Posts by Keir Leslie
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Isn't that exactly how they decide the League Cup, FA Cup and UEFA Champions Cup?
Yeah, the knockout competitions are decided that way. But leagues aren't, because once you've played every other team in the competition home-and-away you've tried every permutation, and you can just count up the points. There's no need for a knockout phase, except a desire for spectacle. I think that if you've won the league, you've won the league.
The American post-season gives you farcical results, like the Patriots winning all but one of their games, and then losing by a touchdown to a clearly worse team, but because that game was the Superbowl, losing the competition. I can't see how that's a fair way to run an event.
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I hate the English system for the fact that if you aren't a supporter of the three big teams all you can hope for is to not be relegated or to the team that gives one of the big teams an upset. "Go team! Don't Lose!" What a fun thing.
I'm not sure that's true -- Tottenham won the League Cup this year, and Portsmouth won the FA Cup. The most League titles won by any club is 17; the most NFL titles won is 12, and the most World Series' won is 26. The most FA Cups won by any team is 11. And the English footballing competitions are much older than either of the American competitions. Almost every English club has spent time in the lower divisions. However, if you look at the Scottish system, Rangers and Celtic utterly monopolise a very similar set up.
There isn't a simple correlation, and there certainly isn't a simple causation.
The other way that the US system makes it more likely different teams will win is that they have a daft post-season, which means that teams can utterly dominate the main league and then suffer an upset defeat to lose the trophy. I don't think that's a particularly good way to run a competition -- leagues and cups are different, and shouldn't be hybridised. The American system just makes it more of a lottery, after already using one of the more exhaustive ranking devices.
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I'll let that one slide.
At the risk of explaining a joke, I was trying to poke fun at the dafter English insular attitudes -- you know, the ``two World Wars and a World Cup'' stuff. '66 and all that. And Argentina do have a bit of a rep for anti-futbol.
I dunno that it was bugger all to do with the FA. The FA gave those sailors a set of rules to play by, it popularised them, it organised the FA Cup to showcase the best football happening. When the Italians wanted to start an organised sport, they used the English model because they saw the FA as an admirable example. Of course, I wouldn't say it was all down to the FA (or even mostly, if I were to be really honest), and I think the English FA had a tendency to amateur incompetency, but they were clearly doing something right, as are the current lot.
It's got nothing to do with the league, it's how they get kids to play, how many grounds and clubs they set up in the seventies and eighties, their high performance centres.
Yeah. According to the scholarly articles I've read, (a) monocausal explanations are probably insufficient, and (b) there's probably something important in the amount of peer-lead play that the French engage in compared to the English. (That is to say, how they get kids to play.)
Of course, the NZRU is pretty shocking on those grounds. I'd say that the things I like in the English system are present in the French system. Mainly I dislike the Americanised franchise nonsense, and the English are the best known, biggest money example of sport done different.
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It doesn't mean it's an unqualified success, nor that you can apply it here, to a different sport and a much, much, much smaller market.
No, but the FA has still done a very good job at getting people to play football worldwide. Maybe not an unqualified success, but I'd have to say that they've done a way better job than any other sporting body on the planet at getting people to play sport their way. Not all of that is due to the organisational structure, but you'd have to admit that quite a bit is.
I think that the English footballing model has proven itself to be a very heavily reproduced way of playing sport. The examples you cite, well, I don't know much about Argentine football (except that they're animals...), but the French use a similar system to the English one -- a league with relegation/promotion, a cup, a national team that doesn't restrict itself to only picking players playing domestically, etc. Stylistically, way more like the English model than the NZ system or the American franchise system.
I don't think that the English way is the best way, but it has a proven track record, and lots of people use variations on it, some of which are better than the original.
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As evinced by the fact that everyone plays Association Football. That would seem the most important measure of the Football Association's success.
The massive amounts of money they make, and the success in European club competitions don't hurt. Further, if you look at the teams which beat English teams, an awful lot of them follow the basic English model of a league and a cup, and are organisationally very similar.
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When you say "this" you mean your idea right? because I want nothing to do with the EPL, I think it's an awful system.
On the other hand, the English football system is the most successful sporting organisational system ever. It might be awful*, but by God it works.
Personally, if I were the NZRU, I'd kill the current Super 14 teams, and make the Super n the European Cup equivalent. Bring back the NPC, and play that as a straight pyramid league system, with no post-season nonsense. Have a league or a cup, or both, but don't try to have 2-in-1.
Televise everything on free-to-air.
Don't monkey around with salary caps and such. Accept that if you can't pay the money, that's not the player's fault, and move on.
Clubs must have more than 50% fan ownership. (Only 25% if the fans are ponies.)
* I think it's a lot better than the NZ rugby system, or the American franchised stuff -
Kracklite, have you read A History Maker?
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You can't say that authoritarianism is a defining feature of Marxism without dealing with the innumerable examples of non-authoritarian Marxists -- Kautsky, Allende, the Kerala Model, etc, and the vast numbers of left-wing political parties, that, given your guilt-by-association logic, should be reeling over dead from the third-hand `poison' of Rousseau and Kant. (By the way, you know that Ayn Rand hates Kant as well, which kind of intimates against this vast authoritarian web of ideologies.)
By your standards even Orwell was a particularly nasty authoritarian, and at that point you might want to realise you've essentially defined two groups: slightly-pink left liberals, and the rest of the world. I think those aren't particularly useful categories.
There's no real informational value in calling the various political bogeymen `authoritarians', because all you're using it to mean is `wrong'.
Libertarian-anarchist types honestly aren't authoritarian in any meaningful sense that you might call fascists authoritarian.
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while Marxism is nominally distinct from right-wing authoritarianism or neoconservatism or libertarianism, they are essentially authoritarian social darwinism and there is no essential shift from the authoritarian, deterministic pattern or mindset of Marxism to those ideologies.
Um, wtf? That's duckspeak. You're not using actual, meaningful words there.
How can Marxism be social darwinism? ``From each according to his ability, to each according to their ability'' is the negation of social darwinism. They're antithetical.
Centrist liberals have their very own set of poo labels, and `extremist' `totalitarian', `authoritarian' etc. are all perfectly capable of being used as such.
This illusion that you can just lazily stick neoconservatism, fascism, libertarianism, and Marxism in one corner and explain them all by the same highly reductive logic is bizarre. It's weird, because, as far as I can tell, it consist of taking everyone who disagrees with a certain species of liberalism, and treating that as the defining feature of their philosophies. Oddly enough, if you do that, they all look the same.
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I've already said I don't follow the Cult of the iJobs, so the Apple mystique gains no brownie points from me
It helps when you argue against the other person, not Artie MacStrawman.
Apple has never been strong on the number of features per se, rather being strong on implementing the right features properly, especially with respect to the UI. That's not iJobs cultism, that's basic knowledge of the existence of things like the HIG and Bruce Togazinni's work.
Of course the iPhone isn't perfect. I don't personally think it's worth the money to me, but people who do aren't all cultists.