Maverick Philosopher

Stupor Bowl LIX

Two reasons to watch:  Trump will be there; DOGE will run commercials. For twelve reasons not to watch see here.

You may enjoy a thoughtful rant of mine from 2016, Stupor Bowl or Super Bore?

Elon Musk on DOGE.

The Double Denial by the 'Woke'

It is not unreasonable to maintain that there is no God and that nature alone exists. But suppose you take it a step further and deny nature as well. Then you are in the precincts of 'woke' lunacy.  Call it the Double Denial.

One way to deny nature is by denying that the biotic underpins the social and that as a consequence the difference between men and women is a matter of social construction and not a matter of biology.  But any sane person will grasp instantly that one cannot change one's sex by merely thinking of oneself as belonging to the opposite sex. It is also obvious that sartorial and cosmetic modifications will not turn the trick.

Less obvious, but equally true, is that chemical and surgical alteration of one's body cannot change one's sex even if the surgical alteration is of a deeply structural sort:  reduction of muscle mass, heart and lung volume,  bone density, size of hands, and length of limbs even unto the removal of portions of bones to make the altered person shorter.

But of course the 'transgendered' biological men who compete in, and win, women's sporting events do not and would not submit to the modern-day equivalent of the Bed of Procrustes: they are not about to be modified in the drastic ways just mentioned.  And yet such men are allowed to pass themselves off as women.  To add insult to injury, some of these impostors are then awarded 'woman of the year' titles.

What is going on here? It is one thing to condemn the injustice to women and overall idiocy of this, quite another to understand how it could arise and be taken seriously by otherwise sane people.

One thing that needs explaining is how leftists, who are supposedly for women and against their oppression by men and 'the patriarchy,' could embrace something so antifeminist as the allowance of male interference with women's sports. I suggest that what we are witnessing here is a collision of motifs on the Left. One such is the oppressor-oppressed motif. Another is the hyper-constructivist denial-of-reality motif. These motifs are in tension with each other. If men oppress women, then women need their 'safe spaces' where they can feel secure against real or merely perceived micro- and macro-aggression. Accordingly, there is obvious need for  sexual segregation in certain areas such as sports competitions, locker rooms, restrooms, prisons, etc.  But if everything is a matter of social construction, as per the second motif, then so are sexual differences in which case they are not innate and immutable, but malleable. A man can 're-identify' as a woman with or without chemical and surgical alteration. Add in a third motif that of expressive individualism and for good measure throw in the 'my truth' meme.  If 'my truth' is that I am a woman, then I am a woman and can compete against women. (There is little or no chance that any woman will 're-identify' as a man so as to compete against them.)

The conflict of leftist motifs explains the utter absurdity of wokesters who tolerate the grotesquely unjust penetration of biological males into female spaces.

The Stupor Bowl is a Super Bore

Panem et circenses! 

I am no fan of spectator sports.  We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid* professional louts. I preach the People's Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.

Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don't call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)

Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry said, "A man sits as many risks as he runs." Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.

In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey opines:

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

Was Abbey a racist? That depends on what a racist is. I'll leave it for you to decide what a racist is and whether Abbey was one.

________________

*Can anyone be 'overpaid'? If enough people like what you sell, and are willing to pay you for it, you may become rich indeed. Think of all the rich schlock novelists. Capitalist acts among consenting adults. That's the libertarian line.  Or do you prefer more government intervention in people's lives? For the record, I am not a libertarian. But I'll take a libertarian over a leftist any day.

Pence's Departure a Stunt?

Damon Linker:

While Trump and Corker took potshots at each other, Vice President Mike Pence engaged in an intentionally polarizing stunt by showing up at an Indianapolis Colts football game only to depart in a huff when players from the San Francisco 49ers (predictably) knelt in protest during the national anthem. It was an utterly gratuitous effort to sow race-based dissension and animosity in the country — the diametric opposite of the kind of behavior we normally label "presidential."

Polarizing? We are already polarized. There is no need for any polarizing. VP Pence was merely taking a stand at one of the poles, the pole of patriotism and decency and respect, and protesting the antipodean ingratitude and disrespect of the louts who protest an imaginary 'systemic racism.' 

Intentionally polarizing? How does Linker know what Pence's intentions were?

Stunt? Pence was courageously pushing back against destructive leftist scum.

Predictably? So the louts lack free will and must be expected to engage in bad behavior?

Gratuitous? Not at all. It was a warranted response to the loutish behavior of know-nothings.

Effort to sow race-based dissension? Again, how does Linker know what Pence's intentions were? And again, the dissension already exists. There's no need for any sowing.

Race-based?  What does race have to do with this?  Pence was standing up against unpatriotic behavior at a NATIONAL Football League event.

Unpresidential? Not at all. Pence courageously took a patriotic stand. He did his job. Had he not done what he did he would have been unpresidential.

As for Trump, it is eminently presidential of him to call for the elimination of NFL subsidies. 

It looks like we have a bit of a disagreement here.

Time to Defund the NFL

Some important points re: the NFL flag and anthem controversy.

1) In its third clause, the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech or of the press."  This protects the U. S. citizen from any attempt from the side of the U. S. government to squelch free expression.  It does not protect a citizen who is in the employ of a private concern from attempts by the employer to limit speech or expression. The kneeling football players while on the field of play have no First Amendment free speech rights.  Their employers may fire them just as Google was within its legal rights when it fired James Damore.

The difference is that Google was morally wrong for firing an engineer who spoke the politically incorrect truth, while the club owners are morally wrong if they do not fire the overpaid, disrespectful football players.

2) What the kneelers appear to be protesting is imaginary.  Jason Riley:

The players have said they are protesting the unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement and cite the spate of police shootings that have come to light in recent years. Team owners and NFL officials will have to decide whether to continue indulging such behavior on company time, but the larger question is whether what is being protested has some basis in reality beyond anecdotes and viral videos on social media.

Hard data, however, shows that the protests are hollow. Heather Mac Donald:

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today [25 September 2017], and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend.  Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

3) Whether or not the kneelers have anything real to protest, they of course have a right to their opinion. They ought to express it in the proper venue. They also have a moral obligation to get the facts straight and form correct opinions, an obligation they are not fulfilling.

4) Just as the kneelers have a right to their opinion, as foolish and destructive as it is, President Trump has a right to his sane and reasonable one: "Fire the sons of bitches!" My thought exactly.  His expression is harsh but justified. There is such a thing as righteous anger.

5) The vicious and destructive Left promotes the lie that Trump's call for a firing of the louts is 'racist.' Not at all. If you believe that lie, you are not only stupid, but vile and deserve moral condemnation.

The kneelers are both white and black, and even if they were all black, race doesn't come into it. The kneelers are being condemned for their lack of civility, their disrespect for the USA, it values, its flag, its anthem, its war heroes, and for injecting politics into what ought to be an apolitical event. 

There was a jackass on Tucker Carlson's show the other night who absurdly claimed that 'Fire the sons of bitches" is code for 'Fire the niggers." That is beneath refutation, but it does indicate what scum leftists are.

6) There is also the issue of federal, state, and local subsidies of football franchises using tax dollars. And it is not just the misuse of public funds to build stadiums.  The NFL gets billions in subsidies from U. S. taxpayers.  That ought to anger you even if you are a football fan.  Football is of interest only to some people, does not serve the common good, lowers the general level of a culture, and its subsidy to the benefit of some is not part of the legitimate functions of government.

7) The NFL and the scumbags of the Left don't care what you think and will ignore what you have to say, no matter how reasonable. The only effective way to punish this collection of bastards is by defunding them. Boycott the games and don't buy the merchandise. If you really must watch the game of football, watch the college variety.  

'Constructivism' Gone Wild: Biological Male Wins Women's Cycling Event

Story here:

A 36-year-old biological male dominated the women’s division of the El Tour de Tucson last weekend, an annual cycling competition in Arizona that attracts thousands of amateur and professional cyclists.

Jillian Bearden — who identifies as a transgender woman — won the 106-mile race in 4 hours and 36 minutes, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

[. . .]

The International Olympics Committee recently changed its ruled to allow biological men to compete as women without first undergoing a sex-change operation. [emphasis added]

Let me see if I understand this.  A biological male, who identifies himself as a woman, is allowed to compete against biological females in an athletic event.  Am I missing something?  Bear in mind that the competitor in question, at the time of the event, has the standard male 'equipment': he hasn't had a sex change operation.  And with that equipment come the sorts of muscles useful for powering a bicycle.

When we conservatives refer to liberals as loons, examples like this are what we have in mind.  Don't you have to be unhinged from reality to suppose that a biological male who merely fancies himself a biological female can thereby transform himself into one?

The paradox here is that while biological reality is being denied, it is at the same time being used to gain an unfair advantage over women.

There is a denial of biological reality if you imagine that your being male or female is simply a matter of a free self-construal or self-construction via thoughts and feelings.  But it is that very same biological reality which gives the biologically male cyclist who fancies himself a woman the edge over biological females.

How would it be any different if a 25-year-old male runner were to enter a footrace in the 60-70-year-old male division on the ground that he 'identifies' as an old man?  

Another paradox is that feminists are typically constructivists; but in a case like this it comes back to bite them.   Shouldn't they be howling over the unfairness of a biological male's domination of women in a women's event? But their political correctness has them hamstrung.

What is ultimately at the bottom of all this nonsense?  The denial of reality and the substitution for it of various types of constructions, both social-collective and individual.  It is a long story.

Martin Heidegger on Muhammad Ali

Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes last night gushed over the late boxer as a "transcendent" specimen of humanity.  Her over-the-top performance put me in mind of what I call the 'Pincers Passage' in Heidegger's 1935 lecture, Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. Ralph Manheim, Doubleday 1961, p. 31, emphasis added.

This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on the one side and America on the other.From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatever, regardless of where or when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the assassination of a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo can be 'experienced' simultaneously, and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples; when a boxer is regarded as a nation's great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph -- then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a specter:  What for? -- Whither? -- And what then?

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Stupor Bowl or Super Bore?

Time for my annual Super Bowl Sunday rant.  But perhaps I should not be so harsh on the masses who need their panem et circenses to keep them distracted from matters of moment, both secular and spiritual.  The Latin could be very loosely translated as 'food stamps and football.'

I won't be watching the game. I don't even know which teams are playing. Undoubtedly there is more to football than I comprehend. But the games are nasty, brutish, but not short, and I know all I need to know about the implements of shaving.

As for the buxom wenches who strut their stuff during the half-time show, the less I stoke the fire below the better.

I am no fan of spectator sports in general. We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid professional louts. I preach the People's Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.

Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don't call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)

Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry said, "A man sits as many risks as he runs." Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.

In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey has it right:

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

 

Related articles

The Rationality of Political Ignorance

More on the Rationality of Political Ignorance

Sports and Politics

When it comes to sports I'm a participant, not a spectator; when it comes to politics, I'm a spectator, not a participant. I watch politics, not football; I run races, not for office.

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The Rationality of Political Ignorance

More on the Rationality of Political Ignorance

Stupor Bowl Sunday 2014

The Stupor Bowl this year acquires new meaning considering  that the competing teams are from states that have recently legalized marijuana.

Stupor Bowl or Super Bore?

Here is my annual Stupor Bowl Sunday rant.

Stupor Bowl Sunday Refused, Yet Again

Herewith, my annual Stupor Bowl Sunday post, supplemented with a properly curmudgeonly quotation from Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey for your reading enjoyment. Things were bad last year: the damn thing transpired in Phoenix. Luckily, it was far from where I dwell safe and snug in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.  This year the game is far away, but the Arizona Cardinals are in contention.  Funny name, 'Cardinals.'  What does football have to do with little birdies?  Will I sneak a peek this year?  Maybe.  But I won't be able to take more than a few minutes of it.  In any case, here is last year's post.  I am tempted to add a rant about the misuse of taxpayer money for the construction of stadiums that are used only by some, but that can wait for next year.

******************

I won't be watching the game. I don't even know which teams are playing. Undoubtedly there is more to football than I comprehend. But the games are nasty, brutish, but not short, and I know all I need to know about the implements of shaving.

As for the buxom wenches who strut their stuff during the half-time show, the less I stoke the fire below the better.

I am no fan of spectator sports in general. We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid professional louts. I preach the People's Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.

Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don't call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)

Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry said, "A man sits as many risks as he runs." Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.

In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey has it right:

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.