I hope this posts before August 17, the first day of games for Premier League this coming season, but I don’t really expect to persuade anyone to become a fan of fútbol either way. This new passion of mine won’t get your PROM to stop flashing noon or nudge your sear into full auto, but it has much to recommend it.
OG = 1862
I didn’t grow up playing either football; I was at least 14 before I ever saw a football that wasn’t pointy on the ends. I was terrible at sports, did the outdoorsy thing mostly, and watched baseball as my high-minded sport; indeed, I carded out baseball games old school, usually over 100 a year Saint Louis Cardinals games a year: I loved the old game, the subtle challenges of managing the flow of the great pastoral pastime, and I loved the actual scoring, the recording of the game with its double ledger approach, reconciliations, and nomenclature.
Then I lost my two big sports: the lovely little tensions that made the games worthwhile were designed out of the sports to curry favor with the majority of unwashed Americans who do not enjoy subtlety or thinking, and I simply lost any interest in the cadavers of baseball and SEC football that resulted. It’s too much to go into, but I’ll just say that baseball’s bringing the designated hitter into the game destroyed for me a full half of the intellectual nuance of the game. As for college football, fifth and sixth-year seniors, transfer portals, and professional players destroyed any illusion I had that the game had anything to do with student-athletes, tradition, or love of school; it wasn’t for alma mater. At long last it wasn’t fun anymore, and I needed something straightforward, with unperturbed balance and without contrivance.
Enter the other football, or fútbol as I tend to write it. I’ve worked for several European companies, known a lot of Latinos, and lived in the fancy suburbs, so I had already come to understand that the largest part of the western world thinks fútbol is a big deal; I thought I’d try it.
I did NOT get invited to this party
Indeed, there were some really special times when I was flattered to be invited to World Cup watch parties: my colleagues working ex patriate gathered around the television at 2 in the morning to watch their home national team; the food and the chat were all foreign to me, a regular fact of my professional life, but the hopeful and mild nationalism were a new and special side to these people I never saw at work: Germans in particular might directly reject many popular American notions and structures, but they would never assert that their own country and culture are superior to others’….at least not on the job. I felt welcome, and I enjoyed their gentle energy.
I had also seen fútbol at work: for direct labor, the French firm I worked for set up a television in the break room to play important Mexico matches; most of operations came in an hour early so they could watch the game together over lunch.
Who to watch for me, then? NewWife’s best friend from grad school is a Liverpool fan; so is a golf buddy of mine who grew up in Belfast and who took the ferries to the games for decades. They explained that there were great, storied clubs in the leagues of Spain, Germany, Netherlands, and Italy, but English Premier League had two or three times the depth; Mexican ball was relatively meager, and American teams were unwatchable.
So I’ll watch Premier League…record it on Peacock for the most part and then watch it after my Saturday morning round of golf. Which team? Well, as Neph says, sports is the only place where nationalism is allowed, so my King James heart wanted to support the team seated farthest from Buckingham…which turned out to be Newcastle. Okay, says I, knowing nothing other than there flows the Tyne and it’s famously Geordie…which doesn’t bother me since my people hid out the entire Revolution in the hills because America was a sweet sweet deal compared to Ulster and we didn’t understand what the fuss in Boston was all about.
Well, after three years, I’m addicted; I’m spending less time watching sports and enjoying it more. It’s a great game, utterly watchable, with so many things about it I really like, and here I’ll switch from American to British in my descriptions: I’m almost another person when I think about fútbol.
The language is fabulous: they play on a pitch; goals are conceded by the offended team and are allowed or disallowed by the referee. The teams are sides; their rosters are squads; games are fixtures. My favorite color commentors are Irish: their passionate lilts are very familiar and comforting. Only about a third of the players are English; some more are Scottish or Welsh. The other half is dominated by the usual suspects: Brasil, France, Argentina, Italy, Spain, Portugal.
The second-best thing about the game is it’s so casual and uncomplicated. Eleven play at a time, but fakirs diving to draw penalties for ostensible but actually absent penalties routinely take the active complement down to ten if not nine. It’s like pickup basketball in this wise: they’re not ticky about things; what is in bounds or out is indeed delineated by the ball’s being completely outside a line, but the players play fluidly, the game rolls, and play is seldom stopped for a referee to over-rule who has possession or whether a kick came from a properly placed ball.
The best thing about the game is the eternal fear of relegation. The national leagues are composed of tiers with the worst three teams at every level being sent down a notch after every season; a complementary three are promoted from below, and then the next season they all give it another go. For example, Wrexham are a third-tier team this coming season after recent promotion; yes, that is to say, all the HBO and hubbub had been about Americans owning a fourth-tier team.
The English tiers are redundantly and ridiculously named:
- Premier League: tippy top heavyweights of the world, ready to fight Napoleon or the Boxers, apparently
- English Football League Championship: or just good old “the Championship”
- English Football League One: tedious, ain’t it?
- English Football League Two: yes, the fourth tier is League Two
The game evolved to keep cricket players in shape over the winter, so the season is long but generally not the heart of summer. Every team plays every other team twice, so once home and once away, and that’s it: no championship. Wins are three points, draws are one; seasonal ties are decided by points scored. 20 teams means 38 games, one each week; a season is usually won with about 90 points.
Time is kept on the field with somewhere between three and eight minutes added at the end of the halves to compensate for stoppage, but it’s highly discretionary, and it’s obvious that the whistle is often blown out of a sense of fairness or we’ve-had-enough rather than the actual passing of the sixtieth second of some final minute.
Five players may be substituted across three windows, never more than three at a time; half-time subs don’t count as a window. That’s pretty much the only rule I’ve noticed.
It’s a lot like hockey in that space and possession are at a premium and that the goalies are usually a half bubble or so out of psychological plumb. The highest recent form owes to a school of play perfected by Ajax in Netherlands, but I’m not the guy to define or report the history of tactics; I would just say that more and shorter passes are the mark of the best teams.
Newcastle are the Magpies. When I chose them I knew nothing about them; turns out they were on the verge of relegation when I started watching, but an infusion of Saudi sovereign cash turned everything around. In the second year I watched, they finished in the top four, an incredible rebound.
The teams perform in a narrow range, but the big boys are paying more and getting more.
I plotted this out to show that the past season was very much bought and paid for:
Which brings us to the last delightful thing about the sport. Teams play in their leagues, but they play in other leagues and for other cups all the while! So, during the season, you’re watching several weeks of Premier League going along, and then they take a break to play in, say, FA Cup. FA Cup, the national championship of England, is a playoff of around a hundred teams that basically any side can participate in. The great thing about FA Cup is that some second- (or even third-) tier team will somehow survive deep into the bracket dealing the occasional defeat of some heavyweight; it’s the world for their fans, the chance of a lifetime.
So a couple of rounds of FA Cup are played, then several weeks of Premier League are played, and then, suddenly, it’s time for Champions League break. The best four teams from last year’s top European leagues play an elimination bracket to say who is the best of the best. A different drama takes over: the coaches must decide which games are most important, which players to play and which to rest this round or that, whether it is better to stay in contention in Premier League or go all-out to win Champions League. The tradeoffs and the results decide careers; a failed season at home can be entirely offset by success in FA Cup.
Then you go back to several weeks of Premier League play again. After that is decided, there are regional competitions by nation, so you get to see, say, all of Brasil’s best, normally antagonists in PL, play together for the Copa America; Spain’s elite are formidable in Euro Cup.
Then under-23 versions of national teams play in the Olympics. Anyone can play in World Cup. So many versions of passion play out in the various competitions; the individual stories have so many sides, and so the players come to mean a lot more than they would otherwise.
For a recovering baseball guy, the traditions of fútbol ring true. The product is transparent; the games are nearly impossible to rig. Everyone is young and thin and beautiful; it’s a delight, and I recommend it highly.
Of course we newer fans never debate the wisdom of the last change to the offside rule (which obliterated the position of one of the greatest players of all time, Franz Beckenbauer).
What was that change?
Two defending players between the offensive player (receiving the ball) instead of the one it is now. Beckenbauer was a sweeper, the last line of defense behind the backline (which is now the last line of defense).
I hate how VAR has become the arbiter of this – instead of what was intended which was to over-rule clearly wrong cases. Now the game stops while the video review takes place. The Norwegian fans I think have been protesting this pretty vigorously, and they are right – it needs to change.
oh shit. I’ve been watching it wrong.
Does this apply to all soccer?
Shit – two defending players *and* the GK. Now it is just the last defender (and being even with, or on the midfield side of him) and the GK.
@JI, “I hate how VAR has become the arbiter of this”
“Look, a tiny sliver of the attacking player’s knee is in front of the defender so it’s offside.”
a tiny sliver of the attacking player’s knee
Or a toe. If it’s that close that you can’t decide without the benefit of video-geometric micrometers – then just go with it as onside, or go back to making the linesman make the call (and only reviewing/over-turning the EGREGIOUSLY wrong decisions).
Yeah, don’t get me started with VAR. The more it’s used the more I hate it.
I wish it would go away. I would trade the occasional mistake for better game flow.
The goalkeeper actually has no special status with the offside rule. It’s behind the last two defenders (or the ball), period. Normally the goalkeeper is the last one of those, but in weird situations he winds up not being one.
In fact they used such a weird situation in the series finale of Ted Lasso. If the goalkeeper rushes out to get the ball and doesn’t get it, you could wind up in a situation where a defender is behind the goalkeeper. They used such a weird situation in the series so that when the other team scored a soul crushing goal, ironically Ted was the only one who realized the goal was offside (the player who scored was in front of the last defender when he received the ball, but was behind the goalkeeper who had rushed out) and the team was still in the game. VAR wound up overturning the goal.
While the idea of relegation and promotion is very intriguing to me. I can’t get over the flopping and the (seemingly) arbitrariness of “extra time” at the end of the game.
The latter part is especially annoying when studies of the game have determined that the teams in the lead almost always (successfully) waste time.
It smacks of hidden trackable information, which is a contentious argument in the board game world for players. There’s no way for fans watching to know if the ref is doing it right or playing favorites. Considering how much arguing gets done when there’s video review and fans watching, I can’t imagine everyone just shrugs and agrees that the ref got it right each time.
Like the flop, the extra-time is an element that the fans expect to add to the excitement, even if they don’t like it or groan at it.
There’s flopping in every contact sport, but Brazilian soccer players are particularly egregious about it.
I thought there was less friction on Brazilian playing areas?
Oh, I’m aware. I personally want miming for a flag to be thrown be a player on the field in football to be a penalty.
I do think that soccer is no longer the king of flopping though, I think that has been fully taken over by the NBA.
“baseball’s bringing the designated hitter into the game destroyed for me a full half of the intellectual nuance of the game.” Amen.
Except for the World Cup or the European Championship (or whatever it’s called), I just can’t get into soccer. Like hockey, I can see the excitement, but I didn’t grow up with it. I just can’t see rooting for some team that’s in a city in an entirely different country. That said, soccer is a better experience in person. The atmosphere of the crowd, sans hooligans, is great and you can see the entire field and how the players are positioning themselves, the games within the games.
I played for many years – and would again – but I have never been able to watch soccer.
Hockey is still nearly watchable, despite the best efforts of the league and the officials.
I’ve really upped my hockey watching over the last few years. Even listening to a hockey podcast now.
My only complaint is, like baseball, there are too many games in the regular season.
I agree with too many games.
A good play-by-play announcer makes the difference. The LA Kings do simulcast for TV and radio and the play-by-play is called like you are listening to the radio. Makes it great if you can’t just sit by the TV.
As much as I love hockey, I agree there are too many regular season games. And WAY too many playoff games.
Concur on the ridiculously long schedule and how many teams make the playoffs.
MN has been lucky – our writers and broadcasters are excellent.
I find golf to be about the only watchable sport left. I prefer LIV to PGA but will watch either if I have time.
I’ll watch rugby (the real game, not 7’s) if it’s on, but that’s rare.
I enjoy watching rugby, but I’ll be damned if I understand the rules. Whistle blown, oh, okay, somebody did something wrong.
I pretty much like all sports watching. Natural human drama. But ice hockey is the most fun to watch for me.
I don’t really expect to persuade anyone to become a fan of fútbol either way
Fucking one of the captains of my college’s women’s soccer team on a regular basis wasn’t even enough to get me to watch the games.
I didn’t know your are a lesbian.
It was just a college phase!
Who said anything about watching women’s sports?
I’ll watch rugby (the real game, not 7’s) if it’s on, but that’s rare.
Oh, come on. Speed rugby is awesome.
Seconded. I like the speed of 7’s
7s is what we did in practice when we didn’t have 2 full squads to scrimmage. Hate because all the scrum play is gone.
Watching: Baseball. Golf. <—-good for naps
Playing: Baseball, football, basketball
I dont care for commieball. I dont really care for any furren games. I never kept up much with The Who's, rankings, players and scores. Since the age of woke I haven't watched anything at all I dont think.
Golf, you say? Yes, golf. I am old and American so get off of my damned lawn. And dont tell me about the Scots, I dont want to hear it.
I asked an English buddy once if he could explain Cricket to me. "No, and neither can anyone else."
Incidentally it was the same guy who, when I asked what happened to the empire, said "You'll see."
He was right on both counts.
I spent an afternoon in a bar in Budapest with a bunch of people from Commonwealth countries watching cricket. They tried explaining the game but even with copious amounts of alcohol I didn’t understand it. We Americans got so hammered that we accidentally walked out on our tab to go eat dinner. When we finally were a little less drunk we realized what we had done and we sheepishly returned to the bar to pay up. Good times.
I do not watch sports anymore.
A golf is one of the few sports left that I can play.
Yes, all the shit indirectly associated with them wrecked them for me.
Any interest I had in soccer was quickly killed by being forced to play it in gym by all my European immigrant teachers at my high school.
That said my interest is higher than basketball. And that’s probably because that was “the” sport at my high school.
I just don’t care for any of the games that are just continuous, they might be fun to play (well, if I can’t hit anyone I personally don’t think it would be fun) the strategy seems lacking for my intellectual pursuit. Sure the coach might have some strategy, but once the ball is in play it’s just players reacting for 10-20 minutes until a time out is called.
One of the things I really enjoyed on the Amazon Prime Thursday night football broadcasts (before they got rid of this feature) was the pro scouts audio stream. They would walk through the strategy being used by the coaches, comment on the decisions and actions of the players, and focus on showing why this O-Line/D-Line guy did what he did and why it did/didn’t work.
back in the day when I watched football I never thought about it in the way of actual schemes or plays like I do for basketball. Maybe the coaches have them I dunno maybe there is a football to horns or staggered screens or pick and rolls.
Basketball is just one very tall dude with very long legs carrying the ball 3 steps down the court, basket, give to other team, repeat other way, back and forth.
Maybe the coaches have them I dunno maybe there is a football to horns or staggered screens or pick and rolls.
It’s 10x whats in basketball. Basketball is much more amenable to improv than football.
Basketball is just…
The NBA is unwatchable because:
1) the rules have been adjusted to be too offensively focused
2) the rules that are left to keep the balance (traveling et al) are ignored
3)they’ve outgrown the court
4)the teams have adjusted to the rules by building offensively focused teams and ignoring defense
5)nobody is relatable anymore, so it’s really hard to find somebody to root for
I watch college basketball here or there, but I’ve maybe watched 2 or 3 NBA games since 2004.
My favorite has always been basketball, which followed from Dad had been a good player–>I enjoyed it and got to be ok myself–>I moved to a team headed toward dynasty status.
What makes that last step relevant is I bought season tickets before the bandwagon formed. So I saw the best player in the world (at that time) live about 400 times at a cheap price. If I had been following a different sport under those circumstances that other sport may have stuck with me.
For the summer I would (and still do) play and watch golf but needed added content. Along came the 1992 Olympic Triplecast. I had bought that to see the Dream Team’s games, and one of the other channels was essentially all track & field.
That sport really appealed to the data nerd I was, so even though I never liked to run I found jumping & throwing fine, and I don’t mind watching other people run.
I found an additional benefit to following track every year rather than just every four…I can ignore NBC giving backstories on who’s overcome the most to be there, as that’s already known to the hardcore fans.
How I lost trust in scientists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMOjD_Lt8qY
Sabine
except climate science still all in in that one.
Well, she doesn’t want to be imprisoned so what do you expect her to say?
You can safely ignore.
I posted before getting to the half way point.
Global warming is the most sinister kind of dishonesty. Climate is not stable. It changes on regular cycles driven by the cyclical weather of the sun. We are now exactly where we should expect to be given the history of those cycles as we know them. This is easy to show.
Because of ignorance and people’s gauging things instinctively based on their own perceptions of scale and time it is easy to get them to see any deviation of the climate within their lifetimes as potentially catastrophic. Creating a sense of impending doom is the foundation of all scams. It is rooted in our natural fear of death. Back off a bit, dispense with your fears and here is what it looks like: We are exactly where we should expect to be on the tail end of an ice age. The climate is warming and a safe bet is that in 3-5K years the earth’s surface will be ice-free for a few thousand years. It will then abruptly enter another cooling period so that around 20-40K years from today there will be miles-thick ice sheets around the poles and well into the temperate zones. Rinse and repeat…at least until we better understand the sun. Having greater knowledge of the sun may alter our understanding of climate cycles on earth, but for now what I describe is the best we have got. Political and economic activities, sacrificing virgins, magic spells, none of the scam artist’s preferred courses of action will have any effect on climate whatsoever.
Most really sinister deceptions are rooted superficially in some basic truth but stray wildly from the logical course and always end in the same place – get out your fucking wallet and bend the knee.
Same is true for the greenie scams, which I will be happy to dissect later. Right now I need another cup of tea.
Global Warming is the ultimate big government issue. It can never be fixed, but will require endless amounts of money and power.
Drake: I remember a Magnum PI episode where a soviet female athlete wanted to defect. Magnum and Higgins took her under their wing. In one scene Higgins tries to distract her Soviet minder by pretending to be interested in socialism and chatting him up with questions about the communist narrative. The Soviet minder was obviously annoyed and thought all of the talking points were complete bullshit, so much so that he barely knew what Higgins was talking about.
I predict that at some point in the not so near future the watermelons will drop the facade and with enough power not bother learning their own narrative. Their argument will be ‘Fuck you, do as you are told or else’.
Football … tl;dr
Newcastle is a great team to root for – very good but not too good. Not always in the top flight either but IIRC they are doing good again.
I am a Liverpool fan but Newcastle is another team I root for. Also Nottingham Forest. Don’t really give a toss about any of the other English teams.
I find baseball best enjoyed on the radio while puttering around my garage.
I’ve got way too many memories tied up with the old broadcasters to deal with the new ones.
RIP Peter Marshall
“Born: Ralph Pierre LaCock”
I would have stuck with my real name.
It’s not as good as ‘Dr. August Balls, from Nice but yeah, I would have kept my real name too.
He’s been R’ing IP for many years now.
And Greg Kihn.
Sigh, you’re missing a team in your points earned by salary graph.
For weird unexplained reasons back in the day when I watched the Footballs I was rooting for Spurs in Old Blighty
Barca and Milan in other leagues.
Romania never registered but probably Steaua.
Nominally a Spurs fan.
My wife and I watched a lot of PL when NBC first picked it up and showed all the games. Once they wanted us to pony up for Gold or whatever it was, we largely drifted away.
That said, we did see Spurs v. Hammers (her club*) when we went to London end of last year and that was a great time (even if I was still recovering from food poisoning).
*she was a goon when she played club soccer in college, so Hammers are just perfect for her.
I saw the Spurs live against New York Red Bulls in NYC some years ago. It was a blast. The Spurs fans were… boisterous on the NJ train back to NYC.
This was in the new Spurs stadium, which is really nice. Nicest in the PL per several people.
Cops did a good job keeping the Hammers fans isolated and onto the trains right after the match.
My wife had to keep her Hammers fandom on the DL – we had to “join” the Spurs club thing just for the right to buy some tickets in their secondary market & they’re explicit about banning people who sell their tickets to opposing fans as well as warning, right on the website, that you can’t wear opposing gear, etc.
Point goes to American sports. We just don’t do hooliganism here.
rhywun:
Depends on the stadium and the sport, but it’s much, much, MUCH lower key than Europe.
Getting overly worked up about “your” team is a bad sign, IMO. There’s not enough in your life.
I think about that particularly with English soccer fans.
Every American sports league would be improved with relegation, but the NBA in particular because the roster size is already small. Play 58 games, start in November and wrap it up in April. Kick out the bottom 4-5 teams.
Agreed that relegation & promotion would improve everything but no current owner would go for it these days.
But it would have been amazing if Oakland, KC & the Rockies got relegated last year, with the Durham Bulls, Norfolk Tides & St. Paul Saints getting promoted.
As I understand it, American leagues are not set up in a way to allow pro/rel. Here the league is all powerful, above the franchises.
Everywhere else the teams are (somwhat) more akin to private businesses.
I think baseball is really the only sport set up that could do promotion relegation. I mean, can you imagine the Patriots becoming a college team?
@Neph:” I can’t get over the flopping and the (seemingly) arbitrariness of “extra time” at the end of the game.”
Hear, hear, regarding the clock issues. Why can’t they stop the clock when there is stoppage of play? It doesn’t really affect any aspect of the game other than the arbitrariness of the extra stoppage time. This really bugs me.
Playing games outside the league (Champions League, etc.) when it is based on a previous year’s results also seems stupid to me.
Other than that, I do enjoy watching soccer. I latched onto Sunderland solely due to their name (“Black Cats”) even before their Netflix series. It’s was heartbreaking to see them drop to Tier 3, but they clawed back the the Championship level and then they got close to returning to the EPL in 2023. Maybe next year.
“Why can’t they stop the clock when there is stoppage of play? It doesn’t really affect any aspect of the game other than the arbitrariness of the extra stoppage time. This really bugs me.”
If my memory is correct, when FIFA was considering the rule changes that led to the newer lengthier stoppage time, one proposal was to change the length of the halves to 35 minutes and stop the clock every time there was a stoppage in play (throw in, goal kick, injury, etc.). Can’t remember why they didn’t do that.
Australian Football did this a few years back. Used to be 25 minute quarters with a semi-arbitrary “time on” period at the end. Some years back they changed it to 20 minute quarters with the clock stopping every time the ball went out of bounds, a score, or umpire discretion (serious injury).
There have been lots of stupid rules added to baseball recently but the worst was the NL adopting the DH. The OG rules were easy – if you play a position in the field, you bat. Is it to much to ask for pitcher to know how to lay down a bunt? Some pitchers took batting seriously and were not automatic outs. It also added a strategic element – when to pitch hit for your pitcher. Other stupid rules are the 3 batter rule, putting a man on second in extra innings, etc, etc. It’s criminally stupid how they have intentionally ruined the game. I am quickly losing interest in baseball. The NFL already lost me. They haven’t managed to completely ruin professional hockey yet.
The NBA died for me with the Jordan Rules, and I had grown up a Laker fan (with all the pain that brought in the 60s and early 70s). Had season tickets for the Chargers* until Spanos started his build me a new stadium shit.
* Rhywun, you want American hooliganism? Chargers-Raiders games. One year when both were well outside the playoff picture, the players were watching the shenanigans up in the stands; one of which was maybe 8 or 10 rows behind me.
Any time I hear some shit about Boston fans being the worst (and there are shitty ones, like everywhere else), I remind people about Raiders fans.
Oh, and Philly fans, of any sport.
RIP Gena Rowlands and Greg Kihn.
Interesting indeed, Don. I share your disillusion with college football (I used to catch a game or two every week, and now maybe a game or two a year), and was only an MLB fan when I was in Boston, because the Sox were entertaining as hell (as was the local coverage). I did very much enjoy AAA baseball in Richmond at the end of the ‘80s – wonderful little stadium, the Braves future World Series winners were on the AAA team, it was walking distance through pleasant residential neighborhoods, what wasn’t to like?
I’ve thought about trying to pick up rugby – the few times I’ve seen it, it looks like fun, but just haven’t tracked down who shows it, etc.
Years ago I read something about the Premier League (probably on the now-defunct EveryDayShouldBeSaturday college football site), and decided, based on their nickname alone, that I should follow Sunderland.
Mind you, I’ve never actually been to Sunderland, or anywhere else in the north of England either. It’s just that the side’s nickname reminded me of something I keep around the house.
Who says sports fandom has to be rational? In my experience, it rarely is.
WTF?
https://ibb.co/6gKfJGD
I picked Nottingham because I was crushing on a coworker from our office there.
My relatives are from Bavaria, hence Bayern Munich.
I hate yardwork.
And there’s no reason for it to be so warm, it’s august already, stop this summer schtick.
I love yard work and summer. It has gotten me into the best shape since…early 20’s?
I seem to have forgotten the old saw ‘Hell is having your dreams come true’. Holy fuck, it isn’t just that the air is too hot to breath, the sun is brutal. I could sear steaks on both sides by flopping them down on the back porch for 2 minutes. Really, who needs that shit.
Well fuck. What were talking about this morning – staying out of this shit?
Hope not too many were Americans. Not clear if Mercs or active duty.
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/08/11/blockbuster-70-jewish-commandos-and-us-navy-seals-attacked-yemen-count-their-bodies-all-are-dead-video/
NSFW images
I am a bit skeptical.
Not “Israeli commandos” but “Jewish commandos”?
I’m definitely on a list for clicking that link.
Who said “The first casualty in war is the truth.”?
I dont really believe anything I hear from either side.
DDG’d it. Aeschylus
So, same as it has ever been.