61–70 of 211 posts
Today I find football unwatchable. Every time I see players slamming into each other at full speed I feel queasy. I’m also ethically against watching it because I don’t want to support the football industry. There are many other sports in the world I’d rather watch.
I’ve never been a huge football fan but never avoided it either. Until, that is, when we started hearing about CTE and how the NFL tried (still tries) to cover it up and downplay it. Today I find football unwatchable. Every time I see players slamming into each other at full speed I feel queasy. I’m also ethically against watching it because I don’t want to support the football industry. There are many other sports i…
"I can't believe people were so dumb about smoking in the 1950s.. how were they so dumb? did they not know it caused cancer?" this is a kinda modern equivalent, imo..
At least it's limited to a small few playing a sport, vs. pretty much every adult.
I didn't grow up playing or really understanding sports. I was one of those guys who joked about "sportsball" and stuff like that. When I started really taking weight training seriously I started having a frame of reference for understanding sports and started really appreciating them. Football is a sport that is designed to really allow people to showcase the limits of the human body. The most impressive athletes in…
That’s a highly cultural-specific viewpoint. For example Rugby union, league, AFL etc are all contact sports with huge followings - I can’t understand let alone (and probably because of my lack of understanding) stand NFL which I personally think culturally encapsulates an American approach to the world - this is the offence team, this is defence, let’s pad up and beat the shit out of the opposing side. Compared to t…
Team sports emulate warfare, and determining who wins or loses is based on achieving goals. Thus the strategy and goals adopted by these sports end up reflecting how each society believes how war should be fought and how wars are won. Thus europeans favour sports and strategies which are focused on achieving the goals without any emphasis on unnecessary manhandling or violence (not because of any pseudo superority or morality, but mainly because it needlessly wastes energy, degrades our side's athletic capabilities and performance, and also lowers the value of what is expected to be conquered) while the US favours a scorched-earth approach where winning is confounded with decimating the enemy in a humiliating manner, without any care preserving any value on which is about to be conquered.
This US-centric view of warfare is very well represented in Ender's game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least it's limited to a small few playing a sport, vs. pretty much every adult.
Well over 1 million American boys and young men play football every year. The game is a rite of passage. Further these studies have implications for head contact that occurs in other sports and in general.
In a healthy society this sport would be forbidden by law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well over 1 million American boys and young men play football every year. The game is a rite of passage. Further these studies have implications for head contact that occurs in other sports and in general.
I'm not trying to diminish the suffering/risks/etc of a million people, but that is about one-third of one percent of the US population so I think woolvalley's comment is pretty on point.
> Researchers are working to develop a test for people still alive so they can begin to study the disease more comprehensively. What more is there to study? Getting knocked in the head for years is bad for you. Do we really need scientists to tell us this? Who in their right mind thinks getting hit in the head on a regular basis will have no negative affects on their well-being? The solution is not some new treatment…
That will be the logical thing to do, but you know... money... the NFL doesn't seem to care about anything else.
There's a lot of hate towards the NFL but the NCAA is an even worse actor on CTE. 70,000 college players every year, and they aren't paid professionals like the NFL. But NCAA programs make billions of dollars off of the players (and their coaches millions). Destroying brains for profit, in the context of the education system, is truly evil.