The Glade 4.0

Loosely inspired by Junior Seau's apparent suicide and the related discussions of long-term brain damage in football players (not to mention boxers).

I haven't given this enough thought or study to make any sort of informed opinion.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I don't see the sports tie at all. Fascinating question though.

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Not within society's current framework. You'd have to legalize suicide first.

Hop - there's been a lot of discussion lately about the prevalence of long-term brain damage from all the head hits in football, and a few ex-players have committed suicide for reasons that are arguably attributable to that brain damage. Some commentators have begun to question the future of the sport and the ethics of watching it, and a recurring theme seems to be references to gladiators - the idea being that paying people to physically destroy themselves for our viewing pleasure is wrong. At this point, no one significant is suggesting that the game be banned, of course, but we obviously do ban explicit deathmatches, so I'm just starting from that extreme end of the spectrum as I work out where I think the line should be.

In and of itself, as long as there is A) no danger to bystanders B) a prohibition on killing an opponent you have rendered unconscious and C) surrender is permitted, then I don't have any particular problem with it. I think it should be a manner of permitting people to fight where the death of one participant will not be held against the other if it happens to occur; it should not be license to execute the other person if they cannot fight back.

In practice; I think tight controls would be needed to prevent exploitation. I think people would rapidly figure out ways to manipulate people into fighting professionals that they have little chance of defeating.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I pretty much agree with Diamondeye exactly.

We allow consenting adults to jump out of airplanes. Just sayin'.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

The NFL, and American football won't be legislated away. It won't need to be. We're watching the beginning of it's natural death due to economic reasons. Wait until the first lawsuit is brought forward, and won, from an amature youth athlete. The organizations that feed the NFL don't have the resources to survive the coming storm, and will become uninsurable. After a few years, you'll see the sport vanish.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

I chose 'depends'.

I'd be okay with it if someone died in a sanctioned fight, but I wouldn't be okay with it if the intent was to go in and have one of the two people die.

Two men enter! One man leaves!

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That arguent is specious at best. It is the equivalent of arguing NASCAR should be banned because it originated with moonshine runners.

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Nah, it's more like saying, "We don't allow 'Death Race'-style races, but we do allow NASCAR, even though some drivers will inevitably get injured or killed in the process, so somewhere in between is an ethical line we don't want to cross. Now that there's growing evidence that the speeds in NASCAR have gotten to the point where the number of people injured or killed is just too high to ignore, we might be getting uncomfortably close to that line."

For the record, the foregoing is just for illustrative purposes. I'm not actually making any claims about NASCAR speeds or accident rates, about which I have basically zero knowledge.

I voted no, despite my love of that sbject in movies and in the abstract. It's just a line I don't think should be crossed, although in my mind, I guess I assumed the question was should they be allowed to do it for paid entertainment purposes. You want to start a Fight Club, I guess, sure, knock yourselves out. But I'll stick with "No" for the poll.

As far as football is concerned, I'm pretty sure there were calls to ban it back in the early days. Most of the rule changes back then were meant to avoid that, iirc. I think I even mentioned here that I came across a reference (in a Texas newspaper, I think) from the 1930s to "the first football death of the season," or something on that order. And that was 20 or 30 years after the really deadly period. I'm of the "go back to leather helmets and less padding school" for saving today's game. But I wonder what the Aussie rules football people go through; maybe they have as many injuries and concussions as our guys get, long-term.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Maybe then I can stop paying for their stadiums...

There's one big difference between gladiators and Terrel Owens: one of them isn't a slave, being forced to compete.

Many football players can retire long before they actually do. There are consequences to the intense physical activity over a long period of time; they choose to ignore them for the sake of DOLLA DOLLA BILLS YALL. Or hubris.

I think this ties into why we don't allow assisted suicide, that is the difficulty of determining when some one is no longer consenting.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I'm torn. I want to be able to do as I want with my own body, but the idea of it as entertainment repulses me.

No. People who do this were influenced by the wrong sort of culture, and are "sick" in the same sense that you should kill children for being muslim, for example. I mean they should not think that a duel is a good idea.

If you rule on this issue, can you all at least be consistent? If it's okay to have the legal right to hurt yourself over time without hurting others in one way, then it should be okay in other ways. I shouldn't need to explain further, and I won't, but I fully expect those who have been entrenched in other particular long-standing views to reflexively lawyer some arbitrary difference out of ego.

Yes, of course.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

It repulses me too. So do The Jersey Shore and The Big Bang Theory, but I'm not willing to legislate against them (no matter how tempting such a proposal may be).

Let them fight if they like. Their choice.

The person who hurts himself gradually has every opportunity to stop. If two people enter and one of them must die, then the person can't change his mind once he's in the fire and and falling behind.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

It is better than sex.

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Raell Kromwell