I Want a New Left

Beautiful Goal!

See here, though I have to say that when I first saw this Benjamin Pavard a couple weeks ago at the beginning of this World Cup, my instant thought was, "child of professors." Wikipedia doesn't say one way or the other. What do you think? Anyway, what a lovely curve on that shot!

“Abolish ICE.” And SNOW

At last Dems are starting to see that global warming can be good. Heh.

This Made Me Smile: Leftists Eating Their Own

A professor at the University of Michigan has complained that green organizations are too white and too male (here). Every time someone does this kind of thing, a few more white males head to the right. Possibly, a few more non-white females head in the other direction, but I suspect those females are already there anyway.

World Cup Notes

We are now out of the first round, and no African nation has made it to the next round, only one Asian nation has (Japan), and only one from our region has (Mexico). And guess what? Both those countries depended on other countries to help them advance. Japan depended on Colombia’s beating Senegal, and Mexico depended on South Korea’s beating Germany. So, basically, this is now a European-South American show, except for those two outsiders. Which is what it usually is anyway.

The big news is Germany’s failure to advance, but they looked rather flat through most of the tournament. Here’s a typical headline from a German newspaper reporting on this shocking event:

I didn’t think Argentina deserved to advance, either, but they did, and maybe they will improve as time goes on.

Two Surprising Events

The first happened recently in Iran when protesters shouted, “Death to Palestine!” See here. I’m so used to seeing reports of them shout about death to Israel or America that I actually misread it as Israel, until the contents of the article made me re-read the shout. That shout should give a jolt to the Palestinians, and to leftists here in the West, who are wholly unused to such sentiments.

The other event happened a few weeks ago when a moderate Muslim sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for including him and his organization on a list of “haters” who are Islamophobes. See here. They also have to pay him a fine of over three million dollars. It’s hard to believe that a liberal organization could be so clueless, but what can one expect these days?

I hope that both of these events are evidence that we are at a turning point, but it is impossible to know, of course, what will happen next.

Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy, and Mansfield Park

I’m not a Star Wars fan, but as I understand it, someone named Kathleen Kennedy (who produced the latest Star Wars pic) has ruined the brand. See here and here:

... Star Wars never appealed to Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen Kennedy didn’t like the franchise, because it was, indeed, a boys’ adventure franchise. Instead of making a boys’ adventure franchise she didn’t get and didn’t like, she made it into something she could like: a girls’ empowerment fantasy.

Let me remind people that this can happen to girls, too. Twenty years ago, at the height of the girls’ romantic fantasy craze involving Jane Austen novels, someone made a movie of Mansfield Park and had to go and ruin it by injecting all sorts of SJW stuff into it. They could have made a lot of money on it (or a lot more money than they did), but they had to go and change much of the story.

This is just what SJW types do.

World Cup: Fix, Fix, Fix, Nigeria Got Ripped Off

Once again we have a penalty that should have been given that wasn’t, and while it’s hard to deal with counterfactuals in sports, if Nigeria had gotten the penalty, and if they had scored, they would have been ahead by 2-1, and given that they needed only a tie to advance, Argentina would have had the hard task of scoring two goals with about twenty minutes left. This was a clear handball in the penalty box by an Argentine player who tried to head the ball, only to have the ball then bounce off his arm. Keep in mind that yesterday a penalty was called on a Portuguese player for a handball, which hit his arm after an Iranian player headed it from about two feet away. I know that players are supposed to keep their hands at their sides in the penalty area, but (as far as I could tell) he was falling at the time. If anything, yesterday’s should not have been called, whereas today’s should have been called because players are supposed to be competent enough to avoid having the ball hit their arm when they are trying to control the ball.

It’s true that Portugal got lucky yesterday, in the opinion of some, when Ronaldo was not given a red card for elbowing an Iranian player in the face. That isn’t the way I saw it. He was behind the Iranian player and brought his arm over the head and around the side of the face in order to get around him. The elbow may have glanced off the side of the guy’s face, but if it did, his arm was held straight at the time and not bent, plus it looked more like his arm only brushed it; it then struck the guy’s arm rather forcefully. Plus, the Iranian player was falling into him, seemingly deliberately so as to impede him. So, yellow card at worst, and that is what he got.

Maxine Waters’ Stupid Policy

Maxine Waters wants Democrats to harass White House staffers when they appear in public. Does she understand that this tactic will be used by Republicans when another Democrat is president?

World Cup Notes

Was yesterday’s Germany-Sweden game fixed? It’s too perfect. Such a storybook ending. Germany reduced to ten men nevertheless manages to squeeze out a victory with a last-minute goal. Not giving Sweden a penalty kick surely helped.

And Serbia deserved one, too, when they played Switzerland. Their striker was tackled American-football style by two Swiss players, but no penalty was called. What’s the point of having video review of you aren’t going to call everything you see?

Today, Senegal and Japan produced a very good game to watch. Unlike Spain, both teams were aggressive about trying to get goals. Also, Senegal finally scored a non-lucky goal. (Recall that the other day, I said that their two goals against Poland were both a matter of luck and it remained to be seen if they could score one based purely on skill.) Its first goal was a bit of luck because of a bad blunder by a Japanese defender. Its second was an ordinary goal that had little to do with luck.

Regarding Croatia’s first goal against Argentina, it occurred to me today that what made this such a devastating goal was that at that point, Argentina had not yet scored. If the score had been 3-0 for Argentina, then the blunder would have been no big deal.

World Cup: Argentina Self-Destructs, and Nationalism and Multiculturalism

Yesterday, Argentina engaged in a painful episode of self-destruction on the soccer field. Their goalie made a horrible blunder: trying to pop the ball over the head of a Croatian player to one of his teammates, he mishit it directly to the guy, who slammed it in for a Croatian goal. That might not have mattered so much, except that their star, Lionel Messi, didn’t do much of anything (either in this game or their first one). Maybe Argentina can advance if they beat Nigeria, but that doesn’t look too likely after their win today over Iceland. But we shall see.

Regarding Messi, I’ve just never seen him help Argentina very much. He hasn’t won a World Cup for them or a Copa America, either. He blows penalty kicks at bad times, and doesn’t score at others. Contrast him with Pele and Diego Maradona. Pele helped Brazil win three World Cups. Diego Maradona brought Argentina one in 1986, and they probably deserved another in 1990. It is true that 1982 was a bad World Cup for Maradona, but he was young enough that he could still look forward to helping his country. But Messi will be too old for the next World Cup, so if Argentina doesn’t advance, that is it for him. His manager is saying that he isn’t getting the support that he should from his teammates, but they could say the same thing about him. He missed that penalty kick the other day, for example.

Meanwhile, Steve Sailer has an interesting post here entitled “Why Can’t Americans be Good Globalists Like World Cup Fans, Who Aren’t Nationalist in the Slightest?” He’s being facetious, of course, because those foreigners are quite nationalistic. Moreover, many of them are (horrors!) flag-wavers. In fact, preceding each game there are two large flags on the field, one for each of the teams. Then they play the national anthems, and no one has knelt yet! Obviously, they love their countries. So, if they can be nationalistic, why can’t we? Moreover, this sort of nationalism is pretty harmless.

More important, while Sailer and his readers imagine that America’s globalists are wild about soccer, in fact few of them are. (If they were, then given how much power they have, they could have easily forced America’s schools to replace football with soccer, but they haven’t demanded that yet because so few of them are soccer fans.) This is what my book on soccer was about, how hypocritical people are who believe themselves to be so cosmopolitan, when in fact they are all rather provincial. They think of me as a xenophobe because I don’t want open borders, and I think of them as xenophobes because they don’t follow international sports.

Anyway, I have many stories to tell about these people, but just one will do. I knew an academic couple who were thrilled at the idea that they would be spending their summer in Rome. It was right during the World Cup (in 2002, I think), and I wondered if they had thought about the consequences of going there at that time. When they came back, they said that at first they didn’t understand what was going on. I presume what they meant was that whenever Italy scored a goal, all the Italians who were in their cars would honk their horns and that they had no idea what it meant. Hey, guys, when in Rome....