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It’s important for us libertarians to celebrate the fun that free people have and the good that they do, and not just to bitch about politics.
Natalija Radic is handling pornography very capably, I’m sure we’d all agree. Dale Amon and I have done stuff about music. Science and technology have been celebrated here, by both David Carr and Perry de Havilland.
But sport is one of life’s great pleasures, both to do and to watch others doing. Yet sport has here mostly been complained about, by David again, picking on a sport he doesn’t like.
Last weekend’s sport was, for me, mostly good, but it started badly. I awoke on Saturday to learn from my Ceefax that England had just been slaughtered in a one-day cricket game by New Zealand. Was this an omen? At Twickenham later in the day, England were to play Ireland at rugby and experts were tipping England to win heavily. But Ireland killed Wales two weeks back, and the last time heavily-tipped England played Ireland, Ireland won. Might they sneak it again? No worries. England routed Ireland with a huge first half display (31-6) and went on to win 45-11 despite appearing to lose interest with half an hour still to go.
With this win England went top of the world rugby rankings, jumping ahead of … New Zealand! I can remember when England couldn’t lose at cricket to New Zealand in their worst nightmares, and couldn’t win at rugby against New Zealand in their wildest dreams. The New Zealand rugby team, remember, is no mere gaggle of sporty blokes who happen to like a bit of rough-and-tumble on a Saturday afternoon. This is the mighty All Blacks, the very definition of New Zealand nationhood and manhood. And now England are better than them. But worse at cricket. Strange times.
Chelsea, the club which plays the sport (football) which David Carr does like to watch, were meanwhile beating Depressing Northern Town Who Used To Be Far Better 3-1 in the sixth round of the FA Cup, and on Sunday my Tottenham Hotspur beat Post-Industrial Wasteland Rovers 4-0. Chelsea and Spurs were then drawn against each other in the quarter-finals. I’ll keep you posted about that, and perhaps David will too.
On a more serious note, I’m struck by the parallels between what David was objecting to about the Olympics and what Natalija’s opponents were saying about pornography. Both were opposing the thing in question because of what it looked like, and what it might lead to. Porn is sometimes faked up to look like something truly nasty – non-consenting sexual aggression – and hence might lead to that truly nasty thing for real. And sport often looks like Nazis being nasty, so what might that lead to?
But isn’t the point of sport that it takes a whole facet of the human psyche (especially the male human psyche) and sucks it into a morally neutral cul-de-sac with no real-world consequences? Those athletes marching through the stadium with their flags and anthems, or those fans baying in hideous, collectivist unison may be behaving a lot like Nazis, but they are not in fact Nazis. Sports fans like me talk about people getting “slaughtered”, “routed” or “murdered” (see above), but that’s only metaphorical. No actual countries are going to be invaded. No Jews are going to be gassed. Okay, sport plays with psychological fire, and sometimes it gets out of hand. In South America, footballers miss crucial World Cup penalties and get murdered by crazed fans. In Britain, unpleasant political collectivists spend their lives trying to turn the pseudo-mayhem of football into the real thing. But the real-world mayhem that results is nothing compared to the horrors of big-time political collectivism, in those miserable parts of the world where such stuff still matters.
In the fantasies of collectivist politicians, huge crowds shouting in huge stadiums only shout in their honour. Such persons must hear the roars in a British football stadium with something close to despair. They slog away at organising their silly political meetings and party rallies, and at most a few hundred political hacks and obsessives show up. Yet thousands turn out for a dreary, lower division football game. The biggest crowd in Europe in recent years was in Paris, but it wasn’t for any politician; it was when France won the World Cup.
I believe that in Iran not long ago, the government made a collective, collectivist fool of itself by trying and failing to stop an international football match. Too much collective adoration of something that wasn’t them or their boring and annoying opinions, you see. Sport only gets political if the politicians take against its essentially non-political nature, or try to use it by pretending that the crowds are really theirs. Wise politicians, even collectivist ones, leave well alone. At least, they say to themselves, the crowds aren’t shouting against us. (Might that be why some libertarians also dislike sport? Big crowds expressing hostility to the wrong things?)
Most sports fans know that sport is only sport. They go mad, scream at each other, smash into each other (if they’re playing), … and then meet up for a drink afterwards. It may look nasty for the duration, but it’s only a bit of fun, to be wallowed in when your team wins and shrugged off as only a game when they lose. We’re just blowing off steam. It’s not real. Well, it is real. In fact it’s great. It’s great fun. But only, in the end, that.
Which is exactly the libertarian defence of pornography. That too only has a tiny few nasty real-world consequences. Mostly that too is just fun.
With sport as with porn, we libertarians should draw our lines carefully. On the one hand, there is that which merely looks evil, might lead to evil, might evoke memories of evil, might lead people down the path towards evil, and which is perhaps therefore in some sense morally evil now. We can argue about the nuances of all that, but no one should be sent to prison if they lose such arguments. And then there’s that which is uncontroversially, aggressively, definitely evil, now, which should be prevented or failing that be punished, either by the law or by force of arms.
I refuse to end on that grim note. To end instead with some more consequence-free fun and to ram home just how much fun sport can be, let me tell you what my sporting highlight of the weekend ended up being. It happened not in a rugby game, or a football or cricket game, but in David’s accursed Winter Sports. The however-many-metres-it-was five blokes’ skating race. Four blokes were racing in a bunch for the medals. Bloke five, an Australian, was way behind. Then, just as they were all about to flash over the winning line, blokes one, two, three and four all collided with each other in a crazy, slip-sliding tangle. Bloke five, being far enough behind to skate around it all, but not too far behind, won. The silver and bronze medallists got their gongs by sliding over the line horizontally. David would surely have enjoyed that and maybe he did.
Fellow Samizdata contributor and cunning shyster to the cognoscenti David Carr has written recently and at length why he dislikes the Olympics and I agree with some of his remarks.
However I do not find the Olympics entirely without its attractions…
Catriona LeMay
Despite my best efforts to filter out the Olympics, the bru-haha about the Skating Gold Medal has managed to show up as a blip on my radar screen. If I have got this straight, a Russian pair was awarded the Gold and a Canadian pair the silver only that seems to have outraged the whole world for some reason (there is a war on, you know) so a gaggle of IOC apparatchicks went into a furious round of secret investigations and deals were made in various smoke-free rooms and, voila, now the Canadians have the Gold medal instead. Apparently the judges got it all wrong
Which leads me to a question: how does anybody know?
First of all, skating is not a sport. It is a hobby; a genteel pastime, especially when it’s called ‘Ice Dance’ which is skating for homosexuals
Secondly, how does anybody know who ‘won’? In football, Team A scores more goals then Team B. Simple. Team A has won. In Boxing, Fighter A is parading around the ring holding a belt while Fighter B is being carried out feet first. Fighter A has won. In swimming, Swimmer A makes his way across the pool quicker then Swimmer B. No arguments; Swimmer A has won
Now skating: Couple A does some circles, triple salkos and pirhouettes. Couple B does some circles, triple salkos and pihouettes. And the winner is…??????
One of my one of my overriding concerns over the next couple of weeks is to avoid any TV coverage of the latest outbreak of ‘Olympic-itis’ from Salt Lake City. The last thing I want to do with what little and precious spare time I have at the moment is to spend it watching a bunch of po-faced fitness fanatics running up and down mountains and listening to a wailing selection of national anthems most of which sound like Turkey’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.
That’s what it all feels like to me: Eurovision on steroids, which is ironic given the Cromwellian intolerance of the IOC for any of their participants swallowing so much as a paracetamol lest it give any of them an ‘unfair advantage’. But I say let them take all the steroids they like. Who cares if they grow horns? In fact, let them grow six titties, four sets of genitals, a spare arse and a third leg. At least it would make the relay races interesting and that I would pay to see.
Short of that I think I’ll pass because former footsoldiers of the East German secret police dressed in sequin jumpsuits and doing triple-salkos is the very antithesis of my idea of entertainment and is it just me or is there something disturbingly reminiscent of the Nuremburg Rallies in those torchlit opening ceremonies? For sure the sight of all those glowing hopefuls being paraded around in their humiliating ‘national costumes’ with a ‘Strength-Through-Joy’ grin on their faces has a jumper-over-the-head factor of about 50. Those about to die of embarrassment, salute you!
I suppose it would be extravagantly churlish of me not to mention the transformation of Olympic events from taxpayer boondoggle to corporate sponsor-fest which, at least, has put a stop to the bankrupting of cities in which the spandex-circus was unfortunate enough to land. In those days they were not so much athletes as locusts in lycra, devastating a whole landscape before buggering off and leaving behind grand white-elephant stadia like monuments of a long lost race.
But corporatisation has had the unfortunate side-effect of morphing the games from dull and condescending expressions of post-war aspiration to multi-culti clappy-happy jamborees in which we are all supposed to enthusiastically join in North Korean style.
The Olympic Games are an expression of 20th century state collectivism; the manifestation of a time when ‘golden youth’ had to have spiffing lungs and rippling muscles in order to be productive citizens, a healthy individual meant a healthy polity and a nations worth could be accurately measured by how far its citizens could chuck a rock. The fact that the British usually collect less medals than an average French combat division is one of the many reason why I love this country.
The Olympic Games is an idea that has outlived its usefulness. At best it is arcane, at worst it is faintly sinister and, even if it were neither of those things, it would still be a dreary, nauseating waste of time.
Ah, those famous lines from the Stealer’s Wheel. Brendan Nyhan over on American Prospect drew my attention to the fact that Ted Kennedy was not the only one making a total ass of himself over the meaning of a game of American football.
Now there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was actually witty and insightful, hell I went to see his show live once in New York some years back. Yet after listening to his radio remarks (available via the Brendan Nyhan article linked above) I am forced to the conclusion that Rush has finally completed his journey from right wing punditry’s doyen to its doofus. I guess the bailiffs must have come calling and repossessed that ‘talent on loan from God’.
Limbaugh contends that because the Patriots Football Team market themselves to ‘the soccer mom’s season ticket base’ as a team rather than by emphasising the individual players, then the Patriots are in fact ‘socialist’. Never mind that it is just a capitalist marketing ploy and never mind that socialism is a political system in which the means of production, including labour, are controlled by the state (unlike a voluntary football team of millionaire players).
And so there we have it: Rush Limbaugh and Edward Kennedy in agreement as to what the Patriots Football Team actually represents. Two of a kind: a brotherhood of absurdity, spouting fallacies that must surely reduce anyone who actually knows what the word socialist really means to either stunned silence or embarrassed laughter.
Perry (below) makes reference to the idiotic comments of US Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) — the folks at Best of the Web have also had some fun with this one — see today’s Stupidity Watch. But this is not the first time that Kennedy botched a sports analogy with an absurd malapropism. In 1998, he managed to refer to fellow Democrats Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle as “the Sammy Sooser [sic] and Mike McGwire [sic!]” of politics during a campaign stump session. (For our European readers, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire play baseball, a distant cousin of cricket played by men in pajamas.)
Kennedy’s staffers must hand him this stuff — he probably didn’t know his constituent team had won the Super Bowl until his interns told him — but what is more disturbing is his suggestion that we are fighting against “individualism.” I am still trying to think of a single aspect of OBL’s ideology that favors individual rights over collectivism. And, as Perry astutely observes, the New England players honed their skills and negotiated their robust contracts in a spirit of self interest, not “sacrifice to a greater cause.”
One word for you, Senator: O’Doul’s!
Honourless buffoon Senator Ted Kennedy read into the Congressional Record, as a result of a sports event, the following example of breathtaking absurdity.
”At a time when our entire country is banding together and facing down individualism, the Patriots set a wonderful example, showing us all what is possible when we work together, believe in each other, and sacrifice for the greater good.”
And so we are lead to believe that a voluntary collaboration of free individuals, working for personal profit, a great deal of profit at that, is a rejection of individualism and an affirmation of collectivism. And what exactly are these sportsmen supposed to have ‘sacrificed’ in the course of their highly paid jobs?
[Update: Mickey Kaus has also picked up on this nincompoopery]
[Updated update: I am glad to see everyone and their brother in the blogosphere has picked up on this floridly ludicrous rant by the dishonourable ‘gentleman’ from Massachusetts]
Editors note: you need to read this carefully in order to ‘get it’
From Reporter J Baxter, Boston (BS NewsNetwork)
The Boston Celtics announced today they have signed a new power forward after several trial workouts. Standing tall is 6′ ‘7″ power forward Sam Ladenson, who demonstrated explosive charges through the paint, and a distinct ability to draw crucial fouls. Contract details are expected to be ironed out by the end of the day.
Celtic General Manager Red Auerbach said Ladenson is a triple threat–a mixture of Bob Cousy’s ball handling skills, weaving through bigger men almost unseen, Havlicek with his stop short 20 foot jumper, and Bill Russell, who could take on the big men in the middle whenever necessary. Auerbach envisions Ladenson’s presence permitting the Celtic’s leading scorer, Paul Pierce, to take more uncontested shots inside the three point stripe.
Celtic officials indicate Ladenson may well get some playing minutes during Tuesday’s game in New York. Remarked one team official—“It is not often such talent just appears out of nowhere.” Ladenson has traveled with various European and Central Asian teams, but apparently decided to give the NBA a shot. Overseas he was known for his ability to disappear until a critical big shot was needed.
Ladenson’s agent – M. L. O’Marr – well-known for having a singular keen eye for unusual and special talent, said negotiations are underway with the Celtic brass for a partial year contract, and a contract extension option for the 2002-03 season and beyond. O’Marr said Ladenson was looking to put down permanent roots. The team’s press agent did indicate that Ladenson had one contract stipulation—that he would be joining the Palestinian Olympic team for the Summer games. O’ Marr expected such contract details to be minor concerns, and predicted his client would fare well in the negotiations.
The Celtics, currently a half-game behind the New Jersey Nets, are making their first serious run at the Eastern Division title since the departure of Rick Pitino to the college ranks. Celtic scouts have privately conceded that Ladenson may expect trouble in the middle from the game’s biggest man in Shaquille O’Neil, but O’Marr was quick to point out Ladenson’s quick moves when surrounded.
Ladenson was not available for comment.
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