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Lazuli  7mo ago (text post)   674 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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My humble CW opinion is that the NFL is immoral. It has married itself to online gambling companies, it decreases civic participation and exercise by marketing itself as a relevant national spectacle, it increases consumerism and microplastic exposure in the youth, and it reduces everyone’s attention to things that actually matter (discourse, philosophy, religion — your pick, anything is better than the sports).

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.

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