I find that the board search functions work quite well if I want to maintain Czarcasm awareness. 
This appears to be addressed in part to other posters. Don’t do that.
Oh please, we don’t have to do political advocacy as part of sports. Did all of the Katrina coverage relating to New Orleans and their stadium require a very special moment where someone ranted about global warming and how it’s going to increase extreme weather?
Sports is fluff. We don’t need sportscasters thinking they’re wise giving us political advocacy. I say this across the board - I don’t want to hear Costas’ opinion on abortion because some phoenom athlete’s mother almost aborted him or something.
Besides, of all the aspects of the story, the gun part is the least related to the sports subject matter anyway. You could make stories out of aberrant behavior by people who get their brains rammed by semi trucks 50 times a week, or the possible influence of roids, or just in general the super macho highly competitive and yet priviledged status the elite athletes have. I don’t want Costas ranting about any of those either, but they would at least be relevant to the sports angle.
“Gun rights advocates are like muslims that send death threats or actually kill over images of Mohamed” is not an exageration designed to put up roadblocks and stop reasoned debate to you?
Since the thread is fully in hijack mode, I figured I’d add this little tidbit about suicide rates world wide, since I peripherally brought it up earlier and I’ve seen a couple posters post about it. Since guns are so free in the, you’d think we’d have one of the largest suicide rates in the world. Interestingly…we don’t. Many countries with strong gun control mysteriously have higher suicide rates than us Americans, with our ‘gun culture’. From here.
The US isn’t even in the top 20 countries (we are actually 38th…man, we can’t be number one at ANYTHING :eek:).
We got the olympics 
And who was it that brought up death treats or actually killing people? I merely said that like Muslims who get extremely upset when Mohammed is defamed, gun advocates got their panties in a twist over a one-minute commentary on television.
Shouldn’t that be “…Muslims who send death threats…?”
Cite, please? I’m not saying it wasn’t said, but I’m not looking over your shoulder as you browse the web and I might not have even seen the phrase in question. By the way, is this going to lead to you going all over the message board looking for supposedly objectionable phrases and saying “What about THIS one, huh? Why didn’t you object to THIS?”, is it? If so, then my response will be as follows:
“Grow up.”
Good grief, are we at that level of having to spell it out? Do I really have to take the exchange all the way back to SenorBeef @121 and work forward?
SB offered a few alternatives, BLD noted that one of them was true, and you confused or equated that one with one of the others. Zzzzz.
I don’t think the gun advocates are making much more of a fuss about a football half time segment as the anti-gun controllers are making about them having their guns? I mean so “they have their guns and it’s causing everyone else to die violent deaths and kill themselves” isn’t getting your panties in a bunch?.
Did you actually say, “Gun rights advocates are like muslims that send death threats or actually kill over images of Mohamed”?
Since you were responding to me, you merely have to answer my OWN questions. Is anyone trying to have him put in jail? No? Just calling for him to be fired? Oh…snore. That’s all?
So…who cares? Why do you think it’s important or even noteworthy? Answer…it’s not. Merely an appeal to emotion and the standard appeal to the board about evil right wingers doing something, which is what Bob was doing. Right?
No, I’m not going to follow you around. In fact I’m one of the least likely people on this board to try to do the tu quoque manufactured hypocrisy shit. But in this particular thread, I find your “oh I’m just above it all, I’m a wise sage here to facilitate rational debate” bullshit particularly obnoxious.
You want to do partisan sniping and selective outrage - fine. Sucks, but it’s par for the course. But don’t try to dress it up the way you have, trying to seem like you’re better than you are.
And no, sorry, I should’ve been more clear, I wasn’t directly quoting him. I shouldn’t have used quotation marks. But certainly saying that gun rights advocates are like muslims who become outraged is certainly meant to convey people who actually call out for harm to come to the person making the statements - that their actual freedom of speech should be nullified, and in extreme cases, people are killed over that shit. He confirms that this is what he means in his next sentence, in which he says gun rights advocates want to take away Costas’ freedom of speech.
Certainly that’s a more inflammatory description of the other side, more likely to stop reasoned debate, than what I said. Furthermore, my statement was an embellishment that loses no meaning if you replace it with a less objectionable term, whereas his statement essentially dissapears if you remove the inflammatory part. So I was trying to at least convey a point. He was just trying to insult the other side.
Having watched the Costas video, I can only conclude that what defines a ‘rant’ is ‘when someone says something I don’t want to hear.’
A calm, restrained mention of the connection between global warming and the likelihood of more Katrinas would certainly have been appropriate, sure. Even more so with the cancellation of the NYC marathon a few weeks back and the possibility of more storms like Sandy.
How is what Costas said political advocacy? What does he advocate for? I didn’t hear a proposal for action, just a statement of the obvious rather than a pretense that the elephant in the room wasn’t there.
And you keep bringing this personal crap in about how you know what I really mean when I ask questions and what my position really is when it comes to gun rights, and how my use of a phrase taken out of context last uttered back at the turn of the century allows you and a couple others to dismiss with contempt anything I say on the subject because I am…ANTI-GUN!!
Well, why did YOU find it worth responding to when Bob pointed out that people are trying to fire him?
Look, if you’re going to find something interesting enough to reply to, and I respond to you, it’s kinda silly for you to ask who cares, and go snore.
Anyway, this is getting too meta even for me, and I can deal with a lot of meta.
Yes, that would have been terrible for some reason. Don’t give me context, just tell me everything is good because football! This is hardly the first time sports has intersected with some larger political or cultural issue. Insisting the sports be kept rigidly separate from everything else is unrealistic and kind of myopic. I love sports but they’re not that important.
As a matter of fact, no. The quote was:
A tiny minority of Muslims do actual violence over such things, the vast majority just get truly pissed off.
Bemoaning the availability of guns in the context of how we’re going to prevent these tragedies and not just forget about them is clearly advocacy, even if he doesn’t say “vote for house bill 1033!”
Costas regularly oversteps his bounds, apparently thinking he wants to be a real journalist about something important and he’s bitter that he’s getting paid millions to cover sports fluff. I know you think I’m raging over how dare someone mention guns, but I get more roll-eyes over sports journalists thinking they’ve got the gravitas for political advocacy more than the issue. I’d have rolled my eyes if he somehow spun a pro-gun message out of it. It was out of place either way.
At the time it happened, I didn’t even really give a shit anyway, it’s only because someone specifically started a thread about it. My first post talks about my disdain of injecting this stuff into sports, and barely touches on gun control.