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.

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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.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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.

College Sportsball

Posted on July 26, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. Behind the green door we have the Sunday podcast, a post on the joy of work and a review of the movie Giant, which I hated. Most of this is available to those who buy me a beer. They are not hosting podcasts yet, so that is exclusive to SubscribeStar for now.

Last week, the American sporting world was sent into a frenzy over news that the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma were planning to leave the Big 12 conference for the Southeastern Conference. In addition to stripping the Big 12 of its flagship institutions, it would make the SEC into a juggernaut. They would have half of the dozen or so major brands in college football. This would no doubt set off a frenzy of moves by the rest of college football in order to keep pace.

For those outside the United States, college athletics is a big business and a big part of the sporting tradition in America. It all started innocently enough when groups of young men at college would challenge the young men of another college in some sort of athletic competition. Before long it was formalized and became a part of the identity of the college, a way for the students and alumni to bond. The colleges found it was good advertising, so they would offer good players free tuition.

Into the 1980’s college sports, not unlike professional sports, was mostly the plaything of rich people. Wealthy alumni would give money to the school so they could build arenas, pay players, and hire top coaches. To be a top donor to a college was a prestigious thing, so successful alumni were motivated to give back. Then the world changed in the 1980’s with the explosion of television. With the spread of cable, television revenue exploded, and it poured into college sports.

It is fair to say that college sports, particularly college football and college basketball, shifted from semi-professional and informal to professional and formal. Prior to the cable age, top coaches made a nice living, but the rest were paid like any other employee of the university. Today, top coaches are the highest paid employees on campus, by a factor of ten. The college athletics department is a 100 million dollar enterprise with hundreds of staff and players.

College football is the primary driver. Football is the most popular television sport in America by far. College basketball also plays a role, but it is primarily football that is driving the economic revolution in college sports. Unlike the NFL, the fans of college football have a bond with the players, as the players, in theory, are attending classes at their school and will be proud alumni one day. Despite the obvious exceptions, this is true, and the players remain part of the community forever.

Both college basketball and college football offer good examples of the dangers of an unregulated marketplace. Into the 1980’s, all college sports were governed by the NCAA, which tried to maintain college athletics as amateur endeavors. With the flood of TV money, the power of the NCAA has declined to the point where they have little say over the governance of football or basketball. Instead, what has erupted is a free market free-for-all where the big try to eat the small and even some of the big.

Prior to the financialization of college sports via the conduit of television money, college sports were a regional enterprise. Schools organized locally into conferences, which supplemented the NCAA in governing the sports and provided local management of the routine items like scheduling and tournaments. With billions in TV money, these conferences were not only empowered to break free of NCAA governance, but they could also go to war with one another in an effort to gain market share.

Contrary to what libertarians claim, this explosion in competition among suppliers did not result in lower prices to consumers or great variety of product, but rather a massive contraction of the marketplace along with spirally costs to consumers. In the 1980’s colleges gave their students free tickets. A college football game was a cheap afternoon of fun for the fans. Today, students pay for seats through their tuition and the fans often have to donate thousands for the right to buy tickets.

Further, the sport of college football is contracting. That is the significance of the latest news about Texas and Oklahoma. The old model was a conference anchored by a few big brands, like Texas and Oklahoma. The league shared revenue and cooperated in scheduling and promotion. The anchor schools got to control the league for allowing the smaller programs to freeload off their brand a little. That model is collapsing as the big brands now seek to combine and exclude the smaller schools.

Like the computer business, college football is headed to a world in which a small number of big names control the market and work to exclude everyone else from the revenue stream. In the 1980’s there was a dozen computer makers with different takes on the home computer. Today there is basically one type of PC. The same happened with mobile phones. The unregulated technology market collapsed into an oligarchy, and we are seeing the same thing happen with college athletics.

Something similar happened with boxing in the 1980’s. It used to be that every large city had weekly boxing shows where up and coming fighters battled one another for recognition and the dream of a title shot. Television put boxing on every week as a normal part of its content. Friday night fights was a thing into the 1970’s, until the cable television explosion. Within short order, greed and corruption removed boxing from the public square and now it is barely an afterthought.

This will probably happen with college sports. There are now minor leagues popping up to pay high school basketball players rather than have them compete in amateur leagues or go to college. It will soon be like tennis, in which promising players turn pro once they hit puberty. Also, like tennis, the interest from the general public will decline. A few stars will make millions, but the rest will be used to maintain a system that was busted out by the usual suspects.

The point of all this is that markets are man-made things. They are not like mushrooms that spring up wherever man leaves nature alone. In order for a market to function, each transaction in the market must have a disinterested third party with the power to enforce both ends of the transaction. It must also have the power to prevent a monopoly of supply or demand. Like a sea wall, this governing authority prevents nature from taking its course and turning the market into an oligarchy.

Boxing never had a governing body to impose order, so it collapsed into a chaos of greed and corruption. College athletics is going through the same process and will meet the same end. Without some entity to guard the interest of the whole, the participants will cannibalize one another until the system collapses. This is the nature of markets and it is why markets can only exist when a controlling authority tasked with preserving the market has the power to impose order on the market actors.

College Football

Posted on September 3, 2020 by thezman

College football officially begins tonight with a few games between minor programs and then this weekend with some more well-known programs. Even though the solstice is not for a few more weeks, the accepted end of summer and beginning of fall in the US is Labor Day weekend. Most years, this weekend is loaded with college football games starting on Thursday and running through Monday night. Due to the man-made panic over Covid, there are far fewer games than normal.

College football is one of those uniquely American things. In the rest of the world, sports are a solely professional thing. Teens with the talent to make a living playing ball end up in a professional league of some sort. The youth play in club leagues until they can no longer play or can sign a professional contract. In America, the only sports that work this way are tennis and golf. The other sports, even soccer, are attached to colleges in some way, until players reach adulthood.

In the case of football, the sport is made weirder by the fact that every school and region have traditions. Europeans are baffled by the bands and cheerleaders used by college football programs. That’s not a thing you would ever see in Europe. There’s also the massive expense that comes with it. American colleges have sporting facilities that dwarf most professional clubs in the rest of the world. College football alone generates two billion in advertising revenue every year.

Of course, what makes it really weird compared to the rest of the world is the players do not get paid in the traditional sense. They are paid, of course. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or ignorant. They get free tuition, books, access to world class trainers and facilities and walking around money. Big time programs give the players a hundred dollars a day for incidentals. They also try hard to cover up their crimes, which is no small thing at many of these programs.

The scale of the industry is why many colleges have decided to go ahead with playing this season, rather than continue the Covid farce. It’s one thing to send the students home to take their classes on-line. It is quite another to give up billions in revenue in order to pretend you’re heroically fighting the killer virus. The two leagues that cancelled their season are now trying to figure out how to reverse course. It turns out that posturing is not as lucrative as playing the games.

Of course, this being the summer of public piety, the colleges feel the need to bend the knee to their black players in public. Nick Saban, one of the most cynical and craven humans to ever walk the earth, put on a big show the other day. His football teams have been crime waves in every city he has worked, but he wants his black players to know he is all about social justice. The issue of cops shooting blacks resonates with his players, because they get arrested so often.

The most amusing bit of moral preening so far came out of the cuck-belt, where the Kansas State football team had shirts made up and brought in celebrity blacks to help the whites with their struggle sessions. One of the players said, “I challenge you to not avoid conversations with people who think differently than you.” These are the same players who demanded a student be expelled for not agreeing with them on the George Floyd overdose incident.

The coaches, of course, are indulging this nonsense because they get paid to indulge all sorts of shenanigans. Nick Saban makes six million per season to keep his players out of prison long enough to finish the season. From his perspective, mouthing idiotic slogans and letting his players lecture the world about social justice is a day at the beach compared to what he normally does. In the world of carny folk, dignity takes a back seat to fleecing the suckers in the crowd.

Still, you can’t help but wonder if the colleges are destroying themselves with this lurch into politics. College football is entirely funded by white people. The stands at a college football game are whiter than an Ivy League professor’s neighborhood. The schools themselves may actively discriminate against white students, but the white fans make it possible for these college football programs to exist. Those fans also tend to be very patriotic, conservative and civic minded.

Of course, sports are supposed to be an escape. Staging mock battles between groups of Africans is a way to forget about the world for a few hours. In the case of college football, it also includes reminiscing about your college days and maybe hanging out with old college buddies. Reminding these people that you hate them and want them dead is probably a bad marketing strategy by these colleges. So far it has been a disaster for the pro leagues. Their viewership has collapsed.

Paradoxically, the collapse in television viewership may save these sports from their black players. If the stands were full, the fans could boo when the players take a knee or make some idiotic gesture. There would be social proof that normal white people resent this stuff. That would also lead the players to speak out and accidentally reveal just how much they hate white people. Playing in front of cardboard cutouts means no booing the teams for their anti-white antics.

This is another example of why sports remain popular. They tend to reflect in simple ways truths about society as a whole. In this case, the players can get away with their anti-white stuff, because there is no one around them to say otherwise. That is how it always is with the Left. There is no genuine market for their ideas, so they make sure to either cripple the marketplace of ideas with censorship or simply impose their way on everyone by controlling the institutions, like colleges.

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The End Of The Beginning

Posted on August 10, 2020 by thezman

For months now, the more cynical have suggested the lock downs will continue into the fall, as the hysteria has become something of a religion. The facts on the ground are useful to the panic party in so far as they can be used to support the idea that this plague is a curse sent from nature because of Trump. They hope the self-inflicted suffering will purge the lands of orange come November. Word now comes that they plan to cancel college football this week.

There’s no public health reason for cancelling college sports this fall or for keeping the kids of campus, which many colleges are doing. Many colleges will be on-line only this fall, meaning it will be a full year of virtual learning for their students. It was not that long ago when these very same colleges said on-line learning was terrible. Students needed personal interaction with their teachers and fellow students. Like so much that comes from the Left, that was true only while it was useful.

As far as college football, the plan was to minimize attendance at the games and make sure the players were tested on a daily basis. The only thing missing from the regime was daily dips into vats of hand sanitizer. Despite it all, the people who run big time college sports have been bullied into shutting down. This should put to rest that the people behind this stuff are motivated by money or power. They are tossing away billions and their grip on millions of people’s attention.

Sport has always been a window into what lies behind the general culture. In this case, the plight of sport reflects what is happening in society as a whole. The efforts to restart professional baseball, basketball and hockey have been a disaster, because the stripped-down versions lack essential ingredients. Like everything else about a big complicated society, sport evolved over time to work a certain way. Rebooting it without essential elements like a live audience does not work.

The people running the NBA and NHL are a reflection of the people running the country as a whole. They have the problem all outsiders have, in that they see the parts of society and can navigate through them, but they can’t see the invisible bonds that hold those parts in relation to one another. Their scheme to restart their respective sports made sense to them on paper, but to the rest of us it is like trying to impose the metric system or soccer. It’s alien and weird.

There’s also the social aspect to the popularity of sports. Football became the dominant sport because it is the best television sport. It was the one thing people could talk about at the office with no problems. It’s why so many companies encouraged their people to sport the colors of the hometown team on casual Friday. The popularity of sports like football had as much to do with their place in the social fabric as their popularity as an entertainment product. Big time sports fill a social niche.

The people in charge predicted people were suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome and that the return of any sports would be a success. Instead, baseball, basketball and hockey are not drawing much interest. People moved on in the short time those sports were off the air. Football will most likely face the same fate if it goes dark this autumn. Sports passion is like a fire. It requires constant tending and fuel in order to keep burning. Once it goes out, it stays out.

What’s happening with sports also puts to bed the notion that the people in charge are playing 4-D chess in order to maintain their power. Keeping white people locked into sports watching was always about crowd control. Nowhere is egalitarianism and anti-racism sold harder to more white people than at a sporting event. It is the one place where multiculturalism appears to work. Take that away and normal white people are left to watch white radicals and black activists riot in the cities.

What lies ahead for sports entertainment, maybe all big-time entertainment, is what small business is facing right now. Every business has a cost structure that reflects its revenue stream. Seasonal business has seasonable const structures. Small business has low cost structures. Global sport has a cost structure that requires millions to spend billions every year. Suddenly, owning a big fancy sports arena is not such a great idea in a world where large gatherings are prohibited.

There is a general assumption that the Covid stuff comes to an end with either the defeat of Trump in November or one final tantrum in January if he wins. At that point, the practical reality of life will force this charade to come to an end. That’s true, most likely, for this phase of the process. Economic necessity will force the people in charge to relent or civil unrest will force it. Unless this is really a simulation and the base code has been altered, this cannot continue much longer.

That’s just the end of this phase. The breaking of the sports entertainment model will have far reaching consequences. Tens of millions of people will fill in the gaps left by tailgates, trips to the alma mater, weekend parties glued to the television and billions spent on sports entertainment. All of a sudden, the sort of liberal guy you used to talk to about the football team is not a guy you talk to at all. Instead of talking to the conservative guy about sports, you talk about other stuff.

Even the most basic human societies are a highly complex web of interpersonal relationships that operate within a hard to define thing we call culture. A big diverse country like America has a degree of complexity that we cannot comprehend, other than to have the wisdom to accept that reality. The people in charge have thrown sand in all the gears of the machinery, machinery that has allowed them to rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Sports will soon be the least of their problems.

Sports Entertainment

Posted on July 29, 2020 by thezman

Last week, the Wisconsin athletic director sent out a letter to supporters that the university would lose 60-70 million dollars this year due to the reduction in football games being played in the fall. If the season is cancelled, the losses will top 100 million just for the fall. That may be an exaggeration, but there is no question that a cancellation of the college football season will cost the big-time college programs tens of millions in revenue. It is a billion-dollar industry.

ZeroHedge pointed out that ESPN has a billion dollars in ad space to sell for this fall’s college football season. They also have ad space for other sports as well, but college football is the prime mover of ad space. It is unlikely that ad buyers will want to buy ads when ESPN is running replays of card games this fall. ESPN’s primary income stream is mandatory cable fees, they net close to nine billion in fees every year, but a billion dollars in ad revenue still counts for something.

Of course, everyone knows no one is watching ESPN at the moment, but that has no impact on the cable fees. The way it works is a service like Hulu of Comcast pays ESPN nine dollars per month for each subscriber to their service. These deals are not contingent on viewership. As ZeroHedge points out, the language in these deals does not require the content provider to deliver particular content. As long as ESPN is beaming something, they get paid for it.

Even so, the mass disruption of sports is going to have an impact on the economic model of professional sports. Out of work people will begin to look at that cable bill and wonder if it makes sense. Cable providers will begin to look for ways to get out from under their ESPN deal. For its part, ESPN will not be paying the leagues for content when the leagues are shutdown. Like the economy as a whole, professional sport is about to experience an unprecedented jolt.

Way back when the lock downs were on the table, the sober minded warned that you can’t lock everyone in their homes and not have consequences. The modern economy is a highly complicated balancing act that has evolved to produce increasingly efficiency, along with the retail excess. Even small disruptions can upset the balance within supply chains resulting in unexpected outcomes. Start turning off large bits of it and before long the whole thing starts to crash.

The first glimpse of this may be what is happening with sports. Major League Baseball is the first to re-open, but it is quickly becoming a disaster. The empty parks make the television product less than compelling and now games are being cancelled as players test positive for the virus. The NBA is struggling to keeps its knuckleheads inside the compound where they plan to play their games. The NFL is seeing droves of players sit out the upcoming season for fear of the virus.

The thing no one dares mention is the impact this lock down is having on interest in spectator sports. Being a sports fan is like being a smoker. Part of the dependency is the ritual and structure of it. The smoker takes a break every hour to smoke, collect his thoughts and get the nicotine hit. The football fan has their weekend in the fall, where they have scheduled social activities around games. Like the smoker, the sports fan builds their life around the habit.

People who quit a vice like smoking or drinking note that they also quit the social scene that goes with it. They lose touch with Sally from accounting who they used to take smoke breaks with every day. The people at the bar are no longer a part of their life. That’s what will happen with sports. Those weekends in the fall will be filled with other things and after the withdrawal pains subside, the habit will be lost. People who cut cable know this experience. In time, you don’t miss it.

This is not idle speculation. It has been known for a long time in the sports world that the recovery time after a work stoppage is very long. When a sports league shuts down due to labor strife, it takes years for the fans to return. It’s not because they are mad at the greedy players and owners. The fans simply find other things to do with their time and many of them drift away entirely. Millions have probably broken the habit already and that is before the hate whitey lectures were added.

There is one final piece to this puzzle. The growth of sports entertainment has tracked the arc of the Baby Boom generation. Look at attendance figures for sports in the 1960’s and 1970’s, before Boomers were dominating the market. Ball parks rarely sold out and the audience for televised product was limited. In the 1980’s as the Boomers took over the marketplace, sports boomed. When they could play tennis, professional tennis was huge. Then it was golf that had a boom.

The fact is, the sports entertainment model was built for and on the Baby Boomer generation, which is now entering its power down cycle. Boomers are retiring and that means down-sizing their lives. The major sports leagues are facing a demographic reality that cannot be overcome with happy talk about diversity. Non-whites don’t spend like whites and they cannot sustain an economic model built for whites. What happened to California is what is coming for sports entertainment.

This demographic cliff has been known to the sports leagues for a long time, which is why they happily throw in with the hate-whitey stuff. Sure, many of the principles really do hate white people, but much of it driven by the carnival barker’s belief in his ability to will an audience into existence. They really do think they can cast the same spell on the brown hordes that they cast on white people and get the same result. The virus panic and cultural revolution will put those theories to the test.

It is hard to see how the old sports entertainment model survives the current crisis. That doe not mean these leagues fold or that sports entertainment dies out. It’s just that the old model was built for an old America, one that no longer exists. On the other hand, sports entertainment has been a vital part of keeping whitey under control. Something will have to be done to reestablish the mind control device known as sportsball. Perhaps part of woke America will be mandatory sports watching by recalcitrant whites.

Never Forget

Posted on February 27, 2020 by thezman

This month was the 40th anniversary of the United States Olympic hockey team beating the Soviets and winning the gold medal. The sports channels have done some segments on it, bringing back some of the young men, who are now old men, to talk about their experiences. Some of the players have shown up with Trump out on the campaign trail. The movie Miracle on Ice, a “fact-based” depiction of what happened with that team is getting replayed on the various services.

The win over the Soviets is one of the greatest upsets in sports history. That’s not an overstatement based in nostalgia or latent patriotism. The Russians were the best hockey team on the planet and it was not close. They had won everything for twenty years and had not lost to the Americans since 1960. They had done a barnstorming tour of the NHL the year before and beat several NHL teams handily. Any team beating them in that Olympics was going to need a miracle.

The Americans, in contrast, were college kids assembled for the tournament. Younger people cannot appreciate this, but at the time there was some national pride in the fact that America relied on amateurs in the Olympics. “The only reason the Russians do so well is they are using professionals” was a common refrain. It had the added benefit of being true. The Soviet bloc countries used full-time athletes, who did nothing other than train for their sport. They were professionals.

To put it in perspective, imagine a college team today beating a team of NHL all-stars or an amateur golfer winning a major tournament. Think of some implausible combination of events in your favorite sport and you have an approximation of the enormity of this upset of the Russians. The American team averaged twenty-two years old. They had played together for a couple of months. The average Russian player had been on the team ten years. It was literally men against boys.

Of course, the reason it still resonates with Americans old enough to remember the event is the cultural and political impact. Carter was still president and the country was in a deep spiritual depression. The nation’s leaders regularly talked about how the good times were over and it was all downhill for America. We were just going to have to get used to be losers. After the disastrous 1960’s and 1970’s, that really did not strike most people as wrong. America had killed itself.

More importantly, there was a sense, promulgated by the Left at the time, that the Soviets were on the winning side of history. Communism was on the advance, while capitalism was on the defense. The number of countries falling under the spell of communism was increasing. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians had made a mockery of American power. It is hard to believe it in hindsight, but serious people really did think it was over for America.

I was a boy in that time and I recall my grandfather telling me that I’d surely live long enough to see communism in America. He’d talk about the number of countries that had gone over to that side. He’d point out the nature of the American Left and how it was mostly focused on destroying the white middle-class. He would say, “Communism is a war on the middle, waged by those at the top using us at the bottom.” His opinion was not out of the ordinary for the time.

The Americans beating the Russians and then beating Finland to capture the gold was a transformative event. All of a sudden. everyone had a reason to be proud and more important, be proud in public. It was a great example of the cascading effect. Everyone suddenly realized that lots of other people harbored the same thoughts as they did about the state of things. Those chants of “U-S-A” still bring chills to anyone old enough to have watched that Olympics. It was amazing.

Young people today get mad at old people for hanging onto the old civic nationalism, thinking they are just deliberately obtuse. There is some of that, for sure, but the real magnetic power of civic nationalism is patriotism. The feeling people had in the days following that win over the Russians was the best thing most American had ever experienced as Americans. Everyone was talking about it. “Can you believe we beat the Russians” was said over and over in joyous disbelief.

Those old enough to remember that time and what it was like to feel genuine love of country, should be forgiven for not wanting to close the door on it. There are few things that rival the bliss that comes from genuine national pride. Not only wanting that feeling for yourself, but for your descendants is not unreasonable. Preferring to look back to when such a thing was plausible, rather to a future of angry caterwauling by ungrateful browns, is perfectly understandable.

Old people should not be so quick to condemn the young people for mocking Baby Boomers or criticizing civic nationalism. At the root of that mockery is a bitterness at knowing they can never experience what their ancestors experienced. There will be no miracle on ice for the young. The social capital that made such a thing possible was converted into money and traded away by global capitalism. They have a right to be bitter over what their ancestors bequeathed them.

For those of us young at the time, this anniversary is a reminder of the strange divide in our timelines. One side of the timeline is the before times, when being a patriotic America was exhilarating. Then there is the after times, the now times, when such feelings seem absurd. Looking back over that great divide to this particular event is a strange feeling, because it’s like remembering yourself as a foreigner, living in a strange and foreign land. Your past is now alien to you.

That is the duty of those who have made the journey over the great divide to dissident politics, but still remember when the other side had promise. The America that made possible the miracle on ice had promise. It could have been a great nation. Instead, the people in charge chose to leverage our patriotism, monetize our social capital, so a handful of alien money-changers could turn themselves into potentates. They can never be forgiven for what they have taken from us. Never forget.

Sports Bowl Thoughts

Posted on February 3, 2020 by thezman

The big Super Bowl extravaganza has come and gone. The television people will tell us that this one, like all the others, was the most watched event ever. They say that every year, but whether it is true or not is hard to know. Television ratings are like everything else about modern times. You have to assume they are a part of the endless fire hose of lies that come from the propaganda organs. Even so, most people watched it and are expected to talk about it the next day with coworkers.

That is the one unique thing about this extravaganza versus others. There is strong social pressure to participate in the festivities. If you are white, no one expects you to follow the NBA, but you’re not expected to watch the World Series or the Stanley Cup Playoffs either. No one talks about the ads placed in these events or the pop stars that perform at them. The Super Bowl is the one unique event that is intended to be for everyone to one degree or another.

How many people actually watch the game is hard to know. Lots of people are at parties for the game and that means partying rather than watching. The game is just an excuse to get together with friends, day drink and cook outside in winter. Many people watch just for the ads, which are often quite clever. The game itself is mostly ads. The four-hour show is probably close to two hours of ads. The sideshows are often just ads for something or someone, but made up to look like entertainment.

For this reason, the Super Bowl is the great cultural measuring stick. The people in charge know they have the attention of most Americans, so they hit people right between the eyes with their best propaganda. President Trump, for example, ran ads promoting his efforts to throw open the prison doors so black criminals could be allowed to roam free. Presumably, he thinks he needs to sure up his support among the career criminal class in America’s urban areas.

The ads people like are the ones for product. Every year there are a flood of news stories about which ads were best and which ones missed the mark. The Super Bowl is something like an annual fashion show for ad makers. They work hard to put on a great ad, which presumably will help them get business the rest of the year. The cost of a single ad is over five million dollars, so it is big business. A particularly bad ad could cause real harm to the ad maker and his client.

Of course, the ads tell us something about what the Cloud People think about the Dirt People watching the show. This year the ads were full of non-whites, with some sexual deviants tossed in for variety. The one normal white person was aging comic Bill Murray, who reprised his role from the movie Groundhog Day for a Jeep ad. Otherwise, the ads looked like the America the elites dream of inflicting on us rather than the actual audience watching the extravaganza.

Then there was the halftime show, which is another big draw for the non-sports fans, mostly women, of course. This year is was a local stripper and her friends, pole dancing in the middle of the field. They performed to what sounded like every Santana song ever made, so presumably they were Latinos. One of the grounds crew put on a silver cape and top hat, then wandered around among the strippers for some reason, while mumbling something in Spanish.

The interesting thing, disappointing to our people, is the audience that makes this extravaganza possible is white, while the ads, halftime show and game are all in celebration of non-whites. Taken as a whole, the target demographic of the event was closer to Brazil than North America. It’s not just the complexion of the people, but the culture they celebrate. For racially aware white people, the whole thing is an alien production clearly aimed at an alien people.

It is tempting to get angry about it. There are plenty of people on-line, who will scold you for having watched any of it. Others will wag their finger about how most whites are so degraded they don’t see what is happening on their TV screens. The truth is most white people see it too. They are conditioned to filter it out and pluck out the bits of joy they can, while ignoring the propaganda. They are not mindless automatons programmed to consume the product without noticing it.

Propaganda works best when it offers the simplest explanation for a set of observable facts or events. It is a narrative that can be easily swapped into the target’s brain in place of his other explanations. What you saw on the Super Bowl show was a lecture by humorless people, aimed at people they hate. People were willing to sit through it in order to enjoy their parties and so forth, but they got the message. Some more than others, for sure, but people are not blind to this stuff.

That is the thing to keep in mind. People have been conditioned to keep these observations private. They have not been brainwashed. Finding a way to notice along with them is how people slowly realize they are not alone. That is the first step in breaking the conditioning. The bombarding of people with the anti-white presentations are a benefit to the effort. Only a lunatic could deny what they saw on the big Super Bowl show. The bad guys are making it easy.

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