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He lied to us when he said he would oppose the FISA sellout bill. Then he supported it. I hate him.

obama | fisa |tqwhite # Comments (View)

The New England Patriots have been living up to the Bush definition of their name. They violated the rules of football by videotaping their opponents signals. Low-life Mark Bowden says those of us offended don't get it. Cheating is part of the game. The only goal is winning. Nobody gets a prize for anything else.

I hereby declare: Mark Bowden is a creep. He is wrong.

In this context there are two things, games and reality. In reality, we do whatever it takes to win. Sometimes, we chop the limbs off of children to warn people not to resist. Sometimes we trick poor people with little education to sign papers that give one the right take their house if you decide to raise the price of their mortgage. In reality, the actions and consequences are extremely complicated, unlimited and, sometimes, awful.

Games, on the other hand, are a respite. We keep reality out of them. We make rules that have nothing to do with physics or natural selection because we want to want an activity that is more interesting (because it is limited and predictable) than reality.

Games are nothing more than rules. We have a word, "cheating", that refers to people that are involved in a game that willfully violate the rules to seek their own advantage.

In basketball, a foul is actually a play. Though the rules prohibit knocking a guy down, even if you think he is about to get a point, Coaches, commentators and fans applaud the adroit use of a foul.

This has always struck me as weird. A game has no existence beyond the fact that there are rules. A chessboard without rules is stupid. Move the bishop horizontally, why not. Ignore it when your opponent takes your king. Who cares?

The point is that games are all about rules. Ignoring the rules means you are not playing the game. You are simply living. When your opponents are playing the game and you are just pretending to, it's dishonest and unethical.

Mark Bowden tells us that people have always cheated in the football industry. Yuck. That doesn't make it right and it reduces my already limited respect for the people that play it. He uses the term "kerfuffle" to trivialize the violation that Belichick and the Patriots committed.

On the contrary, to the extent he is right about the long-standing condition of the game, the Patriots activity is another step on the path to destruction. There is no game if there are no rules.

ps, I think the idea that our Congress would get involved is way stupid. There are things to do that are important. Football is not important.

tqwhite|tqwhite # Comments (View)