Wednesday, January 1, 2014

if sports are a distraction floated by the elite, just who is being distracted by them?

deathtokoalas
he's mostly right, but he's usually mostly right. what he's drawing on is historical imperial policy. there was a time in the history of rome when sports teams didn't just function as a distraction but were controlled by the state specifically as a distraction. there was some blowback to that. the nika riots. but the idea of "bread and circuses" was very entrenched imperial policy for hundreds of years.

what he's missing is a sort of bigger context of people that are obsessed with sports largely having a lot of boredom to pass over due to the trivial nature of modern existence. if there weren't sports to distract the disinterested middle class with, then they would invent them. worse, if they lacked the imagination to invent sports then they'd drink themselves into criminality. there's no need to distract people when they're already oblivious. there is, however, a need to keep them occupied, in order and in line with the proper work ethic. the focus on the myth that hard work has results strikes me as the primary propaganda purpose of sports culture.

if they were hungry, it would be a different issue, but walk into a sports bar some time and get an eyeful of what these people actually eat. chomsky, the muted optimist, wants to believe that people would take a greater interest if they weren't so deeply controlled, but misses that the real basis of their disinterest is that they're well-fed.

but, he's mostly right.

i remember seeing images of this after 9/11:

DEFENSE. DEFENSE. DEFENSE.

...and almost barfing.


james
i would disagree, to a degree. many people are slaving away, day after day, leading lives that are hardly trivial but more hand to mouth and on the edge. sports, celebrity culture, tv and movies (the latter two to a lesser extent, since people are nowhere as passionate about them) are all diverting peoples attention from the absurd lifestyles and endless greed of the rich. at the same time these distractions could be a form of coping. regarding your food analogy, it truly hope that isnt what motivates people because when in 50/100 years we wont have anything to eat it will probably be too late

deathtokoalas
what i've noticed is that if you go to a soup kitchen then the people eating there don't have time for trivialities like baseball. yet, if you go to a software company where the janitor makes 60K, you can't go five minutes without hearing about the "local sports team". the idea that people that ought not be distracted are being distracted doesn't seem right; it's not the poor that are distracted by sports, or that could benefit from spending less time fawning over idiots, but rather the upper middle classes that fuel the obsession.

and, take a look at ticket prices or the cost of memorabilia or even the price of cable. the poor cannot afford to be sports fans.

perhaps things were different fifty years ago, but sports, today, are out of the reach of the poor that people suppose are being distracted by them.

what the people you're describing are actually distracted by are the three jobs they need to pay their bills.

(deleted)

deathtokoalas
umm, i think the massive protests against the world cup demonstrate my correction rather profoundly. as the wealthy glue national flags on to their suvs, the poor carry out massive, popular revolts and endure incredible police violence.

the thing is that the people that are supposedly being "distracted" have approximately zero revolutionary potential in the first place. i didn't say that there's no reason to distract the poor, i said there's no reason to distract the wealthy (or "middle class") because they benefit from the exploitation. the poor, on the other hand, do need to be distracted - but cannot be by something so trivial as sports.
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i'm going to lay this down.

something i want to change this year (and i don't usually do that, but i've been thinking about this for a bit and it's kind of a coincidence with the time of year) is minimizing the amount of time i spend arguing on the internet. that's not the amount of time i spend reading, or discussing, or conversing or even debating - it's arguing, with people that i don't agree with and that i'm never going to agree with.

i've wasted a lot of time doing this in the past. not just here on facebook, but on forums and newsgroups. i mean, this goes back almost twenty years now. what it actually is is a bad habit, bordering into an addiction. when i say the time is wasted, i mean that quite literally. yet, i felt i had more time to waste in the past than i feel i do now.

i've actually taken a number of steps over the last few months that are slowly converting this into a one-way flow of information. i'm not there yet, and don't want to push myself there; it might even reverse. yet, i feel it's given me back some time to spend on music and reading things that aren't related to debating or trolling.

why do we debate on the internet, anyways? i have three answers that i think are true in varying amounts:

(1) it helps us form our own opinions. for me, that's actually the dominant thing. and it's not really about challenging myself, it's more about going over the same points over and over and working out the bugs. in the sense that the debate is a challenge, it's a challenge to see the ideas from different input variables. for the most part, i'm talking over the person i'm debating with. those that have debated with me or seen me debate know this is true. there's no real consideration on my behalf that i might actually be wrong. (well, if i make a factual error, i'm known to correct myself, but that's not what i mean).

(2) it's an opportunity to learn. that is to say that it directs research topics in a way that is lively and organic. it's not a reading list somebody is pushing down from above. i find this does drive me, but it's also the biggest reason i want to reclaim the time. at this point, i've constructed a reading list for myself and the debating is getting in the way...

(3) ego. but, believe it or not, it's not that strong a force for me. my debating tone can be brutally condescending, but that's far less about how i interpret myself than may be initially apparent (and those who know me know my ego is not powerful. i'm actually driven by a super-ego that seems to be extra-terrestrial in origin.).

i just feel i've exhausted the possibilities with (1). i've had every debate that the internet offers so many times that i'm no longer working things out. it's consequently become sort of boring for me. in conjunction with the feeling that it's getting in the way of my productivity, that presents the aforementioned context of feeling as though i'm engaging in a bad habit that needs to be corrected.

i dunno. maybe i'll switch it around. maybe i'll be the nicest person ever on the internet and an impossible tyrant irl. maybe i'll lose my release. or maybe i'll channel it back into my guitar. who knows...

what i know is that this is not the beginning of this slow winding down. i'm several months into a process that will likely accelerate with the new year.
i'm not somebody that's lived a lunch pail life. i've tried to make things interesting, which has meant taking some chances. it's meant uncertainties in things most of us take for granted. it's meant sleeping in some weird places. it's meant that you win some and...

that was probably the most intense year of my life so far. it feels like a decade of time went by; i can barely even contemplate where i was this time last year, except as part of a past existence. i'm 800 km away in space and even further in mind. if i'm not a decade older physically, i feel like i'm a decade older, mentally.

taking it from the context of 2011 as a rock bottom, and 2012 as a needed recovery followed by a slow crawl out, i feel i turned a corner on a lot of things over 2013 - and not just things that had carried on since 2011 but things that had carried on longer than that. everything seemed to go wrong all at once at the end of 2011, and it all seemed to pass all at once in the middle of 2013. it's remarkable, really, how total and sudden both events were. so, there's a lot of legitimate newness for me in the new year. if things continue on the same trajectory, it looks positive.