Tag: sport

How Cancel Culture Should Work

If you’re a government official seeking to police the political opinions of others, you should lose your job, just as this Argentine minister lost his after attempting to speech police the Argentine national soccer team:

Julio Garro — Argentina’s former undersecretary of sport — lost his job on Thursday after he publicly called for Messi to apologize after the Argentinian national team sang a racially insensitive song after winning the Copa America.

Following a 1-0 win over Colombia in the final, midfielder Enzo Fernandez livestreamed himself and teammates singing the song, which makes fun of Black players on the French national team.

Listen, spread the word / They play in France, but they’re all from Angola / How lovely, they will run / They are trans lovers like that f*ck Mbappe / Your mom is Nigerian, your dad is Cameroonian / But on your ID, it says French nationality.

Garro said that by chanting the derogatory lyrics, the team put Argentina in a bad light. Fernandez has already apologized publicly for sharing the footage via social media, but Messi hasn’t addressed it.

“I think the captain of the national team and the AFA president should come out and apologize for this case,” Garro told Argentinian radio Urbano Play. “It is fitting. It leaves us in a bad light with so much glory.”

Argentina president Javier Milei has since issued a statement via social media and confirmed that Garro is no longer in the position. “The president’s office reports that no government can tell what to comment, what to think or what to do to the Argentina national team, world champion and two-time American champion, or to any other citizen,” it read. “For this reason, Julio Garro ceases to be undersecretary of sports of the nation.”

I’m not a fan of free speech. But I’m even less a fan of subjective and ex post facto public thought policing on the basis of Clown World values. Milei did well to immediately can the guy.

Also, the Argentine players are entirely correct. Far too many players on the European “national” teams are foreign nationals. They are called “national” teams, not “paper citizenship” or even “legal resident” teams, after all.

DISCUSS ON SG

Convergence at the World Cup

The Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence: the more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.

Japan have pulled off the second stunning upset of the Qatar World Cup by beating four-times winners Germany in the latest embarrassment for the tournament veterans. In echoes of Argentina’s humiliating defeat to Saudi Arabia just over 24 hours earlier, Germany took the lead through a first-half penalty but a spirited fightback saw the underdogs claim a famous 2-1 victory.

DISCUSS ON SG

Avanti Azzurri

Total domination of Turkey by Italy in the first game of the Euros. It was 3-0 and they could have easily scored one or two more. Mancini’s team is fast, aggressive, and really good on the ball. That’s the group won already, because neither Wales nor Switzerland is going to score 3 goals in the group stage, let alone one game.

Maybe he just hates golfers

That’s my preferred theory concerning this fox’s behavior, anyhow:

Golfers at a course in Verbier in Switzerland have had an unusual interruption to their games. A fox has chased and gathered over 100 golf balls from the course, often while the balls are still in play.

Foxes are fun.  We have a few that show up in the late afternoon to gorge on fallen fruit and like to play with shoes that are left outside. It’s always amusing to see an exasperated child who has forgotten to bring a pair of shoes inside and is grumbling about having to find where the foxes have left them this time.

NFL 12 Week One

And after an offseason nearly as tumultuous as last year’s, we’re back again. I don’t know about you, but I’m curious to see how all the rookie quarterbacks do. We can be certain that one or more will be stars and others will be busts, but no one knows who will fall into which category.

As for me, I really just want to see some improvement from Christian Ponder and a fully recovered AD. A win over Jax would be nice, of course, but that’s almost of secondary interest at this point. We already know the Vikes are rebuilding after missing their one-year window of opportunity in 2009, but do they have anything from which to build? That is the question.