1) The Champions League is the biggest trophy in town. Real Madrid last won the Champions league in 2002. That was the great side with Makelele, Figo and Zidane in midfield. Since then, they have made it to the Semi-Finals once. They haven’t got to the Quarter-Finals in the last 4 years. Roma beat them home and away last season. They are a busted flush.
2) Remember the famous Galacticos? All gone. Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos (whatever happened to them?) were the last to go.
3) What about the Premier League Galacticos? With Beckham, Owen and Woodgate Real Madrid did nothing in Europe. After one year at Real Madrid Owen was lucky to get signed by Newcastle, Woodgate ended up at Middlesbrough and Beckham couldn’t even manage that.
4) What about domestic glory? Yes, they have won La Liga for the last two years. But they have only won it four times in the past eleven years.
5) They change manager every year. The last coach to last three seasons was Del Bosque who won the Champions League twice at the beginning of the century. Since then seven coaches.
6) Bernd Schuster? Really?? Schuster or Ferguson and Quieroz?
7) Here’s a hard choice. Who would you rather play with up front: Rooney and Tevez? Or Julio Baptista (remember his time on loan at Arsenal?), Saviola, Robinho and 31-year old sulkypants Ruud Van Nistelroy?
8 ) United are on a roll. Young players. Premiership winners two years in a row. Champions League winners and semi-finalists the year before. Saha will be replaced. Chelsea are about to go into meltdown. Arsenal too, if Hleb follows Flamini out of the door.
9) Who’s the most famous player in the world? Cristiano Ronaldo. Why? because he plays for a team that’s youthful, winning and plays exciting football. When was the last time you heard anyone talking about Saviola, Robinho and Julio Baptista? Yup. Thought so.
10) So what’s the all the fuss about? He’s trying to push up his wages at United and his sponsorship deals. Keep Real Madrid interested and he’ll stay in the headlines all the way from Moscow to the European Championships. If Portugal have a good run, he’ll be in all the sports magazines for another few weeks. That’s half the summer. His agent will be laughing. Real Madrid will not.
Some delightful blogging from comic author and sometime musician Julian Gough at the Hay festival, in which he reports on his (successful) mission to steal Will Self’s pig in protest at a literary prize seemingly determined before the announcement of its shortlist. The video alone makes essential viewing, as much for the dapper cut of its protagonist’s suit as any porcine poaching. But should we credit Gough’s impressively well-documented claims? According to the Times, festival organizers have reported that “Will Self’s pig is safe and secure in a secret locationâ€â€”although the Telegraph blog contents itself with noting that “this is almost certainly the world’s first literary prize pig ransom video.” I have my doubts. Then again, the very prospect of trying to move a pig against its will strikes terror into me.
This is probably because Hay is the location of my own worst ever pig experience. During an extremely damp walking tour of the Brecon Beacons last year, I found myself strolling beside a farmyard, and paused to admire a couple of piglets playing in a pen. At this point, their mother—a sow of similar dimensions to an adolescent hippopotamus—lumbered into view and began to take a keen interest in my presence. I backed off along the path, in response to which the sow lowered her head, inserted it beneath a large steel five-bar gate, wrenched said gate off its hinges with a flick of her neck, and began to charge towards me. Suddenly recalling some kind of nature programme in which a farmer had boasted that pig-bites are among the most painful wounds known to man, I hurled myself over a fence into a small river, where I remained for some time.
Will Self may have had a lucky escape.
If in doubt, the Old Left would nationalise or regulate. If in doubt the New Right would privatise or deregulate. And if in doubt, the soupy left-right blend that now unites us has its own default option: quantify and publish.
Today The Guardian reports that the government is preparing to publish the death rates of patients undergoing major surgery at NHS hospitals in England. Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty with a promise to publish New York-style ‘crime maps’, detailing the areas of London that suffer from the worst crime.
The practice of tabulating and comparing ‘outputs’ has been growing in policy for a number of years now. The production of rankings is always the highlight of the World Economic Forum’s World Competitiveness Report, in which nations around the world are placed on a chart from the most competitive to the least. And New Labour has been infamous for its league tables, especially in education. The hope in such cases has been to create incentives to alter managerial strategy or try harder. Revealing a country to be the 35th most competitive in the world is meant to be a wake-up call for them to do better (unless it’s France), as well as to give businesses an indication of where not to invest.
This policy trick is now being performed for the benefit of individual citizens, thanks to two developments. Read the rest of this entry »
Very best of luck to Standpoint—the new monthly magazine edited by Daniel Johnson that aims to “defend and celebrate western civilisation”—the first issue of which is published today. A couple of my colleagues attended the opening party at the Wallace collection last night, and this morning have been lauding the quality and the quantity of the champagne on offer.
But it looks like Standpoint’s online editors may have been similarly enchanted by the bubbly. The magazine’s homepage, which features its slogan “The magazine that makes you… think again” not once, not twice but three times, also contains a box headed “Latest Blog Entries,” which promises such delights as “A new Blog peice,” “My another blog” and “My Blog entry.” Click through to read the Blog peices and you are presented with two posts that take their responsibilities to defend western civilisation so seriously that they are entirely in Latin. My favourite, however, is right at the top. I hope you’ll indulge me if I quote in full:
dcee dummy text n dcee dummy text ndcee dummy text ndcee dummy text ndcee dummy text ndcee dummy text ndcee dummy text ndcee dummy text ndcee dummy text nasd ads asd das
Western civilisation is in safe hands.
The March publication of the Byron Review, the government’s first official investigation into the effects of electronic media on children, offered an opportunity to examine what is potentially being gained and lost in the increasing ubiquity of electronic, interactive entertainments. Instead - dazzled by the quite astonishing sales figures and controversial content of recent games releases like the notorious Grand Theft Auto IV - most mainstream accounts of video games since have tended to be either a dazzling stream of featurettes hailing their ascendancy, or bitter dismantlings of any and all of their claims as culture.Â
In this month’s cover story, I look at some of the complexities of the culture of modern video games, and the astonishing divide it has carved out between those generations born either side of the computer era. I remember reading newspaper articles about video games while I was just starting at secondary school, fifteen years ago. It was, usually, bewildering. Here were writers publishing serious pieces in the national press who simply didn’t seem to know what they were talking about. They had clearly never played any of the games they were writing about. And their concerns were bizarrely unconnected to everything I thought I knew about the sociable, intensely absorbing activity of playing games on computers and consoles. How, my friends and I wondered, could anyone take such absurd objections seriously?
Fifteen years later, I’m still playing video games and I’m still bemused by the way they’re discussed. But I no longer think that the objections many people raise against them are absurd: under even the most hysterical rhetorics are, usually, reasonable concerns about social change and continuity, the loss of certain kinds of experience and learning, and the moral and aesthetic limitations of “on-screen” culture. What amazes me, rather, is the lack of a serious, mutually well-informed debate about a phenomenon that is likely to be a dominant cultural force in the 21st century: an industry that’s already bigger business than cinema or physical music sales, and that is likely soon enough to overtake videos, DVDs and even books.
There’s never been a more important time to attempt to comprehend the future before it simply becomes an ill-understood, exploitative present. I hope you’ll join in the discussion on this blog.
With half the newspapers in the land pronouncing the death of New Labour following last week’s crushing defeat in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, the party desperately needs some new ideas. One suggestion comes in the new issue of Prospect from Philip Collins, a former speechwriter to Tony Blair, and Richard Reeves, author of a recent biography of John Stuart Mill.
The Labour party has two contrasting political traditions, say Collins and Reeves. One, the centralising, Fabian tradition, tends to see a problem and then to assume a policy solution. The other—the “radical liberal” tradition as exemplified by the likes of Leonard Hobhouse and Lloyd George—is closer to Isaiah Berlin’s notion of “positive liberty”: it sees the role of the state as providing not the “absence of restraint, but the presence of opportunity.”
Now that the big division in British politics is between not left and right, but between liberal and authoritarian, it is the latter tradition of liberalism, say Collins and Reeves, that the party must focus on if it is to regain the trust of voters. This implies a number of policy changes in areas like the NHS, taxation and the environment. You can read the full treatment here.
If we are to expect anything at all from the dying months of George W Bush’s lamest of lame duck presidencies, look to Israel/Palestine. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has been spending an increasing amount of time in the region, and Bush, the first president to explicitly endorse the goal of an independent Palestinian state, may feel that his middle eastern legacy could do with some bucking up.
Is a deal likely? Two-state-solution optimists often point to the fact that in opinion polls, a large majority of Israelis say they support the idea of an independent Palestinian state. And almost two thirds even want their government to talk to Hamas—a proposal which would probably kill stone dead any of the three remaining presidential candidacies.
Yet dig beneath the surface and you find that in many cases, the support of Israelis for Palestinian independence probably has more to do with a desire to rid themselves of their troublesome neighbours than a commitment to their political rights. Two thirds of Jewish Israelis say the border between Israel and an independent Palestine should be closed. Two thirds say they wouldn’t want to live in the same building as an Arab, and half would not even let an Arab into their home.
This widespread antipathy of Israeli Jews towards Arabs is reflected in the rise of Beitar Jerusalem FC, who have just won the Israeli title for the second consecutive season. Beitar’s fans, particularly the “La Familia” ultras, are notorious for their anti-Arab racism and their hostility towards accommodation with the Palestinians. Yet these attitudes, as David Goldblatt reports in the new issue of Prospect, are if anything spreading beyond the Beitar terraces.
In her essay for Prospect this month, epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani tells the story of the changing relationship between HIV and Aids in Britain’s gay community, and the changing behaviours associated with it.
Today, with new antiretroviral treatments available on the NHS, infection with the HIV virus is not the death-sentence it was even a decade ago. HIV-positive people can expect to live long and relatively normal lives without ever developing Aids, or the secondary conditions associated with it. It is overwhelmingly among Britain’s homosexual community that the change is being felt. Annual deaths among gay men in Britain have crashed from a peak of over 1,162 in 1994 to just 153 in 2007—and behaviours are changing to match, with fewer precautions being taken by fewer people.
All this means that, although Aids infection rates are falling, the rate of HIV prevalence is steadily climbing: the number of gay men living with HIV in Britain has more than doubled in the last decade, from around 14,400 in 1998 to over 31,000 today. Does this matter? Yes, argues Pisani, both socially and economically: the treatment of HIV is hugely expensive, while the virus itself is constantly threatening to mutate beyond the capabilities of even the most modern drugs. So what should HIV prevention look like in a post-Aids world? It’s a question, as she explains, whose complexities will be being experienced for years to come.
In this month’s lead review, Mark Pagel, professor of evolutionary biology at Reading University, reads two new books about race, genetics and social structures—Strange Fruit by Kenan Malik, and Trust by Marek Kohn.
Pagel argues that our understanding of the evolution of our species must begin with an acceptance of the genetic reality of race, but must also recognise our unique ability to transcend this through co-operation of a kind no other species has remotely achieved.
The relationship between our “humanity” and our biological natures is always a troubling topic for scientists and sociologists. Yet, Pagel suggests, there is no inherent contradiction in our understandings of the societies we are able to build and those natures with which we are born, so long as we are able to talk of our unique social features with sufficient precision. Let us know your own thoughts below.
Since its birth just over a century ago, cinema has perhaps changed the way we see the world, and ourselves within it, more than any other art. In his essay this month, Prospect’s film columnist Mark Cousins takes a long look at what cinema has meant to him throughout his life, and the innumerable ways in which it touches our society.
Movies, Cousins argues, shape our aspirations and desires. We live through them, we seek structures and emblems for our lives within them; and—as with all art—we are challenged and jarred by their friction with the world. Most movies aren’t great art, of course; and much movie-making is about money, plain and simple. But, as Cousins traces the course of his own cinephilia, he finds that film does matter; and that, throughout its mixed, imperfect lifetime, it has dramatised certain kinds of human hope and struggle as nothing else has managed.
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