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If a Union is Good Enough For Pro Athletes Why isn’t it Good Enough For Everyone Else?

Irony and hypocrisy had a baby, and called it ‘Barstoolsports.com’

Petr Swedock
3 min readAug 18, 2019
Photo by Ruari Bell on Unsplash

David Portnoy is a man who founded a sports-n-popculture blog. The webpage — called ‘BarstoolSports.com’ — is categorized as the intersection of sports and smut: A (very brief) perusal by yours truly suggest the blog possesses all the delights of toxic masculinity with the many charms of statistical trivialities occasionally sprinkled with scatological elan — members of the site call themselves ‘Stoolies.’ In short, the aesthetic of the site is working-class white-male brutalism: undistilled and unkempt bros, upon barstools, drinking and watching sports and talking amongst themselves alternately about sports, about drinking and about women.

As you can probably imagine, self-reflection seldom penetrates such a crudely built domain: Barstools are too unstable a platform for that kind of heavy lifting. However, on occasion when we step back, we view the emergent incongruity when entitled white bros with too much money, too much bullhorn and not enough sense speak their piece.

Just such an occasion took place last week. In response to tweets from the burgeoning unionization movements taking place in other sports blogs and across other media…

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Petr Swedock
Petr Swedock

Written by Petr Swedock

An unwieldy mix of the sacred and the profane, uneasily co-existing in an ever more fragile shell. Celebrating no-shave Nov since Sept 1989.

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