NFL Orders Retreat From War Metaphors

[jingofever]

Link.

The article is actually about the links between football (American) and war. What I understand after reading is that football (American) is second generation and soccer (a degenerate form of football) is third generation.

[Penguin]

You degenerate, you.

American, is NOT FOOTBALL.

Its some kind of battle ball, with idiots in armor. Foot-ball. Haha. You carry and fondle the ball, pile up on it, and its not even a BALL, but a bloody banana.

Gimme a break.

Football is football, is soccer. And yeah, its a generation more advanced game than your american banana bungle. Sorry!

And, I should add, I didnt even look at the link.
Footy - best played with mates, with your own ball, on any grass space, with 6 people or more (3 a side works already!).

And basketball, yeah, that ones a south american original. And sure, blacks slam dunk the best, go on, call me a racist.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Football is not soccer, which was a game invented for people who weren't quite good enough at diving to make the olympics.

[Fixx]

Football is not soccer, which was a game invented for people who weren't quite good enough at diving to make the olympics.

Not being a soccer fan I will concur with you Joe, of all of them Aussie Rules has to be my favourite.

[marmot]

...

[marmot]

Nike Soccer Commercial Good-vs-Evil

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOM1k4oLGJU&feature=related

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Right now there is an effort to settle the masses down and recharge their tolerance for US military plans. This is still 'recovery time' and 'Obama honeymoon' before the next bloody phase.

That's why there's this PR about demilitarizing the Super Bowl. Total BS.

Football has been used for military recruiting since even before the Vietnam War when it was first put on prime time television back in 1970 to condition American males with a clean entertaining model of competition based on military values and tactics and thus prevent them from turning into non-violent peace and justice types.

Ball players are also a farm team for CIA and Special Forces like Pat Tillman.

Ex-CIA whistleblower Ralph McGehee was one recruited by CIA and was amazed to see how many football players were at CIA's Camp Peary when he got there.
Read about that in his 1983 book, 'Deadly Deceits.'

So this high publicity gesture is merely of the moment, a fake strategic retreat, to keep us from correctly equating football with war since more of us are figuring out how televised sports are used to teach children power dominance on a clean level playing field of rules where 'the best man wins.'

[Nordic]

I like how they're all set up to show the "troops in Iraq" watching the game. They just did, during the National Anthem. Now there's a huge colorguard of dressed-up soldiers waving flags on the field.

When do the jets fly over? Or is it a covered stadium?

Uh ... now they're singing the anthem TWICE? I see, once with a white chick, once with a black chick ....

The superbowl is just WEIRD. It's like the Las Vegas of sporting events. Everything wrong about America, rolled into one.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Thanks for that report, nordic.

Remember the first Uber Bowl after 9/11? brrrr.
Remember the Rose Bowl Parade tribute to Star Wars with flag-bearing rows of 'storm troopers?'

Like a Nuremberg rally.

Studies on sports fan psychology and behavior in large groups have established the increased tendency towards violence. Sometimes people die. Allegedly over fun with a ball.

Women's shelters have been reporting for years the surge of battered women due to the confluence of alcohol and institutionalized televised aggression.

So this event is one of the best examples of a direct link between violent images and actual violence.

Hence the WPost/NFL story as forestalling, a defense tactic.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

http://www.fair.org/extra/9304/superbowl.html

April/May 1993

Domestic Violence Campaign:
Super Bowl Success Sparks Good Ol' Boys' Backlash

By Laura Flanders

Shortly before the start of the Super Bowl on NBC this January, viewers saw a public service announcement that warned: "Domestic violence is a crime." For some, the PSA came as a surprise, but not for those involved in the campaign to get 30 seconds of airtime donated to the ad. The moment (worth roughly $500,000 to advertisers) was the result of many weeks of work by FAIR and a coalition of anti-violence groups in negotiation with executives at NBC and NBC Sports.

Workers at women's shelters, and some journalists, have long reported that Super Bowl Sunday is one of the year's worst days for violence against women in the home. FAIR hoped that the broadcast of an anti-violence PSA on Super Sunday, in front of the biggest TV audience of the year, would sound a wake-up call for the media, and it did.

"Since the Super Bowl it seems as though public awareness has increased dramatically on this topic," the executive director of a women's shelter in McKeesport, Pa. wrote to FAIR. "We believe you've played a major role in bringing domestic violence out in the open."

But a handful of reporters and editors decided to "debunk" the story. These journalists, mostly men, apparently felt affronted by FAIR's success in getting NBC to dedicate 30 seconds, in between the beer ads and the car commercials, to a crisis that, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, claims thousands of women's lives per year.

The "debunkers", led by Ken Ringle of the Washington Post (1/31/93), claimed that FAIR, in coalition with women's groups, slanted the facts in their effort to get NBC to run the PSA. Ringle (and journalists at AP, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal) asserted that the coalition had claimed "national studies" linked Super Bowl Sunday to increased assaults. No such claims were made. In fact, FAIR made the point repeatedly that domestic violence movement is gravely underfunded and understudied.

Critics charged that "predictions" about Super Sunday violence were made; none were. They claimed that the coalition was forced to "acknowledge" that its evidence was largely "anecdotal." "Anecdotal" was the word used in countless interviews by FAIR; stories from women on the front lines were something that made the campaign stronger, not something anyone was forced to "acknowledge."

In the Washington Post, Ringle attacked those who fought for the NBC public service spot as "causists" who "show up wherever the most TV lenses are focused." The article painted a picture of a feminist mob strong-arming the networks with myth and false statistics.

But it was Ringle who distorted the facts. Post readers would not know that of the four experts cited by Ringle, only one agreed with the article's thesis that there is no "evidence that a link actually exists between football and wife-beating."

Ringle quoted psychotherapist Michael Lindsey to defend his point that the Super Bowl PSA campaign was misguided: "You know I hate this," Ringle quotes Lindsay saying. But Lindsey told FAIR that he was referring to Ringle's line of questioning, not the anti-battering campaign. "He was really hostile," Lindsey added. On the same day as Ringle's "debunk" story, Lindsey was quoted in the New York Times, saying, "That PSA will save lives."

Ringle claimed triumphantly that a speaker at a press conference co-hosted by FAIR had "misrepresented" a study by Old Dominion College on violence and sports. FAIR interviewed the authors. While due to the small sample involved, they chose not to express the study results in percentage terms as the activist had, they did not see this as misrepresentation. "We have not accused anyone of distorting the results of our study," the authors stated.

Following the lead of the Washington Post and editorialists at the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh jumped into the act on his TV show. He berated the PSA as "just a bunch of feminist bilge" because the man it featured is not a credible batterer: "Like people who beat their wives wear ties," Limbaugh scoffed.

The backlash articles bore all the traits of typical coverage of domestic violence: They belittled the victims, minimized the crisis and missed the point--which is that, according to FBI averages, a woman is battered every 18 seconds. That is enough to deserve attention all year long.

FAIR's goal was to open up debate. We did. The PSA was seen by more people than any anti-battering message in history. Weeks later, TV news and talk shows were still covering the issue intensely and constructively.

The fact that some good ol' boys managed to miscast the campaign came as no surprise. Some journalists' determination to undermine the Super Bowl effort was just a reminder of how many in mainstream media typically disbelieve women when they talk about the violence in their lives.

Visit FAIR's Women's Desk.
More on Domestic Violence...

[Joe Hillshoist]

American, is NOT FOOTBALL.

Its some kind of battle ball, with idiots in armor. Foot-ball. Haha. You carry and fondle the ball, pile up on it, and its not even a BALL, but a bloody banana.

Personally, growing up a true-blooded, Midwestern, American boy I'm inclined to say that there's no better game on Earth than the NFL variety of football.

I like Australian-rules and rugby and even soccer, but there's nothing like American football, both in the complexity and simplicity of the play. Give it some time, but I suspect, American football will 'conquer' (war language) the rest of the world, being Earth's number one sport; seriously.

Btw, some time ago there was a discussion here about football and it's war metaphors.

I also watched a NOVA program last night on the Mayan Civilization---their footballs were often severed heads! <http://www.hulu.com/nova>

I'm going out in a few hours to watch the PITTSBURGH STEELERS win the Big Game [i don't think the NFL allows me to say: S****B***..]

Any other Black and Gold fans out there?



(trivia: the Steelers have more world fans than any other NFL team)

No it won't. Its not enough fun to play....

[Joe Hillshoist]

BTW The steelers won.

I'll have a beer for you later marmot.

[Penguin]

marmot:
Really, Im no footie fan...No sports fan at all, really.
Games are to be played with your mates, neighbours and guys from the next town, not to be competitive TV sports (sorry, thats mine).

Our national game, pesäpallo, is scavenged from baseball with some slight mods. Tahko Pihkala introduced it here to give the youth a game that teaches useful skills (and I shit you not this is fukin true) - skills like running hard and jumping in the enemy trenches, grabbing a hand grenade from the air and throwing it back at the enemy, or throwing molotovs, and teamplay.

Yeah sports is war play. You beat the enemy guys and score one in the bag of his females.

[jingofever]

Its some kind of battle ball, with idiots in armor. Foot-ball. Haha. You carry and fondle the ball, pile up on it, and its not even a BALL, but a bloody banana.

Anyway, you probably missed an exciting handegg game tonight.

[marmot]

Yay Steelers!

Cheers, Hillshoist, Penguin. Cheers!

You know Joe, I still stand behind my imperialistic claim that someday American style football will be the numero uno world sport.

Men rage with energies---doesn't sports somehow defuse or at least channel and control some of our raging adrenaline? Isn't this perhaps one of the most significant social functions of 'smash-mouth' football types of sports---to sublimate our violent energies and to allow our war extinct to safely find its expression within the game?