Why Brazilians can’t help booing anything and everyone at the Olympics

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Tom Holland tweets: “2 ways for host cities to enjoy the Olympics: applaud competitors from other countries (London) or boo them (Rio)”

It’s like New Yorkers. They love to dump on LA. People from Northern California also love to hate LA. But residents of Los Angeles can’t be bothered to hate any other city.

It seems like everything Brazil touches gets corrupted.

Mark Moffett writes:

It didn’t take long for the Brazilians to rewrite the norms of Olympic fandom.
The list of Olympic participants targeted by Brazilian boos is long and varied: Russians, due to its doping scandal; Spaniards, as symbols of Latin American colonialism; a tennis ball boy who had butterfingers; favorites—like the poor Romanian women’s handball team—when they played the underdogs; and, of course, anyone from Brazil’s historic rival Argentina, who probably get the worst of it.
Pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie was booed by the Rio fans—twice in 24 hours—to the point he was in floods of tears on the podium, leading the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach to take the unprecedented step of saying the crowd’s antics were “unacceptable at the Olympics.”
The fans were so boisterous at a beach volleyball game between the Brazilian and Czech teams that the public address announcer had to repeatedly admonish them against booing the visitors (link in Portuguese). A normally staid air-pistol event almost turned into a melee when unruly Brazilian fans tried rattling the concentration of foreigners as they pulled the trigger (link in Portuguese).
At a tennis match where fans heckled the player from Argentina, there was a scuffle in the stands (link in Spanish)—perhaps the first ever case of tennis hooliganism.
In London four years ago, the British fans got behind not only their own country, but every other in the spirit of sportsmanship. Alberto Murray Neto, a Brazilian lawyer who has served in the past on the Brazilian Olympic Committee, says that as Brazilian soccer dominated the sporting culture here, mastering the codes of other sports will be a learning process for many people who have never seen them played. “This is the Brazilian way, which is different from the very proper English way in 2012,” he says.
At the Riocentro sports complex on Friday night (Aug. 12), the fans were as much the talk of foreign tourists and athletes as the Games themselves. Marian Busch, a German tourist, said Brazilians are wonderful people—as long as you don’t run into them in the bleachers. “They do things that would be considered unfair and unsporting in Europe,” she says.

Good sportmanship is a gift of the WASPs just as the least corrupt countries were created by WASPs (United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand). WASPs make the best citizens.

Ron Guhname writes:

WASPs rule! I wrote in a recent post that I was getting the sense that Americans with Protestant European backgrounds were the best behaved. So I decided to sum all my prior post numbers that dealt with ethnicity and moral behavior to assess this idea systematically. I followed the simple strategy of assigning a rank for each behavior for each of the 8 ethnic groups with sufficiently large sample sizes. Jews were often ignored in previous posts since one must turn to the religion rather than the ethnicity variable to get estimates, but I wanted to include them, so I calculated numbers and then ranks for them.

I included all variables that I have posted on–here’s a list of them: okay to cheat on taxes; drinks too much; ethnocentric; dirty house; frequents prostitutes; promiscuous men over 30; feel that infidelity is not wrong; gay; lesbian; husbands and wives who cheat; fathers divorcing mom; women arrested; and promiscuity for men and women and under. I realized that I had not posted on drug abuse so I added that to the rest. I ranked group so high numbers indicate more bad behavior, then I simply summed the 16 rankings for each ethnic group. Here are the totals:

Bad Behavior Index

Blacks 106
Mexicans 85
American Indians 85
Italians 70
Irish 67
Jews 64
Germans 56
English/Welsh 47

My hunch was correct. This pattern coincides with that feeling that goes way back among nativists that the moral quality of the country was slipping with the mass immigration from Catholic, southern and eastern European countries, and more recently in concern over immigration from Mexico.

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‘I’ve Spent My Whole Life As A Child Hoping Some Family Would Come Along And Adopt Me’

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

I heard that sentence in a 12-step phone meeting (from a woman who sounded like she was in the second half of life) and it resonated. I’ve felt that too. I have perfect good family and yet I often yearn for some other family to come along to adopt me. Growing up, I often preferred to spend time with my friends’ fathers than with my friends. In my work life and in my learning particularly I’ve sought out father figures.

Because my mother was dying of cancer and my father had his hands full with his work and looking after her, I was largely in foster care ages one to four. That’s had a permanent warping of my personality.

Sometimes when I say something cruel, a friend or relation will ask me, “How can you think that way?” And I might answer, “Because I didn’t have a mother.”

I’m a chronic under-achiever. I’ve rarely done well in work or academics unless I was passionate. I got fired from my first few jobs (6th thru 10th grade) and usually performed in a mediocre fashion after that. I kinda half-ass things. I prefer to take the easy way out. I’d go to one job and spend time on another job or looking for other jobs.

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One Jerk Can Ruin Things For Everybody

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

One obnoxious noisy neighbor can ruin a block. One jerk on the roads can tie up traffic for thousands of people. One idiot in a 12-step meeting, either in person or over the phone, can ruin a meeting. One toxic person in a shul can wreak havoc.

Freedom of association is vital otherwise we are all held hostage to the jerks.

It humbles me to think how often I have been the jerk that has ruined things for everyone. I have something in my psyche that wants to be the big shot in every group I join. In class, I’ve often felt a yearning to show off how smart I am and many teachers found me disruptive. In my blogging, I’ve often been a bully, picking on people more than they deserved. In my dating life, I’ve zeroed in on women who want to give because I want to take.

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The Wisdom Of Jerry Seinfeld

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

I moved to Los Angeles in March of 1994. Jerry Seinfeld was a popular TV show (there was a guy at Aish HaTorah who looked just like Jerry Seinfeld) but I had never seen it and over the years I developed pride in never having seen it.

At the same time, Jerry Seinfeld dominated popular culture. I felt a tad out of it from never having seen the show. When I’d make Jewish jokes, people would tell me about the Seinfeld episode where the dentist who converted to Judaism so he could tell Jewish jokes. Eventually I broke down and watched that episode on Youtube and then decided to start watching the show from season one.

I’m glad I did. It’s the perfect thing to watch before going to bed. It cleans your mind out and you are never agitated afterward. You can just drift off.

S3E11 is another superb episode and it ends with Jerry doing his stand-up comedy: “The best part of being in a relationship is when you are sick and the best part of being sick is when you are in a relationship. If I were to get married, all those vows about for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, all I need is the sickness. That to me is the most important one. Do you take this man in sickness? That’s the only time I need somebody there. The rest of the time? Go out. Have a ball. Do whatever you want. But if I get the sniffles, you better be there.”

I’m halfway through season three and there is not one mention of all the main characters, aside from Kramer, being Jewish.

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The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Luke Ford

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.
This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.

Criminals With Peanut Allergies
A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:
A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.
Or, rephrased in another domain:
A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.
Granted, sometimes, in practice, we hesitate to use the bathroom with the disabled sign on it owing to some confusion –mistaking the rule for the one for parking cars, under the belief that the bathroom is reserved for exclusive use by the handicapped.
Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.
Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools are peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).
Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.
Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.

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