@The Handle: I agree with you on almost all things there but this:
They have started wars on footbal.
I get the feeling that you find gratuitous hatefulness to be an okay thing to have around?
I don't discriminate against football specifically; you brought up the Barça. I am not compelled by competitive sports in general. They seem to promote esoteric skills that are otherwise useless in Real Life. Those skills are optimized for through unethical, inhumane efforts, and many such competitions run on "it's not cheating unless you get caught". The games are often zero sum, so that when someone wins, everyone else loses. As such, they manufacture losers and failures in far greater numbers than they do winners and successes. As the limits of human potential are reach in every specific field, successive margins of improvement become smaller and smaller, which seems like we're hitting diminishing returns on the efforts and resources invested in those improvements. And they are cheered on with the unreserved enthusiasm that people feel so easily when no action will be required from them personally.
When I give an artist or a scientist money to help fund their work, I don't take pride in their victories. I take pride in having given them money, and maybe, if I'm feeling particularly smug, in having chosen the recipients of my generosity (such as it is) with good judgement. Because that's all I did.
When a country's Olympic team wins a medal, I question the resulting feeling of pride from the team's fellow citizens, who have contributed even less to that success than sports clubs' teams' fans have contributed to theirs. Conversely, the success of either kind of team does not reflect on the value, the goodness, the excellence of either fans or fellow citizens.
At best, it reflects on their wealth, and how much priority they place on allocating resources for sports (or just the team's specific sport), neither of which I feel are motives from which to derive a sense of greatness.
Furthermore, such a sense of greatness is derived at the expense of that of other countries... although, thankfully, that's mitigated by the Sour Grapes effect of countries being the most interested in the sports they win the most.
In general, I find that, while cheering for one's own success is fine, the mentality of cheering for another's loss is repulsive and harmful, and competitive systems should be reset in such a way that they don't incentivise this.
Good point. But when the pissers start getting blood heated in a pot and poured into their veins beforehand in order to piss a fraction of a milimeter further than the next drugged-up pissant, and when people have literal heart attacks
depending on the results and/or bet dramatic amounts of money on it, we may have a systemic problem in our hands, and perhaps should start re-thinking the concept from scratch and come up with something that doesn't lead to that.
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Well, yeah. The way my fellow individuals of African descent will stop using that word to casually refer to each other, I will be happy indeed. I swear, every time I hear it, my chest aches a little. Who in the world wants to think of themselves as a "nigger", instead of just a "man".
edited 12th Mar '15 8:20:01 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.It simply sounds too far fetched to forsake the differences between history and "story". What you describe as "story" sounds more like "the excuse I made up to be able to get away with X behavior".
In that case what you want to get rid of is not the excuse, but the need to do the shit behavior in the first place. "yeah. Don't kill that guy or punch him in the face" "But he is an X! And X is evil!" "Yeah, I don't care. Don't."
It is of course not as simple as that because there is a lot more that leads a guy or a group to decide on the systematic death or oppression or ostracism of another group than simply "I wanna get away with this", but simply removing the excuse they make up for it is not going to change anything.
They are just going to make up another.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes![]()
Cite honestly, or don't cite at all. From the link you gave in support of the claim that football started a war.
From the rest of your post:
What use in "real life" is being an opera singer? Or writing poetry? Or learning to play an instrument? Plenty of things that people do for pleasure are "otherwise useless in real life".
edited 12th Mar '15 8:49:42 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der Partei![]()
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To be fair, The Football War was more of a culmination of issues. The final drop of water and all that.
Still, I can agree that it was sadly used as an excuse to go to war.
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'd
edited 12th Mar '15 8:49:28 AM by Quag15
Of course we should seek to eliminate or at least mitigate abuses as much as possible. But abolishing something outright is throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Mastery over voice is extremely useful in communication, and so is mastery over language and wording. Musical instruments are likewise useful at social gatherings, especially the evening sort, be it with a casual guitar or a grand piano. I should know, I do all three (choir instead of opera, I'm not that good), and they have served me well. I wish I could say the same about all those hours I spent learning to foot the ball.
As for hoolinganism, it seems less a matter of minorities and more a systematic outcome. Back when I lived in a college dorm, we had just started an inter-college-dorm championship. It doesn't get smaller and pettier as far as football competitions go. Yet there they were, slandering the opposing team and their dorm, calling all their girls bitches and all their men pussies, and fights broke so often, the league was cancelled by the authorities. And these aren't your Lower-Class Lout types; we're talking about educated kids, who should know of better ways to express themselves.
You know, I actually said to them, "if what you actually want to do is fight and vent, why don't we start a Fight Club?" I got that "What a dreamer!" indulgent, condescending look that people give me when I propose an idea that is perceived as desirable but utopic and impractical. The sort with which the answer to "Why not?" is "I dunno, man..."
To be precise, I don't advocate for abolition or prohibition. That's impractical and unnatural. What I suggest is questioning the fundamental cultural underpinnings of the problems, which are part of the system of rewards and deterrents that can perpetuate or extinguish the problems.
When a Zionist says "the segregation and oppression of Palestinians in Israel should continue in order to keep Judaism united and stop Jews from assimilating into humanity and disappearing as such", I really have to question what makes "the continuation of Judaism" so important that it's worth inflicting all this suffering and pain on other people (and expending a great deal of resources and moral capital in doing so!).
edited 12th Mar '15 9:19:21 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.What, and physical fitness, discipline, and teamwork aren't useful? Get a grip. There's also the implication that something must be "useful" - as arbitrarily defined by you - in order for it to be worthwhile, which is false. Besides, football is useful at social gatherings, both as a topic of conversation or a fun activity. Perhaps not among your sophisticated social millieu, but your limited horizons aren't my problem.
Neither is the bad behaviour of your college-mates, but then - its college. It's always going to be full of immaturity and stupidity, "educated kids" or not.
edited 12th Mar '15 9:24:58 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der ParteiStay civil.
What discipline? How does football teach about delayed gratification better than a book? I've certainly never seen an amateur football team show discipline, or teamwork for that matter. At school, I was treated like an insane revolutionary for suggesting that we actually have a formation and assigned roles in our team; instead, everyone competed to be the one to score the goals, and made pointless shows of juggling with the ball which got them the ball stolen or the goal missed (by a WIDE margin) more often than not.
The rude behaviour seems hardly exclusive of college, because I've seen it abundantly among younger kids and older grownups alike, not to mention working boys of college age. It's mostly universally and evenly distributed among football fans. The interesting factor to look at here is not demographics, but eras; the violence and crudity of football fandoms seems to have changed with the times a great deal. From The Other Wiki's article on Football Hooliganism:
Writing for the BBC, David Bond stated that in the UK, "[h]igh-profile outbreaks of violence involving fans are much rarer today than they were 20 or 30 years ago. The scale of trouble now compared to then doesn't bear comparison - either in terms of the number of people involved or the level of organisation. Football has moved on thanks to banning orders and better, more sophisticated policing. And while it is too simplistic to say that the higher cost of watching football has pushed unsavoury elements out, there has been a shift in the way people are expected to behave inside grounds. Offensive chants are still way too commonplace but actual fighting doesn't happen very often."[14]
The other factor is whether this is unique to football. Is it? What similar phenomena are there in other sports?
Arguably
. If you disagree with my definitions of usefulness (what are they, though?), that is also open to discussion.
edited 12th Mar '15 9:57:55 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.It seems to me like you are confusing social gatherings for entertainment (Amateur football, in the example) to professional environments of sports (Chelsea, Barcelona, etc).
No one goes to play a casual game with friends to obey a stringent set of rules, but if one wants to set themelves up to be a professional they must abide by certain rules.
Another object of sports and teams and such can simply be leisure. You can love football all you want but you cannot play football without an opposing team. And that a fan of one team gets pissed off at a fan of the other team because they are of the other team is not an inherent problem of the team...just of that fucker.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesAnd yet everything encourages them to cheat around those rules, because the rules themselves make it a sensible tactical choice, from exaggerating the appearance of injury to insulting and abusing opposing players when the arbiter isn't watching. C'est la danse du coup de boule!
edited 12th Mar '15 10:04:49 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.My apologies if it is a crass statement but I find it curious that you would give a negative attribute to a culture when a few posts ago you mentioned having a dream of defining countries and stuff not by the elements of its past but by how they behaved then. Defining a culture with some trait as negative as "cheating"...is that not setting up expectations on their behavior which is what is more likely to lead to intolerance in the first place?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesYou have a point, but I'm not saying the cheating is inherent to the culture, merely that it happens to be a current feature of it. It is certainly the case in my land of birth, where the State has set up the law in such a way that it is impossible to obey, that cheating is indispensable to get anything done, and that everyone is thus entirely vulnerable to the State's prosecution whenever it needs an excuse to oppress and arrest. Civic sentiment and dutifulness are systematically discouraged, while crass bourgeois materialism is relentlessly encouraged. Corruption runs rampant, and, if it weren't for it, government officials wouldn't eat.
In that context, when you see a player of the team you support cheat, he isn't ruining the game, he's instead braving the authorities and their inconvenient rules in order to give you the victory you deserve. If the player of the other team does it, then he's a vile, vile scumbag. Arbiters are similarly accused of being "sold" to the other team when they grant them the penalties, while when they do it for your team and the cause is dubious, you don't look the gift horse in the mouth, and take every advantage you can get.
The day I see fans booing their own players for foul play, rather than the arbiter for calling it, is a day I shall feel very happy indeed. Seriously, if there's footage of that EVER happening, I'd love to see it.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.But, see, my point is that the behavior that is deemed terrible is already condemned by the institution that restricts it (Football associations).
That fans support it for their means, or that players use it for their means, that is not inherent to the sports, or the team, but to the persons who behave like that. In this case, the fans, and the specific player. Otherwise everyone in the world ever forever would cheat. This is not the case. Correlation does not imply causation.
Otherwise it is still generalizing.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesHandle, the problem with your argument that sports skills aren't "otherwise useful in real life" is that the skills these people are honing ARE VITAL TO THE JOB THEY'RE TRYING TO MAKE A LIVING OFF OF, which IS REAL LIFE. Just because you don't like the value they have doesn't confer actual lack of value to these skills. Considering that sports and competition (which also isn't inherently bad) is a billions of dollars a year industry world wide, I'd say that those skills do indeed have real life importance. Because our modern society is set up in such a way as to make those skills relevant and profitable to those that can master them.
Also, competition? Does indeed promote cooperation in team sports. Competitors have to learn to work with their coaches and teammates, and to respect their competitors. Fans being assholes just means people need to learn how not to be assholes, not that competition is somehow unhealthy. It really seems like you're dissing on sports because you personally dislike the fact that sports exist as a thing. Hell, it doesn't even seem like you like people playing games with friends at this point.
And as to your "dreaming of a world without race" commentary. There's the unfortunate problem of the statement frequently coming with the whitest, straightest, malest interpretation of that concept where others are expected to downplay or hide anything that makes them not these things. People wanting to be proud of things that they are isn't something that should be disallowed, but probably would with this concept and frequently is denied to be a problem with people thinking this.
edited 12th Mar '15 12:37:35 PM by AceofSpades
I am not white, and I couldn't say "I'm straight" with a straight face. The version of the concept that I suggest doesn't require that anyone downplay or hide anything. It only suggests that people be accepted for who they are as free individuals.
No, there's a big show of respecting competitors because that's what looks nice, but I've never seen a sincere case of Friendly Rival in my life, outside of science and academics, and even then that's a rarity. You'll find a mathematician hating that one guy from across the world who independently published a proof for the theorem he was working in before he did.
Cooperation that requires a common enemy to exist is, as far as I'm concerned, worthless from a moral standpoint; just another iteration of tribalism, sectarianism, and us-against-them.
No, I'm pretty sure people being assholes is a function of their environment encouraging it with a badly-designed (or deliberately-designed) system of incentives and deterrents. People are put into roles, and go on to fall into the character and attitude and narrative that the roles demand.
Any system where everyone has to lose for one person/team to win is unhealthy, as it outputs a lot more misery than it does satisfaction.
I'm perfectly fine with non-competitive martial arts, human-tower-building
and other such exhibitions, cheerleading, deep sea diving, hiking, cycling (as a method of transportation and tourism; the Tour
, Vuelta, and Giro are shameful spectacles), horseback riding (again, as a method of transportation), and so on and so forth. I'm all for people improving their fitness, their reflexes, their health. If it doesn't involve fighting enemies, good. If it involves an actual useful skill that you can use to do non-sport stuff, good. If it doesn't, well, at least there's the health benefits.
Of course, there's sports that give little health benefits and no useful skills, and are very competitive, like golf. Golf sucks.
EDIT: I have just been told that there is such a thing a friendly rivalry in sports, and given the examples of Le Bron James and Kevin Durant, or Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, or Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I'm glad to learn that they exist. I love it when people can still respect and love each other even when they're in each other's way.
edited 12th Mar '15 2:15:29 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Here's the time Hearts beat our local rivals the vermin Methadone FC the Hobos H1b5 Hibernian FC 5-1 in the Scottish Cup final. Yeah, I was very proud that day.
If it ultimately contributes to our - what was it? - "tribalism, sectarianism, and us-against-them" - then do you know what? I can live with that.
Because watching your team winning the Scottish Cup is fucking awesome.
edited 12th Mar '15 2:35:54 PM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der ParteiAnd is losing a game a terrible thing that traumatizes people? Would it be better if we made participation medals for everyone? Who is forcing people to participate in these games against their will?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesI would agree if the losing team was not being paid in a professional environment but seriously. What are they losing?
Listen, I hate pride as much as you do and I can understand why it is considered the most evil of sins, as how it can lead to some of the worst things in the world. But identification and competition is not a bad thing that inherently carries malicious practices...
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

I suppose that this would involve making every single racial term/word (including that infamous word that can only be said by the specific group which was previously the target of it) obsolete, and, in the process, destroying/erasing any impact or historical baggage it has or might have, right?
edited 12th Mar '15 8:03:12 AM by Quag15