Accordion my love

US-ians who are getting into football and the world cup are genuinely fascinating to me because a lot of them seem entirely resistant to understanding it at all? Like suggesting rule changes, misunderstanding how rankings work, even how shit-talking works, they're just bad at all of it somehow? (For the shit-talking thing, from what I've seen they're doing basically the reverse of established shit-talking etiquette: instead of talking shit before and during a match, then being a gracious winner/loser and focusing on their own team, they're only talking shit after matches which is, imo, bad. If you're only comfortable talking shit if your team wins, you suck and you're a coward). In my experience, they're also EXTREMELY sensitive about this - when I've seen other people point this out, the US-ian OP tends to bring up things like football hooliganism, and ignore the fact that we also think hooligans are bad and it's an acknowledged problem - it seems indicative of a culture of refusal of self-reflection in favour of aggressively shifting the topic of conversation whenever a potential flaw is highlighted.

I'm sure there's something in how associated cats are with femininity and how willing people are to be extremely cruel to and about cats, but I can't quite put it into words. Like, joking about poisoning a dog or hitting a dog with your car is unacceptable, but people are far more comfortable 'joking' like that about cats.