Violent things take place, to be sure, but does it read violent? Is the run of the mill tackle a violent act? When you finish a football game does it feel like a MMA bout?
I dunno, to split hairs I find the game more action movie than horror film. The premise that a nation's blood lust is satisfied by weekly viewing the gladiators doesn't really hold up in my opinion
Excellent conversation. Open-minded and respectful debate is so lacking today, and it's exactly what we need a lot more of in every sphere of life.
Re democracy and disenfranchisement, something that is under-discussed is that the system we call democracy today actually bears little resemblance to a pure representative democratic model due to one factor - the influence of MONEY. Democracy should not be influenced by money in any sense - the essence of the system is that the richest and the poorest person have the same power through their vote. But that is not even close to the case.
I call modern democracy "corpocracy" because elections have become a fund-raising arms race which funnels money into ever more nefarious people-influencing tactics (see Cambridge Analytica and its progeny); and executing the office once elected has become a process of doing what your donors and their lobbies tell you to for your own enrichment, rather than serving the people who elected you. I don't think we actually live in democracies any more - the system has been bought and paid for by Big Finance, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military, Big Energy, and so on. People don't matter any more, only money does.
I think you make (perhaps unintentionally) a great point connecting the lack of football to the BLM riots. As Hamid notes, football is unique to America, a country where we have significantly more violent crime than other European culture due to our much larger black population. It seems then quite natural that the violent demographic and American impulse would need to find another outlet in the BLM riots.
Is Football violent?
Violent things take place, to be sure, but does it read violent? Is the run of the mill tackle a violent act? When you finish a football game does it feel like a MMA bout?
I dunno, to split hairs I find the game more action movie than horror film. The premise that a nation's blood lust is satisfied by weekly viewing the gladiators doesn't really hold up in my opinion
Excellent conversation. Open-minded and respectful debate is so lacking today, and it's exactly what we need a lot more of in every sphere of life.
Re democracy and disenfranchisement, something that is under-discussed is that the system we call democracy today actually bears little resemblance to a pure representative democratic model due to one factor - the influence of MONEY. Democracy should not be influenced by money in any sense - the essence of the system is that the richest and the poorest person have the same power through their vote. But that is not even close to the case.
I call modern democracy "corpocracy" because elections have become a fund-raising arms race which funnels money into ever more nefarious people-influencing tactics (see Cambridge Analytica and its progeny); and executing the office once elected has become a process of doing what your donors and their lobbies tell you to for your own enrichment, rather than serving the people who elected you. I don't think we actually live in democracies any more - the system has been bought and paid for by Big Finance, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Military, Big Energy, and so on. People don't matter any more, only money does.
I think you make (perhaps unintentionally) a great point connecting the lack of football to the BLM riots. As Hamid notes, football is unique to America, a country where we have significantly more violent crime than other European culture due to our much larger black population. It seems then quite natural that the violent demographic and American impulse would need to find another outlet in the BLM riots.
Absolutely love this. Great discussion and further proof that Twitter is not a real place👍
He used to listen to you on Call In!