Noam Chomsky explains sports, irrational jingoism, submission to authority, etc.

Noam Chomsky: Why Americans Know So Much About Sports But So Little About World Affairs

from The Chomsky Reader via Alternate



The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway to influence the real world

The following is a short excerpt from a classic, The Chomsky Reader, which offers a unique insight on a question worth asking -- how is it that we as a people can be so knowledgable about the intricacies of various sports teams, yet be colossally ignorant about our various undertakings abroad?

QUESTION: You've written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken -- in some places you call it a "Cartesian common sense" -- of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you've written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it's very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?

CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.

In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used -- would be used -- under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.

There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.

...

QUESTION: Do you think people are inhibited by expertise?

CHOMSKY: There are also experts about football, but these people don't defer to them. The people who call in talk with complete confidence. They don't care if they disagree with the coach or whoever the local expert is. They have their own opinion and they conduct intelligent discussions. I think it's an interesting phenomenon. Now I don't think that international or domestic affairs are much more complicated. And what passes for serious intellectual discourse on these matters does not reflect any deeper level of understanding or knowledge.

One finds something similar in the case of so-called primitive cultures. What you find very often is that certain intellectual systems have been constructed of considerable intricacy, with specialized experts who know all about it and other people who don't quite understand and so on. For example, kinship systems are elaborated to enormous complexity. Many anthropologists have tried to show that this has some functional utility in the society. But one function may just be intellectual. It's a kind of mathematics. These are areas where you can use your intelligence to create complex and intricate systems and elaborate their properties pretty much the way we do mathematics. They don't have mathematics and technology; they have other systems of cultural richness and complexity. I don't want to overdraw the analogy, but something similar may be happening here.

The gas station attendant who wants to use his mind isn't going to waste his time on international affairs, because that's useless; he can't do anything about it anyhow, and he might learn unpleasant things and even get into trouble. So he might as well do it where it's fun, and not threatening -- professional football or basketball or something like that. But the skills are being used and the understanding is there and the intelligence is there. One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people's attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.

QUESTION: I asked a while ago whether people are inhibited by the aura of expertise. Can one turn this around -- are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on?

CHOMSKY: I suspect that this is rather common. Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them. Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed. Everyone who writes and speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine. I'm sure just about everyone exploits these privileges. I know I do. When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical about the practice of one of the Holy States: the United States itself, or Israel, since it was enshrined by the intelligentsia after its 1967 victory. This freedom from the requirements of evidence or even rationality is quite a convenience, as any informed reader of the journals of public opinion, or even much of the scholarly literature, will quickly discover. It makes life easy, and permits expression of a good deal of nonsense or ignorant bias with impunity, also sheer slander. Evidence is unnecessary, argument beside the point. Thus a standard charge against American dissidents or even American liberals -- I've cited quite a few cases in print and have collected many others -- is that they claim that the United States is the sole source of evil in the world or other similar idiocies; the convention is that such charges are entirely legitimate when the target is someone who does not march in the appropriate parades, and they are therefore produced without even a pretense of evidence. Adherence to the party line confers the right to act in ways that would properly be regarded as scandalous on the part of any critic of received orthodoxies. Too much public awareness might lead to a demand that standards of integrity should be met, which would certainly save a lot of forests from destruction, and would send many a reputation tumbling.

The right to lie in the service of power is guarded with considerable vigor and passion. This becomes evident whenever anyone takes the trouble to demonstrate that charges against some official enemy are inaccurate or, sometimes, pure invention. The immediate reaction among the commissars is that the person is an apologist for the real crimes of official enemies. The case of Cambodia is a striking example. That the Khmer Rouge were guilty of gruesome atrocities was doubted by no one, apart from a few marginal Maoist sects. It is also true, and easily documented, that Western propaganda seized upon these crimes with great relish, exploiting them to provide a retrospective justification for Western atrocities, and since standards are nonexistent in such a noble cause, they also produced a record of fabrication and deceit that is quite remarkable. Demonstration of this fact, and fact it is, elicited enormous outrage, along with a stream of new and quite spectacular lies, as Edward Herman and I, among others, have documented. The point is that the right to lie in the service of the state was being challenged, and that is an unspeakable crime. Similarly, anyone who points out that some charge against Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, or some other official enemy is dubious or false will immediately be labeled an apologist for real or alleged crimes, a useful technique to ensure that rational standards will not be imposed on the commissars and that there will be no impediment to their loyal service to power. The critic typically has little access to the media, and the personal consequences for the critic are sufficiently annoying to deter many from taking this course, particularly because some journals -- the New Republic, for example -- sink to the ultimate level of dishonesty and cowardice, regularly refusing to permit even the right of response to slanders they publish. Hence the sacred right to lie is likely to be preserved without too serious a threat. But matters might be different if unreliable sectors of the public were admitted into the arena of discussion and debate.

The aura of alleged expertise also provides a way for the indoctrination system to provide its services to power while maintaining a useful image of indifference and objectivity. The media, for example, can turn to academic experts to provide the perspective that is required by the centers of power, and the university system is sufficiently obedient to external power so that appropriate experts will generally be available to lend the prestige of scholarship to the narrow range of opinion permitted broad expression. Or when this method fails -- as in the current case of Latin America, for example, or in the emerging discipline of terrorology -- a new category of "experts" can be established who can be trusted to provide the approved opinions that the media cannot express directly without abandoning the pretense of objectivity that serves to legitimate their propaganda function. I've documented many examples, as have others.

The guild structure of the professions concerned with public affairs also helps to preserve doctrinal purity. In fact, it is guarded with much diligence. My own personal experience is perhaps relevant. As I mentioned earlier, I do not have the usual professional credentials in any field, and my own work has ranged fairly widely. Some years ago, for example, I did some work in mathematical linguistics and automata theory, and occasionally gave invited lectures at mathematics or engineering colloquia. No one would have dreamed of challenging my credentials to speak on these topics -- which were zero, as everyone knew; that would have been laughable. The participants were concerned with what I had to say, not my right to say it. But when I speak, say, about international affairs, I'm constantly challenged to present the credentials that authorize me to enter this august arena, in the United States, at least -- elsewhere not. It's a fair generalization, I think, that the more a discipline has intellectual substance, the less it has to protect itself from scrutiny, by means of a guild structure. The consequences with regard to your question are pretty obvious.

QUESTION: You have said that most intellectuals end up obfuscating reality. Do they understand the reality they are obfuscating? Do they understand the social processes they mystify?

CHOMSKY: Most people are not liars. They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don't think that's the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception. I think there's also a selective process in the academic professions and journalism. That is, people who are independent minded and cannot be trusted to be obedient don't make it, by and large. They're often filtered out along the way. [...]

From The Chomsky Reader,as published on Noam Chomsky's personal site. (Serpents Tail Publishing, 1988).

George Orwell’s special Olympics message: Sports are bunk

another from Dangerous Minds

In 1945, as all combatant nations were recovering from World War II, a notable “friendly” football (soccer) match took place in England. Football had been put on ice since 1939, and fans and athletes alike were eager for a resumption of the action. A Russian armed forces team had scored impressive victories over both its British and French counterparts, and the time had come for a top Russian team to take on a top British club. And thus it was that on November 13, 1945, FC Dynamo Moscow arrived at Stamford Bridge to take on Chelsea FC. The attendance was officially listed at 74,496, but the true attendance is usually estimated to be between 100,000 and 120,000. Chelsea led at halftime 2-0, but the Dynamos were able to make it 2-2, and each side tacked on another goal each before the end of play. (Four days later, the Dyamos walloped Cardiff City 10-1.)


A Chelsea shot narrowly misses against the Dynamos.

About a month after FC Dynamo Moscow went home, a prominent (but hardly famous) journalist for the Tribune named George Orwell published an acid reflection on the nature of nationalism and athletics. In the piece, titled “The Sporting Spirit,” Orwell argued that, contrary to all assurances that nation-based sports competitions foster brotherhood and understanding among the peoples of the world (you will hear endless statements from Sochi over the next two weeks), such events, if anything, generate a modicum of ill will among national groups. The whole thing, according to Orwell, has the flavor of the jingoism that is whipped up before all wars.

Orwell clearly had little interest in sports and is missing part of the picture of fandom for a national team (or even a regional team like our pro squads), but the part he gleaned is instructive, and the entire essay is worth reading. Here are some of the choice bits:

Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before….

As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don’t intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and “rattling” opposing players with boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting….

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators.

Orwell’s bleak conception of sports wouldn’t change over the years. A few years later, in his novel 1984, the following sentence appears: “Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

Here’s a brief Russian report on the Dynamos-Chelsea match. Note the throngs of spectators crowding along the sidelines.

"World Peace" and pro basketball?

For Metta World Peace, a New Name and Outlook

From the New York Times By HOWARD BECK — World Peace is possible. Just check the box score.

World Peace is there, between Blake and Murphy. On many nights, World Peace can be heard echoing across South Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles.

In this holiday season, World Peace is in the air. But only when he jumps.

The locals are still getting used to the phenomenon.

In September, Ron Artest — the Lakers’ burly, quirky, unfailingly unpredictable forward — legally changed his name to Metta World Peace. The first name is a Buddhist term meaning “loving kindness.” The last name is self-explanatory. The intent is noble — the jokes and puns irresistible.

“Give World Peace a chance,” read a Los Angeles Times headline Sept. 24, a week after the name change was stamped as official.

The name also leads to unfortunate assertions, such as a recent story claiming that “World Peace certainly wasn’t winning over many fans” in the preseason. They seem to have come around, gleefully chanting, “We want World Peace!” during a game at Staples Center earlier this week.

This is, more or less, what Artest intended when he made the change: to make the public, unwittingly or consciously, seriously or in jest, consider the concept.

“If you look at a young kid and you tell them, would they love world peace? They would definitely tell you yeah,” he said Thursday after the Lakers’ shootaround. “But as we get older, we change and we adjust to our environment. And we don’t think about little things anymore. But kids love, they love other kids. They love world peace.”

Kids may also love World Peace, although so far he has not seen many wearing the new jersey yet.

Because, he noted, “I’ve had a lot of jerseys” and “people are getting tired of buying my jersey.”

(For the record, World Peace will cost you $49.99 at the N.B.A.’s online store.)

In a statement released in September, Artest explained, “Changing my name was meant to inspire and bring youth together all around the world.”

It probably sounded curious, coming from a tough, notoriously hard-nosed enforcer. But the World Peace of today is not the Ron Artest who ignited the infamous brawl between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers in 2004. He worries Laker fans with his shot selection, but rarely with his behavior.

Last spring, Artest was ejected (and later suspended) for striking Dallas’s J. J. Barea in the face with a forearm. But he has generally steered clear of fights, flagrant fouls, technical fouls and controversy for the last several years. On more than one occasion, he has even played, ahem, peacemaker when teammates have tangled with opponents.

Mike Brown has tracked the evolution from a good vantage point, first as a Pacers assistant coach when Artest was still Artest and playing for Indiana, and now as the Lakers’ new coach.

“We’re all more mature than what we were back then,” Brown said. “We’re a lot more stable with what our roles are, with what our expectations are. He’s no different than I am.”

That last statement might be a bit of a stretch. But Brown clearly has a special fondness for World Peace, and a respect for the name change, even as others snicker. “I think I try to call him Metta more than anybody else,” Brown said. “I’m like ‘Metta, Metta Metta.’ And then I hear Steve Blake, ‘Hey Ron.’ I hear Kobe: ‘Hey Ron. Hey Ron, hey Ron.’ And it throws me off. So I’m trying. But nobody is helping me.”

World Peace is helping Brown, however. With Lamar Odom gone, World Peace is now anchoring the second unit, averaging 12.3 points.

Back in Queens, friends and family still call him Ron or Ron-Ron. Meanwhile, the name perseveres in two Artest generations — in World Peace’s father and son. “I don’t really have a preference,” World Peace said. “I told the guys don’t feel bad if you call me Ron.”

Even World Peace is adjusting to World Peace, admitting it sounded weird the first time he was introduced.

“Our preseason game they said, ‘World Peace is coming in the game’ and the fans went crazy,” he said.

The Lakers have accommodated their fair share of quirky personalities over the years, from Dennis Rodman to Vladimir Radmanovic to Phil Jackson. But World Peace is presenting a different sort of challenge. Team officials first had to establish whether “World” was his middle name or part of his last name.

So World Peace it is — on the back of his jersey, on his locker stall and every time he is introduced by Lawrence Tanter, the Lakers’ longtime public-address announcer. Tanter said he had practice, having been around when Philadelphia’s Lloyd B. Free legally changed his name to World B. Free, in 1981.

The Lakers’ record-keeping has also been altered.

“The name Ron Artest does not exist in our media guides,” John Black, the Lakers’ spokesman, said.

Artest was still Artest when he helped the Lakers win the 2010 championship. He later auctioned off his championship ring for $500,000 to help raise awareness for mental health, a cause he has championed since the 2010 finals, when he thanked his psychiatrist on national television.

“I think I accomplished a lot already,” World Peace said. “First I accomplished a lot with the mental health, changed lives. And people I don’t even know, I’ve probably changed a lot of lives, too.”

Wingsuit Flying - Total Fucking Insanity

If the next James Bond movie opening sequence does not hire this guy (Jeb Corliss) they are playing themselves.

According to Wikipedia:

Wingsuit flying is the sport of flying the human body through the air using a special jumpsuit, called a wingsuit, which adds surface area to the human body to enable a significant increase in lift. Modern wingsuit designs create the surface area with fabric between the legs and under the arms. A wingsuit may be referred to as a birdman suit or squirrel suit.

A wingsuit flight ends with a parachute opening, so a wingsuit can be flown from any point that provides sufficient altitude to glide through the air, such as skydiving aircraft or BASE jumping exit points, and to allow a parachute to deploy.

The wingsuit flier wears parachute equipment designed for skydiving or BASE jumping. The flier deploys the parachute at a planned altitude and unzips the arm wings, if necessary, so they can reach up to the control toggles and fly to a normal parachute landing.

And now some video I saw for the first time recently that made put together this post:





I can't stop watching these clips!!!

more:



NYTimes on line has an interesting video story here:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2007/12/07/sports/1194817096418/a-wing-suit-landing-quest.html



Have a great weekend!

A Vegan in the National Football League?

from Planet Green

Well, almost... Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez eats green and stays strong (and so can you).

Another NFL season is upon us but what can the red meat macho world of pro football offer an earth-friendly greenie? How about a lesson in eco-eating from Atlanta Falcons Tight End Tony Gonzalez? A ten-time Pro Bowl selection, Gonzalez currently holds the NFL records for single season receptions (102) by a tight end, career touchdowns by a tight end (76), career receptions by a tight end (916), and reception yards by a tight end (10,940).

After reading The China Study in 2007, the 6-foot-5, 251-lb. athlete experimented with veganism and now subsists on an almost entirely plant-based diet. In 2008—his first meat-free season—Gonzalez stuck to his diet and broke two major records for his position. "I was like, 'OK, this is working,'" he said. "I have so much more energy when I'm out there."

And he's not alone. In baseball, Milwaukee Brewers slugger Prince Fielder is proving vegan can hit home runs at a prodigious rate. Also, there's mixed martial arts fighter Mac Danzig, ultra-marathoner Scott Jurek, and other athletes both staying green and excelling in their sports.

How is this possible when it flies in the face of conventional (sic) wisdom? Part of it can be chalked up to the deeply embedded protein myth. "Although in the past it was thought that vegetarian and vegan diets might impair athletic performance," explains Natalie Digate Muth, MPH, RD, "scientists, coaches, and athletes alike now agree that with proper planning a diet without animal products can effectively fuel peak performance." In addition, the decidedly mainstream National Academy of Sciences has declared, "There is little evidence that muscular activity increases the need for protein."

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) adds: "People build muscle and other body proteins from amino acids, which come from the proteins they eat. A varied diet of beans, lentils, grains, and vegetables contains all of the essential amino acids. It was once thought that various plant foods had to be eaten together to get their full protein value, but current research suggests this is not the case. Many nutrition authorities, including the American Dietetic Association, believe protein needs can easily be met by consuming a variety of plant protein sources over an entire day."

Read more here.