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One signal that wokeness is waning: the words printed at the bottom of the helmets of NFL players.
I don't have metrics on this, this is all just my subjective perception. I scrubbed through my recording of the games while writing this in the interest of accuracy.
At the start of the 2020 season, just a few months after social justice become trendy, the NFL decided to allow players to swap out the name of their team on the back of the helmet for a social justice message. At that time they could choose one of four messages: "Stop Hate," "It Takes All Of Us," "End Racism," or "Black Lives Matter." The league would also sometimes print these messages on the field.
At the season opener this past Thursday, with the L.A. Rams facing the Buffalo Bills, I noticed a new message: "Choose Love." I thought it was just nearly all of the Rams sporting this one, but this article says it was all of them. Few of the Bills were displaying anything except for their team name. That the preferred message was so non-specific was a signal itself that attitudes may be shifting. The article says that the NFL says "Choose Love" is a message against hate crimes and gun violence, but I would never have guessed that had it not been spelled out for me.
This past Sunday I watched three games: Cincinnati Bengals vs. Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers vs. Minnesota Vikings, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Dallas Cowboys.
For Bengals vs Steelers I saw zero of these messages. Notably neither quarterback on either team had such a message.
In Packers vs Vikings I couldn't see any messages on the Packers, I'd say about a third of the Vikings had them. Neither quarterback had them.
For Cowboys vs. Bucs I saw none on the Cowboys, about half of Bucs players had them, which included the quarterback Tom Brady, sporting "Inspire Change."
In all of the games I noticed just one "Black Lives Matter," on a Vikings player.
Maybe I'm just misremembering the prevalence of these the past two seasons, but I thought they used to be more likely than not, especially for star players.
Richard Hannania had an interest point on gay marriage yesterday. He like me has trouble making a direct attack on gay marriage. But the gay marriage bundle (he used woke bundle) as a whole seems like it’s been a big negative. I’d use Pride bundle. He cited rising depression on the left; I usually cite falling fertility as a bad thing.
Maybe I just want to get to dislike gays like 2 decades ago. But the bundle argument which gay marriage seemed to be the spears tip seems like it’s been a giant negative for society. And then you get an argument of can you pick and choose policy and get ride of Pride but keep gay marriage or you just have to suppress the whole thing.
I think there is no need for attack on "gay marriage", mostly because either gays were duped or "gay marriage" was just another in the long line of attacks on the very concept of marriage, I'd say even a paltry one compared to no-fault divorce proliferating in the society.
In fact I think that gay marriage only showed what was happening in the broader society for some time already, we do not have marriage - a sacred bond between man and a woman before god supported by the rest of the society morally and culturally. We only have "registered partnership", something like a special version of LLC that can be created and dissolved on a whim, with specific bankruptcy laws aimed at distributing wealth as well as children between the partners. In many cases the traditional marriage vow of - I take you to be my lawfully wedded (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part - does not have value of breath spent to utter it, the vow can be broken in a few hours to laughter of wedding witnesses, especially if one party was "duped" somehow into believing such a nonsense.
I'd hope that by now people would be more knowledgeable of all the language games played out there, the words seem to hold some residual power despite having completely different and sometimes opposite meaning. There are other examples out there, often distorted by (mostly left) to suck up the power of the original concept. In the CW space there are myriads of such words like racism or violence up to basic words like man and woman. At a time to me it looks like some strange magical ritual, where people really believe in social construction of reality, as if words can expand their meaning beyond the practical limit inside the communication, that they will retain their original explanatory and cultural power, only with some toxic appendix feeding off of them invisible to the society at large somehow. Just repeat the mantra like "2022 marriage is real marriage" and the very fabric of reality changes to accommodate your wish. It does not work like that.
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