Spoilsports:

Sports leagues, pro and college level, are the favorite past time of most of the world.  They are the feature of every weekend, and sometimes the memories that last a lifetime.  Watching sports games brings people together:  Family, friends, strangers, even nations.  Sports are a major source of income in the economy, from cable television to advertisers to tourism to college donations to bars, pizza, and beer.  The Super Bowl is a national holiday.  The World Cup is watched by billions of people world wide.  And yet both the far right and the far left wants to ban them.

Their reasoning is different, but it all comes down to the same thing -- sports should be banned because sports aren't politics, and everyone should think of nothing but ideologically correct politics at all times.  Recently a bunch of far left thugs vandalized cars in Germany that were flying the German flag in support of the German national team participating in the European Championship.  They explained that caring about your national team is irrational, and that collectivist thinking with an 'us' and a 'them' always leads to a new Holocaust.  According to the far left, you can't cheer for a team, any team, because that's cheering for someone based on identity, but we are all individuals and no two identities are the same.  The moment we fall into the belief in group identities, we're only a step away from genocide.  They'll allow you to admire the performance of a singular athlete, so long as you don't identify with them in any way, and care about them strictly on their own merit as an athlete.  Anything else is strictly verboten.

The far right, meanwhile, thinks sports are childish and everyone should stop having fun and instead be as dark and depressed and despairing as they are.  Unless everyone is at all times complaining about the state of society, the far right will never be happy.  How can we waste time and money playing and watching sports when some terrible doom is coming one hundred years from now that must be averted RIGHT NOW?

On the far left, never mind that athletes love the game and express themselves through how they play it, that they, and their playing of sports, are inseparable aspects of their existence, all athletes are 'exploited victims' of shadowy corporate owners.  They are injured, robbed of their hard earned money, and the coaches and players are never the perfect mix of diversity that 'good' sports, non-merit-based sports, would have them be.

On the right caring about a team because it's fun, because it's an excuse to make friends and hang out with them, because it's something everyone can orbit around in conversation during meals, is equated to 'worshiping false idols.'  You see, everyone should stop being friends, family, communities, and eaters of dinner, and instead should be worshiping true idols, like Peak Oil, Racial Holy War, Hyperinflation, John Galt, Jesus, or Odin.  Everything except their pet project must be swept away as an impediment.  These totalitarians do not believe in the worth of anything that does not promote their version of 'socialist realism,' be it art, leisure, family, recreation, or even supper.  The far right has no wish to actually preserve anything, or celebrate anything, or love anything.  It says nothing positive about any event or any moment in life.  The World Cup is mocked, college football is mocked, the NFL is mocked, the Olympics are mocked, video games are mocked, television is mocked, movies are mocked, everything is mocked and derided as worthless.  So what does have worth?  What are people on the far right allowed to do with their lives?

Did it ever occur to the right that the families and communities they supposedly care about so much depend on things like video games, sports games, and television to exist?  That maybe parents and children, siblings, grandparents, and everyone else get together during Thanksgiving and watch football?  That they get together during New Year's and watch football?  That parents get their children involved in sports as children, because then they get to meet other children and make friends, and children can be proud of an accomplishment they achieved through their own hard work and talent, something that parents can praise them for?

It isn't a stupid ball moving around a stupid court to get into various stupid nets.  To the people playing it's life and death.  It may well be the most important event in their lives.  If you can't respect the sport for its natural artistry, at least respect the feelings of the players who have sacrificed everything to get to the point where they can perform at this level.  And to viewers, it isn't some stupid act of worship, it isn't some mindless vegetation, it isn't an irrational urge to genocide opponents either.  It's a social pleasure, it's a mental stimulant to truly enjoy and understand the game and why the plays went the way they did, and it's simply splendid to watch people trying their best to do something really well -- whether its a concert pianist or a receiver, I don't see any difference whatsoever, and yet the stuffy people on the left and right will insist that somehow the pianist is superior to the receiver, just because.

The receiver is paid more.  The receiver entertains more people.  The receiver catches a pass that was more difficult, and took more effort, than the concert pianist who plays out a song.  And yet one entertainer is okay and the other is unacceptable and should be banned.  This type of false elitism, this snobbery, is so outrageous.  Next they'll say fox hunting is a true man's game or that the only true sport is polo.

Get this, spoilsports.  Football, Soccer, Baseball, and the Olympics are more important than you are.  They are more important than your opinions.  It is okay for a nation to come together from all parts and all sides and cheer for their team.  It is okay to love your country and be proud of its accomplishments and achievers.  It is okay to identify with your genes and your laws and your culture that created the conditions for the athletes to emerge and succeed on the world stage.  You and they are one, and you have every right to sing the national anthem along with them when they win the gold.

It is more important that people be happy than that they embrace socialist realism, or any other philosophical viewpoint.  If people aren't happy, what's the point?  And if they are happy, who needs your wretched philosophy anyway?  Sports are making real people happy in the real world every day.  They may well be the best thing on Earth.  According to viewership rates and revenues, according to youth participation in little leagues and high schools, they're far more important to people than any other recreation, and athletes make more people happy than practically any other job -- perhaps rock stars or scientists who cure cancer are in the running, but that's it.  Sports deserve respect in equal proportion to how loved they are.  People don't deserve to be disrespected in equal proportion to how much they love sports.  This simply does not follow.

Around the 1800's the world finally got enough leisure time, due to the steam engine, that they felt the need to let off their physical energy in a less needed, but more fun way.  Responding to demand, a few select sports were invented on the spot, and boys stopped carrying and pushing and pulling their way through life, and started throwing and running and tackling instead.  This was as natural an event as water flowing downstream.  We wouldn't be human if we didn't delight in the dexterity and strength of our bodies, or want to use them, or at least watch them being used, to their fullest.  It is pure misanthropy to disapprove of this evolution.  Practically everyone on Earth enjoys sports.  If you don't, there's something wrong with you.  You are the problem.  Not us.  Not the 99% majority.  But you, the 1% minority.

Not even Islam is so radical that it bans sports.  Even the worst dictators on Earth, from Caligula to Stalin, had all sorts of pastimes for their countries to rally around and cheer for.  The nightmarish far left and far right is proposing the banning of sports, one of the chief joys in life, and in so doing has gone further than even Mao ever dared.  They are more tyrannical and cruel than any ruler has ever been in the history of the world.  And yet they're the good guys, the reformers, the saviors.  It's so despicable.  They can't even recognize how twisted and dark their souls must have become, to turn even something as naturally joyous and full of good cheer as sports into another object of their hatred and scorn.  Next they'll attack love, or say that the night sky is evil and should be banned, or perhaps flowers.  Who knows what might bring forth the enmity of these haters next?

It's hopeless even talking to these people, driven insane with hatred for the whole world and everyone in it.  Just because they know a few statistics other people don't, just because they can predict and explain a few things other people can't, they somehow think they're better than everyone else and should dictate everyone's daily activities as a result.  But knowledge isn't wisdom, nor is it virtue, and it's meaningless to know facts if in the mean time you have forgotten your own soul.  There are good things in this world, deserving of love.  Start there.  Start every conversation, every proposal, every pontification, there.  Start with God.  Don't start from a meaningless fact that makes you superior because you know it and no one else does.  Without God the truths of this world are empty.  All truth stems from the original, divine truth, and just shrivel into lies again when God is left behind, ignored, or abandoned.  There is no MEANING to facts without a grounding in a perspective of good and evil, right and wrong, human and inhuman, to judge them by.

Sports are GOOD.  You can see that by the lights in people's eyes, the volume in their shouting voices, the smiles of the crowd and the tears of the winning athletes.  This is a divine truth.  Talking about how black athletes do inordinate amounts of crime, or how coaches molest children, or how games in Italy are fixed by corrupt referees, these are all facts, but they're not TRUE.  They don't refer in any way to God, and therefore just become the tools of the Devil to tear down what God has given to us out of his infinite love.  Next people will complain that food makes us fat, when it is also God's gift to us, the staff of life.  Anything can be twisted, anything can be hated.  But where is God in such reasoning?  Where is the Good?  Any facts marshaled forth to support such argument just twist in the hands of their users, like false serpents, and poison people's souls instead.  They are just the devil's myriad legions emerging from the pit of Hell, because they never once admit that there are happy people, made happy by sports.  They just will not admit it.  They cannot accept that there is any light in the heavens and insist that it's all darkness and rot from top to bottom. And because of that, they never realize that despite all of their worthless knowledge and facts, they're still wrong, because one truth is more important than a billion datapoints.  The Bible was right, "The wise of this world are fools."  Everyone is so smug in their special knowledge that they've become blind to what should be common knowledge.  And their blindness makes them more foolish than the lowest of pygmies, who can't even count to five, because at least they still enjoy sports.