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.
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.
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 mean i was more talking about the fact you have to pay for sport and it gets very expensive but competition is not necessarly a social good yeah
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:
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.”