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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24830 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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I have long said that the eurovision song contest needs to be imported to the USA. We need an outlet for regionalist jingoism and dumb arguing and snark. We need something to get politics notionally out of the news. I need another opportunity to insistently call Taylor Swift 'Travis Kelce's girlfriend' because football is more notable.

The one American who I think would legitimately love Eurovision if he was, for some reason, visiting the event by himself, would be Donald Trump. I won't elaborate further.

Trump hosting or commenting on the Eurovision would be hysterically funny.

We've had terrible poofters folks, really terrible, Bidden's gay musicians can't even suck a cock properly, but my gay vocalists can. Really we have HUGE gays, the gayest.

Couldn't resist.

I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?

I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.

We do have the Miss America Pageant, but very few people really care about that anymore. I think with modern communications and moving around, there just isn't as much jingoism between US states anymore.

We might be more interested in an intra-North America competition. Doing it between countries really amps up the jingoism, like the Olympics and World Cup. It would be fun to see the US go up against Cuba in a song contest. Not sure how you'd make it fair, though...

We have a perfectly cromulent outlet for regionalist jingoism, college football. At least until the TV money got large enough to drive the bus with conference consolidation and transfers becoming a whole lot closer to free agency.

Even before it wasn't quite the same. Eurovision contestants are typically born and raised in that country. Sure they've often done some travelling but they have lifelong links.

College football players often didn't have any link to the college or state before they got the scholarship.

The transfer system is garbage. Really undermines college sports.

The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.

American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.

American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it.

I very much disagree. American football isn't as intuitive to start watching as soccer, but you can learn enough about the rules of American football to start enjoying the game in like five minutes. The details of American football rules are extremely complex, but you don't need to know them to be a fan and indeed, out of all NFL fans I think probably only 10% or so actually understand those rules on a deep level. And I am not one of them, lol. All you really need to know to start understanding the game enough to enjoy it are: 1) 7 points touchdown / 3 points field goal, 2) you get 4 attempts to pick up 10 yards, if you succeed you get another 4 and if you don't the other team gets the ball, and 3) you can throw the ball forward no more than 1 time per play.

I myself went from knowing basically nothing about American football to being a fan in just a few minutes of watching. Actually, I don't think I even understood #3 above when I became a fan.

I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?

You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?

I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?

Sorry, "pick up" is slang for "to gain", "to acquire".

Yes, American football is essentially a hybrid turn-based/real-time game where each turn is a burst of real-time activity,.

In each turn, one team is on offense and starts with the ball. It is trying to either get the ball into the other team's endzone for 7 points or kick the ball through the other team's uprights for 3 points. The other team is on defense and is trying to stop that. If either the team on offense scores points or the team on defense manages to grab the ball away from the offense, the team on offense "loses possession" and then has to be the team on defense, and the other team that was on defense before becomes the team on offense.

A given team's offense and defense are usually made up of completely different players, but this is not enforced by the rules. It's just that in practice, no player is good enough at both offensive and defensive skills and has enough endurance to be worth playing both on offense and on defense.

The team on offense can throw the ball or run the ball as much as it wants, but with the extremely important caveat that it can only throw the ball forward once at most in any given turn ("down"). It can throw the ball backward as much as it wants, though teams almost never do this because statistically it is usually a bad idea.

When a team goes on offense, it generally starts at the part of the field where the other team lost possession when it was on offense. The team on offense then has four turns ("down"s) to move the ball, by throwing or running, at least ten yards closer to the other team's endzone than where it started. Each time it tries to move the ball, no matter what happens, then the next time it tries to move the ball, it starts at wherever the ball was stopped the last time it tried to move the ball. So let's say on the first down, the team on offense manages to move the ball 3 yards forward. Then on its second down, it starts 3 yards closer to that imaginary 10-yard line that it has to cross, the line that is 10 yards forward from where it first started the current set of 4 downs.

If the team on offense manages to move the ball past 10 yards from where it started on offense in those 4 turns ("down"s) it has, it then gets another 4 turns to move the ball 10 yards further from wherever the ball was last stopped. And if in those next chances it moves the ball more than 10 yards, then it gets yet another 4 turns... and so on... as long as the team on offense keeps managing to get at least 10 yards in 4 turns, it always gets 4 more turns, and in this way it can "march down the field" as they say and eventually get in the defending team's endzone. But if at any point the team on offense uses up 4 turns and fails to move the ball 10 yards forward in total between all the 4 turns, it gives us possession to the other team and then the other team goes on offense starting from where the offensive team had the ball.

At any point in a 4-turn cycle, the team on offense has the option of kicking the ball far towards the other team's endzone, hoping to run in the direction of the other team's endzone and stop whoever on the defending team catches the ball. Once the other team catches the ball, they become the team on offense. So the only reason for the team on offense to do this is if they feel that there is very little chance that they would be able to get 4 more downs by moving the ball past 10 yards and so it would be better to make sure that the team on defense gets the ball (and thus becomes the team on offense) close to their own endzone rather than at the place where the two teams are currently facing each other.

This is a lot of words but it can all start to make sense pretty quickly once one watches a game.

It is gaining in popularity in Germany. Also, the CFL does exist. It is also hard to overstate the popularity of football in the States.

Also in Finland.

Interesting—didn’t realize that. Thanks!

I had a flatmate in Scotland who was really into it. No idea if it's gaining wider popularity there, but that's my anecdote, fwiw.

Well yes, college ball is too much like the pros these days. Need something lighthearted and trashy, for to let the chainsmoking wives of America fly their regional prejudices proudly over the most trivial excuses.

Eurovision is like soccer: Americans don't care, Americans don't need to care, and that's all to the good.

Eurovision is one of the things I'm definitely going to edit out of my perception once doing so is possible. I'd like to wholly forget it exists.

As a "favorite sport", soccer is almost as popular as basketball or baseball among Americans now.

Yet another reason to eliminate immigration. Liking soccer is moral degeneracy. I say this only slightly in jest!

I'm curious, do you dislike it because you see it as a particularly un-American cultural import or is there some other reason you're not keen on it (and assuming I'm not taking your comment entirely too seriously)?

It is said mostly in jest. But I think soccer is an inferior sport to say football or Hockey. It is less physical, less specialization, and less tools. And I think the reason people in the states love it isn’t intrinsic to the sport but because it is popular. I hate that.

Also there is something sad to the homogenization of all culture. Sports are part of culture

That's interesting because again I would say those are points in soccer's favour. Particularly when it comes to it being less physical, surely it's more entertaining to watch people compete based on skill rather than brute size/strength? I can't imagine there'd be much of a market for watching someone who weighs 150kg beat up an opponent half his size in boxing or MMA. Whereas in soccer someone like Messi can run rings around players much larger than him thanks to his co-ordination and ball control.

In American sports, you do have the ultra skill guys who can compete against the physical brutes. But skill is not enough and athleticism is not enough. Either one will only make you good. Greatness requires both.

And again I can’t stress the point of physicality enough. Physicality isn’t primarily about athleticism but it is hitting. Aggression.

Lots of Americans don't like being asked to care about soccer because they consider a sport which doesn't score that frequently boring.

Living in one of the rare other countries where soccer isn't the main sport, there really seems to be a something ostentatious about the way anti-soccer Americans go out of their way to talk unprompted about just how much they don't care about soccer and how un-American it is etc. that you don't really find here.

I suppose it's a culture war thing but even then, a self-aware person would at least consider that it really is then the culture war that's at fault, moreso than the game itself.

That's fair. IMO the low-scoring nature of soccer/football is what makes the game tense and exciting - that feeling of not even wanting to go to the bathroom because you risk missing a dramatic game-changing moment isn't something I can imagine experiencing watching something as high-scoring as basketball. Differing tastes.

This seems like the inverse of reality. With football or basketball, so much is happening so often that the odds of me missing something very cool (an athletic dunk, a field-flipping interception, a clutch three-point shot from a mile away, a nifty trick play) is astronomically higher per minute I’m away than with soccer.

Even if something exciting does happen in a soccer game, it often takes several minutes to develop (i.e. even after intercepting a pass, a player has to actually make it all the way upfield and usually wait for some team support before attempting to score, giving me plenty of time to get out of the bathroom before missing the best part) and frankly isn’t usually all that visually appealing even when it does finally happen. I would say the average soccer match includes maybe five or six interesting moments. An average basketball game includes like twenty.

Looks like no

Maybe yes

I’d guess the kind of people who liked baseball (coastal white ethnics) are now the dominant soccer audience in the US. Baseball seems to have completely died in terms of younger audience.

I suspect the dominant soccer audience are immigrants and progressives dying to be European

and progressives dying to be European

I remember this as one of Scott Alexander's initial descriptors for blue tribe members.

That’s not surprising. Games are on streaming services and rarely on network TV. Going to a ballgame is expensive for families— somewhere between 150-200 dollars to attend a game and get a snack and a drink. Even youth baseball is harder to access, it’s mostly select teams after first or second grade. All of this means kids aren’t watching as much baseball as they used to.

No, the country music audience likes baseball. Flyover whites and assimilated hispanics go to baseball games all the time.

Baseball is declining, and that's partly because there's too many games for anyone to watch all of them, except for the most hardcore fans ever or those who have some professional reasons(eg local entertainment newscasters). This leads to few people even trying, which makes baseball less lucrative. But ticket sales remain strong so that teams are able to stay above water.

No, the country music audience likes baseball

More than football? Hispanics I agree of course. But I do think there has been a big decline amongst Ellis Island Americans. Every suburban white male New Yorker (be he Jewish, Irish or Italian) over fifty seems to like baseball, almost no young ones do.

No, not more than football, but definitely more than basketball or soccer.

I legitimately know very little about the habits of Ellis island Americans; I live in the south and see northerners with hyphenated ethnicities as essentially foreigners.

There was American Song Contest on NBC in 2022 and hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson, but mixed reception meant it had no 2023 and beyond editions.

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