Wednesday 28 November 2007

Sporting excellence

One reason to really enjoy sports is that any team in the sporting business is in " the excellence business" argues blogger RelieveDebtor, and anyone not captured by political correctness should be cheering on any team that never apologises for excellence and (in the case of the All Blacks), denouncing anything that gets in the way of excellence.

Like it or not, he argues, but sporting teams represent cities and countries, they represent cultures, they represent ideas -- sporting teams provide proxies for discussing ideas and cultures without appearing to: and they let us see that political correctness gets in the way of winning.
We like to debate sports because it’s the way we politely debate politics. Can’t talk about religion and politics? Talk about sports instead, but you’ll find the same debates, just couched behind GMs, players, coaches, and strategies. And in a politically correct world, a world that seeks to rid of greatness so we can achieve “equality,” a world that is often ashamed of success as a sign of greed and sanctimony, you will find that the more [a team] wins, and the less they care about the well-being of their opponent, the more they will be hated.
Sad but true. By all accounts, the New England Patriots are currently such a team -- see our friend RelieveDebtor argue why they would be Ayn Rand's favourite team.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

My new favourite sportsperson is Emily Welch, according to the Herald she competes alongside men and came second in the Aussie Senior comps. Now there's a lesson in equality to those wimpish women at Wimbledon who think equality refers to the prize money and not the competition. Well done Emily! Why wasn't that on the front page.

corbusier said...

Thanks for the link to Relievedebtor's essay. The headline says it all, and my co-blogger makes a convincing point. We'll be talking about this in our forthcoming podcast...Stay tuned.

Anonymous said...

Anon, for what it's worth, Emily's on the front page of today's "Franklin News" from Pukekohe - her local paper, and rightly so. What a story.

She beat the women's world record by 107 to finish with 648 lambs shorn in nine hours.

The toll on her body was like running two marathons back-to-back. And in the six months leading up to the attempt, she ran, rowed and weight-trained on top of eight hours a day of shearing.

Wow.

Anonymous said...

One thing I hate is the second hander/collectivist advertising hype for sport in New Zealand.The worst example was the "loyal"campaign with Dave Dobbin for Team New Zealand a few years back.The script in the collectivist advert had a line which went something like"we have a team of four million strong" or something like that to bolster the egos of all the second hander slobs on couches.Then everybody gets pissed off when the individuals who actualy won the Americas Cup leave when their contracts expire to get better paid jobs.
Recently the Mastercard advertisement went down the collectivist/second hander path with the advertisement in which everybody has blood type black and at the end of the ad the voice over says "lucky were all made of the same stuff" and Im thinking New Zealanders must have a petty screwed mentality for these advertising campaigns to have any appeal

Anonymous said...

Hey Michael Fasher, what's your email contact? Does Ken or PC know your contact? I want to talk with you about something, please forward your contact via Ken or PC.

Cheers.