I’m very fond of Jack Frost. It’s as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

I agree, except when they play Newcastle, who are less far along in their sportswashing project and whose owners are even worse. The fact that PSG are so incompetently run is definitely a good thing; Newcastle’s ownership appearing to be good at this an extreme disappointment.

Every Newcastle win makes the world a sadder, more dangerous place.

Varitek?

They (and the other major Continental leagues) need to take a page out of the English playbook and spread out the TV money across the league, instead of letting Barca and Real take their enormous share.

English dominance in the sport right now is built on them having a strong base of support well down the pyramid, and lucrative rewards beyond that for simply existing in the Premier League. Continental pyramids have the same theoretical structure, but with PSG, Bayern, etc hoovering up all the attention and getting payouts to match, their competition is left in the dust and continues to decline. By contrast, English clubs get substantial revenue sharing assistance, and invest it into making their teams credible competitors domestically and in Europe.

To oversimplify further, top English teams cede a much larger percentage of the revenue “they” earn to their inter-league competition, and are rewarded with a high quality and ultimately even more lucrative final product. Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, etc do far less revenue sharing, and the top teams gorge themselves on lacklustre competition as their leagues slowly fall further and further.

Everybody pumped for Qatar vs Saudi Arabia?

Because I know I’m not, at all. May they both manage a maximally embarasing flop.

That scene is a triumph of Federation ideology.

Finding the wormhole was a lucky accident, but everything else which lead to that apparent deus ex machina came about from Starfleet doing exactly what was needed to get the Prophets on their side: not with the intention or expectation of that ultimate result, but because it slotted right in with what the Federation wants to do anyway.

Sicko and his crew communicate with these strange life forms in they find, and make an effort to not only understand them but respect their wishes. They offer enormous practical support to Bajor and attempt to encourage them to join the Federation formally, but they respect the wishes of the Bajorans even when highly inconvenient (such as the abrupt pivot away from Federation membership that preceded the Dominion War). In short, Sisko and the government backing him legitimately earned the trust of both Bajor and the Prophets by being explorers, diplomats, and excellent allies. The military payoff they got is hardly the point, but they earned it.

Would any of the other races have earned the favor of the Prophets the way the Federation did? The Klingons, Romulans, and obviously the Cardassians would have taken over as brutal occupiers if they felt the need to get involved with Bajor at all. The Ferengi would have ruthlessly exploited Bajoran resources in their own way (which we know the Prophets were no fans of, see their temporary rewiring of Grand Nagus Zek), while the Borg would have simply consumed everything they found useful. Here, it’s the uniquely decent actions and values of the Federation that win out.

This is one of the many things that Strange New Worlds (and Lower Decks as well) have got right. Space battles in SNW are beautifully animated, but they aren’t overwhelmed with excess visual spectacles and they tend to be fundamentally simple: you shoot at us, we shoot back or try to find some helpful obstruction to hide behind, etc.

Even Prodigy’s big space battle in their finale manages the task to some degree, despite it’s scale. I remember watching it felt oddly sluggish, as the ratio of ships on screen to weapons being fired was surprisingly low, but it definitely made it easier to keep track of whatever specific event the camera was focussed on.

It’s not the figure that’s the problem, but the fact that Americans have been forced to accept this sort of casual deception in how the price of a standard good is advertised. Why is it okay that getting gas for “$3.50” per gallon (to quote the most visible price, which everyone will mention in conversation and mentally reference for comparison) is actually very slightly less than $3.51 per gallon? Just post the correct bloody price, in a clear and unambiguous manner, without faffing around with extra decimals that everyone mentally filters out anyway. It’s stupid.

Same deal with American businesses consistently citing pre-tax (and where relevant, pre-tup) prices. Just tell people what the fuck they are actually going to pay, instead of agreeing that literally everyone has to make their pricing an exercise in consumer deception or be beaten out by everyone else’s smaller-looking-but-actually-identical prices.

This whole thing is just another tiny window into why unregulated markets suck.

Au contrarie; sports are a fantastic way to get socioeconomic issues (like labor rights) front and center on the minds of people who wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of them the same way. And they create opportunities for people to educate themselves in other areas as well. Not every sports fan is the willfully ignorant meathead you describe, nor do willfully ignorant meatheads exist because of sports.

MLB is not only a state sponsored monopoly, but like every other American sports league a blatant cartel which is constantly squabbling with its own employees over revenue shares (at the expense of the on-field product) and lying about how much money they actually make. Same thing as most other business owners, but people are a lot more willing to listen to the perspective of, say, Shoehi Ohtani than a random McDonald’s employee. I can tell you that I am personally much more clued in on these sorts of societal problems as a result of sportswriters discussing labor issues, on top of being far more statistically savvy and generally more sceptical of oversimplified narratives than I would be if I had never gained an interest in baseball. Nor would I have anywhere near my current understanding of global politics without global football (soccer) creating both a mechanism and incentive for learning about them.

But that’s not even the point: sports are not a “scam”. Sports exist first and foremost because for many people, watching elite athletes play a game is fun. That is the intrinsic value of professional sports, and nothing about that is inherently scammy. Full stop.

You realize that ChatGPT has no concept of “true”, right? It produces output which looks coherent and reasonable and tends to stumble into truthful statements on accident, by virtue of drawing from a dataset of people saying mostly true things. Of course, the bot is equally capable of spouting off outright lies in an equally convincing manner.

This is a very unreliable way to verify a surprising fact. I strongly recommend against it.

Having said that, I think MLS would be far more attractive to fans if the money paid for designated players was spread out and used to increase the overall wages for the whole team.

I want to agree with this (and there’s no question that it would produce better teams that might actually compete with the best of the Mexican league, etc), but the situation with Messi is going to be a powerful indicator of how much influence a perfect designated player situation can have on the league. It may be that Messi really does draw huge numbers of people, some of whom will become real fans, or it may be that the Messi crowds see all the mediocrity around him and decide to stick with whatever they were watching before.

The other position I would take with this is that the owners of MLS/USL should be thinking long term. Their target fanbase is people born in the last 10-15 years or earlier, who very likely play soccer themselves at some level, and whose families are likely to bring them to games. Keep the tickets relatively cheap (which they have done), keep the games at reasonable times (it’s a mix) and make sure as many teams as possible have something interesting to play for, for as much of the season as possible. Playoffs more or less mirror the race for Europe in the EPL, etc (although devaluing the team which tops the table in the regular season becomes a problem), but promotion/relegation add real stakes to the bottom of the table, and substantially more excitement to the top of lower leagues.

Or in other words, they should try to do the opposite of all the blatantly consumer-unfriendly things that teams in other American sports routinely do. They are selling an alternative product to what most Americans currently care about, with hopes of becoming a big thing with future generations. Lean into that.

And there’s a pretty good chance MLS never will measure up to the top european leagues. They have a ton of competition for national sports interest with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL; getting on the same level as the lower two of those four would be an extraordinary accomplishment. But that’s okay, as long as they can develop enough local interest that they come to games, buy shirts, and keep money flowing that way. Any owner who jumped in hoping to cash out a multibillion dollar franchise some day will be disappointed, but I really do not care.

This after Everton (stupidly) balked at £8M for him. That gave me hope that my Brentford would be in on this, but seeing what he ultimately went for I am merely ambivalent on missing out.

Good for Gyökeres, he’s going to dominate Portugal.

As for the oligarchs deciding a rising tide lifts all boats… the tide lifts their boats. That’s all they care about. It’s a cartel where they don’t compete against each-other. Instead they collude against the players and the fans so that their cartel can bring in the most money.

This happening in all American sports leagues is a big part of what has driven me to fallowing european soccer almost exclusively (with the exception of my local USL2 and baseball Futures League clubs, of course). Sports teams shouldn’t be investment vehicles, they should be vanity projects for these disgustingly rich people to spend money on, money that would otherwise be hoarded away. There is no reason why we should give a damn about “protecting their investment”, we should be forcing them to fight each other for safety, promotion, and silverware. Same as the european clubs.

We’re here for the players. I don’t watch MLS because those players mostly suck, because MLS does not provide salaries competitive with european clubs, because they are run by people who are used to simply having a cartel of the best players in insert-sport-here and totally unaccustomed to genuine competition from comparable or better players (funded by comparably deep pockets) in other leagues abroad. This kind of genuine competition for top players is sorely needed in all sports, especially baseball, but soccer seems to be the only (semi-)major sport in the US where it exists at all. Relegation is the mechanism by which intra-league competition is enforced, and that competition is necessary to keep these owners from collectively investing the absolute minimum and scraping as much profit off the top as they can get.

It’s the lack of really small, niche, but still relatively active communities that is the biggest loss for me (so far). For example, I want to to talk about Brentford FC, a tiny English football club which was only promoted to the Premier League a couple of years ago. But we’re a million miles away from that when there are exactly two communities for general soccer and one community for Liverpool FC, all three with exactly one subscriber.

Any other Bees fans out there? This Flekken guy seems pretty promising, even if I had hopes for Alban Lafont.