Men As Slaves

Steeler Player Calls NFL Commisioner A "Devil"

NEW YORK  — Heavily fined Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison calls NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell a “crook” and a “devil,” among other insults, in a magazine article.

The 2008 AP Defensive Player of the Year hasn’t been shy about ripping the league after he was docked $100,000 for illegal hits last season. In the August issue of Men’s Journal, his rants against Goodell reach another level of wrath.

“If that man was on fire and I had to piss to put him out, I wouldn’t do it,” Harrison told the magazine. “I hate him and will never respect him.”

His other descriptions of the commissioner include an anti-gay slur, “stupid,” “puppet” and “dictator.”

If the Steelers had defeated the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl, Harrison said, he would have whispered in Goodell’s ear during the trophy ceremony: “Why don’t you quit and do something else, like start your own league in flag football?”

Harrison also criticizes other NFL execs, Patriots-turned-commentators Rodney Harrison and Tedy Bruschi (“clowns”), Houston’s Brian Cushing (“juiced out of his mind”) — and even teammates Rashard Mendenhall and Ben Roethlisberger for their performances in the Super Bowl loss. Harrison questions whether a black player is punished more for a hard hit on a white player than the opposite.

Beyond the insults, Harrison makes some serious points about what he believes are the league’s misguided attempts to increase safety. He explains how non-guaranteed contracts make players more likely to hit high, because in the short term, a torn knee ligament is more costly than a concussion.

And Harrison suggests the real way to prevent head injuries is to shorten the season to 14 games, start offseason workouts later and trim the length of training camp so “we’re not bangin’ heads so much in August; that’s where the brain trauma comes from.”

RELATED STORIES

Pittsburgh Steeler Refuses Presidential Visit

NFL Players Say Goodell Attempted To ‘Divide’

Damn he’s fine!

*AHEM*…Now onto the topic….

He called this man stupid, crook, devil, thief, puppet, dictator, and said if Goddell was on fire he wouldn’t piss on him to put him out! But y’all KNOW his career is all but over because he called the man a F****T as well….

More black men imprisoned than were slaves? | Hanlon's Razor

Historically, the criminal justice system has targeted African American males in a manner that defeats mathematical logic. Now, data suggest the unthinkable — that there may be more African American males incarcerated currently than there were in the bondages of slavery. A U.S. Bureau of Justice Department report estimates that, as of 2008, there were more than 846,000 black men in prison.  This figure accounted for more than 40 percent of all inmates in correctional facilities.

In the interest of brevity, let me just throw numbers around rather than doing any unnecessary elaboration.

Now, realizing that the 1.85mil doesn’t account for at any given time, but rather a “range”, not to mention it only talks importation and doesn’t touch how many slaves were born in the US during that time, that may be a fair assumption that everything will even out somewhere in that area. So even in absolute numbers things are wrong.

Even ignoring that, though, there’s one problem: it doesn’t take any proportions into account.

Using the 1.85mil figure, we can do the following…

The problem is that this is a completely meaningless statistic. I’m not going to tell anyone that blacks aren’t unfairly represented in prison populations, all I’m saying is that this is a useless factoid to throw around, because even if it WERE true that there are more blacks in prison now, the black population has increased more than tenfold since then, making it a misleading absolute number. Meanwhile, if we take the percentages, obviously things are much better now.

They aren’t rosy, and if I run the numbers in terms of which races are represented the most in prison things are in dire need of remedy, but please. Let’s not muddle things with bad stats. Numbers don’t lie, but the people who use them often do.

Men, not slaves, to the "editor of the Indicator" ...

Ckiara Song of Men Slaves

Old men, young men, and slaves, a study of some stock types in Shakespeare's comedies

A Slave No More, Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation

Public opinion