You meant me, Reb. In your simplistic world there is one side, Rocky Balboa, the good, and the other side, the evil, represented by Ivan Drago.
Maybe, but he wrote my handle and responded to one of my posts when declaring that
Fischer was clearly the best ever ..... period . Only your communist sympathies prevent you from seeing what is clear to others fabelhaft
I guess one has to be a Commie to rank Lasker ahead of Fischer :-)
He did write your handle, fabelhaft. But he said that your communist sympathies were the only thing preventing you from seeing what is clear to others.
In order for his statement to work,
It's a really tortured reading to presume that Reb believes only one person in the world fits that description. There are many who believe that Kasparov and Carlsen were both better than Fischer in an absolute sense. This includes Robert Byrne, who was not a communist sympathizer, was a friend of Fischer's (at least for a time), and who was in a position to judge the relative quality of both players because he played both and analysed their games.
This is one problem with ad hominem attacks. They don't make logical sense, and are used only to inflame passions.
You meant me, Reb. In your simplistic world there is one side, Rocky Balboa, the good, and the other side, the evil, represented by Ivan Drago.
Maybe, but he wrote my handle and responded to one of my posts when declaring that
Fischer was clearly the best ever ..... period . Only your communist sympathies prevent you from seeing what is clear to others fabelhaft
I guess one has to be a Commie to rank Lasker ahead of Fischer :-)
Well, Lasker did relocate to the Soviet Union, for a short time, but fled from there as surely as he fled from Nazi Germany.
Two sides of the same coin.
In 100 years or more most humans might not even be living on this planet. Just something to think about. Enjoy your weekend.
What guilt ? The other planets we find will be better then this one. I,m not getting into politics with you because because its clearly pointed out ine Chess.com Legal Rules and Regulations that its A forbidden subject on this site along with many other things. We are here to have some fun and play chess.
No thanks, Maybe I will look at it when I have time.
He did not flee. He did not like it there, of course because of the poor living conditions and the lack of liberty, they sure treated him nicely.
This is one of your countless biased threats. When you dislike a fact, your just invent one, to fill the hole in your argument chain.
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Listen to me carefully jamiedelarosa. In a hundred more years, this earth which is going down since the mid of twentieth century, due to the politics of the big corporations and banks, due to the military sector in your country, will either be thrown back for two or more hnudred years in every aspect of life, with Billions of people dead, due to the global problems that were caused by the ressource eating Turbocapitalism of your celebrated Chicago school of economics.
Or, it will come to terms, that is, the earth will change to the good, americans will make a step towards true democracy and strangle the power of the big corporations, USA will become one of many humble countries that will not anymore play world police, it will pay development aid of higher than 20 percent of your national budget to the rest of the world.
I rather lean toward the Austrian School of economic thought.
Make no doubt about it, Lasker and his wife fled the Soviet Union. It was during Stalin's "Great Purge," also known as the "Yezhovshchina".
Lasker's sponsor in the Soviet Union, Nikolai Krylenko (Minister of Justice) was executed in 1938 after a 20-minute show trial. Such was Soviet justice.
Thank you for revealing your true colors.
And personally, I see no problem with your (Caruanovich) views as quoted by Jamie in #334 above. I don't get what bothered her about this quote.
One can't really argue with the fact that short-sighted capitalism is preventing people from acting logically in bringing the population of this planet upwards, and dealing with the various environmental and other challenges that humankind faces in this 21st century. New attitudes are urgently needed - and the idea of providing intelligent development aid (as opposed to just pouring money indiscriminatedly) will have to be applied - and soon. The rich countries must foot the bill - and the US is definitely a leading candidate. In my view, this will have to happen pretty soon. It's not even 'politics' - just common sense.
As an aside, "Inferno" by Dan Brown is very recommended reading in this context.
I agree. In addition, some attention should also be paid to what they actually say.
Jamie is quite a well-known poster over these pages... it certainly pays to know something about her - if only in obeying the "know thy enemy" commandment...
Jamiedelarosa is a woman. Do your homework, fellow
Thanks - I laugh when that happens. I goes with being female in a 90% male sport.
It is difficult to discuss Soviet (and the former Eastern Bloc) activities in international sports, without seeing them through the political lens.
After all, State support for Sport was predicated upon its propaganda value. And with the Soviet Union, the myth of the superiority of the Socialist Man was of paramount importance. Sport was an opiate for the masses.
Yes, I know. Besides that, the Fischer-Korchnoi comparison was discussed at length earlier in the topic. Korchnoi did not think any Soviet player could defeat Fischer in a match, circa 1971-1972.
In view of the recently published (here) diary of GM Krogius, who went together with Spassky to Iceland in 1972, I wrote some interesting comments on another thread in the last couple of hours - you may want to check them out:
It is difficult to discuss Soviet (and the former Eastern Bloc) activities in international sports, without seeing them through the political lens.
After all, State support for Sport was predicated upon its propaganda value. And with the Soviet Union, the myth of the superiority of the Socialist Man was of paramount importance. Sport was an opiate for the masses.
Chess had a strong basis in Russia before the revolution. I am not sure it was an inherent part of the russian culture already then. After the revolution thousands of enthusiasts : trainers, organizers, players, worked to polularize this mysterious game further, and it received the attention that it has until today, also in other countries of the former Soviet Union.
They did it not think about any political (evil) plan.
They could not have done this without states' money.
And the state was not merely doing bad things, also its intentions were by far not all bad during the existence of Soviet Union.
Promotion of chess was a logical part of communist heritage: equality of education. We all know how the game can help to improve our mind capacity: logic, discipline of thought, as a game, it is also a noble way to meet other ideas, to learn to respect them. The idea was to help the underpriviliged of yesterday to master the challenges of the mind today.
We should not forget that the promotion of chess in the Soviet Union started already during the twentieth, long before the efforts paid of in international chess, before they entered FIDE.
About the 'paramount importance of superiority of socialist man': It sure was part of the ideology. The less convincing a system becomes (to the world, and to the own people) the more you need myths...
The problem is, other countries implemented similar tools, that continue to exist until today. Think of the race between USA and Soviet Union about who would be first on the moon. Success in sport was important to the people in Washington, too, to show the greatness of 'free americans'. That's why state money was invested there... And now very much in China!
But it does not diminish the great accomplishments of sportswomen and men (8.90 m in 1968, for instance, or great chess games of Botvinnik) that politicians try to (mis)use them.
The last sentence, Jamied., I cannot take serious, do you think that a good thing like chess can be an opiate for the masses?
I do not disagree with most of what you wrote here.
Our famous blogger, "Batgirl" has written extensively about the cultural influences of chess in Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, among the Ashkenazim, and others since the Middle Ages.
For those who see chess as ersatz-religion, the phrase "opiate of the masses" is appropriate, don't you think?
Got it. Breznev was a parigon of virtue;my mistake. Sorry.