Dr John Dee

Please Jack, stop it. I was there too, well for some of it anyway. It's just too painful to remember given everything else that's happened since. When does nostalgia give us a warm inner glow? When do the nightmares stop? Sorry, forgot the medication.

What on earth do you think I was trying to do with extended efforts to point out the problems in your arguments, particularly your taste for reductionism? But once again you’re conflating comments about your arguments (such as they are) with personal criticism of you. Haven’t done that. Once again, all I’ve addressed is what you’ve said and what sense that does or doesn’t make. Didn’t tell you to leave anywhere. Just said a thread without your travestying the arguments of others would be nice. And that was about how you characterise and misinterpret the words of others in your postings, not about who you are. Given the number of times you attribute attitudes to me in your last posting it seems impossible for you to differentiate between comments on words and comments on their writer. That’s not my problem, it’s yours. Still, if you want to characterise as patronising and condescending my pointing out problems with your arguments and/or (in the case of puerile) explaining my own words, go right ahead. And inflate your sarcasm as much as you can, too, but all you’re doing is producing one more turn on your insistence on reducing anything anyone else says to your own terms. But I suppose, to risk another accusation of condescension: perhaps you ought to read the beginning of my comments on culture a bit more carefully. I said I was only providing a thumbnail version. The word you might be looking for is tautological, or, perhaps totalising, because that’s how it is with culture: as I said, it's everything we do to express who we are. Unlike solipsism, which is a characteristic of persons, singular persons of course, not arguments, and relies on refusing to acknowledge anyone or anything else except in the solipsist’s own terms. Much like the way you seem to go about things, I guess, or I would guess if I existed. One last thing: you didn’t question Barry Hall’s “integrity” you questioned his sanity.

Actually I said it was your arguments that were puerile and simpleminded. Didn’t say a thing about you, don’t know you from a duck’s bum. Didn’t use the word simpleton, either. That’s your turn on my words, which were trying to make observations about you logic, into descriptions about you. Of course I’m tempted to dust off the old cliché about caps fitting and so on, but I wouldn’t be that cheap. Didn’t say you equated Swans culture with success either. I did offer a kind of formula to describe what seemed to be your belief that repeated, inane questions like “So culture is about having lost then winning?” and so on ad nauseum, amounted to some kind of argument. It doesn’t. It’s an attempt to prosecute a reductio ad absurdum, but to do that you’ve got to know the logic of someone else’s argument. If you don’t, and you don’t (or at least you don’t show any signs of being able to acknowledge the full dimensions of what anyone else has had to say), it just ends looking inept. I know Dr Gonzo has already asked you about your basic capacities with comprehension (which, perhaps tellingly, you didn’t bother responding to) but to turn what I’ve said into some suggestion that your “what about this win? What about that loss?” is my saying what you believe, is simply boggling. I wasn’t doing anything more than pointing out how puerile … yes puerile … that sort of reduction of others’ more comprehensive (and comprehensible) positions to a simpleminded … yes, simpleminded … cause/effect equation actually was. No one that you have dumped on throughout this thread has ever proffered “culture” or “good culture” or “Swans’ culture” as the singular and immediate cause of grand final success. They’ve suggested it’s one factor, and an important one at that (a necessary but not sufficient cause as the philosophers are wont to say). And FWIW I agree with them. Talk about misrepresention. Meanwhile you can call other posters, who want to talk about the importance of “culture” on this thread, idiots; and you can defame Barry Hall into the bargain. And that’s all ok is it? I make no apologies for using a word like puerile. Check its meanings in a dictionary some time. I presume you didn’t bother (it’s more convenient to puff up your outrage if you don’t know what someone else has actually said, let alone what they’ve said it about … but then that’s a characteristic of all your posts, whether there’s outrage attached or not). Puerile comes from the Latin puer, a boy. Puerile logic is juvenile logic, unpractised, boyish. As a description of your arguments it probably ought to be taken as a compliment, because it suggests there is in fact some logic to the way you prosecute your case when there isn’t. So the only thing I really need to apologise for is giving you enough oxygen to find one more way to splutter the same old nonsense. At the risk of doing that all over again, I think I have to make a couple of other points about all this culture stuff that you think you’re aguing about or against or whatever: i. your claims that amount more or less to saying that all it takes is good players, commitment to training, will to win blah blah itself assumes all sorts of cultural values and beliefs (we could start with the idea of the heroic individual if you like and go on from there but I see no point in providing an inventory). You can’t really reduce, marginalise or dismiss the relevance of culture in what others are talking about while you depend entirely on your own unexamined cultural position and the perspectives you hold as a result (which, sorry to mention this, are likely to be in good measure based on myths as well, like the sort of Ayn Randish tomfoolery that underwrites current versions of the heroic individual, for example); ii. without going into detail about this, nobody on this thread is using the word “culture” with anything like the full scope it actually has. One useful thumbnail definition of culture that tries to encompass that scope is “the way of life of a people” but it needs to be added that the cultural part is not just the way of life but how that way of life is expressed (hence art, music, football games are acts of culture) … and so culture is something that, in its totality, says “this is who we are” of a people or group because “this is how we do things”. Far from something insubstantial, intangible and so on, it’s actually the very fabric of everything any group or tribe or organisation does. A football club’s culture is much the same: the word names everything the club does, everything that can be identified as expressing “this is who we are”. Most of it, the routine, day to day stuff, would have to be examined pretty closely to distinguish it from what any other club does (that doesn’t stop it being cultural, though, all clubs are part of larger cultural circuits: the AFL, the business community). But there’s something else, a point of difference that can be developed between clubs, something the Swans (and not just the Swans) have managed to parlay into their identity in this “for the Bloods” thing. It’s not actually the whole of the Swans’ culture and it probably doesn’t entirely sum up who the Swans actually are or what the club stands for in toto. But it’s a shibboleth, as I said before, it’s a touchstone, it’s a way of identifying what the team “is”, how the team plays, how it’s expected to play. “Culture” probably isn’t the best word for it, but it’s one way of condensing, crystallising a far broader (and, yes, difficult to name) sense of what the club wants to be seen as standing for, how the team is expected to play to express a sense of “this is who we are.” I’d prefer to call it team identity, but that’s neither here nor there. However we describe it, it works as a way of organising the team, of giving them a sense of “who/what we’re playing for”, of naming something like a common cause (and if you don’t think that some way of expressing that isn’t important in how a team goes about things on the ground I’m glad I never played in one with you). You may think that a win, a premiership is an end in itself … but for the Swans, what they’ve done is find a way to say that a win is for something (let’s win one for the Gipper, as Ronnie Reagan used to say). That is, a premiership is for something, not just the players, not just the team, not just the club (and not even just for the Gipper, either). And it says something about who they are, which includes the fact that they're dual premiership winners in the last decade. Oh, and one other thing about “culture” and how a team expresses it: a strong club or team culture can be sustained even through long years of failure or underachievement; it guarantees nothing on the field other than that the players will try (whether they’re good enough to do so or not) and try to fulfil the expectations they’ve been given for themselves. The difficulty with years of failure is that they can erode whatever belief a team might have in itself, in the club and its traditions and identity and so on; they're years that can accustom players to lower their expectations and then to become satisfied with whatever approximations they can muster in meeting those diminished expectations. I hate to say it but this seems to be what’s happened to the MFC of late, although others have named different internal club issues as factors too. Whatever the causes, the erosion of the club’s sense of itself, of any apparent capacity to articulate a common cause, should be the real question for us … and learning from the success of the Swans, the Hacks, the whoevers, ought simply to be a necessary and understood part of whatever self-examinations the club goes through. Merely trying to argue away what the Swans themselves take to be a crucial aspect of their success I called smug and lazy before. It’s more than that, though, it’s an astonishing level of arrogance that guarantees one thing: continued failure. Those who refuse to learn from history … blah blah As others have already added to this thread, this sense of who we are, what we’re playing for (our “culture”) and how we express it is a really hard question given the trough we’re in. Right now it might even seem insurmountable … at least if trivial gestures like blazers are meant to give us common cause, an identity, to say who we think we are. I suspect we might even need a different thread, a thread free of your insistence on travestying everyone else’s positions with pointless reductions and misrecognitions, and of the pointless hope in waiting for a few good players to tell us who we think we are just by playing a few good games. I suspect we need to ask, to paraphrase Lara Bingle, "who the bloody hell are we?"

I suppose the least that can be said for you is that you've given up on the stupidity of trying to disavow the existence of a club's 'culture' and retreated to an attempt to attack the Swan's version of it. But you haven't given up the reductionist logic that runs through everything you've deposited on this thread, most obviously in your puerile equations that can be expressed as: premiership = good culture, losing = bad culture/no culture. But you can go on trying to 'demonstrate' that the Swans don't have the culture they say they have till you're red and white in the face. While your 'proofs' rely on the same level of reductive thinking, they prove nothing much at all. There's a long history to their efforts to reform Barry Hall and other 'troubled' players which your self-justifying summary overlooks. They also got rid of Hall, I think you'll find (though, according to you he'd gone 'insane' by then. Curiously, the Bulldogs didn't seem to notice that but I hope you get the chance to tell him some time). And, sure, leadership groups 'set standards'. The operative word there is 'set'. The cultural thing is about the kind of belief the whole team has in those standards, and how they enact them on the oval, as well as what those standards express of an idea about the club and its values. But it's about the Bloods that you haven't got a clue. Your efforts at dismissing the influence of this because of South Melbourne's history is another effort to prosecute your simpleminded equation of culture with success. The revival of the idea/identity of 'the Bloods' was, in fact, precisely about that history and that lack of success. They were at it again on the weekend, grabbing the microphone and yelling 'for the Bloods'. That's for the Bloods. It's a recuperation of history, an expression of solidarity and continuity with those old teams that allows present victories to overcome the failures of the past; and more importantly it's a gesture of solidarity with all those followers who remember the old South Melbourne and its various failures and stuck with the Swans regardless. It probably also helps them bundle up the failures of the early Sydney Swans (when, in Paul Roos' words about us, they stood for nothing) and get rid of them as well. Of course it's mythological. It's an idea, an invention. It's BS as Pitmaster wants to call it. But it works because it has also become a shibboleth, a word that marks membership of their group and sums up the values they've chosen to believe in, to 'buy into'. And it's one of the things they use to motivate themselves, to follow their leadership group rather than just listen to them. But go on dissing the Swans and their culture. It's a useful way of ignoring the problems with ours, even if it's also just a bit smug and lazy ... oh, but then that's what we're supposed to be, isn't it?

Oh, sorry, since this thread was originally about $cully I just assumed Roberts was another one of those beat-ups with no substance to him ...

Didn't Sheeds say last night that, as an entirely fabricated entity, GWS has first claim on all fictional recruits and Melbourne can just keep their hands off Roberts?

Haven't had mine for that long, so I'm not sure.

Yes, I know, everything was better in the past. Even the bollocks were bigger then.

Check what Frenzy said. He didn't call people naysayers, he called naysayers naysayers.

School teachers all being the same, of course.

Or Tex's Chainsaw Massacre

Not sure the metaphor really works: (a) Ratten's not dead; (B) he is the asset. Unless the body going cold is Carlton ...

Where was Deestar's claim to being a higher being? Maybe this sort of instant upscaling of comment into argument/abuse has a bit to do with his (?) declining sense of enjoyment.

Has he been up there just to have a look round yet? If not, take a deep breath, relax. The whole $cully experience has people not only jumping at shadows but inventing them as well.

And didn't Chris look threatening into the bargain? Good thing Gerard's an old man now. As for integrity, well, it's the media, integrity is other people's business. The one that got to me was later (yes, I have no idea why I was watching it) when Mike and Roosie both dismissed the fact of Melbourne's eight goals in a row against the Saints as 'academic'. Sheahan talking cr@p I can understand, he wouldn't know the top of a Sherrin from the bottom. But sure, Roosie would have taken that attitude as a coach if anyone had kicked eight in a row against the Swannies? That's alright lads, it's only eight, cue in the rack, all that sort of thing. But as a media flack things is different now.

Following the usual line of diminutives wouldn't it have to be Molonie? You're right, nah One thing that strikes me, though, is that the main arguments for keeping him are based on sentiment (he was good once, we can't just throw him away etc) or experience. But doesn't FA change the experience horizon? We can just buy in experience now, or at least very soon. So the question is probably more about whether Moloney is a better option than whoever else might be available.

The smartarsery seems to be directed more at the effort to make something newsworthy out of a rookie leaving a club, seeing it as another opportunity to hint at something negative about MFC. Or maybe the Dees aren't quite as irrelevant as old Roosie thinks.

But why is he wearing the new Essendon away strip?

Tanks for noticing. Sorry, I'll stop it now.

Good to know that you think there are hierarchies here, Jnr. Better to know that nobody else seems to. But I'd better get back in my place, just in case.

Yay, I've made the magic number.

Which is what Brock says he was asked to do, isn't it? So he should be able to come up with names, dates, details. A bit of proof, sort of thing ...

Oh, no, is there a pecking order here? Do newbies (such an old fashioned word) have to be quiet and deferential? How many posts qualify us to make a noise?

I guess that's more where my question was going, which if I rephrased it would be: is Denham just an idiot or is he somebody's idiot?

I think "for what it's worth" pre-empts your response, doesn't it? But I wonder if there's another question about whether these sorts of rumours have any effect (disinformation etc). I don't get to read the Melbourne press much, so I'm not sure.