Category: Uncategorized

1. The Grecian defensive shell has finally been cracked. Nikopolidis had no chance at stopping Ibrahimovic’s excellent shot, but after stuffing Freddie Ljungberg on a one-on-one, he really should have had the ball when it popped up in the air in front of goal. The keeper always has a right to the ball; it may have been a freak ping-pong bounce that caused it to go in, but Hansson never should have had the opportunity to touch the ball in the first place.

2. For all their dominance last night, I don’t think Sweden is really all that good. I love Freddie, I really do, but when one of your most effective players can’t even hold his place at Arsenal anymore…. I was more impressed by Russia in their loss than by Sweden in their win. That being said, it was a great win for the Swedes and if they can manage to tie Russia and only lose by two or less to Spain, they’ll go through.

3. Spain looked awesome. Villa got the hat trick, but their entire attack was impressive throughout. It reminded me of the Arsenal machine carving up defenses during their undefeated season. This was the most entertaining game of the tournament even though at 4-1 it wasn’t close; the Russians never quit fighting and finally got rewarded for their efforts at the end. Considering that they’ve got Raul of Real Madrid on the bench, the Spanish really look like the team to beat despite their history of choking. Remember, prior to the tournament, Russia with Hiddink at the helm was a popular dark horse pick to win it all.

4. Admirable patience by Villa on his third goal as well as on the final one that Fabregas put away. He’s got speed and power, but it’s combined with the fox-in-the-boxiness of Filippo Inzaghi. He’s been really impressive at Valencia and it amazes me that it’s taken this long for him to get signed away by the big clubs. That hat trick should be enough to seal the deal for Real Madrid. The Galacticos strategy didn’t exactly work out well in the past, but pairing Villa with Cristiano Ronaldo on the wing sounds a lot more lethal than putting Michael Owen with Luis Figo.

5. I wish every midfielder in the world, at every level, would study the goals being scored at this tournament. Most of best chances are coming on quick through passes made on the ground behind the defense. I absolutely hate midfielders who insist on hanging onto the ball too long, then finally have to pass it out to the sides because the defense has fallen back from its offsides trap and is now set inside the 18-yard box.

The Volokh Conspiracy notes that the ruling by the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission bans “disparaging remarks”:

This is a breathtakingly broad prohibition, which extends far beyond the terms of the (already troubling) statute. Boissoin and his group aren’t allowed to saying anything “disparaging” about homosexuals, which presumably would even extend to statements such as “homosexuals are acting sinfully” or “The Bible, which I believe should be our moral guide, condemns homosexuality.”

I wonder how long it will be before someone in Canuckistan reports Richard Dawkins to one of these human rights commissions; he has almost surely made far more disparaging remarks about Jews, Christians, and Muslims than Stephen Boissoin ever made about homosexuals or Mark Steyn ever made about Muslims. The whole thing is appalling to anyone who supports human freedom, of course, but it would be extremely ironic to see Dawkins forced to publicly apologize “for his views on Judaism” and refrain from disparaging the religious faithful by a godless secular organization. Perhaps then he might see that connection between atheism and totalitarianism that he just hasn’t been able to locate yet.

As George Orwell noted early on, totalitarians who reach the pinnacles of power always turn viciously on those who helped get them there.

The Fraters find a point of commonality between three courageous intellectual warriors:

What do Sam Harris, Michelle Malkin, and PZ Meyers have in common?

No JB, it’s not a perky smile and a nice set of gams. Rather all three have been challenged to a debate with Vox Day on the airwaves of the First Team of the Northern Alliance Radio Network and all three have declined to take up the gauntlet.

You know, I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s me…. I really do have to stick up for Sam here, though. The soon-to-be Dr. Harris has always been quite willing to answer the questions I’ve emailed him and we would have already arranged a debate if he wasn’t occupied with completing his doctorate.

Malkin, on the other hand, was afraid to have her total lack of research for In Defense of Internment exposed. I don’t know precisely what PZ Myers fears, but I’m sure that whatever it is, it’s a perfectly rational fear of something material. He’s an atheist, you know.

And you wonder “why agnostics so often regard theists with puzzled bemusement while viewing their godless cousins, with whom they superficially appear to have far more in common, with a mix of embarrassment and unadulterated horror”:

I hope the atheists have gotten what they wanted from me. That’s what I’m here for, to use “offensive” quotes during emotional times and to be instructed with great gusto and attention about what a bigoted jackass I am so that I’ll never use such quotes again and all the world will learn what happens to you when you make that mistake. It’s really quite marvelous and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m ready to join their organization RIGHT NOW, if they’ll have me.

They just seem like such kind and considerate people, out there teaching the world about tolerance and overcoming bigotry, spreading their word wherever they think it’s necessary for the furtherance of enlightenment and elimination of negative stereotypes about atheists, even if it means hijacking a thread on a personal blog about someone in a coma. Because TRUTH is all that matters, people.

The empirical evidence is overwhelming. An atheist is an individual who asserts there is no God because he is a socially autistic asshole. Hypothesis, experiment, observation… it’s all there and it’s eminently repeatable. It is science.

UPDATE – Miss Lucas finds the experience to be instructive:

It’s funny how differently this played out than it did when I used to bait Christians into defending their faith. I said some pretty flippant and borderline-offensive things about Christianity and the Bible, and actually ASKED Christians to fight me on it.

Peter King notes a sporting gesture by an NFL player:

Super Bowl hero David Tyree has a faith-based autobiography, More Than Just a Catch (Strang Book Group), coming out this September. One of the two forewords is by Rodney Harrison, the New England safety who will be inextricably linked forever with Tyree. (Eli Manning wrote the other.) Harrison, of course, played great defense on Tyree and was as close as you can be to separating a receiver from the ball when Tyree made the greatest catch — “the greatest play,” NFL Films poohbah Steve Sabol says — in Super Bowl history.

There are few things I appreciate more than athletic competitors who do their absolute best to beat the hell out of their opponent, and then leave any sense of enmity or opposition on the field. I was fortunate to have encountered a series of great rivals during my sprinting days – Bill of Mahtomedi, Simmy of Brooklyn Park, Johnny and Phil of Minneapolis North – that I’ve never forgotten. Sometimes I beat them, sometimes they beat me, but I know that if I ever ran into any of them again, we’d greet each other with a smile, a handshake, and that half-embrace that you reserve for an opponent who merits your respect.

It’s not necessary to hate those against whom you compete. In six years spent in the dojo, I’ve bloodied my friends’ faces and I’ve been knocked down and knocked out by them in return. But, there is a sporting code that must be maintained, and those who don’t abide by that code deserve all the contempt that will be directed at them by those who do. I don’t think it’s an accident that the uglier sort of bloggers on the Internet tend to people who never played competitive sports. The concept of friendly, or even civil, conflict simply seems to be outside their frame of reference.

The SF maestro speaks on science and fiction:

“I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction,” he says, “it’s that fiction – the study of the human condition – needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we’d still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they’re wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that’s an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.”

I don’t think he’s wrong… although I think the science fiction world has an awful lot that it needs to learn from mainstream fiction, especially the mainstream fiction of the past. As I wrote a few years ago in my essay that appeared in the Revisiting Narnia anthology, the foolish suppression and mischaracterization of religion in so much fantasy and science fiction has significantly crippled the genre by limiting it to cartoonish caricatures of the human condition. Mary Eberstadt points out that it appears to be a problem that has a deleterious effect on all the arts these days.

As for Stross’s work, while I loved Accelerando and enjoyed Halting State, I like his Bob Howard novels best of all. If you have any appreciation for things squamous or rugose and haven’t read The Atrocity Archives or The Jennifer Morgue, you’re really missing out.

1. I know the Azzurri always start slow in the big tournaments. But that was a bad, bad loss to the Oranje. The defense looked nearly as bad as Poland’s, which is an ominous sign for a team that has historically depended upon a rock-solid defense. But Cannavaro is out with injury, Maldini is retired from international play and the midfield is aging. They’ll still make it to the next round, but they sure don’t look like the World Cup winners of two years ago.

2. I’ve always liked Rob Van Persie and while I don’t like Van Nistleroy, he’s a very dangerous striker. I was surprised that the Dutch midfield controlled the ball so effectively, and having an in-form Van der Sar in the net is always an advantage. The Dutch defense looked a bit shaky to me, but Toni and Del Piero didn’t ever look like they were going to take much advantage of that. Neither will the French or Romanian attackers, but Germany, Spain, and Portugal may.

3. One of the great pleasures of this tournament is listening to the English announcers moan and complain about how awful every game that doesn’t feature the English team is. Which, of course, is all of them. That being said, Alan Hanson was entirely correct to criticize the boring and static French attack; in tournaments like these, if you don’t go after the lesser teams and take the points, you’re likely to find yourself out of the quarterfinals. France can’t play for ties now, they probably require at least one win against Italy and Holland and might need two.

4. I kind of miss Gheorghe Hagi. It’s just not the same seeing Romania in action and not hearing the announcers talk about “the Maradona of the Carpathians”. That’s my nominee for Most Unwieldy Nickname in sports.

5. Nicolas Anelka had two decent season for Arsenal, for which we are grateful. Since then, Le Sulk been reliably ineffective. In international play, two of his five goals in games that count are against the Faroe freaking Islands. I have no idea why he’s on the French squad, let alone the field. Hell, I could score against the Faroe Islands. Seriously.

6. Does anyone else think it would have been funny if a bunch of Italians had stormed the Romanian bench at halftime and set fire to it? Okay, maybe it’s just me.

PZ explains why he hasn’t ever encountered any strong arguments for the existence of gods… it’s hard to listen when your head is buried in the sand:

The fact that the Northern Alliance radio show actually thinks Vox Day is a credible voice for conservative thought tells me right away that there is something wrong with them, and no, I’m not going to trust them at all.

I’ve also read Day’s horrible little book, The Irrational Atheist. Well, to be honest, I read a few chapters of dreck, then flipped through the rest rather quickly. It’s actually the “Vox Day Hates Sam Harris” book, with occasional potshots at other New Atheists, and it’s really not very good. You would think that if he had a strong rational argument with evidence for any gods, then he would have put it in there — nothing would more seriously deflate one of us scientific atheists who claim there is no evidence for god than, say, presenting credible evidence for god. That was what I actually skimmed through the book for, but it wasn’t there.

I don’t know, I wouldn’t have cared if it was Minnesota Atheist Talk. The venue makes no difference to me. Also, it’s worth noting that I’m a libertarian, not a conservative, and the Powerline guys aren’t a whole lot fonder of me than PZ is. (They’re pals with Malkin and they support the Iraqi occupation and I doubt they’re down with legalizing drugs.) But I guess it’s hard to blame him for not wishing to imperil his sobriety and his sanity in an encounter with the dark and mysterious brotherhood known collectively as the Fraters Libertas.

As for TIA, I didn’t take the occasional potshot at Dawkins, Hitchens and Onfray, but devoted an entire chapter to each of them. PZ also skips over the small fact that TIA not only wiped out Dawkins’s self-described central argument of TGD, but also inspired Sam Harris to admit that he didn’t have a case against religious faith, but rather tribalism. And I suspect Dawkins isn’t going to be citing that “striking” Red State argument again anytime soon. I don’t know how I could have made it any more clear that TIA was a book about atheism and atheist arguments, not a theological book about God. I may well write that book someday, in fact, this little episode makes it much more likely that I’ll write it sooner rather than later, but TIA isn’t it and it was never intended to be.

Rachel Lucas figures out why many conservatives and Republicans won’t be voting for John McCain:

The moment of my epiphany was when one parent said something that was almost verbatim what I’ve said about voting for McCain and the fact that you are getting a new president whether you like it or not so you may as well do what you can to get the less shitty one. It was something like, “Well, Billy IS going to smoke pot. There’s nothing I can do about that, he’s GONNA smoke it no matter what I say. So I may as well at least try to keep him as safe as I can, and if that means I have to buy it for him, I will.”

Quickly I ran it through my brain: what if I had kids and was in this situation? Would I get drugs for them just because that was better than them getting drugs from strangers and scumbags? Especially if I knew for a fact that my kids were just dumb enough to get busted and would almost certainly end up in jail if I didn’t choose the lesser evil by getting the drugs for them?

Shit no, I wouldn’t! Because it would violate my principles.

Bingo! Supporting the lesser of two evils is STILL SUPPORTING EVIL! I understand why those who will vote for McCain as a vote against Obama are doing so; what they don’t understand is that this guarantees that the Republican party will continue to move further to the Left if they are successful.

1. Austria was terrible. Rough, foul-prone play, no hint of an attack, no decent passing in the midfield. Giving up a penalty shot in the first five minutes was just horrible and there was no question that it was a penalty either.

2. Croatia was competent but they really didn’t show much after being gifted what turned out to be the winning goal right at the start. They’ve got the talent to beat Poland, but they’ll have to be a bit less lacksadaisical. On the other hand, it seemed like the Austrians were dragging them down to their level, so who knows what they’re actually capable of.

2. There was an awful lot of room being created for Polack jokes in the first 25 minutes of the Poland-Germany game. Speaking as a tactically-oriented coach, it’s really not a good idea to play a high offsides trap with a slow and undisciplined back four. They got badly burned three times and if the German strikers had any idea how to pass to one another, they’d have been down 4-0. I have to seriously question any coach who watches the other side running right through his trap but refuses to change anything until he actually gives up a goal.

3. The Germans won 2-0 and they deserved the victory, but their strikers are not impressive. They’re fast and they’ve got solid midfield support, but they attack rather like midfielders who get squirrelly in front of goal. Germany appears to be one of those teams who need three or four good chances to put one in the net, which is fine against the lesser teams but makes life difficult when playing a powerhouse like Italy or a defensive turtle like Greece. On the other hand, they’re a pretty young team, so they may outlast teams at the tail end of close games.

4. Still haven’t seen anyone I expect to beat Italy.