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Even your favourite deity has to make choices, they certainly can’t be everywhere at once…
We do love our dog, and so should you. :)
It is a good test.
The competitive cycling world is being shaken as riders during competitions have be discovered using mechanical assists to help them perform better. From the AP:
“Caught using a hidden motor at a world championship race, cyclo-cross rider Femke Van Den Driessche of Belgium has been banned from cycling for six years.The sanction imposed Tuesday by the International Cycling Union is a first using its rules on technological fraud.
This case is a major victory for the UCI and all those fans, riders and teams who want to be assured that we will keep this form of cheating out of our sport,” UCI president Brian Cookson said in a statement.
The UCI banned Van Den Driessche through Oct. 10, 2021, stripped her of the Under-23 European title she won last November and fined her 20,000 Swiss francs ($20,500).The 19-year-old rider had said she would skip her disciplinary hearing at the UCI’s Swiss offices and retire from racing.”
Isn’t technology grand? We have miniaturized engine components enough to fit into a skinny bike frame and at the same time have improved battery performance enough to make this sort of cheating worthwhile. In the video below, see how it works and possibly see it in action on during professional racing.
I’m not a fan of bike racing or anything but what I find interesting is what the ‘competitive spirit’ can do to people and their moral/ethical character when it comes to high reward activities.
Competition should bring about the best of us, whether it is competing against a time or someone else in an endeavour. I see nothing wrong with this concept as being committed to a goal and focusing time and energy on it is how many things are accomplished in the world. However when the stakes are too high, and too fraught with competition, then unethical activities can be realized.
“There may be no Olympic sport as dependent on technology as cycling, whose space-age, feather-light carbon fiber bikes can cost more than a car and make the difference between a gold medal and nothing.
That has also made the sport ripe for an entirely new kind of doping: mechanical.
It has long been rumored that riders were finding ways to hide tiny electrical motors in their frames, or were using magnets in their wheels, to produce a couple of extra watts of power. But it was not until a young cyclocross racer was discovered to have a motor hidden in her bike frame last year that it became a prominent issue.”
Can we think of cheating as a indicator of when a sport has become too competitive?
The Cycling Union is taking this threat to the legitimacy of the sport seriously as they are using MRI scanners for the Olympics to ferret out the mechanical dopers.
“The group will work with the International Olympic Committee to test bikes in Rio; both will use proprietary software that the governing body developed for iPads. The system essentially scans a bike for magnetic fields that could indicate the presence of motors, and it is advanced enough to distinguish between illegal technology and the electronic shifting systems that have become common among elite riders.”
It seems that there is a limit to the usefulness of competitiveness as a motivator to many human endeavours as once a critical moral threshold has been breached, the allure of cheating becomes too strong. Thus the legitimacy of the sport, built on competition, is undone by that very same factor.
Similar analogs can be seen in the world of business and trading. The market works fairly well until rampant greed ruins the party for everyone. I smell a sociology paper flitting about on this topic as to how the limiting aspects of cheating interact with competitive sports and other activities.
“How We Reached the Point Where We Can’t Hear Each Other” is a article on Counterpunch by Joseph Natoli. I’ve excerpted some of the beginning bits for context, but the best is when he focuses on what is happening in Education and how people are taught to think these days. I’m also a fan of his borrowing of radical feminist methodology that focuses on the the material reality of the situation and the naming of the problem. I heartily recommend you read the full article, as it suggests reasons why we are becoming less social despite ‘social’ media and the corrosive effect that identity politics, one of the crown jewels of post-modern theory, is having on our society.
[…]
“The intent of a past analog world to put us all on the same page so we could all direct ourselves in common to our common, societal problems is something now disseminated into an infinitude of self-designed enclaves. We have connectivity between the like-minded, or opinionated, but not conjunction which Bifo Berardi defines “as a way of becoming other.” (And: Phenomenology of the End, 2015)
If you want to reflect beyond the entrapment of your own personal experiences and the personal opinions derived from such, you are desiring something that has been superseded.
If you want not to be the blind man who feels the tail of an elephant and pronounces the elephant to be shaped like a snake, you are hoping for a door that leads out of the room of your own limited experience.
Unfortunately, there is no longer any need to leave that room because cyberspace has designed the whole world to be your room. You can blog, tweet, text. Video, emoji your reflections online without any intent to augment social knowledge or understanding or to encounter a counter-punch that will cause you to adjust your views.”
[…]
“We exist now within narratives, not impeccable logics and sound proofs, air-tight arguments or binding adjudications. For reasons too elaborate to condense, we have accepted Nietzsche’s view of reason as a pawn of power and have retreated to our own personal reasoning.
This retreat to personal arbitration of all matters is expressed in the politics of identity, a politics concerned with the full emancipation of the individual not as defined within any cultural, religious, historical, or anthropological notion of the individual, but defined by each and every variety of individual. It is as if the individual is a knowledge within itself.”
[…]
Education is also in a special dilemma considering the mission here is get a student to put his or her personal opinions and preferences and different experiences out of sight and attend to a rationally validated collective representation of a subject.
Nathan Heller points out that elite colleges find that the cultivation of the individual is not an easy matter when students will not leave their personal “experiential authority” at the door. (“The Big Easy,” The New Yorker May 30, 2016) One is not reading to extract eternal verities, the Enlightenment dream, or to deconstruct the pretenses of those same verities. In the climate that Heller describes, no content can be permitted to transgress the personally defined identity of the reader or listener.
An Oberlin student who Heller describes as “a trans man …educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder …lately on suicide watch” objected to a discussion of Antigone without a trigger warning, i.e., characters in the play committed suicide. Identity-based oppression is responded to with a theory of intersectionality, which contends, “who knows what it means to live at an intersection better than the person there?” Thus, personal experiential authority now contends with a pedagogic tradition of minimizing the effects of personal experiential authority on objective, rational reflection.
Education attempts to respect individual arrangements of the results of critical thinking but not allow those arrangements to taint the process of critical thinking. This long standing agreement is no longer in effect. We have reached the point where we cannot engage in any way what may “trigger” our personal dislike or what may upset a private space we have self-designed. Long standing notions of both education and society are dissolving.
We now listen to our own voices and our clones in “social” media, a pathological condition that undermines much needed social and political communication and interrelationships. The way out, as with all pathologies, is to first recognize the condition, observe the point we have reached and reorient our compass.”
Teaching critical thinking in public education has always been a revolutionary activity, as this article confirms, it looks like it shall continue to be in the revolutionary category for quite some time.
“It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. It may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retains its power of exploitation and special privilege. – Tommy Douglas
Who doesn’t like to kick back and watch the US primary election campaign? I just scan the highlights, but John Feffer is big picture prognosticating with his recent article on Tom’s Dispatch titled Donald Trump and America B. The article examines the disaffected people who make up America B and who have bought into his faux-populist message. I encourage you to follow the above link and read the entire article as it is well written and laden with trenchant political observations that stretch into the near future.
In the 1990s, the United States changed its political economy. It was not quite as dramatic a shift as the regime changes that took place across Eurasia, but it had profound consequences for the realignment of voting patterns in America.
During that decade, the U.S. economy accelerated its shift from manufacturing — along with the well-paying blue-collar jobs that sector had once generated — to an ever more dominant service economy. In terms of employment, manufacturing jobs dropped from 18 million in 1990 to 12 million in 2014, while wages for such jobs tumbled as well. Over that same period, the health-care and social assistance sector alone grew from 9.1 million to more than 18 million jobs. At one end of that service economy were the 1% in financial services making stratospheric sums, particularly as compensation packages soared from the mid-1990s on. On the other end were the people who had to add shifts at McDonald’s or Walmart to their full-time jobs or monetize their spare time by driving for Uber just to make what they or their parents once earned with one job at the local factory.
America was not alone in undergoing this shift. Thanks to technological innovations like computers and robotics, greater access to cheap labor in places like Mexico and China, the rise of the Internet, and the deregulation of the financial world, the global economy was being similarly transformed. Blue-collar workers no longer played as vital a role in any advanced economy.
In the U.S., put bluntly, the imagination of America A no longer needed the muscle of America B.
[…]
“Falling behind economically and feeling betrayed by politicians on both sides of the aisle, America B might have moved to the left if the United States had a strong socialist tradition. In the 2016 primary campaign, many of the economically anxious did, in fact, support Bernie Sanders, particularly the younger offspring of America A fearful of being deported to America B. Unlike Europe B, however, America B has always been more about rugged individualism than class solidarity. Its denizens would rather buy a lottery ticket and pray for a big payout than rely on a handout from Washington (Medicare and Social Security aside). Donald Trump, politically speaking, is their Powerball ticket.
Above all, the inhabitants of America B are angry. They’re disgusted with politics as usual in Washington and the hypocritical, sanctimonious political elite that goes with it. They’re incensed by how the wealthy have effectively seceded from American society with their gated estates and offshore accounts. And they’ve focused their resentment on those they see as having taken their jobs: immigrants, people of color, women. They’re so desperate for someone who “tells it like it is” that they’ll look the other way when it comes to Donald Trump’s inextricable links to the very elite who did so much to widen the gap between the two Americas in the first place.”
[…]
“America B has a fondness for Donald Trump and his almost childlike audacity. (Gosh, kids say the darndest things!) Right now, his fans are attached to an individual, rather than a platform or a party. Many of his supporters don’t even care whether Trump means what he says or not. If he loses, he will fade away and leave nothing behind, politically speaking.
The real change will come when a more sophisticated politician, with an authentic political machine, sets out to woo America B. Perhaps the Democratic Party will decide to return to its more populist, mid-century roots. Perhaps the Republican Party will abandon its commitment to entitlement programs for the 1%.
More likely, a much more ominous political force will emerge from the shadows. If and when that new, neo-fascist party fields its charismatic presidential candidate, that will be the most important election of our lives.
As long as America B is left in the lurch by what passes for modernity, it will inevitably try to pull the entire country back to some imagined golden age of the past before all those “others” hijacked the red, white, and blue. Donald Trump has hitched his presidential wagon to America B. The real nightmare, however, is likely to emerge in 2020 or thereafter, if a far more capable politician who embraces similar retrograde positions rides America B into Washington.
Then it will matter little how much both liberals and conservatives rail against “stupid” and “crazy” voters. Nor will they have Donald Trump to kick around any more. In the end, they will have no one to blame but themselves.”
End game summary here is this – actual politicians are watching to see how successful DT is. The pull of false populism is strong and in the right(wrong) hands could be forged into a general election winning platform that will take America into a new darker age. So if we see in 2020 the new charming face of proto-fascism rise in the US, remember Tom Dispatch and DWR called it first in 2016.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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