00:30 Happiness and homogeneity
31:00 Is the Bible historical truth?
39:00 Time to Close Down the Elon Musk Circus, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/21/elon-musk-twitter-press-00074881
45:00 The cult of 12 step programs
1:02:30 The Economist: Why cricket and America are made for each other, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146596
1:24:00 The Second Coming of Guru Jagat, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/11/the-second-coming-of-guru-jagat
Virtual Pilgrim says: 9:30 Luke says, Happiness is the more you have in common with others such as, race, ethnicity, religion, culture… Hmmm… reminds me of something someone once wrote: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the SAME ancestors, speaking the SAME language, professing the SAME religion, attached to the SAME principles of government, very SIMILAR in their manners and customs…” ~ John Jay, First Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, 1787, Federalist Papers #2
The problem with national surveys in racially diverse countries such as America, is that there is no such thing as a typical American anymore. The 1828 Webster’s Dictionary defined an American as, “DESCENDENTS OF EUROPEANS born in America.”
1:14:48 “Can anyone become an American?” No. But now, if that idea is true, It is not unique to the United States. Anyone can now become an Australian, an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Norwegian, a Swede. There’s nothing unique about the United States being a nation of immigrants.
Ronald Reagan said, “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Did Reagan really intend to imply Blacks living in France are not truly French?
1:40:46 Luke mentions swearing among Jews. “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.” (Ephesians 4:29)
“Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks.” (Ephesians 5:4)
Posted inAustralia, Happiness|Comments Off on Happiness & Homogeneity (12-26-22)
When the AirHogs stadium reopens in the spring it will be the first home of Major League Cricket (mlc).
All the men were of Indian descent. They and their partners, who include the ceos of Microsoft and Adobe, have put in $44m and committed another $76m to start the league. As owners of the first six franchises—in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, dc—they are betting that conditions are right to turn cricket, long seen as a baffling foreign game, into an American pursuit. The first season will run from July 13th to 30th.
Most Americans may not take cricket seriously—and most of the cricketing world does not take America seriously—but in 2024 the country will co-host (with the West Indies) a cricket World Cup, qualifying the American team automatically. usa Cricket, the governing body in America, wants to include cricket at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. The world’s biggest sports market and second-most popular sport are about to discover what they really think of each other…
In 1971 England were touring Australia for a terrifically dull series of tests—the traditional, five-day version of the game. When the third test was washed out, the teams agreed to play a one-day match. Some 46,000 fans showed up, compared with 42,000 over five days of the first test. (Australia won.)
Cricket tours embraced “one-day internationals” (odis) as a regular feature. By 1975 the International Cricket Council had launched an odi World Cup. In the late 1970s a rogue American-inspired league, “World Series Cricket”, introduced yet more innovations, such as floodlights, colourful uniforms to replace white flannel, and white balls to replace red ones.
* The popularity of sports has little to do with the “quality” of the sport (to the degree that can ever be defined.). It is memories and tradition. Why do I love the Eagles? Cuz I remember watching Wilbur Montgomery drive a dagger in the Cowboys with a 40 yard TD run in the 1980 NFC Championship with my grandpa. And I remember watching Deshawn Jackson run back a punt to beat the Giants in 2010 with my son. I can recall dozens of good and bad sports memories and they are always liked to male family members and friends.
Cricket is a fine sport, I am sure, but there are no memories and legends to recall for Americans. That is the challenge for it to overcome.
* Years ago, when I worked in the Middle East as an expat, TV programming came from the UK where cricket featured prominently. I was baffled by the game at first, but players’ skill and spectator enthusiasm made me take further notice. Once I understood the rules (Steve, they are not that hard to learn), my appreciation naturally increased. I now thoroughly enjoy the game of cricket.
For the curious who don’t yet appreciate game, try the Twenty20 game…a shortened version but the same rules of traditional test match cricket. Twenty20 lacks the endurance and some of the strategy of a test match, but you can usually finish these in an afternoon. Twenty20 cricket might have more appeal to American audiences.
* Not one in a hundred Americans can explain pretty much anything that isn’t shouted at them 24/7 by MSM and social media, so that isn’t saying much.
Speaking as a native-born American, the scoring system in cricket is extremely simple: one run when the batsmen switch places, four runs if the batsman hits the ball along the ground and it goes over the boundary, six runs if the batsman hits the ball over the boundary without it touching the ground.
Cricket was the most popular summer ball sport in colonial America. It isn’t going to be making a comeback anytime soon, but it really isn’t that difficult to understand. Like with any sport you didn’t grow up with, the vocabulary is going to be a barrier and you are unlikely to appreciate a sport as an adult if you didn’t grow up as a kid playing and watching the sport inside a culture that appreciates said sport.
But as a learning exercise, it isn’t that difficult to learn it just requires some effort; learning a new language or skill is harder (but also probably more worthwhile for most people).
* How do we work jumping chest bumps and 360 degree hop screams into cricket? Asking for the negroes.
Seriously though, the need to bring in cricket, and soccer, and pretty soon the game where you throw the dead goat into the circle from horseback, is simply more invade the world (NFL, NBA, MLB games in other continents), invite the world (soccer, cricket, the game where you throw the dead goat into the circle from horseback) philosophy.
* Where on earth is rugby working class? New Zealand, where it’s the only thing going? It sure isn’t prole in England, France, Argentina, South Africa…
* Most of the strange fielding terms were coined in the mid 18th Century, when the game first became organised. The term “silly” is used as a modifier to the names for certain fielding positions when the fielder is so close to the batsman that he is being imprudent, or silly.
* Gully
Leg Slip
Leg Gully
Short leg
Backward Square Leg
Fine Leg
Deep Fine Leg
Silly point
Silly mid-on
Silly mid-off
I can’t see what is complicated about these fielding positions.
First of all you have to understand the simple concept of leg and off. The legside is the side of the batsman’s legs, and the offside is the side of the batsman’s bat. So he can hit the ball to leg or to off.
“Silly” means very close to the batsman. The close fielder is hoping to make a catch if the ball pops up and falls close to the batter.
“Square” means level with the batsman. You can be square on the offside or the legside. You can be forward of square or backward of square. Hence backward square leg. Square on the offside is also called point. So silly point is square on the outside and close to the bat. (The actual location of these positions on the field will therefore depend on whether the batsman is right-handed or left-handed, because his legs will be on a different side.)
Even children know this.
Gully is slightly behind square on the offside. I don’t know the origin of the word, but it probably refers to some historical cricket field that had a gully.
* Surely what the article is saying is yes we know cricket won’t catch on among historical Americans but we don’t have to pretend to care any more because cricket is already the sport of tens of millions of Great Replacement Americans and of hundreds of millions just waiting for their visas. We don’t have to care about the identity or opinions of historical Americans, because that America, the existence and right to self-determination of that American people, are debunked myths, like the debunked myth of baseball being an purely American invention. The myth we don’t debunk, the myth we’re staking our future on, is of America being a nation of immigrants. Since we’re living by that myth a cricketer in flight from Bombay to JFK with a freshly printed visa is already as American, indeed more American, than anyone playing that dying sport of baseball.
Posted inAmerica, Cricket|Comments Off on The Economist: Why cricket and America are made for each other
01:00 Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146522
04:00 Frank Harris, My Life and Loves, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_and_Loves
07:00 Welcome to BazBall: Can England really fly?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgcJz-uuDms
08:00 What is Bazball? https://www.sportstiger.com/news/what-is-the-new-cricketing-term-bazball
09:00 England’s cricket manager is from New Zealand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendon_McCullum
30:20 Elon Musk’s casual support for guns
35:30 FT columnist quits twitter because it is low status, https://www.ft.com/content/8a040159-502d-491d-8ad3-2200609dae71
54:0 The rise of Reform and the rabbinic response, https://torahinmotion.org/tim-torah/the-rise-of-reform-and-the-rabbinic-response-part-11
1:08:00 LAT: Colorado Springs wrestles with its religious, anti-LGBTQ past after gay nightclub shooting, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146270
1:35:00 Rabbis too busy for their own kids, https://torahinmotion.org/tim-torah/the-rise-of-reform-and-the-rabbinic-response-part-10
1:57:30 Sounds like a Cult – 12 Step Programs, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cult-of-12-step-programs/id1566917047?i=1000564661693
2:10:00 Pavlova – the Aussie dessert, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlova_(cake)
Q: Can you explain the Bankman-Fried connection?
A: I met Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried during the 2007-2008 academic year at Stanford Law School, where I was their student and mentee. I already had a Ph.D. in philosophy from another university and was interested in pursuing the legal academic track. Their courses that year were well suited to that end. Joe, along with then-dean Larry Kramer, was teaching the Legal Theory Workshop, a year-long seminar designed to groom Stanford Law students for academic careers. Barbara, along with Prof. Josh Cohen, was teaching a course called “Luck in Morality, Public Policy, and the Law,” which meshed with my philosophical interests.
Those classes went as well as could have been hoped for. Joe and Barbara were both drawn in by my Legal Theory term paper, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, which examined what conservatives maintain is the covert oppressiveness of the liberal elites—also known as the New Class or the Clerisy, among other labels. And so, they became my academic advisers. I charmed them well enough that they quite spontaneously offered me a two-year academic fellowship to stay on at the law school after graduation, which I accepted.
Unfortunately, things later went sideways, at which point they initiated the gaslighting detailed in The Star Chamber of Stanford. My hopes for an academic career were at an end. Even so, I vowed to one day expose my advisers’ gaslighting, by making of it a case study in the cultural pathologies of liberalism and academia, first unearthed in my term paper. That’s the purpose of the memoir, which crafts a philosophical argument through the tale of my convoluted association with the Bankman-Fried power couple. I had been toiling over it for more than a decade before it finally appeared on Amazon in April 2022, after many delays.I didn’t learn that one of Joe and Barbara’s offspring had emerged as the celebrated crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) until fairly recently—only a month or two before his fall from grace, quite by happenstance online. So, it’s pure serendipity that my former advisers should be thrust into the national spotlight just six months after the memoir’s belated release—utterly uncanny, just like my story itself. Ruminating on the denouement of my association with Stanford toward the close of the book, I summed up the situation as follows:
“Now clear-sighted as to the nature of my jihad, I could see in hindsight that what Barbara had diagnosed as my proclivity to “make specimens” of people was perhaps more worrisome than I could then appreciate. But that penchant had always lain latent in my research agenda, spurring me on inexorably according to an invisible logic, and I would hold Stanford to account by dint of it. … Reflecting on Barbara’s prophetic prescience alongside my own premonition all through the summer of 2008 that I’d be engrossed in the project [Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression] full time by the upcoming fall, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we were all vessels for forces larger than ourselves, wooly-minded though that sounds, with these signs from a wise providence auguring a distant yet destined day of reckoning when balance would be restored to the universe.”
That arguably superstitious trust in the fates has, to my mind, been vindicated by the astonishing, unpremeditated timeliness of the memoir, as the spectacular fall of SBF, in combination the role his parents will inevitably play in the various narratives set forth to explain it, will hopefully garner the memoir a lot more attention than it otherwise would have gotten. Truly do I have the favor of the gods (unlike a lot of crypto investors these days). I believe the research agenda I first initiated at Stanford—beginning with Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression and culminating with the memoir—positions me to help elevate the emerging discourse on the fall of SBF. My work—written both for and about SBF’s parents—can illuminate some of the profound questions naturally raised by this epic debacle.
I’ve never met SBF, but I distinctly recall once espying him as a teenager alongside his parents in the late summer of 2008, when Joe and Barbara hosted a gathering at their home for law students contemplating academic careers. My outsider’s impression was one of authentic and harmonious familial relations. From what I’ve read, Joe and Barbara were seriously committed to cultivating their offspring’s moral capacities (moral philosophy being one of Barbara’s specialties). And yet we all know how things panned out. My best guess is that they were as blindsided as anyone. How did that happen? That’s where my research agenda and memoir come in.
To explain is not to excuse, but SBF was raised on the Stanford campus, by not one but two academic superstar parents. So he was being marinated in the elite culture and its vices from the day he was born—the elites’ hubris, their unfounded sense of moral and intellectual superiority, their penchant for stealth, subterfuge, and plausible deniability. These unfortunate tendencies can express themselves in a host of ways. Apropos my feud with my advisers, the medium was a campaign of barely noticeable psychological warfare. Apropos their wayward son, it was epic financial fraud. But the underlying ethos is the same. That ethos was reproducing itself in SBF in subtle ways that Joe and Barbara, snuggly ensconced in their elite bubble, could ill understand, and that’s why he broke bad despite their high-minded intentions. They aren’t responsible for SBF’s (alleged) crimes, but they are responsible for contributing to a culture in which the rise of SBF became possible. The Star Chamber of Stanford can help us understand why.
Q: Is it fair to call you a conspiracy theorist?
A: I’m alleging a conspiracy to gaslight based on circumstantial evidence and inference rather than direct observation. So, yes, I suppose it is. The memoir is a meticulously argued highbrow conspiracy theory for inquiring minds, and I wear my tinfoil hat with pride. I don’t endorse every conspiracy theory out there, of course. I don’t believe the moon landings were faked or that the World Bank has been infiltrated by an alien race of reptilian shapeshifters.
Conspiracy theorists get a bad rap. But no matter the stereotypes we’re not all alike, and our theories should be judged on their own merits. I know my allegations are stranger than fiction, but I think they hold up on close reflection. Plausible deniability is a thing, and extraordinary events do occur in the world from time to time. Did it all transpire exactly as I’ve theorized? Maybe not. Are my claims substantially true as to the big picture? I think so, but readers will judge for themselves. That’s the fun of the book.
Q: Aren’t you exploiting your former affiliation with Stanford to raise your own profile?
A: People wouldn’t be taking on all that student debt to attend Stanford and kindred institutions if not to thereby grow their symbolic capital. My strategy here may be unorthodox, but it was born of necessity, as the memoir explains. Stanford embraces diversity, so it shouldn’t begrudge such transgressive undertakings. This kind of book isn’t without precedent, by the way. William F. Buckley went after his alma mater in God and Man at Yale. John Leboutillier went after his in Harvard Hates America. Now it’s Stanford’s long overdue turn in the spotlight. That’s just an occupational hazard of being a preeminent university. Academia is a dog-eat-dog world, and I’m punching up here, doing my bit to hold the elites to account, so please spare me the crocodile tears.
Posted inStanford|Comments Off on Rony Guldmann: Silicon Valley elites Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, Stanford Law profs and progenitors of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried
Luke said he talks about what is, rather than what should be. I totally agree. Dennis Prager is fond of saying “race doesn’t matter.” It’s literally his number one point when talking about conservatism. What he is really saying is race SHOULD NOT matter. In the real world, race DOES matter. Prager is an ideologue presenting opinions about the world he wishes existed, and so he’s trying to speak that world into existence by convincing as many people as possible that race doesn’t matter. It’s a very weird situation because other times, he speaks in practical terms. For example, he says that he doesn’t care what you believe but only what you do. Then shows his true colors when he wrote his recent article asserting that Holocaust deniers should go to hell. One could be the most generous and wonderful person and hold a view skeptical of the official narrative about the Holocaust, and yet, Dennis Prager will hold you in such contempt will condemn you to burn in hell for eternity.
Luke failed to spread his seed and so is spreading ideas to compensate.
For years, conspiracy theorists have written books about the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement in the assassination of JFK. And as conspiracy theorist E. Martin Schotz, a mathematician and practicing psychiatrist, puts it, “I and other ordinary citizens know, know for a fact , that there was a conspiracy [to murder Kennedy] and that it was organized at the highest levels of the CIA.” 1 The fact that Schotz and his fellow conspiracy theorists haven’t been able to come up with any evidence connecting the CIA to the assassination or Oswald has not troubled them in the least. In their opinion, they have been able to come up with motive (JFK’s refusal to give air support to the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, his allegedly being soft, in the eyes of some, on Communism, his aim to cut the CIA budget by 20 percent by 1966, 2 etc.), means , and opportunity , which, as mentioned earlier, is not coming up with any hard evidence at all.
Whatever the CIA’s short laundry list of dissatisfactions (some merely illusory, some real) with Kennedy, as I discuss later in the anti-Castro Cuban exile section of this book, Kennedy was highly disturbed with the CIA for its incompetence and its having misled him on the probable success of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Perhaps the most famous alleged quote from Kennedy about his animus toward the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle was that he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” But in the two and a half years after the attempted invasion he never did anything remotely close to this, and it is not known to whom he supposedly said these words. The New York Times only said that Kennedy made this statement “to one of the highest officials of his administration.” 3
The reality is that the relationship between Kennedy and the CIA, though strained by the Bay of Pigs debacle, was not nearly as bad and combustible as conspiracy theorists would want people to believe. And as we shall see, and most important on the issue of motive, the period of difficult relations was apparently short-lived. *
We know that no one has ever come up with any evidence of any kind that the CIA decided to kill Kennedy, and got Oswald or anyone else to do the job for it. Indeed, despite the admitted problems Kennedy had with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs invasion, William Colby, who was a ranking official in the CIA during the period of the assassination and went on to become CIA director, would later write, “The fact of the matter is that the CIA could not have had a better friend in a President than John F. Kennedy. He understood the Agency and used it effectively, exploiting its intellectual abilities to help him analyze a complex world, and its paramilitary and covert political talents to react to it in a low key way.” 4
And in 1996, the CIA released a study titled “Getting to Know the President, CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992,” by the CIA deputy director for intelligence, John L. Helgerson. On a one-year assignment, Helgerson interviewed “former presidents, CIA directors, and numerous others involved” in the nine presidencies covered by the subject period to ascertain the CIA’s relationship with the various presidents. On the issue so dear to conspiracy theorists—the CIA’s alleged animosity for Kennedy, and hence, its motive to kill him—it is very noteworthy that Helgerson’s study reported that “the [CIA’s] relationship with Kennedy was not only a distinct improvement over the more formal relationship with Eisenhower, but would only rarely be matched in future administrations. ” And alluding, by implication, to the strained period with Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961, the report goes on to say that “in November 1961, Allen Dulles had been replaced by John McCone, who served Kennedy as DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] for almost two years. In the early part of this period, McCone succeeded in rebuilding the Agency’s relationship with Kennedy. McCone saw Kennedy frequently, and the President—more than any other before or since—would telephone even lower level Agency officers for information or assistance.”
…Since it has been established beyond all doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy, the conspiracy theorists who propound the idea of the CIA being behind Oswald’s act are necessarily starting out in a very deep hole before they even take their first breath of air. This is so because Oswald was a Marxist, and a Marxist being in league with U.S. intelligence just doesn’t ring true. More specifically, why would a passionate pro-Castro follower like Oswald want to join forces with the very U.S. intelligence agency—the CIA—that Oswald knew was behind the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Castro, his hero? The conspiracy theorists realize, of course, the difficulty of knitting these conflicting threads together, and try to get around the problem by saying that Oswald was only “posing as a pro-Castro sympathizer.” In other words, Oswald was really a rightist who was only acting like a leftist. “Oswald’s actual political orientation was extreme right wing,” said New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. “Oswald would have been more at home with Mein Kampf than Das Kapital .” 20 “Oswald was an American agent posing as a Marxist,” says conspiracy theorist James DiEugenio. 21 But this contention cannot seriously and rationally be made. To believe it, one would have to disbelieve not only all of Oswald’s words, including those uttered when he was only a teenager, but all of his conduct, as well as the impressions (many given under oath) of the considerable number of people who knew Oswald personally and spoke of his being a confirmed and passionate Marxist. In other words, one would have to believe that year in and year out for almost a decade, Oswald was putting on an Academy Award–winning performance, fooling everyone, including his family and wife, by the virtuosity of his acting skills.
In its final report, the HSCA took the Warren Commission to task for what it characterized as a virtual lack of investigation of the CIA, which itself was one of the federal agencies investigating the assassination. “Testifying before the Commission,” the HSCA Report says, “CIA Director John A. McCone indicated that ‘Oswald was not an agent, employee, or informant of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with him directly or in any other manner…Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly in any way whatsoever with the Agency.’ McCone’s testimony was corroborated by Deputy Director Richard M. Helms.” 22 Helms had told the Warren Commission, “I had all of our records searched to see if there had been any contacts at any time prior to President Kennedy’s assassination by anyone in the Central Intelligence Agency with Lee Harvey Oswald. We checked our card files and our personnel files and all our records. Now, this check turned out to be negative.” 23
The HSCA Report then goes on to say, “The record reflects that once these assurances had been received, no further efforts were made by the Warren Commission to pursue the matter.” 24 But this simply is not true. Although the HSCA can take justifiable credit in investigating the CIA more than the Warren Commission did, the starting point for any investigation of the CIA, and the principal way to investigate it, would be to look at its entire internal file. If the people responsible for preparing the HSCA Report had bothered to read the very next page in the above-quoted joint testimony by McCone and Helms before the Warren Commission, they would have learned that the Warren Commission did, in fact, do this precise thing.
Posted inJFK|Comments Off on Did The CIA Have A Hand In The Murder Of JFK?
02:00 Messi & Ye, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146549
11:00 Israel’s dumb culture, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146547
13:00 The Atlantic: WHY IS MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE LIKE THIS?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146541
32:00 Marc B Shapiro: Rise of Reform and the Rabbinic Response, https://torahinmotion.org/tim-torah/the-rise-of-reform-and-the-rabbinic-response-part-11
55:00 A political discussion with my brother
Posted inAmerica, Australia|Comments Off on Lionel Messi, Kanye West & Autistic Overlords (12-21-22)
* Messi and the Argentine team had felt disrespected by Van Gaal and the Dutch team’s attitude and comments before the game, and especially by the latter’s height-ist style of play and tactics. The Dutch of course the tallest country in the world. While Argentina was one of the shortest teams in the World Cup and known for their diminutive stars Maradona and Messi.
“Long ball” is the style of soccer where teams make long high passes in the air and tall forwards use their height advantage to head the ball or gain possession against shorter defenders.
“‘Just tall people and long balls’ – Messi tears into Van Gaal for saying Dutch play good football after World Cup loss”
* Why do Americans (no one else says this) always go on about soccer being boring? I watched soccer seriously for the first time in my life this world cup, and it was much more exciting than rugby (which is what we play in my country).
One of the things I’m liking about soccer compared to rugby is that soccer feels 3d while rugby feels 1d. What I mean by this is that in rugby, the game either moves towards one side’s try line or towards the other side’s try line. All other directions are barely explored. But in soccer, the game seems to move all over the pitch, including in the air. Rugby feels like game on rails compared to soccer.
Another thing I like about soccer is what soccer players look like. Soccer plays look like normal dudes, while rugby players look like intimidating elite athletes. Soccer is similar to cricket in this respect. Cricket players tend to look like normal guys you would see down at the pub. And soccer players tend to look like edgy youths you might see fooling around outside a bar.
Soccer commentators are also interesting. There seems to be many different types of soccer commentator. My favourite is the intelligent sounding English guy. This is the accent of the men who built the modern world. I think it’s cool that they’re also commenting on the game I’m watching.
* In part because soccer games are usually rather boring to watch,
Translation: “because I didn’t grow up in a soccer culture playing and watching soccer, I find watching soccer to be boring.”
People aren’t objective about their subjective tastes.
“I find X to be boring” is always going to be a far more objective statement about these things than the broad brush statement “X is boring.”
If billions are watching, odds are most of them don’t find it boring, no matter your opinions on the matter.
I mean I find baseball and golf to be excruciatingly boring to watch, yet people watch. No doubt they appreciate things about those sports that I don’t.
soccer highlights can be exciting in contrast.
You can flip this around for instance a lot of people in Europe and Asia were hooked on the NFL highlight reels back in the 1980s and found them very exciting, only to be very disappointed when they watched a full length NFL game, live, which lasted three hours for only 11 minutes of actual play, which they found to be very boring to watch and not at all as exciting as the highlights.
So it really is all about what you are acculturated to, for the most part; unless you make an effort to really learn something new, you are always going to be using the wrong “metric” to appreciate something that is otherwise foreign to you. But people want to pretend that they are being objective about these things, even though they almost never are.
* Van Gaal was (is?) a super-manager (perhaps top 10 ever?) who is widely thought to dislike South American players. Di Maria (star for Argentina) played under him in 2015 and he was widely understood to have underplayed and generally misused Di Maria to the detriment of Di Maria’s career. Similar stories for many comparable players including Diego Forlan, hero of Uruguay and very well respected player by any account. It’s Van Gaal’s long time pattern.
So the Argentina versus Netherlands match was an opportunity for payback. Many people on the ARG team had been personally slighted (Di Maria as their flag bearer) but not in some esoteric fashion. Their careers suffered by a jerk boss. ARG also saw themselves as defending South American soccer, as you can see by Messi’s “breaking composure” and being very publicly mean/petty with Van Gaal. For Argentina it was a triumphant settling of bad blood.
Of course it was a great moment to see Van Gaal publicly refuted with the best contention at all, a World Cup.
* I remember Paul Zimmerman telling a rather dumbfounded interviewer that football had gone from a white game, which meant a strength game, to a black game, which meant a speed game. When the interviewer asked him to elaborate, Zimmerman basically told him to **** off.
* The Messi autism angle is pretty interesting. He apparently is on the spectrum which explains some of his seemingly aloof, borderline mean spirited behavior. It likely helps his game. Does autism benefit athletes in other sports? One would think autism might benefit a golfer or a pitcher in baseball.
Between Messi and Ye, it has been quite a month for autiste overlords.
The Messi autism angle is pretty interesting. He apparently is on the spectrum which explains some of his seemingly aloof, borderline mean spirited behavior. It likely helps his game. Does autism benefit athletes in other sports? One would think autism might benefit a golfer or a pitcher in baseball.
Between Messi and Ye, it has been quite a month for autiste overlords.
Due to changing sensibilities, we are unlikely going to see Christian Bale in a Rain Man/ I Am Sam type role anytime soon. Messi gives a glimpse as to how Bale might play that role. His inability to walk around the goalie is quite funny.
Steve Sailer writes: “I’m reminded of how Israel doesn’t score that highly on tests, which likely has something to do with the ancient Zionist policy of de-intellectualizing Israeli Jews, that the new Jews forged in Israel weren’t just going to be scholars and merchants, they’d also be farmers and soldiers. So, Israel has wound up with a slightly dumbed down culture (one in which, for example, Mizrahi pop culture tastes are considered more desirable than snobbish Ashkenazi tastes) and correspondingly mediocre test scores.”
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on Israel’s Dumb Culture
* Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. But it had a history. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing in the woods lining the Chattahoochee River; she died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested and charged with assault. A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. White residents then decided to undertake nothing short of a racial cleansing. On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, they drove out virtually all of the county’s Black population—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no whites only signs to fuss over in Cumming, because there were no Black people to keep separate.
* All of which is to say that Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension.
Most of the world punishes problems collectively. It is the Anglo world, almost alone, that believes that only individual wrongdoers should be punished for their sins.
I love this sentence: “Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension.” So, naturally, life should be filled with tensions and conflict?
I’m writing from Tannum Sands, Australia. About 150 years ago, this area was violently cleansed of aborigines and they’ve never come back. Ever since then, there’s only been microscopic rates of violent crime, sociocultural conflict and related tension. I don’t think the residents have suffered from this lack of crime and tension.
Aborigines vigorously defended their land with killings of white settlers at the Mount Larcom Station in 1855 and Miriam Vale Station in 1857. Chinamen, who had been imported by squatters to act as shepherds, were so scared by the ferocity and hostility of the Aborigines, that they deserted “en masse”. Despite the massacres and disease which decimated the local Aboriginal population, descendents have always lived in the area and maintained contacts and links with the land.
I’ve never seen or heard of these mythical descendents. Their presence in this area has been minimal.
Elaina Plott concludes: “Whether Greene actually believes the things she says is by now almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be the person her followers think she is, because her power is contingent on theirs. The mechanics of actual leadership—diplomacy, compromise, patience—not only don’t interest her but represent everything her followers disdain. To soften, or engage in better faith, is to admit defeat.”
Posted inCrime|Comments Off on The Atlantic: WHY IS MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE LIKE THIS?
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
