FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I think it gets less censure because of the helmets. I just don't see the same degree of facial acting during NFL games, so it's less distasteful.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Agreed that it's an issue. My bete noire is the Mahomes style fake going out of bounds so they defender has to stop his momentum to avoid a RTP, then sneak back in for more yards. Or the late slide to pick up an extra yard. It'll need to be regulated at some point.
I just don't think it's nearly as common or nearly as distasteful as the display you see in soccer, or in the NBA at this point.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7hr ago
I think I can judge who is an American and who isn't through years of interaction. Intermarriage as a test is just delegating that same judgment to the cast of 90 Day Fiance. I trust myself more.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
Ok, but realize that even accepting your point, mischlings are a lagging indicator of assimilation by a generation or two. A person assimilates, is accepted, and then marries a native and produces a mixed-child.
And anyway, do we really want to make young women the sole arbiters of assimilation?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
I like the three point game. My problem is with the meta-game of load-management and cap-acrobatics and tanking.
The problems I see are that a) the game is easier in every aspect and phase the taller you are, b) there aren't enough tall people with that talent level in the world to staff 30 competitive teams, c) there are 30 NBA teams, d) who play 82 games a year, which e) don't really matter to the final season outcome that everyone cares about.
Solve those five and the three point game will be much less of a problem.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
I'm not sure professional Basketball is ultimately salvageable as a sport. It would require major surgery, altering rules in ways that would make the modern sport illegible to the classic sport.
What do you see as wrong with QB play?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
It was a shitty, stupid call, but shitty stupid calls are a tradition within international soccer that is being threatened by the American Way.
It's one of the major cultural differences between American big-4 sports and international soccer, and has been for years, along with showing pain on the field*. American sports thrive on precision and accuracy, soccer on a vague sense of spirit. In the NFL and NBA the clock is precise to the millisecond, in soccer the game ends when the ref thinks we're at a pretty good spot to end it. In American sports out of bounds is fought down to the inch and moment the ball or the player is out of bounds play stops, in soccer out of bounds is just kinda casual.
Soccer is very like boxing, in that corrupt or fixed matches are part of the lore in a way that is inextricable from the history of the sport. Reading a big Muhammed Ali bio, basically every one of his championship fights had some accusations of corruption or fixing or tomato can or pepper-on-the-gloves antics by somebody. Maradona is one the inner circle best, and also illegally scored in the World Cup and everyone knows it and it's just a joke. Once you accept that it is part of the history, the thought of actually getting calls right would be change, and there's nothing old-head hardcore fans hate more than change.
*My solution to diving, which I find distasteful and unaesthetic: harshly penalize extravagantly showing pain on the field, regardless of whether there was a foul or not. Soccer players aren't inherently more effeminate than any other athletes, they're just trained and socialized to show pain, where other athletes are trained and socialized to shrug it off. The "don't be a bitch" rule will fix the problem.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
...It really doesn't? At best your point would be that their parents or grandparents didn't assimilate.
And at any rate, I don't buy into the blood-purity ideal of America, so we're both sort of begging the question, if you think assimilation is functionally impossible and I think it's common.
Indian engineers and businessmen are completely integrated into my community. They join Boy Scout troops, they run for local schoolboards and serve on local charities.
Their kids win Valedictorian in the high school, and dominate the varsity tennis squad, but they also skive off on senior skip day and throw house parties and join the marching band and try and fail to lose their virginities on prom night.
My Indian neighbors futz about their lawns and wash their cars in their driveways and get season tickets to the minor league baseball team.
Hell, one of my most firmly held Indian stereotypes was broken last year when a group of Sikhs massively overpaid for a piece of real estate at an auction, due to lack of research, to the point of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on the deal.
There's just no difference.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Second or third generation Indians have mostly already assimilated in my neck of the woods.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Nobody* thinks that migrants drowning in poorly built boats is a good thing, we disagree about the solution.
*lizardman constant aside
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
Marxism's root is in Christianity, Wokeness is Christianity that has evolved to the point of opposing itself. The current ideological justification for tolerance of "sodomy and bigamy" is built off of Christian ethics. Christianity lies at the root of all Western, and therefore world, culture.
((FWIW I also think that high level studies at any ideological bent should include Kapital, if you can't understand why the majority of intelligent Europeans between 1860 and 1960 were admirers of Marx then it's a problem with you or your education))
Not in the slightest.
I remember telling otherwise intelligent kids at a selective private college that Jesus was Jewish, and they were confused.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6d ago
At some point European liberals and handwringers need to realize that their generosity is the problem. When immigrants drown on boats crossing the med, that's the fault of the policies in Europe. When coyotes, or whatever they call them in Europe, take boats full of women and children and abandon them with no fuel in the middle of the high sea, they are doing it because they know they'll be rescued. If the Europeans want to prevent people from drowning in the med, they need to stop accepting them and rescuing them.
They're like a parent who keeps supporting their drug-addict son. Giving him money enables his lifestyle, if he didn't have the support he'd have to get his life in line.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
The problem with personal experiences is that a major part of what we get out of an interaction is what preconceived notions we went into the interaction with. If you have a contempt for East Asians and a personal belief that they are fundamentally alien from you and different, then you probably won't end up bros, no.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
7d ago
I've long thought that an AP-Theology course would be a great idea at the high school level. An easy dunk of a 5 for well educated religious kids who know their bible, helps non-religious kids learn about the world, helps sell Conservatives on public education. Just an easy all around win.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
It does a show a rather concerning inability to exercise control over strategically important bodies of water.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
Runoff from the vast area of lawn that drains into the reflecting pool.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
"He didn't have the choke on me. I could still breathe in little gasps! I just tapped out because of the choke."
Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal:
“We run out of reserves at about four weeks,” Trump said in France while at the Group of Seven summit, discussing the recent memorandum of understanding with Iran. “You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.” He said it would be “bedlam” if the oil ran out. “What this does is it allows the ships to go,” he said of the Iran deal. “If we keep bombing, those ships won’t be going.”
And again:
"I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened," Trump told reporters in the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains. The Republican president said he did not want to be like Herbert Hoover, who was U.S. president in October 1929 when the stock market crashed, triggering what became known as the Great Depression. "All I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship," Trump said. "Every time we said something negative, like, guess what, we're not going to be able to settle, it would go down very big."
Trump himself has made one of the clearest statements he's made about the war, saying that the strait of Hormuz was insufficiently open. We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means or whether we just needed gutsier ship captains if you want, but I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors. Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.
A general or an admiral can claim a "stabbed in the back theory" that "we didn't lose we left" that "we won the war on the battlefield and the politicians lost it at the negotiating table" or that "the civilians followed the traitors at home and didn't support the war enough."
A politician, a POTUS, can't claim that, because rallying public support is kind of his whole job. Coordinating with international insurance companies is within his purview. The home front is his war. Trump can't whine that we were winning the war if it wasn't for public opinion and the markets, public opinion and the markets is his job. The buck stops here. He needs to go to war with the public he has, not the public he wishes he had.
Trump and Hegseth made the specific decision not to attempt to build a public case for going to war with Iran, not to coordinate with international partners, not to plan ahead for the business consequences of the war. They chose speed and surprise over those things. That turned out to be a bad decision.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
That's the beauty of Pro/Rel, everyone has a peer to look up to and a peer to look down on. The clubs that are in danger of relegation have near-peer clubs around them that are a league below them, so just by scoring enough draws to stay in the top flight (or 2nd etc) you've achieved superiority to someone. Where in America a last place team is just a last place team. This is helped in Europe by density, the biggest distance in the EPL is less than the distance between Philly and Pittsburgh, which are in-state rivals in the USA, so no one is ever really bereft of top flight football (which is why pro/rel wouldn't work in the USA). This is also why I support instituting a modified version of the Gold System for draft picks.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
Balogun was benched.
Bosnia would be an embarrassment:
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
Trump called for Unconditional Surrender and made regime change a clear goal of the war from the get-go. That objective was clearly unachieved. Replacing Khamenei with Khamenei is a joke.
On 1, 2, 3 we don't have any data that shows a significant decline in capability. The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable, as they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, threaten their neighbors, and force a deal that benefits their proxy Hezbollah.
The problem here is that some people think this is Team Deathmatch rules and some people think it's Capture the Flag. The objective isn't to kill a lot of Iranians, it's to achieve some kind of strategic goal. The K:D doesn't matter, the objectives do.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
I don't think you're rejecting the premise, that conflict is the premise. Why does all the structure of the sport lean toward variability, but the result toward predictability?
While I hear you on the financial aspects in regular season league play, it doesn't explain the world cup. We see very few upsets in the world cup knockout stages or UCL knockout stages, relative to the NFL playoffs or NBA playoffs, which are just single games. The draw creates an illusion of regular season parity, but disappears in elimination rounds.
And the finances don't explain all of it, expensive MLB or NBA or NFL don't dominate cheap ones in the same way game-to-game, though they show similar advantages over time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
I think what we're seeing here is modern woke secularism is a religion that has adapted to American law around the separation of church and state, such that it is able to infest the perquisites of religion without being expunged by the court's religious protection pesticides. Wokeness is a religion in the sense of acknowledging an ultimate reality and seeking to answer metaphysical questions about life, the universe, and everything; but it avoids the legal American definition of religion and thus can seek to be enforced by laws and taught in schools and discussed directly in the workplace. It satisfies the need for religion without being a religion.
The separation of church and state fundamentally, but silently, assumed that we all had a church we were leaving behind when interacting with the state. The Founders assumed that each man had religious beliefs, likely a formal denomination, which answered questions about life, the universe, and everything and that we would all lay those disputes aside when interacting within government structures. The assumption was that our public schools would be secular, but that was ok because nobody in the room fully believed in what was being taught in that school, we were all setting aside and sacrificing some separate religious belief and finding common ground in the secular.
Wokies have in essence hacked the system, where Hindus and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and prots and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons* all need to set aside their identity at the door and learn to accept secular stuff they don't actually believe, Wokies seek to impose their metaphysical understandings within the classroom and the office as orthodoxy. "Just being a decent person." Yeah, we're all trying to do that, and we all have different definitions.
This will ultimately require reworking the concept of freedom of religion.
*the Overton window of religious acceptability varied with the Founder in question and the era of the American Republic, Jefferson certainly in his writings at least fantasized about including hindoos and Mohamedans in the range of religions accepted in the land, but Missouri only rescinded the Mormon Extermination Order 50 years ago.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10d ago
Soccer fans, something that has bugged me for years: how does soccer manage to combine low scoring with highly predictable outcomes?
In most similar sports, low scoring and low margin of victory correlate with unpredictability. But soccer is the most predictable sport in terms of finishes, very rarely have we seen real surprises at the top of the table or at the end of a major cup. It's the same few teams winning the big 5 leagues, the UCL, the world cup.
Across every other sport, one score games are so close to a coinflip in luck that much of analystics consists in softening or removing one score games from the data. In soccer a one score margin is completely normal, two scores is high, three a murder.
Have there been statements by the Belgian team that they don't care and they'll win anyway? Maybe it's just not being reported, but playing under protest because Balogun is on the pitch is big loser energy.
The result here might be irregular, but it isn't unfair because it shouldn't have a serious impact on the outcome of the game.
More options
Context Copy link