Why the left can never really be taken seriously...
Basketball=Socialism?????
If one wonders why the left, since the end of the Cold War, has never organised itself to mount a serious challenge to the expansion of the right and the seeming dominance of the belief that Liberal-capitalism is the be all and end all I implore you to read this article. If the left is busily engaged in attempting to convince us to follow the path to socialism based on an analogy that basketball equates to socialism then I truly think the left is much worse off than I thought.
While it may be a noble attempt to 'reach out to the people' and transpose socialism into a more digestable format for the ordinary man has Ollman really thought everything through. Yes everyone loves team play, it is beautiful, it's what we really like....blah blah blah blah....
Come on!!Fuck that!!
Who doesn't love watching one man going coast-to-coast and slamming in a dunk with nuclear force?!? That's what people pay to see. I hate basketball but I always tuned in to see Jordan in the play-offs. I watched to see that guy with skills that everyone envied, even his own teammates. Tell me one fan who doesn't love seeing dominant individual efforts by great athletes like Jordan or Kareem versus pass-it-around, run-the-clock, textbook basketball.
If you want to compare basketball to great ideology compare basketball to Capitalism. Yes, everyone can play. You can even play in a wheelchair, but not everyone is going to get to the top and make huge money. To get to the top (The NBA is the top. We all know it. Who plays and doesn't/didn't dream of it?)...to get to the top requires some luck in the physical attributes department (come on we don't all start off from the same position in life as we all know) as well as some hard work busting your ass to get even better and then a hell of a lot of luck in just getting through life in one piece just to the point where someone in a position of power might choose to pay you millions of dollars. For the rest of us we are all stuck playing pick-up games watching the stars from afar and dumping our money down on expensive shoes, jerseys, tickets, or just simply providing advertisers an audience and making rich players and owners richer. That's basketball.
The only socialism I see in the whole thing is perhaps the redistribution of wealth from middle and upper class folks down to the formerly poor black kids turned b-balls stars/multi-millionaires that dominant the game.
Let's leave sports out of ideological battles and find a new angle.
If one wonders why the left, since the end of the Cold War, has never organised itself to mount a serious challenge to the expansion of the right and the seeming dominance of the belief that Liberal-capitalism is the be all and end all I implore you to read this article. If the left is busily engaged in attempting to convince us to follow the path to socialism based on an analogy that basketball equates to socialism then I truly think the left is much worse off than I thought.
While it may be a noble attempt to 'reach out to the people' and transpose socialism into a more digestable format for the ordinary man has Ollman really thought everything through. Yes everyone loves team play, it is beautiful, it's what we really like....blah blah blah blah....
Come on!!Fuck that!!
Who doesn't love watching one man going coast-to-coast and slamming in a dunk with nuclear force?!? That's what people pay to see. I hate basketball but I always tuned in to see Jordan in the play-offs. I watched to see that guy with skills that everyone envied, even his own teammates. Tell me one fan who doesn't love seeing dominant individual efforts by great athletes like Jordan or Kareem versus pass-it-around, run-the-clock, textbook basketball.
If you want to compare basketball to great ideology compare basketball to Capitalism. Yes, everyone can play. You can even play in a wheelchair, but not everyone is going to get to the top and make huge money. To get to the top (The NBA is the top. We all know it. Who plays and doesn't/didn't dream of it?)...to get to the top requires some luck in the physical attributes department (come on we don't all start off from the same position in life as we all know) as well as some hard work busting your ass to get even better and then a hell of a lot of luck in just getting through life in one piece just to the point where someone in a position of power might choose to pay you millions of dollars. For the rest of us we are all stuck playing pick-up games watching the stars from afar and dumping our money down on expensive shoes, jerseys, tickets, or just simply providing advertisers an audience and making rich players and owners richer. That's basketball.
The only socialism I see in the whole thing is perhaps the redistribution of wealth from middle and upper class folks down to the formerly poor black kids turned b-balls stars/multi-millionaires that dominant the game.
Let's leave sports out of ideological battles and find a new angle.
posted by Freedom Slopes at 8:51 PM
1 Comments:
The article in question is fucking terrible.
A bad piece of writing.
Lame.
But, much as you seem to want it to be, it's not representative of "the (radical) Left."
Try (just to start):
http://www.redcritique.org/
http://www.isreview.org/index.shtml
http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/
Bertell Ollman can eat a bag of dicks. He -- according to his webpage -- invented and marketed 'the world's only Marxist boardgame.'
A fish in a barrel, my friend.
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