You're Forcing Me To Defend Robert Barron, You Bastard

Was Hoping I Was Done With This Stuff

I HAVE SAID that I like Keith Olbermann and respect him.  That is to say, on balance I like what of Keith Olbermann that I know.  I've never met him, I've never seen him in life, I've never talked to anyone who knows him, friend or foe.  What I know of him is what I used to see when his Countdown show was on MSNBC (which I rarely saw because it came after I stopped watching cable TV) and what I've heard of him online, first in the series of polemical attacks he made on the Trump regime many of which I posted here and in his revived Countdown which he produces himself, generally the first thing that comes up when I go on Youtube because I listen to it virtually every day it's put out.  One thing that could be said about my idea of Keith Olbermann is that my view of him isn't disinterested because it's based entirely on what he says and what he says about himself and his life (we both like dogs, a lot, for example) and what we agree on, most everything to do with politics.  And what we don't agree on I can take, his anti-religiosity and anti-Christianity most seriously, his love of Thurber, which I don't get at all and his focus on sports.  Though I've said he is about the only person who is a good enough writer and interesting enough so that he is the only commentator on sports who can get me to listen to an entire piece about it.  Of people I like in that kind of way, I like him very much.  

If someone wanted to mock my liking and respect for Keith Olbermann, they could truthfully point out that I don't really know anything "objective" about him, since just about everything I know about him comes from him. I suppose I could go look for what other people say about him, including those who have known him.  But I've never done that and don't really have much of an interest in doing that, I like his commentary enough and find he is honest enough about what I share a knowledge of with him that I don't want his personality, likeable enough but with definite prickles, to get in the way of enjoying listening to him.  I'm sure his enemies, many of whom he has known and worked with would say things about him that could impact that.  I've also admitted that finding out too much about some composers, musicians, writers, etc. have made it impossible for me to enjoy their work.  Considering how much of his podcast is devoted to telling tales of others in media who he has worked with, his criticism of them (many of whom I dislike or, like Rick Kaplan and Laura Ingraham, I detest) and his positive reporting of a few of them, that would probably be something that would be a fair point in evaluating my opinion of him.  I can say that some of those he slams or criticizes I like, too.  I don't feel obliged to dislike someone just because he had a run-in or two with them.

If someone wanted to go all late night college sophomore on me, they could point out that I have a pretty flimsy basis on which to base my opinion of Keith Olbermann on.  I've never seen him, I've never seen him within the milieu in which he lives, I've never verified much of anything he's said about himself and his life.  For all I "know" if by that you mean know in some pretended objective and disinterested way, the man I know as Keith Olbermann is an actor playing a part on TV as I suspect many of those in the media do.  Some of whom he and I share a disliking for.  For all I know all of them are playing who they are as "TV journalists"*.  For all I know Keith Olbermann is a TV character who transitioned into Youtube and other online formats and is as real as any other TV character.  If it wasn't for the fact that he can write well and uses the language very well and doesn't have tell-tale beats taken in his delivery, his most recent Youtubes could be AI generated.  

All of this is because someone mocked me over Olbermann's repeated ridicule of Christianity in his "Worst Persons In The World" segment yesterday.  He gave out his typical barroom atheist mythicist rant about the real existence of Jesus and the events in the Gospels during it.  I'll start with what set that off this time.

Olbermann belatedly slammed the critics of the Olympics opening show's clear mockery, not of "The Last Supper" but of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous and decayed fresco of it, with drag queens as Jesus and the Apostles and pagan content.  Making believe that what the director of the thing, Thomas Jolly obviously did, making a vulgar mockery of one of the central events in all four Gospels, wasn't what he clearly did is beneath Olbermann's level of honest reporting.  It was blatantly an obviously offensive presentation mocking that.  There is no other reasonable interpretation of it.  Jolly's defense of it in terms of a right to disbelief confirmed that was his clear intent, despite his ass covering denials.  That ass covering makes any assertion of its courageousness an empty gesture.

It was a spectacle intending to offend Christians in the most obvious of ways.  It couldn't be more obvious that that's what he and his colleagues did.  And it is as clear THAT HE DID IT WITH THE INTENTION OF OFFENDING MANY PEOPLE AND GETTING A REACTION FROM THEM.  He was probably counting on the Archibishop of Paris, among others, to express that offense.  THAT SUCH PEOPLE GAVE THE REACTION THAT WAS CLEARLY DESIRED IS HARDLY THEIR FAULT.  Nor was it unexpected.   No more than that the fashionable despisers of Christianity expressing their delight at the offensiveness to it intended to offend.  If those who were offended had done what would probably have been the wisest thing to do, brush it off as another pedestrian Parisian spectacle as meaningless as any such production number, none of the pretended counter-offense of the anti-Christians could have happened.  If they'd ignored it altogether Jolly and his colleagues would certainly have been upset instead of gratified by it.  If there is one thing that they didn't want, it was to have the let-down of their offensive tableau NOT GETTING THE REACTIONS IT DID.  Such show-biz types mount spectacles to get attention and if it hadn't they'd have been the most hurt of all.   There's nothing much more to it other than getting paid to do it.

That part of the effect desired by those producing such intentional offense, the part that Olbermann and his like played in reacting to the original offense taken, their pseudo-moralistic defense of the um. . . "art"  on the basis of "liberty," "freedom of expression," "free speech" and "artistic freedom" was the most over-blown part of it.  Well, who stopped them from doing any of it?  

What is the most developed view of this situation is the intense irony that those who slam the objectors to the spectacle on the bases of various "freedoms" is that they are objecting to the liberty, the freedom of expression, the free speech of those expressing their hurt and outrage.  OF ALL OF THOSE EXPRESSING OUTRAGE, THE ONES INTENTIONALLY OFFENDED ARE THE ONES WHO DIDN'T DO A THING TO CAUSE THIS TO HAPPEN.  Even if I disagree with them on extremely important things, even my own rights as an LGBTQ+ man and even as I dislike many of those who have expressed their outrage, their outrage was in response to something they didn't originate.  The hypocrisy of Jolly and his colleagues in pretending they didn't intend to do what they so obviously intended to do is exactly that, hypocrisy.  As is the hypocrisy of those who had Olbermann's reaction to that expression of being involuntarily offended, is that they're objecting to the free expression of that offense.  The whole thing, from start to finish reeks of hypocrisy on the part of those who provoked the offense and those who object to the expression of that offense.  Much as I dislike many of those who have expressed that offense - I pretty much detest the two American bishops named in that piece I wrote about it last week - them taking offense at what they found offensive is the most honest thing about it.

Considering what I said about the dynamics of Olbermann's beloved sports as an entertainment planned to make at least half of those doing it and at least half of those watching it unhappy - for him to slam those who were involuntarily made unhappy by an . . . um. . . "artistic" spectacle they had no foreknowledge would be presented to them expressing their unhappiness is especially odd.  Especially as it was done as a prelude to exactly that kind of sports spectacle in which those made happy or unhappy were expected to express their feelings, how can those expressing their offense at the opening show be offensive?   I wonder if Olbermann has ever expressed his dislike of a half-time show at a football game.  Many do to not much criticism.  What if it had been on the basis of right wing politics, insincere and hypocritical nationalism?  The kind of stuff put on by Olympics mounted within some of the worst dictatorships?   Would it be Ok to slam those or express offense on those bases or is that a wrong on the same basis as the outrage of the Archbishop of Paris is held to be a wrong? 

I have to say, I wasn't terribly offended by the spectacle, which, watching it after it happened, was among the most tediously predictable drag act I've ever seen.  I'm not a huge fan of the . . . um . . . art of drag but it's best when it's surprising and creative.   Which the Paris spectacle was not.  I generally find that modern French culture is a matter of presenting the most predictable and practiced and sterotypical content - people go there to study styles of clowning, for fucksake.  They pretended that Jerry Lewis was a comic genius because some idiot ersatz savant claimed him to be one.  It is entirely in service to whatever is in fashion at any given time.  That's typical of such show biz, everything from nightclub acts to stage presentations, TV shows and movies, no matter where those are produced.  It's typical of the kind of lit that gets on best sellers lists and mentioned on TV and radio shows.  It's very rare that any of it rises above or departs entirely from the recitation of conventional images, in this case the typical conventions of anti-Christian puerility.  I'll add that J. D. Vance's "hillbilly" shit was just a different topic and style of the same thing, otherwise it would never have been made into a movie.

Keith Olbermann taking the opportunity to throw more offense at Christians who were so offended  by claiming that the existence of Jesus and The Last Supper are not knowably historical is, of course, the focus of the first part of this post.  Any claim made about Jesus is demanded to present a level of "proof" that little else is demanded to.  Especially considering when he lived.  Jesus is probably the best documented peasant from antiquity and better documented than any number of well known figures in the ancient and classical world.  There are more independent sources of information about him than for Socrates for whom there are exactly three hardly disinterested sources, Sparticus who is known only through aristocratic Romans writing about him more than a century after his life.   I doubt there is any such a thing as a disinterested classical writer about any person or event.   All of them wrote out of an apriori point of view. 

Since I'm reading him right now, Luke Timothy Johnson has said that the existence of Jesus as a Jewish peasant from the first century, his death on the cross and the movement that arose immediately after his reported resurrection are facts of the highest historical probability.  LTK is someone who has devoted his academic career to the topic, he has the credentials to be taken credibly on the topic.  He lists other things about Jesus that are not as certain but are very well or less well evidenced.  Even atheists who specialize in the relevant fields such as Bart Ehrman hold that view of the historicity of Jesus, a couple of those with such credentials on the fringiest of fringes denying that high probability.  The same cannot be said about many people and events of the ancient and classical eras, though I've never heard anyone doubt that even the most developed stories about them are factual.  

Given the milieu in which Olbermann works and in which both of us live in 2024, how many English speaking People these days believe they know all about figures such as Sparticus, such as Caligula and Claudius when all they know they got second hand through a TV series made from the NOVELS by Robert Graves, or how many believe they know about Thomas More based on the movie The Man For All Seasons, what they know of the Scopes Trial on the grotesquely anti-historical Inherit The Wind?  Basing a knowledge of Jesus on the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles is practicing a heightened level of historical review from what I'd guess is typical in Olbermann's and my milieu.  I have, on occasion, heard Olbermann make the typical historical and other factual gaffs and errors common to our generation of college-credentialed people, maybe some of them gained currency through such show biz.  Maybe I'll start keeping a tab when I hear those, from now on.  I would welcome anyone finding any in what I write to point those out, after documenting that they are actually gaffs.  

I still like Olbermann and will listen to him on politics,** on the media, even on sports (though I cannot listen to Thurber even when he reads it) but on the topic of Christianity, I'll listen to those who have some basis higher than the village barroom atheist school of oratory, such as apparently ill-served Clarence Darrow when he unwisely debated G. K. Chesterton on the topic.  As I've noted here, even such a Christianity unfriendly organ as The Nation said that Chesterton knew what he was talking about and Darrow just repeated that kind of stuff as a boy would try to offend his pious aunt with.  I do thank Olbermann and whoever it was who mocked me over his commentary for making me think out the real nature of the Olympics opening brew-ha-ha even though it made me speak up for the likes of Bishop Barron and the Archbishop of Paris.  Most of those named among the complainers I don't like much at all, I'd rather not have to speak up for them.  Of all of those expressing disapproval in this matter, they were the ones least hypocritical about it.  I might like Olbermann better than them, but in this, they were more in the right than he is.  I just wish they'd ignored the stupid thing and it deflated like I hope Trump is.  

* Olbermann's observation on "TV journalism" that it's not journalism because it's all TV is one of the most valuable and succinct summations of what's wrong with it.  TV is all about getting ratings, reporting of facts coming well down in the list of its priorities.  My thought on that was that the more production involved in "journalism" the farther away from the reporting of facts.  So I've long distrusted TV "journalism" and "journalists" especially as the 24-7 format invented by Ted Turner took over and they flooded TV "journalism" with "opinion journalism" over the far more expensive and slow and risky reporting of verified fact.  And with the idiotic permission of the Supreme Court and the gutting of broadcast standards, the reporting of conjecture, polling and predictions.   

** Another thing, I suspect it's his unstated scientism that leads Olbermann to spend so much time on polling, which, if there's something obvious about it, it's highly unreliable pseudo-science of a particularly dishonest kind.  I think most of it is planned to get the results those commissioning the polls want.   I wish he'd spend less time on the polls which I find myself scrolling past.  I try to let the Youtube play through because I assume it's to his financial advantage but I'm pretty much past the point of tolerance over polls.

Crowd Size

It's so funny that Trump is so upset that hers is so much bigger than his.

I'll Admire The Losers And Those Who Serve The Losers Among Us, Instead

THE RESURFACED FOOTAGE of the massive asshole, male-supremacist creepy weirdo, billionaire's bitch, J. D. Vance once slamming Simone Biles over her generous decision to pull out of a previous Olympic competition to give her team mates a chance to win, got the response among non-Republican-fascists that it should have.  Vance is an asshole. Simone Biles was the expert in that situation, probably one of the few in the world best qualified to make that judgement, CERTAINLY THE MOST QUALIFIED in the world to make it on her own behalf.  His abuse of a young woman over that was a disgusting and self-serving use of her for his own ends, gaining status in a sick and disgusting culture to gain position in the Republican-fascist media and party.  What else does his mentor, bad-sport, foreign billionaire's bitch Donald Trump's entire shtick consist of?  

But what Vance did to her happens all the time to no objection or notice being taken, it isn't atypical of how even the youngest athletes are treated, those who lose or choke up as she may have if she didn't wisely withdraw from tasks she wasn't prepared to do at that time.  That is an inherent aspect of sports.  The difference is that Vance slammed a superbly talented, hard-working athlete, using her and, no doubt, her identity as a young Black Woman to his ends.  But that's the only the major difference.  If he had said similar things about a young athlete who failed to win, even one who came close to winning, no one would have objected to it.  Especially if he were a coach abusing and reviling an athlete or an entire team.  Such an abusive coach would probably gain a similar kind of status as Vance hoped to gain by doing that.  Even the best athletes are subjected to that kind of abuse as coaching and encouragement.   

In my recent dissing of the sacred Olympics I knew the response it might get because the absurd idolatry of the thing is so predictable.  I mentioned the absurd and phony aroma of sanctity heaped on what is actually a sordid international gangster money shake-down, full of millionaire and billionaire beneficiaries, some of them actual royalty, royals being the quintessential. longest standing gangster class.  A gangster syndicate which colludes with the local version of the same thing, whether in dictatorship or alleged liberal democracy.  That's a permanent part of what the Olympics is and saying that got the typical high school mean-boy, mean-girl style responses that I knew it would.  

I heard the sane slogans and accusations when I said something like that to the vice principal when I got caught not attending a mandatory pep-rally my Freshman year of high school.  He said pretty much the same thing as I got last week.  It's so funny reading the superannuated kewel-kids in their sixties and seventies saying what the entirely uncool vice-principal said to me all those decades ago.  I got better at hiding from pep-rallies, not going to them.  The hell with football and jock kulcha.

The international committee behind the Olympics is an extremely profitable scheme comprising the money-making parts of the corrupt deal which feeds on, first and foremost, the generally very young athletes who are required to be amateurs (with some notable exceptions made, allowing even the best paid professional athletes into amateur competition) some of whom are talked into some pretty extreme hardships and sacrifices and personal and family expenses just for the supposed honor of being allowed to compete in the final show.  Especially in obscure sports.  The Olympics is no different.  And that's done knowing only a few of the most talented and lucky will have any real chance of winning any of the events, even some of the best athletes have lost on the particular day of any of the contests involved.  Most of them will be very disappointed and those who encouraged that planned it that way from the start.  In some of the worst cases, such as in the dictatorships, children showing talent are pulled out of a normal childhood and away from their families into a farming system that includes enormous abuse and drugging, chewing them up and spitting out most of them so that the elite can compete for the glory of the dictatorship.  How that differs from John D. Rockefeller's infamous Social Darwinist American Beauty Rose sermon, I'd like some alleged lefty Olympics cultist to explain to me.  And the officials in charge of the filthy thing know all about that.  Maybe I should study the relationship of athletics to eugenics because given the time frame of the Olympics and the rise of eugenics, I'm absolutely certain there are many connections between the two.

Those who get eliminated early, those who lose at the games will be losers, feeling badly, maybe permanently impacted because of something which doesn't matter, one bit.  The time framing of Olympics will ensure that even some of the best athletes of their time will be losers.  I don't know what long term studies have ever been done on a world-wide basis to measure what the losers and their families get out of it, what the athletes who didn't get far at the Olympics got for all of that use by everyone from local coaches and national affiliates of the Olympic syndicates,  I doubt many if any disinterested studies of athletes and athletics are done.   I suspect that for a lot of even temporarily winning athletes they must often regret having given up so much, their families having invested so much into what was, in the end, not very much.  I remember reading one study of kids who spent enormous amounts of time playing pick-up basketball who seemed to fully believe someone was going to pluck them out of their working class or poverty into the wealth and fame of the NBA.  Some of such deluded dreamers didn't even play on a high school team.  The author of one of the articles about the study pointed out how few players made it to the professional level in terms of how much greater their chances of becoming surgeons and members of other elite professions would have been if they'd spent that time studying.  If they'd put it in terms of how many of them could have studied and apprenticed to become members of non-elite professions or trades, making a good living instead of becoming never rich and famous the numbers against them following an absurd fantasy would have been entirely against encouraging them in sports.  

The alleged advantage to their life-long health from participating in sports is also absurd,  I'll back up here to note that the greatest motive in the founding of the modern Olympics wasn't tied to the alleged life-long health benefit to athletes, it was to encourage the young to make themselves better cannon fodder for the competing military powers of Europe after the Franco-Prussian war.  That is why the Olympics is so tied into the most putrid of nationalist cultism.  Those members of the economic elites who planned the Olympics didn't want the athletes to be healthy for a long and good life, they wanted more effective soldiers to fight for their wars of conquest and financial gain.  Getting shot at, likely maimed or killed whether for king and country or republic.

But so many sports, especially at the elite, professional levels are far more contributive to injuries and health problems and poor health habits than being able to lead a relatively healthy and happy life.  Many of those bad effects being problems of emotions and character. I will note in passing the long standing relationship of athletics and alcohol use.  My guess would be that abstinence has been rare and rarely encouraged in the culture of athletics.  

I will point out that much of the same can be said about elite, modern classical musicianship especially in my field of playing piano with all of the famed players who, once prodigies, played themselves into disability in service to some pretty bad music making concentrating on thrills and speed instead of musical content.   I've criticized that from pretty much the earliest comments and blog posts I've written, details will be given on further whining by the pudgy, couch-potato chorus who objected to my criticism of the holy Olympics.  

The direct musical analog to the Olympics, the performance competition racket is something I've never supported even when encouraged to do so within the department in college,  It's part of what's wrongest with professional musicianship and produces some pretty awful music making.  I absolutely and always have loathed the competition racket and the resultant kind of music making.  Bela Bartok said that competitions were for race horses, not artists.  When entrepreneurs wanted to tour the young Rudoph Serkin around the world his father rejected that saying they wanted an artist, not a prodigy.   Outside of opera and rock, music doesn't tend to lead to violence among the audience.  I'd argue strongly against depending on music as a "character" builder but the idea that sports builds good character is so easily contradicted by the many examples when it built bad character and outright criminality that that delusion is one of the major uninvestigated widespread delusions of our time.**  That is because you aren't allowed to tell the truth about that anymore than you are the sacred Olympics.  Some sports produce violent criminals so regularly that the culture that surrounds them and the violence intrinsic to the "game" has to contribute to that.  In many cases even the more likable non-criminals involved will cover up for their criminal teammates and even those on rival teams, mimicking the worst practices among many professions and associations.  

I don't have much of an opinion about non-professional sports engaged in for harmless pleasure, the ones that don't involve injuring the players or lead to regular riots and vandalism or rape.   With pro sports and many college sports fans seem to riot if their team loses or wins.* I am entirely against any that do that, especially to young people too young, foolish and manipulable to protect themselves against adults who feed off of them like vampires.  Womens' softball and, maybe, non-professional men's baseball played for fun strike me as being relatively OK, I'm sure there are other examples in other sports, I just don't know about those.  

I mentioned the effort of local residents in and around Boston to halt the effort of local businessmen and politicians to bring the summer Olympics to Boston a while back. Doing so democratically, not through PR.  The lies told by the promoters about the benefits that the residents of Boston and the surrounding area and the state and even region were pretty blatantly lies.  It is the rarest and only best planned and managed of Olympics that don't end up being a huge cost in taxes and other losses to the "host city, state and country."  And a lot of that is as much a matter of chance and luck as it is by planning and minimizing the cost of the corruptions baked into the deals that bring the Olympics to a particular place.  Reading the demands and guarantees that those costs will fall on the "host" and not on the ultimate beneficiaries of the Olympics, the members and employees of the international and national syndicate controlling them, you'd have to be the ultimate idiot or entirely ignorant of basic arithmetic to not see that it's an old-fashioned shake-down.  Or in on the con job.  Certainly the millionaires, billionaires and politicians who enter into the deal with them aren't the ones who plan on taking the hit to pay for what often turn out to be superfluous sports facilities, often designed by big-name architects who get lots of money as well as added PR for building those often unused white elephants.  Not to mention the accompanying infrastructure that so often doesn't fit into the actual needs of living around them.  Taxpayers are the ones who end up paying for them, probably for their eventual demolition when the same millionaires and billionaires or others of their type set their eyes on the often prime real estate those things sit on.  The poor, the destitute, the homeless who are pushed aside for them and disappeared don't matter at all to much of anyone.   

And there are the contractual obligations of the "host" cities and regions to provide the members of the Olympics syndicate with demanded perks and privileges.  One of the ones I remember was that lanes on highways in and around Boston would be designated for the use of Olympics officials only.  For anyone familiar with the traffic in and around Boston, the consequences of that would almost certainly have been grid-lock for as long as the princes and princesses and other gangsters of the Olympics got that privilege.  And that was only one example of the kind of demands that the Olympics places on whatever host it decides to parasitize.  Again, the same can be said of many professional sporting syndicates, football, baseball, perhaps somewhat less so for indoor sports like basketball and hockey, though those, at least, stick around and sometimes do actually contribute something long term to the place where they play.  I always like to see residents of cities who resist the shake-downs of the millionaire-billionaire owners of teams who demand they build them new stadiums for them to keep the team in their cities.  I think that's a sign of the mental health of the majority, maturity and an ability to understand basic mathematics, something which so many of those who objected to what I said in passing don't possess despite being credentialed by colleges and universities.  I think if a majority of residents in a democracy were presented with the facts of what the Olympics is going to mean to them, no democracy would ever agree to serve as the victims of the scheme.  That Paris, which likes to believe itself the cultural origin of enlightenment culture and governance, agreed to host the thing is a sign of how readily they are suckered by public relations and ephmeral fads and fashions.  Paris like most such over-praised loci is too full of itself.

During the last hostings of the Olympics by one of the major dictatorships, I forget wither it was Putin's Russia or Communist China, I heard talk again of the Olympics having permanent homes for the summer and winter games in relatively stable democratic countries.  One suggested Athens for the summer Olympics, I don't know what snowy location they'd think was reliable enough into the future to have snow games based there.  The suggestion touched on many of the corruptions inherent in the Olympics as being lessened or removed by that and they'd be spared the scandal of making cosy with the likes of Putin and, in the past Hitler and myriads of other vicious dictators and their corrupt regimes.  Though I strongly suspect many of the permanent members of the Olympics committees thrive on the opportunities for corruption baked into the thing and they'd never give up their good thing unless forced to by democratic governments.  Security around the Olympics being more possible in permanent locations might be another selling point.  

That might fix some of what's wrong with them but there's a lot more than that which is bad,  A lot of that is related to the exploitation and abuse of young athletes which is intrinsic to the Olympics.   That is endemic to sports which is, as I said, an irrational form of entertainment in which it is planned that at least half of the participants and fans are made unhappy though them.  I don't think that kind of unhappiness carries the alleged emotional or moral benefits it allegedly does carry.  If it did then the world's population would be a lot more emotionally stable and a lot more moral than it is, especially those who follow sports.  Some of the response to what I wrote, mentioning the practice of giving out medals to those who lost games or competitions, seem to take offense at not sticking it to "losers" in every way.   I've never endorsed giving "losers" ribbons or medals or awards of participation or whatever someone dreamed up in the last few decades, I've endorsed not caring about the whole thing.  Indifference to sports hasn't hurt anyone I know of who is indifferent to them.  And I can tell you, if you played music in high school instead of football, you're a less likely to have gotten fat and had health problems from it.  I don't know if any studies have been done about that, it's just based on being able to observe lots of people I went to school with throughout their adulthood.  Some of the jocks turned out OK but lots of them didn't.  The "character: that sports built wasn't reliably the best, the effect of sports on that is probably everything from nothing to making would-be jerks bigger jerks.

For myself, the coercion to pretend to like sports, to care about sports and to lie about what I can see right in front of me about sports is something I do resent, when I am forced to pay any attention at all to them.  I don't care about the games, I don't care about who wins and who loses, I won't lie about that or the corruption and immorality that is intrinsic to or which attaches itself to sports.  I don't particularly care if you don't like that, you can go soak your head if you don't but I never agreed to the fake morality that presents sports as an unmitigated good.  The only good that might be gotten out of sports, in terms of physical fitness and health are better gotten through rational, safe exercise and an active life.  

I'll save my admiration such as that given to athletes for people who serve the least among us, the "losers" among us, making themselves the servants of losers.  I'll save my admiration for those who give their time and work and resources to the public good, who never once provide the thrills and adrenaline high that sports encourages people to be addicted to.  I'll save my admiration for those who don't conform to corporate, market economics and who make deals with dictators and billionaires and other thugs.  And those who tell the truth instead of theatrical lies marketing those deals.  I'll save my admiration and praise for those who serve the least among us, the losers.  

* In researching what I write here, I  was interested but not surprised, to find out several years ago that the very first inter-collegiate American football game resulted in a riot, necessitating in the visiting team fleeing the town where it was held.  It hasn't gone uphill in terms of morals or ethics, since then.  Sports with violence built into them can't rationally be expected to produce anything else than the encouragement of violence.  As an invention of our economic elite who comprised those who attended universities back then, that's not surprising.  It is an expression of the cruel viciousness of the rich.   That they are asserted to produce good character so widely is one of the most widely believed lies there is.   I found out about that while I was researching the history of American football players who died while playing the "game."    That such a thing is so intimately tied into American colleges and universities, especially those with an alleged Christian character is proof of the depravity of modern life.  That it is presented with such phony, hokey, sentimental and dishonest sanctity when it is a filthy, cruel and violent game resulting in conceit and a sense of entitlement among those involved in it is an indictment of the culture that hosts that delusion.  I don't hold any sentimental regard for baseball but at least the game itself isn't the practice of thugishness.  Hockey, stripped of the violence attached to it, might not be anywhere near as bad as it is but American football is inherently dirty.  

** That American football has produced and not rejected so many rapists and other violent criminals, often being let off the hook by the police, and if not them then by prosecutors and judges is a hard fact.  There have been professional players who were known rapists.  And even the most credible accusations have not often led to such criminals being thrown off of college teams.  Though a few do get thrown off, now.  Often the response has been to quash any investigation into the crime or to discourage victims from making talking about attacks on them.  I've recently written about one of the most infamous and largely forgotten cases of that showing the corruption inbuilt into that sport and the culture that rose up naturally around what is inherently a violent sport.  The revelations of only a few cases of the sexual abuse of boys and young men in sports is, of course, worth following up on because I think there's a lot more of that than is ever reported.  But it's certainly a small percentage of the abuse of girls and Women that is intrinsic to the culture of athletics and has been from the start.  That it is the sexual abuse of males that really causes outrage is an indication of the sexism of the culture and in no way should lead to the minimization of the wrong done to the victims.  Male athletics inevitably seems to an assumption of sexual entitlement by athletes and that inevitably results in sexual violence.  That coaches and others would assume the same about males being used sexually isn't at all surprising when you think about it.  You'll have to prove to me that athletics is capable of changing that.  I will point out that I've had to face the same thing about the world of music, being disheartened when I found out what was apparently an open secret that the late James Levine was a serial sexual abuser and had been for decades before he was finally exposed during #MeToo.  I can't listen to his recordings anymore.  He disgusts me.