Originally posted by Redmikeexactly and footballis not a collective game and it causesseperatism through racila hierarchies,ie who is the best country. And what do they win ? A GOLD cup much like the Olympics where atheletes win a GOLD medal, gold is tainted with colonialism!
So, you think we should get rid of football, chess or any other activity which involves competition? Or maybe all chess games should be draws?
There are many different socialist thinkers and many different views on how socialism will come about and what it will look like. I've yet to come across any which advocate this bizarre idea.
We need to keep the ...[text shortened]... titive spirit, we just need to direct it towards collective gains rather than individual gains.
Originally posted by Vladamir no1OK, but football isn't the cause of these problems.
exactly and footballis not a collective game and it causesseperatism through racila hierarchies,ie who is the best country. And what do they win ? A GOLD cup much like the Olympics where atheletes win a GOLD medal, gold is tainted with colonialism!
You can resolve these problems and still have football and other sports.
Even if we no longer have countries, that doesn't mean we no longer have sport.
Even if we no longer use gold for medals and trophies, that doesn't mean we no longer have sport.
The way football is these days is just one small symptom of wider social problems. We need to fix these problems, not abolish one of the symptoms.
You all are a bunch of elitist sods that should really get out of your high horses and start to appreciate sports for what they are. Your caricatures of the average sports fan are completely xenophobic with slurs of racism and colonialism.
Here's something to chew on:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/05/21/the_art_of_sport/?page=full
So argues Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of literature at Stanford University, in his new book ''In Praise of Athletic Beauty" (Harvard). Gumbrecht laments that most contemporary academic analyses of ''sport" as a cultural phenomenon tend to be socially patronizing, dismissive of sports fans as having fallen for a modern-day version of the old bread and circus treatment. Such thinkers, he argues, ''find it difficult to admit that the fascination with sports can have respectable roots in the realm of aesthetic appeal" more typically associated with the so-called high arts. Conditioned to look for aesthetic pleasure in a concert hall or museum, we fail to recognize that watching a tense seventh game of the World Series (or a championship fight or a 100-meter dash) might be considered a legitimate aesthetic experience as well.
To ground his argument, Gumbrecht turns to that staple of sports bar disputation, Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Judgment." At the center of Kant's writings on aesthetics is his conception of the ''beautiful" as paradoxically related to ''purposiveness." The paradox, as recounted by Gumbrecht, is that although ''something does not need to have a purpose in order to be beautiful. . .whatever we find beautiful looks as if it had a purpose." A triple axel or bicycle kick or 6-4-3 double play clearly have no function outside the arena or off the field. And yet, writes Gumbrecht, such actions give a distinct ''impression of purposiveness." They are beautiful to behold because they appear both carefully calibrated and perfectly natural.”