Choice
by lizard
A paradigm shift or annihilation as a species. That’s the choice. The systems are broken. Even the parasitic bloat of obscene wealth will eventually, if I may be so crude, have to shit where they sleep.
For those with resources it’s still far enough way. The inevitable can be deferred longer, for those of means. How much longer, no one knows.
The barometer I use is football. Keep that going and the underlying ugliness of systemic entropy can be glossed over indefinitely.
What I try to remember is how many good people do their best within all these failing systems. I wish the scale of our collective manipulation against each other wasn’t so immense and sophisticated and seemingly impossible to surmount.
Paradigm shift or annihilation.
That’s the choice.
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September 2, 2014 at 9:49 pm
Swerved into something there Liz.
Football has jumped the shark.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/01/has-football-jumped-the-shark.html
September 3, 2014 at 5:34 pm
No. Football has not “jumped the shark”. Nor, when it meets its inevitable demise will it have jumped the shark any more than trapping, or rabid 2nd amendment interpretation. It isn’t that it is a distraction that has or will lose it’s appeal. It’s that it will prove too destructive to humans to continue.
Which, if you think about it, kinda stands against Lizard’s point in its own right. Just because people like football doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention …
I read a really clever thing on Facilebook. Of course, I found it clever because it’s something I’ve agreed with for a very long time: “Things happen for a reason, and that reason is usually physics.” Paradigm shifts happen all the time, and often we don’t even know them while they are happening. Climate has been responsible for some of the largest shifts ever, (the fall of the first and second dynasties of Egypt, the migration of Asians into eastern Europe, the rise of Islam in the middle east) and strangely, the species has survived them all. Often it’s change in social order, like the protestant revolution, or the rise of American fundamentalism in the early 1900s. Sometimes, it’s technology, and if we are honest, that’s what we are seeing now. Information (notice that I do not say knowledge) is absolutely ubiquitous and immediate. The young (younger than you, Liz) don’t think the way us olderen folk do, because their resources and stimuli have expanded in non-linear ways.
The species will survive, even if it’s cherished institutions do not. What you express here, Lizard, is a fundamentally conservative thought. Please note that I don’t consider that a “bad” thing or in any moral terms at all. Since you are a parent, I would stunned if you didn’t lament the hard choices you profess here. Understand, though it is likely just my opinion, that change is inevitable, to struggle is an option. We have no choice to make that will alter that eventuality.
September 3, 2014 at 8:24 pm
From my link.
Undeterred, Almond doubles down on his argument in Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, an informed broadside in which he contends that the sport encourages bloodlust, bigotry, and other antisocial behaviors. Televised games, he says, should be preceded by parental-discretion-is-advised messages, and tackle football ought to be outlawed for those 15 and under.
“I happen to believe that our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia,” Almond writes.