It Could Happen Here - Sportswashing and the Police State

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

We talk about how governments use sports to launder their both reputation abroad and provide cover for their crimes at homeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We're doing the sports. Five-yard penalty. The Mariners. Foul. The Angels have become the Mariners. Home run. All things are circles now. Go not so.

Body checking. Yep, this is the sports episode. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, your favorite sportscast. I'm not the host of this episode, but I'm talking for some reason. James and Chris, why are we talking about sports? To distract us from the crumbling of society around us. But more specifically, to talk about how sports are used to launder the reputations of dictatorial regimes.

And I know Chris has got some interesting stuff on Bolsonaro's Brazil and sports. Oh, this is way before that, sorry. This is some wonderful PT era vintage crimes. Oh, good stuff. Okay. I love Brazilian crime no matter what the vintage,

so I'm excited to learn about crimes. How the NFL legitimizes the military police state state anyway. Yep. And it's not even football, is it? So multiple things they're doing wrong. I want to talk first about like the original instance of what we're going to call sports washing because everyone else calls it sports washing too.

So that's like using these big global mega events to launder the reputation of a pretty questionable regime. So the OG instance of this is the 1936 Olympics, which were held in Berlin. You'll probably be familiar with who was in charge in Berlin in 1936. It was the Nazis. That's a spoiler. The Nazis weren't actually given the Olympics. The Olympics were given to Weimar Germany,

which was considerably less shit than the Nazis, but the Nazis took them on and they really ran with them. And lots of the symbology that we associate with the Olympics today, that they're raising of flags during the medal ceremony, the playing of national anthems, the parade of flags at the opening ceremony, the torch relay, right? The torch relay goes from OG in greece to wherever the

olympics are being held it's it's this big ceremonial thing right that all of these things were created by this guy called carl diem who was a nazi to draw stronger links between the nazi party and the ancient greeks and position the nazis like the inheritors of this classical legacy right and the civilized people in a barbaric world like the greeks saw themselves and obviously the olympics if you aren't familiar draws its legacy from a largely mythical construct of a games that did actually happen in ancient greece right so they claim to be like a reconstruction of this greek tradition except in the greek tradition everyone was naked which i think would make the olympics much more watchable we could yeah it's uh that is one of

the things i would watch the male gymnastics way more not just naked but oiled yeah yeah honestly men's men's swimming would be a lot more interesting. Yes, it would. Anyway. Yep, naked Olympics we can get behind. But they didn't bring that back. The Nazis didn't bring that back. They did have some naked statues, but they weren't big into nudity. But they fused a whole lot of fashy eugenics shit, right?

So the reason that they started having these medal tables was very much to reinforce their idea of the superiority of one race over other races right didn't really work out for them in 1936 because jesse owens turned up and owned them uh lots of different events and jesse owens being of course a black american sprinter and long jumper and it didn't well the the 1936 olympics did exist to did help significantly in laundering the nazi image they hid away a lot of their bullshit like they for instance like all the nazi party newspapers like weren't distributed for the time that foreigners were in the country right they hid away anti-semitic slogans they even had a jewish woman on the german olympic team because

there was lots of sort of fuss and and sort of uh like neoliberal liberal complaining i guess about like oh no you're being anti-semitic oh you shouldn't oh look there's a jewish person on your team it's fine you guys are great you guys aren't anti-semitic at all it's good we're sorted and the u.s did nearly boycott the olympics uh but they decided not to and this guy called avery brandage who went on to be a piece of shit of some renown so like this 1936 olympics i guess set the tone for the use of these massive events to put on a show to the world and bring the world's press and show them what you want them to see and hide the stuff that you don't want them to see which i think is a nice transition to talking about brazil yeah so we've talked sort

of about that effect of it the the sports has a second sort of incredibly important internal political effect which is that when when you have a sports thing that's large enough like when you have you know like we have a world cup you have the olympics show up you have even since i'm at the super bowl like like you, you, what it basically creates is this like, like it basically creates a temporary sort of state of state of exception where just like the, the, the sort of sort of normal function of society stops. Right.

And, and, you know, this can go, this can go in a number of different ways. Like if anyone's ever lived in Philadelphia, like, okay, there, there, there's a version of this in philly where like after after the eagles win like for like 15 hours there are no laws like or like in indonesia when they just killed like 30 people yeah well not 30 like 130 yeah yeah oh was it was it 130 people dead at the end? Yes. Oh my god. Yeah. 135, I think. Yeah. Horrific shit. You gotta hand it to sports

for killing tons of people. I think they're largely to blame were the cops rather than sports themselves. But this is the thing about sports, right? Is that in order to sort of like do security, blah blah blah, etc. In order to make sure the game is worth, you do fucking anything yes right it justifies nasty ass shit yeah and you know one one of the things one of the sort of like examples that i want to talk about about

this happening is one that is really not talked about that much which is the the 2014 world cup in brazil which wound up i think actually having a pretty big impact on the way brazilian politics went and also just destroying the lives of unfathomable numbers of people so okay so the the the this whole thing uh like had been in like it's happening 2014 it's been in the works since like lula was in office in the late 2000s. This is one of the workers' party's big things, is that they're going to have this World Cup. They've taken a shit ton of corporate money to do it. They've spent an enormous amount of political capital making sure this is going to happen.

out of political capital making sure this is going to happen and the consequences of it are just like astronomical something like 250 000 people like lost their homes in order to like make way for like the fucking stadiums and the fields and like all of the sort of like bullshit around like all the sort of security theater stuff all of like just like debate yeah this is something that happens with olympics is too more famously but like whenever you have a sports event like this there's just this giant cleansing that happens of like anyone who's like on the street who's homeless right anyone who's just sort of like doesn't look right particularly anyone who's black just sort of like suddenly is like disappeared by the police from this area um but this this particular one in in in brazil was interesting because this is happening 2014 so in 2013 there were like enormous

protests in in brazil and actually there there'd been another like set of soccer events there in 2013 then like something like 800 000 people were in the streets across brazil like protesting it but yeah there were these like there was enormous street movements just like like six percent of the entire brazilian population was in the streets um they were like basically started as sort of like anti-austerity protests because cities were sort of like we're increasing the price of uh like fares for stuff and it it gets the protests get kind of weird very quickly because on the one hand so like you have the workers party in power right and like the workers party has been sort of sliding right by this point but you have a sort of like you have like a really

militant left that's in the street you have a bunch of anarchists you have a bunch of autonomists sort of like doing stuff but then also right-wingers start showing up because it's a protest against the government and the government's like nominally left government and yeah this leads to just a really confusing state of affairs but the but you know the the next year this uh like the protests like keep going for like a long time and they're still like even after like the largest ones are kind of petering out there's still protests happening. But when the World Cup hits, like the World Cup is one of the sort of like the urs, like the law suddenly doesn't work anymore. Like in order to do this, you have to sign – like there's something called the general law of the World Cup, which is like a bunch of like laws that you have to sign that like physically change what your laws are like in in order to fucking have this event magnificent great i mean that's actually that's actually great you should do more of that the great thing about fifa is that

they've shown a commitment to human rights equality and democracy and so i'm sure those rules are good rules and oh yeah no so i uh so there are fun things like like literally like parts of the brazilian constitution are suspended um what parts like well so typically a bunch of stuff about the right to strike like there's a special court that's set up that like it'd be like that within 48 hours like we'll like decide on whether a strike is legal or not and what the thing is going to be like so that's not very good that it's real they're all really bad like like there's there's the brazilian government spends like 70 million dollars buying basically police equipment and like from the u.s from germany and from uh israel which is like the

the holy trinity of good normal countries where if you're buying shit from them you're doing a good thing see i thought you were going to talk about how you know there's moments in our society where the regular rules of engagement are suspended and in such we can use this moment of extra opportunity to find new ways of liberate of experiencing liberatory freedom oh people people people tried that and and and instead a bunch of fucking literally like they were driving tanks through the street like into like like blockading off like roads leading out of the favelas with tanks like it was it was fucking nuts there's some incredible videos of this time yeah there

are like laws in brazil about child labor right um guess what doesn't apply to fifa so you can just so they can have fucking ball boys they suspended this fucking child labor they also have they have these there are 20 000 people who are working for this event who are who are classified as volunteers and so you can just like use them as basically they started doing slave labor um yeah what's the deal what's the deal in Brazil? Shocking. Yeah, I know. Are they forced into this, or do they actually volunteer? Kind of.

Okay, so some of them seem to have volunteered. Because I don't want to minimize the actual, I don't want to minimize actual slavery. No, it's not actual slavery. Okay, so the Brazilian government will do actual slavery, but this is not quite that. But it's a bunch of people who are kind of it's volunteering yeah but yeah who have no labor rights like

and the everything happens is there's there are there are enormous crackdowns like they just start they start doing the thing that like the u.s does it too but i think like canada's is more of the u.s where it's like when when they know a protest is about to happen they like go find the like six people who they think are protest leaders and just arrest them beforehand they started doing that they there's a bunch of people who get tortured there's a bunch of like the the police are basically just going ape shit they like yeah they they there are some like there's a point in this where like the the garbage workers go on strike and they actually win

because it turns out that if in the middle of the World Cup there's fucking garbage piling up on the street like it's really bad but like yeah like this has like this has a just like absolutely disastrous effect on like just just sort of what's like everything that's going on brazilian politics like um one of the things that lula does i'm gonna talk about this more in another brazil episode but lula like sent a bunch of brazilian troops to invade haiti um which fucking sucks and then those troops came home and they were used to occupy the favelas

uh in rio while this was going on and this kind of crushed like what was left of the sort of left that had been in the streets in 20 in 2014 like they just got like in 2013 like they just got they just got stomped because the brazilian police are on terrifying and like literally they're deploying colonial troops like in the streets and and yeah so this this is a sort of second kind of thing that you can get with sports which is like on the one hand they're used to sort of whitewash regimes and on the other hand they're used as as basically a way to like do fascism inside of a state where you can you know like you can you could do a state of exception right like the law ceased to exist uh the the state becomes like

this entity that can just sort of like do whatever it wants in order to preserve itself and it's a way that you can just you know you can socially cleanse 250 000 people in which something that would be like you know would genuinely be pretty difficult if you try to do this in any other circumstance but you know it's it's sports so you can just basically do ethnic cleansings and yeah it it sucks ass sometimes you can do it with the support of the other so like uh the uh the world cup is going to qatar right and and they one of the things that's happening is it's quote unquote security consultants from the participating nations are coming so you have this like incredible situation where like a the qatari um like police chief i believe has been like hey uh for your own safety

fans if you do happen to be gay and it's illegal to be gay, right, in Qatar, like just guys, just don't hold hands with your partner because it's not us who's going to come and beat you up.

It's the regular Qataris, right? Like you, you won't be safe and we can't protect you from their violent homophobia. And then we've got like Britain sending soldiers to be like, yeah,

let us help you with your security consultations, guys. We need to keep this country safe. god okay so do you know what else does violent security consultations is it britain yes yeah we're now sponsored by the nation of britain is better eternal better help better help online counseling if you don't sign up for therapy a military a military team will break through your windows and force you to go to therapy with a cop that's that is that is the better help guarantee welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

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And I am not thinking about people who I know who were physically dragged by cops into therapy. Ah, it's great. It's a great country that we live in. No, that has never happened. Never happened. No one's ever been forced to go to therapy non-consensually. It's never happened. It doesn't happen.

Yeah. Other things that don't happen include... Include sports? Yeah. Sports aren't real. They're a figment of our imagination. If we simply stopped... The ontology of sports is fatally flawed. One might say that sports are a way of teaching people

to be compliant with rules and to be administrators in a colonial empire. Or people can argue that sports offer a gamified version of the world that allow you to recognize problem solving in fun and creative ways and encourage team building. So you too can join

a line squad I don't actually like sports very much I on the other hand do quite like sports but I'm aware of the role they play okay so this is like a big thing that the Gulf states do is particularly

do the sports bullshit and Carter I think usually is smarter about it than like carter just has better pr people than the saudis do and it i mean they're slightly helped by the fact that they are marginally less bad than saudi arabia like margin like this is a this is a this is a fucking a bar that is so low you can trip over it. Yeah. Like. I think we can just say both bad. Yeah. So should we talk about the kafala system? Yeah, let's do it.

Okay. So the Gulf States have this thing called the kafala system. And there have been some alterations to it and some things that made it less bad in the last few years. But basically, this is a system that lets. Okay. but basically this is a system that lets okay so there's a budget there's a lot of market workers particularly from southeast asia that like take jobs in the gulf because they pay they have the gulf states have a like a obscene fanatical like world-rending amount of oil money um and so people you know come seeking these jobs because they need to feed their families and you know there's a huge amount of oil money here like they have just

every petrodollar um but the the way this labor system basically works is that like in order to like be in the country you you have to have a job right you like you like to be very specifically have to have a job and your employer has like to be very specifically have to have a job and your employer has to be there and so very very bad things start to happen when you have a group of people who you can just like instantly destroy the life of and so things will happen where for example like uh so you you okay so you you show up you show up to cotter right and your boss will just take your fucking passport yeah and it's just gone right and you know it's like okay if you don't do literally everything they tell you like you're not

gonna get your passport back you're just fucked and this creates a like a a genuinely like very close to slavery has a lot of the fucking horrors like you there have been a bunch of stories people like fucking jumping out of buildings trying to escape and then like being dragged back like it's fucking horrifying labor conditions um yeah it's not it's not not indentured servitude no yeah it absolutely is it's yeah it it is it is one of the worst it's one of the worst labor regimes on earth that is not literally slavery it is it is it is in the category of technically not slavery but like very very close yeah it is yeah it is it is one of the worst things that exists uh a a a a serious and genuine solution to if you want to solve like a bunch of the problems of all of the bullshit that's happening in the Gulf region.

If you gave every single one of these migrant workers, like several artillery batteries and a bunch of assault rifles, like instantly like so many of the problems of this region would be solved. Yeah. So I was just looking up statistics. 6,500 of these workers have died in Qatar since it was awarded the World Cup. Like, that's a pretty alarming number of, like,

so it's from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, places like that, right? And yeah, these people have absolutely no rights and they have incredibly dangerous working conditions. Yeah, and also, people are super fucking racist. Yes. The kind of racism that you get

when you have literally, basically pure absolute power over someone, it is a fucking trip. Yeah, people will literally have to pay off the debts that they include like you'll pay a recruitment fee or a travel fee to get these jobs like we're not messing around when we say it's an indentured servitude yeah and it's very hard to do that your your employees could just you know like they can fucking just withhold your pay for whatever the fuck reason

because yeah there's this absolute power there's like a few should i read this one there's an example of one of these deaths that i could read if we want yeah yeah yeah so this guy um madhu balapali i think is his name he's from india he was 43 he left his wife and his 13 year old son rajesh in india to take a job in katar in 2013 and they never saw him again one late night in 2019 when his roommate returned to his dorm he found bolapali's body on the floor like thousands of other sudden unexplained deaths his passing was recorded as heart failure due to natural causes despite working for his employer for six years his wife and son received 114 000 rupees it's about a thousand pounds about a thousand

dollars now as well in compensation and unpaid salary rajesh had no idea why his father died he had no health problems he said there was nothing wrong with him yeah pretty there's i will link the guardian story but there are dozens of these stories of people who die um working in extreme heat for long hours with no breaks and terrible conditions it's pretty terrible shit yeah and a lot of these and also and this is the other thing we should point out is a lot a lot of people have died directly building yes the stadium stadium yeah which is like just like the absolute human horror of why on why are we using like why are we building a giant

fucking soccer stadium in the middle of in like in the fucking desert like yeah jesus christ in a place with no endemic soccer culture it's not like this stadium is like you know going to be packed week in and week out with the qatari ultras doing tfos and shit like it just exists for people to come once to to watch this spectacle and then leave again i mean it's the same thing with all the olympics stuff right like they they yeah like tank a city's economy to build a a whole like basically miniature like village in town that then becomes useless after like a month yeah some of it will just get turned into like i don't know i that's what the olympics are for the olympics are like a

gathering place for a transnational bourgeois elite and they have always been that right like they when they started for a very long time the olympics had an amateurism clause which meant that like quote unquote professional athletes couldn't take part which was designed such that like bourgeois people who had enough leisure time to train could compete but working class people who needed to take time off to train could compete but working class people who needed to take time off to train couldn't be compensated for that time off right they couldn't even be compensated for their time off taken to travel and compete at the games so like the olympics are doing what they're supposed to do which is is bringing these elite people together but like

yeah coca-cola benefits more from every olympics in the city that hosts it yep yeah i mean and obviously it's the olympics are heavily tied to nationalism um and that has a whole bunch of uh you know not great much of the national symbology comes from the nazis directly like that whole yeah exactly but also on the flip side of that there is other stuff like um have like taiwan having to compete compete as chinese taipei and not use their actual flag which is uh other like yes the alternative would be more you know embracing the country as like a as a nationalist thing like as it's as its own nation but still it's it is it's still not great that they can't compete under their actual flag and name

yeah and you know Cotter's kind of weirdly this is slightly backfiring on Cotter a little bit because Cotter works the best as a sort of diplomatic power when nobody pays attention to it

and then the like absolute fucking brain geniuses at the qatari world elite were like what if we fucking drew attention to ourselves and then everyone was like wait hold on this place is fucked but this has not stopped it fifa is like maybe the only ruling sports body more corrupt than the olympic committee like it is it is incredibly staggering like group of people who have figured out a way to just like help a city ethnically cleanse a bunch of its population and then extract enormous amount of wealth and then look good while doing it yeah it is it's an exercise in like pointing pointing over there while you steal someone's wallet you know welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the

fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get

out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Yeah, so I think that the last thing I think we want to talk about was talking about what the saudis have been doing this too because yes one of the sports i'm most familiar with obviously is like cycling it's a sport i competed in and it's recently seen this influx of money from

petrochemical states right so we have like uae team we had a dubai team for a while um we there is like a tour of qatar and the tour of dubai now that like these are not places anyone wants to go ride a bike right they're hot they're flat they're terrible but like uh bike races have always served as a way to consolidate nations right that's why the tour de france exists it's like uh yeah it's literally a loop and being like hey you're included in this and like in Europe, they're often used to consolidate nations that exist outside of states, right? Like Flanders, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Wallonia. All of these places have bike races that delineate who belongs in and who belongs out. It's slightly different in these petrochemical economies because it more delineates like, look at us.

We're a great country and totally normal. And you can come here and do sports. And please don't look at the uh the way that we treat our workers from southeast asia like um it's it's please ignore our 17 wars and like all the school buses full of children we've blown up like do not look at jamaica it's like yeah which also by the way i i do want i do want to just put this room in cotter also fucking involved in yemen same with the uae they nobody ever talks about it they also are fucking doing this do not left them off the hook for this bullshit uh yeah yeah it's interesting to see like yes it's interesting to see some fan groups organizing like against this shit right and chiefly i think

it's gonna it's about stuff that you're about to talk about i think which is the purchasing of clubs by these these very wealthy interests i find it fascinating to see that there has always been an anti-fascist element in in football ultras right there have always been clubs that have been anti-fascist those clubs have always tended to oppose like ownership uh of of the clubs that they are fans of by finance capital but it's interesting to see that now articulated against these petrochemical regimes in the middle east right like it's keith from fucking bolton and his mates who go to the football match every saturday now i'm fucking pissed ain't it because they allowing lgbtq rights in qatar uh but yeah it's very funny to see and also it's nice to see right like it's good

to see people showing solidarity like you can't display in theory you can't display pride flags uh in stadia or anywhere else in qatar right i know people were talking about taking them anyway uh so maybe someone will do an epic like pride flag or tifo uh at the olympics which would be uh i don't know i've never seen not at the olympics at the Olympics, which would be, I don't know, I've never seen, not at the Olympics, at the World Cup. They might all get disappeared, but... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then the entire...

Approach with caution. Yeah, and then the stadium collapses, and there we go. Yeah. So the other thing that's sort of been happening is the Saudis have been buying up a bunch of clubs. They bought Britain's Premier League, Newcastle United team.

They just, like, bought it. The Saudis have this thing called the Public Investment Fund, which is like, it's kind of like a sovereign wealth fund kind of but they just use it to like buy shit and they've been doing a bunch of sports stuff, they've also been pushing it to esports

which has been a disaster yeah, so they bought the ESL which is the does it still stand for Electronic Sports League? I think so. I think it still does. Are we talking about esports now? Yeah, we're talking about fucking esports.

This isn't... Okay, okay. Are you about to be a bigot and say esports aren't sports? No! They're video games. Yeah, they were. No, it's better than regular sports.

Yeah, but they're different. Chess was at the Olympics. The same shit is happening here. So the ESL is like one of the, it basically ate a bunch of the other, so there used to be a bunch of circuits for a bunch of different esports games, right? Things like Counter-Strike,

seems like StarCraft, those are the sort of, I think there's another another what's the other big one that esl does um esl seems to be mostly counter yeah it's mostly counter-strike and they they basically consumed all of the like starcraft so they used to be iem and dreamhack that did stuff and they've like eaten them all and the esl just got like bought out by like the saudi's fucking investment company by and and by by by a new sort of like media group thing at the saudi's forum that's headed by fucking former activision uh ceo brian ward unbelievable yeah who's the guy who engineered the fucking Activision Blizzard merger and is now going on to do this bullshit?

The Savvy Games Group. Yeah. What a great name. Esports has always, there's funnily enough, always sucked. Like, a bunch of this stuff is funded by, like, fucking cryptocurrency right now. I can't take it seriously. They somehow found something worse than cryptocurrency. It's called esports.

I just, you can't take it seriously. It's the best. But, yeah yeah the saudis have taken my beloved starcraft league i will be waging an unending holy war against them until they fucking cease to exist and yeah yeah you become a starcraft 2 again it it sucks all i know about esports is sonic fox and smash brothers that's all i know because everything else just seems like people who are having a fun time playing video games.

That's great. My postdoc was founded by the IOC and at the time I was there, there was this massive first of all, there was a lot of boomers discussing if esports were sports and then whether they should be incorporated in the Olympics and it was just extremely funny to

watch these people completely fail to understand the fundamental like uh you know sports a physical contest with the metal element right it doesn't matter if you're moving your thumbs or your whole body but it was very funny to watch these people i want to say this because this is okay so this is really funny but also people get like really seriously injured doing esports shit like particularly with soccer players there's a lot of starcraft players who are like fucking paralyzed who have like like serious nerve damage to their spines yeah because they they have like starcraft players like especially older days you have people like practicing 16 hours a day right and they're sitting in a chair and they're they're fucking like you know they have like 400 apm right so

you're doing like like 600 actions in a minute. And people's wrists just explode. People get fucking damage to their spines. They get nerve damage. All this shit happens. It sucks. I have a friend who's a human physiologist. She used to work for the Department of Defense here in San Diego.

Helping high-speed army people be better at killing people. Navy people, I guess, in San Diego, and then left to work for Red Bull in their esports division. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. To be this human physiologist who optimizes people's setups so that they're wristed at the right angle and gets them actually training. I guess we won't be happy until Taiwan is playing Fortnite in a democratized, decentralized esports league that has union workers and i guess

that's what we're advocating for now yep that's the one goal of this podcast there is a there's a uh myanmar national unity government esports team so actually there was actually a whole thing in competitive starcraft where someone someone held up someone held up a hong kong flag and they fucking like they they cut the stream and fucking fired this actually fired the two like like they they not only fired the guy who held the thing up they fired the two fucking casters who like it who were just there while it happened yeah so critical respect that person is the uh the john carlos that's the raised fist moment of esports. Yeah, so, yeah, fuck. Sports do bad things.

Make them do good things. Overthrow your local government. Yeah. I mean, the revolutionary I mean, this has been written about by actual academics, but the revolutionary potential of soccer hooligans and football hooligans is massive. One day we'll do an episode about the fucking i the the the turkish soccer ultras who

fucking stole a backhoe and we're driving it around turkey doesn't 13 destroying fucking police barricades with it sick as shit every and lots of men like in terrya square there were egyptian ultras were leading in the maidan it was it was Ukrainian ultras. There's a really good book called 1312, which people should read if they're interested in the political potential of football ultras. We should do something about hooligans in general. But yes, this was supposed to kind of be about

the various ways that there's sports things that are kind of messed up. Yeah. Maybe they're just regularlympics one more thing yeah you can stop these fucking giant mega events from happening in your city like people people successfully do this they've done this with the olympics they've done this some lesser world cup but yeah and if you can do that like please do like don't you don't have to let these fucking sports company bullshit like execs ethnically cleanse your city you you don't have to let these fucking sports company bullshit, like, execs ethnically cleanse your city.

You just don't. You can stop them. Look up Nolympics LA. It's something that people in the US should look up. Yeah. They're an organization worth supporting. That is your action item for today is look up Nolympics. That's your homework? I think we've talked about Nolympics before, but look it up.

I think you've spoken to Nolympics on the podcast, I think. And the last thing i will i will give an easter egg there's there's one sport i actually un like unironically enjoy curling no not fuck you you racist that's the episode. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him.

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