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WE HATE SPORTS
AanAllein:
Yeah I would dispute that teaching sports encourages people to be competitive. I hated sports at school, and barely participated in pretty much any sports class you could name for the majority of my formative years, but I am one competitive motherfucker. A lot of my competition at school went into trying to be the best academically (including at art! and music!), now it tends to be funneled into card games. So, I would agree with BB that expunging sports teaching from schools would do little or nothing to affect how competitive people are. Maybe they might channel it into something other than sport, if you're very lucky?
And the valuing "mindless things" is pretty laughable (though I'm sure you're aware of this Khar) since anyone could just easily extend that argument to music or art if they consider them to be mindless things. For one, I'm quite disappointed that my school doesn't offer much of a sports program, since the students there are generally less motivated and involved with the community (working in a team encourages this!) than at schools where students are involved in sports programs. Of course, this would also be true of debating competitions, dance competitions etc, but the more opportunities for a diverse range of students, the better.
0bsessions:
--- Quote from: Ptommydski on 03 Oct 2009, 11:29 ---Damn, it's now taking all my energy not to make a WE HATE SPATS thread too.
--- End quote ---
Do it and I swear to god I will make a WE SPAT HATE thread. You've been warned.
Alex C:
I think people need to give khar some benefit of the doubt here too, because in all honesty, the way many people defend sports is often quite asinine. (Calm down people, I'm not talking about anyone here). The fact of the matter is that society values sport in a way that can't really be quantified or justified in purely economic terms, yet a surprising number of people insist on trying to do so anyway, often bending the truth to make the stand. It's rather akin to the way creationists fall back on intelligent design rather than cede the field completely despite the fact that there's not much empirical they can fall back on. It's an emotional issue for many people since there's a lot of pride and tradition wrapped up in these things.
For example, a lot of people in Chicago are rather bummed they aren't going to be hosting the Olympic Games. But a lot of people are also quite happy about it because nobody wanted to get stuck footing the bill. Now, perhaps you can cite the economic impact estimates that claim that hosting the Olympics would bring in serious revenue, but post Super Bowl and Olympic Games studies show that these benefits rarely if ever happen, and they certainly aren't enough to offset the enormous initial expense of meeting IOC facility standards or building high end NFL stadium. At the end of the day, you have a bunch of people opposing the idea by saying "No, we could be doing so much more," while the supporters counter with numbers they more or less pulled directly out of their ass. I won't argue with the effectiveness of such tactics, but it'd probably a lot more intellectually honest if people just came out and said "You know what? Fuck you, the games are going to be awesome."
Bastardous Bassist:
I'm only defending college sports based on economics. The funny thing is that I don't really care for college sports. It's just a subject I've given lots of thought and realized that it actually kind of makes sense. I'll never try to defend professional sports on an economic level. That would be incredibly foolish.
Alex C:
Yeah, my greater point really comes down to the idea that the things that we value are not always producers of more value, or, at least not in any easily demonstrated economic sense. Even if a sports franchise generates a lot of revenue for itself we're still at best redistributing people's disposable income. In the case of college programs you're just shifting money from people with spare time and money to an institution that hopefully should be able to do some good with the funds. Some people might argue that it'd be more efficient to eliminate sports and convince people to devote the resources and energy straight to the institutions without the stadium building, gatorade chugging middlemen. Good luck trying to get that idea past the Libertarians and paleoconservatives.
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