> Chomsky doesn't moralize about sports. [...] He
> has made these comments on the basis of listening to call-in radio shows. He
> makes these comments sympathetically
Sympathy is the highest form of moralizing.
On 7/3/10, JC Helary <brandelune at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe you're not that into sports ? There are as many world championships as
> there are sports and as far as nationalistic BS is concerned, Japan (in my
> case) is pretty good at making Us vs Them headlines in Baseball, Judo, Kendo
> and anything when Japan is considered a world "leader".
Again, nationalism has nothing to do with competition.
I think it's weird that leftists have nothing to say at all about nationalism and how the nation-state functions until it (supposedly) manifests itself at the popular level. Nationalism helps structure everyday life in ways that have nothing to do with competition or Othering, including all the violence associated with maintaining national borders, creating labor markets, and circulating capital, but when a newspaper says "we're going to beat you at judo," that's when leftists want to talk about nationalism? Whatever.
On 7/3/10, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> I think this is of great importance. In reference to the effects of
> ideology there _always_ exists this ambiguity about whether a given
> event or belief causes or reflects 'reality.' And the resolution in all
> such cases is, I think, roughly what Gail suggests here.
Calling it "ideology" is a poor approximation of what you're talking about here, but I agree, though in my ridiculous compulsion to self-clarify against Chomsky, I maybe forgot myself. Everything that reflects reality also contributes to changing reality. But sports have an extremely minor role in that; they are certainly no match for the trillions of dollars a day that circulate on capital markets.