Numerology

Posted on September 5, 2024 by thezman

If you pay attention to sports, one of the things you may have noticed over the last few decades is the rise of numerology. The people making money from sports entertainment and their fans do not call it numerology, but they often treat the numbers of the respective games in the same way mystics treat numbers in life. They think numbers have qualities beyond the thing they are supposed to represent. Therefore, the numbers of the game are transformed into magical tokens.

For example, there is a site called Pro Football Focus that sells itself as something like a quantitative lab for the game of football. They started on the claim that they grade every player in every game in the NFL season, by grading every snap of every game in the NFL season. They conjured a grading system that they claim lets their clients compare the value of each player to the value of other players. Their numbers allow everyone to be a quantitative expert on football.

That last bit is part of the hook. While sports are not complicated, most fans never play organized team sports, so they know nothing about the game, beyond their own emotions while looking at the results. The typical football fan could not tell you the difference between zone blocking and zone blitzing. Baseball fans have no idea why an off-speed pitch is effective. Soccer fans could not tell you anything about the game, as the strategy is a total mystery to them.

What the numerology of sports does for the fan is give them ready made truths they can easily digest and memorize, so they can feel confident when assessing what they are seeing on their televisions. The baseball fan can confidently say Play X is not a good player, because his WAR is below three. The football fan can say that his team lost because the left tackle got a sixty-grade from Pro Football Focus. These numbers bestow a sense of knowledge on the person using them.

Of course, the people using these numbers have no idea what lies behind them, which is the magic of numerology. This allows the sports fan to think these numbers are predictive of future behavior, when, at best, they merely quantify past behavior in a way that allows for further investigation. Many of the numbers that arise from the numerology of sports are meaningless nonsense. The numbers from Pro Football Focus are a good example.

If you look at their site, they state that they are endeavoring to do something that is practically impossible. They employ a team of 600 people, but only 60 are qualified to grade games. These sixty people are then tasked with assigning a pass/fail/neutral grade to every player on every play and have the results hours after the game has been completed. Not only are they doing this for all sixteen NFL games but the fifty or so college football games each weekend.

Even if they solved the man-hour problem in such a task, the numbers they produce are based on purely subjective criteria. Anyone who has played sports understands that a player can do his job as dictated by the coach, but still fail. In other words, the only way anyone can know if a player executed his assignment in a game is to know what the coaches assigned him. You can surmise in many cases, but that requires a deep understanding of the game.

The ridiculousness of the numbers do not matter, even when it is pointed out to the people who love using them. There is a magic quality to assigning numbers, especially numbers that have been sacralized, to the sport. Scan a sports fan forum right now and you will find lots of posts about the grades from PFF. The fans want to believe these numbers tell them something about the prospects for their favorite team, so they accept the validity of the numbers, despite the absurdity.

At this point, some readers will be tempted to post the dumbest comment on the internet which is, “I do not own a television” followed by the second dumbest comment, which is, “I do not watch sportsball.” No one cares that you do not own a TV or that you spend your leisure time in self-flagellation. That is not the point of this post. The point is that in something as banal as sports entertainment, numerology has crept in and taken up a place in the mind of the viewer.

The reason for this is our society is saturated in numerology. In every large company there are hundreds of worker bees churning out tables and graphs that have meaning to the intended audience, well beyond the factual. Show the mid-level manager a report with sales figures and he gets excited. Show those numbers in the form of a dashboard and he passes out in ecstasy. There is a whole industry built on the magical power of showing numbers in the form of a dashboard.

The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers. The things they produce for their employer are not just about understanding the descriptive reality of the company but also understanding the prescriptive reality of the company. When the needle on the meter is in the green, everyone is in a state of grace. If the meter moves into the yellow, then it means someone inside is cavorting with Old Scratch.

This helps explain the obsession with AI. Numerology is just a way of creating an authority outside the people involved in the process. The sports fan does not want to know who is posting those grades after the football game. They just want to believe that there is some objective, omniscient force that knows the truth. Similarly, the people we call the left demand AI not talk about a certain Austrian painter, because they want AI to validate their beliefs and thus be their moral authority.

This is why the game of baseball has been taken over by robots. Quants crank out decision trees they supply to the managers, which the manager consults at every decision point in the game. Everyone embraces this, even when the results are bad, for the same reason the Muslim says, “inshallah” before embarking on a project. The results are in the hands of an authority everyone must obey and trust. If the team loses, then the mystery force behind the numbers must have willed it.

One of the unexpected results of the proliferation of numbers has been the collapse in the ability to rationalize the numbers. The numbers of life used to be simple measures of what needed to be measured. Now they are treated like omens that not only indicate the future but weigh on our moral understanding of ourselves. The bad stats from a game reinforce the notion among the fans of the losing team that they deserve to feel bad because their team deserved to lose.

This helps explain why the sports fan went from being a guy enjoying men compete to a guy whose identity is tangled up in the identity of a team. Numerology of sports did not create the bug man organizing his life around televised sports, but it coevolved with the general phenomenon of numerology, which itself is the result of the search for new moral authorities to replace faith and tradition. The numbers of life have now become signs from the gods, whoever they may be.

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College Football

Posted on August 22, 2024 by thezman

The college football season kicks off this weekend with a game between Florida State and Georgia Tech in Ireland. This is what is now called “week zero” of the college football calendar where a handful of teams start the season early. Labor Day weekend remains the “official” start of the college football season. For the longest time, football season was Labor Day to Thanksgiving, but like everything else that tradition has given way to rapacious greed by all involved.

College sports is a genuinely American thing. On the one hand, it is amateur sports played by college students. On the other hand, it is a billion-dollar sports entertainment industry operating on college campuses. Even elite colleges like Stanford, Northwestern and Boston College find a way to be in the circus, while pretending to put academics ahead of the sports entertainment business. It is a uniquely American form of mass self-deception that the rest of the world does not understand.

The roots of college football are as normal as any other tradition. The game evolved from both rugby and soccer, which were popular sports in the 19th century. The old English line that “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen” carried over to America. Young college men would play one or both, depending upon their inclination. Before long they combined into what eventually became American football.

Naturally, the young men playing sports on their college campus would want to test themselves against the young men on the nearby college campus. Until fairly recent, this was the normal habit of young males. Legend has it that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American football game, but it was more like soccer. Harvard and McGill played the new game which quickly became popular and eventually supplanted both soccer and rugby on the college campus.

To some degree, the popularity of college football was due to one of those threads that made up the American character. In every region of the new country, self-organization was an essential element of life. This is something Tocqueville noted when he traveled around America in the 19th century. Self-organization was the antidote to the alienation and isolation that arises from democracy. Instead of withdrawing from mass public life, the individual forms islands of free association.

You see that in the early days of college football. The sport got its big boost in the Great Depression when local leaders were looking for ways to rally the people and keep them from organizing revolts against the government. Cheering on the local team as they did battle with the team from across town or across the state line was a good way to bring people together and to give them a healthy outlet. Many sports rivalries were born during the Great depression, even high school rivalries.

Of course, free association is at the heart of the college experience. For most families, primary school is a function of where they live. Your kids go to the local public schools whether you like it or not. It is why in the current age it has become common to ask the realtor showing you houses about the local basketball team. Parents understand that they are not just buying a house, but they are committing their children to the schools that come with the community in which the house is located.

College has never been that way. Young people are free to pick whatever college they like as long as they get accepted and can afford it. That plays a part in how the alumni of every school view their rival. Every school’s rival is populated with impoverished simpletons for some reason. While most students attend college within a three-hour drive of home, they are still spoiled for choice. This makes the rivalries between the schools possible and often makes them quite intense.

That is why college football rivalries remain, despite the fact that the localized logic and self-organization have given way to financialization and greed. The family who has always gone to Oklahoma continues to suspect that the people with the Longhorn sticker on their car are Harris voters, because it is the way it has always been and every autumn, they are reminded of that at the big game. America has always been a diverse country and that has always been the root of college rivalries.

The acid of modernity is slowly eroding this bit of social capital. The television oligopolies have decided it is good for them to have Oregon and Rutgers in the same football league. The league Oregon played in since forever was destroyed so they could join the Big Ten, which is still technically a Midwest conference. Washington, USC, and UCLA have also joined a conference whose center is two times zones away, because that makes sense to the bankers.

What is happening to college football is a microcosm of what has been happening everywhere in America since the dawn of financialization. The money men find a way to monetize social capital in order to haul it away to their vaults, leaving behind a shuffling husk of that which they sucked dry. College football is well on its way to becoming as artificial and synthetic as the suburban town center. The reason it exists is nothing organic is allowed to replace it.

Whether or not this is sustainable is never asked, as the point of the American economic model is for connected people to create bottlenecks they can then use to skim money from every transaction that passes through that bottleneck. This was the point Peter Theil made in his book. Once that bottleneck or monopoly is played out, then the parasites get back in their wagon and go looking for a new opportunity to exploit and never look back at what they left behind.

College football attendance has been in steady decline for a decade, even though the television dollars have exploded. They claim ratings are great, but no one cares about TV ratings, as most of the revenue comes from subscriptions. Television in America is one of those bottlenecks the oligarchs exploit. It is why CNN remains in business, despite having few viewers. At some point, the empty seats at football games will become a problem, but no one worries about it now.

For now, like so much of American life, what sustains college football is the echo of old America on which college football was built. Men watch games on Saturday because they watched games with their father, who watched games with his father. Maybe you make a trip to your alma mater once a year to see a game. The tradition has been hollowed out and is now worn as a skin suit by oleaginous television executives and grasping college administrators, but it is all you got.

That is the thing about traditions. People will hang onto them, no matter how tattered and lifeless, until something comes along to replace them. College football is a good example and representative of America as a whole. The fumes of old glory and old traditions fuel the present, but something will come along to replace those things and the people profiting off the nostalgia for them. After all, on any given Saturday, something could happen that changes everything.

Baseball

Posted on August 15, 2024 by thezman

Watch an American baseball game and the thing you quickly notice, especially if it has been a while since you bothered, is that the game is riddled with interruptions to the point where it feels like more stoppage than gameplay. Baseball was always a leisurely game that evolved for a people who had long attention spans, so it is a poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference, but it is also made unwatchable by the constant stoppages.

The league has tried to address the problem by speeding up the gameplay with a pitch clock that gives pitchers 30 seconds between at-bats, 15 seconds between pitches with no one on base, and 20 seconds between pitches with runners on base. According to major league baseball, this has resulted in a 24-minute decrease in the total length of the game compared to the 2022 season. The average length of a game is now two hours and 40 minutes.

That is fine, but it does not change the fact that the number of breaks in play has not changed much and is probably a little worse. The reason for the breaks is the specialization in the game. The days of nine guys playing nine guys are long gone, as now teams employ specialists who enter the game at various points, which slows the game play down. Specialization is the result of quantitative revolution that has happened in all sports, but especially baseball.

Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride. The owners of baseball teams were local rich guys who not only wanted to make money off the game but took some pride in their local community and wanted their team to win. They hired people to run their teams who had played the game and presumably knew what it took to win. Those guys found and developed players who had the skills to play the game.

That started to change with the growth of advanced statistics. Baseball was always a game of numbers, like batting average, earned run average and other measures of a player’s success in his role. Advanced statistics took that a step further and used quantitative measures to predict the impact of players on winning games, based on measures like on-base-percentage and wins above replacement. These new measures not only determine rosters, but they also determine gameplay.

That is why we get so many breaks in the game. After every at bat, both teams basically re-crunch the numbers to determine what they should do next. That may mean pulling the pitcher who has been on a roll to this point or pinch hitting for a guy who has had a monster game thus far. We now have scenarios in which a pitcher is pulled from a game while throwing a no-hitter. The numbers say he has reached his pitch limit, and the reliever has a better chance against the rest of the lineup.

You can see how this works by looking at the roster of the current best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, and the roster of the 1970 Oriole team that went on to win the World Series that year. The first thing you will note is that the 1970 squad used a total of thirty-two players for the entire season. The current year Orioles have already used fifty-four players and will use many more once rosters expand in September. Baseball is now a game of roster rotisserie.

Another thing you will note is that the best starting pitchers on the current team will not reach 200-innings this year. Most likely, they will rest their best pitcher down the stretch so he will finish the regular season with around 175-innings. On the 1970s team, three pitchers pitched 300-innings. More shocking is the fact that the 1970 pitching staff had sixty complete games, while the current staff has none. Last year there were a total of 34 complete games in all of baseball.

The stat guys will tell you that the use of advanced statistics makes for a more competitive game by removing chance from the equation. People with a soul will tell you that the stat guys should be sent to a labor camp. No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching. Sport is human drama with all of the flaws that come with it. Removing the flaws inevitably removes the humanity from it and you are left with robots playing robots

The reason everyone who was aware in 1988 remembers Kirk Gibson hitting the homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series is because it is the thing every kid who played baseball dreamed of doing. It is a scene every father taking his son to a game hopes they will see. The aging slugger called in to face off against the game’s best closer in the deciding moment. The old man mustering what little he has left to stroke one last home run to win the game.

If the modern stat head had been in charge, that moment never would have happened because Gibson would not be on the team, much less sent up to bat. Tommy Lasorda would not have been in the dugout to make the call. Instead, the robot manager would have sent up a specialist whose only role was to face Eckersley. Maybe the Dodgers win anyway, but no one would remember it because there would be no reason to remember what in the end was a statistical anomaly.

The reason that any of this matters is that baseball is a microcosm of American life in that society, like baseball, is now run by people who have no appreciation for the things that make life worth living. Instead, they view people as mere economic units or perhaps items to manipulate in the transactional world of managerialism. Society has been drained of its authenticity and in its place is the drab materialism in the meat space and the superficial drama of the virtual space.

The answer to fixing baseball and other sports is to open the windows of the skyboxes where the stat guys run the game and throw them out of those windows. Let the players play the fans enjoy the human drama. Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live. The results may not make for an impressive pivot table, but no one should live inside a pivot table anyway.

What Must Be Done?

Posted on January 31, 2023 by thezman

A year ago, life was great for Marcus Stokes. He was a young high school quarterback with offers to play college football. Some of the biggest names in the sport were calling and texting him. He committed to play for the Florida Gators, which is one of college football’s major powers. For a young man in this age, it does not get much better than being a coveted high school athlete. These days it even comes with the promise of money, not just coeds and attention from fans.

That all came to a halt when video of Marcus Stokes turned up online singing a popular hip-hop song, which violated the Jim Snow laws. Even though these songs are broadcast to everyone, even small children, white people are not allowed to repeat most of the lyrics, not even acknowledge hearing them. You see, in Jim Snow America, a black guy can advocate for murder, rape and mayhem, as long as it has a beat, but a white guy cannot repeat what is said.

The hip-hop song in question contained the magic word and Marcus Stokes said the word in the video. Immediately agents from the Ministry of Leukophobia were dispatched to investigate. Once it was determined that he was white and he had said the magic word, they issued a fatwah against him, his family and anyone even remotely connected with him. The University of Florida was instructed to rescind the scholarship offer and issue mean words about him.

In two syllables, the promising life of Marcus Stokes was ruined. You see, he violated the most important of Jim Snow laws. It is not the word he said, it is the context in which he said the magic word. One set of language laws for black people and another set of language laws for white people is patently immoral. Not even the most brutal communist dictatorships went down this road. Theocracies like Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have segregated language laws.

The only way the Ministry of Leukophobia can conceal this obvious problem is by terrorizing white people into thinking there are words that possess special properties that when uttered out loud, destroy the white person uttering them. That way, the white people will not notice who is enforcing these language laws. Instead of asking who decided we have segregated language, or even why we have such rules, white people will just assume it is a force of nature.

In order to make this work, the Ministry of Leukophobia does not limit itself to confirmed utterances of magic words. In the case of Mitchell Miller, a professional hockey player banned from the sport, the accusation is that he may have been influenced by a magic word uttered by some white person at some point somewhere. You see, Miller is accused of have bullied a sacred person in high school. Clearly, he must have been motivated by thoughts of the magic word.

Conservatives try to excuse this stuff by blaming the victims or claiming it is just a temporary moral panic. Maybe they blame social media for encouraging the mob to pile on these poor saps, who conservatives are quick to point out deserve everything they have coming for violating the blasphemy laws. The case of the hockey player makes clear that there is nothing temporary or spontaneous about this stuff. It is part of a long term campaign by the Ministry of Leukophobia.

You see this with Marcus Stokes. It has been six months and things should have blown over by now. He issued as many groveling apologies as humanly possible. He has no doubt spent the required time at a reeducation facility. He even found a black person to bless his transformation and provide a redemption arc. The coach of Albany State, a historically black college, offered Stokes a scholarship. No doubt the coach was thinking he could get a good player and lots of applause.

Like Mitchell Miller, there will be no forgivingness for Marcus Stokes. The Albany State coach was told by the Ministry of Leukophobia that he could not offer this blasphemer a scholarship or even a place on the roster. Not only that, they demanded the coach issue an apology. To whom he is apologizing is not all that clear, since no one to date has claimed to have been offended, outside the tyrant class. Of course, that last bit is the key to all of this stuff.

The question that hangs in the air, the center of recent disputes here and elsewhere, is how can American society return to civility? Of course, most of the people attempting to answer it wish the debate to exist in the abstract, as that allows them to defend arguments that make no sense in the natural world. Before any of that can be addressed, however, is the question of whether it is even possible to have a civil, decent society under the current conditions.

Can Austin Nivison, the person stalking Marcus Stokes, exist in a society that respects the dignity of the citizens? Can you have a civil society that includes the people who employ spiteful bigots like that guy? After all, they appear to operate as a volunteer auxiliary of the Ministry of Leukophobia. How is it possible for decent people to cohabited with people so filled with hatred for them? Can anyone reading this imagine being fellow citizens with people who hate them so much?

Stories like those mentioned here, and there are thousands of less notorious examples, suggest that we have reached the point of irreconcilable differences. We have a ruling class that has concluded that the white population is irredeemably evil. That is, after all, what is being said about Marcus Stokes. How can anyone with a soul want to find common ground with someone who seeks to destroy the life of a child for having repeated a forbidden word in a song?

The answer to the subject of this post starts with acceptance. There is no magic set of words that will heal the black hearts of the people who think it is right to torment white kids like we see with these two examples. We have a population of spiteful mutants, to borrow Ed Dutton’s phrase. That population has been weaponized. The answer starts with accepting this reality and then wondering aloud who is doing the weaponing and for what purpose. The answer starts with questions.

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The Canary Is Dead

Posted on December 15, 2022 by thezman

Note: This is the time of year to be generous to those in need, so if you are looking for a place to give, here is an option. Most certainly know the story, but for those who do not here is the background.

If you live near a public tennis court, you may have noticed that there are not that many people playing tennis these days. Many courts have simply been abandoned to nature, due to a lack of interest. Depending upon where you live, you may see people playing pickleball, which has nothing to do with pickles. It is a game that is something like ping pong, except the players are on the table. They use paddles and a plastic ball, taking turns hitting the ball back and forth over a net.

According to the wiki page, the game was invented as a way to give kids something to do when they were bored. Over time it caught on around the neighborhood and soon it was becoming a thing. Recently the sport has caught on in a big way with tournaments and leagues around the country. It is very popular with Baby Boomers, because they can play the game while stationary. They just bat the ball back and forth to get some exercise and socialize with friends.

This is a bit ironic. Fifty years ago, tennis went from being a rich person sport, like polo and golf, to something of a national craze. In the 1970’s big tennis matches were must see television and the stars of the game were household names. Baby Boomers were young and fit, so they could play tennis. Then father time made tennis much less enjoyable and tennis went into decline. Fifty years later the Boomers are back on the court but playing pickleball instead.

It is hard to overstate the warping effect the Boomer generation has had on the American culture. The tennis to pickleball phenomenon is one example, but all of sports has been changed by the Boomers. Through most of the twentieth century, sports attendance was light, but then the Boomers got into sports and suddenly going to games was a thing. Hundreds of billions have been spent over the last half century creating sports arenas for the Boomers.

Of course, standing outside for three hours is tiring on the old back and knees, so sports attendance is in decline. College football, which is a quintessential Baby Boomer pastime is seeing a collapse in attendance. All of sudden the people who make a trip once a year to catch a game at their alma mater are finding a reason to watch the game from the comfort of the recliner. They can stay in touch with their old classmates on Facebook, so why make the trip to the game?

The decline in attendance is a serious threat to the college model because the infrastructure for this industry relies on donations from alumni. The rich donor wants his friends to see his name on the sports building. He wants his friends to party with him in the luxury suite. If all his friends are at the Villages watching the game on television, what is the point of writing the check? This is why those sagging attendance numbers have colleges in a panic.

Golf is another sport feeling the Boomer decline. This is the sport for the white suburban middle manager. Three decades ago, there were a lot of these people and they filled up golf course around the country. Demographics and the actuarial tables are thinning the ranks and so the number of golfers declines every year. Those little brown guys swimming over the Rio Grande may be natural conservatives, but they will not be taking up the game of golf any time soon.

This decline in participation will mean a decline in interest. Twenty years ago, the big names in sports talk radio were known throughout the culture, because tens of millions of people listened to these guys while at work. The core demographic for these shows was white men between the ages of 25 and 55. That demo is now in steep decline and the listenership is following them. Here is a list the top sports talkers and you probably recognize none of them.

What all this points to is a looming winter for sports entertainment. Some sports like the NFL have been gaming the cable system to tax the public for their product, but that model is facing the same demographic collapse. The grandparents still have a cable subscription, but their kids most likely cut the cord and their grandkids will never have a cable subscription. That assumes the grandkids even exist, which is highly unlikely according to the census.

The decline of the Baby Boomer generation was always going to bring a decline to the leisure industry, but the demographic decline promises a depression. Many will wonder why they should care, but the sports entertainment industry is driven by the same economic principles as the rest of the economy. Those billion dollar stadiums and multibillion dollar franchises are leveraged to the max. It all assumes a growing audience of middle class white people.

You can probably do this same exercise with other parts of the economy. How will the legal rackets maintain themselves when the law schools are forced to drop the LSAT requirement in the name of equity? A courtroom like this is amusing, but it is no way to keep the ambulance chasers in business. Even if the standards do not collapse, the legal profession is about to experience a great die off. Soon, simple cases will take years because of the lack of bodies.

It is easy to overstate things, but the country is about to undergo a demographic revolution, and this is before the Great Replacement discussion. All of the things that relied upon a massive number of suburban white people are going to find they lack the people to maintain the old model. The number of suburban whites as customers is in decline and the number to do the work is in decline. Sports entrainment is the canary in the coal mine and the canary is dead.

The NFL’s Racial IQ Problem

Posted on October 1, 2022 by thezman

The absurdity of America’s racial politics is no more obvious than in sports, where a collection of low-IQ jocks and circus performers wrestle with the irreconcilable contradictions of race and racial morality. Everyone involved is smart enough to understand the message they are required to push, but they lack the brainpower to make it work. Guys like Stephen A. Smith or Michael Wilbon come off as white nationalist parodies.

The NFL is probably the best place to see the ridiculousness, as that league has been trying hard to racially atone for the last twenty years. The NBA has been a black sport for generations now. Even the coaches are black. Hockey and baseball are impossible to make into black sports, because running and jumping are not critical qualities in either game. Outside of a few positions, running and jumping are important qualities in American football.

The main area of focus in the NFL has been quarterback, which is a position dominated by white players. The assumption has always been that the position requires smarts, and, well, you know. The league has been working to make it easier for the passing game by limiting what defenders can do. By making it easier to pass the ball, the threshold for being a quarterback has dropped. Add in changes to enhance the value of running quarterbacks and you get more black quarterbacks.

This is not all due to racial morality. The target audience for the NFL is declining in IQ so they are dumbing down their sport to chase the audience. Stupid people like to see simple plays where the star does all the work. Complex offenses that require field generalships are no fun to the typical fan. It will not be long before CGI is added to make the games more interesting for television. Maybe a new play will be the Fast & Furious style car chase.

A feature of football broadcasts is the talking heads assuring us that the quarterback who makes his living running the ball, a guy like Lamar Jackson, for example, is actually winning through intelligence. Jackson’s test scores say he is a full standard deviation below the typical quarterback, but we are told he is a football genius. In reality, he is just faster than everyone else at the moment. He is the Michael Vick of this generation, less the dog fighting business.

This demand to respect the intelligence of the new vibrant quarterback is turning up in the controversy over Tua Tagovailoa. He was slammed to the turn in a game and suffered a serious concussion. He was carted off on a back board and sent to the hospital for evaluation. The sports commentariat has been ordered to put on their outrage faces over this. How dare the league put this young genius at risk by letting him take a blow to the head!

The video looks like one of those things that happens in sports. Whenever one human being tries to throw another human being onto the ground, there is a chance someone is going to get hurt. Given that hitting the ground means sudden deceleration, concussions are to be expected. Anyone who has played football or boxed or wrestled has had their bell rung more than once. It is just a thing that happens, no matter how hard you try to prevent it.

Of course, concussions are a controversial issue. A whole new racket has grown up around the dubious claims from the CTE people. The term is short for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Concussions probably have some negative impact on brain function, but the science is unclear. The CTE business is mostly a scam, which has a racial element to it. The guy who sold the idea is named Bennett Omalu. Will Smith played him in a movie.

The racial angle in the concussion story gets even more nutty when you look at the efforts to remediate the issue. The NFL has set up a fund to compensate players claiming to suffer from CTE. The NFL is race norming the concussion settlements to reduce payouts, which brings out the usual suspects. You see, Jamal is stupid because of the concussion, not because of genetics. It is a classic example of biological reality slamming into racial and political morality.

The truth is no one knows if concussions have a direct or even an indirect connection on cognitive issues later in life. We have always known that taking blows to the head is bad for you. We have the term “punchy” for a reason. Boxers who took too many blows over their career were often quite stupid later in life. It has always been assumed that it is the blows to the head, but no one really knows for sure. Maybe they started out stupid, which is why they took so many shots to the head.

There is a good chance that IQ plays a role. Intelligence strongly correlates with health outcomes, so it is possible that it plays a role in concussions. Higher IQ players may suffer fewer concussions or suffer less from them than low-IQ players. Boxers have never been known as smart guys, so maybe the reason they seem punchy in their later years is the combination of blows and their low-IQ. Maybe smarter people are better at avoiding concussion and recovering from them.

None of this is allowed to be said, so it does not matter much. The NFL is going to have to pay for these black former players. In a way, it is like the ongoing demands by blacks for compensation because of slavery. The math is not the issue. It is the moral blackmail that comes once you accept the current morality of race. The NFL, like white society, can never pay for the sins of the past, but it must keep paying. Discrimination is a nightmare from which will never awake.

In the larger context, the dumbing down of the sport and the presentation of it, corresponds with the dumbing down of race relations. Half a century ago, race relations were better because they were more thoughtful. Both sides sought an accommodation based on what was possible. Today it is two tribes flinging their poo not at one another, but at the rest of us. Like car chases in movies, race relations are now part of the menticide inflicted on our society.

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A Sports Example

Posted on June 29, 2022 by thezman

When the big tech companies decided to crack down on speech on-line, conservatives started chanting about how these are private companies and therefore they had a right to regulate what is done on their platforms. The reason conservatives said this is they were taking bribes from the big tech companies. If Silicon Valley started human sacrifice, National Review would have posted the “conservative case” for ripping the beating heart out of virgins to please Moloch.

Even without the bribes, conservatives would have sided with the oligarchs because for conservatives, the term “private company” has no real meaning. It is just a way to dodge the issue of state power. The Left advocates the promiscuous use of state power to achieve their moral ends, while the Right opposes any use of state power to achieve any ends, which leaves a big void. We end up with giant corporations pushing people around with the consent of the state.

A mundane example of this is sports. In the West, sport has been a central part of the culture since the Greeks. Sport has always been a theatrical version of war, which allows men and society to blow off steam. Sport also allows diverse people, as in people not bound by kin relations, to build bonds. The town comes together to play the next town in a game. After the game, the people of both towns throw a big party with one town having bragging rights until the next time.

In other words, large scale athletic spectacles have a social function, one that is integral to the smooth operation of society. This is why in modern times, cities will spend hundreds of millions to create venues for pro sports teams. A section of the city will often be designed around the arenas, with shopping, nightlife and swank living arrangements placed around the sports facilities. The sports are viewed as a social good so the city spends money on them.

Professional sports leagues also enjoy special rules granted to them by the government that protect them from competition. In the United States, it means an antitrust exemption from Congress. States will grant special tax exemptions, especially for the payroll taxes of the athletes. Localities will give them free land, utilities and exemptions from the normal property taxes. In America, sports leagues are special monopolies that exist as a creation of government.

Here is where the above mentioned dynamic between Left and Right works against the interest of the people. The Left uses state power to make sure these sports leagues aggressively support the cultural causes. The four big sports leagues are out front on the things like sodomy, cross-dressing, social vengeance and so on. They also make sure to support other state-sponsored ventures like war mongering and the medical fads that are an increasing part of daily life.

While the Left is weaponizing sports against the majority population, the Right carries on like these leagues are bastions of libertarianism, instead of rentier enterprises for the benefit of the oligarchs. Any suggestion that maybe the state do something about the outlandish prices or the grotesque subsidies these operations enjoy is met with howls of “socialism’ from conservatives. You see, those subsidies are just tax avoidance and taxes are bad so reasons.

The result is sports leagues function like tax farmers. Every cable household is sending money to pro sports leagues through their cable bill. Since the sports stuff is bundled into the basic bill, you pay for sports by default. The only way to avoid paying for sports is to not have a television subscription. Even taking that approach, you are subsidizing sports through property taxes, sales taxes and entertainment taxes. Everyone is a tenant on the sportsball farm in America.

A functioning opposition to the Left would take one of two moral positions on the issue of professional sports. One is the equality position. The only way to treat all economic actors equally is to avoid special treatment. The sports leagues should lose their antitrust exemption and lose their tax subsidies. They should also lose the right to muscle cable operators into forcing their product on customers. For example, only 25% of people watch ESPN, but everyone pays for it.

The other moral position on this issue is to engage the Left in how best to regulate these public goods. For example, make the leagues choose between pay-per-view and commercials in the broadcasts. Currently, they are allowed to both price-fix the purchased content and jam it full of ads. A football game is about an hour of game time and two hours of other stuff, mostly ads. This is how thirty-two oligarchs get nine billion per year just from broadcasting their games.

If sports are a public good, then they need to be regulated in the best interest of the people, like a road or a waterway. Economic considerations fall behind the moral and social considerations. On the other hand, if they are just another business with no special meaning to society, then they get treated as such. In America, the first option is only open to the Left and the second option is never considered. Both Left and Right support using sports to advance left-wing ends.

This little example illustrates a core premise of the dissident project. It is the destruction of the old dynamic between Left and Right, where one side argues from morality and the other side hides behind abstract economic concepts. The new dynamic needs to begin with the basic question. Does the issue lie in the public culture or does it belong in the private culture? The former requires public power to regulate on behalf of the public, while the latter needs to be protected from public power.

Note that the issue is culture, not economics. This is the other aspect of that change in the political dynamic. The debate must always start first with the culture. Not only does this focus the mind on what actually matters, but it keeps the specter of who decides hanging over all public debate. What is in the best interest of the culture and who ultimately decides is the core of all politics. A genuine opposition to the Left embraces this reality and makes it the focus of their politics.

The Great Embarrassment

Posted on February 3, 2022 by thezman

Form the perspective of human society, there are two types of crises. The most familiar type of crisis is the unforeseen event that threatens order. A natural disaster, like an earthquake, is the obvious example. The ground suddenly begins to shake, buildings fall over and there is general panic. The people tasked with keeping the wheels of the society turning have to rush around to put things back in place. This unexpected event threatens the very order of society.

On the other hand, something like a hurricane or a major snowstorm is an external threat for which we expect the government to be prepared. Florida gets enough hurricanes that the people expect the government to know how to handle them, so if they do not manage the situation properly, it is a big problem. The elected officials come under pressure to explain why they screwed up. In other words, their failure to do their jobs causes a crisis for the political system.

The external crisis is mostly about getting through it as the external event does not last forever, so once it is done you go back to normal. The other type of crisis, on the other hand, is the internal one. This is where some irreconcilable contradiction in the rules of your system begin to threaten your system. It is not something you can wait out, as the contradiction is not going away. In fact, its existence becomes a greater threat each day that it is not resolved or ameliorated.

The Marxists used to talk about the inherent conflicts in capitalism. They argued that even though capitalism produces great material abundance, it destroys the social fabric that make it possible. Over time, the rate of return on capitalism will turn negative and the abundance will decline. This inevitably leads to social conflict and the collapse of the system. It was central to Marxism that the inherent contradictions within capitalism would inevitably lead to crisis.

The thing about a crisis driven by an internal contradiction is that it forces the people in charge to make a choice that they want to avoid. The communist ran into this when it became clear that Marxism had no replacement for price. If they acknowledged this truth, the justification for their rule evaporated. Alternatively, they could acknowledge that communism would never produce abundance, but then they would have to produce another justification for communism.

This story out of the NFL is a great example of the sort of irreconcilable contradictions that exist in the new social religion of our rulers. The assumption is that there are not enough black NFL head coaches. No one says what the number should be, but they all agree the current number is below the threshold. This is a habit you see everywhere with the new religion. What is the right amount of diversity? The answer is always more, but no one can say more than what.

What all of the beautiful people know is that the number of black coaches is less than the desired number and that is because of racism. All men are created equal, so what else could explain the disparity in the profession? Further, most coaches were players and most players are black. The logic of social Marxism says that the only possible explanation is some hidden barrier or conspiracy. The reason racial perfection does not exist is something structural.

That hidden barrier is always structural. The new religion insists that society is a constructed reality. In this case, as in all cases, white men constructed the reality, so it must be for the benefit of white men. That means the system naturally works against black men, which in this case means hidden or unconscious bias in the hiring of NFL head coaches. The solution is to compel teams to interview at least two black coaches as a wrecking ball against the white power structure.

This bit of logic is slamming into the reality of the business. Teams not only need to win games as a business reality, but they attract owners and executives who want to win games out of competitive instinct. This leads to two relevant results. One is they are always looking to exploit loopholes in the rules to gain an edge. The other is they are going to hire the coach they think can win. A team will hire a Volkswagen Beetle full of midget clowns if that means winning games.

Put another way, the inherent contradiction of the new social religion turns on the fact that the human condition is immutable. They may dream of a world of perfect equality, but men are not equal in the general sense or the particular sense. Therefore, human society is going to be defined by variation and inequality, reflecting the diversity of the people in that society. In the case of football, most players will be black, while most coaches will be white.

The crisis is that the true believers think their good intentions put them on the side of angels, which in this case means the side of nonwhites. In reality, they are alienating the people they claim to represent. Imagine being a young black coach hoping for a chance to be a head coach and quickly learning that your value is in ticking the box on a form required by the league. Regardless of your views on race relations, you have to empathize with this coach suing the league.

What the policy does is reveal that you can have a league where everyone tries to win or you can have a league where everyone tries to comport with the new racial morality of the new religion. You cannot have both. That means the owners can choose between wanting to be a hero to the black man or satisfying the needs of the business. In order to do both, they need to find a way to crush the dreams of this and other black coaches in the name of racial equity.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it. The NFL is run by some of the most disreputable grifters finance capitalism can produce. The owners are mostly men who gamed the system to skim billions from the people. They have produced nothing and will leave no footprints when they are gone. The NFL is the full expression what is wrong with placing carnies at the top of the social order. No people deserve this misery more than the NFL owners and operators.

Of course, the NFL is the part of the iceberg we see. They represent the managerial elite of the American empire. This NFL policy is about soothing the sensitive psyches of the managerial elite. It is not really about the black coaches. It is about the elites and their need to reconcile their position in society. Instead of building monuments to their people or culture, they are building monuments to themselves by supporting these reckless social engineering schemes.

It is ironic that the people who come from an intellectual tradition rooted in the belief that the inherent contradictions of capitalism will bring down the system and usher in the communist utopia now sit atop a system riddled with internal contradictions. In the fullness of time, scholar will debate how it was possible that radial politics could be wrong about so much and stagger on for so long. The Enlightenment will inevitably be renamed The Great Embarrassment.

The Microcosm Of Sport

Posted on October 12, 2021 by thezman

Like most things in the current age, professional sport has become a degenerate mockery of itself. The presentation is a high-tech vaudeville act that is now mostly advertisements and propaganda. The people in charge of the various sports are the worst this age can muster. The participants are vulgar carnies. Despite the best efforts of this age, however, sport continues to provide an insight into our times. It is a microcosm of the larger society in which it operates.

For example, football was always the second sport in America, up until the explosion of mass media in the 1980’s. In fact, football was probably behind sports like boxing and horse racing, not just baseball. The explosion of television rocketed football to the top of sport entertainment because it was a natural for the medium. It provides a stage that fits the screen, has breaks for ad space and is a weekly happening. The NFL quickly became a lightly scripted television sports drama.

The mass media culture made the NFL in particular, and football in general, the king of the sports entertainment industry. Like the culture as a whole, the apparent success of the league masks the problems. Ownership has given way to a class of mercurial operators with no loyalty to the local communities. Their greed has resulted in a steady decline in the product. While ratings have seen a boost so far this year, general interest has been in decline for the last decade.

A big reason for that is the product. Kids are not playing football at the youth level, like they used to, so the number of young males moving through the system is in decline, meaning that the quality of player has declined. You see that with the quarterback position, which is the most challenging. The sudden decline in the number of white kids playing youth ball means a decline in the positions requiring smarts. One result is the position has become more “athletic”.

Of course, modernity destroys social capital, and youth sports are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to social cohesion. When America was based on strong white communities, it had lots of white fathers volunteering to coach sports, run youth leagues and so on. As the white population declines, white volunteers decline. As society becomes more diverse, which brings deracination and alienation, the organic structures that make youth sports possible decline.

The men running the sport are not concerned about that as they are not the sort to invest in society. They just assume they can pack up their stuff and move onto the next society once all the life from this one has been drained. These are post-Americans who operate as pirates. Like the global economy that spawned them, they ride the waves of globalism. America is just the place where they can operate at the moment, a pirate’s cove that means nothing to them.

The NFL is also riddled with scandal. Its team in Washington is owned by a degenerate who is one scandal after another. To distract from the latest scandal, DEA agents raiding their facilities, the league instructed their media to focus on manufactured crises involving coaches. For a while, the media was obsessing over the coach of the Jacksonville franchise. They keep making up stories about him, relying on imaginary sources and manufactured internet chatter.

The coach of the league’s Las Vegas franchise was just forced to resign when it was learned he held normal opinions about gays and blacks. His e-mails magically appeared in the media just when the DEA came calling. It was an orchestrated hit, probably with the help of that team’s owner, in order to get out of paying the contract. It could also be part of the effort to distract from the looming narcotics scandal. The DEA does not raid famous people because of a paperwork discrepancy.

This stuff is a microcosm of the ruling class. They got these e-mails from a previous investigation of their Washington team. Then they used those e-mails from that prior scandal to distract attention from the current scandal. Those e-mails were handed to a reporter, who did not bother to mention the source of them. Once the coach addressed the issue another batch of e-mails was delivered to the New York Times. They did not mention their source either. Imagine that.

Like the political media, the sports media is owned by the system. They are the ministry of truth blasting out what the league tells them to say. If one of them gets froggy and does genuine reporting, he is dismissed from his post. YouTube and Twitter are full of people who would be happy to play the role of jock sniffer. Everyone in the ministry of truth knows this, so they play along. To borrow a phrase from Theodore Dalrymple, the media is a collection of emasculated liars.

Right there is the last five years of Washington politics. The system manufacturing fake scandals in order to hide real scandals. The media, which still claims to be impartial observers, plays along because they have not choice. They are servants. The result is the real crimes get pushed to the shadows, while nonsense stories fill the air, often used to discredit people asking too many questions. This is rule by sociopath. It is a reflection of the ruling class as a whole.

The Gruden affair is a perfect moment to see the reality of this age. He is a person who holds normal opinions about things like race and gays. In private he talks like what normal people would expect from a sports coach. He is being hurled into the void on a morality charge by people who lie on spec. The relatively normal guy is condemned by the carny trash as morally unfit. That’s America in a nutshell. Our moral arbiters are vulgar degenerates and sociopaths.

The problems we see with professional sports in America reflect the problems of the West in general. Sport is a Western thing. Other people compete in small ways, but organized sporting activity is part of European man. There is a reason there is no equivalent of the NFL in Africa. Big time sports need big time societies and those societies will always be European societies. The other people of the world simply lack the capacity to produce these cultural artifacts.

As the West declines, sport has now declined with it. The people running pro sports, active in the destruction of the West, are operating under the delusion that they can survive the decline of Western people. In fact, many are driven by a desire to create a post-European world. This is what you see everywhere in the ruling class. You also see that it is unsustainable. Without the necessary human capital, these manifestations of Western culture cannot last and they will not last.

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Understanding The Borg

Posted on July 28, 2021 by thezman

One of the more challenging things for dissidents to grasp about politics within a liberal democracy is emergent behavior. This is behavior of a group that does not depend on properties of individuals, but on the relationships within the group. Right-wing people tend to reject this in favor of reductionism. Individuals act out of material self-interest, so the actions of a group must be out of self-interest. This means the actions of all groups can be reduced down to individual motivations.

The fact that this form of analysis has never been useful in combating radicalism and irrationalism never seems to matter. There is something about the mind of right-wing people that prevents them from questioning this analysis. Perhaps it is simply the product of the rational mind. People who seek to live orderly lives naturally assume order is the default state of mind. To accept the existence of the hive mind is to question a fundamental understanding of existence.

Regardless, emergent behavior is a real thing and accepting it is key to understanding and predicting the behavior of the forces of darkness. The best example is a flock of birds darting among trees at dusk. There is no lead bird calling out commands to the rest of the birds. Instead, every bird is both a leader and follower, responding to the actions of the birds around it. When a bird on the edge of the group moves toward a bit of food, the rest respond in a cascade of corresponding action.

Another useful way of thinking about it, at least within the context of political behaviors within left-wing systems, is the synchronization of metronomes. Everyone has probably seen the demonstration where they take a group of metronomes operating at different rates and sit them together. In short order they are swinging at the same rate. There is a bit of math to it, but the demonstration is enough to make the point. While not emergent behavior, it is a good way to visualize it.

We have a real world example of it this week at the Olympics. This was supposed to be the Olympics where the glories of black girl magic broke through the toxic masculinity of white supremacist culture. Instead, Naomi Osaka was bounced by a nobody in the tennis competition. Then, Simone Biles led her team to a stunning second place finish in the first phase of the gymnastics competition. She topped it off by quitting on her team in the finals and they lost to the Russians.

Inside the hive, this was not expected. They had prepped their stories celebrating black girl magic and side pieces on diversity being the strength of the team. The jock sniffers were in the pumpkin patch waiting for the great pumpkin to arrive only to have reality turn up instead. Faced with disconfirmation, they did not throw down the paper straws from their soy lattes and question the power of black girl magic. Instead, they frantically scanned their hive looking for support in their belief.

Eventually, one of them came up with a way to fit this unexpected turn of events into the narrative of black girl magic. You see, Biles was not a petulant loser who quit on her team at the biggest moment. No, she is a hero for selflessly omitting herself from the competition so the team could carry on without her. Within minutes every sports reporter was blinking this signal to the other members of the hive. By the end of the day, this was the official narrative being told on every sports show.

The reductionist looks at this and assumes there must have been word from central command that instructed everyone to get on board with the new story. At the hollowed out volcano where the deep state operates, they had a meeting, and this new narrative was created and quickly e-mailed to all sports ninnies. It is an exaggeration, but that is how many on the right assume the media operates. They believe it is carefully choreographed performance operating along rational lines.

Instead, what is the norm, as in the case of the Olympics story, is something similar to what Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter observed in their study of the Seekers, a UFO cult in the 1950’s. Faced with the undeniable disconfirmatory evidence, individuals look to the rest for support in maintaining the belief. If there is strong enough social support, they find a way to rationalize the disconfirmation within the general framework of their beliefs.

This is the natural behavior of radical groups. They have strong social relationships within the group, because it is ultimately the point of the group. The members join as a form of self-abnegation. They swap their hated sense of self with the identity of the group, which is why they are fiercely loyal to the group. It is also why they treat criticism of the group as a physical attack. From their perspective, it is an attack on their person, because their person is fully integrated into the collective.

This is why left-wing groups are immune to reality. The fact-driven right-winger can spend his life presenting his evidence and the radicals will either ignore the disconfirmation or assimilate it into the ideology, like a snake digests its meal. There is no shot caller at the top directing it. The members are not conscious of it. Those silly sports reporters covering for the Simone Biles are not even aware of what they are doing, because they have lost all self-awareness.

This is why that left-wing person in your life acts different in isolation than they do when within their hive. Their on-line behavior, for example, is aggressive in defense of the hive, while in person they are often quite meek. On-line, they have the sense of being in the collective, so they act accordingly. In person, they are the soldier isolated from his unit, thinking of nothing but getting home. It is also why the radicals are the most intensely on-line. Social media has become their virtual hive.

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