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You might think that as pro sports gets more competitive, that who succeeds would become more egalitarian. But in many sports, the opposite has been true because the increased competition means that both nature and nurture matter, so wealthier kids who get more nurture benefit.
For example, the paradox with golfers is that as the sport has gotten more competitive, the more important it is to start playing young. Back in 1980s, two top golfers (Larry Nelson and Calvin Peete) didn’t start playing until their 20s, but that seems hard to do these days.
So, to make it as a pro golfer these days, you pretty much have to have grown up in a country club family, and that’s only something like 3% of the population. For example, among the greatest American golfers of the first half of the 20th Century, one (Bobby Jones) was a country club kid, but the other four (Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan) started out as caddies.
In recent decades, however, most American champs have started playing golf young. For example, current world #1 Scottie Scheffler grew up in the sports-utopian inner ring Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park and his family was a member at top flight Royal Oaks Country Club from early childhood:
Smith, the PGA Hall of Fame pro at Royal Oaks in Dallas, has worked with 10 juniors who went on to play on the PGA Tour. Scheffler was 6 when his family moved from New Jersey and joined Royal Oaks, and Smith can still remember a boy small enough to hide in a trash can.
Mostly, he remembers how he wanted to hang around the pros.
“I’m not talking run-of-the-mill mini-tour pros,” Smith said Sunday evening. “He was always up there around the tour pros when he was 8, 9, 10 years old. And it was hilarious. He would just sit there like a sponge. He’d sit over with a shag bag, and then he’d go off and try it himself. He was jacking around with these guys, challenging them to chip and putt and compete.”
It’s a weird paradox that as a sport gets more competitive, it also gets more socially exclusive, but that seems broadly true.
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This observation is only true for as the financial barrier to entry rises. Soccer, basketball, and baseball still produce elite athletes from all walks of life because all a kid needs is a ball, space, and neighborhood competitors.
Sports which have high financial barriers to entry will continue to attract younger players who can afford to compete (or whose relatives can pay for early training in costly venues.)
Sports like golf, skiing, swimming, tennis, polo, etc. are mostly non team sports (though teams can exist) and venues to play these are expensive to built, operate and maintain.
Secondary schools rarely have golf courses (though some can use public ones), or swimming pools, much less ski runs or polo fields. Tennis is cheaper but in colder climates indoor venues are needed and rarely exist in public school systems. For public schools which can access these, the school districts are the richer ones, or private.
There is also a trend of private "academies" mainly in Florida or southern California for some sports. Surfing can only be done seaside in a handful of places. These are mainly for young "elite" athletes or prospects. A few can get scholarships if extremely talented.
Indoor sports (other than expensive swimming) are more egalitarian. Outdoor sports which only require a large flat surface can be cheaply done, absent expensive stadiums.
Parents often have to contribute time and money for some youth sports, Getting to and from the venues, fees, etc. Good family work habits or discipline also matter. Showing up to practice on time, not flunking out, avoiding drugs/drink, being coach-able and honest, these are values harder to acquire in single parent low income households.
However, the benefit of (mainly male) coaching for low income males (or females) is magnified in lower income single parent households. The male role model can turn kids around.
This latter element is probably the only real positive for youth football, with its short and long term health risks, Basketball has much the same benefits with far less potential harm.
Since family income is roughly correlated to IQ, once again being smarter is better. Though smarter kids of all incomes tend to be more coachable and disciplined. Showing up on time, sober, is a great life lesson for all long term personal achievements.
In Central America, it are the major league teams to run academies and clinics to identify talent.
It’s a weird paradox that as a sport gets more competitive, it also gets more socially exclusive, but that seems broadly true.
You can also say as a sport gets more profitable to compete in, the stakes for entry are raised and the competition for positions intensifies. Any advantage a competitor can have over another is vital.
As I pointed out in the post “Why aren’t there more women race car drivers?” from a year plus back racing car drivers start out at a young age now too. It’s not uncommon to see go kart racing with five or six year old kids racing each other. The price goes up as the karts get bigger so having a wealthy family (or at least a mechanically savvy family) is vital to keep moving up the ladder to the top tier of motor sports (NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula One, Sports Cars/Endurance Racing).
Unless you have enormous talent, if you start playing a sport as a teenager, you’re boned.
So much for playing for fun. 😒
Why is this weird? As sports get more competitive, athletes are developed younger and with greater resources (coaching, travelling league, etc.) and that requires more, well, resources.
I wrote of this before, but my orthopedic surgeon (himself a former athlete) told me he’s now seeing more and more children with professional type of sports injuries. When he and I were growing up, we all played different kinds of sports seasonally even while we were concentrating on specific sports (he was a tennis player and I was a Judo competitor), but now, he says that most kids who are serious about particular sports concentrate on them 24/7, 365 days a week.
I see this in combat sports as well. I know kids who – as teenagers – are already training in and competing in (amateur) MMA fights, which I think is crazy (and highly detrimental to the kids).
That’s why my sons do Judo, BJJ, and wrestling. They are all grappling combat sports, but are still different enough that they are getting to move and use different muscles, joints, and body postures instead of doing a small number of the same movements a million times repetitively and suffering injuries easily.
Germans are keen on a sport called Handball. It’s quite entertaining.Replies: @ScarletNumber
Now, if you're the scion of a great family, whatever; you have good backup options. But, the stereotypical poor kid?
*speed probably being the notable exception. It's really helpful in dozens of sports.
OT: Mr. Sailer, might I suggest you cover this circular firing squad that has now claimed not just Claudine Gay, but the wife of her nemesis Bill Ackman, Neri Oxman: https://www.unz.com/isteve/harvard-crimson-claudine-gay-to-resign/#comment-6351634
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.OT, another dodgy Armenian is back in the States. This guy really is impressive, and his strapping redheaded woman seems to be standing by him. He's modelling his look on late-period Van Morrison with added wheelchair.
https://images.ctfassets.net/pjshm78m9jt4/6QEgZRkU5tzPc3EjqiRfI2/292906c62085ed6b0af1ccf998850b6f/PA-66483018.jpghttps://www.itv.com/news/2024-01-05/nicholas-rossi-who-faces-charges-in-the-us-has-been-extradited-from-scotlandhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_AlahverdianReplies: @Frau Katze, @Anon
Not anymore. Go ahead and try to edit any of the top 1000 entries which constitute the majority of traffic. Many are completely locked to edits by unapproved editors, and the rest will probably see any new editor have his changes instantly reverted by a robot.
Wikipedia is hated by leftist academics, even though it is also increasingly leftist, because they hate the fact that random autistic white/NEasian anons have much larger audiences than they do, including their specific academic specialties. Many have also tried to edit it and had their edits rejected, and then left long huffy complaints with their real names.Replies: @J.Ross
Also, I think it's possible that while the academic standard is to cite sources like Wikipedia, there may be people who disagree that it's unethical to fail to cite "free" sources. Since Oxman was moving in circles with people on the cutting edge of technology, she may have been one of those people. Remember there was that brief period of time when many tech influencers like Kevin Kelly were pushing anti-copyright philosophy, as in everything should be free and free to modify and reuse. If true of Oxman, this would make her copying categorically different from Gay's.Replies: @Twinkie
Child labor laws are destroying the American middle class. It is surprising how common working as a pre teen was.
Hagen developed his golf game at the Country Club of Rochester, beginning as a caddie, and earned money to help support his family from pre-teen age.
Gene Sarazen Eugenio Saraceni was born on February 27, 1902, in Harrison, New York,[4] his parents were poor Sicilian immigrants.[5] He began caddying at age ten at local golf clubs,
Sam Snead began caddying at age seven
Ben Hogan … A tip from a friend led him to caddying at age eleven
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
I wrote of this before, but my orthopedic surgeon (himself a former athlete) told me he's now seeing more and more children with professional type of sports injuries. When he and I were growing up, we all played different kinds of sports seasonally even while we were concentrating on specific sports (he was a tennis player and I was a Judo competitor), but now, he says that most kids who are serious about particular sports concentrate on them 24/7, 365 days a week.
I see this in combat sports as well. I know kids who - as teenagers - are already training in and competing in (amateur) MMA fights, which I think is crazy (and highly detrimental to the kids).
That's why my sons do Judo, BJJ, and wrestling. They are all grappling combat sports, but are still different enough that they are getting to move and use different muscles, joints, and body postures instead of doing a small number of the same movements a million times repetitively and suffering injuries easily.Replies: @Twinkie, @Wokechoke, @Anon
365 days a year, I meant.
Lots of truth to what you say.
I remember taking a kid to a pediatrician after a weekend sports tournament. Pediatrician complained about these weekend tournaments leading to far more injuries.
I also heard Tommy John on the radio once. He complained that high school kids are getting Tommy John surgery now.
John was a well rounded athlete. He was from Indiana, and was tall, so basketball was his main passion growing up. He didn’t really concentrate on pitching until college when people informed him that was his path to athletic excellence.
When I was younger there were still a fair number of multi sport athletes who sometimes played professionally in more than one sport. Much rarer now. More specialized.
Compare this to about 100 years ago when the greatest track and field athlete of time played baseball, basketball, and football professionally, and made the Hall of Fame in football. Of course Thorpe was a rare creature, but others could do that if sports were not so specialized.Replies: @Ganderson
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
Ha! I think the phrase is “hoist with his own petard”.
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
OT, another dodgy Armenian is back in the States. This guy really is impressive, and his strapping redheaded woman seems to be standing by him. He’s modelling his look on late-period Van Morrison with added wheelchair.
https://www.itv.com/news/2024-01-05/nicholas-rossi-who-faces-charges-in-the-us-has-been-extradited-from-scotland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alahverdian
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
Let he who lives in a glass house … Still, I doubt this will deter Ackman from his quest. I would not want him for an enemy were I an academic. We all have written things that would not stand up to close scrutiny.
On topic, what’s one of these?
In 70s/80s UK, the phrase was used to describe what would now be a female “friend with benefits” and wasn’t very flattering.
Well, at least you didn’t plagiarise the phrase.
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
What percentage of Harvard and MIT professors will prove to be cheats? 20%? Less, more?
This plagiarism witch hunt should result in some interesting conversations. I hope Ackman (or someone else) broadens the reviews beyond MIT to elite colleges with a larger liberal arts contingent. And more affirmative action.
I wonder if "disparate impact" is what will eventually shut this line of inquiry down.
P.S. Going back on topic for the thread, I think the phenomenon being discussed could give some good information of the relative balance of nature and nurture for different sports. Though one should correct for accessibility of resources. For example, basketball courts are common. Even if high level coaching and competition are not.Replies: @J.Ross, @That Would Be Telling, @Twinkie
https://faculty.harvard.edu/current-annual-report
https://faculty.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xlarge/public/faculty-diversity/files/ay23_single_page_icon.png?m=1671129072&itok=jG-g6YPY
https://faculty.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/faculty-diversity/files/ay2023_faculty_demographics.pdf?m=1671128990
Science and tech follows this in practice. Many papers start off with Maxwell's Equations, but nobody cites them. (Well, once in a while someone does, but unless it's a history-of-science paper, it's considered silly ornamentation.)
The funny thing is, that in science and tech there is a large amount of valuable common knowledge more than 80 years old. It stands the test of time. But in the trendy academic literature of psychology and anything softer, nobody has any use for anything 80 years old or even 50 years old.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
Not really. It very much depends on the sport. The more elite a sport (if you can call golf a sport), the truer, I suppose.
It also depends on the country (& society). Football (not the US variety, where the foot rarely hits the ball) is highly competitive, yet not very elite.
Football also doesn’t cost much for the kids, while if you want your child to become a racing driver, you have to invest heavily.
I like 365 days a week better 🙂
Lots of truth to what you say.
I remember taking a kid to a pediatrician after a weekend sports tournament. Pediatrician complained about these weekend tournaments leading to far more injuries.
I also heard Tommy John on the radio once. He complained that high school kids are getting Tommy John surgery now.
John was a well rounded athlete. He was from Indiana, and was tall, so basketball was his main passion growing up. He didn’t really concentrate on pitching until college when people informed him that was his path to athletic excellence.
When I was younger there were still a fair number of multi sport athletes who sometimes played professionally in more than one sport. Much rarer now. More specialized.
Compare this to about 100 years ago when the greatest track and field athlete of time played baseball, basketball, and football professionally, and made the Hall of Fame in football. Of course Thorpe was a rare creature, but others could do that if sports were not so specialized.
Ryan McDonagh of the Preds, who went to the same HS as Mauer in St. Paul, returned for his senior year (the staff at Wisconsin wanted him in the USHL) in order to win back to back state championships failed at that. He was, however a key piece of their state winning baseball team.
The effects of travel sports clubs has an interesting effect on sports.
First, sports tend to be dominated by the sons and daughters of people who range from the upper end of the middle class to wealthy and who have the time and ability to coach their kids.
For example, there was a former NFL star in this area who chose his residence based on the HS football coach. He also had a gym in his home that rivaled pro gyms. And he could help out his son, who briefly turned pro.
And football seems to be one of the few sports remaining where poor kids can still make it. The wealthier kids still have a huge advantage.
Another thing about specialization is outdoor sports are now dominated by people in warm climates. Far more southerners than northerners on college or pro teams. Even here in the upper Midwest the college teams are often dominated by southerners in many sports.
Of course there are exceptions to everything. There was a white fireman in Wisconsin named Watt whose sons did well in football.
Rugby took a wrong turn by allowing so many substitutions. So you get teams like South Africa abusing the scrum. It used to be about the players.
However, with NIL, women's college athletics can now be remunerative for the girls. Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes came to Piscataway Friday night and completely embarrassed the Rutgers Scarlet Knights 103-69 in a sellout. She is making more in NIL money now than she will in salary in the WNBA next year.Replies: @Paleo Liberal, @mmack, @Pixo
Upper middle class kids with involved fathers dominate skill sports (positions) that are expensive to practice, but also have generational wealth payoffs if performed at elite levels: Golf, hockey, baseball, quarterbacks. The 10,000 hour rule.
Another Gladwellian technique to obtain some of the 10,000 hours on the cheap, hold back Johnny until he is 6 before sending him to kindergarten. he will be bigger than his classmates, thus get more attention from coaches and more playing time. May even get invited to play on a peewee travel team. Good strategy for single mothers, let the travel team fathers do the nurturing.
Football and basketball still fairly egalitarian, thus dominated by poor blacks.
I wrote of this before, but my orthopedic surgeon (himself a former athlete) told me he's now seeing more and more children with professional type of sports injuries. When he and I were growing up, we all played different kinds of sports seasonally even while we were concentrating on specific sports (he was a tennis player and I was a Judo competitor), but now, he says that most kids who are serious about particular sports concentrate on them 24/7, 365 days a week.
I see this in combat sports as well. I know kids who - as teenagers - are already training in and competing in (amateur) MMA fights, which I think is crazy (and highly detrimental to the kids).
That's why my sons do Judo, BJJ, and wrestling. They are all grappling combat sports, but are still different enough that they are getting to move and use different muscles, joints, and body postures instead of doing a small number of the same movements a million times repetitively and suffering injuries easily.Replies: @Twinkie, @Wokechoke, @Anon
A child should mix sports.
Boxing oddly enough is a good basic. Boxing or a Martial Art. Teaches a great deal about discipline and punishment. Also footwork and balance.
Football (soccer) is a very good basic sport. Good for teamwork. It’s a players sport rather than a coached sport. While a bawling coach is common enough many are quiet and the players will just do what they think is best. The coach can substitute lousy players but that’s about it. It’s a perfect sport for decision making. If the child is physical they can go onto Rugby contact styles. Gaelic, American, Aussie etc which are more heavily coached.
Tennis is also a handy sport. It works on the ego. Good for meeting girls. Very individualistic.
Do some rock climbing too.
Germans are keen on a sport called Handball. It’s quite entertaining.
The American woman have fared even worse as they have not only not qualified since their auto in 1996, but they haven't won a match since defeating Nigeria 23-21 in 1992 to finish 6th out of 8.
First, sports tend to be dominated by the sons and daughters of people who range from the upper end of the middle class to wealthy and who have the time and ability to coach their kids.
For example, there was a former NFL star in this area who chose his residence based on the HS football coach. He also had a gym in his home that rivaled pro gyms. And he could help out his son, who briefly turned pro.
And football seems to be one of the few sports remaining where poor kids can still make it. The wealthier kids still have a huge advantage.
Another thing about specialization is outdoor sports are now dominated by people in warm climates. Far more southerners than northerners on college or pro teams. Even here in the upper Midwest the college teams are often dominated by southerners in many sports.
Of course there are exceptions to everything. There was a white fireman in Wisconsin named Watt whose sons did well in football.Replies: @Wokechoke, @Guest007, @ScarletNumber
A coach lead game like American Football is always going to be about the power of a coach. A patriarch in the best and worse sense.
Rugby took a wrong turn by allowing so many substitutions. So you get teams like South Africa abusing the scrum. It used to be about the players.
Not that I’m an expert, but if I can extrapolate from music pedagogy, if a kid starts golfing early under excellent instructors, he’ll have as low a chance as possible of developing bad habits. The golf swing strikes me as an extraordinary example of a motion that must be entirely right, reliably right. If he’s never learned to do it badly, a young golfer has an enormous advantage over someone who tries to correct his swing later. Similar to speaking a second language: When we learn our native language, the identification of word and meaning is solid, but when we learn a second language, we sort of patch the second’s vocabulary onto the first’s and the result, in most cases, is nowhere near as smooth as with the first.
I recall not too long ago, Steve highlighted an article complaining about the lack of diversity in PWG (pretty white girl) sports, and I do think there is a certain aspect of financial gatekeeping in volleyball, soccer, golf, and lacrosse and the like to ensure the right class of people are involved, plus a lot of these club organizations are raking in money from parents as well. Part of having a bit of money is participating in things that signal that, and part of it is being able to select what kind of environment you and/or your kids have to move around in and what you can avoid.
Not necessarily more exclusive. Europe has plenty of potential MLB talent that gets diverted to similar sports or no sports at all. It’s not like working-class Germans can’t afford baseball. Likewise, I’m sure there are at least a handful of Americans that have the potential to be world tour cyclists, but when they were young they quickly discovered that they were too slow for American team sports (note cycling used to be a working-class sport in Europe).
As sports become more competitive, athletes become more specialized. Swimmers get more disproportionately long-armed and short-legged; marathoners become even smaller (vast majority are now bird-boned 5-6’ E Africans; compare to the 70s when there were still tall N Europeans winning marathons); and so on. You have to find your niche, but that isn’t always about money.
First, sports tend to be dominated by the sons and daughters of people who range from the upper end of the middle class to wealthy and who have the time and ability to coach their kids.
For example, there was a former NFL star in this area who chose his residence based on the HS football coach. He also had a gym in his home that rivaled pro gyms. And he could help out his son, who briefly turned pro.
And football seems to be one of the few sports remaining where poor kids can still make it. The wealthier kids still have a huge advantage.
Another thing about specialization is outdoor sports are now dominated by people in warm climates. Far more southerners than northerners on college or pro teams. Even here in the upper Midwest the college teams are often dominated by southerners in many sports.
Of course there are exceptions to everything. There was a white fireman in Wisconsin named Watt whose sons did well in football.Replies: @Wokechoke, @Guest007, @ScarletNumber
JJ Watt is married to a professional women’s soccer player. Is there any doubt that their children will be very good athletes? What would not expect their children to become dentist.
Anecdote: One of the best soccer players in USWNT history is Christie Pearce, who was able to rise through the professional ranks despite playing collegiately at Monmouth, a sub-par Division I school. When she was 26 she married a New Jersey college baseball player who played at the Division III level, albeit it at a good baseball school that won a national championship while he was there.
They ended up having two daughters, but they divorced in 2017. Why? Because as her soccer career was winding down, they had to actually spend time together. In this process, they discovered they didn't have much in common and didn't like each other all that much 🤣. They mated because they were young and horny and both had good genes. The older daughter is a senior in high school but from what I can gather has not signed at a college for next year yet.
https://vsco.co/rylierampone/galleryReplies: @Intelligent Dasein
In further bad news for The Woman of Unz:
Men can now legally punch women in Biden’s America.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usa-boxing-codifies-rule-allowing-male-participation-in-womens-division/
I will take the other side of the 24/7-sponge argument. Back in my day (which was way back), swim practice in high school consisted of an hour in the pool, and the other sports were about the same. It was the same when I got to my college. That seemed about right. I did not want to be a sport “sponge.” Lord knows I had other things to do. Like study, and I had a job or two, and I wanted to socialize. I can’t prove it, but I think most parents today, including those with the resources for private coaching and so on, would prefer the above balanced model to the sponge model. I will go further and say that most young people, if you took a secret ballot, would prefer the balanced model; not many would opt to spend three hours a day standing around on the football field, getting yelled at by an armamentarium of coaches.
I played Little League, and once the season started, we had two games per week, but we almost never had a practice per se after that. Meanwhile, the youth football team practiced every day but Saturday, with the games being on Sunday. When I got to high school I did play football, but we knew that our only day off would be Sunday, with Monday and Friday being in "half pads" and watching tape, and Tuesday through Thursday being full-contact two-hour practices. All high school sports were like this; it was expected that even on weekends, if you didn't have a game you would have one two-hour practice. I'm starting to think that our coaches just wanted to get out of the house.
Some local acclaimed high school teams could probably beat small college teams.
It starts very young. 5th-6th graders start tackle football in local league play with multiple Dad coaches and game video taping/reviews. These games are put on YouTube. They play weekly in seasonal leagues leading up to playoffs.
In Junior High/Middle School, some league play continues until the players can play in freshman school teams. By the time they hit High school, they have had years of coaching, play calling/making and intensive video reviews.
Some of these kids, say about 8th grade, are either huge (220 lbs) or extremely fast. Or both.
When they hit college play, they have experience like former NFL prospects, the very best of them.
Of course most don't continue that since the elites get harder to achieve. Also some get early injuries. But overall it is amazing compared to my youth. Of course some sports like gymnastics actually need their competitors to be sub teens or extremely young. Swimmers also tend to be younger.
We used to criticize the USSR for professionalizing young kids early for Olympic sports. Now it is an American thing too.
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
Filching from Wikipedia of all places is especially and poignantly pathetic
This is a natural consequence of an increasingly stratified system of parasitic classes trying to set themselves up as castes.
As an affluent family in a pathologically-competitive nominal meritocracy, you need an option for your dumb kids. You have to get them into a brand-name school to preserve your social standing and if you got more money than brains sport is ideal, since it’s competitive largely on the basis of capital-intensive training and facilities.
A whole predatory industry has grown up around privatizing high school sports, and large numbers of striving subalterns piss away their net worth on sports camps and teams and leagues. That’s as much of a lottery as SATs but it’s not as obvious how bad your odds are. They’ll take your money and fuck your kid too, if she’s a gymnast, for example, and make her bulimic and arthritic and maybe quadraplegic. There’s a well-known phenomenon of gymnasts losing their edge when they mature cognitively. All of a sudden it occurs to her, Why should I break my neck doing crazy flips and spend my life in a wheelchair getting mucus suctioned out my mouth?
In this hierarchical culture of competition under threat of shunning, insolvency, and destitution, your kid is capital, not like a small but adaptable steer, as in feudal days, but as a Star 80 kind of look-what-I-got to child traffic. It’s why your kids are so fucked up.
(Just before the Olympic finals, no less! Although I don’t blame her for that decision - gymnastics is a crazy dangerous sport.)
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/sport/simone-biles-tokyo-2020-olympics/index.htmlReplies: @Jim Don Bob
Athletic kids rarely need to be forced into sports. Nor do most parents try to do that. Yes a few parents are greedy or try to exploit that, but not common.
The examples you cite are outliers. All culture is "hierarchical" by the way. This Woke rhetoric doesn't constitute argument or analysis.
Yes, too much, too soon can be bad for kids. Parents are not an "exploitative class" and children aren't suffering proletariat serfs. Your old fashioned Marxist rhetoric is outdated. No A+for you!
"Fucked up" kids get into booze, drugs and sex also. They get hooked on cell phone "influencers" and TikTok fakery. Those pink haired 16 year old girls want to be famous, not their parents. And they aren't athletes either.
Since you are either too young or stupid to know this, it was the Official Marxist Communists who were ahead of the child exploitation curve. Drugging up the young girls (and men) and putting the best performers in national elite academies. Russia is still infamous for doping Olympic competitors and has gotten banned as a result.
Whatever the problem may be, neo Marxist, or "Woke" class analysis does not shed any light on the problem.
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
The big difference between the two is that it appears to an outside that Oxman is doing interesting work in a materials science field that she may have invented. OTOH I am amused that she is referred to as a ‘celebrity academic’. I can’t tell if that title comes from her work or her looks
Oh, I’m sure they would. The problem is that it becomes an arms race where unilateral disarmament is to your immediate disadvantage. You need a sanctioning body to sit limits and enforce the rules. In college football the NCAA sit limits on the number of scholarships a school could offer and the amount of hours a team can practice. The coaches howled, but they adjusted.
I played Little League, and once the season started, we had two games per week, but we almost never had a practice per se after that. Meanwhile, the youth football team practiced every day but Saturday, with the games being on Sunday. When I got to high school I did play football, but we knew that our only day off would be Sunday, with Monday and Friday being in “half pads” and watching tape, and Tuesday through Thursday being full-contact two-hour practices. All high school sports were like this; it was expected that even on weekends, if you didn’t have a game you would have one two-hour practice. I’m starting to think that our coaches just wanted to get out of the house.
Oh, I’m sure they would. The problem is that it becomes an arms race where unilateral disarmament is to your immediate disadvantage. You need a sanctioning body to sit limits and enforce the rules. In college football the NCAA sit limits on the number of scholarships a school could offer and the amount of hours a team can practice. The coaches howled, but they adjusted.
I played Little League, and once the season started, we had two games per week, but we almost never had a practice per se after that. Meanwhile, the youth football team practiced every day but Saturday, with the games being on Sunday. When I got to high school I did play football, but we knew that our only day off would be Sunday, with Monday and Friday being in “half pads” and watching tape, and Tuesday through Thursday being full-contact two-hour practices. All high school sports were like this; it was expected that even on weekends, if you didn’t have a game you would have one two-hour practice. I’m starting to think that our coaches just wanted to get out of the house.
I wrote of this before, but my orthopedic surgeon (himself a former athlete) told me he's now seeing more and more children with professional type of sports injuries. When he and I were growing up, we all played different kinds of sports seasonally even while we were concentrating on specific sports (he was a tennis player and I was a Judo competitor), but now, he says that most kids who are serious about particular sports concentrate on them 24/7, 365 days a week.
I see this in combat sports as well. I know kids who - as teenagers - are already training in and competing in (amateur) MMA fights, which I think is crazy (and highly detrimental to the kids).
That's why my sons do Judo, BJJ, and wrestling. They are all grappling combat sports, but are still different enough that they are getting to move and use different muscles, joints, and body postures instead of doing a small number of the same movements a million times repetitively and suffering injuries easily.Replies: @Twinkie, @Wokechoke, @Anon
It’s also a somewhat high-risk strategy. Elite level sport success is a function of having the right body type for that particular sport,* and you don’t really know how that’s going to turn out until your late teens.
Now, if you’re the scion of a great family, whatever; you have good backup options. But, the stereotypical poor kid?
*speed probably being the notable exception. It’s really helpful in dozens of sports.
First, sports tend to be dominated by the sons and daughters of people who range from the upper end of the middle class to wealthy and who have the time and ability to coach their kids.
For example, there was a former NFL star in this area who chose his residence based on the HS football coach. He also had a gym in his home that rivaled pro gyms. And he could help out his son, who briefly turned pro.
And football seems to be one of the few sports remaining where poor kids can still make it. The wealthier kids still have a huge advantage.
Another thing about specialization is outdoor sports are now dominated by people in warm climates. Far more southerners than northerners on college or pro teams. Even here in the upper Midwest the college teams are often dominated by southerners in many sports.
Of course there are exceptions to everything. There was a white fireman in Wisconsin named Watt whose sons did well in football.Replies: @Wokechoke, @Guest007, @ScarletNumber
It’s funny that you mention both boys and girls, as the professional opportunities for girls are much more limited compared to that of boys. Yes scholarships are available, but most of these parents could easily cut the tuition check when the time comes. I think the primary purpose of girls sports is to keep their daughters busy as to keep them out of trouble, with the secondary purpose of satisfying dads who never had sons, i.e. Casey at the Bat.
However, with NIL, women’s college athletics can now be remunerative for the girls. Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes came to Piscataway Friday night and completely embarrassed the Rutgers Scarlet Knights 103-69 in a sellout. She is making more in NIL money now than she will in salary in the WNBA next year.
Keep the girls out of trouble and brush up the old Curriculum Vitae to get into a “Good College”.
I’ve related before that both my niece and nephew played soccer in grade school, junior high, and high school, both on traveling teams and their school teams. What was interesting was their approach to sports after graduating high school.
My nephew played pickup soccer games with friends in college and after until he found out, as all we men do, that as you get older and don’t practice as much, injuries take longer to heal.
Well that and getting married and having kids of his own. But I know he played into his late 20s.
My niece? Once high school was done the soccer cleats went back into the closet.
Why it’s almost like men and women have different views on sports and competition.
Nah, “experts” tell me that ain’t true. 😏Replies: @ScarletNumber
This doesn’t seem secondary IME. Any studies?
A giant share of girls I’ve known seriously into sports, like state finals and college scholarships level, had sporty fathers and no brothers.
Pro basketball players largely come from the basketball academy to elite college pipeline
Perhaps it’s U-shaped?
At the very beginning of a sports existence, the athletes come from a limited socioeconomic and geographic population–the population of the inventor of the sport. Then as it becomes more popular, it spreads and those with with the most native ability rise to the top. This is when nature matters the most. But eventually, when there is serious money involved, it becomes incentivized for parents to start their kids young, and nurture reasserts itself as important.
However, with NIL, women's college athletics can now be remunerative for the girls. Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes came to Piscataway Friday night and completely embarrassed the Rutgers Scarlet Knights 103-69 in a sellout. She is making more in NIL money now than she will in salary in the WNBA next year.Replies: @Paleo Liberal, @mmack, @Pixo
I mentioned daughters because my kids and my friends’ kids of both sexes were involved in club sports. That got very interesting. One of my kids was on the same team for a while with someone who is now on the US National Team in that sport. Made for some very interesting competitions.
OT: Ed Burke, Chicago alderman for life and arch enemy of Harold Washington has been convicted of corruption. He proved to a stand up man and did not squeal on others. No doubt the ghosts of Christmas past, present am future visited him this Christmas. I wonder how he will feel in the future when he is breaking rocks under the hot sun and the three pensioned mayor is enjoying his retirement in luxury.
However, Richie Daley, Hizzoner da Mare's son, has been blissfully silent.
That said, God love the Vrdolyak 29, of which Burke was a member. By opposing Washington they kept Chicago from becoming what it is now under Beetlejuice and Brandon way back in the early to mid 1980s.
This is not only not a paradox, it’s actually quite obvious. It’s been obvious to me ever since I was in high school 25 years ago. It’s been obvious enough that I’ve written comments about this phenomenon here before, most recently this one.
Elite sports is now the province of your Thurston Howell the Thirds, not your Thirst-and-Howl the Firsts, for some rather obvious reasons. It is too much to expect from a kid starting out from nowhere that he not only make himself into a great athlete, but that he also overcome all the socioeconomic and class barriers to entry in order to access the elite circles, the elite training facilities, and the personal networks where all the good help and information is to be found. If you aren’t in that milieu, you won’t even know where to start.
No one person can do everything in one lifetime. Life is too short, and the tactical details required to excel in every dimension of life are too divergent to allow one person to succeed in all of them simultaneously. If you did not have parents who at least did the legwork to move the family up into a middle-class existence, you aren’t going to have the economic freedom or the psychological comportment to spend all your time training at sports (which is basically a luxury activity that adds no value).
Most people get this at an intuitive level. It’s one of the factors that accounts for the stranglehold that the academic-credentialism-athletic complex has over the life decisions of millions of Americans. It’s why today’s helicopter parents do everything to send their children college and pay for them to play sports in travelling leagues, just as in the past ambitious British parents would move heaven and earth to send their sons to private school and get them an imperial post as vice snot-wiper to the postmaster general of Burma or some such—all in the hopes that the new milieu will take hold and that their descendants will finally be “upper class.”
The exception to the above, of course, would be black kids in America who are fast-tracked into elite athletic circles that they never could have earned their way into on their own. But this is the exception that proves the rule. These blacks become athletes not because they are great at what they do, but because the system picked them and favored them. It’s just another example of how the primary victims of affirmative action are poor white children, and how the race war is really just a class war of upper-class whites against lower-class whites.
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
As long as everyone in the circle deserves to be shot I got no problem with it.
OT — German farmers have started protesting hugely (Dutch farners have been protesting for over a year now). “Environmentalism” now is just naked class warfare.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/peter-sweden-video-its-spreading-massive-farmers-protest/
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.OT, another dodgy Armenian is back in the States. This guy really is impressive, and his strapping redheaded woman seems to be standing by him. He's modelling his look on late-period Van Morrison with added wheelchair.
https://images.ctfassets.net/pjshm78m9jt4/6QEgZRkU5tzPc3EjqiRfI2/292906c62085ed6b0af1ccf998850b6f/PA-66483018.jpghttps://www.itv.com/news/2024-01-05/nicholas-rossi-who-faces-charges-in-the-us-has-been-extradited-from-scotlandhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_AlahverdianReplies: @Frau Katze, @Anon
That’s quite a story! Dodgy indeed.
Agree with you on golf. Some years ago I was a member of a country club (at the urging of friends, not because I love golf) and had the kids get some experience playing and the pro there said that if you are not playing regularly by 12 years old you just won’t ever be competitive these days. Other sports I think raw athleticism can get you up to speed fairly quickly although obviously there is situational experience that matters as well.
I recall not too long ago, Steve highlighted an article complaining about the lack of diversity in PWG (pretty white girl) sports, and I do think there is a certain aspect of financial gatekeeping in volleyball, soccer, golf, and lacrosse and the like to ensure the right class of people are involved, plus a lot of these club organizations are raking in money from parents as well. Part of having a bit of money is participating in things that signal that, and part of it is being able to select what kind of environment you and/or your kids have to move around in and what you can avoid.
It depends upon the particular sport. Even with superb native talent, golf takes a lifetime to learn but with enough native talent e.g. basketball can be learned relatively quickly. Snooker is like golf — the best players start young. Is the difference between sports professionals starting very young something about extreme degrees of accuracy (golf, snooker) versus more general athletic skills (basketball)?
Hagen developed his golf game at the Country Club of Rochester, beginning as a caddie, and earned money to help support his family from pre-teen age.
Gene Sarazen Eugenio Saraceni was born on February 27, 1902, in Harrison, New York,[4] his parents were poor Sicilian immigrants.[5] He began caddying at age ten at local golf clubs,
Sam Snead began caddying at age seven
Ben Hogan ... A tip from a friend led him to caddying at age elevenReplies: @prosa123
Golf carts have reduced the demand for caddies.
I suspect it depends greatly on where exactly you draw the line.
This plagiarism witch hunt should result in some interesting conversations. I hope Ackman (or someone else) broadens the reviews beyond MIT to elite colleges with a larger liberal arts contingent. And more affirmative action.
I wonder if “disparate impact” is what will eventually shut this line of inquiry down.
P.S. Going back on topic for the thread, I think the phenomenon being discussed could give some good information of the relative balance of nature and nurture for different sports. Though one should correct for accessibility of resources. For example, basketball courts are common. Even if high level coaching and competition are not.
For example because you don't get tenure without being judged first or second in your field, including by a visiting committee who's remit includes keeping the department honest, and all professors with exceptions that prove the rule are tenured or tenure track.
Harvard is very weird in that they don't tend to hire tenure track junior faculty, instead preferring to poach already tenured Top Professors ... like Claudine Gay! Who first became a professor at Stanford, after a year at Princeton and then finishing her undergraduate degree at Standford, then off to Harvard for her Ph.D. Which reminds me that we're told Princeton is the most academically rigorous of the Ivies....Replies: @J.Ross, @res
At Harvard : 44%, increasing to 68% eventually.
https://faculty.harvard.edu/current-annual-report
https://faculty.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xlarge/public/faculty-diversity/files/ay23_single_page_icon.png?m=1671129072&itok=jG-g6YPY
Germans are keen on a sport called Handball. It’s quite entertaining.Replies: @ScarletNumber
Yes, while the coach can instill and supervise drills and work on schemes in practice, once the game starts it is pretty much out of his hands. The main difference between soccer and basketball is that in basketball there are pretty much unlimited substitutions, so a coach can replace a player for any or no reason, while in soccer substitutions are much more limited, so if your star player goes rogue, you pretty much have to accept it for the time being.
In the United States, it is considered such a minor sport that the NCAA doesn’t even acknowledge it. It is big in the Olympics, but due to a lack of feeder program we have not qualified for the Olympic tournament since 1988, although we got an automatic bid in 1996 as host. In 1996 we actually defeated Kuwait and Algeria in order to finish 9th out of 12.
The American woman have fared even worse as they have not only not qualified since their auto in 1996, but they haven’t won a match since defeating Nigeria 23-21 in 1992 to finish 6th out of 8.
This plagiarism witch hunt should result in some interesting conversations. I hope Ackman (or someone else) broadens the reviews beyond MIT to elite colleges with a larger liberal arts contingent. And more affirmative action.
I wonder if "disparate impact" is what will eventually shut this line of inquiry down.
P.S. Going back on topic for the thread, I think the phenomenon being discussed could give some good information of the relative balance of nature and nurture for different sports. Though one should correct for accessibility of resources. For example, basketball courts are common. Even if high level coaching and competition are not.Replies: @J.Ross, @That Would Be Telling, @Twinkie
Plagiarism witch hunt! Plagiarism witch hunt! No conversation about how Jews got Jews killed! No conversation about what really happened or the human lives or social order it cost! We’re going to babble about fucking plagiarism, during the climax of the reproducibility crisis!
Men can now legally punch women in Biden's America.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usa-boxing-codifies-rule-allowing-male-participation-in-womens-division/Replies: @res
We can only hope that Biden himself goes all in on this in an election year. I hope he is pressed on this issue.
At Harvard : 44%, increasing eventually to 68%
https://faculty.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/faculty-diversity/files/ay2023_faculty_demographics.pdf?m=1671128990
There should be a statute of limitations on plagiarism. If the information you copied is more than 80 years old, you don’t have to cite it. Anything 80 years old that is worth citing is common knowledge.
Science and tech follows this in practice. Many papers start off with Maxwell’s Equations, but nobody cites them. (Well, once in a while someone does, but unless it’s a history-of-science paper, it’s considered silly ornamentation.)
The funny thing is, that in science and tech there is a large amount of valuable common knowledge more than 80 years old. It stands the test of time. But in the trendy academic literature of psychology and anything softer, nobody has any use for anything 80 years old or even 50 years old.
This plagiarism witch hunt should result in some interesting conversations. I hope Ackman (or someone else) broadens the reviews beyond MIT to elite colleges with a larger liberal arts contingent. And more affirmative action.
I wonder if "disparate impact" is what will eventually shut this line of inquiry down.
P.S. Going back on topic for the thread, I think the phenomenon being discussed could give some good information of the relative balance of nature and nurture for different sports. Though one should correct for accessibility of resources. For example, basketball courts are common. Even if high level coaching and competition are not.Replies: @J.Ross, @That Would Be Telling, @Twinkie
Indeed. Might find some pay dirt in the MIT Humanities Department, although its professors were solid in the 1980s; I’m not sure how tenure works there let alone today, but it generally should be difficult to be a MIT Claudine Gay.
For example because you don’t get tenure without being judged first or second in your field, including by a visiting committee who’s remit includes keeping the department honest, and all professors with exceptions that prove the rule are tenured or tenure track.
Harvard is very weird in that they don’t tend to hire tenure track junior faculty, instead preferring to poach already tenured Top Professors … like Claudine Gay! Who first became a professor at Stanford, after a year at Princeton and then finishing her undergraduate degree at Standford, then off to Harvard for her Ph.D. Which reminds me that we’re told Princeton is the most academically rigorous of the Ivies….
Then again...Michelle Obama.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @That Would Be Telling
I don’t believe that Nelson and Peete didn’t pick up the game until their twenties. There’s some evidence that Nelson did play golf in his teens, and as for Peete, his teen years have been largely scrubbed from history. What we do know is that he grew up in Florida and had plenty of free time on his hands. He also loved to hustle people for money.
One odd thing is that both claim they read Hogan’s book and everything suddenly clicked. Did the Wee Ice Mon have them on his payroll?
Not only did Watt marry a soccer player, but he married a pretty one who played at Carolina. Her sister played at USC and married Watt’s teammate Brian Cushing, so there will be two sets of cousins with good genes on both sides.
Anecdote: One of the best soccer players in USWNT history is Christie Pearce, who was able to rise through the professional ranks despite playing collegiately at Monmouth, a sub-par Division I school. When she was 26 she married a New Jersey college baseball player who played at the Division III level, albeit it at a good baseball school that won a national championship while he was there.
They ended up having two daughters, but they divorced in 2017. Why? Because as her soccer career was winding down, they had to actually spend time together. In this process, they discovered they didn’t have much in common and didn’t like each other all that much 🤣. They mated because they were young and horny and both had good genes. The older daughter is a senior in high school but from what I can gather has not signed at a college for next year yet.
https://vsco.co/rylierampone/gallery
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I'm asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can't stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can't even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don't watch it and I don't care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it's actually physically painful. You couldn't pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it's just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can't just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man's matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Frau Katze, @Emil Nikola Richard, @Twinkie, @Guest007
The nice part of volleyball and soccer is that they do allow for certain positions to have beasts, so even if your daughter wasn’t blessed appearance-wise, there is room for her at libero or goalkeeper. Meanwhile, someone like Jennie Finch is considered good looking in the world of softball when her face could stop a clock. To take it to another level, bowling is an official NCAA sport for women. Two local colleges have nationally-ranked teams so I get to see them on TV every so often. Imagine what you think a woman college bowler would look like, and you would be correct. These two particular schools don’t have football teams, but some of their women bowlers could pass as linemen.
That's one of the dumbest things I've read here, and considering all the Mom's-basement-dwelling lunatics on this site that's saying a lot. Vanderbilt University has one of the top women's bowling teams. Here is a team picture. My reasoned guess is that 99.9% of straight men in the country would gladly nail any of them.https://vucommodores.com/sports/wbowl/roster/Replies: @Redneck Farmer
However, with NIL, women's college athletics can now be remunerative for the girls. Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes came to Piscataway Friday night and completely embarrassed the Rutgers Scarlet Knights 103-69 in a sellout. She is making more in NIL money now than she will in salary in the WNBA next year.Replies: @Paleo Liberal, @mmack, @Pixo
I think the primary purpose of girls sports is to keep their daughters busy as to keep them out of trouble, with the secondary purpose of satisfying dads who never had sons, i.e. Casey at the Bat.
Keep the girls out of trouble and brush up the old Curriculum Vitae to get into a “Good College”.
I’ve related before that both my niece and nephew played soccer in grade school, junior high, and high school, both on traveling teams and their school teams. What was interesting was their approach to sports after graduating high school.
My nephew played pickup soccer games with friends in college and after until he found out, as all we men do, that as you get older and don’t practice as much, injuries take longer to heal.
Well that and getting married and having kids of his own. But I know he played into his late 20s.
My niece? Once high school was done the soccer cleats went back into the closet.
Why it’s almost like men and women have different views on sports and competition.
Nah, “experts” tell me that ain’t true. 😏
While your niece hung up her cleats, hopefully she picked up some physical activity to stay in shape, as a lot of girls put on weight once they give up organized sports.Replies: @mmack
it depends on the sport, but i think the opposite is happening in most sports. there’s a bunch of good africans in swimming and tennis now. as competitive golf has slowly proliferated around the world, it seems like a few of the low to mid level PGA card players are exotic brown guys who were never around even 25 years ago.
tennis, swimming & diving, golf are at the bottom of the ‘real’ sports – not among the major balls sports in league play, but big enough that there’s some money in the player developmental process for coaching, hundreds of NCAA programs, 100 years of sports science, and enough participation that non-competitors can’t just come in from other sports and immediately be the best guy. they could do that if they spent 10 years on it, but they’ll never just do something like leave the NFL and immediately become one of the best rugby players or leave the NBA and immediately become one of the best volleyball players. which seem like things that could happen.
ice hockey is even smaller than those sports in participation, developmental size and scope and money, and much bigger in terms of barriers to entry, but even in ice hockey there are some african players now. only a couple countries even play this, so it’s WAY down there in the participation to spectator interest ratio. maybe the highest ratio of any sport, perhaps next to boxing. although it’s an international sport, nobody boxes, but millions still watch title matches. there’s only 16,000 active boxers or so in the entire world – 3 times as many people are doing diving, the VERY minor side sport to swimming.
Tiger Woods was probably the most famous golf prodigy. His father Earl would appear with him on talk shows to show off young Tiger. Now, was Earl Woods rich? No. Was Earl Woods a professional golfer? No. However, he was 43 when Tiger was born and was already retired as a Lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army. While Earl was an athlete in his own right when he was young, having played baseball at Kansas State, as an Army officer he discovered golf. Almost every army base has access to a golf course and Earl was stationed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. Being on garrison, he had pretty much unlimited time to learn the game, and once Tiger became old enough he devoted his life to teaching his son the game, since as a retired Army officer, he was living off of his pension.
football is one of the exceptions in sports – barriers to entry here are actually kind of high, not as high as ice hockey or competitive golf, but higher than most sports, and costs are covered the by the school districts and the towns themselves, along with what are called the boosters. so the entire developmental process for players from youths up thru young adults playing in NCAA are subsidized by the community, and really, the nation itself, as football is by far the most important sports in America.
the majority of the african players would have trouble playing football as a career if it wasn’t for those other people paying for everything. so their ubiquitous presence is kind of artificial. football is only an example of ‘anybody can play, so obviously these guys dominate’ as long as other people foot the bill. which they always will, and which will never change. but that’s how it is just the same. once money gets low in some program, you hear the complaints that the africans don’t have what they need to continue to dominate football. send more money.
football participation is actually in decline, as the non-african players continue to think more seriously about the damage-to-benefit ROI situation, and slowly but steadily decide it’s not worth it. high schools are slowly eliminating football teams, leading some people to think that ‘football is gonna go away’, but what’s much more likely is that football will become even more african than it is now, since africans mostly don’t care about the damage situation and gladly accept the risks. plus players were able to successfully sue NFL in a retarded way – every player knew the risks, nobody was surprised they got brain damage from 10 seasons, so the head damage situation is central to the damage to ROI decision making going forward, and africans don’t care about that either. NFL even got rid of Wonderlic for them, and rigged the concussion protocol rules.
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
“ While Wikipedia is generally accurate, anyone can edit it”
Not anymore. Go ahead and try to edit any of the top 1000 entries which constitute the majority of traffic. Many are completely locked to edits by unapproved editors, and the rest will probably see any new editor have his changes instantly reverted by a robot.
Wikipedia is hated by leftist academics, even though it is also increasingly leftist, because they hate the fact that random autistic white/NEasian anons have much larger audiences than they do, including their specific academic specialties. Many have also tried to edit it and had their edits rejected, and then left long huffy complaints with their real names.
Anecdote: One of the best soccer players in USWNT history is Christie Pearce, who was able to rise through the professional ranks despite playing collegiately at Monmouth, a sub-par Division I school. When she was 26 she married a New Jersey college baseball player who played at the Division III level, albeit it at a good baseball school that won a national championship while he was there.
They ended up having two daughters, but they divorced in 2017. Why? Because as her soccer career was winding down, they had to actually spend time together. In this process, they discovered they didn't have much in common and didn't like each other all that much 🤣. They mated because they were young and horny and both had good genes. The older daughter is a senior in high school but from what I can gather has not signed at a college for next year yet.
https://vsco.co/rylierampone/galleryReplies: @Intelligent Dasein
Serious question:
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I’m asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can’t stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can’t even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don’t watch it and I don’t care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it’s actually physically painful. You couldn’t pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it’s just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can’t just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man’s matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.
I’m only reading this iSteve post because it’s a slow Sunday. I don’t usually read his sports posts at all.Replies: @Catdompanj
However, everyone has something that they are interested in that most people would find boring whether travel, hobbies, religion, movies, books, etc. One of the big ones that I cannot understand at all are people who have a beach condo or lake house. Nothing could be more boring than vacationing in the same place every year.
More than a decade ago, an unnamed freshmen English professor wrote an article in the Atlantic called "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower." The professor noted that there is no book, movie, TV show, sporting event, or any part of culture that all of his students are familiar with. He said the closest to a common experience would be having seen The Wizard of Oz.
Just because one does not like sports does not make one superior because those avid sports fans can review anyone's life and point out something that they detest.
Lennon and McCartney would like a word with you.
For example because you don't get tenure without being judged first or second in your field, including by a visiting committee who's remit includes keeping the department honest, and all professors with exceptions that prove the rule are tenured or tenure track.
Harvard is very weird in that they don't tend to hire tenure track junior faculty, instead preferring to poach already tenured Top Professors ... like Claudine Gay! Who first became a professor at Stanford, after a year at Princeton and then finishing her undergraduate degree at Standford, then off to Harvard for her Ph.D. Which reminds me that we're told Princeton is the most academically rigorous of the Ivies....Replies: @J.Ross, @res
I wish I could be punished like Claudine Gay, and that my enemies might triumph the way Bill Ackman has here. It’s kind of scary to see all the nothing that a billion dollars can buy.
Similar in tennis. The kids who are going to be the next Agassis and Federers have already been spotted by the time they’re 13. In tennis, it isn’t just helpful to start really young and get first-class coaching *while* you’re still young, it’s pretty much mandatory. Groove those strokes, refine that timing, and internalize that choreography.
There’ll be a few exceptions, but generally speaking if you take up tennis after the age of 13 you’re never going to get to be college-team good, let alone professional-level good. It’s a surprisingly complicated — and, for many who give it a try, dismayingly difficult — sport to master, or to even get to be pretty good at.
However, with NIL, women's college athletics can now be remunerative for the girls. Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes came to Piscataway Friday night and completely embarrassed the Rutgers Scarlet Knights 103-69 in a sellout. She is making more in NIL money now than she will in salary in the WNBA next year.Replies: @Paleo Liberal, @mmack, @Pixo
“ with the secondary purpose of satisfying dads who never had sons”
This doesn’t seem secondary IME. Any studies?
A giant share of girls I’ve known seriously into sports, like state finals and college scholarships level, had sporty fathers and no brothers.
Not anymore. Go ahead and try to edit any of the top 1000 entries which constitute the majority of traffic. Many are completely locked to edits by unapproved editors, and the rest will probably see any new editor have his changes instantly reverted by a robot.
Wikipedia is hated by leftist academics, even though it is also increasingly leftist, because they hate the fact that random autistic white/NEasian anons have much larger audiences than they do, including their specific academic specialties. Many have also tried to edit it and had their edits rejected, and then left long huffy complaints with their real names.Replies: @J.Ross
That’s true now, but it overtakes a previous state in which wiki editing was infiltrated and cartelized by activists (often extremist trannies), and obscure subjects were vulnerable to pranksters like the Scotsman who was caught just making stuff up, and the article on the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh was (last time I read it) clearly written and controlled by cultists of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.OT, another dodgy Armenian is back in the States. This guy really is impressive, and his strapping redheaded woman seems to be standing by him. He's modelling his look on late-period Van Morrison with added wheelchair.
https://images.ctfassets.net/pjshm78m9jt4/6QEgZRkU5tzPc3EjqiRfI2/292906c62085ed6b0af1ccf998850b6f/PA-66483018.jpghttps://www.itv.com/news/2024-01-05/nicholas-rossi-who-faces-charges-in-the-us-has-been-extradited-from-scotlandhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_AlahverdianReplies: @Frau Katze, @Anon
Strapping? She looks like some kind of scarecrow. Never seen a stringier, more frayed looking woman in my life outside of police mugshots.
You must live surrounded by landwhales then....
My favorite part of the David Peace novel The Damned, United was Brian Howard Clough feeling strongly that a sport should be a sport: no drugs, no extra hours, no file folders profiling the best players on the opposite team, no cheating, nothing that could be cheating, you go out there and you play and somebody wins.
Two local colleges have nationally-ranked teams so I get to see them on TV every so often. Imagine what you think a woman college bowler would look like, and you would be correct. These two particular schools don’t have football teams, but some of their women bowlers could pass as linemen.
That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve read here, and considering all the Mom’s-basement-dwelling lunatics on this site that’s saying a lot. Vanderbilt University has one of the top women’s bowling teams. Here is a team picture. My reasoned guess is that 99.9% of straight men in the country would gladly nail any of them.
https://vucommodores.com/sports/wbowl/roster/
As an affluent family in a pathologically-competitive nominal meritocracy, you need an option for your dumb kids. You have to get them into a brand-name school to preserve your social standing and if you got more money than brains sport is ideal, since it's competitive largely on the basis of capital-intensive training and facilities.
A whole predatory industry has grown up around privatizing high school sports, and large numbers of striving subalterns piss away their net worth on sports camps and teams and leagues. That's as much of a lottery as SATs but it's not as obvious how bad your odds are. They'll take your money and fuck your kid too, if she's a gymnast, for example, and make her bulimic and arthritic and maybe quadraplegic. There's a well-known phenomenon of gymnasts losing their edge when they mature cognitively. All of a sudden it occurs to her, Why should I break my neck doing crazy flips and spend my life in a wheelchair getting mucus suctioned out my mouth?
In this hierarchical culture of competition under threat of shunning, insolvency, and destitution, your kid is capital, not like a small but adaptable steer, as in feudal days, but as a Star 80 kind of look-what-I-got to child traffic. It's why your kids are so fucked up.Replies: @Paul Jolliffe, @Muggles
Simone Biles is the best example of a female gymnast who quit when she realized exactly what she had been asking her body to do.
(Just before the Olympic finals, no less! Although I don’t blame her for that decision – gymnastics is a crazy dangerous sport.)
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/sport/simone-biles-tokyo-2020-olympics/index.html
I agree. Good comment.
Sports which have high financial barriers to entry will continue to attract younger players who can afford to compete (or whose relatives can pay for early training in costly venues.)
Sports like golf, skiing, swimming, tennis, polo, etc. are mostly non team sports (though teams can exist) and venues to play these are expensive to built, operate and maintain.
Secondary schools rarely have golf courses (though some can use public ones), or swimming pools, much less ski runs or polo fields. Tennis is cheaper but in colder climates indoor venues are needed and rarely exist in public school systems. For public schools which can access these, the school districts are the richer ones, or private.
There is also a trend of private “academies” mainly in Florida or southern California for some sports. Surfing can only be done seaside in a handful of places. These are mainly for young “elite” athletes or prospects. A few can get scholarships if extremely talented.
Indoor sports (other than expensive swimming) are more egalitarian. Outdoor sports which only require a large flat surface can be cheaply done, absent expensive stadiums.
Parents often have to contribute time and money for some youth sports, Getting to and from the venues, fees, etc. Good family work habits or discipline also matter. Showing up to practice on time, not flunking out, avoiding drugs/drink, being coach-able and honest, these are values harder to acquire in single parent low income households.
However, the benefit of (mainly male) coaching for low income males (or females) is magnified in lower income single parent households. The male role model can turn kids around.
This latter element is probably the only real positive for youth football, with its short and long term health risks, Basketball has much the same benefits with far less potential harm.
Since family income is roughly correlated to IQ, once again being smarter is better. Though smarter kids of all incomes tend to be more coachable and disciplined. Showing up on time, sober, is a great life lesson for all long term personal achievements.
For example because you don't get tenure without being judged first or second in your field, including by a visiting committee who's remit includes keeping the department honest, and all professors with exceptions that prove the rule are tenured or tenure track.
Harvard is very weird in that they don't tend to hire tenure track junior faculty, instead preferring to poach already tenured Top Professors ... like Claudine Gay! Who first became a professor at Stanford, after a year at Princeton and then finishing her undergraduate degree at Standford, then off to Harvard for her Ph.D. Which reminds me that we're told Princeton is the most academically rigorous of the Ivies....Replies: @J.Ross, @res
Thanks. That is an interesting thought.
Then again…Michelle Obama.
Of course wokeness wasn't hardly so dire in 1985 when she graduated, whereas Gay's Ph.D. was granted in 1998. And a lot of people have looked at Michelle's thesis, I'd expect plagiarism to have been discovered by now, but I could be wrong, or it could have been suppressed. OK, this is amusing:Her experience for that included babysitting Jesse Jackson's kids while she was growing up politically well connected in Chicago. Given her husband's ambitions, he need to connect with something resembling the African-American "experience," we can see why he chose her.
TL;DR: is that she's not a cypher like Obama was when he came onto the national stage.
On the surface she's reasonably well accomplished especially in the Chicago context; how much of that would stand up to investigation I can't say, but, again, we all can examine her thesis.
Given that before her engagement she become a tenured MIT professor, where she did her Ph.D., and she's known to have made a variety of things, at least one of which from her thesis was attractive, I'd say her reputation is a bit stronger than her marriage and looks when she's dolled up.
I have, BTW, checked out her thesis and while I'm not in that field from a skim of its three hundred pages it looked strong; a CAD system which bottlenecks at "Finite Element Synthesis" (emphasis added) if I remember it correctly certainly sounds very interesting. And the sort of thing MIT's architecture department is known for, it benefited from MIT's leading role in computers, the Media Lab being a famous spinoff of the department where she was appropriately a professor.Replies: @Curle
In my neck of Texas football is a religion.
Some local acclaimed high school teams could probably beat small college teams.
It starts very young. 5th-6th graders start tackle football in local league play with multiple Dad coaches and game video taping/reviews. These games are put on YouTube. They play weekly in seasonal leagues leading up to playoffs.
In Junior High/Middle School, some league play continues until the players can play in freshman school teams. By the time they hit High school, they have had years of coaching, play calling/making and intensive video reviews.
Some of these kids, say about 8th grade, are either huge (220 lbs) or extremely fast. Or both.
When they hit college play, they have experience like former NFL prospects, the very best of them.
Of course most don’t continue that since the elites get harder to achieve. Also some get early injuries. But overall it is amazing compared to my youth. Of course some sports like gymnastics actually need their competitors to be sub teens or extremely young. Swimmers also tend to be younger.
We used to criticize the USSR for professionalizing young kids early for Olympic sports. Now it is an American thing too.
Depends on the department most likely. The hard sciences- probably little or no plagiarism- the fraud there will be more of the making up false data variety, but that is risky in the hard sciences, especially in a hot field. In the social sciences and the humanities and their bastardized offspring- 30%+?
As an affluent family in a pathologically-competitive nominal meritocracy, you need an option for your dumb kids. You have to get them into a brand-name school to preserve your social standing and if you got more money than brains sport is ideal, since it's competitive largely on the basis of capital-intensive training and facilities.
A whole predatory industry has grown up around privatizing high school sports, and large numbers of striving subalterns piss away their net worth on sports camps and teams and leagues. That's as much of a lottery as SATs but it's not as obvious how bad your odds are. They'll take your money and fuck your kid too, if she's a gymnast, for example, and make her bulimic and arthritic and maybe quadraplegic. There's a well-known phenomenon of gymnasts losing their edge when they mature cognitively. All of a sudden it occurs to her, Why should I break my neck doing crazy flips and spend my life in a wheelchair getting mucus suctioned out my mouth?
In this hierarchical culture of competition under threat of shunning, insolvency, and destitution, your kid is capital, not like a small but adaptable steer, as in feudal days, but as a Star 80 kind of look-what-I-got to child traffic. It's why your kids are so fucked up.Replies: @Paul Jolliffe, @Muggles
Sorry Comrade. I’m not buying your neo Marxist class analysis here.
Athletic kids rarely need to be forced into sports. Nor do most parents try to do that. Yes a few parents are greedy or try to exploit that, but not common.
The examples you cite are outliers. All culture is “hierarchical” by the way. This Woke rhetoric doesn’t constitute argument or analysis.
Yes, too much, too soon can be bad for kids. Parents are not an “exploitative class” and children aren’t suffering proletariat serfs. Your old fashioned Marxist rhetoric is outdated. No A+for you!
“Fucked up” kids get into booze, drugs and sex also. They get hooked on cell phone “influencers” and TikTok fakery. Those pink haired 16 year old girls want to be famous, not their parents. And they aren’t athletes either.
Since you are either too young or stupid to know this, it was the Official Marxist Communists who were ahead of the child exploitation curve. Drugging up the young girls (and men) and putting the best performers in national elite academies. Russia is still infamous for doping Olympic competitors and has gotten banned as a result.
Whatever the problem may be, neo Marxist, or “Woke” class analysis does not shed any light on the problem.
Then again...Michelle Obama.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @That Would Be Telling
I though about that as I was composing my comment, but I back in the day I skimmed and read some of her undergraduate thesis which is never expected to be a major, stunning thing like a graduate one, and it was OK.
Of course wokeness wasn’t hardly so dire in 1985 when she graduated, whereas Gay’s Ph.D. was granted in 1998. And a lot of people have looked at Michelle’s thesis, I’d expect plagiarism to have been discovered by now, but I could be wrong, or it could have been suppressed. OK, this is amusing:
Her experience for that included babysitting Jesse Jackson’s kids while she was growing up politically well connected in Chicago. Given her husband’s ambitions, he need to connect with something resembling the African-American “experience,” we can see why he chose her.
TL;DR: is that she’s not a cypher like Obama was when he came onto the national stage.
On the surface she’s reasonably well accomplished especially in the Chicago context; how much of that would stand up to investigation I can’t say, but, again, we all can examine her thesis.
In football and baseball at least, the percentage of negroes who were raised with their fathers present is far higher than otherwise. Basketball, maybe not.
Not many in exact sciences, especially in the theoretical fields; I guess a rather good chunk in social & humanist sciences.
I wonder how this asshole became a billionaire? Somebody should investigate his ass. Oh,I forgot,he’s a Jew, he can only be cited for wrong doing if he pissed off the wrong lansman!😑
You can also say as a sport gets more profitable to compete in, the stakes for entry are raised and the competition for positions intensifies. Any advantage a competitor can have over another is vital.
As I pointed out in the post “Why aren’t there more women race car drivers?” from a year plus back racing car drivers start out at a young age now too. It’s not uncommon to see go kart racing with five or six year old kids racing each other. The price goes up as the karts get bigger so having a wealthy family (or at least a mechanically savvy family) is vital to keep moving up the ladder to the top tier of motor sports (NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula One, Sports Cars/Endurance Racing).
Unless you have enormous talent, if you start playing a sport as a teenager, you’re boned.
So much for playing for fun. 😒Replies: @pyrrhus
Of course, the wealthy can also easily afford expensive “medical” treatment to make their kids more competitive, and hit longer drives….
Right, Michele was a dynastic Dem politician. Obama was a cypher because he’s a third-generation CIA spook. His Mom was a spook exterminating Indonesians, his Dad was an agent, his Grampa was a OSS/CIA spook, and his Grandma was a spook laundering money for CIA black ops. Obama did his internship in CIA’s BIC proprietary. He was under illegal domestic surveillance classified ECI to make sure he was up to the presidential figurehead job. He went to Columbia and no one ever saw him. You know there will be no embarrassing pocket litter until he gets too big for his CIA britches.
(Just before the Olympic finals, no less! Although I don’t blame her for that decision - gymnastics is a crazy dangerous sport.)
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/sport/simone-biles-tokyo-2020-olympics/index.htmlReplies: @Jim Don Bob
An alternate explanation is that she quit (and let down her team mates) because she realized she wasn’t good enough to win. Or perhaps all the “you’re the most wonderful (black) gymnast ever” talk got to her.
You don’t spend years and years training, get to the Olympics, and all of a sudden say, “I have health concerns”.
She flat chickened out. And everybody covered for her.
Which is why Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal Of Freedom along with the other choke artist Rapinoe.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
LOL. It’s like wanting to cheat on a test in school and doing so by copying off of a negro…
Right – take Christian McCaffrey, whose dad was a notoriously fast white receiver, mom was a D1 soccer player and grandpa was an Olympic sprinter. Hopefully he meets a sporty lady and has many children.
Steve is in Cali and can probably find out how Mia Hamm and Nomar Garciaparra’s kids are doing in sports. IIRC, their twin daughters should be in their mid-teens.
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I'm asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can't stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can't even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don't watch it and I don't care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it's actually physically painful. You couldn't pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it's just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can't just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man's matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Frau Katze, @Emil Nikola Richard, @Twinkie, @Guest007
Well as per the post you replied to, both Pearce and her husband were from New Jersey and were excellent college athletes in New Jersey as well, so when they married it was a big deal and was covered extensively in the newspapers. And once I learn something, I tend to remember it. Beyond that, you are reading too much it to and are virtue signaling.
I don’t know how this fits into your pattern, but here in Victoria talented teenage Aussie Rules footballers are harvested with scholarships by the elite private schools; I’ve even heard of footballers being taken by prestigious schools from lesser private schools. I had a point in there somewhere…
Keep the girls out of trouble and brush up the old Curriculum Vitae to get into a “Good College”.
I’ve related before that both my niece and nephew played soccer in grade school, junior high, and high school, both on traveling teams and their school teams. What was interesting was their approach to sports after graduating high school.
My nephew played pickup soccer games with friends in college and after until he found out, as all we men do, that as you get older and don’t practice as much, injuries take longer to heal.
Well that and getting married and having kids of his own. But I know he played into his late 20s.
My niece? Once high school was done the soccer cleats went back into the closet.
Why it’s almost like men and women have different views on sports and competition.
Nah, “experts” tell me that ain’t true. 😏Replies: @ScarletNumber
While your nephew is obviously better than your niece one-on-one, who is older and who was the better player relatively speaking?
While your niece hung up her cleats, hopefully she picked up some physical activity to stay in shape, as a lot of girls put on weight once they give up organized sports.
I know, I'm a terrible uncle as I never went to all of their games. Oh the shame. 😔
(Well frankly, I never went to any of them. Their traveling games literally traveled out of state or downstate, and commuting to and from work in and around Chicago meant school games during the week weren't going to happen)
I would figure my nephew was the better player overall. But both of them had to beat determined competition to make their school teams.Replies: @ScarletNumber
Muggles, 71, it tickles my funny bone that I pushed your buttons ever so inadvertently. You must be one of those Epoch Times Readers. Cause you call everything communist, which is like running around yelling about Hittites, there are no fucking commies anymore. There is one (1) flag with a hammer & sickle that they fly in a Rhode Island size dump with some cows and nothing else. Do you know where it even is? You do not. Your problem might be that you can’t tell the difference between Marx and Bourdieu, probably because you didn’t read either, only the Epoch Times about communists.
It also tickles my funny bone that parents of dumb kids blow shitloads of money to get scholarships they won’t win, instead of just saving a lot less money and paying for college. It also tickles my funny bone how kids who can’t do math take law school scholarships based on curved grades so most will get their grant aid yanked. And also how your kid’s societal rank is fucked anyway, if he’s not coming from HADES or Saint Grottlesex.
So, we’re all friends here, what was it that set off all that status anxiety? Your kid’s dumb and a spazz and soccer camp didn’t help? Or he’s fucked up and you suspect it’s your fault? It’s okay, let it out.
In the U.S., Japan, South Korea, baseball takes money and parental resources. Look at who makes it to the college world series and who has been caught cheating.
In Central America, it are the major league teams to run academies and clinics to identify talent.
Not this year.
No, entirely predictable according to Frans Johansson’s take on the 10,000-hour rule. The more established an endeavor is– classical music, chess, tennis, golf– the more necessary it is to put in your time just to reach minimally competitive competence. But in something brand new– punk rock, rap, extreme sports– you can reach the top in very little time.
Or intensively schooled, as with Korean women, or Russian women’s tennis. (You’d think golf would be easier to fit in spacious Russia and tennis more appropriate in crowded Korea, but that’s not what happened.)
Highland Park, Texas, like Highland Park, Michigan, is not a neighborhood but an independent municipality within a much bigger city beginning with D. Neither is a true enclave, though, because one also borders University Park, and the other Hamtramck.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/life/home-garden/2019/04/11/motown-mansion-berry-gordy/3334565002/Replies: @Reg Cæsar
https://dallasredistricting.com/2023-adopted-map-files/COUNCIL_District_MapSeries_2.pdfReplies: @FPD72
OT: From Scientific American:
The Language of Astronomy Is Needlessly Violent and Inaccurate
For instance, in galaxy evolution we invoke imagery strikingly similar to what you would expect if you were eavesdropping on Hannibal Lecter: words like cannibalism, harassment, starvation, strangulation, stripping or suffocation. There is a rather long list of foul analogies that have entered, and are now entrenched, in the lexicon of professional astronomy. We have grown accustomed to this violent language and as a community, we seldom question or reflect on its use.
Strangulation is a particularly cringeworthy term in astronomy, referring to the decline of the number of stars born in some types of galaxies. This is a vicious crime where most often the victim is a woman; the perpetrator, a man.
Given that Harold Washington has been stone cold dead since 1987, I doubt he’d have any say in the matter.
However, Richie Daley, Hizzoner da Mare’s son, has been blissfully silent.
That said, God love the Vrdolyak 29, of which Burke was a member. By opposing Washington they kept Chicago from becoming what it is now under Beetlejuice and Brandon way back in the early to mid 1980s.
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I'm asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can't stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can't even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don't watch it and I don't care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it's actually physically painful. You couldn't pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it's just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can't just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man's matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Frau Katze, @Emil Nikola Richard, @Twinkie, @Guest007
I don’t watch sports either and find the topic a bore.
I’m only reading this iSteve post because it’s a slow Sunday. I don’t usually read his sports posts at all.
While your niece hung up her cleats, hopefully she picked up some physical activity to stay in shape, as a lot of girls put on weight once they give up organized sports.Replies: @mmack
Well if you MUST know, my nephew is the older of the two by three years. All I can recall is my niece made her high school team as a goalie and got a nice little write up in the local paper, which my mother placed up on the fridge in her condo. (Because OF COURSE grandma would do that. 😉)
I know, I’m a terrible uncle as I never went to all of their games. Oh the shame. 😔
(Well frankly, I never went to any of them. Their traveling games literally traveled out of state or downstate, and commuting to and from work in and around Chicago meant school games during the week weren’t going to happen)
I would figure my nephew was the better player overall. But both of them had to beat determined competition to make their school teams.
It's interesting that your niece was a goalie, as this tends to be an exception to the PWG paradigm that Arclight mentioned.
She flat chickened out. And everybody covered for her.
Which is why Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal Of Freedom along with the other choke artist Rapinoe.
OTOH, Rapinoe is a nasty bitch, and I was glad to see her lose. Too bad she took her team mates down with her.Replies: @Rick P
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I'm asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can't stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can't even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don't watch it and I don't care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it's actually physically painful. You couldn't pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it's just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can't just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man's matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Frau Katze, @Emil Nikola Richard, @Twinkie, @Guest007
Sports, weather, and business are the only topics for which reliable data is ever reported in the media. The most accurate corona virus coverage was on Rogan and McAfee. This was not Rogan and McAfee’s intent, ever, as far as I can tell. It’s just the way the journalism industry is at present.
Paying attention to what Tucker Carlson says about anything really is a complete waste of our time.
For whatever reason I’ve assumed most people here don’t watch TV news regularly. Probably because the info in their comments rarely seems to come from such sources.
To the extent Carlson revives controversy over JFK’s assassination he’s providing a useful service. To the extent he refuses to let the Russiagate attempted coup fade from view he’s providing another useful service. Same goes for his Ukraine war skepticism.
A very interesting NPR series on IQ tests started tonight. I expect to later hear (from lefties, urinalists, twitter tubthumpers, and self-designated courageous fighters of Nazism) those explanations and examples put forward in this series.
The spiel:
https://www.wnyc.org/press/radiolab-g-series/60719/
The episode itself:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/g-miseducation-larry-p
Not very impressed by the analysis from this "professor."
http://www.thenoviceprofessor.com/blog/radio-labs-g-series-all-about-general-intelligence
Long (but low SNR) Reddit thread.
Reddit thread for another episode.
That one talks about Steve Hsu's work. His response here.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/07/radiolab-on-embryo-selection-in-ivf.htmlReplies: @J.Ross
https://www.peoplenewspapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/redistrict-map.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52670836449_ee1a3a2525_o.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Curle, @Curle
Confusingly, Highland Park (Detroit) is crime-ridden ghetto suffering headlines about funding shortfalls (I was stuck residing there once, it was not a fun time), but in the middle of it is “Boston Edison,” which is neither in Massachussetts nor an electrical power monopoly, but a super-wealthy enclave, featuring the “Motown Mansion” owned by Berry (not Barry) Gordie, which has secret tunnels.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/life/home-garden/2019/04/11/motown-mansion-berry-gordy/3334565002/
Though Detroit also had a Gordie in Berry's heyday:
https://puckstruck.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/e011157052-v8.jpg
tomorrow is Black Monday in NFL. get ready to hear the usual demands for Not Meritocracy.
lately this has taken the form of musical chairs. smart teams will quickly hire the guys they actually want to be their head coach. less certain teams going thru a careful coach selection process better hurry up though, as the last team left with a head coaching vacancy will then be under tremendous pressure to hire a melanated candidate.
not sure how long NFL will let teams get away with this workaround. they were already outraged at the Colts for doing what they thought was a new workaround, by firing the head coach mid season then bringing in an outside pale person candidate for an audition without going thru the usual consideration of melanated prospects. you can’t just hire the person you want for your billion dollar business. we’ll TELL YOU if that person is acceptable.
These people forget that Art Rooney, of the Rooney family that owns the Steelers, pressured the NFL to implement the Ro0ney Rule which says that you must interview a POC when looking for a coach.
Christian McCaffery is engaged to Olivia Culpo, a former Miss Universe and a current media personality/influencer. Their children will probably be screw ups.
Bianca Peters:
https://imgs.search.brave.com/qKODeAPpA_7U2gMVLA2Dps9O8aEJhCsvINNbTOBUdug/rs:fit:860:0:0/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaW9n/cmFwaHltYXNrLmNv/bS93cC1jb250ZW50/L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAy/MC8wNi9CaWFuY2Et/UGV0ZXJzLWF0LXdv/cmsuanBn
Culpo:
https://imgs.search.brave.com/cTJuiQ0lym84QTVRH2TggZAGU-JBtdDJx5wJJAe1-NU/rs:fit:860:0:0/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cu/dXNtYWdhemluZS5j/b20vd3AtY29udGVu/dC91cGxvYWRzLzIw/MjIvMDcvT2xpdmlh/LUN1bHBvLVNhdmVz/LVNpc3Rlci1Tb3Bo/aWEtRnJvbS1GYWxs/aW5nLVJlZnJpZ2Vy/YXRvci0wMDEuanBn/P3c9ODAwJnF1YWxp/dHk9Nzgmc3RyaXA9/YWxs
Life is good for NFL stars!
Science and tech follows this in practice. Many papers start off with Maxwell's Equations, but nobody cites them. (Well, once in a while someone does, but unless it's a history-of-science paper, it's considered silly ornamentation.)
The funny thing is, that in science and tech there is a large amount of valuable common knowledge more than 80 years old. It stands the test of time. But in the trendy academic literature of psychology and anything softer, nobody has any use for anything 80 years old or even 50 years old.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
What you’re suggesting is already the case in practice, I think. The question here is not about giving credit to ideas but to blocks of prose written by other people. I never see a justification for not indicating when prose is not your own.
The sisters attend [a nice prep school in a nice part of Southern California]. One of the twins in listed on the girls soccer roster.
I believe that Steph Curry would disagree.
The second Business Insider article has the juicy details: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipedia-mit-dissertation-2024-1Replies: @IHTG, @YetAnotherAnon, @Jim Don Bob, @dearieme, @Known Fact, @Erik L, @tyrone, @Pixo, @Chrisnonymous
While I think anyone should indicate when writing is not their own, copying from Wikipedia is far less egregious than copying from other academics for several reasons, such as the fact that Wikipedia copies are going to be of passages summarizing accepted views and well-known information rather than original thought or research and the fact that Wikipedia doesn’t technically have an “author,” so that no individual person’s work is going unattributed.
Also, I think it’s possible that while the academic standard is to cite sources like Wikipedia, there may be people who disagree that it’s unethical to fail to cite “free” sources. Since Oxman was moving in circles with people on the cutting edge of technology, she may have been one of those people. Remember there was that brief period of time when many tech influencers like Kevin Kelly were pushing anti-copyright philosophy, as in everything should be free and free to modify and reuse. If true of Oxman, this would make her copying categorically different from Gay’s.
I’ve never played golf but crazily both my father and brother played – couldn’t see the attraction. My outlook was/is that a good percentage of playing golf is sizing up the current situation i.e. my ball is at A and I want it to be at B. So the goal is to robotize yourself, in the sense of controlling every little body movement, to carry out that task. So it’s words of wisdom from guys that know what they’re doing and practice, practice, practice.
Though not so meticulous as to have checked out femme Ackman’s academic corpus and paid off Business Insider. Anyway, her field is Art and architecture. Her rep rests on her marriage and looks not her dissertation and she isn’t pissing off the Tribe so this will go nowhere.
https://www.peoplenewspapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/redistrict-map.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52670836449_ee1a3a2525_o.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Curle, @Curle
The following map shows in white the two cities designated together as “Park Cities”. It’s certainly an odd municipal arrangement. Wiki calls the two together an enclave though, as you note, neither alone is an enclave.
https://dallasredistricting.com/2023-adopted-map-files/COUNCIL_District_MapSeries_2.pdf
I’m only reading this iSteve post because it’s a slow Sunday. I don’t usually read his sports posts at all.Replies: @Catdompanj
Not only do you not read his sports post, you don’t take the time to comment on them. Oh, nvm.
Then again...Michelle Obama.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @That Would Be Telling
But her field also includes biology, computation, as in for making things that won’t fall down, and materials science.
Given that before her engagement she become a tenured MIT professor, where she did her Ph.D., and she’s known to have made a variety of things, at least one of which from her thesis was attractive, I’d say her reputation is a bit stronger than her marriage and looks when she’s dolled up.
I have, BTW, checked out her thesis and while I’m not in that field from a skim of its three hundred pages it looked strong; a CAD system which bottlenecks at “Finite Element Synthesis” (emphasis added) if I remember it correctly certainly sounds very interesting. And the sort of thing MIT’s architecture department is known for, it benefited from MIT’s leading role in computers, the Media Lab being a famous spinoff of the department where she was appropriately a professor.
His target audience was all those cowardly gentiles who might be feeling uppity. You know, the House Republican caucus.
This plagiarism witch hunt should result in some interesting conversations. I hope Ackman (or someone else) broadens the reviews beyond MIT to elite colleges with a larger liberal arts contingent. And more affirmative action.
I wonder if "disparate impact" is what will eventually shut this line of inquiry down.
P.S. Going back on topic for the thread, I think the phenomenon being discussed could give some good information of the relative balance of nature and nurture for different sports. Though one should correct for accessibility of resources. For example, basketball courts are common. Even if high level coaching and competition are not.Replies: @J.Ross, @That Would Be Telling, @Twinkie
Do you now find the situation more absurdly “hilarious” (me) and less “despicable” (Jack D)?
As far as "more," I think I will cop out with apples and oranges as a reason.
P.S. I do think the gleeful/triumphal "glass houses" commentary makes things even funnier since we are about to find out how many MIT professors have such residences (I wonder if Ackman will either fail to follow through or be convinced not to). As I said elsewhere, I really hope that effort is extended to softer universities and fields.Replies: @Twinkie
Also, I think it's possible that while the academic standard is to cite sources like Wikipedia, there may be people who disagree that it's unethical to fail to cite "free" sources. Since Oxman was moving in circles with people on the cutting edge of technology, she may have been one of those people. Remember there was that brief period of time when many tech influencers like Kevin Kelly were pushing anti-copyright philosophy, as in everything should be free and free to modify and reuse. If true of Oxman, this would make her copying categorically different from Gay's.Replies: @Twinkie
Worry not, she did that too:
You really should the cited article before commenting.
Like everything else in modern life, sports has become over professionalized, over wealthy, and disgustingly toxic. A pox on it all. Zero good comes from sports anymore, and a gigantic pile of bad.
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I'm asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can't stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can't even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don't watch it and I don't care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it's actually physically painful. You couldn't pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it's just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can't just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man's matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Frau Katze, @Emil Nikola Richard, @Twinkie, @Guest007
I also have a serious question: do you play any sports? Team sports?
Bill Ackman is itching to find out. Harvard and MIT have pissed off the wrong guy. He can easily afford to put several people on this for a year for what is pocket change to him.
https://www.peoplenewspapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/redistrict-map.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52670836449_ee1a3a2525_o.jpgReplies: @J.Ross, @Curle, @Curle
Gotta add that the arrangement in Highland Park is genius. Average household income in Highland Park is $429,832 with a poverty rate of 4.92%. The residents enjoy the benefit of living in the center of the City without paying a disproportionate share of the city’s infrastructure and human services budget as similarly wealthy people would in other cities. This gives them more money to pay for high quality police protection while keeping the municipal property tax burden low, at least the local portion, and the property values high. There is no high school and the largest open space is a country club. There’s little here to attract riff raff only a couple of small parks on what looks like home lots. There’s also a pool. I wonder what restrictions the town has on nonresident use of the the pool and small parks?
Unlike in many states, school district boundaries and city limits in Texas are not the same. The HPISD covers all of University Park, a sliver of Dallas, and almost all of Highland Park. The original HPHS building was located in Highland Park but a new building was built in University Park.
The city limits of Dallas fall within part of several school districts, including Highland Park, Richardson, and Plano, in addition to DISD. Our previous home was in Dallas city limits but within the Richardson ISD.
I read and comment on sports posts if I’m bored. But I already said that: it’s a slow Sunday in my neck of the woods.
Which is why Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal Of Freedom along with the other choke artist Rapinoe.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
I kind of felt sorry for Biles. She seemed to be out of her depth. She was young and everybody pushed her real hard to be the black Nadia Comaneci (sp?)
OTOH, Rapinoe is a nasty bitch, and I was glad to see her lose. Too bad she took her team mates down with her.
The nasty attitudes may not be confined to the US team. The Spanish team that won the women's world cup also seems to be filled with complainers.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
There have been rumblings in Steeler Nation that maybe it is time for Steeler’s coach Mike Tomlin to go, because why haven’t the Steelers won the SB lately.
These people forget that Art Rooney, of the Rooney family that owns the Steelers, pressured the NFL to implement the Ro0ney Rule which says that you must interview a POC when looking for a coach.
“ Paying attention to what Tucker Carlson says about anything really is a complete waste of our time.”
For whatever reason I’ve assumed most people here don’t watch TV news regularly. Probably because the info in their comments rarely seems to come from such sources.
To the extent Carlson revives controversy over JFK’s assassination he’s providing a useful service. To the extent he refuses to let the Russiagate attempted coup fade from view he’s providing another useful service. Same goes for his Ukraine war skepticism.
Given that before her engagement she become a tenured MIT professor, where she did her Ph.D., and she's known to have made a variety of things, at least one of which from her thesis was attractive, I'd say her reputation is a bit stronger than her marriage and looks when she's dolled up.
I have, BTW, checked out her thesis and while I'm not in that field from a skim of its three hundred pages it looked strong; a CAD system which bottlenecks at "Finite Element Synthesis" (emphasis added) if I remember it correctly certainly sounds very interesting. And the sort of thing MIT's architecture department is known for, it benefited from MIT's leading role in computers, the Media Lab being a famous spinoff of the department where she was appropriately a professor.Replies: @Curle
Ackman is only going after the Black Harvard lady on plagiarism because she wouldn’t bow the knee to Jewish power and so he decides to embarrass her into submission. BI going after his artsy girlfriend is cute but makes them look pathetic for failing to take on Jewish power directly rather than pretending Ackman’s truly interested in plagiarism. He’s not. His goal was the very public submission and humiliation of a high profile non-Jew. You know, kinda like a crucifixion.
His target audience was all those cowardly gentiles who might be feeling uppity. You know, the House Republican caucus.
Just straight wrong. The only talking head worth any attention at all is the one that used to sport bow toes.
Neri Oxman is Jewish and is from Israel.
Right. She’s not violating the don’t piss off the Jews rule for having your humiliation circulated far and wide.Replies: @J.Ross
Elite sports is now the province of your Thurston Howell the Thirds, not your Thirst-and-Howl the Firsts, for some rather obvious reasons. It is too much to expect from a kid starting out from nowhere that he not only make himself into a great athlete, but that he also overcome all the socioeconomic and class barriers to entry in order to access the elite circles, the elite training facilities, and the personal networks where all the good help and information is to be found. If you aren't in that milieu, you won't even know where to start.
No one person can do everything in one lifetime. Life is too short, and the tactical details required to excel in every dimension of life are too divergent to allow one person to succeed in all of them simultaneously. If you did not have parents who at least did the legwork to move the family up into a middle-class existence, you aren't going to have the economic freedom or the psychological comportment to spend all your time training at sports (which is basically a luxury activity that adds no value).
Most people get this at an intuitive level. It's one of the factors that accounts for the stranglehold that the academic-credentialism-athletic complex has over the life decisions of millions of Americans. It's why today's helicopter parents do everything to send their children college and pay for them to play sports in travelling leagues, just as in the past ambitious British parents would move heaven and earth to send their sons to private school and get them an imperial post as vice snot-wiper to the postmaster general of Burma or some such---all in the hopes that the new milieu will take hold and that their descendants will finally be "upper class."
The exception to the above, of course, would be black kids in America who are fast-tracked into elite athletic circles that they never could have earned their way into on their own. But this is the exception that proves the rule. These blacks become athletes not because they are great at what they do, but because the system picked them and favored them. It's just another example of how the primary victims of affirmative action are poor white children, and how the race war is really just a class war of upper-class whites against lower-class whites.Replies: @Twinkie
Judging from this dismissive statement, I gather you never played sports or, worse, did try to play, but were bad at it.
At its best, athletics teaches many fine, honorable, and masculine qualities such as courage, toughness, stoicism, teamwork (even non-team sports), confidence, humility, dedication, and a sense of fair play among many others.
Moreover, athletics can also produce amazing feats of human bodily movement that are, simply put, things of beauty.
Do you know the “fields of Eton” comment that is attributed to Wellington (or Orwell)?
Those sons of English gentlemen bled and died on the fields of Waterloo and Passchendaele in droves. That’s how the survivors earned the right to be “the postmaster general of Burma or some such.”
In this I agree. I have written many times here that the current Kulturkampf is a white people civil war, in which the GoodWhites are badgering the BadWhites with their black and brown auxiliaries as cudgels.
That's one of the dumbest things I've read here, and considering all the Mom's-basement-dwelling lunatics on this site that's saying a lot. Vanderbilt University has one of the top women's bowling teams. Here is a team picture. My reasoned guess is that 99.9% of straight men in the country would gladly nail any of them.https://vucommodores.com/sports/wbowl/roster/Replies: @Redneck Farmer
All of them. WOULD.
“Exercise is a capitalist plot” or something against natural aristocrats, like our buddy ID.
The funny thing is that the notion of a "sportsman" (one who plays fairly) is very much the creation of actual (English) aristocrats. I still remember reading about how a British officer described whom I think was a Luftwaffe ace - "A Nazi, but a sportsman." I think the second part of that description was a compliment.Replies: @res
Lots of truth to what you say.
I remember taking a kid to a pediatrician after a weekend sports tournament. Pediatrician complained about these weekend tournaments leading to far more injuries.
I also heard Tommy John on the radio once. He complained that high school kids are getting Tommy John surgery now.
John was a well rounded athlete. He was from Indiana, and was tall, so basketball was his main passion growing up. He didn’t really concentrate on pitching until college when people informed him that was his path to athletic excellence.
When I was younger there were still a fair number of multi sport athletes who sometimes played professionally in more than one sport. Much rarer now. More specialized.
Compare this to about 100 years ago when the greatest track and field athlete of time played baseball, basketball, and football professionally, and made the Hall of Fame in football. Of course Thorpe was a rare creature, but others could do that if sports were not so specialized.Replies: @Ganderson
Joe Mauer, who will soon be punching his ticket to Cooperstown, was an elite HS athlete in baseball and football, and really good at hoops, too.
Ryan McDonagh of the Preds, who went to the same HS as Mauer in St. Paul, returned for his senior year (the staff at Wisconsin wanted him in the USHL) in order to win back to back state championships failed at that. He was, however a key piece of their state winning baseball team.
Except it will be much more verbose and far more archaic in vocabulary.
The funny thing is that the notion of a “sportsman” (one who plays fairly) is very much the creation of actual (English) aristocrats. I still remember reading about how a British officer described whom I think was a Luftwaffe ace – “A Nazi, but a sportsman.” I think the second part of that description was a compliment.
https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/the-real-count-almasy-20020702-gducoz.htmlReplies: @Twinkie
Culpo likes her football players. She’s a castoff of former Patriots/Dolphins WR Danny Amendola, who cheated on her with a former beauty queen/sports journalist.
Bianca Peters:
https://imgs.search.brave.com/qKODeAPpA_7U2gMVLA2Dps9O8aEJhCsvINNbTOBUdug/rs:fit:860:0:0/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaW9n/cmFwaHltYXNrLmNv/bS93cC1jb250ZW50/L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAy/MC8wNi9CaWFuY2Et/UGV0ZXJzLWF0LXdv/cmsuanBn
Culpo:
https://imgs.search.brave.com/cTJuiQ0lym84QTVRH2TggZAGU-JBtdDJx5wJJAe1-NU/rs:fit:860:0:0/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cu/dXNtYWdhemluZS5j/b20vd3AtY29udGVu/dC91cGxvYWRzLzIw/MjIvMDcvT2xpdmlh/LUN1bHBvLVNhdmVz/LVNpc3Rlci1Tb3Bo/aWEtRnJvbS1GYWxs/aW5nLVJlZnJpZ2Vy/YXRvci0wMDEuanBn/P3c9ODAwJnF1YWxp/dHk9Nzgmc3RyaXA9/YWxs
Life is good for NFL stars!
Well … There are rumors that CM is a poofter, and CDAN says that OC has been a beard for hire in the past. So it may be as fake as Taylor and Travis.
Why do you know this stuff? What is it about the personal lives of obscure college athletes that is worth your time and attention?
I'm asking because a lot of people here like to rail about how pointless and corrupt and distracting athletics has become, and yet they also display an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject that could only have been acquired by long familiarity with it.
I can't stand the sports culture in this country, and I can prove it by the fact that I have no knowledge about it. I can't even tell you who won the Superbowl last year without looking it up, because I don't watch it and I don't care. The idea that I might be interested in who some girl soccer player married is so tedious that it's actually physically painful. You couldn't pay to care about this. My nonfamiliarity is consistent with my expressed attitudes.
I suppose for many people, it's just a part of who they are. The interest is not consciously chosen and even if they see its deleterious effects, they can't just turn it off. This is normal. Having an older man's matchmakerly, busybodyish, Thomas Mitchell-like interest in the health and doings and marriage prospects of the young ones, and staying all up to date with the village scuttlebutt, is the ordinary preoccupation of the broad middle segment of mankind; and in this day and age a lot of that is expressed through the idiom of school athletics.
However, it would be much better for society if this faculty were exercised elsewhere.Replies: @ScarletNumber, @Frau Katze, @Emil Nikola Richard, @Twinkie, @Guest007
Only about 50% of Americans are interested in following sports. Less than 50% of Americans watch any portion of the Super Bowl and that is with nothing else occurring on Super Bowl Sunday.
However, everyone has something that they are interested in that most people would find boring whether travel, hobbies, religion, movies, books, etc. One of the big ones that I cannot understand at all are people who have a beach condo or lake house. Nothing could be more boring than vacationing in the same place every year.
More than a decade ago, an unnamed freshmen English professor wrote an article in the Atlantic called “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” The professor noted that there is no book, movie, TV show, sporting event, or any part of culture that all of his students are familiar with. He said the closest to a common experience would be having seen The Wizard of Oz.
Just because one does not like sports does not make one superior because those avid sports fans can review anyone’s life and point out something that they detest.
It’s hard for outsiders to understand just how good Highland Park High School is at golf. My younger son was on the team at HPHS’s closest competitor. All three years his team came in third to HPHS’s A and B teams; that’s right, schools were allowed to have two five man teams. His senior year all ten HPHS players signed college scholarship National Letters of Intent. The year after my son graduated his school managed to beat HP’s B team in the district tournament.
It’s not just golf. HPHS is good at every sport. Our older son finished second in four large (at least 16 teams competing) tournaments; in each he lost to the same HP kid in the finals. The same HP kid knocked him out of the state tournament in the quarter finals and went on to wrestle at Princeton. You’ve written extensively about their leading football and baseball players (Matthew Stafford and Clayton Kershaw). The Texas Rangers GM, Chris Young, played baseball and basketball at HPHS. His senior year he lead the basketball team to the state championship game and went on to play four years at Princeton.
As American Enterprise magazine stated, in Dallas the elites are still meat eaters.”
“Neri Oxman is Jewish and is from Israel.”
Right. She’s not violating the don’t piss off the Jews rule for having your humiliation circulated far and wide.
Was his toenail fungus that bad?
OTOH, Rapinoe is a nasty bitch, and I was glad to see her lose. Too bad she took her team mates down with her.Replies: @Rick P
To my understanding, the women’s soccer team members just about all adopted Rapinoe’s politics. They complained and sued about “equal pay” based on a collective bargaining agreement they signed. Carli Lloyd is a patriot and the rare exception regarding the politics. I enthusiastically root against the US women’s soccer team.
The nasty attitudes may not be confined to the US team. The Spanish team that won the women’s world cup also seems to be filled with complainers.
Yeah, a bit disappointing. She’s four years older and not athletic at all. McCaffrey really couldn’t find some former college volleyball or soccer player to give him some more super athletic McCaffreys?
You’re talking about the Texas one, right?
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/life/home-garden/2019/04/11/motown-mansion-berry-gordy/3334565002/Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Berry Gordy (not Gordie)
Though Detroit also had a Gordie in Berry’s heyday:
The spiel:
https://www.wnyc.org/press/radiolab-g-series/60719/
The episode itself:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/g-miseducation-larry-pReplies: @res
A rebroadcast since that is dated 2019? I looked around a bit and did not see much. What did you think of it?
Not very impressed by the analysis from this “professor.”
http://www.thenoviceprofessor.com/blog/radio-labs-g-series-all-about-general-intelligence
Long (but low SNR) Reddit thread.
Reddit thread for another episode.
That one talks about Steve Hsu’s work. His response here.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/07/radiolab-on-embryo-selection-in-ivf.html
I am not a big fan of going after people’s families. Though in this case the degree to which the accusations match make it at least on topic. Hard not so see the humor in the whole situation though.
As far as “more,” I think I will cop out with apples and oranges as a reason.
P.S. I do think the gleeful/triumphal “glass houses” commentary makes things even funnier since we are about to find out how many MIT professors have such residences (I wonder if Ackman will either fail to follow through or be convinced not to). As I said elsewhere, I really hope that effort is extended to softer universities and fields.
I don't have a dog in this fight. As another commenter mentioned, no one wears the white hat in this circular firing squad. I do, however, find Ackman's plagiarist wife being critiqued with the very weapon Ackman used against another person humorous, not "despicable" or "cruel" as Jack D put it. But, we all know Jack D finds "despicable" or "cruel" anything negative toward Jews, deserved or not. I just don't understand how someone of his intelligence (he is not dumb though much less intelligent than he thinks of himself) cannot see that his overt ethnic nepotism is a turn off to the 97.8% of the rest of the population.Whether Ackman does or not (or is successful or not if he tried) doesn't change the fact that his wife is a fraud. At some point, I'd like to live in a society (again) where truth matters and it's not just an Alinsky-style ideological war of all against all for political supremacy.I hope so too. I think academia is rotten to the core, so much of it should be demolished and re-built again. I don't have a problem with leftist academics or people who harbor very different ideologies than I do running academia. I do, however, have a huge problem with dishonest and fraudulent people running it. I think that poisons the young and produces a dishonest and fraudulent elite class, with terrible consequences for the country.
Most of my friends are rightist Catholics, but I also have a few friends who are atheist leftists, but those friends of mine are quite principled. They will argue strongly for their positions, but will honestly acknowledge where their ideas are deficient or don't work.
You might note that I was a big fan of the Audacious Epigone blog. A part of that, of course, was that the author and I were pretty sympatico on many subjects, but a bigger part of that was he was intellectually very honest. When he was wrong about something, he corrected himself and noted the correction in a way that did not hide his earlier incorrect position. I thought very highly of him for this intellectual honesty and humility. He earned my trust.
I actually think that you would have been a very worthy successor to run that blog when it went defunct. Maybe you still could be?Replies: @MGB
The funny thing is that the notion of a "sportsman" (one who plays fairly) is very much the creation of actual (English) aristocrats. I still remember reading about how a British officer described whom I think was a Luftwaffe ace - "A Nazi, but a sportsman." I think the second part of that description was a compliment.Replies: @res
Here is the attribution I see for that quote.
https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/the-real-count-almasy-20020702-gducoz.html
I just checked when I bought the latter book - it was 2004, so it's been almost 20 years ago I read it!
Thanks for rekindling my memory of that look. I think I might hunt it down in my home library and give it a whirl again.
I know, I'm a terrible uncle as I never went to all of their games. Oh the shame. 😔
(Well frankly, I never went to any of them. Their traveling games literally traveled out of state or downstate, and commuting to and from work in and around Chicago meant school games during the week weren't going to happen)
I would figure my nephew was the better player overall. But both of them had to beat determined competition to make their school teams.Replies: @ScarletNumber
You should be embarrassed to admit that you never attended any of your nephew’s or your niece’s soccer games.
It’s interesting that your niece was a goalie, as this tends to be an exception to the PWG paradigm that Arclight mentioned.
https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/the-real-count-almasy-20020702-gducoz.htmlReplies: @Twinkie
Thanks! For some reason I thought I read it in a British officer’s evaluation of a Luftwaffe officer, but I also did read The English Patient and Saul Kelly’s The Lost Oasis: The Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura, so it probably came from the latter.
I just checked when I bought the latter book – it was 2004, so it’s been almost 20 years ago I read it!
Thanks for rekindling my memory of that look. I think I might hunt it down in my home library and give it a whirl again.
As far as "more," I think I will cop out with apples and oranges as a reason.
P.S. I do think the gleeful/triumphal "glass houses" commentary makes things even funnier since we are about to find out how many MIT professors have such residences (I wonder if Ackman will either fail to follow through or be convinced not to). As I said elsewhere, I really hope that effort is extended to softer universities and fields.Replies: @Twinkie
I agree. However, I am also fiercely critical of people engaging in academic fraud, including plagiarism. Oxman is not a child or a minor. She’s a big girl and one who has enjoyed a considerable degree of fame (in the academic context) and likely influence/power via her credentials and her husband.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. As another commenter mentioned, no one wears the white hat in this circular firing squad. I do, however, find Ackman’s plagiarist wife being critiqued with the very weapon Ackman used against another person humorous, not “despicable” or “cruel” as Jack D put it. But, we all know Jack D finds “despicable” or “cruel” anything negative toward Jews, deserved or not. I just don’t understand how someone of his intelligence (he is not dumb though much less intelligent than he thinks of himself) cannot see that his overt ethnic nepotism is a turn off to the 97.8% of the rest of the population.
Whether Ackman does or not (or is successful or not if he tried) doesn’t change the fact that his wife is a fraud. At some point, I’d like to live in a society (again) where truth matters and it’s not just an Alinsky-style ideological war of all against all for political supremacy.
I hope so too. I think academia is rotten to the core, so much of it should be demolished and re-built again. I don’t have a problem with leftist academics or people who harbor very different ideologies than I do running academia. I do, however, have a huge problem with dishonest and fraudulent people running it. I think that poisons the young and produces a dishonest and fraudulent elite class, with terrible consequences for the country.
Most of my friends are rightist Catholics, but I also have a few friends who are atheist leftists, but those friends of mine are quite principled. They will argue strongly for their positions, but will honestly acknowledge where their ideas are deficient or don’t work.
You might note that I was a big fan of the Audacious Epigone blog. A part of that, of course, was that the author and I were pretty sympatico on many subjects, but a bigger part of that was he was intellectually very honest. When he was wrong about something, he corrected himself and noted the correction in a way that did not hide his earlier incorrect position. I thought very highly of him for this intellectual honesty and humility. He earned my trust.
I actually think that you would have been a very worthy successor to run that blog when it went defunct. Maybe you still could be?
Right. She’s not violating the don’t piss off the Jews rule for having your humiliation circulated far and wide.Replies: @J.Ross
This.
Not very impressed by the analysis from this "professor."
http://www.thenoviceprofessor.com/blog/radio-labs-g-series-all-about-general-intelligence
Long (but low SNR) Reddit thread.
Reddit thread for another episode.
That one talks about Steve Hsu's work. His response here.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/07/radiolab-on-embryo-selection-in-ivf.htmlReplies: @J.Ross
There are predictables (IQ tests lead to Nazism!) and certain largely unknown personalities to watch for getting name-dropped by the people who depend on NPR. I thought they came curiously close to admitting that IQ tests actually helped people and that the activist’s arguments had enormous problems, without actually saying so outright (NPR does this kind of a lot). One host unironically uses the word “problematic.”
OC has all the warming welcoming allure of a pit viper.
Before mocking people who pay too much attention to sports, remember a few facts.
First, most men are not attractive to most women, but a man watching sports generally increases his attractiveness to most women (compared to watching most other forms of entertainment, such as ‘late night talk shows’, ‘jazz’ concerts, and – God forbid – ‘Hallmark channel movies’.). It is a good thing for men to try to increase their attractiveness to women! Of course it would be better if the men were actually doing things, rather then being spectators, but we should not let the best be the enemy of the non-worst.
Second, there are a few hundred talented military historians in the USA (max a few thousand). For such people, an interest in sports is an easy way to observe how others treat the general subject of violent contests. I, for one, would rather rewatch John Madden’s commentary on the NFC championship games of the 1990s than listen to most of the military history lectures from the West Point professors of that decade. While the games were trivial, probably fixed to a certain degree, and not in themselves all that interesting, Madden’s commentary was the product of a lot of knowledge about violence (albeit sort of over-mannered violence, and as such fairly useless to the military historian) and something that is generally not available without an extreme level of interest and competition. A resource.
Third, most people do not live long enough to be too old to play at least some sports, and so watching some country club kid who is good at putting, after decades of a comfortable life devoted to things like putting, may be helpful to the 70 year old who still wants to be active; and it is a good thing for a seventy year old to still want to be active.
The nasty attitudes may not be confined to the US team. The Spanish team that won the women's world cup also seems to be filled with complainers.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
You are correct, I’d forgotten about their demands for equal pay with the men despite women’s soccer producing about 10% of the mens’s game revenue. I guess they skipped Supply and Demand in school.
https://dallasredistricting.com/2023-adopted-map-files/COUNCIL_District_MapSeries_2.pdfReplies: @FPD72
University Park and Highland Park form an educational enclave. They share a school district. Highland Park High School is the high school for the district. They are surrounded by the Dallas Independent School District. Cross the street from Park Cities ISD into DISD and home prices go down hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There is a high school, Highland Park High School. Although it is located in University Park it is funded by property owners in both of the Park Cities and located within the Highland Park Independent School District.
Unlike in many states, school district boundaries and city limits in Texas are not the same. The HPISD covers all of University Park, a sliver of Dallas, and almost all of Highland Park. The original HPHS building was located in Highland Park but a new building was built in University Park.
The city limits of Dallas fall within part of several school districts, including Highland Park, Richardson, and Plano, in addition to DISD. Our previous home was in Dallas city limits but within the Richardson ISD.
First, most men are not attractive to most women, but a man watching sports generally increases his attractiveness to most women (compared to watching most other forms of entertainment, such as 'late night talk shows', 'jazz' concerts, and - God forbid - 'Hallmark channel movies'.). It is a good thing for men to try to increase their attractiveness to women! Of course it would be better if the men were actually doing things, rather then being spectators, but we should not let the best be the enemy of the non-worst.
Second, there are a few hundred talented military historians in the USA (max a few thousand). For such people, an interest in sports is an easy way to observe how others treat the general subject of violent contests. I, for one, would rather rewatch John Madden's commentary on the NFC championship games of the 1990s than listen to most of the military history lectures from the West Point professors of that decade. While the games were trivial, probably fixed to a certain degree, and not in themselves all that interesting, Madden's commentary was the product of a lot of knowledge about violence (albeit sort of over-mannered violence, and as such fairly useless to the military historian) and something that is generally not available without an extreme level of interest and competition. A resource.
Third, most people do not live long enough to be too old to play at least some sports, and so watching some country club kid who is good at putting, after decades of a comfortable life devoted to things like putting, may be helpful to the 70 year old who still wants to be active; and it is a good thing for a seventy year old to still want to be active.Replies: @prosa123
The big problem with adult sports is that they’re almost entirely limited to individual sports, rather than team sports. What amateur adult leagues exist in team sports such as basketball or baseball are usually far more recreational and informal than children’s leagues in the same sports.
I don't have a dog in this fight. As another commenter mentioned, no one wears the white hat in this circular firing squad. I do, however, find Ackman's plagiarist wife being critiqued with the very weapon Ackman used against another person humorous, not "despicable" or "cruel" as Jack D put it. But, we all know Jack D finds "despicable" or "cruel" anything negative toward Jews, deserved or not. I just don't understand how someone of his intelligence (he is not dumb though much less intelligent than he thinks of himself) cannot see that his overt ethnic nepotism is a turn off to the 97.8% of the rest of the population.Whether Ackman does or not (or is successful or not if he tried) doesn't change the fact that his wife is a fraud. At some point, I'd like to live in a society (again) where truth matters and it's not just an Alinsky-style ideological war of all against all for political supremacy.I hope so too. I think academia is rotten to the core, so much of it should be demolished and re-built again. I don't have a problem with leftist academics or people who harbor very different ideologies than I do running academia. I do, however, have a huge problem with dishonest and fraudulent people running it. I think that poisons the young and produces a dishonest and fraudulent elite class, with terrible consequences for the country.
Most of my friends are rightist Catholics, but I also have a few friends who are atheist leftists, but those friends of mine are quite principled. They will argue strongly for their positions, but will honestly acknowledge where their ideas are deficient or don't work.
You might note that I was a big fan of the Audacious Epigone blog. A part of that, of course, was that the author and I were pretty sympatico on many subjects, but a bigger part of that was he was intellectually very honest. When he was wrong about something, he corrected himself and noted the correction in a way that did not hide his earlier incorrect position. I thought very highly of him for this intellectual honesty and humility. He earned my trust.
I actually think that you would have been a very worthy successor to run that blog when it went defunct. Maybe you still could be?Replies: @MGB
just two quick points: there is humor to all this duplicitous fuckery and own goal, foot shooting, but if i have any sympathy at all, and it’s not much, it would be for hackman’s wife, the only one of the three (ackman/gay/oxman) who might have been doing something of redeeming value. having said that, what most interests me about this snapshot of 21st degeneracy is that it is a sign that there may be space for a new path to be forged. as i understand history, it’s usually only when the elites are at each other’s throats that real opportunities for change exist.
“Never seen a stringier, more frayed looking woman in my life”
You must live surrounded by landwhales then….