Take a Knee To Smash the State

In all of the fake outrage over taking a knee (or NOT taking a knee) in NFL games, there are a few things missing in the discussion.

Keep in mind that the gladiatorial arenas are provided by coercion: Taxpayers are forced to pay for them.

It's also very important to keep in mind WHY some players have chosen to kneel: because of the behavior of police.  American police have killed roughly 1,400 Americans in each of 2015 and 2016; and they are on track to kill a similar number in 2017.  Even though about a third of those killed are running away, or are unarmed and not resisting, vanishingly few of the responsible officers are even brought to trial, much less given the same prosecutorial aggression Average Joe would be faced with for committing the exact same act.

There are far more whites killed by police -- but it is true that blacks are killed at a higher rate relative to their population.

In any case, there are roughly 1,400 deaths annually at the hands of police -- and tens of thousands more who are alive but injured or permanently and horribly maimed (just ask Walter DeLeon).

Who hires those cops, and refuses to fire them when they can't keep their fingers off the bang switch?

City governments.

The very same entities that will send the same costumed revenue enhancers around to your house if you refuse to pay their extortion that pays for those stadiums and those subsidized multi-million-dollar salaries of the professional sports class.

Football players (along with most other pro sports enterprises) are essentially taxpayer-funded welfare queens.

Beginning with stadiums but hardly limited to just those, American gladiatorial sports spectacles are endowed with a truly impressive network of subsidies.

It starts with the lavish spending on school sports.  These are subsidies to jocks, and the main beneficiaries are the vanishingly few who will go on to professional sports.

Think of the message government schools send to the most intelligent kids:

"We might let you play with other nerds on the Battle of the Brains team, which won't be televised or reported in your local newspaper.  We'll allow the jocks to harass you as you walk through the school, and to laugh at your accomplishments.  But the jocks -- we're going to turn them into stars for the whole student body to worship and cheer.  We'll build gigantic facilities for them to practice in.  Oh, and you and your parents are going to pay for it all, too."

The best of the jocks are offered full or partial rides to college, and then get a break on what kind of classes they must take -- and pro scouts will sniff out the best of them.

Most of the large sports colleges are themselves largely taxpayer-funded, to the tune of over $80 billion annually by the feds, with a similar amount coming from states.  A large fraction of those billions goes to sports and athletes.

Then, once an athlete turns pro, they will be the recipient of further taxpayer loot: Many pro sports stadiums are funded by cities, states, and even the federal government.  For instance, the federal government has -- for decades -- paid the gladiators to do the patriotic circus before each game, at least partly as an indoctrination measure but also to boost military worship and recruitment.  This week, because of all the ginned-up outrage over "taking a knee", the NFL refunded three-quarters of a million back to Leviathan.

The players who make it to those professional teams are the privileged of the privileged of the privileged.

Every last side in this fiasco -- from the posturing players, to the posturing bureaucrat class, to the outraged "patriotic" class, is a hypocrite.

If the NFL players really wanted to protest injustice, they should be protesting government involvement in sports, from elementary school right on through their paychecks.

But more importantly, they should be demanding the Abolition of  the Police.

Because for all of the five thousand years of civilization, government police have *always* been a brutal occupying force.  There is no "reform", because the incentives are completely wrong.  Millions of people have tried to reform police; or to protest, or even to resist their worst aggression.

But nothing changes.

The experiment has failed.  It is beyond time to Abolish the Police.