Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 66
January 23, 2013
The Party Of John Calhoun
In Virginia, the legislature is moving to apportion its electoral votes by congressional district, instead of by direct popular vote:
One reason the rural areas were "outvoted" is because there are more votes there. If the GOP can't convince enough people to win, it will rig the rules so that certain people matter less than others.
Jamelle Bouie calls this exactly what it is:
I'd like to double-down on that point. Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination--poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests.
These were cloaked under a colorblind argument--"We don't discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can't read the Constitution." By "read the Constitution," they meant "recite the Bill of Rights by heart." And they'd ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a "new" racism. This is how it scheme went before the Civil Rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.
To see the only other major political party in the country effectively giving up on convincing voters, and instead embarking on a strategy of disenfranchisement is bad sign for American democracy. There is nothing gleeful in this.
Sen. Charles W. "Bill" Carrico, R-Grayson, said the change is necessary because Virginia's populous, urbanized areas such as the Washington, D.C., suburbs and Hampton Roads can outvote rural regions such as his, rendering their will irrelevant.
Last fall, President Barack Obama carried Virginia for the second election in a row, making him the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win Virginia in back-to-back presidential elections.
For his victories, he received all 13 of the state's electoral votes. Under Carrico's revision, Obama would have received only four Virginia electoral votes last year while Republican Mitt Romney would have received nine. Romney carried conservative rural areas while Obama dominated Virginia's cities and fast-growing suburbs.
One reason the rural areas were "outvoted" is because there are more votes there. If the GOP can't convince enough people to win, it will rig the rules so that certain people matter less than others.
Jamelle Bouie calls this exactly what it is:
In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of "one person, one vote." If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state...
It's also worth noting, again, that this constitutes a massive disenfranchisement of African American and other nonwhite voters, who tend to cluster near urban areas. When you couple this with the move on Monday to redraw the state's electoral maps--eliminating one state senate district and packing black voters into another, diluting their strength--it's as if Virginia Republicans are responding to Obama's repeat victory in the state by building an electoral facsimile of Jim Crow.
I'd like to double-down on that point. Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination--poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests.
These were cloaked under a colorblind argument--"We don't discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can't read the Constitution." By "read the Constitution," they meant "recite the Bill of Rights by heart." And they'd ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a "new" racism. This is how it scheme went before the Civil Rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.
To see the only other major political party in the country effectively giving up on convincing voters, and instead embarking on a strategy of disenfranchisement is bad sign for American democracy. There is nothing gleeful in this.
The Grammar of Parallel Worlds
Earlier today, attempted to explain what tense and mood "look" like to me while studying French. But I think a couple of commenters have done a much better job at bringing the abstract to life.
Here's a formulation that allows us to consider the conditional as a kind of parellel universe:
Pretty cool. The indicative mood is Earth-616. The conditional gives us the Age of Apocalypse. The subjunctive is House of M.
Here is another that pictures mood almost as a spectrum. (Perhaps that's why they call it "mood.")
And here is one other that is a correction of my French, but exhibits something I want to highlight:
I pull this out because it shows how vocabulary really isn't enough. Sometimes I'll write, or say, something in French and I can "feel" that it's off, even though the relevant words are all there. The difference between me and someone who knows the language is that they can "feel" that it's wrong, and also "feel" what's right. My wrong, in these cases, usually comes from proceeding from English directly into French. It often involves the improper use of prepositions--translating "de" strictly as "of" will trip you up. It's a little more than that.
To be clear by "feel" we aren't talking about anything mystical. We're talking about muscle memory. My dream is to do a Bo Jackson and develop that kind of muscle memory in three or four other languages.
Here's a formulation that allows us to consider the conditional as a kind of parellel universe:
Here is an especially mind-blowing way to think about it: Tenses provide ways of talking about temporally distant locales in this spatiotemporal volume -- points in the past, present, or future. But subjunctive constructions provide ways of talking about potentially counterfactual realities -- about points in a space that includes spatiotemporal volumes that are utterly disconnected from this one. Call these "alternative realities" or "possible situations."
Pretty cool. The indicative mood is Earth-616. The conditional gives us the Age of Apocalypse. The subjunctive is House of M.
Here is another that pictures mood almost as a spectrum. (Perhaps that's why they call it "mood.")
If this is your visualization of French tenses, a way to helpfully extend that to include the conditional might be to think of these other things not as intersecting lines but as complementing or parallel lines. Imagine you've got a line drawn on a page. Now imagine you realize that that line is actually more like a plank or a rectangle--it's got width to it. You still move between past, present, and future linearly, like you did before. But now you've got the ability to move sideways within this broader line to express different attitudes about past, present, and future.
So "Je voudrais un café" sits right in the same general area that "J'ai besoin d'un café" does--it's next to the present tense on your mental timeline. But rather than being a dot on that line, it's more like a region of coverage. It extends a little bit into the future. And it also gets in a little bit of your attitude about the wanting--it's conditional. It's couched. It's not a direct line from wanting to having. It allows for other circumstances, the whims of other people.
Or take a sentence like "Il serait ici s'il n'était pas malade" (he would be here if he weren't sick). Serait is a future conditional, formed by adding the conditional ending onto the regular future tense of etre. So on your mental timeline, it sits next to the future tense. But it expresses something more than a simple statement of future. It's a would-be, could-be future. It's a broad future with coverage that almost reaches back and touches the present because in an alternate universe, where he isn't sick, it IS the present.
And here is one other that is a correction of my French, but exhibits something I want to highlight:
You're improving but I think the next step you will have to reach when you translate is to re-think your sentence in french instead of using your english sentence and trying to stick close to it. "On Saturday" is a formula that has no real equivalence in french so french people would write/say something like "Samedi, je suis allé au marché". In the same vein but reversed, french people would be more likely to say "j'ai entendu dire" instead of "j'ai entendu". I'm not sure if "j'ai entendu" is wrong per say but it doesn't sound like "conversational" french I'm used to hear in Montreal. Do french people from other countries use that formula?
I pull this out because it shows how vocabulary really isn't enough. Sometimes I'll write, or say, something in French and I can "feel" that it's off, even though the relevant words are all there. The difference between me and someone who knows the language is that they can "feel" that it's wrong, and also "feel" what's right. My wrong, in these cases, usually comes from proceeding from English directly into French. It often involves the improper use of prepositions--translating "de" strictly as "of" will trip you up. It's a little more than that.
To be clear by "feel" we aren't talking about anything mystical. We're talking about muscle memory. My dream is to do a Bo Jackson and develop that kind of muscle memory in three or four other languages.
The Grammar Of Parallel Worlds
Earlier today, attempted to explain what tense and mood "look" like to me while studying French. But I think a couple of commenters have done a much better job at bringing the abstract to life.
Here's a formulation that allows us to consider the conditional as a kind of parellel universe:
Pretty cool. The indicative mood is Earth-616. The conditional gives us the Age of Apocalypse. The subjunctive is House of M.
Here is another that pictures mood almost as a spectrum. (Perhaps that's why they call it "mood.")
And here is one other that is a correction of my French, but exhibits something I want to highlight:
I pull this out because it shows how vocabulary really isn't enough. Sometimes I'll write, or say, something in French and I can "feel" that it's off, even though the relevant words are all there. The difference between me and someone who knows the language is that they can "feel" that it's wrong, and also "feel" what's right. My wrong, in these cases, usually comes from proceeding from English directly into French. It often involves the improper use of prepositions--translating "de" strictly as "of" will trip you up. It's a little more than that.
To be clear by "feel" we aren't talking about anything mystical. We're talking about muscle memory. My dream is to do a Bo Jackson and develop that kind of muscle memory in three or four other languages.
Here's a formulation that allows us to consider the conditional as a kind of parellel universe:
Here is an especially mind-blowing way to think about it: Tenses provide ways of talking about temporally distant locales in this spatiotemporal volume -- points in the past, present, or future. But subjunctive constructions provide ways of talking about potentially counterfactual realities -- about points in a space that includes spatiotemporal volumes that are utterly disconnected from this one. Call these "alternative realities" or "possible situations."
Pretty cool. The indicative mood is Earth-616. The conditional gives us the Age of Apocalypse. The subjunctive is House of M.
Here is another that pictures mood almost as a spectrum. (Perhaps that's why they call it "mood.")
If this is your visualization of French tenses, a way to helpfully extend that to include the conditional might be to think of these other things not as intersecting lines but as complementing or parallel lines. Imagine you've got a line drawn on a page. Now imagine you realize that that line is actually more like a plank or a rectangle--it's got width to it. You still move between past, present, and future linearly, like you did before. But now you've got the ability to move sideways within this broader line to express different attitudes about past, present, and future.
So "Je voudrais un café" sits right in the same general area that "J'ai besoin d'un café" does--it's next to the present tense on your mental timeline. But rather than being a dot on that line, it's more like a region of coverage. It extends a little bit into the future. And it also gets in a little bit of your attitude about the wanting--it's conditional. It's couched. It's not a direct line from wanting to having. It allows for other circumstances, the whims of other people.
Or take a sentence like "Il serait ici s'il n'était pas malade" (he would be here if he weren't sick). Serait is a future conditional, formed by adding the conditional ending onto the regular future tense of etre. So on your mental timeline, it sits next to the future tense. But it expresses something more than a simple statement of future. It's a would-be, could-be future. It's a broad future with coverage that almost reaches back and touches the present because in an alternate universe, where he isn't sick, it IS the present.
And here is one other that is a correction of my French, but exhibits something I want to highlight:
You're improving but I think the next step you will have to reach when you translate is to re-think your sentence in french instead of using your english sentence and trying to stick close to it. "On Saturday" is a formula that has no real equivalence in french so french people would write/say something like "Samedi, je suis allé au marché". In the same vein but reversed, french people would be more likely to say "j'ai entendu dire" instead of "j'ai entendu". I'm not sure if "j'ai entendu" is wrong per say but it doesn't sound like "conversational" french I'm used to hear in Montreal. Do french people from other countries use that formula?
I pull this out because it shows how vocabulary really isn't enough. Sometimes I'll write, or say, something in French and I can "feel" that it's off, even though the relevant words are all there. The difference between me and someone who knows the language is that they can "feel" that it's wrong, and also "feel" what's right. My wrong, in these cases, usually comes from proceeding from English directly into French. It often involves the improper use of prepositions--translating "de" strictly as "of" will trip you up. It's a little more than that.
To be clear by "feel" we aren't talking about anything mystical. We're talking about muscle memory. My dream is to do a Bo Jackson and develop that kind of muscle memory in three or four other languages.
Junior Seau's Family Is Suing the NFL
The AP reports:
Junior Seau isn't John Mackey--a great player who only a few big-time fans remember. He was recently billed (by the NFL, no less) as one of the toughest men to ever play the game. Now he is dead. And football killed him.
Seau was one of the best linebackers during his 20 seasons in the NFL. He retired in 2009. "We were saddened to learn that Junior, a loving father and teammate, suffered from CTE," the family said in a statement released to the AP.I don't know what the legal barriers are for a case like this, or what it takes to bring a successful suit. But I don't think a successful defense by the NFL is the end of this story. The spectacle of the widow and fatherless son of one of greatest players of this generation--one who retired only four years ago--suing the NFL is a bad look defined. Again, parents see this and erosion begins.
"While Junior always expected to have aches and pains from his playing days, none of us ever fathomed that he would suffer a debilitating brain disease that would cause him to leave us too soon.
"We know this lawsuit will not bring back Junior. But it will send a message that the NFL needs to care for its former players, acknowledge its decades of deception on the issue of head injuries and player safety, and make the game safer for future generations."
Junior Seau isn't John Mackey--a great player who only a few big-time fans remember. He was recently billed (by the NFL, no less) as one of the toughest men to ever play the game. Now he is dead. And football killed him.
Junior Seau's Family Is Suing The NFL
The AP reports:
Junior Seau isn't John Mackey--a great player who only a few big-time fans remember. He was recently billed (by the NFL, no less) as one of the toughest men to ever play the game. Now he is dead. And football killed him.
Seau was one of the best linebackers during his 20 seasons in the NFL. He retired in 2009. "We were saddened to learn that Junior, a loving father and teammate, suffered from CTE," the family said in a statement released to the AP.I don't know what the legal barriers are for a case like this, or what it takes to bring a successful suit. But I don't think a successful defense by the NFL is the end of this story. The spectacle of the widow and fatherless son of one of greatest players of this generation--one who retired only four years ago--suing the NFL is a bad look defined. Again, parents see this and erosion begins.
"While Junior always expected to have aches and pains from his playing days, none of us ever fathomed that he would suffer a debilitating brain disease that would cause him to leave us too soon.
"We know this lawsuit will not bring back Junior. But it will send a message that the NFL needs to care for its former players, acknowledge its decades of deception on the issue of head injuries and player safety, and make the game safer for future generations."
Junior Seau isn't John Mackey--a great player who only a few big-time fans remember. He was recently billed (by the NFL, no less) as one of the toughest men to ever play the game. Now he is dead. And football killed him.
French Across Time and Dimension
Last week, I moved on in my study of French to a couple of new tenses. I understand le present, le passé composé, l'imparfait, le plus-que-parfait, le passé recent et le futur proché. By "understand" I mean I get the rules, have many of the participles memorized and can--with some difficulty--employ them. The distance between "understanding" and "mastery" is significant--as you shall soon see in this post.*
All of these tenses are degrees of present, past and future.
Some refer to a past event that happened at a specific time--"On Saturday, I went to the market." (En samedi, je suis allé au super-marché)
Others refer to a past event that happened with some consistency or did not happen at any specific point--"When I was a child I liked to play football." (Quand j'etais jeune, j'amias jouer au football.)
Still others refer to something I can show, but (Horde help me) don't know how to explain--"I have heard that French people talk to Americans in English." (J'avais entendu que les gens de France parlent en anglais avec les Americains.)
But toward the end of our lesson, we touched on "The Conditional," which I guess isn't quite a tense, but is more of an aspect. (Again, Horde help me out please.) The conditional expresses a kind of wish, or a desire. "I would like to go to Paris one day." ("Je voudrais aller à Paris.)
It isn't a definite like "I am going to go to Paris one day." ("Un jour, je vais aller à Paris.")
It also connotes politeness as in "I would like a cup of coffee." ("Je voudrais un cafe.")
In my mind I see tenses as lines in space--the past tenses are down the line, the future tenses are up the line. But then there are these other intersecting lines which offer more information about how you are thinking about the statement. Are you trying to be polite? Or are you trying to give an order? Are you expressing a wish? Or are you expressing a plan?
When you are learning a language all of this is slowed down for you. It's like The Matrix and you get to see the bullets coming at you. Accept that native speakers (and fluent speakers, I guess) actually can do The Matrix trick in real time. The bullets are slowing down for them. In a milliseconds they can decide what they want to say, when the thing happend, adjust for who they're talking to (Il ou Elle? Tu ou Vous?) and how they wanted to say it. Sometimes they can even invert forms. The "Vous" in French is supposed to be formal and polite. But if you've watched as many French thrillers as I have, you'll know that your hero is in trouble when the villain uses "Vous." It connotes a sinister irony--think Agent Smith sneering, "Mr. Anderson."
Seeing the thing laid out like this, you really start to marvel at the power of the brain.
*I have intentionally not used google translate or babelfish to correct or check any of my French in this post. I have written as it occurred to me, and I have done that because this blog (web-log.) In that spirit it is not the display of knowledge, it's about the acquisition of knowledge. In that spirit, I encourage the Francophones among us to correct my French.
All of these tenses are degrees of present, past and future.
Some refer to a past event that happened at a specific time--"On Saturday, I went to the market." (En samedi, je suis allé au super-marché)
Others refer to a past event that happened with some consistency or did not happen at any specific point--"When I was a child I liked to play football." (Quand j'etais jeune, j'amias jouer au football.)
Still others refer to something I can show, but (Horde help me) don't know how to explain--"I have heard that French people talk to Americans in English." (J'avais entendu que les gens de France parlent en anglais avec les Americains.)
But toward the end of our lesson, we touched on "The Conditional," which I guess isn't quite a tense, but is more of an aspect. (Again, Horde help me out please.) The conditional expresses a kind of wish, or a desire. "I would like to go to Paris one day." ("Je voudrais aller à Paris.)
It isn't a definite like "I am going to go to Paris one day." ("Un jour, je vais aller à Paris.")
It also connotes politeness as in "I would like a cup of coffee." ("Je voudrais un cafe.")
In my mind I see tenses as lines in space--the past tenses are down the line, the future tenses are up the line. But then there are these other intersecting lines which offer more information about how you are thinking about the statement. Are you trying to be polite? Or are you trying to give an order? Are you expressing a wish? Or are you expressing a plan?
When you are learning a language all of this is slowed down for you. It's like The Matrix and you get to see the bullets coming at you. Accept that native speakers (and fluent speakers, I guess) actually can do The Matrix trick in real time. The bullets are slowing down for them. In a milliseconds they can decide what they want to say, when the thing happend, adjust for who they're talking to (Il ou Elle? Tu ou Vous?) and how they wanted to say it. Sometimes they can even invert forms. The "Vous" in French is supposed to be formal and polite. But if you've watched as many French thrillers as I have, you'll know that your hero is in trouble when the villain uses "Vous." It connotes a sinister irony--think Agent Smith sneering, "Mr. Anderson."
Seeing the thing laid out like this, you really start to marvel at the power of the brain.
*I have intentionally not used google translate or babelfish to correct or check any of my French in this post. I have written as it occurred to me, and I have done that because this blog (web-log.) In that spirit it is not the display of knowledge, it's about the acquisition of knowledge. In that spirit, I encourage the Francophones among us to correct my French.
French In Across Time And Dimension
Last week, I moved on in my study of French to a couple of new tenses. I understand le present, le passé composé, l'imparfait, le plus-que-parfait, le passé recent et le futur proché. By "understand" I mean I get the rules, have many of the participles memorized and can--with some difficulty--employ them. The distance between "understanding" and "mastery" is significant--as you shall soon see in this post.*
All of these tenses are degrees of present, past and future.
Some refer to a past event that happened at a specific time--"On Saturday, I went to the market." (En samedi, je suis allé au super-marché)
Others refer to a past event that happened with some consistency or did not happen at any specific point--"When I was a child I liked to play football." (Quand j'etais jeune, j'amias jouer au football.)
Still others refer to something I can show, but (Horde help me) don't know how to explain--"I have heard that French people talk to Americans in English." (J'avais entendu que les gens de France parlent en anglais avec les Americains.)
But toward the end of our lesson, we touched on "The Conditional," which I guess isn't quite a tense, but is more of an aspect. (Again, Horde help me out please.) The conditional expresses a kind of wish, or a desire. "I would like to go to Paris one day." ("Je voudrais aller à Paris.)
It isn't a definite like "I am going to go to Paris one day." ("Un jour, je vais aller à Paris.")
It also connotes politeness as in "I would like a cup of coffee." ("Je voudrais un cafe.")
In my mind I see tenses as lines in space--the past tenses are down the line, the future tenses are up the line. But then there are these other intersecting lines which offer more information about how you are thinking about the statement. Are you trying to be polite? Or are you trying to give an order? Are you expressing a wish? Or are you expressing a plan?
When you are learning a language all of this is slowed down for you. It's like The Matrix and you get to see the bullets coming at you. Accept that native speakers (and fluent speakers, I guess) actually can do The Matrix trick in real time. The bullets are slowing down for them. In a milliseconds they can decide what they want to say, when the thing happend, adjust for who they're talking to (Il ou Elle? Tu ou Vous?) and how they wanted to say it. Sometimes they can even invert forms. The "Vous" in French is supposed to be formal and polite. But if you've watched as many French thrillers as I have, you'll know that your hero is in trouble when the villain uses "Vous." It connotes a sinister irony--think Agent Smith sneering, "Mr. Anderson."
Seeing the thing laid out like this, you really start to marvel at the power of the brain.
*I have intentionally not used google translate or babelfish to correct or check any of my French in this post. I have written as it occurred to me, and I have done that because this blog (web-log.) In that spirit it is not the display of knowledge, it's about the acquisition of knowledge. In that spirit, I encourage the Francophones among us to correct my French.
All of these tenses are degrees of present, past and future.
Some refer to a past event that happened at a specific time--"On Saturday, I went to the market." (En samedi, je suis allé au super-marché)
Others refer to a past event that happened with some consistency or did not happen at any specific point--"When I was a child I liked to play football." (Quand j'etais jeune, j'amias jouer au football.)
Still others refer to something I can show, but (Horde help me) don't know how to explain--"I have heard that French people talk to Americans in English." (J'avais entendu que les gens de France parlent en anglais avec les Americains.)
But toward the end of our lesson, we touched on "The Conditional," which I guess isn't quite a tense, but is more of an aspect. (Again, Horde help me out please.) The conditional expresses a kind of wish, or a desire. "I would like to go to Paris one day." ("Je voudrais aller à Paris.)
It isn't a definite like "I am going to go to Paris one day." ("Un jour, je vais aller à Paris.")
It also connotes politeness as in "I would like a cup of coffee." ("Je voudrais un cafe.")
In my mind I see tenses as lines in space--the past tenses are down the line, the future tenses are up the line. But then there are these other intersecting lines which offer more information about how you are thinking about the statement. Are you trying to be polite? Or are you trying to give an order? Are you expressing a wish? Or are you expressing a plan?
When you are learning a language all of this is slowed down for you. It's like The Matrix and you get to see the bullets coming at you. Accept that native speakers (and fluent speakers, I guess) actually can do The Matrix trick in real time. The bullets are slowing down for them. In a milliseconds they can decide what they want to say, when the thing happend, adjust for who they're talking to (Il ou Elle? Tu ou Vous?) and how they wanted to say it. Sometimes they can even invert forms. The "Vous" in French is supposed to be formal and polite. But if you've watched as many French thrillers as I have, you'll know that your hero is in trouble when the villain uses "Vous." It connotes a sinister irony--think Agent Smith sneering, "Mr. Anderson."
Seeing the thing laid out like this, you really start to marvel at the power of the brain.
*I have intentionally not used google translate or babelfish to correct or check any of my French in this post. I have written as it occurred to me, and I have done that because this blog (web-log.) In that spirit it is not the display of knowledge, it's about the acquisition of knowledge. In that spirit, I encourage the Francophones among us to correct my French.
January 22, 2013
The Impending Death Of Pro Football
This is major:
I don't know if this will change anything, right now. But telling a player "You have CTE" is a lot different than "You stand some chance of developing it."
There's something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players--and maybe athletes at large--to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don't know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)
After that, I don't know how pro football can stand for long.
Brain scans performed on five former NFL players revealed images of the protein that causes football-related brain damage -- the first time researchers have identified signs of the crippling disease in living players.
Researchers who conducted the pilot study at UCLA described the findings as a significant step toward being able to diagnose the disease known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, in living patients.
"I've been saying that identifying CTE in a living person is the Holy Grail for this disease and for us to be able make advances in treatment," said Dr. Julian Bailes, a Chicago neurosurgeon and one of the study's co-authors. "It's not definitive and there's a lot we still need to discover to help these people, but it's very compelling. It's a new discovery."
I don't know if this will change anything, right now. But telling a player "You have CTE" is a lot different than "You stand some chance of developing it."
There's something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players--and maybe athletes at large--to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don't know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)
After that, I don't know how pro football can stand for long.
The Impeding Death Of Pro Football
This is major:
I don't know if this will change anything, right now. But telling a player "You have CTE" is a lot different than "You stand some chance of developing it."
There's something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players--and maybe athletes at large--to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don't know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How many common are college boxing teams these days?)
After that, I don't know how pro football can stand for long.
Brain scans performed on five former NFL players revealed images of the protein that causes football-related brain damage -- the first time researchers have identified signs of the crippling disease in living players.
Researchers who conducted the pilot study at UCLA described the findings as a significant step toward being able to diagnose the disease known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, in living patients.
"I've been saying that identifying CTE in a living person is the Holy Grail for this disease and for us to be able make advances in treatment," said Dr. Julian Bailes, a Chicago neurosurgeon and one of the study's co-authors. "It's not definitive and there's a lot we still need to discover to help these people, but it's very compelling. It's a new discovery."
I don't know if this will change anything, right now. But telling a player "You have CTE" is a lot different than "You stand some chance of developing it."
There's something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players--and maybe athletes at large--to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don't know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How many common are college boxing teams these days?)
After that, I don't know how pro football can stand for long.
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