Cricket Terror Attack
March 6th, 2009I’m going to leave this one up to you guys. Frankly, I’m having difficulty finding the motivation to cover this. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be covered, but I’m hard wired to ignore anything that has to do with sports. But a few of you guys are right on top of developments on this story. Feel free to use this as an open thread on the event if you like.
Sidenote: It’s interesting, cognitive dissonance, isn’t it? I see “sports” and my brain just wants to close the browser window. I might have to get over this because it makes perfect sense that sporting events are ideal venues for false flag attacks. The average person’s attachments to “sports” make extremist religious beliefs seem like mild neuroses in comparison. As an analyst, I should force myself to try to understand the “sports” related obsessions rather than just seeing it all as mass mental illness.
Obviously, if people are busy watching some stupid ball being thrown around, they’re probably not paying too much attention to why they’re sick, broke and apathetic. Who benefits from that situation?
If religion is the opiate of the masses, what would sports be?
1. cricket is the only common religion uniting the entire Indian Subcontinet: Pakistan, India, Babgladesh, Sri Lanka. it is lierally the only peaceful means they have for playing out their rivalry. muslims, hindus, sihks, younameit, they play on the same teams with each other and against each other. yes, sport, including cricket, is used as a distraction. but it can be a way to re-humanise the “opposition” who are being continually de-humanised by the corrupt politicians and religious extremists.
2. i have only read a relatively small amount about this “attack” but it doesn’t add up. quelle surprise. certainly seems suspiciously FF to me. security forces AWOL, half a dozen security personnel are killed but no cricket people. police take ages to turn up IN THE MIDDLE OF LAHORE!!! all the shooter-men get away!!!??? “This was our Mumbai!!!” spouts the politician. oh, how convenient.
3. getting Pakistan removed from the international cricket map is definitely a quick way to really piss off a lot of non-extremist Pakistanis of all social classes, imho.
The cocaine? Another opium?
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
It’s not sports per se, it’s sports and athletes being used to transform people from actors into spectators.
Sports turns from a form of workout and play to a dis-empowerment ritual for the masses. Rather than go out and play themselves, they watch other people, people they are told are better than themselves, people who are trained and invested in and made as such. Thus, they stop living their own lives and they live vicariously through the athletes.
This would also apply to actors and actresses in TV, films, and movies; it would also apply to musicians in music videos as well.
People stop doing and performing. They just show up to mass events to experience participating mystique.
And of course, drugs in their various forms are made available; at sports stadiums it is beer; at concerts, it is weed.
And of course, the accompanying gluttony.
But this is all as old as the Romans’ bread and circuses.
The ethanol of the masses?
“If religion is the opiate of the masses, what would sports be?”
Well, George Orwell wrote that sport “is war minus the shooting.”
cricket is the only common religion uniting the entire Indian Subcontinent…
…
getting Pakistan removed from the international cricket map is definitely a quick way to really piss off a lot of non-extremist Pakistanis of all social classes, imho.
Woh. I had no clue about this. None at all. Thanks for this info. It helps me to take this much more seriously.
Religion as an opiate is an excellent metaphor, motoring along in either direction. The somnambulistic nature of the opium smoker is the stuff of historical record and literary legend.
Cocaine is a perfect choice to describe the emotional/social effect of sporting events on the human animal and tribe, but if you’re going to be rigorous it’s probably best to associate each “stupid ball” with an appropriate substance. Most “action” & “contact” sports definitely fall into the stimulant class. The exceptions are more sedate events like cricket, lawn bowling, curling and baseball.
So, how about the coca? I’m going to go with basketball. American football? Crystal meth. Baseball? A powerful barbiturate, for certain. Quaaludes, perhaps. Soccer, or what the rest of the world outside the USSA calls “football”? A little harder to pin down, though it is surely among the stimulants. And so it goes on down the line: volleyball, tennis, etc.
But what are we to do with “sports” that contain an element or kernel of a practical nature, such as cycling, running, snow skiing (downhill or cross-country), snowshoeing and biathlon?
Personally, I see a conceptual break between “team sport” and the social distraction it can generate and physical activities that often still qualify as highly individual pursuits. From personal experience, I can tell you they often quite the opposite effect on the human psyche.
The following statement is extremely clear-headed: “The average person’s attachments to “sports” make extremist religious beliefs seem like mild neuroses in comparison. As an analyst, I should force myself to try to understand the “sports” related obsessions rather than just seeing it all as mass mental illness”.
To broadbrush “sports” as a single monolithic item isn’t much different than conflating disgruntled locals pissed off at — and working actively against — the injustices enforced by the Sheriff or the taxman into the category of “terrorists”.
Instead of sports, I should have been writing “professional spectator sports.” Colosseum scale, bread and circuses style mass events. The type of sports zombie I’m thinking of are those fucking retards who listen to sports radio all day, and ask you about “the game last night” etc.
WARNING: Graphic image:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/pictures/2008/10/18/460GreenBayDavidStlukaGetty.jpg
I definitely don’t want to offend any archery freaks or Kendo heads, or anyone who participates in ______ (fill in the blank) by lumping them together with the Cheddar Heads.
I like to SCUBA dive. Is that a sport?
One last thought that fell off the end of the post above, which lays my thoughts a little more bare:
It’s not sport that warps the personal space and the social fabric, it’s the spectacle it’s been surrounded with and the resulting “herd mind” effects. If you’ve ever felt completely alone standing among a multitude of thousands of enthralled minds, you know exactly what I mean.
It first happened to me when I was twelve. It’s been going on ever since, though I spent many years ignoring the sensations by way of fitting into the regular flow of the people around me I called friends.
Hell, I trashed my body for six years playing American football. And it was as a result of knowing how it looked and felt as a participant and an observer that I discovered the obvious difference just sitting there in the seat right next to me.
Only when you introduce the crowd do you begin to pervert the beneficial social aspect of “play” into something less divine. When you add the paying spectator, and commercialization occurs, then you’re playing with serious psycho-pharma.
The only thing approaching wisdom I have left to share here is this: Don’t blame the athlete for the spectacle, blame the promoter. Yes, at each level their complicity increases, but at the very core of all but the most professional of athletes resides only a highly individual drive and/or desire to achieve, to excel, to test their limits, etc. These are the stuff of personal growth and advancement, not social control.
If Tochigi’s analysis is a correct appraisal of the situation it leads me to this question: what’s the strategic value of fomenting violence between India & Pakistan at this point in time? My best guess is because both countries have nukes, a limited war between them is a great way to test the use and ‘fallout’ of a limited nuclear exchange. Playing with fire for sure, but this is supposed to be the year we have ‘the summer of hell.’ Same as if rioting is provoked this summer in London; it would be a great live test of all the surveillance equipment, other goodies, and training they’ve been implementing there for years.
re: sport, i agree with Miracukix’s statements:
sorry, the formatting got screwed up again. the second indent is obviously my own opinion, not Miraculix (apologies for the typo too!)
Come on everybody, it´s so obvious. What do you get when you combine heroine with cocaine?
Sports are the speedball of the masses.
What do I win?
Kevin, I don’t know how much you’ve noticed NZ’s ‘love of rugby’, It may not be so strong up north, but imagine the agonising that would go on here if our beloved All Blacks were no longer able to play in New Zealand.
I mean, this is a team that is consistenly the best in the world but can’t win a world cup because the pressure from it’s supporters is so gret that they freak every time they go to a tournament.
And New Zealanders are usually a pretty mild bunch too.
In “Sports News” there’s this from Bloomberg:
“The New York Jets are asking some employees to take two weeks of unpaid leave during the off- season to cut expenses and avoid job cuts by the National Football League team.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601079&sid=akrqtqb8W4Fc&refer=home
“Come on everybody, it´s so obvious. What do you get when you combine heroine with cocaine?”
Well, when you put it like that, the first and strongest image that springs to mind is Penelope Cruz as the cokehead wife in Blow… =)
Speedball? Ice hockey.
…but this is supposed to be the year we have ‘the summer of hell.’
You reveal your sources there Jon. A “rickety time machine” indeed. I interpret the results from linguistic forecasting a little differently. I see the entire operation as a practical use of data mining to keep a hazy eye on the Tavistock & McLean set and the “semantic control panel” that is the modern media.
They’re not reading the future so much as picking up on some of the more prominent “signals” being fed into the echo chamber that steers the mass mind. Occasional glimpses of the “wizard behind the curtain” feeding the global head, to dress the metaphor up in accenting Monarch colors.
@Miraculix
God bless the internet as where else could us pikers learn all about those cool terms like ‘Tavistock’ and ‘Monarch.’ I’m assuming you’re referring to CIA/Eyes Wide Shut Monarch vs. royal colors. Which segues to Ron Paul. Having the misfortune to have been raised in Kucinch land, I’m pretty sure he sold himself out years ago for the $’s, just look at his wikipedia entry. Going from boy mayor to Shirley MacLaine’s cabana boy to penniless in New Mexico to congressman w/trophy wife in the mid ’90’s. He always struck me as the club’s far left ‘break in case of emergency’ pres. candidate. Ron Paul, I’d couldn’t figure out ’till this week (thanks to Mrs. O doing her diablo thingy on the March cover of Vogue. Turns out he’s probably a member of the Scottish Rite and is married to an Eastern Star w/daughters being Rainbow girls back in the day. Explains why he gets away with making those fed guys, Bernake & Greenspan, look like idiots as he’s the right’s ‘break in case…’ candidate.
As for Ure & High, I just don’t know. Could be BS, could be on to something, could be a conduit to pass info from our overlords.