Isabelle Gall wrote:

Ty Webb wrote:Being chosen first among a finite pool of choices=succeeding in art.

This is how you would value art? That is what 'success in art' would mean to you? Rather than it’s intrinsic value? Context doesn’t equal competition.

Not how I value art. You said that you created art and that perhaps someone would choose it out of a finite pool. Here:

Isabelle Gall wrote:Someone may 'choose' me over an other choice, after making a comparison, and i'd hope it'd be because I was dedicated 100% to the subject-delivering it on it's own terms rather than worrying if I was 'better' than a supposed rival like a jealous schoolgirl.

I said nothing about value. You're the one who insists placing value judgments on the very concept of competition. I said nothing about the art's spiritual, philosophical, or aesthetic worth. You're the one who made that leap. I disregarded the criteria and simply said that the act of choosing is a part of the competitive process. Choosing one thing rather than another = result of competition.

Ty Webb wrote:Self-improvement is competition with yourself.

Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Only because you refuse to be open to any definition of competition other than "amorally crush another person to further one's own goals".

Ty Webb wrote:For the last time, spare me your condescending, psychobabble definition of competition. There is nothing inherently destructive in competition. Quite the opposite.

According to you, which is gospel apparently. Your judgements are no less value based than mine. 'For the last time'? Sorry?

I haven't made any value judgments. I have not said besting another human being is inherently good, because I have not limited the definition of competition so narrowly. You have.

Ty Webb wrote:And thus, no matter how you much you want not to believe it, you have participated in a competition. The criteria of their choice don't matter. A choice was made between two or more parties, which is a competition.

How is this a competition? So basic ‘choice’ now as well as ‘context’, all just competition to you?

Two paintings. Only one can be bought. Painting A is chosen. Therefore, painting A won the competition for the buyer's money over Painting B. If you prefer to keep this out of the realm of filthy lucre, only one of the two paintings can be the subject of a thesis. Or can be visited because the two paintings are miles apart and there isn't time enough in the viewer's day to see both. Pick your criteria. It's all competition whether you intended to compete or not. Often, the judgment is completely out of the hands of the competitors. You don't have to pander to a judge in order to be in a competition, any more than you have to seek another's pain or disadvantage.

Ty Webb wrote:What exactly is your point?

Competition is something which is unfortunately and unnecessarily imposed upon the lives of many irrespective of their own choice or personal wishes.

Endlessly pitching people against each other allows you to think that you've ‘won’ due to the magical thinking of imagining that everyone is thinking the same way as you. The fact that they aren't is something which you are absolutely unable to comprehend or deal with. How are you supposed to ‘beat’ them if they aren't even playing?

Again, "endlessly pitting people against each other" until they are all "thinking the same way" is your own jaundiced view of competition. And who's to say every competition has one all-encompassing winner and one destitute, devastated, irrevocably hollowed loser? You, that's who. But not me.

Ty Webb wrote:Competition is good.

Or God rather, for you, and also by your own definition ‘for everybody’, whether they like it or not. If they don't like it, fuck them. In your mind, you win.

What are talking about? I haven't expressed ANYTHING like that, but you continue to believe that competition, and to an even more precise degree sports, are nothing but "I win and you're a loser! I'm better than you!". That's convenient and no doubt helps you feel morally superior to those benighted Philistines on the field, but it's just a small, hideously biased portion of the larger picture.

And for the record, you started with the name-calling, the disparagement, and the poorly disguised, nose-in-the-air disdain for my opinion and for anyone who'd dare sully themselves with the banality of sports. I got snippy when I inferred that "cocksucker" included me, and I'm glad to see I wasn't wrong.

Ty Webb wrote:Competition is good. Obsession, exclusion, narcissism, and the other possible byproducts are not, but they hardly intrinsic.

competition IS exclusion. if life is a contest - what will you win? and what about all the loosers? did they just not try hard enough? I think we're way too focused on this competition idea. it starts on the first day of school: be better, be faster, be the best - crap.

sports is ok if you're doing for fun.

bassdriver wrote:if life is a contest...

miseryandthesun wrote:

bassdriver wrote:if life is a contest...

the invisible mr Darwin does not contradict my point. evolution is not a sportive contest. the strongest does not necessarily win. the "life is a contest" idea implies that you can win if you just try hard enough. obviously this is not the whole truth.

bassdriver wrote:

miseryandthesun wrote:

bassdriver wrote:if life is a contest...

the invisible mr Darwin does not contradict my point. evolution is not a sportive contest. the strongest does not necessarily win. the "life is a contest" idea implies that you can win if you just try hard enough. obviously this is not the whole truth.

I just meant to imply that competition could easily be considered as relevant as anything else, so long as we consider ourselves the result of a constant and natural struggle for power.

Ty Webb wrote:you continue to believe that competition, and to an even more precise degree sports, are nothing but "I win and you're a loser! I'm better than you!". That's convenient and no doubt helps you feel morally superior to those benighted Philistines on the field, but it's just a small, hideously biased portion of the larger picture.

And for the record, you started with the name-calling, the disparagement, and the poorly disguised, nose-in-the-air disdain for my opinion and for anyone who'd dare sully themselves with the banality of sports. I got snippy when I inferred that "cocksucker" included me, and I'm glad to see I wasn't wrong.

Saying that I fucking hate sports and find the notion of 'competition' retarded and offensive is hardly 'poorly disguised nose-in-the-air disdain' is it? I'm just being honest. Sure, your own opinion of sports was well written but it still reads like a pile of 'Ebony and Ivory' rhapsodizing to me, personally, because I fucking hate sports. I don't know why this would bother you.

What I do object to is you telling me about my own life, that i'm living in a 'deluded wonderland' simply because I don't subscribe to the same ideas that you do. For you, a competition isn't something which you ever willingly enter ('in a competition' implies that you've made a personal choice to enter and are fully aware of the rules) because it's already always there in life whether you like it or not, inherent and all-encompassing. You say that your ideas about competition see it as a 'relatively neutral concept', for good or bad, yet any criticism of it is immediately dismissed as negative and untenable, coloured purely by personal experience and therefore invalid. Ty knows best, and speaks for everybody. Well, you don't speak for me, and enough already with the trick of claiming that i'm trying to play king of the castle on a level playing field. I can absolutely assure you that it isn't the same for everybody. 'Tiresome' yes, but it all seems rather jingoistic, no?

Sports are just games. And games aren't CRAP, cos that would just be silly. Especially considering we can't even say for sure what a game is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, wrote:66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. -- For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! --

Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear.

When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.-- Are they all 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis.

Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! sometimes similarities of detail.

And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and cries-crossing: sometimes overall similarities.

67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: 'games' form a family.

Anyhow, make of that what you will. I say sports cannot be defined as CRAP or NOT CRAP, they're just there, inevitable behaviours, part of our dispositional behaviours.

But then again, I'm silly.

miseryandthesun wrote:........ as we consider ourselves the result of a constant and natural struggle for power.

is that the science-based definition of what life is about? geeez I'm off to the suicide-both!

oh... and I didn't mean that competition isn't relevant for us, it's much more too dominant.

bassdriver wrote:the strongest does not necessarily win.

No, but the most fit will and does.

Not to horn in on someone else's conversation, but this looks like a fun one.

Isabelle Gall wrote:"in a competition" implies that you've made a personal choice to enter and are fully aware of the rules.

No it doesn't. I was born and did not choose to be. In fact, I believe I compete constantly without the knowledge that I am competing entering my conscious thought processes at all.

Isabelle Gall paraphrasing Ty Webb wrote:because [competition is] already always there in life whether you like it or not, inherent and all-encompassing.

This is correct.

One way you could prove your point is to provide an example of a social interaction in which you are not competing against anyone. That would prove your point.