ሙቾ

Dark days echo in the twilight/ If you saw the future you'd pray God take away your eyesight/. ~Eschantologist.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found – D. W. Winnicott

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@_realmaverik @beanjaudrillard Maverick! Are you trolling? Also, fetishising aside, this shows that the Rwandan exceptionalism that we like to tell ourselves is just a fiction. Our umucyo etc is just a fantasy

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@DecaymanR @RobCyubahiro @AVFCOfficial Are you slow? Don’t you know sax sells?

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@Honeyfarsafi @Onjerika @DCI_Kenya Funny enough I was reading about Eastleigh and its issues with crime that is occasionally unsolvable due to interference from elders & clan politics. I wonder if that’s involved in this case.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@YusufSerunkuma @IMFNews Has the UK been eating IMF loan money and stealing it to buy apartments in Switzerland? Let’s not be asinine.

[Anwar Ibrahim @anwaribrahim]

I mourn today the passing of a dear friend, Professor John L. Esposito, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Islam. I first came to know John in the early 1970s, and our friendship endured for more than five decades since.

John built the intellectual foundations for a deeper understanding of Islam in the West. His contribution to the cause of Muslim-Christian understanding was enormous. He founded Georgetown’s Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding, edited the “Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Islamic World,” served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and co-authored, with John Voll, “Makers of Contemporary Islam,” a study of the diverse and often divergent paths taken by modern Muslim political thought. His more accessible works, from “What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam” to his landmark study with Dalia Mogahed, “Who Speaks for Islam?,” carried that same rigour to a far wider audience, particularly after September 11 when the world badly needed it. He built bridges where others were content to build civilisational barriers.

I will remember John as a formidable scholar, yes, but more than that, as a friend whose counsel I valued over many years. John was as generous in private conversation as he was rigorous on the page. And he stuck with me through thick and thin.

On behalf of Malaysia, I extend my deepest condolences to his beloved wife, Jean, and to John’s family, colleagues and students. May his scholarship and the dialogue he spent his life building continue to bear fruit. He was, to the end, a true friend to the Muslim world.

ANWAR IBRAHIM

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@dcngroup79 @CharityKeza Hahaha! Are you feeling okay? 97% of the population is rotten.

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

This is sort of funny, and Brazil have definitely got worse, but it misdiagnoses the problem. In fact, this is a story of what has happened to society and with our economies, and the ideology of our ruling elites.

The first point to accept is that *all* football nations have lost their particular style: there has been a flattening of the way in which teams play. I first started watching football as a very young boy in the late eighties, and through until the early 2000s, most of the big nations maintained a distinct way of playing. The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Brazil and England all spring to mind. But two things have happened -- the first connected to the latter.

First, the Champions League (and later the Europa League) means that the best teams in Europe play each other almost every week during the season. That provides a consistently present interface for an accelerated exchange of ideas, formations, and tactics. But it also acts as a kind of gain of function research for football: there is now an extremely rapid cycle of tactical, transfer policy/player selection, and fitness innovation, response and counter response. The football OODA loop has never been tighter.

Second, and connected to this, there has been an extreme version of the Pareto Principle income inequality that has happened among western societies as a whole. Wealth, partly due to the Champions League, and partly due to the Premier League, has accrued to a smaller and smaller number of teams, even as the size of the pie, due to the massive increase in TV revenue in Europe, has expanded beyond all recognition. This means that all the best players in the world end up in the same handful of clubs. We can name them: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona. Furthermore, with the advent of global scouting networks and post-Moneyball databases, this means the best players from anywhere in the world, often at young ages. Remember when an unknown player would have a great World Cup and find himself playing for, say, Tottenham or Monaco or wherever? Those days are gone. We know about every player in the most minute detail. There is no mystery. The good players are already in Europe.

The first time I noticed this process of wealth accumulation was with the great Ajax team of 1995. I was only just a teenager, and that team was like a revelation for me in terms of the way football could be played. All of them (bar Danny Blind and Frank Rijkaard, who were an earlier generation) came up through the Ajax academy system and blossomed at the same time. They played in the Ajax/Dutch style (4-3-3, with two wingers that stayed very wide, and a centre back pushing into midfield when they had the ball, holding possession playing in the opponent's final third). But within two seasons, the entire team was broken up: Davids, Seedorf, Klijvert, Ovremars, Rijzeger, Kanu, Litmanen, even Van Gaal, the young manager -- they'd all gone to richer clubs elsewhere. In the 1960s or 70s, they'd have stayed together and won multiple European trophies. In England, we saw a similar thing with Southampton. Newcastle are suffering the same now.

All this means that players don't stay in their home environments and countries, with their clubs, and the process of mimesis breaks down. Add that to the first point, related to the way intra-European football forces a flattening through various mechanisms, and you have what we see now.

A couple of World Cups ago, the Netherlands played a 3-5-2, to my absolute horror. The Netherlands playing without proper wingers! Now we have a Brazilian team that has two Arsenal players, two Man U players, one Newcastle player -- even a Bournemouth player, for goodness sake. And they'll all have had the majority of their careers outside Brazil. Some will have left when they were 15 or 16, scouted by Shaktar Donetsk (famous for bringing in young Brazilian players) or Real Madrid. Why are we therefore surprised that they play like any other European team?

The Netherlands style lives on -- but through Barcelona and therefore the Spain national team (via Cruyff, and thence Guardiola), not in the Netherlands national team. But the Brazil style (a languid slow, slow, slow, punctuated by sudden bursts of incredible skill, raking passes, speed, and crackerjack long shots) is dead. When better Brazilian players emerge in future, and maybe they return to winning World Cups, they'll do so as Europeans would, not Brazilians. The German and Italian styles are also dead. The English style is also pretty much dead, although that was an evolutionary dead end in terms of International Football, so we do not lament it.

This, rather than boozing or religion, is the reason for what we see with the Brazil national team. I find it deeply sad. But no doubt the neoliberal progressives who run our countries will view it as a great success.

@AaronBastani @WilliamClouston @georgegalloway @jj_bull

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@Rick_1400 To be fair, we are a bit like Israelis in our expectation of sympathy from everyone despite our crassness and arrogance.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@OliviaChar30912 This is how the West was lost.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@JosephRyarasa In psychological evolutionary terms we are still subjects of chieftains in chiefdoms. Statehood, democracy and all the impositions of the west are just facades that we cosplay in. We’ve never been modern.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@JosephRyarasa Good points. Respectfully though, no one is necessarily encouraged to reject… rather it’s mostly the case that we don’t have institutions in the traditional sense; but individuals that embody institutions. Ours are chiefs, clan leaders & kings. Everything is juvenilely personal

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@JN_Chukwudi @AishaDaughter You guys have never heard of Ayi Kwei Armah ?

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@JRobFromMN @RevTChristopher Your inability to make your case logically sans emotions renders your important point invalid. “Most was driven by…” yet they appear as no.4 on your initial list. “Obama…” is no.2… were they there pre his presidency? Are they communists? If so, what’s your proof?

[The Sutton Trust @suttontrust]

🚨 Girls, and certain ethnic groups, perform strongly at school but underachieve in the labour market.

Our new research shows how geography, gender, and ethnicity all impact opportunities for disadvantaged young people, with big variations across England ⬇️

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@Norfolkforever @suttontrust Value educational attainment for itself but culturally value family more.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@Thirsty_Bandits One of his best.

[Helen Reynolds MBE @helenrey]

@patricebain40 FANTASTIC!! So glad they have that for their book club - AND they can use the summaries here!
https://t.co/O8uDMfRgaw

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@berabose_ @kagire @CityofKigali And when the city is accused by visitors of having a certain vibe, people get all defensive. A thousand voices can’t all be entirely wrong.

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@theshadeborough Asking a crack head if they should ban crack

[ሙቾ @fan0nite]

@NotFarLeftAtAll The immigrants made them do it