So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[tonyb]

^^^^
It's much the same for those in most any occupation that puts a person in the spotlight -- politics, show biz (I suppose professional sports falls into that category), broadcast journalism (which is often difficult to discern from show biz as well, alas).

 

[HudsonHawk]

2)As a guy who wants the government to do less, but do those things really well (and to raise taxes if necessary to pay to do these core things well) - education, a strong social net for the needy, police, etc. - sports stadiums shouldn't be on the list because the gov't has enough to do already and there is plenty of private money to pay for stadiums. The rub is that if "your" community takes that approach but "mine" doesn't, then the outcome will not make people happy. That's why I said I wish (it ain't gonna happen) all the communities would agree to say no more spending on sports stadiums.

But the government doesn't really have to do anything other than collect tax revenue (something they appear to do well) then write the check to a contractor. Sure there is some administrative effort, but it's pretty small potatoes in the larger picture. I don't think it's particularly onerous.

 

[HudsonHawk]

https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/207443

https://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~afenn/web/SPORTSECON05/EconImpact/EC390/newspaper_articles.htm

http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/1997/06/summer-taxes-noll

^^^^^
There are many, many others, by the way, prepared by academics with no dog in the fight. Indeed, it would seem likelier that the movie theaters have a greater positive economic benefit to their local communities.

And I could point to dozens of studies who say the opposite. Again, the numbers are real. The only thing that changes is how you slice them and then what you claim they mean.

 

[HudsonHawk]

You are putting words in my mouth. I just pointed out how absurd that argument becomes when it gets stretched to point you take it.

Oh, by the way, on this matter I am neither "out of touch" nor "hopelessly naive." Indeed, I am quite to the contrary. But then, you remain anonymous here, which leaves you less susceptible to the consequences of your insulting statements.

The you seem to fundamentally misunderstand. I'm not making that argument. I'm saying there are large groups who oppose all sorts of government tax and spend, including public schools. Their arguments are all basically the same.

As for being insulted, I'm certainly not the one to call you a chump and question your intelligence, which is what precipitated this exchange. And I'm far from anonymous. Please send me a private message and I'd be more than willing to discuss further on a one on one level.

 

[tonyb]

The you seem to fundamentally misunderstand. I'm not making that argument. I'm saying there are large groups who oppose all sorts of government tax and spend, including public schools. Their arguments are all basically the same.

As for being insulted, I'm certainly not the one to call you a chump and question your intelligence, which is what precipitated this exchange. And I'm far from anonymous. Please send me a private message and I'd be more than willing to discuss further on a one on one level.

I'm not misunderstanding your position at all. But you do stretch that position to a breaking point. Hell, there might be some benefit to the public in paving my street with gold, and I might get the neighbors to agree. And, as you put it, the argument is basically the same.

My comments regarding how pro sports franchises play their fans and their host municipalities for chumps (which they clearly do) were not directed at you personally, but you chose to put on that shoe. How's the fit?

 

[HudsonHawk]

I'm not misunderstanding your position at all. But you do stretch that position to a breaking point. Hell, there might be some benefit to the public of paving my street with gold, and I might get the neighbors to agree. And, as you put it, the argument is basically the same.

Again, I'm not stretching it. I'm not making it. I stated as clearly as possible, I don't agree with the argument, only pointing out that it's not unique to public funding of sports arenas. You insist on projecting it on me. So no, I don't think you understand my position at all.

My comments regarding how pro sports franchises play their fans and their host municipalities for chumps (which they clearly do) were not directed at you personally, but you chose to put on that shoe. How's the fit?

Poor. But let's recap:

You: If you're reasonably intelligent, you have to recognize you're a chump.

Me: I don't think I'm a chump. I'm making a fully considered decision.

You: There are worse things than being a chump.

I enjoy your posts, and agree with your thoughts most of the time. But clearly this has run its course. The last word is yours, if you want it.

 

[tonyb]

So you've spilled all these ones and zeroes on a position you don't share? You're just stating what some unnamed others say?

The most reliable data indicate that the benefit of these publicly funded sports facilities is dubious at best. And that's not even taking into account what we've seen lately -- teams abandoning facilities with less than 20 years on them, the public being saddled with paying for stadiums they actually turned down at the ballot box, et cetera.

Yup, they're playing us for chumps. Which is not to say I won't be attending. Other than the threat of relocating to some other city willing to be extorted, the franchises have given us no other reason to go along with this hustle. I say " enough." And I hope enough others grow a spine and say the same.

 

[Fading Fast]

But the government doesn't really have to do anything other than collect tax revenue (something they appear to do well) then write the check to a contractor. Sure there is some administrative effort, but it's pretty small potatoes in the larger picture. I don't think it's particularly onerous.

Done right, if the gov't is going to spend tens or hundreds of million of taxpayers dollars on a stadium, they need to do an extensive pre-investment cost-benefit, community impact study. Then, the bidding process for choosing a contractor would have to be robust, detailed, assessed and reviewed. Also, the financing aspect would take months of extensive consultation with investment bankers and, even, after all that is done, the work should be constantly measured against benchmarks to prevent overruns and time delays. Since all of that would have to be done in consultation with many parties, and consistent with robust policy and procedures and compliance policies, done right, it is an extremely taxing undertaking for a gov't in time, resources, people and focus.

And that's my point. The gov't has more than its hands full doing the things it has to do (and should do well) - fill the pot holes, feed and house the homeless, have aid available for those who have fallen on very hard times, help the mental ill, build and run schools that do a great job educating kids (absolutely making sure to including those kids from disadvantage areas), prevent crime and pick up the trash and a bunch more core functions of gov't. Sure, in a perfect world, the gov't could do all those things well and fund stadiums, but my view is that until it does those key things well, it shouldn't take on all the other things it does - like building stadiums - that the private sector can and will do and that are not a core gov't function.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I'm not sure how it works everywhere, but I think it's similar to here: A local, independent non-profit corporation is established with its own directors and governance structure. The involvement of the city (and in our case the county as well) is basically a financial commitment. Yes, there is some government administration, but it's not as if the public works department is doing the day to day planning or even participation. Its very much run like a private company enterprise in that sense. The role of the local government office is very, very minimal, and I don't believe it takes away from their ability to provide other city/county services.

At any rate, it's clear I'm in the minority here, and have already gotten crosswise with Tony, regrettably. I'll continue to support local professional sports (as well as public schools), and I know that others will oppose it. Different ideas in action.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

You know what ticks me off? People like my Old man who refuse to believe that the Civil War was first and foremost about slavery.

 

[Fading Fast]

You know what ticks me off? People like my Old man who refuse to believe that the Civil War was first and foremost about slavery.

From time to time, I've read that argument to and always think (and am not commenting on your Dad at all as I have no idea what his thought process is), that those arguments are too smart, too sophisticated, too nuanced for their own good. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sure, as always, there are multiple secondary forces at play and agendas at work in a war of that scale, but the Civil War, IMHO, was primarily about slavery.

 

[tonyb]

You know what ticks me off? People like my Old man who refuse to believe that the Civil War was first and foremost about slavery.

Jelani Cobb wrote perhaps the most concise and insightful critique of that "it wasn't really about slavery" argument in The New Yorker shortly after the mass shooting at that Charleston church about a year ago.

The gist of it, as I recall, was that for those prideful sons and daughters of the Confederacy, there's no denying their side lost the war, but they salve their injuries in the belief that their cause was a noble one.

It's hard for all but the hopelessly unreconstructed to sell the nobility of chattel slavery, so hey!, it was really about "states' rights!"

States rights to do what?, you might quite reasonably ask. To maintain the institution of slavery, of course.

Hard enough to lose the war, but to acknowledge that your ancestors died in a cause anything but noble is more than some people can do. Perhaps those still torn over losing a war a century and a half ago might look to modern Germany. Yup, we lost WWII, and we should have. Let's own up to that, in the knowledge that we can't bring back the innocent lives who died at our hands, and move forward. Let's learn from our dreadful mistakes, and not double down on them.

 

[HudsonHawk]

There are many things about being a Southerner that I love. The "noble cause" is not one of them. I have numerous ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and I find their stories fascinating from a personal and historical perspective, but there is no denying their cause was not noble in any way, it was evil and morally reprehensible. One need only to look at the various declarations of secession to know exactly what the South was fighting for. As the state of Mississippi declared: "our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery."

 

[tonyb]

I have little doubt that if those of us of European descent had been born in a Southern state a century and a half before we were, we, too, would have found the cause a noble one.

Which does nothing to ennoble the cause. But considering that likelihood might keep us from another moral failing -- that of finding ourselves superior without considering the experiences of those we might look down upon.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And I imagine a lot of fine Americans today, had they been born in Germany in the 1910s....

 

[BlueTrain]

Alas, but we had no choice about where we were born or into what family or "condition." And it is a rare individual who will rise above the age into which he was born. Some of my wife's ancestors and some of mine, too, served the South and it was entirely an accident of birth. There were choices involved, in some cases, of course. Lee for instance did not exactly choose the South or succession; his stated loyalty was with Virginia. Right or wrong, you might say.

Something that irritate me a little, and I've no doubt stated this before (I repeat myself a lot), is seeing someone wearing both a Confederate flag and a U.S. flag (pins) on his cap. It is as if the most loyal, most patriotic American is a rebel. I suppose in a twisted sense it exhibits a certain kind of freedom but a certain kind of schizophrenia, too. I'd never say that to anyone either to their face or behind their back, except maybe to my wife. My wife's grandmother's grandfather (one of them, that is) was adjutant general of the Confederate Army and had held the same post in the U.S. Army when Davis was Secretary of War, which I'm sure I've mentioned before. So he just went to work for his old boss. He was actually from New York but had married the granddaughter of George Mason.

If you had been born in Germany in the 1910s, it would still have been a Good Thing if you didn't happen to be born Jewish. I believe all the immigrants I knew as a child had been born overseas during that decade, too, mostly in Italy. Don't know why the came to West Virginia, or rather, I don't know why they left Italy. I do remember an elderly gentleman from Scotland that I knew 35 or 40 years ago who arrived in this country during the 30s and asked himself the same question. Why did I come here?

 

[Fading Fast]

And I imagine a lot of fine Americans today, had they been born in Germany in the 1910s....

I think about this regularly. I recently watched "Judgement at Nuremberg" and there is an insanely powerful moment when Spencer Tracey as the Allied Supreme Judge of the trial tells Marlene Dietrich, the widow of a German General who claims she and her husband "were not nazis but loyal Germans," that in all his time in Germany he has yet to meet a former nazi. I can tell myself all I want that I wouldn't have this or that had I been here or there in history, but who knows - plenty of people smarter and more aware than I were sucked into the nazi fold or were supporters of slavery in the South.

I try, not always successfully, to think about the cultural context and norms of the time when assessing people's behavior back in their day. This is part of why I'm put off by the current fad by some of smugly denouncing this country's Founding Fathers who were slave owners. I'm not offering an outright defense or saying criticism is wrong, but simply using today's standard to judge someone in the past and not considering the memes, standards and accepted conventions of the time is unfair as well.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's the same way everybody in France who was alive during the war claimed to have been in the Resistance -- once the war was over, that is.

And the paramount of idiocy, to me, is seeing some halfwitted Maine teenager driving around in a rusty pickup truck with an American flag and a Confederate flag lashed to the back, right above the rubber testicles hanging off the trailer hitch. Seeing things like this make me wish birth control could be made retroactive. That's not "working class pride," that's telling the world you're an illiterate nose-picking pinhead.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I do remember an elderly gentleman from Scotland that I knew 35 or 40 years ago who arrived in this country during the 30s and asked himself the same question. Why did I come here?

I know that at least some of my ancestors didn't come here from Scotland because they wanted to -- they were kicked out because they upset the Powers That Be. And you have to go some to do that in Scotland.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, there were the clearances, plus the attempt at colonizing Ireland. Most of the things mentioned here in the last dozen posts are still causes of trouble. As far as the founding fathers being slave owners, they were aware of the issue when they put their names to documents with a lot of high-sounding words that simply didn't apply to three-quarters of the population. But they weren't meeting with the express purpose of abolishing slavery, which they hoped would just go away on its own. They were there for a different reason, to create a new country, which was a difficult enough job to begin with. I wonder if there are people who could do that now, to put aside their differences and make enough compromises to get the new country on it's feet, and there were lots of compromises and things that just didn't work out. Remember, there had never been a national government before the first Continental Congress met and there were lots of people who spoke other languages here, too, which apparently didn't upset them as much as it does some people today.

It might shock some people to learn that a few states before the Civil War had a majority slave population.