CandidProfessor

This baseball versus cricket debate is rooted more in Indian nationalism and their obsessive desire to convince people of their superiority than anything else. I moved to the UK for work a while ago. When I first arrived I was recruited to play cricket by a university cricket team simply because they were desperate for players. I am a big baseball fan, played through high school, and then played beer league softball as an adult. I was excited to try cricket. They first brought me to the nets (batting cage for Americans) dressed me up in pads and explained to me that the ball would “break my bones” without the pads. They said the ball was much harder and heavier than a baseball. Basically the same argument the Indian Nationalists keep using. They then handed me a ball and it felt pretty much identical to a baseball in the hand. Same leather cover. Same hardness. Same weight. Apparently a cricket ball is slightly harder and heavier but the difference is so slight you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. They then gave me a bat and showed me how to hold it. Batting in cricket is defensive. You are protecting the wicket primarily. You rarely take a full swing, and almost never hit the ball hard. Trying to hit the ball hard is too risky because losing a wicket is so costly. I started batting the way they showed me. However, I quickly found the bowling so slow that I had no trouble hitting the ball every time. I did not find the bounce problematic because the balls were coming so slowly. I reverted to swinging baseball style and hitting the ball hard. Even taking full swings I still connected on every bowl because the balls were coming so slowly. The rest of the team seemed genuinely shocked by how hard I hit the ball. In baseball I was a power hitter. I hit 3rd or 4th. In beer league I was the top home run hitter in my league. So hitting the ball hard was in my skill set. The reason I never went farther than high school in baseball was because I did not have the insane reaction times necessary to consistently hit fastballs while being able to adjust to breaking balls. When I played my first cricket match they used me as the opening batter. First bowl I hit a boundary (4 runs). Second bowl a six. I swung as hard as I could baseball style on every bowl. Because the bowling was so slow it was not an issue unless the bounce was an in between hop. But even then, the ball almost never hit the stumps so it didn’t matter. To people familiar with baseball, you can swing and miss as many times as you want in cricket. As long as the ball does not hit the stumps it doesn’t matter. After batting like this for a while I asked the umpire if I was allowed to just move forward and hit the ball before it bounced. They said it was allowed but risky because if I were to miss the ball they can get me out if I am outside the crease. I then just moved a few steps forward on every bowl and hit the ball before the bounce. The bowling was so slow that this was not a problem. I then just hit six after six. Pretty much every ball I hit in the air was a six. If I happened to hit it on the ground the fielders would literally jump out of the way because they weren’t used to fielding balls hit hard, and these would go for four. The reality is because of the difference in pace and because batting in baseball is offensive rather than defensive, batting in baseball is harder. The statistics clearly reflect this with batting success in baseball so far below batting success in cricket. For this reason I find it odd that the Indian Nationalists have focused on this aspect of the game. It is perfectly obviously from a glance at the stats that batting in baseball is more difficult. The flip side, of course, is that bowling in cricket is probably more difficult than pitching. In baseball the pitcher has the advantage. In cricket the batter has the advantage. In baseball outs are the normal outcome. In cricket outs are rare celebrated events.

The low IQs have actually managed to convince themselves that Trump crashing the stock market is a good thing.

Religious people are so weird about sex. Does the religion make people weird, or are people with sex hang ups naturally drawn to religion?

One of Trump’s final acts as president his first time around was surrendering to the Taliban. One of his first acts this time is surrendering to Russia.

Hillbilly Hamas out in full force.

Since the year 2000 there have been more than 300,000 legal marriages of underage girls in the USA. Most of these marriages are forced by conservative religious families when their daughters get pregnant. Often these are christian conservative families legally signing their underage daughters over to the men who groomed and raped them. The UK Rotherham scandal is it a horrific scale, but it is absolutely dwarfed by the systematic child sexual abuse being performed by conservative religious Americans. Why is this not an international scandal?

There is no expectation that conservatives and liberals should be equally represented in professions on the right tail of the distribution for IQ. The reason is because liberals are on average smarter than conservatives. To illustrate this I have performed a computer simulation experiment where I randomly sample from a population with mean IQ of 100 and standard deviation of 15. Conservatives have mean IQ of 90 and liberals have mean IQ of 110. I plot the distribution and the ten smartest individuals

Read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law if you are genuinely interested. Rothstein documents the legal history of segregation and zoning laws that prevented African Americans from acquiring generational wealth through home ownership.

This reads like an essay from a low IQ undergraduate desperately trying to sound smart.