[catharsis] have to let it out

Blogging can be quite a cathartic exercise, really - purges the pent up emotions and leaves one refreshed and if someone has read and commented along the way, that's the icing on the cake.

For someone like Prodicus, whom I've always admired, to blog is the thing. He can have his rant, get it down "on paper", shake his fist, nod and go off to the kitchen, feeling braced.

Competition.

Nothing to do with Prodicus but one of the two topics of this post. Competitiveness. Ben Johnson, the drug takers, the ones who stretch the rules, Hand of G-d. Alonso and Hamilton.

And hypocrisy.

It's everywhere and goes with competitiveness - the practice of spouting about fine and noble virtues whilst behind the façade pursuing an aggressive policy of self-aggrandizement.

Long ago, in sportsmaster days, there were a series of incidents still etched in the mind. I'd been seconded to an older rugby team and they were, quite frankly, appalling. They had no spirit as it had been knocked out of them and had won nothing in two years.

Players were not getting to the ball and when the ball came to them, some sort of malaise came over them, some hesitation. We had a pow wow during the week and though nothing had been expressly said, it came out that their coach had drilled them with such discipline that they were afraid to try anything which wasn't by the book.

There's not a lot wrong with self-discipline and playing for the team, especially on a wet day and against tougher opposition but there's also not a lot wrong with breathing freely, trying nifty plays and throwing it about a bit, especially if you'd had no taste of success for two seasons.

Lateral thinking

With our younger teams, you had to take a more Irish approach. There were more constant breakdowns of play and as long as everyone was in support, kicking the ball along the ground was a real option - it broke the opposition plays open but the key to this was playing to your teammates.

However, the purists didn't like it. Said it was teaching bad habits, like William Webb Ellis who in 1823 had had enough, picked the ball up and ran. There'd been a complaint from the opposition coach from the last match that though we'd played within the rules, we hadn't played within the "spirit of rugger".

Oh really? And did the "spirit of rugger" include the eye-gouging and testicle grabbing they'd been allowed to try on our boys whilst ours were expressly forbidden to indulge in that competitive advantage? I suggested our head coach put that to the complainants.

Such rank hypocrisy. It's a competitive game and our small school was a terror in the district precisely because the players were totally ball aggressive, with back-up discipline. Plus, that attitude, with good conditioning, lessens injuries through the season.

I can't see any logical reason, when in a competitive situation, to pursue vague notions of "fair play" the opposition likes to cite at you, as long as you play within the rules and take no unfair advantage. Take unfair advantage and the victory is hollow.

Two case studies

Yesterday I saw two examples of this sort of hypocrisy.

1] I visited one particular blogger outside our sphere who'd been rabbiting on about how statistics don't matter and someone had commented "yes they do" and he'd started about how the main thing's the joy of conversation with others and so on and some people had admired his calm wisdom.

Three comments further down, someone had then commented about his own 5000 visitors that month and this blogger countered, in a throwaway line, about his 7000 that month. Two posts further down the page the blogger had run a graph of his stats for the last month. I nearly spilt my coffee.

2] The second incident was an "A" student on a scholarship in America, at a college whose buzzwords are "civility", "tolerance" and "diversity of opinion" who told a professor in 2006 that she was due to attend a conference and when asked which conference and saying it was conservative, promptly received failing "F" grades on every work she submitted from then on and eventually brought a lawsuit against the professor.

Now, as a professor of sorts myself, I don't smile kindly on troublemakers like this but she seems to have had a point here. She won her case and the college was forced to rewrite its tolerance regulations. Now she was sent constant rape and death threats from the feminist lobby who'd organized her demise and an anti-Ruth site was set up on campus, all condoned by the admin and academic staff.

Detractors said she was an intolerant bigot because Christianity does not accept homosexual marriages and she spoke against them. By also speaking against radical feminism and lesbianism, she'd effectively taken on the whole university as these are the two fascistic groups who control all campuses today.

What she took offence at was a play which was being taken round 650 major campuses, at taxpayers' expense, where actors dressed up as vaginas and other women's organs and "celebrated the throwing off of the fascism of shame", "women as victims of a male-dominated society"; marriage as an "instrument of oppression"; and fathers as "foreign male elements."

All with the full backing of staff and administration. The woman who'd written this stuff, Ensler, had been raped as a child and was now "reclaiming her private parts" by pushing it onto students across the U.S. How much collusion does it take to reach 650 universities before someone complains about the obscenity?

The rest of the story will have to wait for another post as this post was just about competitiveness and hypocrisy.

Photo below: admittedly this sort of thing would be red rag to the bull with the leftist controlled academia.