Here's an idea.
War is constantly changing.
But it probably won't change to anything resembling soccer
anytime soon.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
With the World Cup front and center, Garrick on Twitter
and a bunch of other people asked
us a question we've seen a lot during the three global sports
showdowns that have transpired during Idea Channel's
existence.
Could a competitive sporting event ever replace war?
There are two approaches to this, I think.
The first asks if the outcomes reached at competitive sporting
events will ever replace the outcomes reached
by bullets and explosions.
Not to get all Betteridge's Law on our own episode,
but I'm gonna say, no.
Like, imagine that because they've just won the World Cup,
that Germany for the next four years
is now officially the world's top economic, cultural,
and defense force.
Or even less grand, imagine that any nation pulls off
a huge win against some other nation,
showing them aggression, and at the ref's final whistle,
everyone puts their guns down and shakes hands.
All of the jets are melted down into nonviolent toys
for the kids instead of being used to assert dominance
or as showings of force.
And another way to look at this is
to consider international sporting's long history
of strengthening diplomatic ties.
Iran's win against the US in the '98 World Cup
has been called, quote, "the most politically charged game
in World Cup history."
At its conclusion, the Iranian players
handed their US counterparts flowers.
And then everyone posed for a big ole friendly group photo.
US defender Jeff Agoos said that we did more in 90 minutes
than the politicians did in 20 years.
In the early &70's, ping-pong diplomacy,
where America and China traded Olympic level table tennis
players, signaled a huge improvement in US-China
relations.
It led directly to Nixon's visit to the People's Republic
of China, making him the first American president to do so.
Nixon always wins!
Which might make us feel warm and fuzzy,
but diplomacy is very different from war.
Ideally, it lessens the likelihood of
or need for combat.
But it does not replace it.
Unfortunately, diplomacy, the Olympics, or the World Cup
would never stand in for the goals or ambitions
of a leader or military force if they got it in their mind
that physical violence was necessary.
In order for soccer or any sport to replace military action,
their outcomes would have to be respected similarly.
And, I mean, yeah, people takes soccer seriously,
but not that seriously.
So I guess that's it.
Seems like the answer to this one is a pretty solid no.
What do you guys think?
Let's us know in the comments.
[SLURPS]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[REWIND]
I mean, I guess we could go one step further and ask
why we ask this question, why we see this situation, sports
as a replacement for battle, as being meaningful,
why it shows up in places like Samsung commercials.
ANNOUNCER: And the stakes could not be higher.
The battle for Earth's survival is well and truly on.
And quite a battle it's going to be.
Can football save the planet?
First and foremost, war is bad.
World peace is, I think, a thing that we would all
like to happen.
And the idea that international sports contests
could eventually lead to that is probably inspired by the idea
that the Olympics were invented to
or had the secondary effect of diffusing or replacing combat
amongst ancient Greek territories.
Unfortunately, that idea is a big old thing that is not true.
Sorry.
The Olympic truce is a thing that does exist.
But its scope is pretty narrow.
To quote olympic.org, during the truce period,
athletes, artists, and their families,
as well as ordinary pilgrims, could travel in total safety
to attend or participate in the Olympic games.
Additionally, it said that the host city should not
be warred upon, and countries competing in the games
shouldn't actually fight when they meet on the field or court
or fencing runway or plank.
Track?
Fencing track.
Countries sending teams to the games
are encouraged to adopt the spirit of the truce.
But I mean, could you imagine?
We're sending some guys and a ball to Russia.
So better stop the bombings.
In the 20th century alone, we've even canceled the Olympics
three times to fight wars, in 1916, 1940, and 1944.
It is easy for us to see connections
between war and sport-- strategy, cunning, competition,
national pride, the expenditure of resources.
But, and here comes just a gross understatement,
they are very different things.
Games like chess and Go are popularly
regarded as microcosms of intense, vaguely militaristic
strategy.
Go was thought to have possibly been
derived from the wartime maps of tribal Chinese generals.
Lacrosse, as it was originally played
by Native Americans and Canadians,
was meant as a quote, "symbolic warfare," sometimes involving
hundreds of players who saw themselves
not as athletes seeking victory, but warriors seeking honor.
Lessons from these games might be
translated to the battlefield.
I mean, that is the very purpose of so-called serious games.
Shall we play a game?
Oh.
We can design games to look like or imitate
wartime situations or take some lessons of those games
to armed conflict.
But I think the reverse is impossible,
to design a war as a game.
Even the most brutal games are built atop a set of clear rules
and are overseen by officials with power that is
both respected and effective.
Sure, there are things like the Geneva Convention
and Protocol, the Hague Conventions,
things which seek to establish a set of standards for what
is permissible during wartime.
But unsurprisingly, these things are not exhaustive
and are very difficult to enforce.
They are not rules in the strict sense of the word, the one
that we find in games and sports.
War is what happens when an authority
figure, governmental power, or critical mass of citizens
stop respecting the sovereignty of the established rules.
The idea of sports potentially replacing a war
is built on a misconception of what modern warfare really is.
It is not the classic, glorious two nations meeting
on a field of battle to duke it out.
War is not some tidy contest where
two opposed forces put their resources or national capacity
to work defending or advancing their own interests.
Ukraine is dead to you?
How about I take that little board and smash it?
In reality, especially now, especially after the Cold War,
war is just--
There are no teams.
It's a mess.
I mean, it's always been a mess.
But now it's, like, it's really a mess.
Wanting sports to replace war is a noble and understandable
want.
But unfortunately, it's something of a category error.
It's like wanting bicycles to replace trains or Katy Perry
to replace Taylor Schilling.
We can see the similarities, but fundamentally, they
are very, very different.
War is not some clean cut, one-against-the-other,
face-to-face demonstration of force or skill with one clear
victor, the way it is in classic literature or the World Cup.
It's a constantly bubbling process underlying politics,
the economy, and media.
Unfortunately, war is in everything.
And we're constantly finding new ways and reasons
to support, justify, and fight them, some moral and some not.
I know, I know.
Ron Perlman says, "War, war never changes."
But I disagree.
I think war is constantly changing.
Maybe people never change.
Maybe the reasons they fight never change.
But the way they fight, always changing.
But whether it will eventually change into something
resembling a Samsung commercial or "Space Jam,"
I'm pretty skeptical.
What do you guys think?
Is there a situation in which sports could replace war?
Let us know in the comments.
And please subscribe.
Kudos to everybody who braved a very dangerous comment
section from last week's video.
Let's see what you had to say about the rules for spoilers.
Cyberwolf wonders whether or not there will eventually
be features built in to social media
to protect people from spoilers.
And yeah, there are certain things
like Tumblr Savior for Tumblr to block tags and tag filtering
in certain Twitter clients.
But yeah, like those things rely on people
being explicit about tagging those things.
And they don't work on images or animated GIFs
and stuff like that.
So there's a whole bunch of work to be done.
I know that there are certain TV show Tumblr accounts,
especially like Doctor Who and Orphan Black that
try to be really explicit about, we're
going to live blog this episode that's coming up.
And so we're going to tag it this.
And make sure you block if you don't want to know anything.
But yeah, right?
Expecting that from the entire internet-- yeah,
will that ever happen?
Probably not.
[INAUDIBLE] sort of boils down what
I think the moral of the spoilers episode is,
which is that there is really only one rule in that it
is having empathy and respect for other people,
but then goes on to say that claiming a spoiled experience
is actually more enjoyable leverage as a kind of value
judgment, and says that being able to, like the quote
in the episode said, bask more critically
and reflexively is definitively more enjoyable,
which for a lot of people, maybe it's not,
which is very, very fair one.
Victoria Hathaway and a bunch of other people
wonder about the time limit or statute
of limitations on spoilers.
And I think this is the most complicated part of developing
spoiler rules, first of all, because it's actually
kind of hard, I think, I find, to keep
track of how long things have been around.
But also, your friends are always-- or at least,
my friends are always in a different state
of working their way through different pieces of media.
And if your friend is like a week or two outside
of the deadline, like, are you really going
to argue that they can or should be spoiled
if they don't want to be?
I think, like, having a deadline, like a date that
has to be crossed, having a rule like that is, I think,
less useful than trying to develop
a sort of general sense.
But I don't know.
Maybe that's just me.
Serialcomplexity wonders about TV and movie trailers
and whether or not people feel that those are spoilers.
I think a lot of people do.
But I also have been wondering recently whether or not
trailers have been showing more of what happens in the movie
because I feel like they do.
But I don't have any data on this.
And I wonder if they're doing it in response
to the kind of research that Emily was talking about.
Like, do they know in some sense that if people
know what's going to happen, they will enjoy the movie more?
And are they encouraging that by actually spoiling the movie
in its own trailer?
I don't know.
Should I put my tin foil hat on?
I know.
It's weird, right?
I agree.
I think it's strange.
James Mackenzie wonders about sports-related spoilers,
which is the thing that, yeah, we did not touch on at all.
And I wonder, like, because sports do not
depend on narrative, at least, not narrative as such, not
like the way TV shows or movies depend on it, can a sporting
event actually be spoiled in a way
that, right, it doesn't matter if you know what happens
and then that allows you to bask critically and reflexively,
that really it is all about the final result.
And there may be highlights, like what James says,
but that really, it's about the outcome.
I guess I don't know.
I mean, I'm not nearly enough of a sports person
to be able to answer this question.
But what do you guys think?
Are sports the most, like, spoilable thing?
I don't know.
Ben Streeter asks about media that spoils itself.
And actually, this is interesting
because while we were making the spoiler episode,
I was reading Flann O'Brian's "The Third Policeman," which
its own introduction spoils it.
And I think that made it better.
I mean, of course, right, I didn't
have the unspoiled experience.
But knowing what the reveal was, knowing
what the twist-- it's not really a twist-- was, I think,
yeah, I support that.
I was shocked when it happened, a little appalled,
but ultimately, I was into it.
Dude, Drackar, actually, I've been thinking about this a lot
over the last week.
And I think I agree.
I'm going to change my position.
Bart Charles actually wrote a really great comment
about losing at Pokemon when he was young
and that recognizes while it might have been
the folly of youth in some sense, that makes it no less
real, and makes the impact on his life
and his adulthood no less real.
And so yeah, yeah, I think I will rescind my pronouncement
from last week's episode.
And last-but-by-no-means-least, Emily from BlinkPopShift
on last week's video started a comment conversation that was
made up entirely of comments left on her own videos with
the gender pronouns swapped.
It is an upsetting and amazing and powerful reminder
of what I think we'll call an unfortunate
truth of making YouTube videos.
I highly recommend you read the whole thing.
And then go subscribed to Emily because she is amazing.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these ping-pong diplomats.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a subreddit.
Links in the doobly doo.
And instead of the tweet of the week,
I'm going to implore, again, that you go and read
the comment thread that Emily started, link in the place
where links are.
You know what it's called.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And for this week's record swap, we
will be replacing Johnny Cash's "Showtime" with Holly Herndon's
"Chorus."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I really like the way that looks next to Black Widow.
Anyways, adios, Johnny Cash.
Welcome, Holly Herndon.