I am often hard on the owners in Major League Baseball, so let me start out here by offering them an olive branch. It is time to built a rapport, to foster a constructive dialogue that can be used for the common good. It is time to come together, and in that spirit I offer this:
I commend MLB’s ownership groups for not killing thousands of slave laborers in the construction of their new stadiums.
Some might say this is a low bar that they are clearing, that I should not give billionaires too much credit for not doing something that would be just about impossible for them to do in the United States. I say nonsense. When billionaires clear literally any moral bar — plausibility and legality be damned — it should be celebrated, because it’s such a rare achievement.
In Qatar, of course, it’s even more rare. The World Cup officially started yesterday, and the sporting world was abuzz with tales of just how horrifically the South Asian workers who made it happen were abused. Qatar has pushed back on those claims, noting that only three people directly died in the construction of their stadiums, although another 37 workers died in technically-non-construction activities such as traffic accidents on their way to work.
The other six to fifteen thousand deaths (depending on your source and the timeframe) came during the construction boom that made new World Cup-related facilities like roads and hotels and a new town, which Qatar’s government counts as unrelated to the World Cup. If someone dies making a road, why, that barely counts at all!
Also, they were all basically slaves. The migrant workers were forced to take out large loans to travel to Qatar from, for example, Nepal, and then they weren’t allowed to leave Qatar until they’d worked off their debt. They worked absurdly long hours in absurdly high temperatures, then woke up the next day and did it again. There was no way out other than work or death; plenty of the workers got out that second way.
The question, then, is why. Why did Qatar do all of it? Why did they give out a ton of bribes to FIFA officials so that they could construct all of these things and kill a bunch of South Asian migrants? And why was this allowed to continue?
The answer to all of these questions is that people love sports.
Soccer is, of course, not the biggest sport here in America, but it’s massive over large swaths of the world. People want to see soccer on its biggest stage, and will excuse a lot for that. Qatar badly wants to promote itself, and will pay a lot of bribes in order to do so. Everyone has an incentive to act like they’re not garbage people killing people because it’s easier than not killing people. It’s a perfect disaster scenario.
This is the downside of loving sports. Here in Giantsland, we hold our noses and give the team money and then Charles Johnson receives a large percentage of that money and turns around and gives it to traitors so they can do more treason in Washington. In the Middle East, it ends up with Qatari bigwigs who flagrantly abuse human rights getting everything they want on a huge stage.
This comparison isn’t meant to suggest any moral equivalences between the two, but it’s important to remember that, to very rich people, sports are not an end in themselves. Sports are a tool which they use to accomplish other goals. They make money through sports, and launder their reputations through sports, and gain social and political influence through sports. It’s all very ugly.
The actual sports suffer, of course, because they have to. Fans get distracted and angry, and owners gamble that we will not become angry enough to give up on the team. There is a level of fan anger that is optimal for them, and it’s unfortunately not zero. It’s the number where the supply curve of Likes Watching Game With Ball meets the demand curve of Angry About Human Rights. They want you a little angry, because it means they’re making money more efficiently. A little angry means they’re getting as much of what they want in other areas as possible without losing too much money in the short term. It’s perfect for them.
For us, of course, it’s extremely not perfect. We want sports to mostly just be sports, and to not have to worry about the moral costs of watching them and supporting them. More and more, though, there is a moral cost. It’s much less in baseball than in FIFA, which is why I praised baseball’s owners so extravagantly to open today’s newsletter, but that’s damning with faint praise.
You can hold your nose and allow a small amount of harm to be done with your money because you think you’re getting enough good out of it and there’s not that much bad. There is a little bad, though. And as much as I wish I could justify watching the World Cup, I can’t. I’m not a soccer fan, but it’s kinda fun and I think I’d have a good time following it. I’ll do it for the Giants, because it’s less of a compromise, but for the World Cup it’s too big of an ask. Maybe I should give them both up. Maybe I should live in a cave and only eat plants I grow myself. Maybe I should give up completely and not give a shit what happens after I spend my money.
I don’t know the answer here. I just know that liking sports is for suckers, because they’re getting worse all the time in terms of morality, and once you’re on that train, it’s real hard to get off. That’s what they rely on, and it works.
Also, Twitter. The same thing applies to Twitter. The world sucks. Oh well.
Right on, Hombre.
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