Specter Vision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird Studies.com. Last time we were talking, we were talking about games and the particular game we were talking about as Dungeons and Dragons, or more generally, I guess you call them tabletop games.

Role-playing games?

Tabletop role-playing games, I guess, we were talking about.

And today we're talking about a rather different kind of game, which is the games of violence, blood sports.

Those would include boxing, mixed martial arts, and any of its component arts,

Taekwondo, Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, etc. Basically combat sports, and particularly those that lie closer to actual combat.

In other words, where participation in organized competition of these games results in injury,

not as a happenstance, as an unwanted byproduct, but as kind of the point of the game.

That's kind of what I mean by blood sports.

And I'm not talking about things like cockfighting or dog fighting, like animal blood sports,

which maybe this is some kind of philosophical or logical inconsistency on my part,

but to me, those are an entirely different

order of things. I mean, I find them utterly repulsive, because my feeling is that animals

don't consent to be in these fights, whereas human beings do. And maybe that's a thin rationalization for why I absolutely detest this kind of spectacle

of brutality to animals, whereas I don't detest that same spectacle when it's applied

to human beings.

Maybe on some level that doesn't make sense.

But I'm just going to draw a line in the sand right now and say that all of that Hemingway shit about the nobility and tragedy of the bullfight

get the fuck out of my face with that shit I just I got no you don't like that

I just got no patience for that and like I I said, I'm probably inconsistent on that point.

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