Actually I did still support those teams full of those over-hyped thundercùnts. At least a bit, but there's a difference between having reservations, which might lead to quietly being indifferent about their results and success, and loudly calling for their defeat and trollishly revelling in it when it happens, and issuing proclaimations against those who have supported them (albeit in your case, I understand, in some jest). Monty's claims of intellectual consistency are at best misguided and at worst non-sensical but others have worked through that one.Originally Posted by Burney
All very nice, a, but you fail to spot the glaring contradiction at the heart of your argument.
You admit that you find this England team preferable to its predecessors containing said ‘thùndercûnts’. In doing so, you concede that your affection or otherwise for England teams is negotiable based on the individuals they contain. Which means that, in essence, you concede that the principle underpinning my distaste for this England team is valid. You are, in other words, no different to me in principle, we just happen to have different criteria.
Speaking personally, though, what really bothers me about England football teams is the sheer level of conformity they tap into. I’ve always despised unthinking, reflexive conformity and that is at the heart of what you choose to call my misanthopy. That isn’t to say I’m not outwardly conformist in many respects, but I can say with my hand on my heart that where I conform, it is as a consequence of thought and self-examination. So for instance, I am patriotic because there are many things about this country which are admirable and worth defending. However, those things do not include a mediocre football team teeming with Spurs shítcùnts. And, if I may say so, I find the notion of assessing patriotism based on support for a sports team patently ludicrous. And it’s no less ludicrous when you propose it than when Norman Tebbit does.
For natural-born conformists who have never examined an idea in their lives, of course, England supporting in World Cups is second nature. They are quite able to reconcile hating Spurs 204 weeks out of 208 and then cheering on ‘Harry’ and ‘Alli’ the other four because they’ve never actually bothered thinking about it. Confront them with the parent absurdity of their position and they become enraged and start indulging in convoluted post-rationalisations for their own intellectual inconsistency and reflexive conformity. They will attack you because you have not done the same and use as justification for their attacks that millions of people agree with them and not with you. Because, to the conformist, if everyone’s doing it, it must be right.
I’m afraid I’m just not built that way.
I certainly respect your sense of non-conformity, as something of a non-comformist myself when it comes to certain matters of national pride (where we will often disagree), but I do generally support English and somtimes British sport as a default position - as my local team in international competition, even though I have much admired football teams from France, Germany and elsewhere in the last couple of decades. I have pride in my support for Arsenal because of family roots in both Woolwich and Islington, and without local support where would many teams be? I'm not saying that supporting England at football should be compulsory or expected, just that there's no need to go too far the other way and cùnt people off who do, and rub their faces in England's inevitable defeat when it happens.
Slight aside: I remember the Septic Arsenal blogger 7amkickoff (who sometimes writes some good stuff tbf) doing a piece about how someone he knew over there was supporting Leicester in their season of glory, and how he could say nothing to suggest that supporting Arsenal was a good idea, because Leicester were, at that moment, better than us. 7amkickoff is what you might call a leftist internationalist who seemingly despises the 'parochial/chauvinist' notions of both international competition and support for a local club team. What he didn't seem to grasp was that if everyone only supported the best teams, then why would any of the other teams even exist? I wanted him to understand that some of us support Arsenal because of geographical and family connections to the club, and even if/when we are shít, the club will get new fans because of these historical and geographical connections.
I wasn't getting all Norman Tebbit btw, not least because you strongly identify as English and support England at cricket
And please don't claim to have 'won' a debate before it has finished. There's a good chap.
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