Everybody loves football in Britain. At least, they say they do.
The enthusiasm for football is indeed a religious enthusiasm, albeit with rituals that leave much to be desired from the aesthetic point of view. And no one dares criticise the Church of Football. Even I tend to preface my slight dissent from the church by prefacing my remarks with, ‘Of course, there is nothing wrong with the game itself…’
It is not merely that one reveals oneself as a bad person when one admits that one is uninterested in the game, the kind of person in short who has no empathy with the great mass of mankind; but that, per contra, by claiming to be interested in the game one establishes one’s virtue, one’s deep sympathy for the great mass of mankind.
I think I know a thing or two about sport as something akin to religion or rather a compensation for the lack thereof. Mind you a lot of sports adherents are promiscuous and God and gods and angels etc are all part of the orgy of life.
As for kinship with the herd being some kind of damage limiting hedge against too much ill feeling for bringing a company to the brink of bankruptcy.
Abruptish transition –
I remember back in 1994 expressing my dismay about attitudes of certain people in retail, and more generally… the lack of honesty. I was talking to a German at the time and he said “I think you’re unrealistic” … And I was and still are.
Abruptish transition,
I think of the movie clips on the Margin Call thread on the forum.
A movie clip that comes to mind is from the film Duplicity
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cYjv9uWxW94
“…everybody thinks like that they just don’t say it”
Suspicious minds…
Nothing quite like ‘consenting adults’, thems what makes the world go pear shaped.
I found it, I’ve looked for this movie clip for some time http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_LwdyNsIQ
It’s from Alfie (Jude Law), I’m not recommending the film, I’ve not seen it all, I know it’s trashy.
But this scene captures well what is at the root of the financial crisis, probably all our most serious problems. By far the majority of people, women also, of course, are only too familiar with the feeling “What’s he/she got?”.
The stress proves too much to endure for most people and honourable behaviour goes out the window.
Alfie would probably like to think that he obeys the golden rule, the so long as it harms no one else thing also. At least most of the time, and if his wishful/wilful conquests assume too much of their flings then really they have themselves to blame and frankly they obviously do. So that’s not really the harm I’m most concerned about here, the fact that these sad women will most probably be either neurotic pathetic and/or deeply unpleasant expensive pests to society trying to use the state as an instrument of revenge.
Alfie, and there’s a lot of men racking up obscene numbers of conquests, (but gentlemen don’t kiss and tell right? so we have to rely on the research of people like Frans de Waal to know what’s really going on… Oh pleeezzzz) Alfie just revels in perpetuating the sort society that marginalises so many but when he gets a taste of his own medicine he takes it very badly. “He’s younger than you” how fickle is sexual desire? The film gets this absolutely right but the idea that Alfie does a spot of soul searching later that night and he’s on the path to recovery is rubbish.
So when in this documentary http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XcGh1Dex4Yo&feature=related at 17:33 he says money is being distributed to the priorities of the banking sector, and not society. Well, what an interesting distinction to make… It’s feeble, most people have really crap priorities http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-whOtC8aak and the banking sector reflects that, it is a subset of society.
As the graph demonstrates, things really started going through the roof at the sixties, those expensive wars, but don’t worry ‘summer will be a love in’
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hT2sCL0svSc
Nice song but basically insidious