Signe Wilkinson leads off with the most trivial of today's topics, the legalization of sports betting, or, more precisely, the ruling that you can't forbid states from legalizing it.
Most of the professional leagues and the NCAA are against it, because they feel sports betting can breed corruption.
And, aside from the 1950 college basketball point-shaving scandal, and the 1978 college basketball point shaving scandal, and a few others, we've currently got a tennis gambling scandal going on, there are any number of accusations of horses being drugged, held back or even substituted, and then there was the Colombian player who had the misfortune to score an own-goal in the 1994 World Cup and was murdered by gamblers on his return home.
But, hey, that won't happen any more once it's legal, right? Right!
Wilkinson, however, comes closer to my objection, which is that I like the games and have this naive idea that watching the games is the point.
I don't mind a bet on a game I care about. When my favorite team faced my brother-in-law's favorite team in the Super Bowl, we made one of those bets involving regional treats, the way governors of states traditionally do.
But I certainly didn't give him any points. If you don't think your team can win, don't make the bet.
Gambling changes that. Fantasy league or straight gambling, the wins and losses don't matter anymore, as long as the stats line up.
I used to like baseball, until I was stuck at a desk in a newsroom surrounded by fantasy league "managers" who prattled on endlessly about "their" teams and how many points they'd made. Baseball has always been a little nerdy, but I never heard any of them say "Did you see that catch?" or "I couldn't believe he made that throw from center field!"
Only the points matter.
And football isn't far behind: There is an entire channel that shows the scoring plays as they happen, while coverage of the sport includes segments, and entire shows, devoted to fantasy league nerds who root against their own teams if it earns them points.
Sports betting is hardly the most important issue we face. But it's one more leak in the dike, and we've only got so many fingers.
Looking back Over at the Nib, Eleri Harris and Mariah-Rose Marie M take a look back at the Occupation of Alcatraz of 1969, which, as they note, was not only a big deal at the time but a turning point in Indian self-awareness.
The occupation was, as the above panel notes, widely supported at least in theory because, while militants could have chosen any number of historical wrongs for action, this was based on treaty rights and, however unlikely the federal government was to stand by its promises, the tribes were making a valid claim.
In August, 1970, I picked up a young Pottawatomie coming home to Six Nations from the occupation and, when he found out I was going to be driving past Akwesasne, he changed his plans in order to go visit a place that never lost its sense of militant sovereignty. In the course of the ride, we had a very interesting conversation: Like other militants I've met since, he was very open about sharing his goals and beliefs.
Possibly because, like other militants I've met since, he wasn't trying to provoke a fight so much as he was insisting on standing his ground. I've dealt with members of the Mohawk Warrior Society as well as tribal historians, cultural experts and even school administrators, and I can't tell you where the line is between pride and militancy, because I think events like Alcatraz awakened an awareness that, if there ever was a line, erased it.
And they aren't looking for fans, just dignity.
I remember in roughly the same era a Navajo elder who came to campus and sat down with about 25 of us in a seminar room, and answered some questions about Indian culture in general and Navajo culture specifically, and finally asked us why we were trying to adopt these aspects of his culture when our own culture was more psychologically accessible to us and had great depths that we had not even begun to explore.
I think this cartoon does a nice job of explaining the specifics of what happened, but also of celebrating the cultural shift, both within the Indian community and in the wider community outside, that it brought about.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The G7 disaster has proven to be like the blind men and the elephant: Whatever aspect you seize upon, you're leaving out things that also matter and you're not completing the picture.
These three seem to sum up as much of the elephant as you can hope to capture, though it's still not one coherent piece.
Zyglis captures the bizarre lack of perspective and does it well. It's beyond rational belief that anyone could swap that inoffensive little beaver and that snarling, ferocious bear, but the truly appalling part is that Trump's delusions are shared by his loyal followers and, purportedly, by the lickspittles who went on yesterday's talking head shows to explain and defend him.
Meanwhile, Sack -- who actually drew this before the conference -- picks up on Trump's destructive, lunatic trade policies and, once again, it's not just that Trump would say such things but that nobody stands up to rein him in.
Trump even threatened to end all trade with G7 nations: “It’s going to stop — or we’ll stop trading with them. And that’s a very profitable answer, if we have to do it.”
That's not a profitable answer. It's an insane answer.
It's the answer of Putin's puppet and still leaves the question of why nobody is working to stem this tide of dangerous, imbecilic nonsense.
Which leaves us with Dave Granlund's prediction for the summit, and, if Kim isn't thinking this way, he's a bigger screwball than Trump.
I don't think that's possible.
"Foot identified, sir. It's one of ours."
Posted by: Kip W | 06/12/2018 at 12:03 PM