We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – the culture wars, sporting edition My stance on this is Bill Burr’s. I’ll take it seriously when women fans show up. The men’s game is subsiding the sport with my money. Not that anyone asked my permission. I’ve done more than enough and it’s just “not my job” to watch it for them too.
– ‘Tom Payne‘
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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All of the new “supposed to’s” in life have changed. I’m supposed to pretend the guys on the winner’s podium at the girls’ games are women. I’m supposed to pretend that Hamas people have human rights. I’m supposed to pretend that oil use is evil. I’m supposed to pretend that productive capacity is unnecessary. I’m supposed to pretend that everyone deserves an equal outcome.
What I do actually feel is, humanity must have arrived at an especially comfortable existence for us to have the luxury of denigrating all of the things that brought us that comfort. But I suspect that all of these new “supposed to’s” are the very things that will eventually bring us back to that state of hunger that will make these new “supposed to’s” look silly.
It does strike me that if they transgenderize women’s soccer then before long it’ll be a bunch of biological men who couldn’t cut it in the men’s league. So it’ll basically be like EFL League One and a Half that they’ll all be playing in.
Which just shows that the contradictions of the insane left eventually eat their own tail.
I was struck by a couple of headlines in the onion. Don’t remember them exactly, one was “Outside Democrat headquarters, apparently the Palestine flag has thrown the Gay Pride flag off the top of the roof.” Another was “Students at Harvard mad that a scheduling conflict meant they had to leave their microaggressions seminar to get to the “Kill All the Jews” rally on time.”
It also struck me that the Queers for Palestine movement isn’t actually a sarcastic joke. Apparently though there is a reciprocal organization “Palestine for Queers”. From what I read they have a weekly meeting on the roof of a tall building. I’m sure the view is lovely.
We live in a world where even the so called Noble Price for Economics is given on the basis of “is this person Woke – are they pushing the Equity narrative?” and where “Woman of the Year” is awarded to a transvestite who is not even a very good female impersonator.
Is it any shock that sport is also messed up?
I’ve discovered a literal silver lining to the current fixation with wokified “entertainment”, whether sports, films, theatre or whatever: I’ve been saving a considerable amount of money by simply choosing to no longer frequent anything on offer these days.
Nah! It’s the demotion of thinking in general education and the promotion of emoting. Feminizing of education system, in fact. Nothing that hurtz your ‘feels’ should be permitted. Everyone gets a prize.
That’s not ok. But we’ve been able to get by, so long as the systems put in place by our grandparents still function, but as those systems deteriorate or have become overloaded, we’re starting to notice that ‘things aren’t working’ like they used to. And the process flow charts that managers have been accustomed to using, they don’t work now, either.
Now I know you don’t need technical drawing so much these days, what with CAD/CAM etc., but my tech drawing teacher had a scar around his neck where he learnt the hard way not to dangle items of clothing into fast turning machinery. That is, he had more that an academic knowledge of the subject he was teaching. He’d done something else, other than academia. There are almost none like him today.
Which is probably why we can’t seem to build a functioning aircraft carrier in the UK, and our much lauded main battle tank has a ‘notorious‘* weak-spot. If it’s out of its dugout, its armour is useless.
*Why the F* didn’t we hear about that over the last thirty years, it being notorious, and all?
@APL,
Oh, I don’t know… Because that’s mostly bullshit, written by ignorant journalists?
The Challenger 2 took heavy fire during its service in Iraq on numerous occasions; no kills were achieved by the Iraqis. I believe the one kill on a Challenger 2 was by another Challenger, which the crew survived.
The root problem with these idiots, who gleefully trumpet everything they hear, whether or not it is factually correct or not, is that they understand nothing at all about the military. Were you to armor a tank such that it was proof against everything at all angles, you’d have something that weighed in at several hundred tons and couldn’t move. The current issue is that the battlefield has changed, and we’re now seeing different angles of attack than were classically available to the opposition. Right now, for example, the turrets are vulnerable to top attack because drones weren’t a thing you had to worry about, and the idea of someone being able to precision-drop a grenade into your hatch was ludicrously unlikely. Now? Routine risk… So, the armor has to improve, along with tactics, techniques, and procedures. The glacis plate thing is another example of this; the Challenger was not meant to fight offensively; what was envisaged for it was a defensive battle, withdrawing from prepared position to another successive prepared position, wherein they would actually fight from a hull-down aspect. This being the case, heavy armor on the glacis was positively to be discouraged, and once the threat profile and tactics changed, so too did the armor package priorities need to change.
Modern military proficiency is demonstrated by this sort of flexibility; you have to adapt to the battlefield you encounter, much as the Allies had to weld improvised forks onto the front of their tanks in Normandy to deal with the bocage hedges.
Actual professional soldiers understand this; every engagement you go into has to be as much an exercise in adaptation and learning as it is one of weapons and leadership. The winner is likely going to be the guy who can learn and operate flexibly in accordance with what reality has to teach him, compared to the doctrinaire fool that thinks all circumstance is pre-recorded somewhere in a book that he can reference.
You can’t learn, you lose. Every battle is a classroom; what works, what doesn’t are the lessons. You can’t grasp that fact? You’re going to die. You have to constantly adapt, learn, improvise, and improve. If you go into every engagement in a war with the same old tactics and procedures you had at the beginning, you’re either incredibly lucky, or you’re on the losing side.
Fraser Orr, I’m pretty sure those were both Babylon Bee articles, not the Onion. BB is IMHO consistently funnier than the Onion these days.
…OK, just checked the current Onion headlines, and they’re 80+% woke/leftist and pretty uniformly unfunny. Well, some of the non-political ones are OK, but they’re a minority down at the bottom of the page. How the mighty have fallen.
What I know about women’s soccer (or any soccer, for that matter) could be written on the back of a postage stamp. One of the small ones.
But I well-recall having a conversation with a lady I know who has 2 (at-the-time) teenage daughters, both of whom were serious soccer players in high school.
And what she said, in essence, was that girls/women’s soccer (in the US) is a cult of personalities, which has very little to do with athletic ability, being mostly concerned with ‘building girls’ self-esteem’ and creating more college funding and scholarships for a specific demographic of women.
As she said, when she started looking into it more deeply, is it realistic to believe that the finest soccer players in the US are a) overwhelmingly white b) invariably college educated c) all aged (on average) in their late 20s or early 30’s and d) disproportionately gay?
Yet that’s the US women’s national team?
Just for S&G, I went and checked the average-age thing because it seems so counterintuitive – athletic ability correlates so-strongly with age. If you check the average age of UK Premier League teams, for example, it’s absolutely-correlated – the higher in the league, the lower the average age of the players, with the top teams having an average age of players of about 24. Yet the US women’s national team has an average age of almost 29, with the oldest player being 37 years old? And we’re expected to believe that these are the finest female players in the nation?
As she said, it became obvious that organized US women’s soccer is dominated by white, middle-class participants, mostly the beneficiaries of Title IX college sports funding, and very-disproportionately gay. It’s basically a college-funding racket for the benefit of a small and self-selected subset of the population – with an excellent publicity department, devoted to elevating these generally-mediocre players to the status of heroic role-models for legions of teenage girls.
She also mentioned that, as her girls got older, the nature of the games and their play changed. In elementary school, they played aggressive, physical games, with lots of scoring. By the time they finished high school, they had been coached into a defensive, slow-paced low-skills game, with lots and lots of boring passing and very little scoring. Both of her girls bored out of the game. Maybe that’s why the game just can’t get any traction with the public – slow and boring football just isn’t something many people want to watch.
llater,
llamas
llamas:
Methinks the problem is the incentive structure.
If you want to win in soccer/football, your best bet, almost every time, is to play safe and wait for opportunities.
That is why i almost never watch it; and when i do, i watch it absent-mindedly, the way i watch a fish bowl. Surfing the web on the side.
Women’s soccer MIGHT make it to the big leagues eventually.
My experience is, people mostly watch the sports in which they participated as youths. I played football from 6 to 20, and so I used to watch football religiously. I never played soccer, and so watching soccer never created that same inner resonance.
I see more and more fields on Saturdays filled with soccer games, and more of them are girls teams. Maybe it will take those girls growing up and identifying with the game to bring the girl’s side of the sport into view.
I actually like watching women’s rugby. Or rather, I have no interest in the England women’s team which plays exactly like the England men’s team do when they have the biggest lunkheads – ie really dull steamroller processions. But I do like watching ze French laydees, who like ze French chaps have ze actual flair and ze elan and ze good passing and ze body swerves. OK they get steamrollered too by the big English steamrollers, but they’re fun to watch.
Never bought a ticket though. But that’s because you see the game better on TV. Just like men’s rugby.