America’s Newest Culture War: Football Daniel Flynn is a conservative activist and author whose newest book argues that there is a War on Football, with the real victims not being Junior Seau and his brain damage, but America.
FTA:
An audience member "wants to know what Flynn thinks about Obama’s confession to The New Republic in January that in light of the game’s health crisis, he’d think twice about letting son play football—if he had a son.
"He does," interjects a white-haired woman in the third row. "The guy from Florida." After the audience and Flynn share a good laugh at the expense of Trayvon Martin, Flynn gets to the point: Football is the perfect way to turn boys into men. Obama, he says, was a wayward teen, citing the "choom gang," who could have benefited from the structure of the gridiron."
Wikipedia entry on CTE:
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a form of encephalopathy that is a progressive degenerative disease, which can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem, in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. The disease was previously called dementia pugilistica (DP), as it was initially found in those with a history of boxing. CTE has been most commonly found in professional athletes participating in American football, ice hockey, professional wrestling and other contact sports who have experienced repetitive brain trauma. It has also been found in soldiers exposed to a blast or a concussive injury,[1] in both cases resulting in characteristic degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein. Individuals with CTE may show symptoms of dementia, such as memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression, which generally appear years or many decades after the trauma.
The NFL also promoted and interviewed Flynn.
Deadspin report from Flynn’s talk.
via MetaFilter http://www.metafilter.com/134355/smashing-kids-brains-against-their-skull-maybe-not-so-bad-after-all