Gary BUTTERWORTH Online

Stratford, NJ, USA

I haven’t posted that much in the past week.  Part of it might be laziness, but I really don’t have all that much to say anyway.

Well, let me re-phrase that.  I haven’t come up with many ideas to write about. 
Maryland Macaca, however, has. 
I mean, she has come up with ideas for to write about herself, but they have inspired me to write about the same thing! 

She has written several posts this week, and two of them were right up my alley. 
I ended up bascially hijacking her “comments” sections twice this week to essentially write full essays about my own views of her topics.

I thought I’d link them here, partly because her blog is worth reading in its own right, and partly because, this week, I’ve written more of my opinions on her site than I’ve written on my own!

On Wednesday, she talked about John Edwards. 
Now, I don’t have particularly strong feelings on Edwards one way or the other.  But the post touched on a number of broader issues (eg., education, economics, entitlements, globalization) that I think transcend politics and affect the basic lives of people in the US and around the world.
So, I left a LONG comment!

I think that we, the US people (and I’m not excluding myself here; I’m plenty guilty of it myself), have forgotten that the nature of capitalism is competition.
I think too many of us have come to expect an easy, comfortable, well-paying job with low barriers to entry as a right. MAYBE that was the case for our grandparents, but, in today’s world of 6 Billion, all of whom can communicate and thus compete against each other, it is certainly no longer the case. We need to accept that.

You can read her full post and the comments (including my full comment/outlook) here.

Then, last night, she wrote a post about soccer, violence, US sports fans, and their European counterparts.

Of course, this was also right up my alley, so I wrote a LONG explanation:

So, if i wanted to be brief (for once!), I guess I’d just say that soccer may be more likely to result in violence than other sports. The lack of soccer’s popularity here, combined with the lack of a group mentality among American spectators, and our vast geography, accounts for fewer incidents of hooliganism.
Is that a valid thesis?

If you’d like to see what else I have to say about that (and I have a lot to say!), check out MD.M’s post, here. 

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