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Lazuli  1mo ago (text post)   547 thread views

Weekly NFL Thread: Week 5

Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):

Sun 2024-10-06 9:30AM New York Jets @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Buffalo Bills @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Carolina Panthers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Cleveland Browns @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Indianapolis Colts @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Miami Dolphins @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-10-06 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Arizona Cardinals @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-10-06 4:05PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM Green Bay Packers @ Los Angeles Rams
Sun 2024-10-06 4:25PM New York Giants @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-10-06 8:20PM Dallas Cowboys @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Mon 2024-10-07 8:15PM New Orleans Saints @ Kansas City Chiefs
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I agree with most of your points and disagree with the idea that the NFL is bad. At the end of the day, if you want to have traditions, you have the traditions you have. Mourning the loss of a unified culture? Want to RetVrn to family traditions? Want to see regional pride? Want to see masculinity, aggression, sacrifice for the team? The NFL is what you've got in 2024 in America. You can't build something else in any kind of time to replace it. For all its flaws, the NFL is America, and if you love America and try to hate the NFL, you're a man without a country, even if I mostly agree with Carlin that baseball is philosophically superior. There is no other sport that can take its place, and if you think that once you eliminate sports you can replace it with religion or philosophy...well, I don't even know how to address that objection. Philosophy and sport have always been tied together, especially the contact and combat sports.

Personally, I watched the Eagles a lot growing up, but really stopped caring much about it in my twenties for a variety of reasons. I've only really gotten back into it since returning to my home town, my mother loves football and we watch essentially every game together as a family. It all starts there. I can think another sport is superior, but I can't walk into wawa and chat about the America's Cup race or the pro-lacrosse league or even boxing anymore, but I can say "Go Birds" and get back a "Go Birds."

“if you want tradition you have the traditions you have” can excuse any bad cultural practice. The NFL consciously marketed itself as tradition and TV football only started being popular around 1960. Boys playing games with ad hoc rules and a ball is tradition; the NFL is an invention coinciding with rising obesity and civic stupidity. Many of the original American traditions — Puritanism, freemasonry, Revivalism — did not value sports. And freemasonry is created tradition with a manufactured legend going back to Solomon’s Temple (reminder that we can create traditions and we ought to create good ones).

The NFL does not unify culture because it is anti-cultural: it is a commercial spectacle that alienates you, whereas playing a game with your neighbors is better at community-formation. It involves no family tradition. It destroys civic participation and replaces it with commercial pride with the players coming from all over the country. The “self-sacrifice” and “community pride” is a player moving across the country to make more money as soon as offered. The American who hates the NFL is the American who remembers that his country isn’t just an economic zone built around siphoning your energy and attention, but something grander. This is pure Americana: creating something new and better, inventing new traditions, recovering some old good ones, and leaving everything bad in the dust.

“Philosophy has always been tied to sports” ignores that from the advent of Christianity until the 20th century, sports were not esteemed in Western culture. That’s a long time. That’s more than 1500 years of Western philosophy not being tied to sports. Plato’s character Socrates was written to be good at wrestling in order to draw the vain to philosophy, sure. And wrestling also isn’t a commercial spectator sport.

The American who hates the NFL is the American who remembers that his country isn’t just an economic zone built around siphoning your energy and attention, but something grander.

Brian Flores is currently producing genius-level art.

“if you want tradition you have the traditions you have” can excuse any bad cultural practice.

This is why a traditionalist's support for tradition is, ideally, qualified. Tradition by itself with no further specific content is a vacuous concept, and an overriding commitment to tradition above all else is vulnerable to Euthyphro-style attacks. (If the gods told you that murder was actually a good thing, would you believe them? If your tradition told you to be a communist, would you still support tradition?)

Characteristic of Solon also was his regulation of attendance at public entertainments, for which his word was "parasitein." Those who attended too often were punished, as were those who attended too little. Solon thought the conduct of the first grasping; that of the second, contemptuous of the public interests. -- Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

“if you want tradition you have the traditions you have” can excuse any bad cultural practice.

And if everyone refuses to accept any traditions excepting those they deem perfect, there will be no traditions, and no common culture. To have traditions requires compromise, requires acceptance of what everyone will enjoy together rather than demanding specificity, that everyone cater to your tastes and opinions.

The NFL consciously marketed itself as tradition and TV football only started being popular around 1960.

I was born in 1991. My father likes football, my mother likes football, my maternal grandmother likes football, my maternal grandfather liked football, my paternal grandparents were Witnesses so a little off. "Tradition is the handing down of the flame and not the worshipping of ashes." Tradition is living tradition, it is my experience of my parents, my scoutmasters, the guys I grew up working with, and, yes, the old timers at Lee's Hoagie House in Cheltenham we would stop to buy a hoagie from on our way to catch an Eagles' game at the Vet. The Eagles are a living tradition within my family and my community.

The NFL does not unify culture because it is anti-cultural: it is a commercial spectacle that alienates you, whereas playing a game with your neighbors is better at community-formation.

Alienates who? Alienates the family I saw two Mondays ago, wearing their matching Section 105 season ticket holder hats? Alienates the guys hanging out in the parking lot, drinking and grilling together? Alienates my family, getting together at my mom's house to watch the game together?

“Philosophy has always been tied to sports” ignores that from the advent of Christianity until the 20th century, sports were not esteemed in Western culture. That’s a long time. That’s more than 1500 years of Western philosophy not being tied to sports. Plato’s character Socrates was written to be good at wrestling in order to draw the vain to philosophy, sure. And wrestling also isn’t a commercial spectator sport.

Fake and gay. Medieval Christianity esteemed the Tournament, the pas d'armes. Waterloo, one of the formative moments of European history, "was won on the playing fields of Eaton." Muscular Christianity originates around the mid 19th century.

And it wasn't Socrates, it was Plato himself, Plato was his wrestling nickname. Wrestling may not be a spectator sport anymore, but wrestling is a major portion of MMA which is.

And, once again, living tradition. I don't care about the 1500 years before my grandfather was born. That isn't a living tradition, it's no more relevant than gay space communist fantasies.

That is from Plutarch 24:2. I find “public entertainment” in a 18th century translation but that is not the normal translation today. University of Chicago’s online Loeb portal reads

Characteristic of Solon also was his regulation of the practice of eating at the public table in the townhall, for which his word was "parasitein."The same person was not allowed to eat there often, but if one whose duty it was to eat there refused, he was punished. Solon thought the conduct of the first grasping; that of the second, contemptuous of the public interests.

This appears to be in reference to the “public dining-table in the prytaneum”. Regarding these meals:

The nearest approach that modern usage makes to the Prytaneum of a Greek state may be found in the town-hall or hôtel de ville; but the religious character attaching to it gave it a much higher significance, and it had also state purposes* which were peculiar to cities of Ancient Greece, being non-existent even at Rome, where, as will be pointed out, we have a near parallel on the religious side. The Prytaneum, so far as our evidence goes, was a requisite for every Greek state (Paus. 1.43; 5.15); but only in the capital, not in demes or villages attached to it. Its archaic history appears to be as follows. Every Greek tribal settlement of primitive times (and probably the same holds good for most nations of the world) had a common hearth in the chief's house, where the fire was scrupulously preserved, because of the difficulty in those days of procuring fire at all. To pursue this question further is unnecessary here: any book on the folk-lore and customs of almost any primitive nation will supply examples: numerous references are given in a paper on the Prytaneum by Mr. Frazer (Journal of Philology, 14.28, 1885). The perpetual maintenance of this fire was the duty of the chief, but delegated by him to daughters or slaves; in Rome, no doubt, to daughters, who reappear in history as the Vestals [VESTALES]. If the settlement was moved, the firebrand was taken carefully from the hearth and carried onward, a custom which Parkman has particularly noted in the Indian tribes of America; and similarly, if a swarm of colonists went out to settle elsewhere, they took fire with them.

All very interesting. I am very much in favor of town halls and discourse halls. Distracting commercial sports? This does not qualify as prytaneum usage.

I was born in 1991. My father likes football, my mother likes football, my maternal grandmother likes football, my maternal grandfather liked football, my paternal grandparents were Witnesses so a little off.

Then you guys should get together to play. Playing a game is a wonderful tradition. My extended family would play games in November. A wonderful song by Cayucas paints the scene well: “Came running down the stairs like clickety-clack You slipped and fell And landed on your back Playing tackle football covered up with mud Rutgers sweatshirt dirty, ripped and scuffed Old sport Oxford champ a pioneer”. Watching others play it with half the screen time as ads while you sit sedentary is terrible.

we would stop to buy a hoagie from on our way to catch an Eagles' game at the Vet. The Eagles are a living tradition within my family and my community.

How many yards down until you enter Wall-E world? Somewhere between utopia and Wall-E we have to eliminate bad cultural practices, like hot dogs and spectator sports. In one hundred years people will be defending Walmart scooters as American tradition, I swear.

Alienates the family I saw two Mondays ago, wearing their matching Section 105 season ticket holder hats?

They are alienated from culture and any good tradition, probably fat, and risk becoming gambling addicts.

Alienates the guys hanging out in the parking lot, drinking and grilling together

It is a severe tragedy that their communal meal is shitty carcinogenic meat, shitty alcohol, car exhaust and consumer merchandise. How far we have fallen. I want them at the Prytaneum. What Plutarch said! What you quoted! I want them to have their communal meals again, which every culture has, in a healthy and communal context

Medieval Christianity esteemed the Tournament, the pas d'armes.

But these were for knights to practice war. Today’s wars are not fought like knight tournaments. Today’s wars are economic and technological. Football, if anything, distracts from skills that enhance national security. Regarding the tournaments as mock war:

horsemanship was still a key military skill, and “chevaliers” valuable, even iconic soldiers. Anyone who could demonstrate “chivalry” was potentially a military asset. Indeed, kings and princes in the twelfth century gained prestige by allowing themselves to be dubbed knights. When Henry II of England, at age 18, wanted to show that he was worthy of the English crown, he had himself knighted by the King of Scots. When it came to educating his own son, King Henry gave the young man into the care of the most skilled horseman of his time, William Marshal. William Marshal progressed from this position as royal tutor to become an earl and, when civil war broke out in.

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