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
3d ago
https://thehill.com/policy/sports-gaming/5925843-iran-world-cup-travel-issues/
It seems like it would be elementary to keep eyes on the members of the traveling team while they are in Los Angeles, and attempting to use them to spy on Tehrangeles is a silly conceit to begin with.
Maybe I'm caught up in cold war nostalgia, but the story used to be that when Soviet bloc teams traveled to America it was the commies that locked them up in the hotel to make sure they didn't defect, rather than the Americans that hustled them out ASAP. We should WANT Iranian players to see rich happy free America, full of rich happy Persians, and go home and think about how their home could be less of a shithole if they spent less energy hating Jews.
And I think you need to be more specific re:racism. In my lifetime there is no level of organized American sport where a white player calling a Black player a nigger isn't a major foul. Because we understand that in a contact sport you can't say shit like that and not get violence. We can argue about where on the hyperstitious scale we should fall, or about how slurs are the only real profanity left, but for racial slurs to be accepted in sport in America you're reaching back to Hammerin' Hank or Victory's Glory.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
One thing that is not apparently to me is this - growing up in sports in the US homophobia and racism was the default and beloved by all...
I'm not sure I agree. Even growing up in philthy philly at the Vet, while I still have my "Romo's a Homo/Dallas Sucks T.O. Swallows" t shirt and heckling is a proud city pastime, I never heard anyone use racial slurs against opposing players, and if you had asked me about it at fourteen I would have said "well we all sing about T.O. overdosing on pills, but if you called him a nigger you'd probably get banned from the Vet." The only place I recall hearing racial slurs directed against opposing, and their own, players was in Boston, which is notorious for it, and even Fenway says that any use of racial slurs will result in a permanent stadium ban.
((As an aside, some of the best heckling I remember was the Bleacher Creatures in the Bronx chanting at Adam Jones in centerfield that the batting coach was fucking his wife))
Europe has significantly larger problems with racial abuse hurled at opposing players, it's just a different animal over there. And it seems reasonable to label racist slurs as "fighting words" within the context of a contact sport, you don't want to have players taunting each other into a rage. Some things we understand to be so offensive that we can't blame the taunted player for engaging in physical violence in response. The rules are seeking to cut off escalation at an earlier stage. The "no hiding speech" rule seems eminently reasonable, there's no reason to hide your lips unless you're saying something that you don't want publicized. I actually think the American leagues should police players' on-field speech a lot more heavily, and would if the unions weren't so unreasonable.
I'm amazed at the success of the world cup. I'd bought into a lot of the anti-FIFA, TDS negative reporting on the world cup, and so far it's been a complete success. I do think the efforts to restrict travel for the Iranian team is a little disgusting, the Spartans used to be the enforcers of the Olympic peace, but it's overshadowed by the joy that European travelers are bringing to the country. The saga of Lawrence, Kansas is so good that I have shitlib friends of mine saying that it adjusted their own feelings about the American heartland. Scots are reportedly drinking Boston dry. Selfishly, tickets are staying way too expensive around me, I was kind of hoping that I'd be able to snipe $20 tickets in the nosebleeds, but they haven't appeared yet.
And fuck it, the USA will probably fall apart in the round of 16, but I BELIEVE
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
The conceptual expansion of Doxxing as complained about online, at the same time that internet privacy has collapsed in most cases, is fascinating.
Fifteen years ago Doxxing was a narrow concept: you hunted down and exposed the real identity of someone who was posting pseudonymously on the internet, who at least tacitly hid their identity and did not want their "real" identity to be connected with their pseudonym.
Today, I see people accused of doxxing for things like finding out public information about someone who was real-name and real-face posting to begin with. Or finding the identities of public officials who performed public acts. Or normal acts of paparazzi following celebrities. It has been reduced to publishing any information about anyone in any situation.
In my mind, Doxxing properly has three factors: to be guilty of Doxxing you must a) expose real life details about b) someone posting under a pseudonym on the internet who c) had a reasonable expectation those details wouldn't become known. A LOT of people believe in exceptions for "this guy is really bad tho actually" or "well this was a journalist doing it;" I don't necessarily buy those.
This is clearly not a case of doxxing, it fails all three points. Franco wasn't posting on the internet under a pseudonym, he was communicating using his government name with a company. No real life details about him were exposed beyond his name, the rest came out after it was already a story. Franco can't possibly have reasonably expected that his message was private, particularly when it consisted of an insult.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I was told that "woke is dead" but it seems cancel culture is alive and well on the kosher Right. How is one supposed to take any of the clowns seriously attacking "woke leftists" when they act like this?
Yeah...this ain't it big dog.
I don't see why they publicly published it, but being that insane a bigot IRL will have that consequence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Maybe you're correct and Israel has successfully pissed away generations of Jewish-American efforts to combat antisemitism in four years. But I doubt it's been that bad.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Sure, if the Jewish population of Israel drops ~10% over the course of 35 years, then there will be no political problem for anyone in the USA. But if we saw mass casualty events in Tel Aviv, or entire cities in Northern Israel abandoned in mere weeks, then it wouldn't be survivable for any president.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Also do DEI/affirmative action for people with children. The state should hire/promote for public servant positions the person with more children
Since DEI/Affirmative Action is most impactful and least harmful at earlier opportunity stages rather than at executive stages, I would say the correct aim should be to do Affirmative Action for kids with siblings. If you make having more siblings a major plus for getting into Harvard, and having enough siblings a near-guarantee of significant college scholarships, you get two birds stoned at once. Rather than the optimal meta being to focus parental investment on one kid to get them into Harvard, the optimal strategy becomes having a bunch of kids to boost all their odds. It subsidizes one of the major cost concerns for having middle-class kids, education. It taps into existing status hierarchies rather than trying to create new ones from whole cloth.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
A) The cosmic power of the USMNT making even the semifinals of a home world cup is so tremendous that it is actually supertemporal in nature, the vibrations would echo back into the near past.
B) One SCOTUS opinion isn't the final word on it. Trump won't accept an opinion upholding birthright citizenship and will seek to undermine it in some other way. And a pro-Trump opinion would merely be that the Constitution doesn't guarantee birthright citizenship, not that it forbids it, so at a later time it would be possible for Congress to write a more orderly birthright citizenship law into effect.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
By the way, is this the first deal with a foreign adversary that the American public hasn't been allowed to even read?
Probably not, public disclosure of treaty clauses has only been a norm post WWI, so there were probably secret treaties prior to that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Legally in the United States I have freedom to travel as I please. But legally in the United States, I can't walk on most interstate highways, I can't drive a car on any road without meeting a host of regulations and paying several taxes and fees, I can't fly in a plane without special government ID or at all if I'm on a list the government can add me to for any reason.
I suspect a similar fiction will come into play here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Do you read the New York Times? The push back against Israel is milquetoast at best, and would shift quickly if Israel were actually threatened.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I predict that if the USMNT has an all time run (for them) with the world's most accidental American, birthright citizenship will be upheld. The man is scoring goals for the national team because his mother was refused air transport home because she was too pregnant with him at the time. This wasn't even birth tourism: they just didn't want her giving birth over the Atlantic.
If they embarass themselves, birthright citizenship will be rescinded.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
We had a Palestinian restaurant here that really went all in on the politics. They went out of business, probably didn't help but mostly the service was truly horrendous, like the dumbest kids at the mosque got waiter jobs there.
I kind of appreciate it, but I also wouldn't care about going to a Jewish deli that had Israeli flags everywhere. I like places where the owners feel free to express themselves personally.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
The US suffers from being stalled in expectations. We will make the group stage, we will not win more than one game in them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I don't think Israel has hurt their image to that extent. They've hurt it significantly, but not that badly.
The image of Jews who look sound and act like Europeans or Americans being pushed out of their homes would not be politically survivable.
As soon as Trump turns on Israel the Democrats will have the Jews back in their good graces.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I don't think one can pretend there's no difference between what Dubya did, which I protested at the time!, and what Trump is doing.
When Dubya or Obama gave circuitous and diplomatically phrased lies in press releases or statements by some underling, there was still some idea that if the President spoke directly and said it like he meant it, everyone would know we were serious.
If Obama had given a direct personal statement saying that we were going to blow some little country to hell if they didn't do what we wanted, everyone would have considered it a very serious situation. Trump now does that regularly. That possibility that there is a mode of communication that would be more serious or more credible no longer exists.
There is no way to signal seriousness or credibility anymore.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
That was a literal reference I was thinking of when I said it.
Obama set a red line, and then hemmed and hawed about whether it was crossed and what the consequences would be, and as a result we sent so much crap to Syrian rebels that it sparked Chinese manufacturers to create knockoffs of the fanny packs that were issued by the CIA to sell to other Syrians who wanted to imitate the style. And we're still talking about it today.
Trump does the same thing over and over until we don't even bother talking about it on this forum anymore.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I've been critical of Israeli policy before, but that kind of disagreement hides a fundamental similarity: Israel is us. They live like us, they act like us, they mostly look like us.
The image of Jewish people being purged from their homes as a result of US foreign policy mismanagement would be incredibly destructive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
(Obviously sample size of 1 doesn't say much about anything, but from my perspective, football watching has seemed more sticky in a marketing sense than the other sports, idk).
I think Football is more of a social event than the other sports for most people, and as social connections have gotten more attenuated and the list of acceptable small-talk topics has shrunk, the NFL has taken on a greater meaning for a lot of people. It's doing work that casual discussions about things that didn't used to be risky or politically charged used to carry the burden for. Being Birds fan is a bigger part of my personality now than it was in college, because "Go Birds" is an easy way to chat with a wide variety of people in my life now. I can talk with my wife's ob-gyn and with my roofer about the AJ Brown trade quite easily.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
The Israeli conflicts are a trap for American presidents because they don't want either side to win or to lose. Israel losing a war would destroy Trump's presidency irrevocably.
Are we still doing this? Which is it, 39th time? Are Pakistanis fabricating this again? I understand that Trump really, really wants a deal with Iran, he is generally an enjoyer of Deals (wrote a whole book on that, I recall) and more immediately there's the issue of midterms. But Trump has kept announcing this deal, and every damn time it fell through, sometimes with Iranians flat out denying that they even were in contact with the US. I am skeptical about this one too.
It's a funny meta-situation that all weekend I saw the deal announcement in the news, and thought it was notable that there was no post about it in the CWR, but at the same time I couldn't come up with anything all that creative to say beyond "here we go again.jpeg"
I think it's notable that Trump has so reduced the credibility of statements of foreign policy from POTUS to the point where we all agree collectively that they aren't worth discussion. It's impossible to imagine a world where Obama or Dubya or Clinton made these kinds of empty threats and promises that went nowhere at all. "Bush Lied, People Died" was a popular protest T Shirt in the oughts; "Trump Lies, nothing in particular happens" would be the modern equivalent. Presidents lied to us throughout my life, obviously, but the lies were things like "we are building a strong stable Afghan democracy" which were backed up by significant action and time wasting. The statement is untrue, but its implications cannot be ignored. The
At the same time, I'm being assured by Top Men in the plan truster crowd that the whole deal is a feint and Trump is actually planning to continue the war. Which makes me unspeakably sad as an American. We used to understand why December 7th was a day which will live in infamy, now we brag about doing worse.
I don't think it's good that the US government, directly through the president and cabinet secretaries and not through a sacrificial undersecretary of yadayadayada, regularly lies to us about what's going on. I'm starting to get very tinfoil hat about the various looney tunes accidents that are supposed to have occurred during the Iran operation. I just don't come anywhere close to believing things said directly by the president, SecState, SecWar; even directionally or legally they aren't anywhere close to true.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
There seems to be some kind of psychological law that everyone believes that their out-group is uniquely cowardly and can easily be cowed and persuaded by terroristic aerial bombing campaigns, despite the knowledge that one's in-group would absolutely never be persuaded by such means.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Reasonable seems like an odd phrasing.
Can you live your life that way and survive? Yes, obviously.
Will you miss out on many things? Yes, obviously.
I think the big question to ask yourself is are you comfortable with coming back to interpersonal relationships in ten years and being in a profoundly weird position of trying to play catch-up?
High achieving gunners often experience this after college, they focused on academics throughout high school and College, and now they've achieved their early professional goals and it is time for romance, but they missed the developmental steps along the way, so they're stumbling through first dates and first kisses at 24, and lack the training and reference that their peers have around these things.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't believe it's the case that we're seeing a significant shift in fandom between sports as a result of phone introduction, which we would expect if the modern attention span drove changes in which sports were more amenable to fandom.
I've been seeing these "just-so" stories forever about why X sport is superior to or expanding past Y sport, and for the most part things haven't changed that much from when I was a kid. I've no doubt phone consumption is way way way up, but we're not seeing a concomitantly massive change in sports consumption.
Which sport you find interesting and engaging seems to be mostly downstream of what you grew up with, with the possibility of conversion as an adult being unusual but not unheard of. The parallel is closer to religion than it is to anything else.
You know you might be right, I look forward to the classification from DHS that the Iranian team is welcome to stay as long as they please.
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