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Will We Ever See Tactically Dropped Catches in T20?

There is a nightmare scenario lurking in the future shadows of T20 cricket. It’s unexplored territory that arguably goes against the spirit of the game, like the underarm delivery or the Mankad. The possibility of it is so unpalatable that few have thus far dared think about it. The nightmare scenario is this: Will we ever see a T20 match in which a fielder deliberately drops a catch?

The reason why this might become an issue is because of scoreboard pressure. Considering the following scenario:

It is the second innings. The team batting first scored 200, and in response, the chasing team is 141/1 after 15 overs. This means that the chasing team needs 60 runs off 30 balls, a RRR of 12 per over. This is a challenging task but not ungettable. The No. 3 batsman is in, but has struggled to get the ball out of the middle all day and is striking at less than 100. The Nos. 4, 5, 6 and 7 batsmen are all established hitters who reliably strike at 125+. The No. 3 batsman has just hit the first ball of the 16th over in the air towards mid-on, who is lining it up.

The question: Is it in the interests of the fielding team for the mid-on fielder to complete the catch, or is it better for him to deliberately palm the ball into the ground?

Consider the match situation. The chasing team needs 60 runs off 30 balls, which essentially means that they have to score boundaries. The No. 3 batsman has had trouble hitting boundaries all innings, which means that the chasing team has a fair probability of losing if he remains at the wicket, because he will use up deliveries that the Nos. 4, 5, 6 and 7 batsmen could be using to strike boundaries.

If he gets out now, on the other hand, those batsmen will be able to come in and strike at a higher rate, meaning that the chasing team would have a much higher chance of winning the match.

In simpler terms, what happens when the wicket count is meaningless on account of there being so few overs left and the current striker has a lower strike rate than the next man in (or, at least, the fielding team anticipates that he will have a lower strike rate)?

Against this, it might be argued that a set batsman will have his eye in better than the next batsman in, and so taking the catch will always benefit the fielding team. Moreover, taking the catch makes it more likely that the bowlers can get into the tail.

But that doesn’t negate the possibility, however unlikely, that a match situation may arise in which the fielding team calculates that the match is unwinnable for the chasing team while a certain batsman is at the crease on account of the intensity of the scoreboard pressure.

What may happen in the end is that batsmen are simply sent to the crease in descending order of strike rate.

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The Western Centre-Left Have Now Fully Betrayed the Working Class

The Marxists have made it clear: white people are the enemy, even if they’re working-class

Imagine being a working-class Englishman of a line of working-class Englishmen, knowing that it was your hands and the hands of your ancestors that built this country, and then being charged £10 more to enter a Labour Party gathering because you were white. No-one in that situation could help but to feel insulted, if not completely betrayed, by the Labour Party in that situation. After all, it’s supposed to represent the labouring class!

Western political parties that used to represent the working class have now been completely taken over by middle-class Marxists who despise the workers. This was never more evident than this week, when the British Labour Party made the decision to charge white people £10 more to attend a Jeremy Corbyn rally compared to non-whites.

The sense of betrayal among the white working class is total. Imagine knowing that one of the millions of wealthy black or Asian people out there are privileged to pay a lower price for the same service than you, even though they have more money, just because the social democrats have abandoned you.

Unfortunately for those in the working class, the young middle-class Marxists who run most of the centre-left parties of the West have declared them the enemy. The white man is the enemy, and white skin is the enemy uniform. It doesn’t matter if you are poor, if you are descended from poor people, or if your white ancestors have been exploited their whole lives going all the way back to medieval times. Possession of white skin is sufficient for guilt.

This is not a phenomenon confined to Britain. The DACA shutdown in America represents a similar betrayal of the native working class by the major centre-left party. Here, the Marxists are willing to go as far as shutting the Government down (meaning that many poor Americans are forced to miss out on services) for the sake of protecting illegal immigrants. It’s hard to imagine such a thing being possible at an earlier time in history.

Even in New Zealand, the Sixth Labour Govt. went back on its promise to legalise medicinal cannabis, instead using its sparse political capital to agitate for the importation of “refugees” from Manus Island. It doesn’t matter that the working class has been crying out for a recreational alternative to tobacco and alcohol for decades – the blood debt of white people necessitates that they go to the back of the queue.

Western centre-left parties have started to put people from foreign cultures ahead of the people from the cultures that they originally represented. This is an incredible development if one considers that it was the white working class that founded and built all of the Western centre-left parties. These movements have now been totally co-opted.

There is historical precedent for this sort of thing, and it’s not promising: the rise of Adolf Hitler was mostly fuelled by playing on the discontent of the German working class, who felt themselves abandoned and humiliated by the Weimar Republic and by the Marxists responsible for the German Revolution of 1918-19, a majority of whom were Jews.

In the Internet age, we don’t need a megalomaniacal genius totalitarian dictator to arise for problems to hit the streets. All that’s necessary is an economic downturn of sufficient magnitude – and the mainstream media was warning just this week that the extra time bought by quantitative easing is just about to run out, with the fundamentals looking even worse than before the Global Financial Crisis.

A sharp downturn in economic fortunes could see the European perception of their Muslim and African populations to shift from disadvantaged to burdensome to parasitic, and then the world will be in a state of extreme danger.

Humanity’s Greatest Conceit

Many people are happy to hold the belief that other creatures have a “lesser” or “lower” form of consciousness to themselves, despite the absence of a logical basis for it

The single greatest conceit of the human animal is that humans like it are somehow more conscious or self-aware than the beings who make up the rest of the animal kingdom. This belief is not only insane and irrational, but it has had devastating consequences for the rest of the Earth.

When it comes down to it, no-one has any fucking idea who or what else is conscious. This follows simple logic. After all, how could we possibly know? Each one of us can assert with absolute certainty that, as an individual, they are conscious, because being conscious of your own consciousness is sufficient evidence that it exists. But this gets taken to illogical conclusions.

The vast majority of humans labour under the erroneous assumption that other creatures are only conscious to the degree that they are like those humans. A chimpanzee is considered to be very similar to us relative to the rest of the animal kingdom (and it is if the comparison is made in physical and anatomical terms), but this has no relevance to whether or not the chimpanzee is conscious.

If we can’t observe or measure consciousness in other humans, then we can’t measure it in other creatures either. So if consciousness has never and can never be either observed or measured in other creatures, then any belief about the consciousness of another creature must of necessity be an article of faith.

Simple enough, but the difficulty arises when this iron-clad logic meets the infinite human capacity for self-delusion. The vast majority of people make the erroneous assumption that their brain generates consciousness and therefore that other creatures are similar to the extent that their brains are believed to be similar.

But this is pure superstition, and not logical.

Even worse, despite being a majority, are those who assume that they are superior to all creatures of “lesser” consciousness, and that the supposed lower consciousness of other creatures give us a green light to abuse and exploit them.

It’s common for humans to look at a cat and think we see an animal that is uncomprehending of the greater existential questions, but how can we rule out that the cat has long since solved all these questions and is now blase about them, to the point that any human wondering about them merely appears sophomoric?

How can we know that the cat, who sleeps 15 hours a day, isn’t meditating for most of this time? Cats might all be spiritual masters on the order of Buddha.

How do we know that the ant that appears to go forward mindlessly, isn’t at perfect peace with its role in the world and accepts it without reservation?

The logical flaw is also evident if one observes that many people are willing to assume that these creatures have less consciousness on account of that they didn’t evolve as much of it as we did – but they aren’t willing to make the same assumptions of different races, even though the logic is the same.

The argument that differing selection pressures could account for differences in consciousness between humans and the other mammals, but could not also account for differences in consciousness between white people and black people, is a contradiction on its face.

Humanity’s greatest conceit is that our consciousness is somehow more special or worthy of not suffering than the consciousness of other creatures, and this line of reasoning is what has enabled the rape of the planet that has occurred over the last century.

Sweden Met With Catastrophe Because of Arrogance

I arrived in Sweden for the first time in December of 2001. Within weeks, before I even had the chance to adjust my sleep schedule to the 11-hour time difference, the country was rocked by the murder of Fadime Sahindal. I didn’t understand it at the time, but this incident – and Swedes’ reaction to it – could explain the disaster that has now befallen the nation a generation later.

Sahindal was a Turkish refugee, and had moved to Sweden with her family at the age of seven. She was evidently a high-spirited woman because she refused to accede to her father’s demands that she abstain from dating any Swedish men. This refusal, to to horrified astonishment of the Swedish population, was enough to provoke her own father into shooting her in the head to absolve the perceived shame Fadime had brought upon the family – a so called honour killing.

I had never, ever heard of such a thing as an honour killing in New Zealand, because our Muslim population is too low. So I had to look to Swedish people, as fellow Westerners, to suggest a reasonable reaction. The reaction to this was, at first, utter shock, mostly because murders were shocking enough by themselves in the Sweden of 2002, and to my surprise people got over it very quickly, appearing to reason that the problem would be sorted out soon enough.

But on the fringes on Swedish society, a plaintive voice sounded in the dark forests. It said, calmly and logically, that if women are being murdered for going out with young Swedish men, then the nation’s efforts to integrate these people – now arriving in their tens of thousands – were going to be extremely difficult. If the immigrants hate us so badly that they’d rather kill their own children than have them go out with ours, how will they ever have the will to integrate?

Many Swedish people appeared to have followed that line of reasoning to the obvious, and unremarkable conclusion that if they hate us that badly then we ought not to let them into the country, at least not in any large number. These people had learned, however, that they could not articulate these thoughts without being socially executed, because the consensus was that Sweden would do an excellent job of integrating these immigrants, and anyone going against this consensus was ostracised without mercy.

The intellectual class of Sweden appeared to be obsessed with becoming an “ideologiskt stormakt” (ideological superpower). The reasoning was that Sweden was too small to be a superpower in any military or economic sense, so she could only find satisfaction for her ambitions to be recognised as the best in the world through ideology. She would have to set some kind of Christ-like moral example for the world to follow.

Swedes strongly disagreed with me when I claimed that this desire, borne of a self-righteous and narcissistic need to be recognised as the best in the world at everything, was likely to backfire. Sweden had proven itself the best in world at solving any and all social issues – this was the constant refrain that I could not escape during my time here. Vi är stolt men inte nojd – we are proud but not satisfied – was the campaign slogan.

Therefore, Sweden would inevitably prove itself better than every other country in the world at solving the issue of how to integrate masses of angry, psychologically crippled men of fighting age from cultures rotten with hatred for outsiders. I realised this from talking to a Swedish friend of mine who was a member of the ruling Social Democrat party.

I tried to explain the mathematics of open borders to him. I used the metaphor of two bank accounts, one containing $100 and growing at 5% interest, the other containing $1,000 and growing at 2% interest. No matter how small the initial principal in the first bank account, as long as it grew at a higher percentage it would eventually become the larger of the two.

Therefore, I explained, if you allow mass and unending chain migration from a foreign population into your country, and those foreigners breed at higher rates than you, those foreigners will eventually outnumber you in your own country. Then you are forced to either get rid of democracy or be ruled by them.

He shrugged his shoulders. It was evidently not considered a big deal. “Dom försvenskar sig” (they will become/make themselves Swedish) was heard everywhere. The underlying belief appeared to be that, out of sheer gratitude, the refugees would cast aside all of their previous culture and immediately adopt Swedish norms, having finally come to the conclusion (self-evident to Swedes) that Swedish culture is the best in the world.

None of this is to disparage Swedish culture – to the contrary. Aside from the problems mentioned in this essay, I was deeply impressed with the national character of the Swedish people. In all regards I found them exceptionally competent, thoughtful, industrious, honest, organised and compassionate. They had clearly succeeded in building a society with very few problems.

Unfortunately for them, this success also contained the seed for their demise.

A foreign visitor to Sweden (at least 16 years ago) quickly noticed that it was an unusually high-trust society. People generally believed what you told them. This high trust allowed for an exceptional level of efficiency, because it meant that business could be conducted with very little suspicion.

It also led to Swedish people forgetting, over time, that not everyone else in the world was like that. The level of trust in Swedish society at the turn of the century was so high, and so taken for granted, that it was assumed that everyone else in the world was capable of behaving like that if they were just given a chance.

And so, the failure of other countries to successfully integrate large numbers of Africans or Muslims and turn them into productive members of society was blamed on the moral failings of those countries – those populations were simply too racist or unwilling to pay the high levels of welfare necessary. Sweden would be different because of the unique foresight and generosity of these people.

The psychological origin of the disaster currently befalling Sweden is nothing more than the very same hubris that great writers and playwrights have been warning us about since the time of Homer. It lies in the narcissistic, arrogant belief that Sweden is the best in the world as if by God’s Will and therefore can effortlessly solve the social problems that other nations had struggled with.

Sweden has to accept that it’s impossible to make gold out of shit, no matter how skilled and intelligent one is.