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Football ("soccer") is a sign of U.S.A.’s moral decay

 
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 04:32 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
Tant pis ... 2:1 ...Fini
Germlat
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 04:35 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
But WH...Germany is one of the best football teams in the world. The style has to do with accuracy, precision, and strategy. I think football as a religion lacks something.....but as pure sport ...not so much. Hint: didn't read the entire thread ...but Germany is still the bomb.
0 Replies
 
Wilso
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 04:55 pm
Firstly - not a soccer fan.
The "flops" in an attempt to gain an advantage are somewhat a microcosm of the environment in which the players grew up. Particularly in say South America, where many of the players were literally dirt poor, and saw themselves as not having any power. In that situation, "cheating" is often seen as a valid attempt at levelling the playing field. It tends to translate into the way the players later play the game. You'll see a lot less attempts to abuse the rules from say Germany or Australia, than from many South American teams.
Ragman
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 04:56 pm
@Wilso,
Clearly you don't watch the game. You're projecting your own bias because they all cheat/flop.

In fact, in the early '90s, Jurgen Klinsmann (current coach of USA) helped to make it an art form and quite the common practice . He is a German who played in the '90s for Germany for a few of the German WC championship teams.
0 Replies
 
Olivier5
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 05:23 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
So France meets Germany in the quarter finals... That should be fun. :-)
JTT
 
  0  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 05:24 pm
@Olivier5,
Oh oh, WWIII!
0 Replies
 
Germlat
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 05:31 pm
@Olivier5,
What? Germany will win for sure!! Exciting would be a high ranking underdog...I'm not sure France qualifies .
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 07:12 pm

0 Replies
 
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 07:19 pm
A semi-solution to the flopping problem, posed by Adam Gopnik and then followed by many people saying how wrong he is and why...

in a NYer blog comment six days ago -

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/06/a-better-world-cup.html

Opinions?
(it's not a huge article)
0 Replies
 
glitterbag
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 09:26 pm
Ann Coulter would drop that notion of moral decay if the US won. Since we have never won Ann dismisses it as moral decay. She is one of those simpletons who think there is a new Europe and an old Europe. It's just Europe.
0 Replies
 
Finn dAbuzz
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 10:28 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
WARNING: If you can't stand the sight, sound or writing of Ann Coulter, immediately thumb this post down.

Ann Coulter is a professional provocateur. Half the things she says or writes is to get a rise out of people (most often on the left) and publicity so that she will keep getting invited as a guest on television shows, sell books, and have her articles published in magazines (for a fee).

Her net worth is $8.5 million, she has sold over a million copies of her various books, and her syndicated column appears in a number of magazines and websites.

She graduated cum laude from Cornell University where she helped found the Cornell Review. She received her J.D. from The University of Michigan Law and was an editor of the Michigan Law Review. She was the president of her local chapter of the Federalist Society and was trained at the National Journalism Center.

The woman is smart, accomplished, and in my opinion, very funny. In most of her unposed pictures (and posed as well for that matter) she is usually wearing a big smile, a grin, or a smirk...even and especially, when she has launched herself on a political rant about (what else) the nature of American Liberals.

Her critics on the Left (and they are legion) tend to loathe her and resort to petty and crude insults. The more they do, the more they play into her hands. Our old friend blatham from a few years ago was convinced that she was destroying Western civilization...not single handedly, of course, per The Mountie, she was joined in her mission of destruction by fellow hell-spawn, Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist.

She has helped play a major role in keeping liberals from enthusiastically embracing the label of their faith.

I don't only have good things to say about her though: She has very strange looking hands.

She is quite knowledgeable in a number of different areas, but she doesn't know much about futbol, nor does she really pretend to. The subject, as addressed in this article, is grist for her polemical mill.

Some of my favorite Coulter quotes:

Quote:
It’s something in liberals’ DNA: They think they can pass a law eliminating guns and nuclear weapons, but teenagers having sex is completely beyond our control.


Quote:
Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. “Abortion” becomes “choice,” “communist” becomes “progressive,” “communist dictatorship” becomes “people’s democratic republic” and “Nikita Khrushchev” becomes “Barack Obama.”


Quote:
The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.


Quote:
Here the country had finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism and they don’t want to fight it. They would have, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.


Quote:
With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan’s premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society.


Quote:
The Great Satan is wearying of this reverse hegemony, in which little pipsqueak nations try to impose their pipsqueak values on us. Aren’t we the ones who should be arrogantly oppressing countries that unaccountably do not have the death penalty?


Quote:
The liberal charge of “hypocrisy” has so permeated the public consciousness that no one is willing to condemn any behavior anymore, no matter how seedy. The unstated rule is: If you’ve done it, you can’t ever criticize it — a standard that would seem to repudiate the good works of the Rev. Franklin Graham, Malcolm X, Whittaker Chambers and St. Paul, among others.


Quote:
Back in the prelapsarian fifties, women worked if they happened to fall into the .01 percent of the population who are able to have interesting jobs or they retired in their twenties to raise children and, incidentally, do what all serious people would like to do anyway — be a dilettante in many subjects. As far as I’m concerned this was a division of labor nothing short of perfect. Men worked and women didn’t. So when our benefactors come under attack as “patriarchs” and “oppressors,” I realize, someone has to put in a kind word for the oppressors. For cocktails alone, I figure I owe the male population several thousand dollars. So I will be the one to step forward and say: To the extent one gender is oppressing the other, it’s not women who should be complaining.


Quote:
Liberals seem to have hit upon a reverse Christ story as their belief system. He suffered and died for our sins; liberals make the rest of us suffer for sins we didn’t commit. Their claims of how awful ‘we’ are never seems to encompass themselves in the ‘we.’ Saying America is a racist nation is never meant to suggest that the speaker is a racist — it’s his neighbors who are the racists.


Quote:
(Sheryl) Crow explained that the ‘best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.’ War solves that problem too: We won’t have any enemies because we’re going to kill them. Crow warned of ‘huge karmic retributions that will follow.’ She seemed not to understand that America going to war is huge karmic retribution. They killed three thousand Americans and now they’re going to die.


Quote:
If he had only said he bombed the building in Oklahoma City to protest American “imperialism,” McVeigh, too, could be teaching at Northwestern University, sitting on a board with and holding fundraisers for presidential candidate B. Hussein Obama.


Quote:
Gore said foreigners are not worried about ‘what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we’re going to do.’ Good. They should be worried. They hate us? We hate them. Americans don’t want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There’s nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell anger. Japanese Kamikazes pilots hated us once, too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. Now they are gentle little lambs.


Quote:
The reason any conservative’s failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It’s an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites.


Quote:
If liberals were prevented from ever again calling Republicans dumb, they would be robbed of half their arguments. To be sure, they would still have “racist,” “fascist,” “homophobe,” “ugly,” and a few other highly nuanced arguments in the quiver. But the loss of “dumb” would nearly cripple them.


Quote:
What liberals mean by “goose-stepping” or “ethnic cleansing” is generally something along the lines of “eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. But they can’t say that, or people would realize they’re crazy. So instead they accuse Republicans by speaking in code words.


Quote:
Liberals don’t care. Their approach is to rip out society’s foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What’s with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards — why not make heroin legal? Let’s take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!


Quote:
It’s a perverse world when the most aggressive people are always wailing about their victimhood. In what other place or time have people boasted about how wretched they are? Isn’t it more natural to claim to be better than you are than to claim to be worse than you are? But instead of falsely claiming to be rich or of royal lineage, in modern America people seek rewards by falsely asserting they are victims — of homophobes, hypocrites, Karl Rove, racists, Republicans, and oppressive Alaska governors.


Quote:
Like all totalitarians, the Democrats’ position is: We thought up something that we know will work better than anything anyone else has done for the last 30,000 years. We don’t know why no one else has thought of it. We must be smarter. This is why the history of liberalism consists of replacing things that work with things that sounded good on paper.


You may not like her politics or her use of liberals as her comedic foil, but you should be able to admit that she is at least every bit as witty and droll as Bill Maher and a lot less crude and misogynist

Not surprisingly, quite a few of these also appear in Huffington Post and Daily Kos lists of the dumbest or most horrible things Coulter has said.

For more Coulter bon-mots see This
0 Replies
 
Olivier5
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 11:07 pm
@Germlat,
Nothing is ever sure in football. Beside, the bookmakers disagree with you and give France more than a fighting chance. After all, we just beat Nigeria within regular time, and Nigeria as the Africa champion is considered stronger than Algeria... which Germany could not beat within regular time.
Finn dAbuzz
 
  1  
Reply Mon 30 Jun, 2014 11:09 pm
@Walter Hinteler,
As for football, which deserves the name more so than our game, I don't think the football powers that be should do anything to the rules for the sole purpose of attracting more American fans. The appeal of the game is far more widespread that any sport played professionally in America, and while every business wants to be able to succeed in the American market, football doesn't need American fans.

The only thing that might significantly expand the interest in this sport among Americans is if the American Men's Team makes it, at least, to the final game of the World Cup and that seems unlikely. The American Women's Team has actually won the Cup but that didn't result in a large surge in the popularity of the sport in the US.

Unlike in most other places in the world, football in America has to compete with a number of extremely well entrenched professional sports and they, not football, are attracting our nation’s best athletes. The same can't be said with women's sports in the US which is why they have outpaced men in terms of international success in this sport.

The common explanation for the lack of enthusiasm for the sport in the US is lack of scoring, but in my opinion, that's short of the mark. The sort of people who like to find fault with Americans in every area will also argue that Americans are just not cerebral enough to appreciate football and have to have any orgy of scoring to keep them interested. As with other snarky generalizations about American tastes, this simply isn't true. Americans are perfectly capable of appreciating low scoring games in all sports (albeit not if that's all the sport is capable of) and due to American football's point system, the final high point scores are not an actual representation of the number of scoring events.

As for appreciating nuance, and strategy, core American sports all have that, and for the players (and for the dedicated fans) American football is far more complex that football. The coring in Basketball is so prodigious that it is routine and so for a fan to love the sport they have to be able to appreciate aspects of the game that are more subtle and less obvious than putting the ball in the hoop.

Football (soccer) is a rich and complex sport and the top players are incredible athletes, but it has a somewhat frenetic, staccato pace to it, that like hockey makes it difficult to appreciate unless the viewer knows what to look for. Most people who don't like hockey complain that they never know what the hell is going, but that's because they haven't learned to follow the puck. Once you learn (which requires enough viewing experience to anticipate where the puck is going) the opportunity for greater appreciation becomes wide open. I think it’s the same thing for football. Americans are certainly capable of appreciating the game as it is, they just have to watch it enough, and that's not going to happen until an American national team makes a really big splash at the World Cup, becomes a consistent threat to win, and the quality of play in the US Soccer league improves to the elite levels of the European leagues. A tall order.


0 Replies
 
Lordyaswas
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 12:16 am
From 21st June, prior to Portugal match.



David Beckham has turned USA into a 'soccer crazy' nation, says Paul Dalglish
Son of former Liverpool boss, Kenny, now coaches in the MLS and says Beckham has sent popularity of football soaring since his move to LA Galaxy in 2007
USA face Portugal in their second match of the World Cup on Sunday and 20million viewers are expected to tune in


"This is the first World Cup David Beckham hasn’t been directly involved in for more than 20 years, yet the crowning glory of a lifetime’s work will be felt in the Amazon on Sunday night when the whole of America stops to see how Team USA perform against Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal.
Make no mistake, America is going ‘soccer-crazy’. Not in an underground kind of way, but mainstream crazy, with millions following every kick and Hollywood celebrities tweeting about the hottest show in town.
There will be tens of thousands of USA fans in Manaus — 90,000 World Cup tickets were sold in America for this tournament, more than in any other country bar hosts Brazil — and more than 20million viewers are expected to tune in. To put it into context, only 18m saw San Antonio Spurs become basketball’s NBA champions last week.


http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/21/article-2664556-164F13CA000005DC-308_634x422.jpg


It’s an extraordinary coming of age for football in the States, helped by the insatiable patriotism that America taps into whenever one of their teams or personalities do well, as they did in beating Ghana 2-1 in their opening match.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/21/article-2664556-131B4182000005DC-937_634x411.jpg

But none of it would have been possible without our greatest English export. Beckham has galvanised interest since he shocked the world by leaving Real Madrid for Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007.
Four years ago, Beckham was in the England dug-out alongside Fabio Capello, having played in the three previous World Cups.
For Paul Dalglish, son of Liverpool and Scotland legend Kenny and someone who has been in America for eight years as a player, coach and manager, Beckham has created a monster in terms of public interest.
‘I wouldn’t say soccer has grown at grassroots level too much because it was already the most popular participant sport ahead of baseball and basketball, even when I arrived in 2006 to play for Houston,’ he said.
‘The big game-changer in terms of its growth as a professional sport was when Beckham arrived in 2007.........

Full article....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/worldcup2014/article-2664556/David-Beckham-turned-USA-soccer-crazy-nation-says-Paul-Dalglish.html

izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 01:36 am
@Olivier5,
I wouldn't want to call it, when France gels it can go all the way, and this team certainly does that.

Now we're out I'm still rooting for Holland, just love the Dutch.
Ragman
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 06:08 am
@izzythepush,
French gels = mousse?
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 07:46 am
@Lordyaswas,
Pah! Beckham has never had anything to do with my own growing interest in soccer/football - Pantalones and Fbaezer and Robert at some point and the Guardian newspaper do. Oh, and Lordyaswas and other a2k folks across the pond's interest, including Ellinas, a Greek poster of long ago.

Why football (soccer) is the king of the sports, an Ellinas thread:
http://able2know.org/topic/81876-1

I'm somewhat doubting Beckham is the cause of interest for most of the americans interested now. Perhaps some.
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 07:56 am
@Ragman,
I don't think you'd want to put it in your hair.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 07:56 am
@ossobuco,
ossobuco wrote:

Pah! Beckham has never had anything to do with my own growing interest in soccer/football -


Not even Victoria?
Lordyaswas
 
  1  
Reply Tue 1 Jul, 2014 08:00 am
@ossobuco,
Ha!

I thought that might set the cat among the pigeons.

Our Brit newspapers are full of it, sometimes. The truth is, Becks has just jumped on an already rolling bandwagon.

Has he started up his own team yet? We heard news that he was forming a syndicate and going to create a league team in Florida, or somewhere equally sunny.

Am watching Sharapova at the moment, grunting away. If I was the opponent, I would reply with something equally ridiculous.....like FLOUNDER! (as Kicky used to say)
0 Replies
 
 

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