World Cup: Round of 16, who to cheer for

For a reminder, I did a ranking of who my favorite teams were by spreadsheet.  This is difficult because Uruguay has lost probably my favorite player, in terms of maximum entertainment value, do to his antics, but continues to have Diego Forlán, so I think I’m going to leave them at #2 and not readjust everything.  Also I’m lazy.

Cheer for Uruguay
Cheer for Uruguay

Updated list of 16 ranked:

  1. United States
  2. Uruguay
  3. Mexico
  4. Argentina
  5. Costa Rica
  6. Brazil
  7. Colombia
  8. Chile
  9. Algeria
  10. Nigeria
  11. Netherlands
  12. Greece
  13. Switzerland
  14. Belgium
  15. France
  16. Germany

Brazil v Chile (I’d be happy for Uruguay with a Chile victory, though)
Colombia v Uruguay
Netherlands v Mexico
Costa Rica v Greece
France v Nigeria
Germany v Algeria
Argentina v Switzerland
Belgium v United States

Can I add how exciting it would be to get to the next round with two african teams and no European teams.  #BigDreams

World Cup: Round of 16, who to cheer for
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World Cup: Who to Cheer For (or who I cheer for anyway)

For me to be really interested in a football match, I have to decided who I am going to be cheering for.  It’s not enough for love of the game, you have to be emotionally involved with the outcome.  I came up with a little spreadsheet that accurately reflected how I make choices on who to cheer for.  This is a little different than my attitude in the Women’s World Cup where I cheer solely based on what is best for the US.  I ranked them based on the things I care about.

  1. If your are related to the US Women’s National Team (which is to say the USMNT) then I award you five points.  It’s nearly a trump card.
  2. If you are in the same region (CONCACAF) as the US, you get one point.
  3. If you’re on Continental Europe, you lose one point.
  4. If you speak an Iberian Language (functionally Spanish or Portuguese), you get one point.
  5. If you’re uniforms are a pretty shade of sky blue, you get one point (Uruguay and Argentina).
  6. You get a point for every player I know and like.
  7. You lose a point if you were an Axis power in World War II.
  8. Any ties are broken by Five Thirty Eight’s Soccer Power Index — I will always cheer for the underdog, all other things being equal.

So I fed all that information into a spreadsheet and very happily got a list that put the teams that I knew I liked or hated in the right place, and gave me some insight on how to apply my preferences to teams I didn’t ever think much about.  If you’d asked me before I made this whether I’d cheer for Netherlands or Japan, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.  But now I’ve got numbers telling me what to do.  As you can see, if it wasn’t for the association with the US Women’s team, the US would only be 6th on my list, and France, Germany, and Italy, who I only cheer against, are all at the bottom.  They really should be tied, because I can’t imagine cheering for any of them.  On principle.  (Thank you England for these wholly irrational prejudices).  That said, I love to watch Germany play, they make beautiful soccer.

Screen Shot 2014-06-22 at 12.22.50 PM

 

For those who can’t read the chart:

  1. United States
  2. Uruguay
  3. England
  4. Spain
  5. Mexico
  6. Argentina
  7. Honduras
  8. Costa Rica
  9. Brazil
  10. Ecuador
  11. Colombia
  12. Chile
  13. Algeria
  14. Australia
  15. Iran
  16. Cameroon
  17. South Korea
  18. Nigeria
  19. Ghana
  20. Ivory Coast
  21. Portugal
  22. Netherlands
  23. Japan
  24. Croatia
  25. Greece
  26. Switzerland
  27. Russia
  28. Bosnia and Herzegovina
  29. Belgium
  30. France
  31. Italy
  32. Germany

Oh, you want to know who to cheer for in all the matches?  Many of the first matches have already passed, but I am going to put the whole list here.  Will update when we have knowledge on the next rounds.  A reminder that this isn’t meant to be a prediction of who will win, just who your heart should belong to for ~2hrs. Bold is who I cheered/will cheer for and gray is games that had passed at the time of posting this.

Brazil v Croatia
Mexico v Cameroon
Spain v Netherlands
Chile v Australia
Colombia v Greece
Ivory Coast v Japan
Uruguay v Costa Rica
England v Italy
Switzerland v Ecuador
France v Honduras
Argentina v Bosnia-Herzegovina
Germany v Portugal
Iran v Nigeria
Ghana v USA
Belgium v Algeria
Brazil v Mexico
Russia v South Korea
Australia v Netherlands
Cameroon v Croatia
Spain v Chile
Colombia v Ivory Coast
Uruguay v England
Japan v Greece
Italy v Costa Rica
Switzerland v France
Honduras v Ecuador
Argentina v Iran
Germany v Ghana
Nigeria v Bosnia-Herzegovina
South Korea v Algeria
USA v Portugal
Belgium v Russia
Australia v Spain
Netherlands v Chile
Cameroon v Brazil
Croatia v Mexico
Italy v Uruguay
Costa Rica v England
Japan v Colombia
Nigeria v Argentina
Bosnia Herzegovina v Iran
Honduras v Switzerland
Ecuador v France
USA v Germany
Portugal v Ghana
South Korea v Belgium
Algeria v Russia

World Cup: Who to Cheer For (or who I cheer for anyway)

Guess who got posted about on ChimpOut again?

This might be my favorite ChimpOut thread I’ve been featured on because it’s so juvenile. I mean, it’s still racist and ignorant, but it’s also almost quaint in it’s schoolyard level antics.

For example, they said I was secretly a man by posting a link to Austin Powers:

They also seem to be under the misapprehension that I want to be martyred and decided to make fun of my self-descriptors by repeating them and laughing at them, which is so boring.  At least actually come up with something to say.  I swear even “Activists are lame” would be better than this nonsense.  And of course, wishing for my death.

Uh oh! Look out! We have a “polemicist, activist, nerd” after us! I’m quaking in my shoes. I’m sure she is hoping for “martyrdom” so that, one day, there will be an “Ashley F. Miller Day” holiday like MLK Day.

Guess what? No one gives a shit about you, your lousy blog or your views. You’re preaching to an empty auditorium. Your blog has MSNBC-level ratings and your views are a distinct minority in your city, your state and the country as a whole.

Please go choke on a negro dick and die.

I wish my blog got MSNBC level ratings, that’d be like a million people a day.  Guess it’s time to cancel Lawrence O’Donnell’s guest blog.

I also learned that they were technically not supposed to talk about “Coal Burning” on the site, which is fascinating as the entire goal of the site appears to be to say the nastiest, most racist shit they can invent.  But they have rules.

Which include looking forward to my death by beating.  I will say that the only time I’ve ever been hit by a man, it was by a white man.

Who gives a fuck? Really. She will be beaten to deff like all the rest.:

Sent from my non obama phone

inevitable statistic.

no loss.

I don’t know what an Obama phone is, but if these guys hate it, i want one.

Then they got in an argument about whether I was black because I have Sub-Saharan African DNA.  Sophisticated genetic understanding from these guys.  Also more about my imagined beatings.

she isn’t a coalburner she has african dna to begin with. Was just hiding, blacks in the past did alot of passing and pretended to be white.

It’s too ginger to be a nig, I think we can still classify it as a burner.

Still, it has the dead soulless eyes of an ugly girl who’s received one too many beatings from their pet nigger.

-Agreed. There’s definately a “looks at me” gene in her. Classic nigger DNA traits.

I find this denial of humanity and gender to be fascinating.  Like the guy who called me a man, it seems to be that to qualify for femaleness in their world you have to only have sex with white men, preferably just your husband.

I find this one interesting because it shows a deep lack of reading comprehension.  I was not given an ultimatum, there was no us or him, there was no warning, nothing like that.  So I didn’t really have a choice.  I’m no longer dating the guy, but my Dad’s still not talking to me, so I’m pretty sure it really didn’t matter what I “chose” after being alerted to my Dad’s racism.

How these dopes choose nigger over family is a mystery to me.

May her STD’s be fast and furious.

If having Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel develop in my nether regions is an STD… I’m really fine with that as long as they make out.  Spoiler Alert: They’re both half black.  And super gay (in my dreams).

fast_five_movie_image_vin_diesel_dwayne_johnson_01

But some of these guys do have a sophisticated understand of what I think about them:

Oh she’s an idiot. She think’s we are all YT; typical libtard stereotype of racists, she thinks we are all religious; another typical libtard stereotype of racists. Libtards don’t even have brains in their heads. They just pull out their script and regurgitate the same old tripe.

 

Fortunately, he doesn’t resort to any stereotyping in his descriptions of others.  What a charmer.

My main takeaway is that I am clearly a drag queen who will get to have a threesome with Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson.  Not literally everything I want in life, but I can’t complain.

bringing willam makeup RAYLness
To Summarize: These assholes can suck my (admittedly imaginary) dick
Guess who got posted about on ChimpOut again?

Salon and Jezebel: Honey Boo Boo and 8 reasons you should be ashamed of yourselves

Honey Boo Boo is a child, not a monster
As you know, I spend a lot of my time with Honey Boo Boo because of my dissertation, and people often say disparaging things about the show and the weight of the family and other things.  And for the most part, I keep my cool, but occasionally, I read something that makes me incredibly angry.  I am loath to even link to this article, because it is so unfortunate, but here it is: “Honey Boo Boo is a monster: What reality TV did to the pint-size pageant queen” and the Jezebel uncritical repost: “Honey Boo Boo Has Turned Into a ‘Visibly Troubled’ Monster Child.”  (UPDATE: Since this article was posted, Salon has changed the headline to remove the world “monster.” Small victory!)

I am not, in general, a defender of Reality Television.  I find it fascinating, yes, but not always ethical.  That said, blaming ills of the world on Reality Television is ignoring the fact that the world created it in the first place.  Reality Television might reflect societal problems, but it’s very rarely the cause of them.  Unsafe workplaces, brutal contracts, and terrible pay, sure, but they don’t create societal wide poor education, poverty, or violence.

So when I see articles posted that use the word “monster” to describe a real little kid, I find it upsetting.  When those articles purport to be doing it because they care about the girl and come from sources that I generally find reasonable and feminist minded, I become slightly apoplectic.  Here are 8 reasons that the article on Salon, and Jezebel using it for hits without saying anything critical about it, were terrible.

1. Calling a little kid a monster is severely uncool.  Doing it in the headline to get hits is exploitative and uncool.

2. Calling a little kid a “monster” for having a temper tantrum because she doesn’t really like doing interviews on TV and for not wanting to give away her property is blowing things well out of proportion.

3. “The quick wit we’ve come to expect from Honey Boo Boo…” Have you ever even watched the show? The quick wit is from Mama June, Alana is just weird in a charming and amusing way.  Just because she’s in some of your favorite gifs, doesn’t mean she’s quick-witted.

4. Fallon intervening and trying to discipline Alana wasn’t ” Finally someone is addressing this child’s attitude,” it was shaming her in front of a live studio audience and assuming her mother was incapable of doing her job as a parent. Not your role, Mr. Fallon, and not something to be commended, Salon writer.

5. Wishing she had the chance to develop her creativity without television is ignoring the reality that the money and exposure and opportunities she’s been given from this show has meant far more opportunity to develop her creativity.

6. You have no reason to think that being on Reality Television has caused this in her.  She has been remarkably little changed from her first appearance on Toddlers & Tiaras to the second season of her own show.  Newsflash: Little kids can be bratty sometimes, and editors know when it’s amusing or not.  Your own article points to the fact that this is being edited, where on earth are you getting evidence that it is television’s fault?

7. Don’t you think publicly calling a child a monster in Salon is exactly the wrong thing to do if this article expresses your real feelings about her fate?  Do you really think that publicly shaming a little girl makes it look like you care how she is treated — because you’re treating her badly.  You don’t get a pass on that.

8. Finally, finally: Christy O’Shoney, I don’t think you’re a very nice person or a person who cares very much about Alana Thompson’s future. And Jezebel, you’re just as bad for uncritically repeating this article because you wanted hits.

I realize my blog is just a tiny corner of the internet, but if you’re decent people who actually care about this little girl you will 1. Change the title of your articles 2. Release an apology for being cruel to a child 3. Think twice before calling a child names in order to get hits.  Frankly, your behavior is far worse than anything Alana Thompson did on the set of Jimmy Fallon’s show.

Salon and Jezebel: Honey Boo Boo and 8 reasons you should be ashamed of yourselves