hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3d ago
The worlds major sporting powers probably could. Lots of rugby players on it, of course, but American football isn’t completely unknown over there either.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
American football is expensive but it’s within the realm of what Western Europe could afford- after all it took off in America when we were a lot poorer than they are now. Could Europeans fill out a full team? Probably, a number of those countries are very competitive across a range of different sports.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
College quidditch is also notable for being ridiculous and inane as a sport. They run around with brooms held between their legs, even.
Like ultimate frisbee is not that.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
And then people unfamiliar with sports tried to make quidditch real, giving ammunition to ‘JKR made a fictional sport, not a real one’.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
American football is ludicrously more expensive and has more specialized players. But typically rugby(and Canadian football) players find more success slotting into American football teams than the reverse, and I struggle to believe that high income countries can’t afford to build NFL teams.
But the other thing to point out is that the NFL is not, primarily, a sporting organization, it’s an entertainment platform. A limited number of teams isn’t going to expand, because the NFL’s success formula is celebrities+tabloid fodder+a big show that’s easy to televise- and thats a lot harder to replicate. Hardcore sports fans in the US are pivoting away from the NFL and towards things like hockey and soccer(college football is also huge, but it’s a class/cultural phenomenon).
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Cuba being right next to the USA brings in lots of investment, they’re mineral rich, and they were probably destined to have at least some shipping income.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
What is ‘traditional anthropology’? Margaret Meade’s work was mostly based on lies. Early anthropologists said all kinds of crazy shit. The field has been ideologically driven fan fiction, sloppy research techniques, and actual lies since the beginning.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
In fairness, Spain had 12 goals blocked, which only happened because Argentina has the best keeper in the world.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
There are lots of countries that are wealthy enough to play American Football- but soccer got to Africa from France, not the other way around.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
I mean, you should vote. But if you want something higher impact, volunteer with local campaigns that oppose flock cameras. Many local elections are nonpartisan and people are simply lost as to who to vote for; a door knock or a phone call can replace the all important (R) or (D).
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Folding knives are extremely normal for Americans to have in their pockets for opening boxes and the like; even if it's technically illegal nobody cares outside of the sorts of places that already have metal detectors.
Then again, this is the country where a day long class and a background check entitles people in most states to carry a firearm anywhere they go.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
That's actually not true- the handful of sports whose ancestors were clearly documented functioned as a substitution for war. A lacrosse match substituted for a battle.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Actually soccer, rugby, and cricket spread out from England at about the same time, but soccer got the widest adoption and displaced the others, in both rich and poor countries alike. Rugby and its descendants(like American and Canadian football, or Australian rules football) are dominant in most anglosphere colonies, but not in Britain itself.
Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder. It's not highly scripted. It isn't a sport that rewards sheer mass over athleticism. Anyone except the wheelchair bound can play, anywhere, anytime. It's the world's sport for a reason, it beat out rugby and cricket for a reason.
Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate.
Tiny nations do, however, do this. The rugby powers could field good American Football teams if they wanted to, probably quite quickly. Plenty of small european countries already field good basketball teams- Serbia actually pushed the US to the brink for olympic gold. And Latin American baseball players are extremely common.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
In practice, that is not how it works- excommunications are publicized as a judgement that the extenuating factors don’t apply. The lack of publication of excommunications serves as a judgement that whatever reason they have for doing it(in this case, almost certainly persecution) is good enough to dispense from the law.
Lone cranks doing crank things under the radar is the reason for the látame sententiae cannons, when high profile behavior goes unpunished it can be assumed to be judged not excommunicating.
The current status is that there is an above ground church. Officials(clergy etc) in the above ground church are legally required to be members in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, a communist front group which picks bishops and disciplines priests for hewing too close to Catholic doctrines the CCP doesn’t like. Non-Chinese Catholics are generally agreed to be dispensed from mass attendance inside red China and the Vatican does not impose penalties on the CPCA.
China also has an underground church about which virtually nothing is known except that it was stronger when John Paul II let them consecrate underground bishops to replace the ones martyred. There may still be underground bishops being consecrated in technical violation of canon law; the Vatican is supremely uninterested in excommunicating them. Most Catholics in China attend underground services at least occasionally(unlike in the gulf countries, underground priests are largely local) but underground church only Catholics are agreed to be a minority.
Edit to add- in Conservative Muslim countries, the underground church usually uses nonresident priests who say masses in private. Red China is unique in having a theoretically aboveboard structure to go along with it; the soviets tried to have this but failed and tended to lapse into persecution. To read about the experience of a Catholic priest ministering under persecution in the Soviet Union, With God in Russia by Fr Walter Ciszek is generally agreed as the best account. Nothing of the sort has been published for either red China or the gulf countries.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Argentina fought in multiple wars, but the Falklands/Malvinas are just the only recent one- they fought in the triple alliance, for example(the South American world war).
hydroacetylene
5d ago
It's pointless barely-justified jingoism of the sort that is very common in Latin America. But because the Argentines are white people behaving like Slavs and the counterparty is Britain, it's newsworthy.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Mamdani needs an out to agree ahead of time not to arrest Netanyahu or this is an uncharacteristic political stumble.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
I know there are societies where opposing surrogacy is more of a feminist thing than a socially conservative thing, but it's rarely more popular on the center right than the center left.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Mamdani is not Greg Abbott who can line up the troops to deter the federal government into letting him get away with stuff(and even then- only with Joe Biden)- and if he's not savvy enough to know it, well, that's limboing under a very low bar, the sort of which would result in him actually trying to arrest Netanyahu- and probably getting arrested by the NYPD for giving the order. Everything we know about him is that he'll come up with some reason to get out of it ahead of time.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
He's obviously not going to seriously try to do this. He'll go to Florence if he does, and he knows it. Equally obviously, he has lots of supporters who eat this stuff up. This is a political stunt, and he knows better than to try.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Isn't CDU a not particularly ideological establishment party? I know that they are socially conservative by name, but my impression was that they had a knack for sitting just to the right of the median voter in Germany on social issues, wherever that happens to be.
‘People’ don’t watch 37 seasons of cops. People watch cops when they’re bored, they don’t follow the franchise.
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