I don't actually have a problem with your position. It's yours, and you're obviously entitled to it. But I do have a problem with the collective failure to accept, in the sense that as a consumer I have this right, that while I also care about many of the things that you have spoken about, my own conscience simply won't allow me to stop at that point. I also care about many things beyond that which you have spoken about.
It's the snide and dishonest remarks about "harming the club" that I take issue with, because that exact same reasoning also applies to you when you don't buy a product from someone. Would it be fair for me to claim that you are "purposely harming Nike", simply because you don't want to, for whatever reason, buy one of their products?
And if it is fundamentally different, please explain how?
As to whether it was a straw man, I wasn't attacking a position that you don't hold. Do you or do you not believe that football is now fundamentally a business like any other? The purpose of my reply was to highlight the fact that you don't feel the same way about any of those companies as you do about Manchester United, as revealed in that post.
Why is that, and what does that say about your other beliefs about the way that football clubs should operate?
I haven't been following this thread a for a few months now (and I don't feel inclined to wade through pages and pages of the same arguments and counter-arguments repeated ad infinitum, so I don't know what Cider said about 'harming the club,' but I'm guessing this is a reference to starving the Glazers of funds?
There are 2 separate issues here: one is healthy, rational acceptance of the fact that football is a business and that the individual (the non-wealthy, non-connected kind) can do SFA to change that. Even when well organised apparently, as MUST and the RKs have demonstrated over the last few months.
The second, and this is where you seem to getting a little nuts, is to take it to its logical extreme and immediately declare, that therefore the emotional connection of the supporter to the club should also be similar to those towards corporate giants whose products they may use frequently.
(Come to think of it, there are probably tons of groups the world over, that are just as crazy about Apple's products as we are about United, but I'll let that go.)
Cutting nose, spiting face. Think that sums up the phrase 'harming the club,' adequately. I don't know where the question of conscience comes in? I'm quite bizarred out by that comment, frankly.
Let me be clear, I would also like to see the back of the Glazers and I think the G&G campaign has been heart-warming to watch, but in a very juvenile sense. It's like taking your tie off at morning assembly at school and taunting your teachers etc. A bit of fun, a bit of venting but not very much more than that. It's a 'safety valve' approach, if you get what I mean.
Nonetheless, unless I am logged into the Caf, I don't even remember that such a family exists. The type of anger and hatred on display here is comical, especially when it purports to be a crusading, justice-dispensing exercise.
Simply put, yes, football is a business today. And it's the entertainment business. Yet, it is not a business 'like any other' - there is an element of continuity that separates it from any other 'mass-opiates' (although maybe the makers of the various Idol contests would beg to differ - when I speak to my sister, she gushes about the show and contestants much the same way I do about United and our players.)
There is however, no 'moral imperative' here. If you feel quite
that way about a mere football club (even if it's our dear Reds), I'd say you might also in danger of joining up with rebel armies in Africa and South America to free peoples of their oppressors. (Now, how's that for a man with a conscience?)
Yet, someone a little wiser in the ways of them humans, might even say (or sing) 'Won't Get Fooled Again.'
