Some parts of 'Merica & the intertubes they'd still say that. What was on TwiX lateley? "a woke Black woman pilot? GET ME OUTTA HERE!" Most Wyte whiners dont realize the high standards BP have to keep just to not be thought of as being tokens in high paying professions. If a pilot is going to be nailed for being drunk or on drugs on the job, it's almost a certainty that it's a Wyte middle aged male.
The hangup about diversity among pilots is, among other things, the premise behind a joke from Rob Schneiders' Fox Nation standup special. It seems to really be in the right-wing zeitgeist right now. The thing about that particular example--which is a backlash against EDI/diversity efforts in hiring pilots--is that it's much easier to see the flawed premise underlying so much of the "meritocratic" backlash to calls for diversity in elite professions and institutions. And that flawed premise is that there is always a "best possible" candidate for any possible role--whether that be passenger jet pilot, or Supreme Court Justice. If you accept that belief, then you're at least potentially amenable to the argument that: "Hey, diversity is nice and all, but for important life-and-death jobs like landing a plane full of people, we need to make sure we get the best person available regardless of race or gender or whatever." The flaw, of course, is that "the best possible candidate" doesn't exist. For airline pilots--there are far more people on the planet with the requisite physical and mental qualifications than there will ever be planes to fly or pilot jobs to fill. Beyond those basic competencies, there's a need for education & training...and then from THAT pool of qualified & trained applicants, there's an effort to diversify the ranks of professional pilots by giving preference to women of color in order to get more diversity. But the social media outrage machine skips all those parts, and behaves as if "woke" airlines are bringing in random Black women off the street and telling them "We're gonna have you fly a plane--passenger safety be damned!" But they know it would sound ridiculous to spell it out, so they leave it to the audience to fill in the blanks. The reasons there's no such thing as 'the best qualified Supreme Court Justice nominee' are different, but in that case the right-wingers ignore politics and ideology rather than training and expertise.
I'd maybe look at it in another direction. If we strive for meritocracy but then we deny half the population the ability to achieve that merit because they have boobs or weird names or skin color, then, by definition, we're not getting the best. We're just getting the best of a highly specific population.
Sure--I don't think that's incompatible with what I'm saying; we should be drawing from the best when we create/recruit/train pools of potential candidates for any specialized or highly skilled or important profession/trade/role. It's just that the notion that there's ONE BEST PERSON for any particular vacancy is a fallacy which feeds narratives arguing that leveling the playing field won't beef up those talent pools but will instead dilute them.
https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/wilfried-nancy-what-making-mls-history-reveals-about-life-our-game Wilfried Nancy writes about his experience growing up black in France and compares his experiences in Canada and the US.
"Brilliant move by Trump because The Blacks loooove their sneakers. Man, you ever accidentally step on their sneakers in the subway? watch out! I think Trump should also roll out menthol cigarettes and a grape soda" These MAGA racists think black people will move to Trump because black people love sneakers. This is what they think of us. pic.twitter.com/hx8kLUiJHv— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) February 22, 2024
He mentions there that there have been very few black coaches in european leagues. I remember discussing that issue some years back about the EPL but the thing is it rather ignores the fact that there are only 18 coaches in the EPL so, by definition, they're a very select group of people and they're chosen by the owners of the clubs, not by the public. As I pointed out at the time, there were no English managers of English clubs either, (although there were some Scots and Irish), so if the criteria for bigotry is who manages the 18 EPL clubs then the English must be biased against the English which seems... well, unlikely, shall we say.
A lightly populated, unathletic nation with a desire for quality football that outshines every other country on the planet. They pretty much have to outsource.
When you look at their Olympic record, compared to, say, West Germany, they are unathletic. Turn this around. What are they good at, aside from the one thing they invented?
West Germany? Showing your age there dude D'yer mean the UK compared to Germany? A lot of sports people over here simply don't do so unless there's heavy investment in it. We started doing that in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics and did quite well. It's like the winter Olympics where there just isn't the interest in it because of the lack of snow and ice here most years. If there was a lot of sports that were played in 'drizzle' we'd win everything TBH, though, we haven't done too badly over the years... https://www.olympedia.org/statistics/medal/country Probably helped having brought in a load of quality athletes from the colonies I guess. One of the many advantages of immigration Having said that a lot of the sports we've done well in have been things like cycling, rowing and sailing. Not a lot of black folks in those things so what do I know!
Darts, snooker, raping the world. Don't sell them short! India might be the most unathletic big country. Can't think of one top track & field athlete they've produced, for instance. Cricket & field hockey about it. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36941269.amp
Didn’t really answer my question…how could one geographic area contain 40 million inferior athletes compared to other nations? And if Olympic Golds define that, does the same apply to intelligence? Doesn’t work for Nobel laureates, for example? Im just trying to ascertain the thought process you had that led you to type those words. Me, I think once the sample size is large enough (and England’s population is obviously large enough) one nation is going to be as athletic, or as intelligent, as any other. It wouldn’t even occur to me that the English could be more or less athletic or intelligent than the Germans.
Apart from the fact he mentiones alot of players are black but not in coaching. One thing has become very true, great players don't make great coaches too. We Dutch had the tendency to award our great players with a shortened coaching education in the believe they already had what it takes, the knowledge of the game. We gave that short route to Gullit, van Basten, Frank de Boer to name a few and they turned out to be shit at coaching.