Posts by giovanni tiso
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How you doin'?
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The sporting examples you give are unrelated to any of this, but I look them up and,the reaction to the spiteful outburst by a Canadian player is was huge public opprobrium for his remarks in Canada, and a milder disapproval in the US.
You also oddly left out the part where a Canadian player nearly murders an opponent and is met by the huge opprobrium of being selected for the Olympic team. I remain somewhat baffled by the selective approach, and saying that sports is a business therefore doesn't count makes no sense. However I am now working on a "there is no sexism in Italy" theory that I will propose to you all real soon.
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Bobby Hull, most famously. I'm still a bit befuddled that Bertuzzi is not a pertinent counter-example though. He commits aggravated assault on an opponent and doesn't so much as lose his place in the national team. The fact that Steve Moore wasn't a woman or a child doesn't seem that much of an extenuating circumstance to me.
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As for this guy... Patrick Kane ... he's not Canadian.
Ops. Hehe... yes.
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Unrelated, but Danyl has discovered that Lhaws' mystery woman has her own blog.
Not only unrelated, but frankly, who cares?
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...but this struck me as a completely different league of difficult for the public to fogive this ...
brutal killing of his five-month daughter Jeanette.
You'll note I never defended that decision nor claimed that the NZ public would get up in arms about something like that. Just that there are well-documented instances of machismo and tolerance of bullying in both cultures.
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Im not sure the parallel between middle aged women at a cocktail party and the hockey viewing public in Canada is quite... comprehensible to me.
I took your general point to be that insofar as bullying existed at all in Canada, it was met with near-universal derision. And I think it's not unreasonable to counter that claim by pointing to hockey culture - where machismo, sexism and racism are rife. I appreciate that you don't follow it, but you can't ignore it exists, surely. And it is about as small and insignificant an aspect of the national psyche as rugby is in New Zealand, by all accounts.
Nor did I read in any of the crap I looked up anything that suggested that the Canadian public supported either the first player's tacky outburst or the second player's violent act. But I am quite open to correction on that point, if you can be bothered to find it and post it. A poll perhaps?
If you won't take my word for it (amazingly, I didn't file those discussions from 2004) I point you quite simply to the fact that Bertuzzi was selected for the Canadian team in both 2005 and 2006, at the Olympics. (As indeed was Patrick Kane last year, after assaulting and robbing a taxi driver who didn't have $1.20 change for his fare).
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Those wot has money are middle class, those wot has none are lower, and filthy rich scum are upper class. If you manage to fit in with any of these groups in spite of your income, good for you.
Except it's not just income. As I said, my father earned probably less money than my mother, but always saw himself as a businessman and an employer (which he was). He was a burgeoise, albeit far from a wealthy one, and that made material differences to his social and political outlook. (Also, there was no union available to him, but rather a cooperative which - again - was essentially an employers' federation.)
That said, these days people in all kinds of work are treated more and more like self-employed free agents simply in order to ensure that they can be accessed on tap. But I would still hesitate to just use income as a measurement. The measure of the upper middle class it's also that it can choose to forgo employment for extended periods - say, when the children are little - because of the expectation that they will make up for it later. Supermarket packers in those years may have a greater income than the voluntarily unemployed professional, but their long-term prospects are very different.
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And the reaction from the Canadian sporting body...
Er... the NHL is not the Canadian sporting body! It's a league comprising for the most part US teams. The NHL actually came down on Bertuzzi reasonably hard, but if you followed Canadian hockey forums or media in those days at all you'd know there were people quite literally falling over themselves to say that what he had done wasn't so bad. And the actual Canadian sporting body saw fit to keep selecting him for the national team, including the 2006 Olympics.
But what women and their ways have to do with hockey players on the ice escapes me... really different situations.
Bullying doesn't just happen to women, and what Kyle and I have been trying to argue is that the behaviour of Messrs Avery and Bertuzzi is actually more tolerated in Canada than it is in the US, if anything.
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