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.

  • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
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    3 years ago

    capitalism making sport horrible is in most the US pre high school i serioisly contest the assertion most of sport is proletarian

    • blobjim [he/him]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Leper_Messiah [he/him]
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        3 years ago

        Do you think the entire concept of competitive sports only exist in capitalistic nations? I mean, baseball is pretty fuckin popular in Cuba and Venezuela for example. China loves basketball. I seem to remember that hockey was kind of a big deal in the USSR

      • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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