A sound mind in a healthy body

The picures here are obviously of men of the black race. But I am not saying anything about skin color here. I am talking about a problem that is endemic to persons of all "colors" or lack of same: athletic competition. It's bad in any color, from the AZOV soccer club to Wimbleton. Why?

Raphael Dwamena, the footballer who died playing the game he loved

Tom Burrows, Nov 19, 2023 The New York Times

Egnatia FC's Demrozi Stadium in the tiny Albanian town of Rrogozhine is a modest stadium, with just one side open for spectators.

It was here on Saturday, November 11 that Raphael Dwamena, the league's most decorated player and top scorer with nine goals, collapsed and died during a match against FK Partizani.

Twenty-four minutes in, a video shows the referee and players from both sides rushing to help and medical staff attending to Dwamena on the grass. An ambulance enters the pitch within a minute of him falling to the ground as distressed players look away with their heads in their hands.

Dwamena was taken to Kavaje hospital, 20 minutes' drive away, with his wife of six years, Ama, but was pronounced dead before he got there.

His death, aged only 28, shocked the football community and tributes poured in from around the world. Yet it also throws up difficult and troubling questions.

Dwamena had repeatedly been warned by doctors and friends to stop playing football because of issues with his heart. He did not pass a medical at Brighton & Hove Albion in 2017 after a £10million (now $12.4m) fee had been agreed, had collapsed during a match in October 2021, while contracts at clubs across Europe were ended early because of his heart condition.

He had an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD; a small battery-powered device) fitted in his chest in January 2020, but then had it removed in early 2022. [Players are allowed to play with a defibrillator in Denmark, but the rules vary in different countries. In Italy, for example, they do not allow footballers to play with a defibrillator.]

Antonio Asso, the cardiologist who fitted Dwamena's defibrillator, is convinced the player's decision to remove the device resulted in his death.

He said: "Unfortunately, what happened last Saturday was easy to predict. Two years ago, he suffered ventricular fibrillation (a chaotic rhythm in the heart that equals death if an electric discharge is not applied to the chest in the first 10 minutes). Fortunately enough, as the defibrillator implanted was operative, it resuscitated him. He later asked for his device to be taken out and when that malignant arrhythmia recurred last Saturday, no defibrillator was in his chest.

"He has died as a consequence of a respectable personal decision, but if the defibrillator had not been removed, Raphael would still be alive. It is the end of a sad and foreseeable story"....

"In the end, he decided to play; it's his life," Zenelaj said. "He can decide so long as all the tests were done by the club... and everything was OK."

This is the story of a talented footballer who could not face giving up the game he loved.

In my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) not humble opinion: This is stupid

Long story short: Physical exercise should improve a person's health and, as one important result: make their body sexier for better erotic pleasure oneself and to be more erotically attractive to an intimate partner. Say "No!" to HBO which is often violence soft porn. Say "Yes!" to more "big O": more orgasms! And, as said, better overall vigor in living to better nourish "the life of the mind", which is "the light of the world", in pursuing the arts and sciences. Some people, I am almost certain, would say: "No fun in that life."

In schools, replace competitive athltics with cutivation of erotic connoisseurship: repurpose all the school gyms! Oh! Horrors! No tackle football brutalization of young males; kids copulating instead of "practicing"; nobody gets concussions from gentle sex. Different job for "coaches" and no more need for "sports medicine". Furthermore, as the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes urged: athletics should not pay, because it does not contribute to the wellbeing of the city but just amuses the masses; what he aparently falied to mention is that that "amusement" sometimes entails [especially professional soccer] fans trampling each other to death, for fun, one presumes.

All competition is bad: homo homini lupus. Cooperation is good I help you and you help me. Make love not war. And if you don't like somebody, respect them in civil society and don't go to bed with them. I conclude my case with the story Professor Louis Forsdale once told me:

He visited his girlfriend at Black Mountain College one summer. There was a softball game. Well, not exactly. The students were goofing around and had some beer and were sort of playing softball but nobody was keeping score or anything like that. Then one of the students started to take the game seriously and began trying to win. Others followed suit. "And then things turned ugly" because instead of having fun the students were competing to win.

I THINK persons should play nicely together, always, except when frustrated by unavoidable toil to reproduce individual and species life ("pragmatic agenda"), which is a misfortune imposed on us by the Abraahmic Deity because Adam ate a piece of fruit, and which can only be overcome if instead of trying to meke profits off technology the persons with social power deploy AI and indusrial robots to do all scut work instead of human persons having to do it. I am aware that, lamentably, this is not a very popular opinion, because males are ofen childreared to want to become "men" not intellectuals who can't even ride a bicycle straight (George Wallace).

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