The most interesting part of the red card saga isn't the ruling. It's how differently Americans and Europeans process the idea that they might have been wronged.
Europeans are fundamentally different from Americans in one particular way: they expect life to be aggravating and at times unfair. It's just a fact of moving through the world. I joke that in Europe, the customer is always wrong. You didn't read the fine print. The only pharmacy in town is closed every other Tuesday for three hours, and even if the times weren't posted, that's still your problem. Too bad if you want the bill, because the waiter's on his union-mandated half-hour smoke break, and you're just going to have to wait.
To quote the great Mark Knopfler: sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug. There's something freeing in that. Things are less in your control, so there's less angst in managing your expectations.
In America, things couldn't be more different. We simply can't accept a wrong left unrighted.
The flight attendant sneezed handing you a drink on your one-hour flight? 15,000 frequent flyer miles. Didn't like your appetizer? A replacement is on the way, and the whole course comes off the bill. There's a reason our interstates are lined with trial lawyer billboards.
Europeans have turned complaining into a continental pastime with no expectation that the universe owes them a remedy for their grief. You gripe about the train being late, your friends nod solemnly and everyone goes back to their apéro. In America, we launch a full-blown investigation of the train system, sue the government (and its contractors) that allowed for the tardiness and hold a Congressional hearing on the state of national infrastructure.
So to an objective observer, the red card shouldn't have happened, and VAR was a travesty. To Americans, our star player shouldn't be unfairly banned from a match we couldn't afford to lose for a card he so obviously didn't deserve.
Who cares that FIFA used a little-used reversal to fix it. Who cares that other people are mad about it. We. Were. Wronged. It was unjust. It must be corrected. We would accept nothing less.
Europeans waxing poetic about the sanctity of the game are, of course, talking about a governing body whose last tournament host was decided via confirmed cash bribes — one that imposed dress codes on women, shrugged off widespread allegations of modern slavery and reconfigured the entire tournament calendar to suit the host country. Which is exactly the point. If you've made peace with all of that, at least enough to watch the tournament four years later, a probationary suspension isn't actually a scandal.
Maybe that's the real divide. Over millennia, Europeans have made peace with being the bug. Americans have never once considered it, and apparently, we're not about to start now.
You've probably heard this before, but it's always worth repeating. Something extremely cool about the "Star-spangled Banner," the American national anthem, is that it asks a question, and it's the question at the heart of everything in the American worldview.
"Oh, say, can you see
By the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight's last gleaming..."
So the anthem begins with a question and a scene. One man, a patriot, is asking another man, another patriot, "can you see it?" at sunrise after a long, dangerous night.
The "it" in question is going to be revealed to be the flag, our "star-spangled banner," which they had last fully recognized and honored as the sun set, daylight failed, and night crept over them the evening before.
Can you see it? Say! Can you see it?!
IS IT STILL THERE?!
"Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming..."
Here we find that the "it" is in fact the flag, our star-spangled banner, and we learn why the question is being asked.
The flag is described as having flown and streamed gallantly over ramparts of war through a perilous fight. All could have been lost. The flag, and even the fledgling country for which it stands, one nation under God and indivisible.
Say! Can you see it? Now that the light is back?
IS IT STILL THERE?!
"--And the rockets' red glare,
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there!--"
They could see it through the battle in the light of the rockets and bombs that threatened them, here and there in quick glimpses. But it was still there throughout! But now? At dawn?
Say! Can you see?
IS IT STILL THERE?!
"Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?"
The urgency is palpable with every refrain. They have to know. It's the first thing they must know as the sun begins to light the sky, even before it rises.
IS IT STILL THERE?!
Say! Say!! Can you see? Can you see it?!
At the heart of every American beats the fundamental truth and reality that what we have here is precious, that it's worth fighting for, to the death if necessary, and that it's fragile. That at any moment it can be lost. That we have to remember to look for it because last night might have been the night in which it failed.
Every day, every year, every generation.
The American fight for freedom, to live in self-governance within ordered liberty, is ongoing and never-ending. The price of the land of the free is that it must be the home of the brave. We have to defend it, defend it, and defend it again, against all enemies foreign and domestic, because what we have is amazing, rare, fragile, and worth every cent of treasure, every drop of blood, and every risk to our sacred honor to protect it.
Our anthem is not a declaration. It is not a proclamation. It is not a statement.
It is a question.
Every time we sing our wholly unique national anthem, we as American ask the question again. IS IT STILL THERE?! Are we still America? Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?
Because it's a question, the answer is not known. It is not a guarantee. It cannot be taken for granted and isn't. And what an honor to ask and take up our part in the story, in the American Experiment, in the greatest country the world has ever known.
For tonight, the last night of our first 250 years, as the sun gave way to twilight's last gleaming and darkness overtook our land once again, the answer was still yes. We can see it even tonight in the red glare of rockets, with small bombs bursting in air, fill the sky with the noble tribute of fireworks once again.
And we all ask ourselves, will it still be flying at dawn?
This is what it means to be an American.
Happy 250th, America! Now for many happy returns!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
🧵THREAD🧵
In case you missed it, I’ve been working on a series called “A COVID Autopsy” for the last couple of months, revisiting what the legacy media (and their frequently quoted “experts”) got wrong during the pandemic.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot. I started writing this years ago, got sidetracked by some life events (getting married, getting cancer, beating cancer, starting a new job) but finally finished it. I’ve linked to all six parts published at my newsletter (link to it is in my bio) in the thread below.
If you’re interested in how I think the response to COVID broke America, I hope you’ll give it a read, and share (with me in the comments, with others as you see fit) what you think.
@_homoduplex Wird erwähnt, dass der Verhaftungsgrund angebliche Gewaltaufhetzung und nicht Meinungsäußerung war und dass die Anklage fallengelassen werden musste und der Mann 800K Abfindung bekam?
@MonikaGruber24 Eltern wird systematisch eingeredet, dass sie der Selbstbestimmung des Kindes nie im Weg stehen dürfen. Es sei wichtig, dass Teenager ein Recht darauf haben, privat mit dem Arzt zu sprechen und dass Ärzte als Experten alles am besten wissen
One of the oldest - and most dangerous - justifications for totalitarianism is the appeal to the “common good” or the “greater good.” It sounds noble. It sounds compassionate.
But history tells a very different story: every totalitarian regime wraps itself in this language, claiming the collective - the state, the people, the race - matters more than the individual.
And once you accept that premise, everything else follows: total control, forced sacrifice, the crushing of dissent.
Your rights don’t disappear all at once - they’re surrendered piece by piece, all in the name of some perfect, utopian, unified vision that always seems to require someone else to suffer first.
Totalitarianism always starts with the same lie: that society is some living, organic whole that matters more than the individuals who make it up. And once you accept that idea, total state control becomes easy to justify.
The so-called “common good” is redefined as some higher cause - national expansion, racial purity, a utopian future - anything except the real well-being of actual, sovereign individuals the way our Founding Fathers understood it.
And that’s the switch. Rights are no longer inherent; they’re conditional. Private interests are no longer protected; they’re suspect. You are told that you must surrender yourself to the collective, to “the people,” to the cause.
The Nazis had a name for it - Volksgemeinschaft, the people’s community - but the principle is always the same. Once the individual is subordinated to an abstract collective, freedom doesn’t just erode. It disappears.
And here’s the heartbreaking part: too many naïve Christian leaders have been pulled into this trap - embracing a totalitarian idea of the “common good” under the banner of what’s being called Christian Nationalism. But let’s be honest about what this really is. It isn’t rooted in the American tradition of liberty or the Protestant understanding of cognitive liberty. It’s far closer to Roman Catholic Integralism, just repackaged with Protestant language and symbols (sacralism).
And that should alarm every believer who understands the dangers of promoting a coercive, ever-evolving religioin with centralized power. When the monarchial episcopate starts defining righteousness, and the “common good” is used to override individual conscience, history tells us exactly where that road leads - and it never ends with freedom.
And let me be very clear about this: the so-called “common good” now being pushed by the totalitarian Right is no different from the tyranny of the “common good” we’ve been living under from the Woke, religious Left for the past two decades. The language is identical. Only the branding has changed.
Covid lockdowns - for the common good.
Distributism - for the common good.
Mass surveillance - for the common good.
Social justice mandates - for the common good.
Forced compliance with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals- for the common good.
Vaccinations - for the common good.
It’s always the same script.
Fear first.
Moral pressure second.
Coercion last.
And every time, you’re told that surrendering your rights, your conscience, and your freedom isn’t oppression - it’s compassion. Different sides, same poison. Because when the “common good” is used to override the individual, liberty is always the casualty.
Why I've lost trust in most all intellectuals and the institutions that purport to represent them: they have had almost nothing to say (except by way of support) of the entire Covid response.
I just cannot take these people seriously now or ever. This goes for many supposedly great minds I once respected.
It should be obvious by now that this was and is probably the most important shift in the historical narrative In decades if not hundreds of years.
Why the silence about the following?
* A entire generation was denied actual eduction
* The response showed public would mostly believe any absurdity, even that masks were protective against microbial infection and that standing far apart from people was the key to health
* Governments canceled religious holidays with two thousands years of tradition and got away with it
* A grass-roots movement would rise up among us to defend and enforce preposterous claims including that hiding under the sofa would cause a respiratory infection to go away
* Governments the world over learned that they could perhaps spend without limit, run up debt, and inflate away the obligations
* Industry realized there were far more profits in panic and mandates than in normal marketing
* The ruling class discerned that they could get away with endless abuse of the people provided it was pushed as public health
* The vaccine industry realized that no lie was beyond plausibility even when they were caught and even when their product caused vast injury and death
* Media was revealed to be nothing other than a deep-state megaphone
* Academia proved itself to be mostly useless
Any actual intellectual worth his salt would have been sounding alarms throughout this amazing fiasco. Some have. Very few, mostly associated with new institutions that are displacing the old failed establishment. Legacy thinkers have generally pretended that none of this happened.
Remember these days: an entire generation of vaunted intellectuals is hereby discredited, revealed as sycophants, and otherwise exposed as having chosen the comforts of social position and financial stability over truth.
If we actually taught raw, unfiltered history in schools...the blood-soaked, soul-crushing truth instead of this sanitized, revisionist horseshit...the Left would lose half its recruiting pool overnight.
Teach kids what the Bolsheviks actually did: a fanatical minority of intellectuals and agitators, drunk on Marxist poison, overthrew a crumbling regime in 1917 promising “peace, land, and bread.”
What they delivered was the Red Terror...Cheka death squads executing 100,000–250,000 without trial, shooting priests in the street, drowning officers tied to planks, starving entire villages into submission.
Teach the psychology: how Lenin’s “vanguard” justified any atrocity as “historically necessary,” how useful idiots in the West swooned over the “workers’ paradise” while millions were worked to death in the first Gulag camps.
Then show how that same Bolshevik machine birthed Stalin’s Holodomor...engineered famine in Ukraine that starved 4–6 million while grain was exported.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward that killed 30–45 million in the name of “equality.”
Pol Pot’s killing fields where wearing glasses got you executed.
Every single time.
Teach the visceral pattern: utopian promises always slide into mass graves because power concentrates, resentment is weaponized, and humanity breaks under ideology.
Teach that the road to hell is paved with moral grandstanding and envy dressed as justice.
But no.
Instead we get 1619 Project fanfiction, endless white guilt seminars, and lessons that paint America as uniquely evil while glossing over the fact that every civilization had slavery, conquest, and brutality...ours just happened to end it while others still practice it today.
We don’t teach the why of human nature: tribalism, the will to power, how demagogues exploit the eternal human weakness for free shit and revenge fantasies.
So when some blue-haired activist screams “eat the rich” or “defund the police” or “from the river to the sea,” millions of historically illiterate kids nod along because they’ve never seen what those slogans actually produce when tried in the real world.
They’ve never smelled the mass graves.
If we taught real history...ferocious, ugly, precise../they’d recognize the Bolshevik playbook being dusted off and run again right in front of them.
Instead, we raise generations of useful idiots who think they’re on the right side of history while marching straight into the same fucking slaughterhouse their grandparents escaped.
The Left needs historical amnesia to survive.
That’s why they fight so hard to control the curriculum.
Wake the fuck up.
Teach the truth, blood, horrors and all, or watch the cycle repeat with fresh corpses.
Fuck this revisionist, sanitized, soft bullshit. We are raising a nation of fucking pussies and useful idiots.
💀🔪
@LibertyHannes@DRechtsanwaltin ICE darf nur mit gerichtlichem Deportationsurteil auftauchen.
Warum sieht man nicht, was vor dieser Szene passiert ist? Sollte es eine gesetzeswidrige Festnahme sein, warte ich auf die Klage und den Medienaufruhr, dessen der junge Mann sich sicher sein kann
You Europeans may not understand the game Trump is playing right now, but it is going to be favorable if he actually gets his way - especially for Europeans.
You’re hooked on the old post-WWII setup where America foots the bill for security while lecturing from the sidelines.
Steinmeier accuses the US of a “breakdown of values” which is really rich given the EU’s widespread censorship campaigns, the cucking of all your societies thanks to infinity immigration, and the chronic underfunding of defense while your bloated welfare states and anti-business stances drive away prosperity and innovation.
And on Maduro, I don’t think preventing a failed state from becoming a permanent narco-hub and platform for the Russia-China-Iran axis is “destroying the world order.” It’s in fact the contrary. It’s using American power and leadership to stabilize regions and cut off bad actors.
In other words, he’s pressing reset on a broken world order that was benefitting the “den of robbers.”