Pidyon Ami
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A current "Dream Team" squad has an excellent coach who has worked with this group for though a number of iterations, be it the last two Olympics and the Redeem Team squad in Beijing. Also, these players have already experienced competition with one another and have their own effective chemistry. One can also assume that knowing that they were going against the original Dream Team, the current US team would experience their own story and produce a narrative of banding together. They would improve as the tournament honed their focus and defined their journey. Assuming that only the real Dream Team would have the experience of learning to love each other as teammates flies in the face of what we saw of the Redeem Team and the World Championship team that went to Turkey.
@TimMiltz This whole trope of Islam having saved Aristotle or Plato is ridiculous. The Roman world had records of all the Hellenistic and Christian philosophies, as well as a great store of scientific record going back thousands of years. They were kept in the many centers of the Roman-Christian world, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, New Rome (Constantinople) and Rome. Even as the West broke away from direct Imperial control from Ravenna (the sometimes capital of Western Rome) and Constantinople , there was constant contact and exchange of information between all these administrative centers, until... lets guess? Right, the Islamic Conquest of the Levant. At this point Alexandria and Jerusalem was cut off from the rest of Rome. Later Antioch was cut off and much later, as the Islamic Conquests continued their destructive path through Rome, Constantinople itself was taken. In the process, much of the knowledge was lost. If it did not pertain to engineering the Arab conquerors has little interest in Greco-Roman/Christian knowledge. The fact that for many generations, the Muslims kept Roman educated scribes, tax collectors and other administrators around to administer their new conquests, this is what saved the otherwise useless knowledge that you credit the Arabs for saving. Finally, and this is the biggest ramification as relates to knowledge saved by the Muslims, papyrus was the Roman way to keep information for thousands of years. There were thousand year old trade routes that were cut off from Europe by the Arab conquest of Egypt. One key product that was cut of from Europe was papyrus and this led to what we call the Dark Ages. It is not that this age was particularly dark or backwards. If you look at the art, architecture and other relatively permanent remains of that era you will find magnificent examples of advanced techniques and detail in the works of those who lived in this Dark Age. The reason the age is dark is that we have very little written record of what was happening in that era. We have very little written record because the item used to keep records, papyrus, was prohibitively expensive. Only vellum and parchment was left to be used and this was expensive enough to make written recording to be used very conservatively. Arguing that Islam saved Plato and Aristotle is like arguing that a man burned down your house, rummaged through it and later gave to you a few family pictures that had survived the fire.