Anatomy of a slow-moving scandal: Canada's 2018 WJ hockey team
The "World Juniors", the under-20 international hockey championship, is probably the third-biggest sporting event for Canadians after the NHL playoffs and the Olympics. Played immediately after Christmas each year, it gets massive TV ratings as people are home for the holidays. It helps that Canada wins more often than not, though its hold on being the undisputed champion of ice hockey becomes more precarious year-by-year. The brightest stars of junior hockey in Canada are often already household names before they go onto their professional careers, and people look back at certain years with specific fondness for their wealth of talent, in particular the 2005 team.
Well no one is going to look back at the 2018 team with much fondness: five of its members have been ordered to surrender to police to face charges for the gang rape of a woman after a celebratory gala in June 2018 to commemorate their victory. The move towards criminal prosecution has been somewhat glacial; an investigation was briefly opened in February 2019, but was closed and the story never reached the press. In 2022 the victim sued Hockey Canada; they settled with her out of court, and it was this settlement that sparked media attention as news of the incident had never reached the public. The settlement ignited a real public scrutiny on Hockey Canada, which was revealed to have a special unmarked fund for compensating victims of sexual assault by its players, and using government funds to do so. The criminal case into the affair was re-opened, and the problem of sexual assault within Hockey Canada and hockey culture in general became a national debate.
Hockey culture is kind of weird. I grew up somewhat alongside it; I was good enough to play rep hockey, but my parents were too busy for it so apart from a summer when I was 12 I never got too deep into it. But I knew the guys who played AAA or junior hockey and a few future NHLers, and I got enough taste of the locker-room culture to put me off it. It's really not too dissimilar, from my understanding, to the culture of similar macho, competitive sports like American football; a mix of jokes and pranks and lighthearted misogyny and homophobia (with an undercurrent of repressed homoeroticism). For the really competitive teams hazing was common and could get quite severe, bordering on sexual assault of new players. If you're a really good player (not necessarily a future NHLer, but maybe a pro in Europe or somewhere) you leave your family at 14 or 15 to go play junior hockey in the CHL. Education is very much a lesser priority, you probably don't go to university, and there's generally few people telling you you're anything but hot shit. If you make it to the Canadian WJ team you're practically a national celebrity if only for a brief period of time. I think all of these things add together in not necessarily the most wholesome of ways.
So that this kind of scandal would happen, or that it would be swept under the rug only to eventually reappear later, is not entirely shocking. "Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal a real shock to anyone who has never met a junior hockey player" says The Beaverton, the Canadian equivalent of The Onion, and yeah that pretty much sums it up.
Since the coming to light of the incident in 2022 there's been a flurry of speculation about who might have done it: my understanding was only two of the players (including superstar Cale Makar) had airtight alibis as far as internet sleuths could tell. Every time news came out about one of the 2018 WJC players there was speculation it was somehow linked: a player being traded, or not being re-signed by their team, or rumours about locker room problems, etc. My team (the Ottawa Senators) didn't re-sign a player, Alex Formenton, from the 2018 WJC who had had a good season the year before, and so speculation swirled that everyone behind the scenes knew what was up. There have apparently been a few hunches confirmed: in the past day and a bit five players have been announced by their teams to be taking "indefinite leaves of absence." All five were semi-regular NHLers (except for the aforementioned Formenton who was now playing in Italy). I wonder whether there will be pushback against the teams that employed them, presumably knowing this was coming for a while.
There's no statute of limitations in Canada (except for treason, bizarrely: 3 years!). Presumably the London Police feel they have a strong enough case here: besides the woman there were apparently three others who saw and did not take part. As of yet I've seen no sort of arguments that the alleged victim was lying or something, but there are some conflicting details and perhaps more that will emerge as prosecution moves further along. This is after all what the criminal justice system is for. So as of yet this case has sort-of ignited a culture war debate, without yet succumbing to culture war neuroses quite yet. The last big sexual assault case that got national attention in Canada was gigantic clusterfuck (Jian Ghomeshi, if you're interested) and pretty badly damaged the credibility of the media. We'll see where this goes.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
johnfabian
3mo ago
If the Western Allies had refused to ally with the Soviet Union, there would have been no war between Germany and Western Europe.
I cannot fathom what you mean by this. Like I cannot tell if you are being deliberately dishonest or if you have a perplexing, gigantic gap of knowledge. Who was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed by? Who made a deal split Poland, and all Eastern Europe? Who was allied right up until the point tanks began crossing the border on June 22 1941? Because it sure as shit wasn't the western allies and the Soviets.
johnfabian
3mo ago
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.
johnfabian
3mo ago
The communists needed the liberals much more than the other way around. If the western allies had refused to help the Soviets at all and the Germans beat them, Berlin and Hamburg and Frankfurt are still piles of radioactive ash come September 1945.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Liberalism is only successful because its adherents truly believe in it and cannot imagine anything else. The second it's regarded as anything other than an inevitable endpoint, or universal truth, is when it is going to fail.
I think you underestimate the strength of liberalism. In the darkest days of 1940-41 when it was Britain alone against Germany, many were happy to write it off as an annoyingly obstinate but ultimately dead ideology. Yet the liberal democracies ended up thrashing the autocracies; not only crushing them under the weight of the combined outputs of the arsenals of democracy but ultimately converting them as well.
Perhaps liberalism will wither and decay. Perhaps some other, superior, more evolutionarily fit ideology will take its place. But I'm not betting against it just yet.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I often think of liberalism as a bell jar: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is essentially no competing world view that people in the west are exposed to. Everyone they meet are some kind of liberal. Liberals call each other "liberals" as an insult. The "communists" are really liberals, the "alt-right" are really liberals, when you scratch beneath whatever surface label they've applied to themselves all you find is a liberal. On the one hand this is a reflection of the blinding success of liberalism but also has resulted in a significant weakening of liberalism as an effective mode of governance.
To treat liberalism as an inevitable endpoint, or a universal truth, or some manifestation of the underlying laws of the universe; it undermines what made liberalism triumphant and successful.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Tai-Pan is also imo quite inferior compared to its "sequel", Noble House
johnfabian
4mo ago
At present Israel could take the rest of the Arab world by itself with little difficulty. It's no longer 1970; they've far outstripped their immediate contemporaries in ways they did not expect. If they had anticipated the economic state of their rivals they would not have ceded all the land they did for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, etc.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Also working "outside the home" was not the only kind of work - it's easy to think of being a homemaker in the 21st century as just essentially being a glorified doer-of-chores, but apart from the idle rich women who worked at home were near-constantly busy with domestic tasks. Before the advent of the commercial washing machine, laundry was an enormously labourious task. Sewing and mending clothing was the norm. Food preparation was much more involved and complicated. Work at home, depending where one lived, also involved a myriad of tasks ancillary to agriculture, or forms of cottage industry.
johnfabian
4mo ago
The book I'm reading is the second volume of a 2018 translation of his gulag stories.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Finished Prit Buttar's Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany's Eastern Front, 1944-45. The endgame of the Eastern Front tends to get short shrift in popular history with the exception of the capture of Berlin, and this is a very interesting book about a very messy series of campaigns. A must-read for lovers of war crimes.
Currently reading a collection of dissident (leftist) Soviet author Varlam Sharlamov, called Sketches of the Criminal World. More grim stuff, but quite darkly humourous at times.
johnfabian
4mo ago
That may be tolerable for someone who wasn't Netanyahu. Netanyahu built his image on being the Great Defender, while simultaneously burning his political capital with his corruption and mismanagement. Maybe another leader could've weathered the storm in trying to show restraint, but Netanyahu had to strike back disproportionately. Every Palestinian killed works towards rebuilding his position.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I think it was likely that political pressures in Israel meant that a primarily non-violent response would not have been acceptable. Yes, Israel could have used the rush of international sympathy as diplomatic capital, but Israelis want a lot of Palestinians to die for this, and would vote for whoever promised that.
johnfabian
4mo ago
The Trudeau government has been particularly bad (or deliberately bad?) at anticipating second-order effects.
johnfabian
4mo ago
A couple months ago I took this screenshot of the-then top posts for that day in /r/canada. Was an effective summary of the malaise we're in
johnfabian
4mo ago
Yes, but the different colonies aren't separated by skin colour/race; as far as I can remember they all run the gamut. In that respect it maps better on to debates surrounding free trade and western "exploitation" of developing nations rather than racial identity politics within western countries, especially with the talk of Zarek and his ilk as "freedom fighters" vs. terrorists
johnfabian
4mo ago
A brief retrospective on the Battlestar Galactica reboot:
So I saw the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. This interested me for a few reasons: firstly, I'm getting old. This was the first TV show I was actively a "fan" of, and as a young teenaged boy it was everything I could have wanted. Timing-wise, it aired in the last heyday of the network TV drama: before the writer's strike of 2007-08 that would see the bifurcation of television into cheap reality shows and "prestige" (but relatively little-watched) cable dramas. As such the show ever tries to balance itself between the seriousness of its concept and demands for mass appeal with 20+ episode seasons. But it also served as a sort of test case for the rebooted franchise, a phenomenon you may have observed has become more common in recent years. It is also not dissimilar to the slew of comic book movies in that it took a somewhat childish and cheesy media property aimed at children and "updated" it for adults. So in many respects it's interesting to see it again as a portent of the shape of things to come.
So I sat down and watched the miniseries, and then a bunch of episodes from season 1. It's still great, and although it collapsed into nonsense later in its four season run it's still very much worth a watch. Don't worry about spoilers here, I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you're interested then don't google anything. The characters are rich, the plotlines imaginative, the music might be the best ever composed for the small screen, and the special effects look great (especially for a constrained budget). And when the show fails, it does so trying to swing for the fences... or in an attempt to please network execs.
It's an interesting look back in time from a culture war standpoint, because it is a show very much of its time. It mines pretty heavily the feelings of post-9/11 America (though like almost all low-budget sci-fi, is staffed almost entirely by Canadians). There's an alternating sense of paranoia and simultaneous togetherness that runs through everything. The show muses repeatedly about the nature of overlapping civilian and military governance, and the appropriateness of how either might extend their power given the situation. The Iraq War of course provided inspiration no science fiction show could pass up, but the show generally opted for much more interesting parallels, and ones that you might not expect.
You might not also expect how little the ripped-from-the-headlines controversies resemble the culture wars of today. Take for instance the sex-swap of fan favourite, hotshot pilot "Starbuck", who was now a woman in the rebooted series. This is the sort of thing that has become a rote controversy in current media adaptations; inevitable long youtube rants about "wokeness" and trillion-dollar companies playing the victim ensues. There was a minor, albeit passionate outcry at the time, but was pretty solidly squashed by how well the show pulled it off, in part because the show makes no attempt to treat it as significant or lecture the audience. In fact there's almost no gender-war elements at play in the series, and the only one of note I can remember again does not play out how you might expect. (A bunch of characters were also "race-swapped"; some light googling suggests no one even cared at the time, nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly).
But there also exist parallels that didn't exist at the time: it's pretty impossible to watch it today and not think about it as an exploration of the dangers of AI. Of course, rebelling robots was a hackneyed concept even by the time the original series aired in the 1970s, but the reboot does a good job of imagining the ways superhuman intelligence might rapidly evolve out of our ability to contain or comprehend it.
So do you like sci-fi? Do you like drama? Do you like shows that respect your intelligence and don't treat you like a child, morally or intellectually? Do you like depictions of a military that is not totally incompetent and treats discipline as actually essential? Then hey, give it a shot. Though I understand it can be tricky finding it to stream legally; Amazon or torrents or 123moviestv dot net would be better options, especially because you want to start with the miniseries before season 1, episode 1.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Another detail: maybe the biggest obstacle to securing a murder conviction is if you don't have the weapon. If you shoot someone in broad daylight, there's a logic to doing it with a cheap weapon you then immediately throw into the deepest, darkest hole you can find.
johnfabian
4mo ago
This is a non-spoiler detail: later in the show one of the drug dealers has a chief enforcer who was ex-Army/Marines, and it's implied he served in Iraq. All these complaints and suggestions are more or less embodied by this character.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Good thing they're not calling it the Cis- and Trans-jordan anymore, that would really confuse people
johnfabian
4mo ago
This is the only possible outcome. Getting rid of DEI is an impossibility. Nobody with their hands on the levers of power actually wants to do it. All that will actually happen is Jews will get re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy, or a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy will be set up. And they will continue to collaborate throwing white people under the bus for literally everything.
Somebody writing for the Wall Street Journal did a bit of polling, and the results were amusingly predictable.
Only 47% of respondents could identify which river and which sea "from the river to the sea" meant. When shown the region on a map and realizing what the slogan would mean, 75% of respondents who had previously supported the slogan moderated their opinion.
johnfabian
5mo ago
So no correlation. If you really really want to squint, there's a slightly positive correlation (which I did not expect).
johnfabian
5mo ago
Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.
Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.
It's hard to say exactly how much has filtered through to him on social media - I always hope that people in the public eye don't look at this kind of stuff, but you have to expect they do. The team itself always treated him very differently from Formenton - they gave him the A, he played a big part of media/promotion, etc. They clearly tried to establish without saying directly that he wasn't at fault. I think that makes the "guilty before even accused" behaviour worse, really. But it was also from a pretty small wedge of the fanbase, I wouldn't say all or even most of the "prog side" jumped in on this
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