The Sports Media Thread

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Jesus who cares.

[The_Admiral]

You cared enough to call me an MRA for explaining why people dislike her so much but you're right to hit the eject button on this one because it's gonna get worse before it gets better.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

26 minutes ago, the admiral said:

You cared enough to call me an MRA for explaining why people dislike her so much but you're right to hit the eject button on this one because it's gonna get worse before it gets better.

 

It looks like an awful lot of the dislike for this particular sports person is 1.) geographic or 2.) sex-based. I get that no one likes to get called on their misogyny, but that doesn't mean that misogyny doesn't exist. Or that people also can't evolve their opinions.

 

There are a lot of boogeymen in sports journalism with far more power than Sarah Spain. I feel like I've seen this story already with Gamergate and that turned out terribly for everyone, especially as it contributed heavily to the early beginnings of the alt-right.

 

I find it annoying when people helicopter into threads to say how stupid they are and I don't mean to do that here. And I'll cop to being out of the loop with the new sports media zeitgeist. I don't know about Barstool. What I know I've read in this thread, which is that there's some great content but also some anti-SJW stuff that appeals to a certain crowd. Inasmuch as the latter is true, it'd be great if we could be done with that.

[Tracy Jordan]

I'm completely out of the loop here (I've never even heard of Barstool sports until recently). Who is this PFT guy? Is he parodying someone? 

[The_Admiral]

22 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

It looks like an awful lot of the dislike for this particular sports person is 1.) geographic or 2.) sex-based. I get that no one likes to get called on their misogyny, but that doesn't mean that misogyny doesn't exist. Or that people also can't evolve their opinions.

 

No one said people can't evolve their opinions, but if you've done a lot of evolving, you should avoid putting yourself in positions where you can bite your own ass, which is what's happening with her right now as all the Barstool people unearth her pre-woke tweets calling other women sluts and complaining that they're getting work instead of her (which just serve to codify the vibe she's given off for years). Maybe it's too cynical, I know I get a lot of crap from you for that, but it's not hard to track her metamorphosis with social justice going mainstream and that Cool Girl monologue making the rounds. She was very much the Cool Girl until suddenly she wasn't because there was a new niche to exploit. 

 

I don't even know that Barstool has great content, I'm guessing they don't, but they have something that there's a market for, which is sports talk as frat house/corner bar/whatever. That's what sports radio as a 24-hour format was built on, not people telling you how stupid you are. But media is infinite now! They're not taking bandwidth from more highbrow sports discussion. They don't need to be no-platformed. Let them wallow in their mud while do your own thing, because if you don't, they'll drag you into the mud every time. 

[The_Admiral]

1 minute ago, Tracy Jordan said:

I'm completely out of the loop here (I've never even heard of Barstool sports until recently). Who is this PFT guy? Is he parodying someone? 

Yes. Pro Football Talk Commenter is a parody of Pro Football Talk commenters. I don't know how he wound up in the Barstool universe; I think he used to do stuff with Jeb Lund because I'd come across him before he had the show with Big Cat and really was just devoted to making fun of people who comment on Pro Football Talk.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

39 minutes ago, the admiral said:

I don't even know that Barstool has great content, I'm guessing they don't, but they have something that there's a market for, which is sports talk as frat house/corner bar/whatever. That's what sports radio as a 24-hour format was built on, not people telling you how stupid you are. But media is infinite now! They're not taking bandwidth from more highbrow sports discussion. They don't need to be no-platformed. Let them wallow in their mud while do your own thing, because if you don't, they'll drag you into the mud every time. 

 

This is a good point.

[The_Admiral]

Now that it's had time to settle, this whole mess reminded me of "Planet of Cops," what I think was the last big essay Freddie deBoer did before he had to institutionalize himself:

 

Quote

The irony of our vibrant and necessary police reform movement is that it’s happening simultaneously to everyone becoming a cop. I mean everyone — liberal, conservative, radical and reactionary. Blogger, activist, pundit, and writer, obviously, but also teacher, tailor, and candlestick maker. Cops, all of them. Cops everywhere. Everybody a cop.

 

Quote

Demos firing Matt Bruenig because people dropped a dime on him to powerful people. The little army of snitches who have written to my employers and tried to divest me of my job. The self-appointed Twitter police — they’re in every subculture of that forum — who constantly start :censored:, DMing people to berate them for who they follow or whose work they boost, the ones who keep an oppo file on everybody, who try and regulate other people’s friendships. The ones who keep a big file folder of screen grabs, just waiting to play judge and jury. They’re cops.

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.

 

Yeah, pretty much, right? Sarah Spain tattling on Dan Katz to their boss, the Barstool drones tattling on Sarah Spain to anyone who will listen, just tattletales all the way down. High school never ends.

 

Side note: it's interesting that the phrase "bad person" has never had more currency in recent memory than it does today. He's a bad person. This person's entire existence, entire sense of humanity, is rotten, undesirable, past redemption. Being a bitch or a dickhead still has a sense of being temporal or transient, but bad person, where the hell do you even go from there? Calvinism, man.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Nah. I don't buy it. For every Twitter storm attacking someone's sexism, racism or homophobia, there's someone being sexist, racist or homophobic.

 

Obviously people can take it too far, and clearly some people need to take a deep breath before destroying someone's life. 

 

But when I read the above passage, I mostly get a better-written version of "why do only black people get to say the N word?"

 

Harassment is real and minority populations get it far, far worse online than do straight white dudes (or other dominant power figures) with unartful turns of phrase.

 

It's not like people didn't know they were wrong for calling people "fags" in 2002, you know? It's been easy to be decent for a long time; it's only recently that the consequences for not have become more severe. (And even then! ...)

[The_Admiral]

26 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

But when I read the above passage, I mostly get a better-written version of "why do only black people get to say the N word?"

Talk about a pretty bad-faith reading but at this juncture I can't say I'm surprised.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Just now, the admiral said:

Talk about a pretty bad-faith reading but at this juncture I can't say I'm surprised.

 

But if that's not a bad-faith reading, then what is The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion.?

 

I grant that people go too far. But you (the collective you) have to grant that a lot of people need to do better. The #MeToo campaign has likely prompted a lot of very uncomfortable conversations in offices, schools, and homes...and it should. The price to pay for easy access to porn and sports GIFs is that other people use the internet for (sl)activism. If that means a few sexual harassers and racists are named and shamed, that's not so bad.

 

Again, I grant that people go too fair. I also believe that a lot of bad actors had a free ride for a very, very long time. You see this complain in comedy a lot too, that college audiences can't take a joke anymore. Alternatively, be more funny, you know?

[The_Admiral]

Well, I think the internet as self-righteous circular firing squad is pretty accurate. Isn't there a mountain of evidence to that effect? It certainly seems that way, but if you're as sympathetic to all this passive-aggressive snitching as you're showing yourself to be, if not engaging in it yourself, then what's the point of me arguing? I'll never change your mind; you're dug in too deep. If citing someone who's a way better writer than I am can only get me "oh he just wants to say the n-word" for some dumb reason, then screw it.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

You must have read Magary today.

 

I'm sympathetic to people using a voice who traditionally didn't have one. And I'm tired of old voices complaining that things got hard.

[Sodboy13]

I read Drew Magary's piece today, and it dovetailed with the thoughts below I meant to post last night, but forgot.

 

What Portnoy is doing now is, to me, one of the more dire effects of the idea that "The Internet Never Forgets" that I don't know any of us grasped until people started screenshotting tweets and making the world their public burn books. As I mentioned in another thread, there's thirteen years of me on this board. That's slightly more than a third of my life, highlighted in over 10,000 mainly-pointless blurbs of who the hell knows what. I didn't have my current job then. I was still a year-and-a-half away from meeting the woman I'm now married to with two kids. And I bet I've said a lot of things on this board that present-day me wouldn't support or would recoil at with regret. Does that give anyone who doesn't like what I say in a given instance the right to go dredging and say "Ah HA! You used to think this other way! You have ceded moral high ground for eternity"? I mean, in the current climate, I guess it does, but to me, all that does is lead to a resistance to self-change or self-improvement, for fear of being labeled an eternal hypocrite. It's Who Ya Crappin' meets the Rollerball rules committee. It's an approach that threatens to level a playing field in a destructive manner rather than a constructive one, abandoning the hard, frustrating work of building up in favor of tearing others down and saying "See, now we're even."

 

And on the other side of it, you have Portnoy, proudly unchanging, proclaiming it as virtue. He was a piece of back then, he's a piece of today, and he'll be the man you can count on to be a piece of tomorrow. I find it vile, but I also can't deny that that's what wins nowadays.

[The_Admiral]

Barstool is their beloved New England Patriots. You despise them and are right to do so but you have to begrudgingly accept that they will run up the score on everyone. Just as Belichick mastered football, they've mastered, uh, being pricks on the internet, basically.

 

But yeah, good points, none of this is remotely healthy or constructive. And I just can't quit! Set me on fire already.

 

 

[Sodboy13]

When I find a good active volcano with reasonable airfare, I plan on sharing the good news with everyone whom I respect and/or care about.

[dfwabel]

29 minutes ago, Sodboy13 said:

And on the other side of it, you have Portnoy, proudly unchanging, proclaiming it as virtue. He was a piece of back then, he's a piece of today, and he'll be the man you can count on to be a piece of tomorrow. I find it vile, but I also can't deny that that's what wins nowadays.

While he's gained financial success from first the paper, then the blog(s), Portnoy has been afforded a goid education, but really isn't very bright.  Heck, upon getting the Chernin money, he bought a race horse, gambles heavily and tries to flaunt a lifestyle towards his cis, wasp fanboys. He'll go broke within a decade.

 

 

https://thinkprogress.org/barstool-sports-sexism-30cee73eccc4/

[Sodboy13]

i wouldn't underestimate the ability or the extent of someone like him to fall upward.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Related to this discussion, I don't think Bob McNair thinks all black people are prisoners, and I believe that he was just using a handy cliche.

 

But, he has to do better. It's not just enough that rich old white dudes get to have power and money. That they're also expected to think just a little before they speak isn't asking too much.

[dfwabel]

29 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

Related to this discussion, I don't think Bob McNair thinks all black people are prisoners, and I believe that he was just using a handy cliche.

 

But, he has to do better. It's not just enough that rich old white dudes get to have power and money. That they're also expected to think just a little before they speak isn't asking too much.

Bob McNair isn't getting a Christmas card from the Houston chapters of the NAACP or La Raza this December.

 

You know a few owners, like the Jerrys (Jones and Richardson) and Martha Firestone Ford, are glad he took one for the cause. Someone likely told Jed York to stfu too.