I care nothing for football (soccer to Americans), but I was pleased when Portugal won the European Cup last Sunday. I would have preferred it to be Liechtenstein or San Marino, or best of all Vatican City—that is to say, the smallest country possible. But at least Portugal is not a large country, however, important it may once have been in world history.

Naturally, as a patriotic Englishman, I was thoroughly delighted when Iceland defeated England. Everyone likes an underdog in any case, and anything that humiliates crushes mentally and causes misery to the beer-bellied, shaven-headed, and tattooed English football supporters is obviously a blow for civilization. If there are more unattractive people in the world than these supporters I do not know them, and I am better-traveled than most. If we but lived in a sensible world, such people would be on sight automatically denied entry into all foreign countries. But we do not live in a sensible world, where this obviously wise precaution would be taken.

The Problem with Socia... Thomas DiLorenzo Best Price: $9.49 Buy New $11.93 (as of 06:45 UTC - Details) The sport has long brought out the worst in crowds, of course, especially among those whose lives require constant spectacles to disguise their lack of a deeper source of satisfaction in life. I remember once reading (a long time ago) a brilliant book by a professor of classics, Alan Cameron, titled Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium. He was not a man to mince his words: Of the work on the circus factions by a fellow scholar, he wrote that it was such “a spectacular marriage of traditional falsehood with original fantasy” that it was “beyond the reach of ordinary criticism.”

Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?

There were two main factions of supporters at the games in Rome and Byzantium, the Blues and the Greens. Before Professor Cameron published his book, scholars believed—under the Marxist influence or on the somewhat optimistic assumption that people are not willing to kill or be killed for no good reason—that these two factions, whose clashes often caused many deaths and much destruction, must really have been expressing some deep social antagonism. The Blues were therefore believed to have represented the rich and the Greens the poor, but Professor Cameron demolishes that supposition with what seems to me something very much like finality.

Read the Whole Article

Hidden History: An Exp... Donald Jeffries Best Price: $9.86 Buy New $14.70 (as of 04:30 UTC - Details)

The Best of Theodore Dalrymple