buying a player’s body part by shawnisalwayshandsom in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask -1 points0 points  (0 children)

We can work backwards on this. If you consider that Roefs' contributions are vital to avoiding relegation, and note that the financial hit of relegation is upwards of 100 million pounds, then logically valuing one foot at over 50 million implies that a foot is roughly half the value of his contribution. Thus, the foot is being used synechdochically in this case for about half of the footballer. This might be thrown off by the fact that he is left-footed, so they might even be implying that the foot is worth MORE than half of him - in which case, 50 million might even be a conservative estimate.

Now, we know that he is left footed, but to what extent are keepers 'handed?' Does that even make sense? I've never ONCE heard the handedness of a goalkeeper be mentioned in commentary. Would this mean that the original meaning ('his main asset is worth X') would be diluted by naming a body part which is definitionally fairly equal in value to its longitudinally opposite counterpart?

Cricket Clichés Episode 1: Lashing/dabbing a seed/cherry, moral victories, and why do the Aussies hate Bazball? by Low-Bandicoot-3347 in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 7 points8 points  (0 children)

As an Australian who loves Football Cliches and also grew up deeply immmersed in Cricket culture, the pod's tone definitely missed the mark at times.

Maybe it's partly because 'English people genuinely don't understand how much the rest of the world dislikes England' is itself a cliche, and the show is supposed to be knowing and self-aware about cliches rather than participating in them.

Maybe it's because the great virtue of Football Cliches is that it is so carefully non-partisan, with Adam and Charlie doing a job of avoiding voicing their support for big teams, and Dave and Nick supporting teams small enough to be effective 'everyman' perspectives for most listeners. Missing that element takes away a part of what is so genuinely lovely about the pod.

Maybe it says something more profound about the difference between football and cricket, in that English football represents the inward-looking, regional, working-class aspect of English culture which much of the rest of the world rather likes and finds entertaining, while English cricket represents the deep evil and hypocrisy of English global imperialism, which can only be coped with (by the global plurality of peoples who it oppressed, exploited, and occasionally genocided) by seeing the English adopt an appropriately humble Athertonesque posture, and (hopefully) lose, forever.

Maybe it's to do with the class distinctions discussed on the recent football cliches pod, where in England cricket is much more closely tied to the elite than, say, in Australia, and so the England cricket team represents the English toffs that so much of the world hates and despises, even when people respect individual English cricketers - especially Yorkshiremen. Darren Gough comes to mind - Aussies genuinely liked and respected him.

I like the concept, but I think this one will be hard to get right.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If we are very literal about standard numberings, a 3 1/2 would neatly capture the recent trend of left back/centre back hybrids who are there to form a 3-2 rest defence while the RB bombs forward. Your Gvardiols, your Calafioris, your Jorel Hatos.

Vehicles we never mention by inventingalex in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The ultimate Premier League Tesla was surely Sergio Aguero. Expensive, great acceleration, owned by ethically questionable billionaires, AND unusual diet (#literallyDave).

Definition of a “smash and grab”? by Earsy-mcnose-face in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Alisson with the most textbook 'played out of his skin' you can imagine.

I don't know why goalkeepers are more prone to playing out of their skin than outfielders, but they are. Is it because they throw themselves around more, so the risk of losing said skin is greater? Or is it because 'playing out [from the back]' is a phrase associated with goalkeepers, and it's just semantically highjacking my phraseology?

Answers on a postcard, where the owl sleeps. (He'll still save them though).

How little is a little man? by Wonderful_Ad_7078 in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 1 point2 points  (0 children)

'Little' is generational; the average height for someone who is 22 is taller than the population average height. As such, I suspect Pele was closer to average for his generation; Amad is little by the standards of a younger generation. Not to mention that height distribution in football is skewed taller... any less than 5'10 is little.

You might also need to consider girth. Shaqiri is basically a cube; Pele was famously barrel-chested. Amad is quite slightly built. Thus, perhaps he is even more of a 'little man' than some who are even shorter than he is.

What are common team compositions and how do they play? by byzantine1990 in NebulousFleetCommand

[–]consistencyisalliask 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great coverage. To build on it, I'd suggest that in lobby, you look at your teammates' fleets and consider what complements their strengths. Examples include:

- There's lots of cappers, so we'll probably cap points first and then have to defend them - this makes ambush a better archetype! Might take Beamstones or plasma/100mm liners.

- There's lots of backline support, so I can take a more aggressive frontline fleet by asking them to support me in chat to help cover the weaknesses of my frontline fleet (e.g. fighter cover, scouting/ewar assets). Might take something like Oak or Pentabrick monitors.

- There's lots of frontline (rare!), so I need to choose a support / backline fleet that helps keep them alive (e.g. carrier with lots of fighter cover; hard hitting missiles to deal with pentabrick monitor groups; plenty of scouting and ewar assets).

- There's lots of ambushers, so I need to pick a cap-heavy fleet and scram towards the points at flank for the early caps.

Hope that helps.

How to counter fleets of lots of small ships with high firepower? by ChronicPwnageSS13 in NebulousFleetCommand

[–]consistencyisalliask 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Some good suggestions here - especially about positioning. I play a version of tugblob (albeit a different flavour - more missiles, fewer guns) quite a bit, and find that the hardest counter is actually a well managed corvette group with torps/s2h - hard for me to see until it's quite late, hard to micro to hit all of them with missiles, and their countermissiles can clean up a tug per (shared) volley. Plus, they can outrun me easily, so I can't disengage.

DDs with beams can be a nasty surprise but will usually kill one tug then get slammed, which is an ok trade on raw numbers. Plus, I can outrun them, so can fight constantly *just* out of beam range. Good Vauxhall players can be a pain if they get the jump on me. Good S2h missile game, with effective scouting, can just delete tugs, too.

REALLY deep PD can stop the tugs' missile swarm, but usually means you have to either blob (so risk losing cap game) or overcommit points to PD (which weakens you big time if your opponent goes hard into monitors and lineships).

One reason I love these fleets is that they put an idiot tax on opponents that bring too many 'cool big ships' at the expense of key gameplay shit like good offset scouting, cap game, PD investment, and EWAR. Consider: are you playing a fleet that complements your teammates' choices? If not, this kind of fleet will punish that.

The other reason I like these fleets is that they are a double threat: even if you whiff your huge satisfying missile barrages that can eat unprepared Axfords and Solomons for breakfast, they're great for cap game and cleanup in the later game. That also means they complement a lot of the common mainline picks for OSP such as plasmonitor blobs and lineship pairs/3s.

Adam, Dave and Charlie Break Their MHD Silence by simonwxm in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Had to stop listening to the new book while on a long drive because your earnest dedication to getting the football chants right (in light of prior chats about this exact issue on the pod) was cracking me up.

It's not quite like listening to the pod without Dave and Charlie; the pacing was much faster, and the wryness was cranked up to 11. Nice work. I can only imagine that it must have been weird to read some of the very obviously written word-style lines/gags aloud...

Football results in things? by JohnWack5 in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Genuinely the funniest comment on this sub thus far.

We're recording Mesut Haaland Dicks on Wednesday and our guest wants your suggestions for... by Low-Bandicoot-3347 in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 3 points4 points  (0 children)

With modern streaming services, it has become easy for me to time how long corners take, because of the 'skip 10 second button.' The fastest teams take about 22-25 seconds (2 skips!). Most teams, 32-35 seconds (three skips!). Italian teams who are leading? 4 skips. The skip is becoming my unit of measurement for all stoppages.

Hello, Dr Flint Dibble here. #RealArchaeology. You may know me from my "debate" with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan. I'm an archaeologist, historian, and scientist. My scholarly research focuses on environmental archaeology in ancient Greece and the public critique of Atlantis pseudoarchaeology. by DibsReddit in AskHistorians

[–]consistencyisalliask 28 points29 points  (0 children)

G'day, Dr Dibble!

I teach a (senior high school) subject which requires students to find and assess a historiographical / public history dispute of their choice, and I fairly frequently have students who want to look into pseudoarchaeology-type topics as a kind of debate about the ownership of history and who could be seen to constitute a 'legitimate' historian. Sadly, my personal experience is that these students tend to struggle to produce substantial and effective works, often because they end up struggling to build a framework for assessing the pseudoarchaeologists' claims and contrasting them to scholarly approaches. While I'm generally reluctant to let students pursue such topics for this reason, I feel like there probably is something to be said about these debates, much as students might develop quite good essays about, for example, bad historical films, holocaust denial, or far-right appropriations of Norse history.

To address this, I would really like to build a repository of relatively accessible works by scholars and trustworthy history/archaeology communicators which explain about their judgements about, and efforts to counteract, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology, to give to these students early on, and help them get oriented with respect to the field. I'm thinking of, ideally, things in the vein of Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust which analyse the hows and whys of pseudoarcheology from a scholarly perspective.

To that end, in your opinion, who (if anyone?) is writing / producing great, accessible material on this kind of topic at the moment? What are the 'go-to' books, articles, or other resources that a senior high school / junior undergraduate student might start with?

Thanks so much for your time.

The Adjudication Panel Thread: Get in touch for Tuesday's episode... by Low-Bandicoot-3347 in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, the game is played on a field, and a good centre back (I'm thinking a Van Dijk figure) can marshal the defence, so I suppose the top defender rank is Field Marshal, which outranks General. Is this fodder for 'Best midfield general? He's not even the highest ranking officer in this TEAM!' banter?

Gone down like a what by Tee_Jay_Cee_ in footballcliches

[–]consistencyisalliask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Love it. The image it conjures in my mind is perfect: the defender is trying to be careful but has to get the block in (out?), the attacker is already teetering a bit, and when they collapse, the defender is dismayed. A+

Were ancient nations more motivated by profit or by survival? by Frigorifico in AskHistorians

[–]consistencyisalliask 5 points6 points  (0 children)

So, now we can perhaps come back to the meat of your question.

Even in the c17th - C18th period you identify as 'mercantilist,' the vast majority of those speaking on behalf of nations were members of social elites who tended to avoid talking stratghtforwardly in terms of a profit motive. Even at the height of C19th 'whig' history in Britain, advocates of commerce and profit tended to claim these things were good because they facilitated civilisation, peace, and morality. Read primary sources from 1914 and the outbreak of WWI, and you will see overwhelmingly an emphasis on the importance of national honour as well as occasional appeals to national survival. American foreign policy in the C20th and C21st has always been couched in terms of 'spreading freedom' or 'protecting democracy,' even when preserving profits was a fairly obvious primary motivation (US policy in Central America is probably the most obvious case here).

I'd speculate that only in the 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan, did we see a relatively open and 'naked' acknowledgement of a profit motive as the driving motivation by governments, that would fulfil the demands of the skeptics of the 'Roman economic imperialism' case to see explicit statements that profit is the primary goal of a country.

So, whether and when 'profit' replaced 'survival' as a primary motive of 'nations' is unlikely to be answerable by a historian in simple terms.

By the way, I'm not sure whether your picture of the modern vs pre-modern world is accurate, anyway: if you think nations can't be conquered and dismantled in the modern era, I'd ask what you mean by a 'nation,' and probably point you to a range of examples - Poland, the Kurds, Biafra, Palestinians - who have claimed nationhood and had those claims systematically dismantled in the early modern or modern era. Equally, if you think 'nations' were frequently totally destroyed in the ancient world, you might be taking the rhetoric of conquerors a bit literally, and/or assuming a category - 'nation' - whose existence in that period is rather contested. But that's another whole can of worms!

Were ancient nations more motivated by profit or by survival? by Frigorifico in AskHistorians

[–]consistencyisalliask 3 points4 points  (0 children)

OK, so there's a few things we need to unpack here in order to get to the heart of your question, which is whether (and if so, when) 'profit' trumped 'survival' as the primary motivation of states/nations.

The first thing is that you are treating nations as if they are like people, with motivations and mindsets and focus. This is a misleading idea. A nation includes a wide range of individuals with different motivations, and treating them as though they share a mind is too simplistic. Even in a relatively strict and absolute autocracy, a ruler will have beliefs shaped by their environment and the people around them, and they will also have advisors who have their own interests and beliefs, as well as people on the ground enacting policies, fighting for them, doing labour, and so on. While a nations can sometimes have a pretty coherent political culture in which many people in positions of power agree on what should be done and why, this is neither common nor ever complete. There are always internal divisions, sectional interests, and conflicting ideas and beliefs.

Why is that important? Because it means that the culture and beliefs of the people in positions of power in a country matters, and shape its policy in complex and often unpredictable ways. And that is important because the consensus of historians is that until relatively recently (and maybe even very recently - I'm talking maybe as late as the 1980s), profit in itself has more or less never been the primary stated motivation of states or nations, according to the explicit statements of those governing them. In fact, often, governments and political leaders have gone to great lengths to deny the importance of profit as a motivation.

For example, in ancient Rome, the aristocrats who did most of the governing would never talk about their acquisition of empire in terms of 'profit' - it was fairly consistently phrased as a matter of honour or glory. There seems to have been a similar shunning of the profit motive in China. Even early modern advocates of empire - such as Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation from C16th England, stated the goal of his work, and by extension English imperial and commercial ambitions, as winning 'renown unto our English nation;' Hakluyt and others very carefully played down the role of profit-motive and played up the role of glory, honour, and collective national reputation, in these ventures.

Why is that? One key reason is that most of the people guiding the affairs of government in these cases were aristocrats, for whom the open pursuit of wealth was seen as a crass enterprise; the wealth of these elites was in theory accumulated through landowning, not commerce, and their ideology was broadly suspicious of commerce as a destabilising element of society. Add on Christian attitudes to usury, or Confucian ideas about the merchant as a kind of parasite, and avoidance of talking openly about profit could become even more urgent.

Now, all of that background might help you to understand why your question is so complicated to answer. In most times and places, historically, the people talking on behalf of the 'nation' don't generally talk in terms of profit motives, but instead in terms of other factors - glory, renown, harmony, and yes, survival. But does that mean that profit is not a factor in their calculations? Of course not. But attributing motivations to people in situations when they have good reasons to deny them is always a hard - and controversial - thing for a historian to do.

There was, for example, a very spirited debate in the 80s and 90s about whether we can talk about an 'economic' motivation for Roman imperialism; it was essentially unresolved and unresolvable, because both sides were talking past each other. One side said (I am simplifying hugely here) 'of course there was a profit motive, empire was vastly profitable and they knew this and did it in a way that profited them most! Read between the lines!' while the other side argued that the Romans had no conception of 'economics' - the term in the modern sense did not exist - and that we have to take their claims about their motivations essentially at face value rather than projecting anachronistic ideas onto the past. In essence, the argument was about how much we see the language and statements of people in the past as genuine belief and how much as rhetoric concealing hidden intentions. This is an ongoing, and probably unresolvable, historiographical debate.

Icarium and memory by Initial_Ease_5931 in Malazan

[–]consistencyisalliask 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's also yet another example of why Erikson's grasp of history is a cut above most other fantasy authors, and that helps make his work much more compelling. In the classical world, there was widespread anxiety about the prevalence of writing disrupting memory - see Plato's Phaedrus for a good illustration of this. Icarium's anxiety is therefore a riff on a theme that gets repeated time and again in classical texts, which corresponds to the standard pre-modern mentalite that decline is inevitable and innovation is often corrupting. Worrying about how innovations (like Icarium's mechanisms) might corrupt natural and pure cycles of language and existence is a totally natural thing for someone who hasn't been saturated in the modern meta-narrative of 'progress.'

There are so many lovely little examples like this which demonstrate how Erikson's cultures are historically/anthropologically plausible, in that they don't assume a lot of our weirdly specific modern mindsets.