It is this extremely played-out joke in the world of Big Tech that if you want federal funding for something you have to phrase it in a way where it could be used to kill communists (or, after the end of the Cold War, terrorists) It's an incredibly well-known political truth
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It's actually cool
@Nymphomachy brought up sports because sports is a very powerful analogy here when it comes to "human irrationality" It's very hard to say what some alien observer would find beneficial about playing high school sports1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
People say sports are good because they get people to exercise Okay, but exercising could be much more easily accomplished by just, like, jogging and doing push-ups
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*Good* exercise is supposed to be about pushing your body to its natural personal best, and then gradually pushing past that threshold to expand your capacities *Sports* is a *competitive* process where you push your body to do whatever it needs to do to beat that other fucker
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This frequently leads to *injury*, which is very *bad* for your body in a very direct way that counteracts the ways exercise is good Sometimes the injury leads to *permanent disability and death*
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You could ask -- is this a necessary price to pay to get people to exercise? And for tons of people the answer is fuck no -- tons of people hate sports and only get into exercise by getting into it in a non-competitive context
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But for plenty of other people if you try to ban sports they will fucking fight you They will actively destroy their health with PEDs to get better at sports and beat the other fucker The sports wasn't to enable the exercise, the exercise was to enable the sports
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Fundamental human drive and all that People who have, themselves, never worked out in years will pay tons of money to watch "their guys" own those other guys on the field and it has nothing to do with abstractly wanting more people to exercise
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And I really do feel like at least in our benighted world international competition of various kinds -- actual war, and the military-industrial complex buildup that serves as saber-rattling proxy for war, and performative fake stuff like the Space Race -- is the sports
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And actual scientific advances are the exercise WWII did in fact get a very flabby American economy mired in depression back in shape, and hey that's good I guess Same war gave a ton of other countries around the world "career-ending injuries", and that's bad
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The Cold War was this prolonged, fucked-up exercise program where the whole country was being exhorted "Eat right, do your calisthenics, pass your PT tests -- you don't want Russia winning the Big Game, do you?" And hoping to never actually have to play a Big Game
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And hey, we did get in better shape (Actually literally in better shape -- the USDA started taking malnutrition seriously when looking at how underweight many draftees were in WWII and pushed the idea of "nutrition standards" and school lunches etc. to try to fight this)
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Was it worth the cost? I dunno, we got and gave a lot of injuries in the scrimmages we played all over the Third World in that half-century But I really, really doubt we'd have had the motivation to do all those push-ups if there were no Big Game
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End of conversation
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