My daughter plays soccer on a travel team, U16 this year. When she was U13 the other team was calling her a cunt and threatening to kill her.
The sideline refs were typically 15 year old kids and the parents were yelling at them non stop. I mean legit yelling.
As she has gotten older, the coaches/parent liaisons have gotten more vocal about telling the parents to STFU.
Last week my daughter played in the LI Cup Championship. The other team was predominately hispanic, and they were chippy, but played hard, and they won. The ref came over in the middle of the game and nicely told the parents to STFU and let their kids play. It was directed at both teams.
I read an article that said most kids quit sports because of the ride home. Think about that.
My daughter is a big kid and plays aggressively, but clean. Having other kids call her a cunt and threaten to kill her is a reflection of their upbringing. I try to teach her to walk away and recognize this as a sign of her winning.
Stalin almost lost the Great Patriotic War in the 1930ās because he murdered off a lot of good military talent who werenāt perfectly aligned with the party line.
Happens all the time. I coached football and basketball for 8 years at a high school. We lost a really good athlete his junior year who told us it wasnāt fun anymore because of his dad. We talked about it his senior year at graduation and he said he missed certain things about playing but was much happier without it.
His dad was nuts. Went to war at a game with the principal over his sons playing time, got one of our coaches fired. At halftime of the girls game both boys team shoot around. I get a text from a number I donāt know saying about 5 things to tell Jimmy about his shooting form from watching him shoot. Text says make sure you tell him heās not listening to me right now. Asked one of our other coachās and he said thatās Jimmyās dad.
Of course I proceeded to tell the kid not one damn thing about his shot.
Yeah, I went through this when I started umpiring at 13. It got bad, but never this bad.
On the other hand, I was once recruited to ref a soccer game by parents when the actual ref no-showed, because I was āan umpireā. Despite not knowing the rules of the game (duh). I proceedes to tell them, they paid me $50 cash, and then yelled at me the whole game when I didnāt know about any of the rules (except handballs) or stoppage time. LOL.
Strangely years later when I rolled up to the baseball game on my Harley, bearded and longhaired at 250 lbs, I never had any problemsā¦
āThe first is that it is not enough in politics and governance to have truth and facts on your side. Any fair-minded person who has looked at all the available facts about the extradition bill cannot but wonder why there is so much needless controversy over its proposed enactment.ā
Because China kills people and puts their entire family in torture camps if they so much as step out of lineā¦ for starters.
Nah, this doesnāt happen anymore. China is a modern country with a rising middle class and highly reliant on international trade relations. This generation of Chinese will not accept shit like this. What the CCP will do is just send some people to secretly bump them off lol. Maybe put a headline in the papers that the dude and his family bought plane tickets to Brazil or something.
Dead is dead. That sounds like the stereotype of what american parents tell children when a beloved family pet dies: āthey went to live on a farmā.
When the CCP kills someone: āthey bought plain tickets to brazilā.
Love it. Yeah after you knowing him for 6 years we decided while you were asleep to have him live on a farm and make sure to do it before you said goodbye. Also we can never visit the farm heās on.
First, the details matter when youāre dealing with propaganda. Get one part wrong and no one will believe the part thatās right.
Example:
No one was crushed by tanks at Tiananmen. You will not find any evidence nor read any eye witness accounts of this. People saw that video of that one guy challenging a tank and somehow the myth got spread and thatās what people outside China associate the event with. Itās like how Hannibal Lector never said the line āHello Clariceā. The police did, however, fire at the students and killed a lot of them.
Now, when you tell someone like my wife who has been told it was a small, peaceful student protest and The West spread lies and produced fake footage of the event, if you make āstudents crushed by tanksā the main talking point and canāt back it up, she wonāt believe anything else you say despite you having evidence to back the rest up.
Second, it shows society is evolving. Just 15 years ago, the CCP could broadcast videos of arrested protestors seeming to recant their beliefs and swear loyalty to the State which were very fucking obviously DUBBED and people would buy it. No one will buy that shit today.
People actually staked out homes of corrupt officials and uploaded cctv footage of them receiving bribes on the internet after 2010. Everyone I know there has a VPN. They are not that ill-informed and are open to opinions from abroad as long as they donāt think your image of them is that of scared, oppressed people watching everything they say for fear of being taken to labour camps in the middle of the night.
Last, the smart socialists outside China are actually rallying behind Hong Kong hoping to pass the buck of the shit socialism caused to ācommunismā and, now, CAPITALISM. Not joking. The fuckers in Asia are starting to do this. Things like āDeath camps in Chinaā are going to be part of their narrative soon when talking about capitalism. This is why I was making it clear above that China can be a pretty nice place to live in if youāre part of the rising middle class and you donāt care for things like freedom of speech. This was all enabled by capitalism.
