We get it. You don’t like sports. Who cares. I think there’s validity to sport and I enjoy watching and playing many of them. Has capitalism ruined everything the common person holds dear in most sports? Yes. I literally wrote an article about it.
But sport itself isn’t inherently bad and being like “herp derp sportsball” makes you sound like a basement dweller incel who wants to shoot up their school because they think jocks get all the girls instead of the kind gentlesirs who study the blade.
A lot of people are only exposed to sport as a tv show and a product, but most sports have roots that go back hundreds of years, are very influenced by working class history and local teams are often at the heart of communities (although many have been stolen and turned into just another generator of capital).
Sports have also been an arena for the class struggle - aristocrats and workers battling it out over who should be allowed to play and control different games at different time, “amateurs vs professionals” (i.e. those who were wealthy enough to be able to fund their sporting career as a hobby vs talented workers who needed to be paid to play) was a controversy in sports for decades. Even today there are many teams run and owned by fans in some sports, and the struggle between workers who have been watching their teams for decades (even through multiple generations of families) vs their indifferent capitalist owners is ongoing.
Also playing sports is fun and you will make friends and get healthy.
Read up on sport in 20th century socialist states, it was treated with massive investment and athletes were awarded high honour, it was tied in to public health (along with often being integrated with making people fit enough to serve in the army to defend against all the capitalist countries wanting to invade you for trying to not be capitalist). Even in capitalist countries today grassroots sport is one of the only real community/social circles people have that isn’t tied to working for a capitalist.
Leading up to the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government initiated a movement of “let the whole population exercise” (全民健身). Part of the initiative is to build many public outdoor light exercise “gyms,” with stuff like parallel bars, bench presses, ellipticals, chess presses, etc. (some pics here). Pretty much every residential community got at least one such free “gym” in the end. They immediately became public gathering grounds after dinner, a very fond part of my memory growing up. That’s what socialist sport could look like.
socialist sport is good.
capitalist sport is bad
this aint complicated. the superbowl is the greatest display of US fascism and consumerism you can witness, and i really cannot begrudge people hating on it.
The superbowl is fascism is my new favorite take on this site, narrowly beating out “bedtime is fascism” :che-laugh: :che-laugh: :che-laugh: :che-laugh:
the DoD spends millions of dollars on advertising every year at the NFL. this isn’t a mystery or revelation.
big expensive displays of nationalism are pretty fash, yo
Advertising is advertising. This guy is talking about the actual event being fascist. Also you can find displays of nationalism in every communist country. Using that to define something as “fascist” is not very smart. Do you clutch your pearls and scream brown shirts every time you see a military flyover?
All football is a blood ritual, the Superbowl isn’t special, although they really aren’t calling penalities, which sucks for the players.
risk of head injury = human sacrifices isn’t quite as funny as Superbowl = fascism but I gotta give you props it still made me laugh
20 years from now, in an even more explicitly fascist America: “Oh yeah sure, everything is fascism to you guys, huh? The weekly police marches? The public executions of dissidents? Immigrants disappearing into train carriages and never being seen again? How on earth are we gonna be taken seriously as a movement if we just say that everything around us is fascism? People will get tired of hearing that shit and you’ll just alienate them from your movement even more.”
What you say is true 100% but the point isnt about just hating on stuff like superbowl or capitalism ruining aspects of sports. The vast majority of consumption of , let alone participation in, sports by billions of working class people is still very far from being superbowl-ish. So generalized hate and mockery for “sportsball” or any positibility of it being good and positive even under capitalism that can be found as a reaction in the left and not towards specific consumerist domination and capitalist corruption of it examplified by extremes like superbowl makes you indeed seem like an edgy unlikable new atheist
capitalism making sport horrible is in most the US pre high school i serioisly contest the assertion most of sport is proletarian
Yeah it seems like the explicit purpose of a lot of competitive sports in the US is to make people compete with each other and create anger. It reinforces the whole capitalist competition narrative that everyone needs to constantly be in conflict with each other, whether that’s competing companies or entire countries or fellow humans.
I scream when I see sports. I pace my house and I fucking scream until sports stops.
Actually as a kid we had a game called Runny Screamy where everyone would line up and scream as loud as possible while running forward and if you stopped screaming to breathe you had to stop and the round was won by whoever ran the furthest on one scream
lmao shut up ball nerd :farquaad-point:
