Welcome to Sportswriting 2021

A female advocate of the WNBA lectures people on why their reasons for not watching a terrible parody of a men’s sport are not acceptable:

This friend played sports at a high level, and he asked me, tentatively, whether he could explain why he doesn’t watch women’s sports. “Of course,” I said. “Let’s hear it.” I wanted nothing more than to understand why someone like him—an athlete, a millennial, a feminist—had never turned on a women’s basketball game. Or, more precisely, I wanted to hear why he believes he hasn’t.

“I’ve actually thought about this a lot over the years,” he said. “Because I often feel some level of guilt about it, but when it comes down to it, I just think that if I’m going to take the time to watch sports, I want to be watching them at the peak of how they can be played—speed, strength, all of it. And to me, that pinnacle is happening on the men’s side.”

I nodded as my friend spoke. He hit all the expected notes. I don’t watch because they can’t dunk; I don’t watch because they’re like a good boy’s high school team; I don’t watch because, you know, I could probably beat them one-on-one.

Perhaps you even saw your own reasoning reflected in his. At its heart, this reasoning insists that people don’t watch the WNBA because men run faster and jump higher. That is, in fact, true. Most men do run faster and jump higher. And, yes, it’s incredibly exciting when one of those men runs fast and jumps high and we watch, in awe.

It’s a soothing rationale, this little story we tell ourselves about our insatiable appetite for windmill jams. It’s foolproof, too, because this reasoning doesn’t just absolve sports fans of any further introspection, but more important it absolves the marketers, the TV networks and the sports apparel companies. Hell, it even seems to pardon the women themselves: It’s not your fault; sports fans crave something you just can’t give them. This reasoning presents itself as more than logical; it’s biological.

Actually, it’s pathological. It’s chronic, and irrational, and it’s been stalking the WNBA since its founding. In the U.S., this lie is the serial killer of women’s professional leagues. To name a few: the American Basketball League (1996–98), the Women’s United Soccer Association (2000–03), the Women’s Professional Softball League (’97–01) and Women’s Professional Soccer (’07–12).

The WNBA, though, is resilient. When launched in 1996, the league was ahead of its time—in almost every way. Long before Big Business saw the value, the players of the W stood against racial injustice, and for equality, and took the hits—“Every direction we turned, we were walking into a wall,” says WNBA legend Sue Bird—for representing the folks at society’s margins. “People think you’re supposed to look and talk and be a certain way, but the WNBA blasts all of those things out of the water,” says A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces. “And you should want that. We are standing on the shoulders of women who didn’t back down just because casual sports fans didn’t think they were worthy. That’s what makes our league better, because we have faced those hurdles. I can’t think of another league that gets hit with every single last knock, and I don’t see that going away, but we’re not going to let that stop us.”

Understanding why we watch sports isn’t just a thought experiment. It has practical implications. Rather than passively believing the WNBA is biologically inferior, we can actively recognize that no athletes in modern history have faced more cultural obstacles than the players of the W. Not only are comparisons to the men ubiquitous—and the differences rendered clearer because of the unique intimacy of the sport—but also, more important, no women’s league has a higher percentage of Black athletes, meaning that for nearly a quarter century the WNBA has been rowing against the headwinds of racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

What a deeply stupid article! The amusing thing is that this idiot woman is trying to sell the WNBA on the very same basis that has most – not many, but most – former NBA fans turning off the men’s game, thereby offering additional support for my hypothesis that SJWs are both evil and stupid.

Most women’s sports are not an alternative or a variant of the similar men’s sport. They are parodies. And they harbor absolutely no appeal for any actual fan of the sport itself, unless one happens to find entertainment in the comedic aspect of watching sustained incompetence.

There are some women’s sports that are superior to the men’s versions. For example, women’s tennis is better in the rare circumstances that it is competitive for the same reason that men’s tennis was better when the players used smaller wooden rackets. It’s boring to watch two 6’6″ men using oversized titanium weaponry to launch rocket serves at each other that neither of them can return. And women’s soccer actually makes for relatively interesting viewing now that no top-level male player not named Ronaldo or Messi is capable of beating a defender one-on-one anymore.

(I think the men’s game could use bigger fields or two less players per side to open up more space, but that’s a tangent for another day.)

In general, women’s sports are tedious, parodistic, and parasitical on the male versions. Which is why the WNBA will collapse, sooner rather than later, as a consequence of the NBA’s vanishing audience.

Fake election, fake president

The Arizona audit has uncovered more evidence of fraud, sufficient to prove the statistical evidence that has clearly demonstrated how the 2020 election was faked:

According to the Maricopa Arizona Audit account, they are finding “significant discrepancies between the number of ballots therein and the batch reports included in the boxes”.

We already know exactly how the election results were faked due to the algorithm that was reverse engineered. The same ratio of nonexistent votes were injected everywhere, which is why the number of ballots in Maricopa, or anywhere, will not match the number of recorded votes. 

And that’s why there were 159,633,396 votes reported cast, compared to the 128,838,342 in 2016, 126,849,299 in 2012, and 129,446,839 in 2008. Occam’s Razor indicates there were at least 30 million fake digital votes for which there are no ballots to be found.

Ground forces enter Gaza

It appears Netanyahu has not been reading van Creveld, as he has ordered the IDF infantry and armor into Gaza:

Israeli ground troops have attacked Gaza as its air force bombarded targets and officials ordered everyone living within miles of the border to go to bunkers amid fears of fierce retaliation from Hamas.

The Israel Defense Force tweeted from its official account on Thursday night: ‘IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.’

Military spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus confirmed: ‘There are ground troops attacking in Gaza, together with air forces as well.’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted moments later: ‘I said that we would charge a very heavy price from Hamas. We do it and we will continue to do it with great intensity. The last word was not said and this operation will continue as long as necessary.’

It is not yet clear whether the offensive was to destroy rocket sites or Hamas leaders or part of an extended campaign to invade Gaza.

Earlier Israel called up 9,000 reservists to bolster its forces as it deployed troops to the border in preparation for the ground assault.

One can’t help but wonder what Hezbollah has in the works, or if they want to see Hamas destroyed by the Israelis. 

The media “corrects” the model

Don’t read too much into my posting this. I’m just a little surprised by the current spin on the latest phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being pushed by the mainstream media. I mean, it has literally never occurred to me to pay any attention to anything that Bella Hadid, or any other fashion, swimsuit, or glamour model, happens to say.

Large numbers of Jews began moving to Ottoman Palestine – a predominately Arab region – following the 1896 publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, which promoted the idea of a haven for Jews in their ancient homeland to escape anti-Semitism in Europe. There has been a community of Jews in the region for millennia.

The exact population balance is hard to tell, because at the time people frequently avoided the census. According to the Ottoman census of 1878, the Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre districts were home to 403,795 Muslims, representing 85.5 per cent of the population.

Christians made up 9.2 per cent (43,659); Jewish people 5.3 per cent (25,000).

So Bella is wrong to describe Israel as a colony, because Jewish people had already been in the region for centuries. 

The Holocaust increased the pace of arrivals with Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, and many emigrated from Eastern Europe and Russia.

In 1947, after years of Arab-Jewish violence, the UN General Assembly voted for the establishment of two states in Palestine – one Jewish and the other Arab. 

Bella is incorrect in describing ethnic cleansing and a military occupation, because the redrawing of boundaries was done under UN auspices.

Shortly after the UN ruling, the Jewish community in Palestine declared Israel an independent state, prompting hundreds of thousands more Jews to emigrate, and precipitating a war launched by neighboring Arab states.

She is also incorrect in describing the region as being under apartheid, because Israelis and Palestinians are free to choose their own leaders and live under their own rules. 

For their part, Palestinian Arabs say Jews have usurped their ancestral homeland with help from Western powers, including the United States and the United Kingdom. 

The current conflict is notable for pitting Israelis against Israelis, in addition to the depressingly familiar exchange of rocket fire.

Israel’s 21 per cent Arab minority – Palestinian by heritage, Israeli by citizenship – is mostly descended from the Palestinians who lived under Ottoman and then British colonial rule before staying in Israel after the country’s 1948 creation.

First, it’s strange that the British media felt it necessary to cover and “correct” Bella Hadid’s statements. This wouldn’t have happened in years past, and tends to indicate a public shift toward the Palestinian perspective and rather less of the Boomer sympathy for “plucky little Israel, our greatest ally.”

Second, whoever is handling the “corrections” is almost ludicrously incompetent. If the mere idea of troubling to correct a model’s opinion wasn’t bad enough, doing so in an obviously inept manner just makes it that much worse. A “colony” is defined as “a group of people who leave their native country to form in a new land a settlement subject to, or connected with, the parent nation.” This means the fact that there were already a few thousand Jews in the region doesn’t change the fact that groups of people left Poland, Russia, and other places where their ancestors had resided for generations in order to settle in British Palestine.

Nor is it incorrect to describe the ethnic cleansing and military occupation taking place there as ethnic cleansing and military occupation simply because the UN drew some boundaries. The UN also recognized the India-Pakistan boundary after the 1947 partition, and the post-partition movement of peoples that took place there was arguably the largest in human history. And no one hesitates to describe that movement as religious cleansing.

While it is incorrect to refer to any political system as “Apartheid” other than the historical South African policy, it is also indisputable that the laws of Israel are specifically designed to ensure that the nation of Israel is dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation’s Jewish population, as per the Basic Law’s assertion that the Jewish people have the unique claim to national self-determination in the State of Israel. While technically incorrect, apartheid is a perfectly reasonable way to describe these policies at a rhetorical level.

My personal opinion is that all of the historical posturings on both sides are pointless. The original Jewish claim is based on the right of conquest of the Land of Canaan, so they cannot reasonably complain if any other group of people decides to lay claim on the same basis. The situation is difficult, but it is hardly insoluble; a positive resolution will simply require a lot more carrot and a lot less stick.

Of considerably more concern to me is the fact that those who claim that Palestine is not a country and the Palestinians are not a people are the exact same individuals who claim that America is just an idea, Americans are not a people, and Western Civilization is nothing more than combination of Judaism and Greek philosophy.

The modern constant

Is the low-intensity violent squabbling over territory between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Israeli Martin van Creveld provides his usual insightful perspective.

Several factors explain the low number of casualties. First, the rockets coming from Gaza are enormously inaccurate. They hit targets, if they do, almost at random. Second, the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system works better than anyone had expected.  The system has the inestimable advantage in that it can calculate the places where the rockets will land. Consequently it only goes into action against those—approximately one in five or six—that are clearly about to hit an inhabited area. The outcome is vast savings; in some cases, realizing that the incoming rockets are not going to hit anybody or anything, the authorities do not even bother to sound the alarm. Third, civil defense seems to be working well; people obey instructions and are, in any case, getting used to this kind of thing. Fourth, as always in war, one needs luck.

In turn, the small number of Arab casualties and the limited amount of damage inflicted has enabled the government of Israel to keep the lid on its own actions in the face of extremist demands. It suggests a degree of control and precision never before attained or maintained in any war in history. But while the Israelis have been extremely effective in avoiding collateral deaths, the impact of their strikes against Hamas’ short-range rockets in particular is limited.

Israel’s lucky run will not last forever.  Sooner or later, a Hamas rocket that for one reason or another has not been intercepted is bound to hit a real target in Israel and cause real damage. Imagine a school or kindergarten being hit, resulting in numerous deaths. In that case public pressure on the government and the Israel Defense Forces “to do something” will mount until it becomes intolerable.

What can the IDF do? Not much, it would seem. It can give up some restraints and kill more—far more—people in Gaza in the hope of terrorizing Hamas into surrender. However, such a solution, if that is the proper term, will not necessarily yield results while certainly drawing the ire of much of the world. It can send in ground troops to tackle the kind of targets, such as tunnels, that cannot be reached from the air. However, doing so will almost certainly lead to just the kind of friendly casualties that the IDF, by striking from the air, has sought to avoid.

Whether a ground operation can kill or capture sufficient Hamas members to break the backbone of the organization is also doubtful. Even supposing it can do so, the outcome may well be the kind of political vacuum in which other, perhaps more extreme, organizations such as the Islamic Jihad will flourish. Either way, how long will such an operation last? And how are the forces ever going to withdraw, given the likelihood that, by doing so, they will only be preparing for the next round?

And so the most likely outcome is a struggle of attrition. 

Now, consider that he wrote that in July, 2014….