Everyone has been so impressed by Japanese fans cleaning up after themselves but most probably missed this beautiful moment at the post-game (🇳🇱2 - 2🇯🇵) press conference.
Toward the end after reporters were done asking questions, 🇯🇵head coach, Hajime Moriyasu, asked to speak one more time.
🗣️ “May I speak?”
He turned to the Dutch reporters in the room.
🗣️ “I think there are many Dutch reporters here as well, so I’d like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the people of the Netherlands once again.”
Moriyasu explained that when he became part of the Japan national team, Japanese football still had no professional league.
🗣️ “I was trained by a Dutch coach named Hans Ooft. It wasn’t just me. Japanese coaches in general were greatly influenced by him, which has led to the development of Japanese soccer today.”
He also mentioned another Dutch figure who shaped his career.
🗣️ “The legendary Dutch coach Wim Jansen served as the manager for J.League’s Sanfrecce Hiroshima and also as a coach for Urawa Reds, contributing to Japanese soccer.”
🗣️ “It’s not just those two. Many other coaches and players have contributed to raising the level of Japanese soccer, so I want to express my thanks. Thank you very much.”
What a masterclass in graciousness and gratitude. Imagine after a high-stakes match, instead of basking in glory and bravado (well-deserved in my opinion), the coach took to the microphone to... thank his opponents publicly and sincerely.
Japan's cultural operating system prizes harmony (wa), respect for precedent, and gratitude as a form of strength, not weakness. Japanese sports culture reflects its broader society where you'll see athletes bow to their opponents, thanking referees, and even crediting rivals or mentors.
Think of sumo wrestlers, Olympic athletes, or even bullet-train staff apologizing for a 30-second delay.
The Japanese have this concept of On (恩) - it is the sense of indebtedness to those who came before or helped you. It's what you'd expect from a culture that truly prizes continuity.
Moriyasu was acknowledging a real debt to Dutch coaches like Hans Ooft (who coached Japan in the early 90s and helped professionalize the game) and Wim Jansen. Japanese football openly credits foreign influences - Dutch "Total Football" philosophy, German organization, Brazilian flair - while building something distinctly their own. Few nations do this with such little ego.
Japan is pure class
1. Scouts is not about who you shag
2. Not all gay men are fun camp zoo animals for straights
3. This is a kids organisation can we just bloody stop with this let the young gay lads maybe just be lads and forget the gay thing with their mates
4. Im so tired of this
Ed Davey has written to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson demanding she WITHDRAW official EHRC guidance protecting female-only spaces in toilets and changing rooms.
Let that land.
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission — a statutory body — has produced legally grounded guidance telling employers and public bodies that biological men should not access women’s single-sex spaces.
This is not opinion.
This is not politics.
This is the settled legal position following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on the meaning of “woman” under the Equality Act.
And Ed Davey wants it gone.
His stated reason?
The guidance is not “compatible with long-standing British values.”
British values.
He used those words to argue AGAINST protecting women’s single-sex spaces.
The same Liberal Democrats who lecture the country about tolerance, inclusion and human rights are now lobbying a Labour minister to tear up statutory guidance that protects every woman in Britain who walks into a changing room, a refuge or a hospital ward.
This is not a fringe position within the Lib Dems.
Their leader wrote the letter.
The party has chosen its side.
It is not the side of women.
Repost if you think women’s single-sex spaces should be protected.
High cortisol is the real reason you wake up at 3-4 AM.
It also shaves 5 years off your life — tanks testosterone, locks belly fat, literally shrinks your brain.
If I wanted to fix it without medication, here are 8 things I'd do every day:
1. No food 3 hours before bed.
Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions:
- welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap
- defence spending is too low
- the triple lock is unsustainable
- without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution
- we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea
- migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state
- any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement
- we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable
- Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly
Blair basically says all that.
The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind:
- judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast
- the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs
None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it
Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.
Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others
You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
One of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in the West is treating immigration as a question of virtue instead of a question of governance.
Of course our country can help people fleeing genuine persecution. But not against the wishes of its citizens!
That isn’t extremism. It’s reality.
It is symptomatic of a willingness to inflict cruelties and absurdities onto vulnerable populations because a powerful social movement demands conformity to the most brazen lie ever told at scale. It is dispositive proof of a void of epistemic and moral integrity and should be disqualifying to the exercise of any public authority. There has never been a simpler litmus test of a person's fitness for high office that so many have been eager to fail.
So what would it actually take for Western society to drop the double standard?
1. End the monopoly on guilt. The West is the only civilization that built a moral vocabulary for examining its own sins and then handed that vocabulary exclusively to its critics. Either every civilization gets audited by the same rules, or none do. Asymmetric guilt isn't morality; it's surrender dressed up as virtue.
2. Restore the universities. The framework that produced this double standard was built in humanities and area-studies departments over fifty years. It won't unbuild itself. It requires hiring committees, tenure decisions, curricula, and funding sources that reward honest comparative history rather than activist conclusions dressed as scholarship. That's a generational project, not a tweet.
3. Tell the rest of the story. Most Westerners genuinely don't know that Arabs conquered an empire stretching from Spain to India, that Turks displaced the Christian populations of Anatolia, that the Bantu expansion absorbed entire peoples, that Islamic slavery ran for twelve centuries and trafficked more Africans than the Atlantic trade. None of this is hidden. It just isn't taught. Mainstream history education has to stop ending the conquest chapter in 1945.
4. Reward intellectual courage. Right now, an academic, journalist, or politician who points out the selective application of "colonizer" pays a career cost. Someone who applies it conventionally pays none. Until that incentive structure flips, until not asking the obvious questions becomes the reputational risk, the asymmetry will reproduce itself automatically.
5. Recover confidence. A civilization that believes its own existence is a crime cannot apply standards evenly, because the conclusion is fixed before the analysis begins. Self-criticism is a strength. Self-loathing is a pathology that masquerades as a strength. Telling them apart is the precondition for everything else.
6. Accept that some allies won't like it. Honest comparative history will offend regimes the West currently treats as untouchable. Not just adversaries, but partners. Real intellectual consistency has a foreign-policy cost. The current double standard exists partly because that cost has been judged too high to pay. It isn't.
None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens quickly. Civilizations don't reform their moral vocabulary in an election cycle. But the alternative is a West that keeps applying its own highest standards exclusively to itself, until eventually it doesn't have the strength to apply them at all.
Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).
Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.
Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.
Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.
Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.
Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.
Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.
C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.
Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.
Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.
Alors pardon. Et au travail.
If your name includes a dental fricative - e.g. Anthony, Theodore, Nathaniel, Samantha, Elizabeth, Catherine, etc. - native speakers of the overwhelming majority of the world's languages cannot pronounce your name properly. If you're living or traveling outside of the Anglosphere you learn to adapt to this, accepting whatever the most common local mispronunciation happens to be, because the alternative of lecturing every single person you encounter on the finer points of English phonetics is actually insane.
@MerrynSW Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow (Zevin); Big Swiss (Beagin); Prophet Song (Lynch); The Bee Sting (Murray) are longer but propulsive & absorbing; Look what you made me do (Lanchester) is a fun romp, Mania or A better life (Shriver) may burst brief teenage bubble of all-knowingness!
You are correct that Arabs were the majority. You omit that Jews had been purchasing land legally for decades, that the Jewish population had grown substantially through legal immigration, and that the UN partition plan allocated territory roughly proportionate to population distribution at the time. The Arab leadership's objection was not to the details of partition. It was to any Jewish state anywhere in the territory. That position left no room for negotiation and no alternative to conflict.
On the Nakba beginning before May 15. Correct that fighting began after the UN vote in November 1947. What you omit is what started that fighting. Arab militias launched attacks on Jewish communities immediately after the UN vote. The Jewish forces that subsequently pushed back and in some cases expelled Arab populations were responding to an assault, not initiating one. The sequence matters. Arab violence preceded Jewish military operations. Presenting the Jewish response as the origin of the conflict requires removing the first chapter.
On all historians agreeing. They do not. Benny Morris, the Israeli historian whose work is most cited by those making your argument, has explicitly said that while expulsions occurred, they happened in the context of a war of survival and that the Arab states bear primary responsibility for initiating that war. Morris is not a Zionist apologist. He is the most rigorous historian of 1948 and his conclusions do not support the narrative you are presenting.
On the Jewish exodus from Arab countries not being a mirror image. You describe it as decolonisation, rising nationalism and Zionist pull factors. Jews had lived in Iraq, Egypt and Yemen for over two thousand years, centuries before Islam existed. They were not colonial settlers. They were indigenous communities expelled by states that confiscated their property, revoked their citizenship and in some cases murdered them. Describing that as decolonisation requires a definition of colonialism that applies to no other people on earth.
On one population getting a state and the other producing a refugee crisis. The Palestinian refugee crisis has been perpetuated by Arab states that have deliberately kept Palestinians in camps for seventy five years as a political weapon rather than integrating them as Jordan briefly did. Israel absorbed 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries within a decade. The difference in outcomes reflects the difference in political choices made by the surrounding states, not the difference in the original displacement.
The argument that Palestinian suffering is uniquely catastrophic and uniquely unresolved is accurate. The argument that this is solely Israel's responsibility and that the Arab states, Hamas and the Palestinian leadership bear none of it is not supported by the historical record.
The torment of British Jews https://t.co/k0KsczNEcQ I wrote this two years ago - saddest thing I ever wrote. They've been here SO long and given us SO much. Why aren't we protecting them from the scum who are terrorising them?
Hello Julia, sans aucune ironie, c'est top que tu prennes le temps de te renseigner. Mais le problème quand on lit Marx aujourd'hui, c'est qu'on prend pour acquis sa prémisse de départ, alors qu'elle a été démontée scientifiquement il y a plus de 150 ans.
Toute la pensée de Marx repose sur la théorie de la valeur-travail. L'idée que la valeur d'un bien vient de la quantité de travail nécessaire pour le produire. Si tu acceptes cette prémisse, alors oui, tout son raisonnement tient. Le capitaliste "vole" la plus-value du travailleur, l'exploitation est mathématique, la révolution est inévitable.
Sauf qu'en 1871, trois économistes (Menger en Autriche, Jevons en Angleterre, Walras en Suisse) découvrent indépendamment la même chose : la valeur n'est pas objective, elle est subjective et marginale.
Un verre d'eau dans le désert vaut une fortune. Le même verre à côté d'une rivière ne vaut rien. Le travail incorporé est identique. Donc le travail ne détermine pas la valeur. C'est le consommateur qui valorise un bien selon son utilité marginale dans un contexte donné.
Exemple concret : tu peux passer 1000 heures à tricoter un pull moche que personne ne veut. Selon Marx, ce pull a énormément de valeur (beaucoup de travail incorporé). Selon la réalité, il ne vaut rien. Parce que personne n'en veut.
À l'inverse, Bernard Arnault crée des milliards de valeur non pas parce qu'il "exploite" mais parce qu'il a su anticiper et organiser des désirs humains à grande échelle. La valeur est créée par la coordination, pas extraite par le vol.
Cette découverte (la révolution marginaliste) a invalidé tout l'édifice marxiste. Pas pour des raisons idéologiques, pour des raisons scientifiques. C'est pour ça que plus aucun département d'économie sérieux au monde n'enseigne Marx comme un cadre d'analyse valide. On l'enseigne en histoire de la pensée.
Maintenant, le truc important. Si ton intention en lisant Marx c'est d'aider les pauvres (c'est une intention noble), alors tu vas être surprise par ce qui suit.
Regarde les chiffres de la Banque mondiale. En 1820, 90% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Cette chute historique ne s'est PAS produite dans les pays qui ont appliqué Marx. Elle s'est produite dans les pays qui ont libéralisé leur économie.
Chine post-1978, Vietnam post-1986, Inde post-1991, Pologne post-1989. À chaque fois qu'un pays libéralise, des centaines de millions de gens sortent de la pauvreté en une génération. À chaque fois qu'un pays applique Marx (URSS, Cambodge, Corée du Nord, Venezuela), c'est la famine et les goulags.
Ce n'est pas une opinion, c'est l'expérience la plus massive jamais menée en sciences sociales. Plusieurs milliards de cobayes humains, sur un siècle.
Donc paradoxalement, si tu aimes vraiment les pauvres, la position la plus cohérente n'est pas d'être marxiste. C'est d'être pour la liberté économique. Parce que c'est empiriquement la seule chose qui a jamais sorti massivement les gens de la misère.
Pour creuser, je te recommande trois lectures qui vont changer ta vision :
"La Loi" de Frédéric Bastiat (court, lumineux, gratuit en ligne)
"La Route de la Servitude" de Hayek
"Économie en une leçon" de Henry Hazlitt
Bonne lecture, et vraiment chapeau de chercher à comprendre plutôt que de rester dans tes certitudes. C'est rare.
Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist who proved chronic stress is the silent killer doctors ignore.
On Chris Williamson's podcast, he revealed 10 "normal" habits you do every day that wreck your sleep, mood, and nervous system:
1) Replay conversations in your head