Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Game Fourteen, Part The First-Afternoon Delight?

Enough with all that rhyming.

A trio of 3 run homers off of Scott Baker, the Home Run Maker from Our Man Youk, Mike Lowell, the Greatest American Hero, and New Guy Nick Green have powered Boston to a 6-0 lead after 4 innings in Boston today.

It's Sox manager Terry Francona's birthday today. Both Francona and his father Tito were major league players.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Dan Carlin's most recent Hardcore History show (www.dancarlin.com). He is talking about the Eastern Front battles during the Second World War, and firstly the sheer volume of people who died on both sides, and secondly the extent to which so many of the soldiers on both sides were slaves to evil ideologies-there were victims on both sides.

It just made me think about demonization in general, and how casually people, myself included, throw around words like "evil" and "monstrous" and "barbaric". I'm going to try to be more careful about what I call people.

6 comments:

  1. I see that I should have stuck with my initial instinct of the Twins losing today. =)

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  2. I liked when you were rhyming. Do I understand sports talk? NO. Do I love you? Yes! and your rhyming? Yes!

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  3. The large scale deaths in the East continued after the official end of WW2, as the Soviet Union started many programs of ethnic cleansing and "killing fields" in its new territories in order to bring its new subjects into line. WW2 was as much about the successful aggression and expansion of the USSR was it was about Hitler's unsuccessful attempt to create an empire.

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  4. Lapis-Well, what can you do? You win some, you lose some. Happy birthday!

    Katie-So sorry to disappoint again. Hope you will remain a friend?

    DMarks-I think WWII became about Soviet expansionism, but I don't think it was originally about that. Carlin documents the utter monstrousness of Stalin, but also notes his stunned surprise when the Germans invaded. Carlin also notes a Churchill one liner I hadn't heard before-"If Hitler invaded Hell, I'd look kindly on the Devil." In other words, the desperation to defeat the Nazis overcame the dislike for Soviet Communism-of course, Churchill was no friend of Communism.

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  5. WW2 might have been coincidental with Soviet expansionism. Just a good opportunity to get away with it. Lenin invaded and annexed several just a couple of decades before, and Stalin was anxious to continue expanding the new empire Lenin founded.

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  6. Just like the race to the Rhine-very quickly, the West realized that, whatever ground you had when Germany surrendered, that was going to be yours.

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