Internet crashes at a site? Maybe not as much of a no-brainer as I had thought. But even if they keep the 'show up at such and such a place' concept, I'd like to see them move to playing on electronic devices, which still would offer many of the advantages I listed.

Thanks for saying that, it's nice to hear. (The first bit, I mean. I still like the guys who run BW and in general I'd much rather post in a forum with a little bit too little moderation than a little bit too much moderation.) If someone wants to call me an a-hole I'm fine with that. I saw a bunch of disingenuous claims being made repeatedly (about the Israelis being denied visas or being banned or "denied access" or FORCED out) and I saw Roy Welland get branded with a hateful epithet and I started getting pretty mad. So I didn't play 'nice'. But I did play fair (imo.) Was my 'special snowflake' or 'big-boy pants' language or Ladies First video going to win me any friends? Of course not. But when the other side is dragging the conversation into the gutter, I see no reason to be Mr. Friendly. I was a little disappointed in a few people who should know better, but I've been disappointed by people I respected before.

I didn't know who ggwhiz was. Now I do! Sorry you stepped in my Animal House trap. I didn't set it for you. Of course it's absurd to offer anyone a 'blank check' to ask for whatever they want and hold the organizers hostage unless they deliver. The whole thing is an ugly mess. A bunch of bullies shouted everyone else down (I feel especially bad for Roy Welland, but anyone who was subjected (or saw what was going on and risked being subjected) to that hateful tripe and stood their ground gets a big thumbs up from me) and got their way. About the only silver lining is that the event wasn't moved. I agree with hrothgar that it reminds me a lot of Shanghai: I made a lot of posts because I saw a vulnerable group being bullied and I didn't like it. Bobby Wolff was dead wrong then too. The USBF pres made a very poorly worded statement (iirc.)

This is the one area that troubles me, because I don't have any expertise in this area so I rely on my own 'common sense', fully aware that I might be completely wrong. Had the Bridgewinners thread been focused on this issue exclusively (which is the only remotely valid complaint that I've been made aware of,) and been populated by people who knew what they were talking about, discussing the issue in a rational, civil, consensus-building way, I would have stayed out of it. My 'trying to be fair-minded' belief is that Israel is entitled to expect about the same level of cooperation that they would give if they were hosting the tournament and Indonesian security people were making inquiries. My suspicion is that their level of cooperation would be comparable to what has been offered by the Indonesians. I tend to agree with CSGibson that, as 'security chief', the less I reveal about my security arrangements, the better.

I so seldom give likes, but hrothgar so perfectly encapsulated what I wanted to say, only better than I could, that I made an exception this time.

I'm with the folks who consider the German smear both unfunny and borderline inappropriate (I won't quibble about which side of the line it falls on, but I think mods generally should try to set good examples.) The 'who we going to invade next' jokes refer to very recent history. I'm not sure precisely how long the statute of limitations on such humor is, but it's shorter than 65 years. Basically, if there's hardly anyone left alive who was an adult when the events transpired, it's not really fair game anymore imo. (Unless the nation still romanticizes or basically condones whatever transpired back then.)

LOL