Cartoon for October 3, 2009
It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise, but playing football makes football players even stupider than they were before they started playing football.
Labels: Football
posted by Ted Rall at
12:01 AM
36 Comments:
Ah yes, Ted, it's hilarious when poor blacks with no other means of making a good living go brain dead. I am by no means a jock, but just because football players picked on you in high school (as the did to me) doesn't mean you need to gloat about the obvious fact that they have sustained brain damage playing the sport. But then again, a lot of your opinions seem to be shaped by personal grudges.
And even if what I said about your opinions shaped by personal grudges doesn't necessarily make them invalid in all cases, sometimes you anger is backed up by nothing other than emotion. [Awaiting snarky reply by Susan Stark].
Anything for the almight dollar eh?
Is this an explanation as to why Pat Tillman joined up to fight?
Is this another swipe at Tillman?
I work with people who've overdosed their children on sports in an attempt to keep them off drugs. Every single one of their children has had some kind of sports related surgery for broken bones, torn ligaments, etc. The kids aren't even in High School yet and they're permanently disabled. This is the trade off, no pot smoking, but you're out for the season and you'll have that limp for the rest of your life. PS Their parents were all coke freaks in there youth and will never admit it to their children. I'm waiting to hear that one of them's in rehab for Oxycontin or something worse.
Larffff...
Ted,
I love that the fallen player's jersey says "LEGUME"! I LOLed.
Is the cartoon cruel? Well yes, but humor is usually at someone's expense.
I know plenty of guys who got permanently injured at regular jobs and never made the big sports bucks. At least these guys got hurt doing something they wanted to do and not just because their employer was a cheap SOB.
As to opinions being shaped by grudges...duh. What are you Kristofer? Jesus H Christ? Mahatma Fricking Gandhi?
sports are a cancer on society.
...since you still have French citizenship through your mother, couldn't you (in theory) hop on a plane there and take advantage of the free healthcare? I realize you can't do this on the fly once you immediately get H1N1 (plus your brain would be fried at that point). Perhaps something to think about in the future...
I can't figure out who's more annoying, people who are overall sports fans or people who "hate all sports". Probably the latter, as there is possibly more personality diversity in the former. Personally, I love hockey and can appreciate the strategy involved in American football. Baseball is as boring as anything ever conceived, and basketball is retarded, as are most of its fans. Soccer is boring too, but people seem to like it, outside of this country. Everything else is the Olympics (except NASCAR, which is definitely a sport along with all other auto racing. Try it sometime and tell me it doesn't require physical strength and dexterity), and the Olympics SUCK. Be glad, Chicago. Be very glad. I think I'll go read the cartoon now.
It isn't only BLACK professional football players who get brain and neurological disabilities.
Oh yeah you limp wrists hate sports. As a matter of fact, you hate anything that involves testosterone. That's why the rest of us call you the new castrate. Just to piss off you girls, I'm going to drive my big gas guzzling SUV to Costco and load up on supplies for NFL Sunday (on my HDTV and with my AC running full blast). We are going to BBQ spewing gases into the air. And where did I get the money? From my corporation with 15 employees.
That's get all your pretty little pink panties in a bind!
[S]ports are a cancer on society.
Agreed. Someone once said that Europeans use sports as a substitute for war and America uses war as a substitute for sports.
Of course, the truth is that America distracts itself with both--which partially explains why the typical American is so docile.
Don't know if this reply is snarky enough, but it's easy to have grudges against sport players. For instance, I knew very well that the grades of the football and basketball players at my high school were doctored up to A's, and they had other special privileges like cutting in the lunch line and eating in special areas the other kids weren't allowed to go.
In light of this, it's perfectly normal to hold a grudge against sport of any kind.
At the same time, I don't blame the football players for my poor performance in school. Other kids got good grades because they applied themselves, and if I had done what they did, I would have gone to a much better college. But, again, at the same time, the professors at the no-name university I went to taught me how to think just as well as any Ivy League professor. (Too bad I didn't do well in class until my senior year, but it took me until my senior year to finally learn what they were trying to teach me.)
Oh, well. I'd love to pursue a master's at NYU, but I'll have do some serious fund-raising for that.
Of course, the truth is that America distracts itself with both--which partially explains why the typical American is so docile.
Seen a tea party lately?
Billy Jack, my spindly little panties are hopelessly entwined...
taught me how to think
That's the funniest thing I've read all day. But hey the day is still early.
Did they teach you to think that wearing a wet tshirt would combat global warming... I mean climate change? Or did they teach you that you are not required to pay into your precious Social Security system? Maybe they taught you that if someone criticizes you, but doesn't post the same criticism to men they must be sexist.
Ah the hilarity of what passed for critical thought. Perhaps Aggie was one of your "professors" of theory (not facts) at Michigan Community College?
As a matter of fact, you hate anything that involves testosterone.
Oh, now, I wouldn't say that.
(8-D
[S]ports are a cancer on society.
Come now, it's not the sports that are bad, it's what we've done to them. Let's get the insane money and spectacle out of sports, and just enjoy them!
Do anything demanding for long enough and it will mess you up. That doesn't mean its not worth doing.
People have free will and must decide for themselves how much risk they want to expose their bodies to. Its important to take common sense precautions, but shit still happens. We need to be adults about this. Life isn't absolutely safe and an absolutely safe life isn't worth living.
If someone is willing to get multiple concussions for athletic glory, who am I to stop him? I think that's silly, but a jock would probably think some things I do are silly.
I played football for 10 years (in addition to swimming, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, and track including two decathlons at the Penn Relays) and I know for a fact that I've forgotten more than you'll ever know.
It's not just my degrees in genetic engineering, medieval English literature and medicine that suggest this.
It's the fact that everyone I see is an individual with thoughts, feelings, experiences and personalities all their own and that engaging in any stereotyping at all is simply a manifestation of the mindless prejudice that allows people to hate others based on nothing but a single fact about what how they appear to be as opposed to who they are.
I'm sorry that you were bullied by football players.
Get over it.
Hate is hate, and one less hater hating one less thing will eventually make a difference.
Also missing from your prejudice is the fact that football has done more to advance American public education than anything in history.
State university systems aren't built on the accomplishments of the philosophy graduates.
This post has been removed by the author.
Did they teach you to think that wearing a wet tshirt would combat global warming...
And as far as seeing me in a wet T-shirt, Billy Jack, only pansy-ass wussy-boys have that privilege, so don't even think about it.
"I'm going to drive my big gas guzzling SUV to Costco and load up on supplies for NFL Sunday (on my HDTV and with my AC running full blast"
a cancer
Billy Jack luuuves him some big guys in Spandex....
What's important is to understand the true importance of Sports. These are gladiators, nothing more. They battle for glory and for our attention in an arena caked in blood. This is pure entertainment to distract us from our duties as citizens.
Sure, sports are legitimate. But when we see all the corporate money at-play in these sports, something is amiss. Ask yourself this question - how much more time do you spend watching sports, and how much money do you spend on them; versus how much effort do you put into running your country? This isn't a full service government we have here, its self-service. Have a party and watch a game once in a while, but make sure you do your homework first - contacting your representative to tell them what you want...oh, and it helps to express your OWN opinion, not the opinion of Glenn Beck or whatever asshole you listen to on the radio who dictates your opinion to you.
Wow.
My comments have been deleted.
What truly disturbs me is that you even deleted the non-combative comment, the one you know is true, that (relatively) low-cost public education in the US would be fuck-all without football, especially in the Deep South where thousands and thousands of low-income families have been given the hope of otherwise inaccessible higher education through the athletic scholarship.
If even one person takes advantage of this gift, let alone the thousands who legitimately graduate every year, isn't that worth a mention?
The donations of those rah-rah assholes build essential classrooms, labs and equipment and endow department chairs and academic and athletic scholarships across the nation.
You know this to be fact, yet you choose not to share it with your readers.
I must have struck a very tender, very tiny nerve.
You're a chickenshit coward and every femtogram of respect I had for you is gone.
Not that anyone will see this, because your respect for open argument is apparently akin to the Generalissimo's (great character, by the way) respect for human rights, but your need to confront your fears and frailties is very real and very necessary.
You are the one who has to wake up every morning and see your pale, weak reflection staring back at you in fear.
I personally couldn't give a fuck whether you publish my factually correct comment or whether you are so intellectually dishonest that you will prevent its publication to ensure that you sell your books to timid, frightened mental midgets like yourself.
Your readers deserve better than that.
Better than you.
You are so bigoted, so afraid and so, so wrong.
Live with that, you wretched, horrible excuse for a human being.
If you have the guts, drop me a line at eyespy_00@hotmail.com to explain your cowardice in the face of irrefutable argument.
Otherwise, goodbye.
I did enjoy your work and I will truly miss it.
Practicing some sport is part of a healthy life. Frantically watching sports on TV is kind of pathetic. Of course, the most mind-numbing use of sports, for nationalistic purposes to boot, was, and still is done, by the various totalitarian regimes that spawned from Marx's feeble ideas.
Now I'm curious: when Susan says it is normal to hold a grudge against sports (an abstract entity) because of what some dork did to you in high school, how is that different from holding a grudge against the culture of a people because of what someone of that ethnicity did to you when were a kid?
Lastly, and gratuitously: football, of course, rules, but I'm talking about the beautiful game, not the sissified bastardized American version of rugby for overweight men. Baseball is boring. Basketball is OK. Car racing is not a sport, especially if you keep going in circles forever.
Calm down, Commie. I haven't deleted any comments in weeks. Just a computer glitch, obviously.
Ted, you should know that making a blanket statement about the intelligence of all individuals within a specific category is practicing bigotry. You're being a bigot. Stop it.
That football is a particularly debilitating sport for those who play it, and that this begins early on, is a public health crisis that you're simply turning into an opportunity to insult an entire group of people with.
I bet you didn't find it funny when right wing bigots used the AIDS issue against gays, so why is it funny to you to say these things about athletes? There are very few athletes that I know, in any sport, that are somehow inferior for their athleticism. Most are exceptional people for what they do.
This trivializes a very important conversation that is beginning in this country, and that is the identification of severe, long term problems associated with CERTAIN sports. We should be having a serious conversation about which sports children should NOT participate in.
Ted, this piece makes me think you're in high school. Are you in high school? Are you adolescent in your maturity? This isn't funny.
I don't mind sports or sports fans so much, even if I am not one of them. I just wish that sports fans understood how obscure and arcane their trivia actually is.
As John Waters said, in not so many words, "Do I get in a taxicab and bellow at the driver,'Hey, how about that new Fassbinder film?'"
Billy Jack, my spindly little panties are hopelessly entwined..
Borrow some from Aggie.
What does it say about our country that a cartoon about sports injuries garners more comments than one on healthcare or our crappy economy or our one of our unnecessary wars?
Bread and circuses...
As John Waters said, in not so many words, "Do I get in a taxicab and bellow at the driver,'Hey, how about that new Fassbinder film?'"
Waters must have said that a long time ago. There haven't been any new Fassbinder films in a long time.
Let me update it: "Hey Mr. taxicab-driver, how about that new Ozon film?"
Oh yeah you limp wrists hate sports. As a matter of fact, you hate anything that involves testosterone. That's why the rest of us call you the new castrate. Just to piss off you girls, I'm going to drive my big gas guzzling SUV to Costco and load up on supplies for NFL Sunday (on my HDTV and with my AC running full blast). We are going to BBQ spewing gases into the air. And where did I get the money? From my corporation with 15 employees.
That's get all your pretty little pink panties in a bind!
Ted, Susan, come on this is clearly abuse. This is explicit homophobia and sexism. Why is this person still welcome to post here? Do you think your readers come here to see this crap?
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