Tuesday, January 28, 2014

NYT Guilt Piece Plays Anti-Football-Male-Aggression-War Card

The manner of this op-ed is unfortunately no longer uncommon.

Our society has become increasingly accustomed to the Leftist/Progressive agenda. As a consequence of this, a piece that denigrates one facet of American culture will inevitably also contain multiple add-on's in which other aspects of our culture are treated as having been already judged and found guilty.

The writer intention is to draw the reader in with his personal reflections on the dangers inherent in American Football, then render the same reader stuck in a bewildering quagmire of class guilt, personal guilt, anti-masculinity guilt (here referred to as "hypermasculinity) - all topped off with the patently false conclusion that the concept that a war can be won is the product of "childhood fantasies of war as a winnable contest".

The approach makes sense for them. How does one write a refutation piece when each uberbriefly-noted false premise needs several paragraphs or pages to be decisively proven false?  

One must realize that there is a reason why your child's friend is being raised to abhor even play-acting of any type violence, even if it's a pretend game of fighting bad guys. Men have largely surrendered their place to Moms. The Moms in turn have drank the Kool-aid and now demand that their sons grow up with an entire region of their male brains being fully suppressed.

-It's no wonder that we then encounter men who tell us that they feel "fear" while seeing or touching a firearm, but have spent their youth treating girls as sexual playthings.

The Leftist operates with a "Year Zero" approach to every topic. Anything that ever occurred in history is irrelevant to the Leftist so one should not think to cite proofs of wars that were won. You'd have an easier time telling a Christian Fundamentalist about the writings of Medieval Christians.

The need for the Left to weaken the hearts, minds, and bodies of Westerners is so great that one Leftist film utilized the undeniable maxim of Flavius Vegetius Renatus to engage in truly Orwellian Newspeak:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_peace_racket.html

"If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”

This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it’s wishful thinking that doesn’t follow logically from the history of the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to stand up for yourself than if you’re proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it’s denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes.

Call it the Peace Racket........"



I do not happen to be a big football fan. My favorite sport is baseball, with boxing coming in second place. I have also come to enjoy high school wrestling as my youngest took up up this sport two years ago. Boxing (noted in article), wrestling, and MMA (which strangely was not mentioned although it is far more "vicious" than boxing) would be the next probable targets for the Left. All of these are overwhelmingly male in participation and general outlook.

Softball is very close to baseball and requires the same skills and athleticism, but few things can be harder to hit than a fastball moving at well over 95 miles per hour - we have yet to find a female that can do this consistently. Coupled with the now-shameful fact that men are the participants, the chance of catastrophic injury from being struck by either a pitched or batted ball would in all probability be another reason for baseball being on the Leftist hit-list. Recently we have seen calls to ban Baserunner-Catcher collisions at home plate. It is an extremely rare occurrence that is understandably prohibited in youth baseball - but is still a key elements in the Game; the chance of a baseball being dislodged from the Catcher's hand or mitt in a tight game (the difference being a crucial run scored or a just as crucial out made) may someday be a thing of the past.

The main goal for the writer is to get us to assume a guilt-ridden, gender-neutral, classless, and pacifist mindset - both being arguably more dangerous than their opposites of aberrant masculinity and war-mongering. At least the latter two can be checked by courageous and capable souls. If all one has to work with are examples of the former two, he is in trouble.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/magazine/is-it-immoral-to-watch-the-super-bowl.html?_r=0


"............The problem is that I can no longer indulge these pleasures without feeling complicit. It was easier years ago, when injuries like Stingley’s could be filed away as freakish accidents. TV coverage was relatively primitive, the players hidden under helmets and pads, obscured by fuzzy reception, more superheroes than men. Today we see the cruelty of the game in high definition. Slow-motion replays show us the precise angle of a grotesquely twisted ankle and a quarterback’s contorted face at the exact moment he is concussed........

There are two basic rationalizations for fans like myself. The first is that the N.F.L. is working hard to make the game safer, which is flimsy at best. The league spent years denying that the game was causing neurological damage. Now that the medical evidence is incontrovertible, it has sought to reduce high-speed collisions, fining defenders for helmet-to-helmet hits and other flagrantly violent play. Its most significant response has been to offer $765 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 former players, but a judge recently blocked the settlement. It simply wasn’t enough money.

The second argument is that players choose to incur the game’s risks and are lavishly compensated for doing so. This is technically true. N.F.L. players are members of an elite fraternity that knowingly places self-sacrifice, valor and machismo above ethical or medical common sense. But most start out as kids with limited options. They may love football for its inherent virtues. But they also quickly come to see the game as a path to glory and riches. These rewards aren’t inherent. They arise from a culture of fandom that views players as valuable only so long as they can perform.

But if I’m completely honest about my misgivings, it’s not just that the N.F.L. is a negligent employer. It’s how our worship of the game has blinded us to its pathologies.

Pro sports are, by definition, monetized arenas for hypermasculinity. Football is nowhere near as overtly vicious as, say, boxing. But it is the one sport that most faithfully recreates our childhood fantasies of war as a winnable contest.

Over the past 12 years, as Americans have sought a distraction from the moral incoherence of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the game has served as a loyal and satisfying proxy. It has become an acceptable way of experiencing our savage impulses, the cultural lodestar when it comes to consuming violence. What differentiates it from the glut of bloody films and video games we devour is our awareness that the violence in football, and the toll of that violence, is real.

The struggle playing out in living rooms across the country is that of a civilian leisure class that has created, for its own entertainment, a caste of warriors too big and strong and fast to play a child’s game without grievously injuring one another. The very rules that govern our perceptions of them might well be applied to soldiers: Those who exhibit impulsive savagery on the field are heroes. Those who do so off the field are reviled monsters.
The civilian and the fan participate in the same basic transaction. We offload the mortal burdens of combat, mostly to young men from the underclass, whom we send off to battle with cheers and largely ignore when they wind up wounded........"


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