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Sports are Dumb

2018-06-15 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:52 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Sports · mode: Personal essay · tags: timely hook, self promotion

Responding to John's World Cup guide, Hank admits a leftover 'sports are dumb' mentality from being excluded and punched by athletes as a teen, rejects its rationalizations because all value is bestowed by humans, and argues the World Cup is a beautiful, nonviolent outlet for tribal instincts: maybe sports are dumb, and that is why they aren't.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Hank's half-enthusiastic, half-detached 'anthropological' fandom at minor-league games

  • ★★ At sports games Hank sometimes gets the urge to yell 'Sports!', half genuinely enjoying himself and half watching as a detached intellectual from an anthropological perspective. — 00:00:01
  • ★★ On reflection, Hank finds that detached intellectual stance crappy. — 00:00:34
  • ★ The games Hank attends aren't easy to take seriously: the Missoula Bruins out-skate him but are mostly teenagers, nothing like the NFL. (playful) — 00:00:43

00:00:58 — The 'sports are dumb' mentality from being punched as a teen, its rationalizations, and value bestowed by humans

  • ★★ Hank still has a 'sports are dumb' mentality left over from being socially discounted and occasionally punched by athletic people as a teen. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Rationalizing that mentality is a problem: it really comes from not liking what people who don't like you like, dressed up as half-assed arguments. — 00:01:09
  • ★★★ All value is bestowed by humans, so when we say it matters that the ball went through the hoop, it matters. — 00:01:41 · social construction

00:01:51 — Coming into John's World Cup video uninterested; why it didn't get more views

  • ★★ Hank came to John's World Cup video with little interest in the World Cup, but by its end had many questions. — 00:01:51
  • ★★ John's video made Hank laugh so hard he peed a little; it may have got fewer views because nerdfighters are more like Hank than John about sports. (playful, hedged) — 00:02:03 · Nerdfighteria

00:02:16 — The case for the World Cup: caring, a world sport, tribal instincts turned beautiful

  • ★★★ Caring about stuff is good, and sharing passions with people otherwise dissimilar from you is maybe even better. (hedged) — 00:02:22
  • ★★ Unlike the World Series, the World Cup is truly global: soccer is a world sport the way nations cooperate on the space station, maybe loftier than its science. (hedged) — 00:02:30 · United States
  • ★★ For one month every two years the whole world works together to find out who is best at a 'dumb game'. — 00:02:53
    • check: every two years — slip of the tongue
  • ★★★ Maybe nothing is less dumb: sport turns our tribal instincts toward something not violent but beautiful, a celebration of skill, intellect, hard work and perseverance. (hedged) — 00:02:58
  • ★★ The pitch offers equality and lets nations interact outside the fraught mess of geopolitics. — 00:03:19

  • ★★★ The World Cup matters so much without mattering too much; maybe sports are dumb, and maybe that is why they aren't. (hedged) — 00:03:27

    “maybe sports are dumb. And maybe that's the whole reason why sports aren't dumb.”

00:03:40 — Sign-off; VidCon, a hankschannel hockey video, the DFTBA.com redesign

  • ★★ Hank will be at VidCon a week from now. — 00:03:43 · VidCon
  • ★★ Hank just uploaded a hankschannel video about why he used to play hockey. — 00:03:45 · hankschannel
  • ★★ DFTBA.com was just relaunched with a new design, which makes Hank very happy. — 00:03:47 · DFTBA Records

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Hank admits an impulse to dismiss anything broadly popular as 'lowest common denominator', but in math the lowest denominator is the ideal one. — video description
  • ★★ That shared denominator unifies us, so Hank is going to try to watch some World Cup this year (2018). (hedged) — video description
  • ★★ Hank doesn't know how he will find the time to watch the World Cup, but he just bought a temporary TV subscription so he could get it. — video description
  • ★ Hank acknowledges that the title, and the thumbnail that disagrees with it, are confusing and meant to draw attention, but hopes their message makes sense by the end of the video. (hedged) — video description

Humor (significant)

  • How seriously Hank's local hockey team takes his attendance — 00:00:54

    “Sometimes, I think the Bruins would pay me to go as long, as I sign up to buy a certain amount of personal pan pizzas.”

  • Hank mocks the intellectual's argument against sports — 00:01:26

    “gets to be beyond the geometrically defined plane of the place where you don't want the hockey puck to go!”

  • The intellectual claims to know where true meaning comes from — 00:01:35

    “Duh um, oh shoot!”

  • Hank's questions after John's World Cup video — 00:01:58

    “Particularly why all the teams seemed to have eleven people except for the Russian team, which has like 26!”

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: FIFA World Cup

Also: Projects: DFTBA Records · hankschannel · VidCon

Organizations: Missoula Bruins · National Football League

Concepts: association football · bullying · ice hockey · in-group favoritism · social construction

Places: Canada · International Space Station · Russia · United States

Events: World Series

Only in the description or credits: clickbait · television

Also centred on FIFA World Cup: Mmmm....PARTS · You're Gonna Die · GOOOOOOOL!!!! · ALL THE SHIRTS (and some paths to community) · Who Should We Root For? · Your 4-Minute Guide to ALL 32 TEAMS at the 2018 World Cup

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