I think the even bigger problem is how these dudes get surrounded completely by sycophants and are encouraged to let their brain atrophy completely starting in high school, if not earlier. Nobody is allowed to criticise the sportsballmen, they're often not required to actually do any schoolwork, and the entire social structure of the US education system exists to deify them. They just become the most credulous, egotistical idiots on the planet with nobody willing or able to call them out.
The traumatic brain injuries don't help, but athlete brainrot is a more insidious structural problem as well. That's why you see it in lower contact sports as well.
This is the more accurate read on situations like this. Add in that you need to be a little bit different in your view of the world to even make it as a professional athlete, and you're going to get stuff like this. Like, as far as they're concerned, hard work and believing in themselves to an unhealthy level HAS paid off. If you're working out at the combine, you are in the top percentage of a percentage of college football athletes, which they themselves are already a sliver of top football players in the world.
Harris writes extensively about the eugenicist origins of the combine and Stanford and how college football was essentially used as a petri dish to try to build a better soldier.
The competition didn’t end once students were accepted. Starting in the 1920s, they had to contend with Terman’s new grading system, which ranked them on a curve of comparative rather than absolute achievement. But the bionomists also needed an athletic substitute for combat, and Jordan believed that he found one in football. “[H]e felt football’s combination of physicality and cooperation fit in with the spirit he wanted to see thrive at Stanford,” writes California historian Kevin Starr of Jordan.
Stanford was literally like the ivy league version of the hitler youth.
Of course this should come as no surprise given the history of Leland Stanford and the Stanford family.
More valuable than any single horse, any thousand horses, were the insights into natural efficiency the farm developed. The “13 million horses × $100” calculation is the kind of disruption math that twenty-first-century start-ups use to persuade venture capitalists to sink millions into protean projects, but Leland only had to convince himself it was worth his money, which he seems to have had no problem doing. Bringing industrial techniques, goals, and capital to the production of animals, Stanford’s farm was the prototype for what the scholar Phillip Thurtle calls the laboratories of speed, with their limitless resources, firm-style employment bureaucracies, (pseudo)scientific breeding methods, and focus on a single product.11 This was not an animal farm in any classic sense; it was an experimental engine factory, churning out high-performance horse flesh by the ton. Since they sold horses for their genetics—the blood more valuable than the muscle—the Palo Alto Stock Farm was really in the business of intellectual property
Note: Easier to be the top of the world when no other country plays that game
canada has gridiron football too but for all intents and purposes they're a vassal state
I was very grateful to go to a high school where our football team sucked so bad they were a punchline--I honestly couldn't even tell you who the quarterback was. I can only imagine the psychic damage I would have incurred had I attended one of those Texas schools where they spend more on the football stadium than the actual school
edit: I accidentally a word
Tbf if I were in his position I'd say the most ridiculous shit, if not for fun then bc I have reduced cognitive function
You can add fighters to the pile. Like Joe Rogan has a Swiss cheese brain from the brainworms burrowing through it. Then they moved out and new worms moved into the tunnels.
Nah I think he's just a flat earther.
There's a weirdly large number of semi-prominent African American flat earthers for some reason.
The same reason why Farrakhan is alive but Malcolm X is not. The black communist (or simply anti American, anti imperialist) radicals were a genuine threat to the US, one the FBI considered more dangerous than anything else the US has faced. The leaders and figureheads were killed, the groups infiltrated and disbanded, non black allies were also targeted.
And the government allows and promotes the conspiracy theorists, the black supremacists, and the liberal bourgeois reformers to thrive because they’re not a threat to the system, and in fact, while many are “critical” of the US and racism in some capacity, they would ultimately promote the system (explicitly or not) and shame other black people for not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and starting their own business or some other nonsense.
A more recent example: https://www.wired.com/story/what-can-crypto-still-do-for-black-people/
A black leftist professor warns other black people against the false allure of cryptocurrency and how it’s a ploy to siphon their already low amount of wealth. Of course, this is a crypto conference where most people are already die hard adherents of crypto, but black people were burned the most when crypto fell after the spike in the 20s, and this conference was created to assure weary black investors that this time, they won’t be robbed again, because… Winklevoss and Gemini are here to help lol. The author is also a bit pathetic. They were rightfully skeptical about the whole meeting but got rizzed by the speakers and came out convinced that crypto will help black people despite listing the various as they were robbed by financial institutions and crypto influencers.
