Proposition: let's make war a sport

The Knicks won the NBA recently. I’m sure you know about this by now if you’ve spent a nanosecond on any social media. You know it, I know it, his mayor’s Muslim, his bagel’s Jewish, his Christian’s Dior, you can fill the rest in yourself.

We saw celebrations from all around the world, but in particular, scenes such as those covered by street media outlets like @sidetalknyc show how emotional this victory was for Mamdanistan. I mean I kinda get it, all these years waiting for a ring, and it paid off massively.

We saw vehicles getting their windshields redecorated with bats and fists. We saw police brutality. We saw Spurs jerseys lit ablaze on the asphalt roads of New York. We heard the celebratory rage of New Yorkers and the many strays that Trae Young caught. We saw what the concrete jungle had to show us, and it was really something to behold.

A theory was proven that night, by the Knicks’ victory and similarly, by the ongoing FIFA World Cup: people can easilyemotionally attach themselves in sports.

Whether it’s for a basketball team or a soccer team, the masses do show up. They huddle, shoulder to shoulder, sweat in the air, chanting the names of players who transport balls from one point to another. They will scream their voices hoarse, in celebration of the number on the screen going up, as Andy Martin gives a masterful analysis of how the ball went from someone’s foot to the back of the net. They don colourful jerseys, paint their faces, wear funny wigs. They research deeply into the team they support so that on the off-chance someone asks: hey who’s your favourite, they can confidently rattle off and glaze the best ball kicker or the best ball bouncer and thrower or ball hitter and some arbitrary statistics to back their claim.

People, especially men, display such strong affinity, almost a parasocial love, towards ball-playing-people they’ve never met before, yet some find it a struggle to express similar emotional depth in other facets of life. People stay up till the wee hours of the morning to catch the game or the race or the qualifier, despite having work tomorrow. People will get into literal physical fights and damage property to defend the honour and glory of the badge on their left breast.

I’m writing this note at 02:57AM, my lights are off and I just saw a video of Knicks fans celebrating in a bar. A white guy, probably smelling like a brewery, standing atop a table, dancing, while fans swarmed the courts on the TV above him. I swiped because, well I frankly don’t care about basketball that much, and the next video I saw was an appeal for aid for a blind child in Lebanon.

I was really thinking to myself at that moment, yeah I don’t think we have our priorities quite in order here. (I didn’t think this by the way, it was more along the lines of: oh so I suppose Americans are actually capable of organising, destroying state property and being pretty vocal about a cause, except when it actually fucking matters)

Don’t take this note personally, for sports fans out there reading this. I enjoy sports too, I played and watched field hockey for most of my life, and I have random phases when my Youtube algorithm is nothing but a certain sport. This isn’t someone who isn’t good at/interested in any sport writing a hate-piece on sports. This is more so me trying to convince you that maybe we should turn war into a sport too. A bloodsport if you will. I find no alternative more convincing than to commodify the violence of man, for it seems we adore sports magnitudes more than we defy and condemn oppression and injustice.

It might be a little radical but hear me out. What if once every year, we held the Palantir Cup? Okay, yeah you’re right. Maybe, every 4 years so people don’t get too bored of how repetitive it is.

It’ll borrow a similar tournament structure to FIFA’s World Cup because if something works, why not give it a peace prize right? Each participating nation has to kill as many people in a foreign land, steal as much of their resources as possible, drop as much heavy explosives on them, sabotage as many elections, basically, fuck up as many lives as possible, to progress in the tournament.

I’d wager that Israel would have a pretty strong fanclub, but given the history of the world, I’d say the West would probably be where most Palantir Cup betting money ends up on. Israel’s good but, you’d be surprised how many underdogs there are in this competition. We might even have some of our own Southeast Asian representation for once at a sporting event of this scale!

If there’s a tie or a dispute in the score, the globally deployed network of security cameras can feed live footage from each victim country directly to the Palantir Referee Command Centre (PRCC) for Video Assisted Reviews (VARs, thanks again FIFA). This helps us get a more accurate kill count from each victim nation, for each participating nation.

I foresee this being a huge success and am open to any potential sponsorships to make this event happen. I will be writing in to Peter Thiel personally, Raytheon, Boeing, the US Department of War (what a fuckass name), the Knesset and many more like-minded organisations. I will be seeking financial support for the upcoming Palantir Cup 2028 held in Singapore. FYI, I am completely open to corruption, bribery and manipulation by any of the hosting/participating nations (great idea btw, thanks again FIFA).

If you can’t tell by now, the problem is not that people like sports. The problem is that for the majority of people, they only give an actual shit about sports. God forbid Americans reacted about a genocide their tax dollars fund with the same reactionary violence to the Knicks’ win. God forbid a pea-brained soccer manchild read up about the exploitation of the working class or the Rohingya crisis (oh but yes, do make time to watch all the highlights and doomscroll sigma edits of Thierry Henry). God forbid you stand for something that affects real lives in the real world.

If every sports fan in the world was somehow politically involved even in the slightest, I would honestly think that we would have half the inequality in our world today. Could you imagine a crowd full of those crazy die-hard European soccer club fans protesting for workers’ rights, with flares burning into billowing red smoke and gargantuan flags being draped across the masses? Could you even imagine for a second if people brought the same energy against war and injustice?

Again, the problem, is not sports. The problem is that we are focused on the wrong fucking thing.

Sports as an entertainment medium, is just a part of the plethora of random bullshit that we are fed to placate us, to lull us loudly into ignoring what’s right in front of us. We all fall for it, whether in one form or the other.

All it took was bread and circuses. The Roman poet Juvenal coined that almost 2,000 years ago. To paraphrase:

“The people now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

Juvenal refers to the Roman practice of providing free wheat to Roman citizens as well as circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining political power. Thousands of years later, and we’re no better than the Romans. Hell, we might even be worse given how interconnected we are by tech now and we’re still falling for the same shit.

2000 years on and we’ve traded the bread in for the latest 3-week-trend to pretend to like and consume, and the circus tents for the expertly architected stadiums for the masses.

You could deadass show the average Singaporean raw unfiltered footage of Israel’s absurd bombings across Lebanon, and it would probably trigger less of an emotional response than dangling a $600 mint condition Pokemon card and 2 litres of matcha served in an Owala bottle in front of their face.

As much as we want to deny it, in its late-stage capitalist perversion, sports are a form of entertainment designed to numb the masses. Ads everywhere. Gambling options rivalling the stock market. Subscription models and ludicrous prices the common worker could never afford, plastered to the gates. That being said, life is pretty rough and I think it’s okay to want to numb it by sometimes screaming at a TV with friends.

However, I think it’s fundamentally important that we bring that same energy to other more important, more concrete parts of life. That’s where we’ve completely lost the plot.

I mentioned earlier about the Palantir Cup. In a future I thought only possible in South Park, I do fear an actual timeline where this Cup happens. I do fear that the spectacle will grow far too horrendously beautiful for us to pry our eyes away, even if we claw them out.

I’m really worried for the state that the world is in and I’m really not trying to be alarmist here. We have wars and genocides waged across the world. We have sexual exploitation of women and children that continues to go unpunished and meme-ified by the Internet. Ok wait.

I mean seriously, let’s take 1 minute to think this through okay. The Knicks won. People took to the streets of New York. People burned shit. People destroyed vehicles. People vandalised. People fought the police. I saw nothing on that scale for the Epstein files. It wasn’t even close to comparable in terms of the scale of violence and destruction. It is so fucking ridiculous to think that a basketball team winning had a city more outraged than an actual nightmare, pedophile sex-trafficking ring being surfaced and then swept under the rug. I mean GENUINELY HOW FUCKING ABSURD IS THAT?

This is fucking sickening. I really don’t understand New Yorkers for this. Cool city, cool mayor and all but, holy shit, the priorities are clearly wrong here. This world wide phenomenon of drugging the masses with sports, celebrities, drama etc. just happened to show shamelessly on full display in NYC, after the Knicks won.

It’s not just New York, it’s all of us. We need to understand this.

I tried not to end this article off with something too depressing but I find it challenging with what’s going on all over the world now, and even in my own country. Urgency is needed now, more than ever.

We need more people to organise. We need more people to educate themselves, we’re beyond the Information Era now, there’s no excuses to not know. We need more people to balance the bread and the circuses, with real-world change. We need more people to volunteer. We need more people to show up.

Much like how Marx opined that religion is the opium of the people, those in power know that by cultivating a cult-like following of these forms of entertainment, we will never organise successfully. They want us numb to our suffering all because we got to watch grown men sweat it out on a field. They know we will know not notice the injustices of the world, if the comfortable spectacle is far too grand and too beautiful to ignore.

Fuck the bread and the circuses.