Good Title, But One Of The Words Is Wrong

A new book is called Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

Darned close. Darned close. Just change it to How Liberals Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, and you've got an insight that might actually help liberals figure things out.

The Biggest Scam Running

Back from a splendid trip, which included an overnight backpacking trip in the spectacular Wallowa mountains of far eastern Oregon. So, quite refreshingly, I have zero idea of what's been going on in the news. But we'll soon fix that.

Just found some good anti-inflationist writing here.

excerpt:

Not that the good people of the Federal Reserve like inflation. Their stated mission is to "maintain stable prices", stable being defined by Webster's as "not changing or fluctuating."[14] But why would anyone want to create an economic world where prices stay stable? As Benjamin Anderson wrote, "prices have a job to do." Prices are like the road signs we follow when driving in unfamiliar territory. They tell us where to go in terms of production. They come about naturally, they are what they are, and no grandstanding, moralizing, or wailing will change them. Experience has shown us, repeatedly, that to set a price by decree will do no more than cause a scarcity or glut.

Arbitrarily decreeing a price for money and credit is as foolish and destructive as decreeing the price of any product. Playing with prices, especially on such a massive scale as the central planning of short term interest rates entails, is tantamount to tampering with the safety valve on a boiler. Prices and safety valves are there for a reason — we disrespect them at our peril.

Even measuring a "price level" to keep "stable" has proven an impossible task. The inputs are far too numerous to track, and you must subtract all market goods which have joined the dodo bird, then add those which have blossomed anew, while making sure that you properly weight the basket to take into account every human being's ever changing valuations, and then and only then can you go to the econometrician's ball.

That hasn't prevented armies of statisticians from trying, God bless their hearts, but no human being has yet been able to climb that statistical Everest. And due to the endless, ever changing variables, accurately measuring a general level of prices using mathematics is about as likely to come about as measuring how insane a man is by mathematically tracking his various body movements. We are not that smart.[15]

I freely admit I got this belief from a man of far greater reputation than I, John Maynard Keynes. In his opus General Theory he writes of "the well known, but unavoidable, element of vagueness which admittedly attends the concept of the general price level"[16] and therefore any attempt to compare price levels from one period to the next is "unsuitable for differential calculus."[17]

Furthermore, if we would like a stable price level, why then do we cheer and clap over rising productivity numbers? More goods produced by the same amount of input causes a fall in prices. In addition, it frees up capital and labor to produce other useful, heretofore unavailable things for the consumer.[18] It makes your dollar buy more stuff. So everyone is right to cheer for rising productivity. Yet at the same time the same people who are cheering rising productivity are explicitly calling for a monetary policy to "maintain a stable price level" — a policy that, should it succeed to perfection, would destroy the very gains that rising productivity gives to the working masses.

Why on earth would we want to deliberately squander a rising standard of living? No man refuses a raise at his job, yet we cheer on the very men who are deliberately stripping from us the benefits of productivity, God's pay-raise for us mortals. Why do we do this?

The great historian Robert Conquest once wrote, "Reliance on reason alone is irrational. It neglects the instinctual or deep-set elements of the real human being".

So there you have it. We do it because, deep down in our genetics, we're all crazy as loons.

On Vacation

Back Sunday, July 9.

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fur

Well, this just beats all. A blog full of pictures of cats that look like Hitler. H/T Tennapel. Sieg meow!

The Sleeping Giant

Excellent essay speaks eloquently about many things: Wilsonians, Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians, and Jacksonians, as well as what awaits those who go too far in provoking America (and why the Iraq strategy is our way of trying to prevent this).

It's Easy, I Just Wipe Away All The Dust That's Not The Mona Lisa

Via Peeve Farm, some pretty cool "wash me" art.

Supreme Court, Which Part Of "Shut Up, It's None Of Your Business" Do You Not Understand?

I've just read several NRO articles about the Hamdan decision. Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, you guys are high-larious!

This piece has some passages that sum things up nicely:

The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, enacted last December, gives the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., exclusive jurisdiction to review habeas-corpus petitions from the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay. The act also expressly provides that, other than that court, “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider . . . an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . .” Legislative word-smithing does not get much clearer than that. Equally clear is Congress’s authority to restrict the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court; Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution describes that the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is subject to “such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Yet despite this clear mandate from Congress and equally clear constitutional authority for it, Justice Stevens and a majority of the Supreme Court proceeded to hear and consider, and today decided, the application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, currently a resident of Guantanamo Bay and formerly Osama Bin Laden’s driver (allegedly). For Justice Stevens, the law didn’t really mean what it said because Congress did not, in this section of the act, go out of its way to say that it applied to cases already pending, and interpreting the statute as plainly written would, in his view, raise serious constitutional concerns. The lawlessness of the Court’s action is manifest.

This is not the first time in our history when Congress has sought to revoke the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in a certain class of war-related cases. As Justice Scalia correctly noted in dissent, the Civil-War-era Court confronted the issue in Ex Parte McCardle, which involved an act of Congress removing the Court’s appellate jurisdiction over the habeas claim of a convicted war deserter. As here, that case was also pending at the time Congress acted. Indeed, the Supreme Court had already heard oral argument in the case and was already drafting an opinion. Yet that Court, unlike the current one, recognized the constitutional limits on its authority, noting:

Without jurisdiction the Court cannot proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the cause.

In a case which has been reported as the Court’s rebuke to the nation’s commander-in-chief for acting “above the law,” the Court’s own lawlessness should not go unnoticed.

...

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Any sound mind would recognize this infamous “mystery” passage to be gibberish. But five justices on the Supreme Court — Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer — have expounded it (the first three in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and all five in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas) as their license to override, in the name of “substantive due process,” whatever democratic enactments they disfavor.

It should come as no surprise that it was these same five justices in Hamdan who disregarded the fact that Congress, in the Detainee Treatment Act, plainly deprived the Court of jurisdiction in the case and who arrogantly and illegitimately intruded on the president’s conduct of military operations. The Mystery Five have simply practiced once again the utterly lawless willfulness that they have proclaimed to be their mission. And they undoubtedly know that they will receive ample cover, in the form of fawning accolades, from legal academia and the liberal media.

Our country (loosely defined) may well survive these continuing judicial depredations. But our Constitution — and the system of representative government, separated powers, and federalism that it established — won’t.

Update: The American Thinker also has a great piece re:Hamdan.

The Planet's Dullest Major Sport, Again

Another good anti-soccer column.

excerpt:

Even though things had not gone the Americans’ way, I regretted missing those two games. I felt vaguely guilty, in fact, the way Americans are supposed to feel when it is pointed out to them that the rest of the world is in love with soccer and that they are a bunch of parochial, provincial philistines for not getting on board. Flat-earthers (the Friedman kind) tend to despise American football — too violent, militaristic, macho, etc. — and find something sublime in the international version. It is the aesthetically — even morally — superior team sport, and the average American sports fan’s indifference to soccer and the World Cup is just further proof of how unenlightened and boorish he is.

After all, Henry Kissinger is a soccer fan, and that ought to prove something.

Actually, to my thinking, it strengthens the case against soccer. Kissinger, remember, was also a fan of détente with the Soviets, which was the geopolitical equivalent of soccer, with lots of 1-1 games where you had to count on your enemy to score your goals. (The Soviets kicked the winner, for us, in Afghanistan.) Fans of American football prefer the American football approach to foreign policy. You know — long bombs, blitzes, sacks, and the rest of the NFL arsenal, with the result being something like a 51-0 annihilation of the guys in the wrong colored jerseys.

With cheerleaders, of course.

Something came up, again, so I missed the American team’s loss to Ghana. Our boys did score a goal, I learned from the highlights. Or, perhaps, that should be highlight, singular. One goal in three games.

I am one of those baseball fans who likes low scoring pitchers’ duels, but one goal in three full games of soccer … watching that strikes me as something more akin to watching chess. The people who push soccer cite the sport’s non-stop action, and I’ll give them that. But there ought to be a point to all that action. Sports are often described in martial locutions, and the ones that come to mind for soccer are “stalemate” and “trench warfare.” Who wants to watch the Brits and the Germans go at it again, the same way they did outside of Ypres?

Speaking of which, for a sport that is supposed to inspire the universalist in one’s breast, soccer certainly seems to stir up the old, primitive, nationalist juices. As an American, I like for my rivalries to resemble a clan feud rather than a struggle between sovereign states. There is more humor and fellow feeling between the Hatfields and McCoys than the Germans and the Poles. So give me an Alabama/Auburn football game any time. After the game, the drunks are much nicer.

Fans at American sporting events will, from time to time, get out of hand in their enthusiasm. They will tear down goalposts after a big college game or burn up some cars in Detroit when the Pistons win an NBA championship. But these things seem trivial compared to the kind of riots and street thuggery that often follow when soccer emotions reach a boil. The cops have busted hundreds of rioters during the World Cup matches this time around, but so far nobody has been killed, which has been known to happen. And fans have not been the only victims. Back in 1994, playing against the Americans, a Colombian goaltender unwisely deflected the ball into his own net. (Shades of the Italians against the U.S. in 2006.) The Colombian team went on to lose, 2-1, and was eliminated from the tournament. A few days later, the goalie was shot, 12 times, as he left a nightclub. The shooter is reported to have shouted “goal,” each time he fired.

Scott Norwood’s last-second kick sailed wide-right against the Giants in the Buffalo Bill’s first of four Super Bowl losses. Yet Norwood is still with us and still appears in public. So much for the way American football provokes violence.

Now If, Say, They'd Knocked Down Two Of Our Biggest Skyscrapers With Hijacked Airliners, Well, That Would Be A Totally Different Thing!

Unbelievable:

Can This Guy Count to 11?

Writing on the Puffington Host, Philip Slater, who in 1982 "was chosen by MS. Magazine as one of its 'male heroes,' " says war is bad, and America is extra bad for waging it:

Perhaps the reason Americans seem so comfortable about bombing and invading little countries around the world is that the United States, unlike Europe, has never experienced "collateral damage". If we had ever been bombed and invaded ourselves, had our infrastructure demolished, been subject to foreign soldiers breaking into our homes at night, seen our children slaughtered and our houses destroyed, we would be, I suspect, less gung-ho about war and less cavalier about inflicting these horrors on other people.

If you take this guy at his word, he actually has never heard of Sept. 11.

Co-option. Is There Anything It Can't Do?

From Uncommon Descent:

Over at evolutionnews.org (http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/06/whats_up_with_ronald_numbers_a_2.html) Casey Luskin comments on an article coauthored by Ronald Numbers for the Journal of Clinical Investigation (”Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action”).

In this article we once again hear the bogus co-option argument as a proposed refutation of irreducible complexity: “…Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity argument ignores exaptation (co-option)…”

This claim of the refutation of IC by co-option is so ubiquitous that some people are actually starting to believe it. I therefore feel that it is my civic duty to refute this “refutation” of IC, which turns out to be a trivial exercise.

1) In order for co-option to produce a bacterial flagellum (for example) all of the component parts must have been present at the same time and in roughly the same place, and all of them must have had other naturally-selectable, useful functions. There is no evidence whatsoever that this ever was the case, or that it ever even could have been the case.

2) The components would have to have been compatible with each other functionally. A bolt that is too large, too small, or that has threads that are too fine or too coarse to match those of a nut, cannot be combined with the nut to make a fastener. There is absolutely no evidence that this interface compatibility ever existed (between all those imaginary co-opted component parts), or that it even could have existed.

3) Even if all the parts are available at the same time and in the same place, and are functionally compatible, one can’t just put them in a bag, shake them up, and have a motor fall out. An assembly mechanism is required, and that mechanism must be complete in every detail, otherwise incomplete or improper assembly will result, and no naturally-selectable function will be produced. The assembly mechanism thus represents yet another irreducibly complex hurdle.

4) Last, and perhaps most importantly, assembly instructions are required. Assembly must be timed and coordinated properly. And the assembly instructions must be complete in every detail, otherwise no function will result. This represents an additional irreducibly complex hurdle.

Co-option is a demonstrably fantastic story made up out of whole cloth, with absolutely no basis in evidence. And it doesn’t withstand even the most trivial analytical scrutiny. There is not a shred of evidence that this process ever took place, or that it even could have taken place. Worst of all, it requires blind acceptance of the clearly miraculous.

There is a great irony here. This verifiably ridiculous co-option fantasy is presented as “science,” while a straightforward and reasonable inference to design is labeled pseudoscience. The real state of affairs is precisely the reverse.

The poor Darwinists lack engineering training and are, hence, quite ill-equipped to see these obvious problems. As the first comment to the post says:

I’ve always thought it would be worthwhile for biologists (or biology students) to have some sort of engineering apprenticeship. By spending time with a design engineer (be it software, mechanical, electrical, or any other discipline), they would see first hand just what it takes to end up with a tightly integrated, functional system on the back end.

It still astonishes me how so many in the origins community are so sloppy with their thinking regarding co-option. I particularly like your point about assembly mechanisms and instructions. I’ve commented before that Darwinians seem to be satisfied with a parts list (hypothetical at that), never paying mind to the arguably more important step of assembly - spatially and temporally [shut up, theocrat!].

Uhhh, What You Did Is Nothing To Boast About, Dear

Via Mark Shea, a sensitively written NPR-esque tale of a mercy killing committed by a well known author.

A 19th Century-Style Literary Fisking

This is great. Mark Shea has a couple of background posts that set the stage.

Update: A new installment of the saga can be found here.

Duh

Can you spot the stoopid statement in the following (from James Taranto's column)?

Weighing in against the proposed amendment, in an op-ed for the Charlotte Observer, is Dr. Susan Roberts:

Flag burning was thrust into the public eye following an arrest of a young man during the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. The man identified himself as a member of a group calling itself the Revolutionary Youth Brigade. He was charged with a violation of the Texas Desecration of Venerated Objects statute.

In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed an appellate court decision that the man was within his First Amendment rights. Wasting no time, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act just months after the ruling. Wasting no time, the Supreme Court ruled that the Flag Protection Act was inconsistent with First Amendment freedoms and thus unconstitutional.

It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court would now uphold an amendment prohibiting flag burning, even with the change in the court's composition.

I hope you can spot it.

Says Taranto:

It may seem unlikely that the Supreme Court would uphold a statute prohibiting flag burning (and indeed, in 1990's U.S. v. Eichman it overturned the federal Flag Protection Act of 1989). That's why Congress is considering a constitutional amendment, which the court couldn't overturn.

It's embarrassing enough that Dr. Roberts's error got past the editors of the Observer, but it's even worse that she made such a goof in the first place. For she is not a real doctor but a professor of political science, at North Carolina's Davidson College, where she teaches such courses as The Legislative Process (POL 211) and The Politics of Feminism (POL 215).

It is troubling indeed to think that the political scientists of tomorrow are being taught by people who lack basic knowledge about the workings of American government.

Political Dynamics

Interesting analysis by Bruce Bartlett, which looks at why the party in power seems to lose its principles while the party out of power turns into lunatics.

Gravitas Rematch

Stephen Colbert vs Stone Phillips. Quite amusing.

Dance This Mess Around

Another guy named Matt has done something kind of interesting and endearing. H/T Right Wing News.

The Only Sacred Thing On This Planet Is The Press

An outstanding Andrew McCarthy piece on the treason of the NYT. Too much to excerpt, a great piece of writing.

Another great piece of writing is this Lileks screed re: the inspiring Democrat message.

Sweet Surrender

Good retrospective on the glory that is Democratic Party foreign policy.

excerpts:

This rather effete (and eerily French) inclination to seek defeat has a rich history in the Democratic party, going back at least to the Kennedy administration. Despite sweeping declarations about paying any price, etc., for the success of liberty, Kennedy’s foreign policy was actually based on the notion that war most often results from miscommunication. That, apparently, was his thinking when he reassured the Soviets that we would not attack if they raised a wall in Berlin. (They didn’t know that before, which is why they hadn’t built it). The predictable result, a few months later, was the Berlin Wall, which saved the Communist regime of East Germany from death-by-mass-emigration.

What is harder to divine is what Kennedy might have been thinking when he waited until the Bay of Pigs invasion was underway before deciding to pull American air and logistical support. Thousands of Cuban exiles, who were in fact willing to pay any price for the success of liberty, threw their lives away on the beach or rotted in jail for decades.

And then, of course, we have the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was caused most fundamentally by Khrushchev’s desire to see if there was any limit to Kennedy’s submissiveness. (Fortunately, there was a limit to the Pentagon’s.)

The roots of the Democratic defeat-fetish grew deeper in the weary Johnson years, during which nearly a million American boys were sent to the other side of the world by a president who was driven there almost purely by domestic politics and who appears never to have worked up any real resolve to win. By the time 1968 rolled around, Johnson himself gave up, and withdrew from the reelection battle.

Nixon and Kissinger came to office convinced that Vietnam was unwinnable (which, by that point, may have been true) and that the key thing was to surrender without appearing to have done so. They started negotiating with everyone — the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Russians — to try to triangulate a settlement that would bring “peace with honor.” For most Democrats, there was no reason to sugar-coat it — surrender tasted just fine by itself. They put enormous pressure on the administration to withdraw, with or without concessions from Hanoi. In diplomacy, this is called a unilateral concession; in strategy, we use a different term: Surrender.

...

The basic message of the Carter presidency was that America is on the decline, and we have to accept it. Though the Carter years are really too depressing to think about, I recently came across an interesting and telling anecdote: The Delta Force units that took part in the disastrous Desert One operation were under orders not to use lethal force if they got as far as the embassy in Tehran and encountered a hostile crowd. (As Mark Bowden revealed, they had little intention of following these ridiculous instructions).

...

The greatest of Clinton’s achievements in the realm of defeat-fetish was his response to al Qaeda’s declaration of war on the United States. After our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were destroyed, Clinton valiantly lobbed scores of cruise missiles at a milk factory in the Sudan and several empty campsites in Afghanistan. The only effect on Osama bin Laden, besides giving him a reason to laugh at us, was to convince him that we were weak and would quickly accept defeat if we were hit hard enough.

And now, with the Iraq war, the Democrats are at it again. Their comparison of Iraq to Vietnam is, to say the least, a stretch. The insurgency in Iraq has failed to achieve a national geographic scope; it has no foreign countries supporting it; it has no political program that anyone can understand; and it does not even have the scant military effectiveness of the Viet Cong. But there is one striking parallel with Vietnam: The Democratic party is once again mired in a race-to-the-bottom debate about how best to make America surrender.

As events in the Senate showed last week, there is diversity of opinion among Democrats on that issue; victory, on the other hand, has almost no support within the party. Senators Clinton and Lieberman, among the only Democratic politicians who think that victory is both possible and necessary, routinely get booed at public functions when they even mention the dreaded “v” word.

The basic problem for the Democrats is that Americans are not instinctive losers. And because the Democratic base is split between moderates who want to surrender in Iraq, and liberals who want to surrender generally, they can’t exploit the biggest vulnerability Republicans have, which is, of course, the war. Any time the Democrats are forced to take a position on the war, they alienate a part of their base, and embarrass themselves in the process. This is why last week’s defeat of the two surrender declarations in the Senate is such good news for Republicans; the Democrats appear to have made surrender the essential theme of their political platform. As a result, they may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory come November.

Golden Retrievers And Train Schedules

From Bill Bonner, one of my favorite (and the most poetic) financial writers:

A large headline in the Financial Times proclaims: "Global economy heads towards a soft landing."

It is a marvelous line, made unwittingly more poignant for being placed over a photo of an addled-looking Noel Forgeard and an Airbus 320. Neither Airbus nor Forgeard managed a soft landing last week. Both crashed...the former because it couldn't deliver the planes it promised and the latter because he sold shares in advance of a profit warning that sent the aforementioned stock down like a kamikaze pilot. Five billion dollars was wiped off of Airbuses' capitalization. Good timing on Forgeard's part.

What the article itself was concerned with was not the sudden crash of Airbus, but the gentle descent of the entire world economy. How do we know it will land softly? Two hundred and forty economists have said so.

"Economic growth is set to slow this year and next amid rising interest rates, weaker house prices, high commodity and energy prices and fresh geopolitical tensions," the FT summarizes. "The global liquidity bubble, which propped up global growth for so long, is now being pricked by central banks desperate to stem surging consumer price inflation."

Here we watch the markets, too, and even more, the market commentary.

Ms. Market, we have found, is like a woman – coy, changeable and contemptuous of our efforts to understand her. Will she be perky and charming today? Or will she be sulky and distant? What is bothering her now? Oh my, my...she seems frisky today, doesn't she? We will never fathom what moves her; we might as well be a golden retriever trying to decipher the Tokyo train schedules.

But market commentary is another thing altogether. It is more masculine, which is to say it is more logical, more understandable, more reliable, and more thoroughly imbecilic. Just read the papers. You will find analyses there that even a 10-year-old could grasp. Are they correct? No more correct than a man trying to dope out his mistress's moods. Are they useful? Yes, of course. Mainly because they are almost always wrong.

Commentators, it seems, are from Mars. Markets are from Venus.

And like Mars and Venus, they move in separate orbits.

We say that, mind you, in earnest admiration. Not of the financial media nor of the pundits, but of the elegant way in which the world is designed to deceive the mass of men. In order for the markets to function as they do, most investors must be wrong most of the time. Otherwise, they would look ahead and thwart the trend. A developing bull market requires that most people distrust it. Otherwise, they would jump in right away and bring the whole thing to a premature conclusion. Likewise, a market peak needs a preponderance of bullish investors at the very moment when bullishness is the most unprofitable sentiment one could have.

The financial media, amplifying popular sentiments rather than filtering them, helps investors arrive where they shouldn't be exactly when they most shouldn't be there.

As near as we can tell, the league of extraordinary economists is right so far. They have only to look out the window; the sky is so dark with inflation hawks, it looks like a scene out of "The Birds." German producer prices are rising at the fastest rate in 24 years, we learn from yesterday's press. The European Central Bank is tightening up to fight it. In Japan, the ZIRP – or zero interest rate policy – is set to end "without delay," says the country's top central banker. China, meanwhile, has begun taking liquidity out of the market as quickly as its own central bankers can manage. And, in America, a further rate increase next week is said to be a "done deal," with another one now expected in August.

"By curtailing the rate of growth of liquidity and making it more expensive for companies or individuals to borrow," the FT continues, "central banks are hitting share prices, bond markets, commodity and precious metal prices as well as the international housing market."

Again, we see nothing to argue with. We have seen what has happened in the financial markets. Houses are not marked to market the way copper and Airbus shares are. If they were, we suspect we'd see a decline there, too.

No, it is not the landing we doubt. That is a known and well-reported fact. It's the qualifier "soft" that we wonder about. How do 240 economists know we will have a landing that is soft rather than hard? How do they know what mood Ms. Market will be in tomorrow or the day after? How does a Martian understand what a Venusian is up to?

They don't. They have no more idea than we do. But their unanimity gives us a clue about where the money will be made. With so many people betting on a soft landing, the long odds on a hard one are bound to be attractive.

The World's Cup Of Tea Definitely Ain't My Cup Of Tea

When I hear or read that the U.S. is not held in high esteem by world opinion, I often think to myself, "Yeah. And soccer is held in high esteem by world opinion. So do you have a point?"

The American Thinker has a nicely written anti-soccer essay.

excerpts:

Despite decades of strenuous efforts to promote soccer to American youth and sports fans, and despite the phenomenal success of the American women’s soccer team in international competition, soccer remains the neglected stepchild of the American sports scene. Indeed, when the American men’s team was bounced in the first round of the World Cup this week, the response from the nation at large was a great big yawn. Compare this to the black cloud that descended over the country when the American men’s basketball team failed to win the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics.

So why don’t Americans like soccer? There appear to be two basic explanations. The first is that the “marketplace” for sports in this country already is filled with baseball, football, basketball, and (to a much lesser degree) hockey, leaving no room for soccer to grow in popularity.

...

I’m not convinced. Marketplaces are inherently dynamic. If soccer were a worthy object of the American sports fan’s interest, then it would enjoy greater popularity. But it doesn’t. Which brings me to the second common explanation for its lack of popularity: soccer is boring. As a blogger vividly explained only a few days ago:

The first round [of this year’s World Cup] isn’t even over yet, and there have already been five 0-0 draws. Five matches in which nobody scored. In the Argentina-Netherlands match, there were a total of six shots on goal in the match (three a side). For those keeping score at home, that’s one shot on goal every fifteen minutes (and that’s only if you ignore “stoppage time”). There were nineteen total shots taken, if you include the thirteen that weren’t on goal. So barely over one shot every five minutes, on average. When Americans complain that “nothing happens” in a soccer match, this is exactly what we’re talking about.

While I’m on this rant, there were six 1-0 matches, three 1:1 draws (nine total draws), and fourteen other shutouts (twenty total shutouts if you count the 1-0 matches). So out of forty matches played, in 25 of them, at least one team failed to score at all. That’s a staggering 62.5%! (By way of comparison, there were fifteen baseball games today, and two of them were shutouts; in all but 13.3% of the games, fans of either team had at least something to cheer for; and baseball isn’t exactly known for being the most exciting sport in the world…)

In my opinion, a lack of scoring is not merely an incidental aspect of the game of soccer—it is its essence. That is, the ultimate purpose of soccer is to engage in lots of furious activity to accomplish . . . absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, when that elusive goal is scored (if it is scored), ear-shattering howls of euphoria erupt from players, announcers, and spectators alike, as if their very souls were being released from the depths of hell.

Goals are indeed a rare commodity in soccer, so much so that soccer is, essentially, a zero sum game. The “pie” of goals not only is meager, it never grows. So it is fought over with an intensity that is almost never found in American sports [reminds me of the quip about academia: the infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low]. This isn’t boring, but it is deeply unsatisfying to Americans.

My theory is that Americans have neither the belief system nor the temperment for such a sisyphean sport as soccer.

...

That soccer may be “the most popular sport in the world” speaks volumes—but not about America’s lack of sporting knowledge or sophistication, as soccer aficionados like to argue. Rather, I think it reflects the static, crimped, and defeatest attitudes held by so many of the other peoples on earth.

The day that soccer becomes one of the most popular sports in the United States is the day that American exceptionalism diminishes in our souls.