as a side note I once saw the Tour de France go through Carcassonne, which is absolutely the best thing you can do in a town I otherwise thought was horrible

I realise that they don't have the literal natural scenery angle but cricket broadcasters esp (maybe baseball too?) haven't realised that they have a dream second-screen product if they make it aesthetically pleasing to have in the background lol

the long watch point is correct and also entertaining, because cycling has successfully utilised its advantage here; iirc like half of the TdF's massive tv viewership says they just have it on in the background for the scenery

One reason is that people who’ve fled for their lives need security and permanency to rebuild their lives. The last thing they need is unending anxiety about being sent back to what they escaped. This will cause huge stress, damage to mental health, harm to children, difficulties in integrating 3/

there's certainly a romanticisation to that past although I think it's less self-obsessedly Declining than baseball or cricket. perhaps because it's so clearly thriving in Belgium and that's just next door, perhaps because media conglomerates are quite literally invested in it

it's a bit different but there's something interesting with cycling in France and Italy - after all, the professional sport is born as a marriage between mass-media capitalism and modern nationalism (the Tour de France's purpose was to trace the borders of France!)

in both cases it's surely very racialised also

"sports" feels a bit inaccurate - is this a thing outside baseball and its big daddy? (the-week-bookshop.myshopify.com/products/tha...)

this is particularly brutal

we're very proud of our rebels. Boudica v the Romans, Robert Kett v the Tudors, Thomas Paine v monarchism, Orlando Williams v people who said he was operating a restaurant in his home just because you could go to his home, order food from a menu, be served the food, and then pay money for the food

in contemporary history Germany was also substantially more religious than the UK, and I think remains so by some measures. obvs religious practice is sorta all about regular participation in organised group activity, often starting very young, so there's a habit formation thing

generally party infrastructure is much more developed in Germany than it is in the UK, where imo parties still have a lot of vestigial amateurism (literally, not metaphorically) from their origins as social clubs on the margins of horse races. cf their think tanks etc

rewatching bojack horseman rn and he also gets some exquisite deliveries in as woodchuck coodchuck-berkowitz

(even though the blunt certainty "Norwich opposed the slave trade." still amuses me)

obviously that's sort of bound up with the noble lie point too. I am ""proud" that my Norwich Quaker great-great-whatevers were surely involved in abolition campaigning, but I'm also proud that today this pro-social version of history is important in my hometown, bc that says things abt the present

I think it's hard to do on a national level but I guess one justification in my head is "I am from this place, with characteristics XYZ, which also produced person ABC, and that person's achievements are worthwhile, which inspires / justifies me, and it's nice feeling that way"

I believe @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com posted once that it was the only Dylan song she truly liked? which I don't agree with but can understand

And then to compare against other leagues, the closest analogue in recent world football is probably the Leverkusen unbeaten double but they'd been in the Bundesliga since 1980 and reached a Champions League final