Jocks vs. Brains: the debate rages on
ElectricAye
Posts: 4,561
I've always wondered about bellicose cultures. Lots of battles result in lots of brain injuries. Brain injuries make you stupid, impulsive, sometimes violent. So you start a war because you get mad kinda easily and send your kids into battle. Ergo the cycle continues. Is it a form of natural selection that weeds out the worst of us? or is it a self-destructive infinite-loop that drags us all down? And are we a culture that is unwittingly worshipping brain injury recipients?
Intriguing new research:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/sports/study-bolsters-link-between-routine-hits-to-head-and-long-term-brain-disease.html?hp&_r=0
Intriguing new research:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/sports/study-bolsters-link-between-routine-hits-to-head-and-long-term-brain-disease.html?hp&_r=0
Comments
American football would perhaps cause a lot less brain damage if they played it with out all that body armour and crash hats on. Rugby is a similar game that does not seem to have these head trauma problems. Having a lot of body protection just encourages one to batter away harder.
Of course some sports are much worse than others. Harder the contact and the bigger the players the worse it gets.. Take football, when it was played with leather helmets the men half the weight of the roided out monsters that top out at 300lbs. Add the gear that allows them to ram themselves at full speed into another player and you have a recipe for damage. Then again they are very well compensated compared to almost every other profession, so I don't shed a tear over their injuries.
1st year in college ,,,wrestling .. It was that or waterpolo and I can swim worth a darn ..
Then in 09 right as I was Graduating for the first time . I was in ballet .
this ended up destroying my knees so now I am handicapped ....
I would not consider my self a jock by any means . ..
* as a pure geek with a distaste for college sports I am thrilled that OIT's north campus is %100 geek on campus . No sports are here at all .*
Heater has a good point . the way we pad US football players reduces there Front on, linear veloicity ,impacts . Yet all those pads are worthless for over-rotation and twist . so Yes Players play harder and as long as the impact is Head on so to say the damage is smalll. Yet a non square impact will twist your joints to shreads ..
This is akin to playing paintball with Live .22 rounds and kevlar vests ..
And there is the money aspect .....
Playing with a inflated oblong ball is not worthy of more then 100K a year ...
No sport is . It is just entertainment . and I have yet to see Real actors in theater making 6 FIg for doing good Shakespeare .
I see a ton of " fluid dynamics" on Foot ball days
Boring isn't the word.
According to the Wall Street Journal, actual play time for an NFL game is about 11 minutes.
67 minutes of your life are squandered watching the players do nothing but stand around.
It's like selling Americans breakfast cereal - most of it is nothing but air.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406.html
The way I see it is we all have a set of keys and we wouldn't even 'think' of giving them up.
Sort of like sarcrificing the dumb to keep the brains entertained.
Personally, I became disinterested when althlete became solely interested in the money. Cheating, performance enhanciing drugs, unsportsman-like activities on and off the field, sponsors that own the players and the name of the stadium, and so on.
Watching the rich get richer might be an interesting thing to do, but I have no intention of paying to do so.
You are viewing the situation from the modern day skewed perspective.
When automobiles first appeared they were so obviously dangerous that you could not drive one on a public highway without a guy walking in front carrying a red flag.
Someone dies on the roads in the USA about every 15 minutes. That's about forty thousand per year.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1372202/U-S-road-deaths-lowest-levels-60-years--killed-16-minutes.html
The September the 11th attacks killed about 3000 people.
I think you see where I am going with this. Whilst I might not expect driving of private cars to be outlawed if you want to reduce the unnecessary death toll of American citizens your efforts and money would be better spent regulating traffic than worrying about terrorists.
As far as the old red flag is concerned. Whilst it seems unreasonable to expect a guy to walk in front of your car with a flag I see no reason why a car traveling through an urban area where people live and move should ever be allowed to travel at more than walking pace.
If i ever find myself battling lions and grizzly bears, I'll adapt, but for now it seems games focused on crushing you enemy seem kind of silly.
Anyway, jocks vs brains? Whats that about? Both groups are exactly the same, except for how much time they practice the other discipline. As with everything in this life.
Couldn't agree more. I gave up taking my kids to sports events after having loud mouthed morons like the one in the picture ElectricAye posted spill beer and food all over us. We found more enjoyable ways to spend time together.
We already have that - it's called Professional Wrestling and Mix Martial Arts competitions. The former is more popular than NFL Football and it kills their wrestlers at a alarming rate. From Concussions, to steroid and painkiller addictions, add in the illegal drugs provided by the company to keep the wrestlers from bolting and you have a recipe for crippling injuries and death.
Mixed Martial Arts - is just a sanitized version of gladitorial games. The fighters have careers measured in less than a decade. Some only last a handful of fights and they're finished. Some of the biggest names have painkiller addictions and juice. It's spreading fast.
Football isn't much better, these guys are all juice heads. I don't care what the NFL docs say, a tackle who is 6'4" and 320 pounds and moves like a sprinter is juicing big time. It's killing them before the brain trauma sets in. IMS most die in their mid-50's.
It's all about bread and circuses for the masses. The same applies for Soccer at the pro level, just a way to keep people distracted with mindless garbage.
All following the great tradition of self-destruction that was pioneered by Evil Kneevl.
But I have trouble considering Professional Wrestling a real sport. Then again, some people claim gambling is a sport as well, or dog racing.
The mindless fill the stadiums for just about any purpose - sports, religion, music, auto races. More intelligent folks can stay away.
When he was a kid, a former boss of mine competed with his friends to see who was the toughest. It seems the two chief tests were 1) how high could you survive a jump to the ground and 2) how hard could you be slugged in the stomach. Those never seemed like good ideas to me. I don't know if such thinking was a remnant of WWII and the idea of soldier heroes, or if it hearkened back to frontier life.
That's a good question. A number of old relatives and "old timer" colleagues of mine used to tell me stories of what their typical Friday nights were like: they'd go out to bars with their buddies, get drunk and intentionally get into fist fights with strangers. I even heard stories of particular groups of females in Mississippi who did exactly the same. This was all pre-WW2 stuff and such events seem to have waned post WW2. It's always baffled me, and when Fight Club became such a popular movie, and when this wretched cage fighting stuff became available on cable, I really began to wonder: De-evolution? Darwinism in action? Personally, I probably wouldn't care what people outside my gene pool do to each other, but brain injuries have a way of spilling over into my personal space and suck up public resources that could be spent raising the rest of us a notch or two higher out of the cesspool of ignorance.
I'm also one of those who likes food flavored with wood smoke. "Smoke"? That's strange but just as strange is cows that spend all day eating grass."Hmm.." Taste as well as the speed of light is relative.
Once you come to understand the strategy involved in football you come to appreciate the sport.
Indeed. But, like most images I present, it's not mine. It's an image pulled in from here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynfrancey/4296048750/