Dogs aren't pets. Dogs are packmembers. They love in the way a kid loves a parent, or a mom loves her kids. Most dogs say, "tell me i'm a good dog." I think that's literally the only thought in their head, "How can i be a good dog?"
Except Poodles, which are smart enough to have a theory of mind and blame other dogs when they do a Bad Thing.
Cats are evil and sadistic. They love assholes. Feeding them is not enough to buy their love.
Feeding them isn't enough but they can still be won over eventually and get emotionally needy too. It just tends to be more situational. The cat will want to come and cuddle up with you when they're in the mood for it and viciously resist it when they're not. A dog will just want that attention all the time and will never ever turn it down.
My husband is a football fan, but I find sports fandom in general to be baffling even though I grew up in a family of really obsessive sports fans. I mean, my brother was so obsessive about the Mets that he not only went to all their games, he also would go to Florida every spring to watch their spring training; and my dad was so emotionally invested in Ohio State's football team that he punched a hole in the wall once when they lost - even though he didn't go to Ohio State.
I tried to develop an interest in football, as it seemed important to my husband and he spent a lot of time watching the games, but even though I tried really hard, I just couldn't muster any sort of enthusiasm. I just really cannot seem to care about which group of total strangers wins the game.
I think it's because I tend to be a rather concrete thinker. I once met a guy who played for the Patriots; I was shopping for dog food at Petco and struck up a conversation with a large, muscular gentleman who had two really sweet dogs with him. We chatted for a while about dog things, and then he asked me if my kids wanted his autograph. I asked "Why? Are you famous or something?" and he laughed, and said "You're obviously not a football fan!" Anyway, he was a super nice guy and a dog lover; so I became mildly interested in the Pats as I wanted the nice dog guy's team to win. Then the dog guy messed up his knee and retired, and I went back to not caring about the Pats because I don't know any of them.
My husband tells me that's not the point, you don't have to personally know someone on the team to root for them. But, he hasn't given me a logical reason as to *why* I would want to root for them. He says "well, they're your local team," and I respond "but the players aren't from around here - they're from all over the country. They're only playing for the Pats because they get paid to. It's not like they are people I know, who are from here," and then he says "I give up, you are just never going to understand!"
I read this thought experiment once: suppose in some bizarre trade, every member of your team (Team A) gets traded to your rival team (Team B), and every member of your rival team gets traded to your team: which team would you root for? The person who thought this up said they would continue to root for Team A, and concluded they were, in fact, rooting not for people but for jerseys, hahaha.
This is kind of like a different spin on the Ship of Theseus. I'd say that really, you're rooting for the "franchise" or "club". If you're a long term fan, players will always come and go (the only have so many good years in them, even if they're completely loyal and never leave), but the institution lives on.
If all the current Yankees are replaced as they retire, but they then get together and form a team, which group is the true Yankees? The Baseball Team of Theseus. I love it.
Few things take the fun out of watching sports than realizing you're rooting for a corporation owned by a billionaire. It helps if you're rooting for a team that has deep roots in a city's culture like the Red Sox.
Yes. I have to tap into my dialectical mind to enjoy any pro sports for this very reason. Free agency, money ball, sabrmetrics, no salary cap, have all made baseball a lot less enjoyable
Honestly, as someone who isn't even that into sports, it's sort of just a choice you make. A lot of the time it's a team that is local in some way, but it can be a team a friend or family member likes, or just totally arbitrary. The point really is to just pick one and then decide to become emotionally invested in them.
It's not about logic, it's just about fun. Almost nothing that is fun really holds up to cold rational assessment. Even if you're literally the person on the team, there's no particular reason to care about winning or losing, except that we've just collectively decided that putting a ball over a line on some grass is a good and valuable thing to do.
I got free tickets to an Eagles game last year. I had no real emotional attachment to the team. I hadn't followed them before, I've never lived in Philadelphia, and I only knew the name of one player on the team. But I wanted it to be fun, so I got some beers, went to the tailgate, chatted to other fans, and then watched the game having decided that I was going to be invested in the Eagles winning. I was going to shout at the players who couldn't year me, celebrate the touchdowns scored, and complain about the touchdowns conceded. As a result, I did have a lot of fun. I was worried when they want behind and I was thrilled when they caught up and went ahead. And I had a great time on the subway afterwards with all the fans.
If I was being logical, none of that really made sense. It didn't affect my life at all whether they won or lost, but I just decided I wanted it to matter so I could enjoy it more. I guess that's all I can say to someone else that it doesn't come naturally to. Nobody will ever be able to explain why you should care if you don't already, because there isn't a serious reason, you just have to decide to because you think it'll be more enjoyable.
“Sports let us channel our innate competitiveness into non-murderous forums so that we can experience competition without sacking, looting, and burning cities except for our own city when our team wins a championship.”
I was in Philly during each of their last three Super Bowl appearances. People were remarkably well-behaved, as well-behaved as you can be when Center City is wall-to-wall people.
Anyway, when they won the Super Bowl in 2018, it was reported that only one car got overturned. One! That’s like a Tuesday!
There is nothing like when the local team is going on an extended playoff run. The city just seems... nicer. People are happier and there's a genuine sense of civic pride. Is it silly? Sure. But most things that are fun are silly. But sports are a sort of tribalism in which no one gets hurt (except the athletes), creates a sort of mythology for you to adopt, and you can form very real bonds with total strangers in mere moments by using the proper shorthand. Even your hated rivals are a part of the same club, and an essential part of the ritual.
My wife isn't really into sports. She can't wait to watch our boys play when they're older but is indifferent to college and pro sports. College football is probably the sport I get the most worked up over. We both went to Mizzou and somehow I actually got her to care about a game once. We were playing Florida and had a couple who are Gator fans over, so she engaged.
Long story short, we won on a last-second field goal. Had it not gone in our season would've been ruined. She immediately turned to me, stressed out of her mind, and said, "That was horrible. Why do you like this?"
"The stakes are real" is a pretty wild thing to say about a ball game. I mean, what is actually *lost* when a team loses?
That said, I definitely feel the stakes when watching combat sports. The effects of a KO or a snapped limb are just way more personal and immediate, and depending on what organization you're fighting for, may also mean a smaller payday. And for anyone who isn't already a champ, that check is already pretty small.
> A screenwriter won’t expose the audience to heartbreak because we want to keep you coming back
Uh, not a Game of Thrones fan then
(First Ned’s beheading, then the Red Wedding, then Season 8 (though no one would’ve come back after that), then Winds of Winter (or rather, NOT Winds of Winter)
Game of Thrones was the big exception to this rule! It’s a big reason why it drew so many people in (including me). And then it got boring in later seasons when you realized that characters like Tyrion and John Snow were not going to die.
I was thinking something similar a few weeks ago while watching a pretty epic extra inning game between the Giants and the Dodgers, although putting a finer point on it: We need more proxies for violence in our world.
There's no denying that people get a thrill from beating up a bad guy, and in the absence of a bad guy to beat up, they will vent their frustrations in a ridiculous number of ways that are almost all terrible.
But at the Giants-Dodgers game, there was an entire mob chanting "BEAT LA! BEAT LA!" for minutes at a time, drunk dudes in the bleachers, moms with their kids, dweebs in glasses, everyone. And then when the Giants actually DID beat LA, the feeling was absolute euphoria and utter victory, as if we had pummeled a villain with our bare hands - when in reality, all that happened was that a guy hit a ball a few hundred feet. It landed harmlessly. No one was physically injured in any way. But we have structured this thing in such a way that a ball moving from Point A to Point B can serve as a complete proxy for the same emotions we get from physical confrontation and violence.
Of all the teams in all the world The caption photo had to be of one I really really like? Then again if you wanted a encapsulation of futility it's a pretty useful shorthand these days.
Take back the thing you said about pets
The way my dog looks at me in the morning tells me that I pour her food into that bowl better than anyone else and therefore our bond is sacred.
Dogs aren't pets. Dogs are packmembers. They love in the way a kid loves a parent, or a mom loves her kids. Most dogs say, "tell me i'm a good dog." I think that's literally the only thought in their head, "How can i be a good dog?"
Except Poodles, which are smart enough to have a theory of mind and blame other dogs when they do a Bad Thing.
Cats are evil and sadistic. They love assholes. Feeding them is not enough to buy their love.
Feeding them isn't enough but they can still be won over eventually and get emotionally needy too. It just tends to be more situational. The cat will want to come and cuddle up with you when they're in the mood for it and viciously resist it when they're not. A dog will just want that attention all the time and will never ever turn it down.
My cat is beautiful and placid how dare you
Are you sure it's not dead? Perhaps you should check.
(A reminder that we're on a humor website, and therefore responses are to be graded, in part, on how silly they are).
Obviously you’ve never heard of the no holds barred action of Microsoft Excel World Championship
https://youtu.be/QwNoFOUiSiE?si=7XlQU5BaoqIA00Oc
Oh my God, I clicked the link: it's real and it takes place in Vegas.
The finals are December 1 this year. Still time to buy your tickets https://excel-esports.com/
This made my day. Thank you. 🙏🏽
It's basic tribalism. We form tribes; we ride or die with our tribes. We're not as sophisticated and evolved as we want to think we are.
[oops]
My husband is a football fan, but I find sports fandom in general to be baffling even though I grew up in a family of really obsessive sports fans. I mean, my brother was so obsessive about the Mets that he not only went to all their games, he also would go to Florida every spring to watch their spring training; and my dad was so emotionally invested in Ohio State's football team that he punched a hole in the wall once when they lost - even though he didn't go to Ohio State.
I tried to develop an interest in football, as it seemed important to my husband and he spent a lot of time watching the games, but even though I tried really hard, I just couldn't muster any sort of enthusiasm. I just really cannot seem to care about which group of total strangers wins the game.
I think it's because I tend to be a rather concrete thinker. I once met a guy who played for the Patriots; I was shopping for dog food at Petco and struck up a conversation with a large, muscular gentleman who had two really sweet dogs with him. We chatted for a while about dog things, and then he asked me if my kids wanted his autograph. I asked "Why? Are you famous or something?" and he laughed, and said "You're obviously not a football fan!" Anyway, he was a super nice guy and a dog lover; so I became mildly interested in the Pats as I wanted the nice dog guy's team to win. Then the dog guy messed up his knee and retired, and I went back to not caring about the Pats because I don't know any of them.
My husband tells me that's not the point, you don't have to personally know someone on the team to root for them. But, he hasn't given me a logical reason as to *why* I would want to root for them. He says "well, they're your local team," and I respond "but the players aren't from around here - they're from all over the country. They're only playing for the Pats because they get paid to. It's not like they are people I know, who are from here," and then he says "I give up, you are just never going to understand!"
I read this thought experiment once: suppose in some bizarre trade, every member of your team (Team A) gets traded to your rival team (Team B), and every member of your rival team gets traded to your team: which team would you root for? The person who thought this up said they would continue to root for Team A, and concluded they were, in fact, rooting not for people but for jerseys, hahaha.
This is kind of like a different spin on the Ship of Theseus. I'd say that really, you're rooting for the "franchise" or "club". If you're a long term fan, players will always come and go (the only have so many good years in them, even if they're completely loyal and never leave), but the institution lives on.
If all the current Yankees are replaced as they retire, but they then get together and form a team, which group is the true Yankees? The Baseball Team of Theseus. I love it.
Few things take the fun out of watching sports than realizing you're rooting for a corporation owned by a billionaire. It helps if you're rooting for a team that has deep roots in a city's culture like the Red Sox.
Yes. I have to tap into my dialectical mind to enjoy any pro sports for this very reason. Free agency, money ball, sabrmetrics, no salary cap, have all made baseball a lot less enjoyable
Was that the thought experiment that was featured in an opening Seinfeld monologue bit, rooting for different clothes I think he said.
Oh my gosh--I think I know the concept from the Seinfeld bit and misremembered reading it, hahaha. Good call!
Haha. It happens. At any given time I have 4 or 5 disjointed Seinfeld or Simpsons references swirling around my head.
Honestly, as someone who isn't even that into sports, it's sort of just a choice you make. A lot of the time it's a team that is local in some way, but it can be a team a friend or family member likes, or just totally arbitrary. The point really is to just pick one and then decide to become emotionally invested in them.
It's not about logic, it's just about fun. Almost nothing that is fun really holds up to cold rational assessment. Even if you're literally the person on the team, there's no particular reason to care about winning or losing, except that we've just collectively decided that putting a ball over a line on some grass is a good and valuable thing to do.
I got free tickets to an Eagles game last year. I had no real emotional attachment to the team. I hadn't followed them before, I've never lived in Philadelphia, and I only knew the name of one player on the team. But I wanted it to be fun, so I got some beers, went to the tailgate, chatted to other fans, and then watched the game having decided that I was going to be invested in the Eagles winning. I was going to shout at the players who couldn't year me, celebrate the touchdowns scored, and complain about the touchdowns conceded. As a result, I did have a lot of fun. I was worried when they want behind and I was thrilled when they caught up and went ahead. And I had a great time on the subway afterwards with all the fans.
If I was being logical, none of that really made sense. It didn't affect my life at all whether they won or lost, but I just decided I wanted it to matter so I could enjoy it more. I guess that's all I can say to someone else that it doesn't come naturally to. Nobody will ever be able to explain why you should care if you don't already, because there isn't a serious reason, you just have to decide to because you think it'll be more enjoyable.
“Sports let us channel our innate competitiveness into non-murderous forums so that we can experience competition without sacking, looting, and burning cities except for our own city when our team wins a championship.”
I was in Philly during each of their last three Super Bowl appearances. People were remarkably well-behaved, as well-behaved as you can be when Center City is wall-to-wall people.
Anyway, when they won the Super Bowl in 2018, it was reported that only one car got overturned. One! That’s like a Tuesday!
And only one Santa got punched! (He deserved it.)
Geez, I was all in until I got to that pets thing. You’re wrong and I hope Alf doesn’t stop at diddling your spleen.
How tempted were you to list religion as one of the utterly made up things to which people ascribe meaning?
There is nothing like when the local team is going on an extended playoff run. The city just seems... nicer. People are happier and there's a genuine sense of civic pride. Is it silly? Sure. But most things that are fun are silly. But sports are a sort of tribalism in which no one gets hurt (except the athletes), creates a sort of mythology for you to adopt, and you can form very real bonds with total strangers in mere moments by using the proper shorthand. Even your hated rivals are a part of the same club, and an essential part of the ritual.
I mean, who doesn't love Remembering Some Guys?
One of my favorite philosophy papers from the last few years also opens with an alien watching human sports.
https://philpapers.org/archive/BARWCA-6.pdf
My wife isn't really into sports. She can't wait to watch our boys play when they're older but is indifferent to college and pro sports. College football is probably the sport I get the most worked up over. We both went to Mizzou and somehow I actually got her to care about a game once. We were playing Florida and had a couple who are Gator fans over, so she engaged.
Long story short, we won on a last-second field goal. Had it not gone in our season would've been ruined. She immediately turned to me, stressed out of her mind, and said, "That was horrible. Why do you like this?"
"The stakes are real" is a pretty wild thing to say about a ball game. I mean, what is actually *lost* when a team loses?
That said, I definitely feel the stakes when watching combat sports. The effects of a KO or a snapped limb are just way more personal and immediate, and depending on what organization you're fighting for, may also mean a smaller payday. And for anyone who isn't already a champ, that check is already pretty small.
> A screenwriter won’t expose the audience to heartbreak because we want to keep you coming back
Uh, not a Game of Thrones fan then
(First Ned’s beheading, then the Red Wedding, then Season 8 (though no one would’ve come back after that), then Winds of Winter (or rather, NOT Winds of Winter)
Game of Thrones was the big exception to this rule! It’s a big reason why it drew so many people in (including me). And then it got boring in later seasons when you realized that characters like Tyrion and John Snow were not going to die.
Exactly. Also re Jesse - you knew they weren’t going to have him die bc truly fans would have rioted.
Also I just sent a screenshot of your Tottenham fans pic to my Arsenal fan husband.
Also we saw you at DC Improv in March - it was fun!
As a NY Jets fan, sports are torture. But I keep coming back ...
https://todaysmuse.substack.com/p/suffering-sports-fans-and-the-motives
Enough of this argument. Let’s bury the hatchet. In your skull.
I was thinking something similar a few weeks ago while watching a pretty epic extra inning game between the Giants and the Dodgers, although putting a finer point on it: We need more proxies for violence in our world.
There's no denying that people get a thrill from beating up a bad guy, and in the absence of a bad guy to beat up, they will vent their frustrations in a ridiculous number of ways that are almost all terrible.
But at the Giants-Dodgers game, there was an entire mob chanting "BEAT LA! BEAT LA!" for minutes at a time, drunk dudes in the bleachers, moms with their kids, dweebs in glasses, everyone. And then when the Giants actually DID beat LA, the feeling was absolute euphoria and utter victory, as if we had pummeled a villain with our bare hands - when in reality, all that happened was that a guy hit a ball a few hundred feet. It landed harmlessly. No one was physically injured in any way. But we have structured this thing in such a way that a ball moving from Point A to Point B can serve as a complete proxy for the same emotions we get from physical confrontation and violence.
More of that, please.
Of all the teams in all the world The caption photo had to be of one I really really like? Then again if you wanted a encapsulation of futility it's a pretty useful shorthand these days.