Not exaggerating when I say this comic was the cultural version of a war crime

I wonder how old people with takes like this are.

If you grew up before 2010 and nerd culture you would realize that liking sports was not optional. You were mocked as gay. You couldn't keep up in small talk with your boss and would get passed over for promotion. It was mandatory to watch sports or you would be stigmatized. There was eventually pushback to that hegemony via the "sportsball" meme and mocking sports for being silly. Everyone seems to have forgotten how oppressive and toxic American sports culture was (and continues to be, schools are still getting gutted to make way for more football shit. Stadiums are still built with slave labor. Now it just makes you a "loser" instead of a "f**" to hate sports but the toxic masculinity underlying it is still there as you can see even in this thread)

for growing up with same shit i did. I hope that it has changed enough for people to not get it, but i kind of doubt its changed that much. Just unexamined patriarchy
- i think the person I'm replying to isn't American, which probably shows where the difference is coming from. It is possible for most sports to have a healthy place in society, and in different countries they may have struck the balance a bit better I don't know. But in the USA it's absolutely absurd the amount that people who worship sports and sacrifice people's health and educations on the pedestal of a game, and it's very sad how many poor kids grow up thinking its their only avenue out of poverty - destroying their bodies and forsaking their educations for a 0.01% chance at becoming a pro player. Americans overall act like everything is normal and fine, but it's not. Sports need a serious reckoning and they need a complete divorce from schools and heavy, heavy taxation to remove a lot of the profit that creates perverse incentives.
  
  If we could have publicly funded sports broadcasts without ads that didn't make any profit, that would be one step for progress. Another would of course be to create a publicly funded youth sports program that is entirely divorced from schools and colleges, their funds entirely disentangled and separate, that would be another step. I'm fine with sports existing, but right now they are a parasitic growth. College sports need to be banned in all public schools across the board. Get rid of sports scholarships, make them illegal, and make public colleges free.
I grew up before 2010 and you are being more than a little melodramatic about this.
- melodramatic
  
  Would you say I'm being a bit theatrical? A bit fruity? A bit hysterical? lmao you aren't helping your case that this is toxic masculinity being enforced
  
  Treatbrained concern trolls often need to frame people they disagree with as emotionally unstable, mentally ill, or female/queer coded weak and they may not even consciously do it.
  
  Being obsessed with sports and destroying all other aspects of social life and replacing it with sports is normal and the baseline. Questioning that? Wow, what are you a GIRL? A FREAKING WIMP?!?
  
  It's NOT NORMAL and it EMBARRASSES LEFTISM. You need to TOUCH GRASS and by that I mean consume sports treats on the screen.
  
  It’s funny cause usually people see how nonsensical the “let people enjoy things” angle is, but when it comes to sports we now have to let people enjoy them even though there’s demonstrable social harm attached. I haven’t even touched on how interwoven militarism and nationalism are in sports either. There’s so many angles to come at this from because American sports culture is so uniquely fucked up
  
  But according to treat defending verions of crude sophistically-applied materialist theory, everyone in the world would be exactly the same way and do the exact same actions whether they were watching a soccer game or collecting stamps. Hooligan riots would be stamp collector riots in an alternate dimension
  
  Stamp collector riots
  
  Never stop posting
  
  to you @ProxyTheAwesome@hexbear.net Just enjoyed this exchange as a fellow 80's kid who lived through and hated sports being forced on kids. It's really depressing to see some of these takes
- and you are being more than a little melodramatic
  
  I grew up in the 80s and your concern trolling is tinged with residual misogyny/homophobia that's so watered down that you maybe don't see it yourself.
- I also grew up in the 80s and 90s and Ulysses is 100% correct and it was often times even worse.

My resentment towards sports comes from being good at sports as a kid, so I got a ton of pressure from a bunch of boomer dads, sucking any fun that once existed out of sports for me. I nonetheless kept playing sports until middle school (because I was scared of my dads reaction if I didn’t want to play sports anymore) when the pressure started coming from my peers in addition to my parents and coaches. There was so much pressure on us to be good at sports that kids would thrown tantrums and get in fights if they lost a pickup basketball game. If I wanted to goof off a bit or just not try so hard just playing pickup basketball I’d have a couple of my “friends” start yelling at me giving me shit for trying to have a little fun. The atmosphere around sports was so toxic, I remember the fights and the arguments when some of us made the school basketball team and others didn’t. By 7th grade I had enough of an independent streak (and was sick enough of my “friends”) that I quit baseball tryouts halfway through. My dad didn’t speak to me for like 2 months after that.

I wish I had stuck with sports I really do (and I wish I didn’t quit just to do drugs all day in high school) but when everyone around you is a toxic asshole who sucks all the fun out of it it’s hard to. I like competition, but when you have kids breaking down crying and throwing tantrums when they lose a simple pickup game I think it’s gone too far. Sports culture is extremely sick in the United States and “sportsball” is a cringe term, but sports culture deserves most of the hate it gets.

Sports parents are truly the worst. The only good famous one that I can think of right now is Antony Hamilton. And even then, Lewis Hamilton still had to let go of him as his manager in 2011.
- Jos Verstappen intensifies
  
  The best role model for how not sport parent.

I think most people's resentment for sports, if you asked them, comes from their connection to gender norms, and how kids who aren't interested in sports are treated by society as freaks who need to be policed into liking the appropriate gender coded activities. I suppose that also extends to people who for whatever reason weren't fortunate to be good enough at sports that they were picked last.

Either way the issue isn't that they werent good at it or weren't interested - its the gendered stigmatization that comes with it.

Perhaps that's changed or isn't as extreme now as it was. But, most peoples issue that grew up when i did comes from the reaction from society at large for not liking the enforced gender coded thing and being told whatever we liked instead was stupid or wrong and that we needed/were expected to like sports instead.

Yes and I also hate sports because of the macho “my team (us) vs. your team (you)” culture, like toxic masculinity and pseudo-nationalism wrapped into one.

Oh and I also how these guys that run around after a ball make tens of millions of dollars (and their investors) even more
- Eh, athletes are workers whose labor is still exploited by owners despite their large salaries. And don't forget about the exploitation of free labor at the college level and even lower because kids are competing and hurting their bodies to maybe one day make that money. I think that's the part that's worth being mad about, not that the few who make it get to make large salaries for years of wrecking their bodies
  
  Yeah, most athletes don't make even close to enough compared to the value they bring team owners. I can't feel bad for millionaires who play a game for a living, but I feel a hell of a lot more for them than billionaire owners who don't do shit.
  
  After writing my comment i'll just add a foreword that I know i'm hyperfocusing on pro-level sports and on the athletes that survived varying degrees of other evil shit they were subjected before they went pro
  
  athletes are workers whose labor is still exploited by owners despite their large salaries
  
  that's true, maybe i'm stuck in my ways with a reactionary take, but i don't know what can convince me to empathize with the exploited NHLers who earn (on average) over 60 times the median salary in Canada to play hockey, for example. or the golfers who earn more. or the soccer players who earn more. like i don't know any other way to feel but mad.
  
  Sure, they are exploited to some degree, but also they benefit to incredible lengths from the labour of everyone else that keeps their leagues and arenas and schedules running; and many of them pivot with ease into petit bourgeois (maybe i'm not using that right) roles with huge investment portfolios and business/brand deals. The only way their salaries from the league (and their earnings with brand deals) are so inflated are because they are being paid out from the surplus value of all those other labourers. For me, it's like feeling bad for A- and B-list Hollywood actors because their labour is exploited by movie execs, meanwhile the countless other staff that make movies possible earn literal pennies on the dollar.
  
  And from there I arrive at a weird thing about the bodily destruction that these sports and industries demand from players. Sports like football, MMA, boxing, and hockey are disgusting (imo) for the bodily destruction that they demand from athletes of all ages. Yet, the risks (or guarantees) of physical harm are never really factored into any wages.
  
  And don't forget about the exploitation of free labor at the college level and even lower because kids are competing and hurting their bodies to maybe one day make that money.
  
  that's also true. I think i overlooked that because we don't have the same college athletics culture in Canada. I generally forget about it until i get an from some coach telling me a student needs exemptions for a tourney lol. It's super gross that many young people are forced into harmful sports by parents or coaches in some odd hope that they will become a millionaire. I feel like that's all the more reason to oppose sports being like this billion-dollar industry and golden ticket to amassing intergenerational wealth.

I'm not fond of them because I never grew up with it and I don't understand having loyalty to a random North American city over another one. I don't watch much TV to begin with so that's another big barrier.

To your school point, I wish there had been more non-competitive alternatives. I thought I hated physical activity until I realized you can go portaging or on long bike trips, and work with your peers in an extensive environment instead of being pitted against them in a very mechanized ruleset on a very small court.

I love pushing my body to new limits and travelling ambitious distances in the woods. And now I'm not against a good game of ultimate or whatever with some buddies, but sitting down to watch "the game" is one of the most frightfully boring ways to spend an evening that I can think of.

I can watch a game especially in person, but the thing that really makes me wither and die is when people talk about the fucking probabilities of the success of teams over the course of the season and fucking picks and shit.

I thought it was because I just wasn't interested in football or whatever. But that's not it.

I really like video games and I often love watching someone playing a game in a fun or skilled way. But when someone starts talking about the fucking bracket some esports team made it to, I want to claw my fucking ears off. I don't care! Holy shit! If any of those games were a good watch, send me the vod or whatever. But don't talk to me about who's gonna win IEM Katowice or whatever. Fuck! What could be less interesting???

thats fucking ableist

Are you mad or just blowing your referee whistle?

TW: bullying, domestic violence

Only your parents might, potentially, hit you for failing math. You could beaten a lot for not liking sports. The fact that you are suggesting people don't like sports only because they are weak is a part of this.

Everyone has treats that they're biased towards and treats that they're biased against. In the end, I don't see how one set of treats (sports) is noticeably more harmful than another set of treats (movies, games, anime, YA novels). You could argue that a particular sports fandom like American football is very obviously more reactionary, fascist, jingoistic, and in general terrible than other sports fandoms or fandoms period, but sports as a whole? It's pop culture, and in a reactionary society, pop culture will always be some shade of reaction. Pop culture is a key component of the superstructure that socially reproduces reaction. You can't escape it.

I personally don't tap into pop culture these days, partly for the reason above, partly because I don't really get personal fulfillment out of pop culture, and partly because I realized that even if you share the same taste in pop culture as someone else, it doesn't actually help you socially and emotionally connect with them, so why bother? But I'm not going to stop rolling my eyes at some weeb or gamer making the same "sportball" joke while they gush over some slice-of-life anime or AAA game that nobody, including them, would remember in a year.

I don't see how one set of treats (sports) is noticeably more harmful than another set of treats

Lmao. My high school in town just laid off 10% of the teachers in the same year they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on new turf for the stadium. Sport culture in America is extremely toxic and harmful and has destroyed public institutions and education. Public education systems are being gutted and replaced with footballs. YA novels don't do this.
But I'm not going to stop rolling my eyes at some weeb or gamer making the same "sportball" joke while they gush over some slice-of-life anime or AAA game that nobody, including them, would remember in a year.

That's pretty much it yeah.

I realized that even if you share the same taste in pop culture as someone else, it doesn't actually help you socially and emotionally connect with them, so why bother?

I have the complete opposite experience. Formed quite a few friendships and even relationships by starting from common interests, like say talking about soccer. It's a good ice breaker. Even if you go outside of sports, were only on hexbear due to our shared interest in left wing politics.
- For me, the bonding comes more from shared experiences than shared tastes in pop culture. By shared experiences, I mean like if we live in the same city getting stuck in traffic in the same highway or if we both have a deadbeat dad and were raised by our mom. I guess sports have the most potential because it isn't as passively consumed as other parts of pop culture, especially if you go to stadiums to watch it live and play the sport casually with other people. If we're talking about videogames, there's a difference between playing couch co-op Smash with other people and saying, "BG3 and DE are my favorite games. I can see it's also your favorite game as well." I've encountered the second in the wild, some dude who had the same exact taste in games as me. It also did fuck all to actually develop a friendship because talking about videogames doesn't mean much except talking about videogames. We might have the same tastes in games, but we didn't share the same experience of playing those games together.

If you werent a jock you were a target. My frjend group gad death threats against us during school and tge jocks were exempt from consequencez because they needed them for the "big game" 🫠

I was good at neither and yet I only dislike sports today. Organized, big league broadcasted on TV sports I should say. I just do not care about it, or talking about it, or it taking time on the news every day. There are few tings that matter less to you and me then who won the ballgame yesterday. It's pointless.

Not caring about it makes perfect sense, but its still entertainment to a lot of people, so them talking about it also makes sense.

Now Ultras, yeah that goes way too far.

neither nerd nor jock