An Interesting Discussion featuring Allyship

 2026 I feel has been a year to demonstrate the unifying power of sport. The rise of the beta-male in the form of silicon valley cult-of-personality founders, is probably a painful and uncomfortable disillusionment process whereby the world discovers that the sentiment behind 'Revenge of the Nerds' lied to us. The nerds turn out to have the same capacity to be moral reprobates as the jocks. 

On top of that, it turns out making a useful software application, or at least owning a useful software application, once, that is now shit but scalable to the point that you have hundreds of billions of dollars on paper and can tweet about how maybe Hitler had some good ideas, is much much worse than the worst athlete who can compete in one event at one place at any one time and then endorses sportsbetting or whatever.

The world cup is great, the offside rule is great. FIFA as one of the most corrupt institutions in the world and all the problems and protests and despicable grift that comes with the world cup is bad, but the world cup itself is great.

And it kicked off while we were still awaiting the outcome of the NBA finals with Knicks v Spurs, and that was great, with just the atmosphere in New York broadcast around the world of a long suffering fandom that would even turn against Elmo for making some equivocating inclusive pap.

Then like yesterday give or take 16 timezones, Trump opened his big old mouth to brag about how he'd gotten on the phone and pressured FIFA to lift the one match suspension on the USMTs leading tornament scorer for the red-card he got last game. 

This interference meant that Belgium finally found itself playing one of the most important games in football history, where they literally had to eliminate the US team to save the integrity of football. Which they did in style, eliminating them 4-1 and football is saved for now.

I was perusing this climate this morning when I stumbled upon a Novara News story about how it had taken David Baddiel 25 years to sit down with UK footballer Jason Lee to apologise for sketches Baddiel did where he dressed up as Jason Lee in blackface with a pineapple on his head and mocked his abilities as a player.

That sent me down a youtube-hole going to grab context, and Fantasy Football League hasn't aged well for Skinner and Baddiel. Now the "25 years to apologise" headline actually took place 4 years ago, with Baddiel appearing on Jason Lee's podcast to apologise and then discuss issues of race, stereotyping and discrimination in football and life in general. That's the video I will embed:

Novara are dredging it up because Baddiel is about to star in a BBC documentary based on his book "Jews Don't Count" where he explores his experience or perception that Antisemitism is treated differently/in a discounted way by otherwise politically progressive people.

The whole conversation is one of the more interesting ones, with Baddiel in essence having a long-overdue bill he can't pay, but also he and Jason have much common ground.

At the 30 minute mark, the two start discussing 'allyship' a term I first heard from a contributer to the "it gets better" Dan Savage of Savage Love fame initiative way back when. Now to be clear I had heard of the concept 'alliance' and 'ally' before but not in the modern pre-packaged-off-the-shelf way.

I wouldn't say 'ally' was appropriated, but it was definitely skunked in left-wing identity politics to basically not mean a strategic alliance, but a unilateral form of fealty to an "optimised" morality. As in my experience of 'Allyship' that as a term differs significantly from how it would be historically employed.

So, perhaps the most well known branding of "Allies" was the 'Allied forces' in WW2 that generally at its core is England-US-USSR and of course, that 'England' is not just the UK but also the commonwealth so Canada, ANZACs, India etc. plus French resistance and even German saboteurs, Italian partisans etc. all made sacrifices in the name of that alliance. And we can see that there's a massive ideological divide between the USSR and the other Allied parties, forming an alliance based on mutual interest, a negotiation namely a kind of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' basis with absolutely no actual commitment to friendship as was the case with the NATO and the USSR.

Vs. 'Allyship' which comes up in this conversation with Lee and Baddiel, and another phrase put to Baddiel by Lee as a question in terms of 'are you doing the work?' a question I feel that Baddiel performs poorly on, in his answer, namely by stating (and I'm going off recent recollection here) that he is mostly focused on Antisemitism at the moment and then expresses some solidarity, with the conversation lead by Lee into a further interesting space about supporting women's football, which again Baddiel comes across poorly by Lee essentially asking him when he last went to the women's football game - so Baddiel is walking into a bunchola of coffee tables in this interview.

This sentiment though is what I would point to as the skunking of 'alliance' implied in the neologism of 'allyship' which is, if you want to address racism in sports fandom and media, Allyship promotes an idea that you can only do so by 'purchasing' a package or bundle, that you are obliged to also address sexism in sports, homophobia in sports, racism in literature etc. etc.

Now this makes an intuitive sense, and when I was an RMIT student in Melbourne that constantly took me past the state library which is the regular gathering point of protest movements, I recall noticing in particular a protest flying Lebonese flags, almost certainly protesting some action taken by the IDF on their southern boarder (this was over a decade ago, so not the current occupation that has been tanking the peace efforts in the Iran conflict) and it was the war on terror and I remember just on the eye test, feeling like I was seeing an almost wholly Lebanese community protest, roughly the same size as protests against other conflicts at the time like protests against Chinese occupations of Tibet or suppression of citizen rights in Hong Kong SAZ etc. And just noticing the lack of solidarity as an intuitive weakness of such protests - that it is basically no good to turn a blind eye to contraventions of international law and/or human rights abuses when it is happening to disenfranchised citizens of Burma/Myanmar and only turning up when it is happening to you when the local government won't let you go to an Air-BnB on the surf coast for mothers day because apparantly there's a global pandemic going on and case numbers are still rising.

So yes, hypocrisy or egocentrism does make a kind of intuitive sense, but when Allyship went hyper in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020, it was more apparent that it (intersectionality) quickly transforms into an incredible strategic weakness. It places a burden upon 'progressives' operationally and tactically to distribute their resources equitably across everything necessary to attain a kind of Utopia, an ideal society where there simply is no marginalisation, instead of being able to allocate resources to mere progress, Barack Obama's reminder that 'better is good' a variation on the idiom 'Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.'

But beyond that, it is simply the sheer cost of Allyship is incredibly onerous, and even more incredible when compared to the costs of being 'conservative' with the additional suicidal layer, that Allyship assigned people of goodwill to 'the right.' This line of criticism being typically described as 'purity tests' but few point out, that you are taking (for example) straight white men who are pro-marriage equality, pro-freedom of expression, pro-civil liberties, pro-democracy, pro-wealth equality, pro-rule of law, pro-representation etc. and then if they are not the complete package for example, have a divergent view on affirmative action on college admissions then they are simply assigned to the enemy. A literal 'you are not welcome here' with an implicit 'go and join the right-wing populists'

Now, I don't want to overstate the problem of Allyship, its adverse effect of its operational pitfalls, is that the far-left simply did not have the popularity to hold this position with any real leverage, it was a false dichotomy that you are either an 'ally' or an enemy. Mostly the far-left could be safely ignored, people could simply opt out of allyship and instead just try and do what they can. But in some small number almost certainly there were people who bought into the false dichotomy presented and wound up in the manosphere or something when they needn't have before.

What is often forgotten is that it's hard to get people to do anything. One of the easiest ways to get people to do stuff is to pay them to do it, especially when they are under some sort of economic duress. News may cover the sensational, clashes of political factions in our polarized times in both real and virtual spaces, but most people just kind of go to work and most of about half of them will talk football or some other local dominant sporting code.

By comparison, what proportion of women yoga practitioners actually become anti-vaxers that feed their children through 'birding' or other such weird alternate medicine quackery? My wager is few enough that those that do are still able to be 'characters' in your social circles.

And of course, bringing us to bio-psycho-social factors, that is a complicated way I understand to say, that who your friends are isn't an accident. It isn't random. Because it's possible that the weirdest person you know, knows heaps of like minded people because they've gravitated together.

Bringing us back to Lee and Baddiel's conversation. I feel you can witness David Baddiel's self-consciousness constantly fighting this temptation to explain - 'at the time...' and Jason Lee does bring up his issue that he doesn't just hold Baddiel responsible for wearing the makeup and playing the role, but realising there's all these other people around saying 'this is fine' and Lee asks if anyone spoke up in the production. 

Frank Skinner is on record, expressing his own incredulity that Baddiel came out of the dressing room and they looked at eachother and nobody thought 'what the fuck are we doing?' and I find this impulse by David and Lee to want to contextualise what happened - Lee to understand how bad mid90s racism was and Baddiel to understand himself.

I'm not British, I played football as a kid but in Australia it was called 'soccer' I went to an international student residency for Uni and so was drawn into the 2002 Japan-Korea World Cup perhaps earlier than all but the most gregarious sports fans of my generation - SBS australia's best terrestrial TV channel with the lowest ratings heavily promoted a book that was the history of football in Australia titled "Sheilas, Wogs and Pooftas" by Johnny Warren that was published in 2006 at the cusp of the Socceroos qualifying for the world cup just before the regions were redefined to almost guarantee us a birth in the group stage, while Italy and Paraguay and Bolivia can now routinely miss out.

As such, I have to retrospect my own context for Fantasy Football League on BBC2 from 1996-1998 and I feel there is plenty of interest there. There is also this beguiling challenge, of how can you explain the mid90s to a young person, or for that matter like the 70s to me or the 50s to me or the middle-ages to me.

So like, I can think of two Australian potential analogues to Skinner and Baddiel's show, the first is very likely unflattering to Fantasy Football League - 'The Footy Show' which ran through the 90s on Australia's worst and most watched TV station 'Channel 9' and into the 2000s, and it existed as this strange kind of pocket dimension. You could be surfing channels as people used to do until the advent of streaming, and stumble across 'The Footy Show' and think you were suddenly watching a show broadcast from the 1960s. Athletes and media personalities of the day struggling with concepts like homosexuality and race decades after most of media had caught up to the Golden Girls.

A phenomena like 'The Footy Show' serve as perfect rebuttals to sentiments like 'It's 2016' or 'it's 2022' or 'it's 2026' where in a global perspective we have people no doubt forming a polycule with 8 genderless language model based agents in some kind of cybersexloop, and a child bride is marrying her first cousin somewhere in a hunter gatherer tribe and when she isn't presence will spend her menses in a cloistered red-hut and they coexist at the same point in human history. Within these extremes, you will likely be impressed by somebody who can run a regression analysis that cuts down your inventory holding costs in shitty Microsoft Excel software, and you will likely be impressed by somebody who can handmake artisanal soaps. 

But Skinner and Baddiel's show could exist in the mid90s but be in many ways representative of a football culture that was not in synch with the broader media culture, in some cultural cul-de-sac where dependent on the observer, learning of this blackface bullying campaign for the first time might see the players OR the time period as anachronistic.

The second potential local analogue is likely unflattering to the analogue - Recovery, a low budget youth television show that ran on ABC in Australia that as far as I know never had any racism controversies. It's controversies where Greenday swearing on live television at 10am on a Saturday morning and shit in the early-to-mid90s. But when I watch clips of Fantasy Football League a particular 90s ethos comes through that is detached from race, rather it's what I would call the Nirvana effect.

My understanding is that while Nirvana in reality were this Seattle based band the incrementally evolved out of the punk scene and then adopted the real calling card of 90s sound from late 80s band The Pixies - the quiet-loud-quiet-loud pattern exemplified by Nirvana and early Radiohead before Kurt Cobain committed suicide and Radiohead having exhausted the Pixies catalogue shifted to Aphex Twin - to the record industry Nirvana just came out of nowhere and blew everything up.

Youtuber Todd in the Shadows has this series called 'Train Wreckords' where he looks at albums put out by formally popular acts that are so damaging the act never quite recovers their reputation, and sometimes even perish, and within this he has a whole category called 'Nirvana ruined my career' or something, where he describes Nirvana as 'the hardest left turn in music history' 

The impact being that the industry record labels just kind of signed artists for a while, scrambling, sprawling in the way hacks always do, but instead of seeing the success of Elton John and then scouting for someone else who can sit at a piano and sing ballads producing an 80s wave of middle aged men in suits having hits like Phil Collins, Steve Wynwood, Lou Gramm of Foreigner etc. and these ballads ushered in younger long haired power ballardeers like Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Warrant and Guns'n'Roses who were the biggest band in the world right up until Nirvana.

A&R executives at record labels felt they understood the world of Michael Jackson, Madonna and even Guns'n'Roses and Metallica. There was a formula, Nirvana's surge to music supremacy shocked them, disoriented them. Then you get all these weird things going on in the mid90s, rap keeps evolving into hip-hop, but also alternate rock, college radio becomes a thing, you have indy rock like the Smashing Pumpkins, heralds of Nu-metal like Faith No More, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers through Rage Against the Machine (the heralds are awesome, the Nu-Metal, in hindsight quite an enjoyable joke), Industrial acts in Nine Inch Nails and Ministry adjacent to them you have an emergent prog-metal in Tool and also the Butthole Surfers, you have these gimmick acts that are actually good musically, kind of artrock like Ween (the Beatles if there were no Beatles), Primus, Wheezer, Crash Test Dummies and King Missile. 

You had the daughters of Siouxie and the Banshees coming through - Hole, Garbage, The Cranberries, The Breeders, Veruca Salt, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey. Now obviously indy music still exists, some get big like Arcade Fire, The Flaming Lips all that crap, what's hard to describe about the 3-4 year period between 1993 and 1997 between Nevermind and The Spice Girls, is that in that window if there was a Taylor Swift then nobody would have given a fuck about Taylor Swift. 

Nobody in youth culture, really gave a flying fuck about straight up pop for a few years and that permeated everything.

And Britain made its contributions to this moment, it produced the aforementioned Radiohead and Garbage (actually they might be Irish) also Oasis, Blur and The Verve though this was both the tail end of "The Second British Invasion" of the 1980s and I feel the UK while making significant contributions to the 90s that cannot be denied, were also I think the nostalgia-pump that killed the 90s because they just fucking love pop, and there were hints of this in Oasis I feel, probably Blur too who accidently blew up with "Song 2" but it was the Spice Girls that restored a status quo of manufactured pop and served a femininity that was not tomboy femme like the Gen X frontwomen of 90s music that had been starved since Janet Jackson's last single or something.

Recovery was a 90s show, I believe iconic host Dylan Lewis was literally a street performer and gigging musician plucked off the streets a la Robin Williams for Mork, but given a saturday morning music show with a set made up like a sharehouse kitchen and suits from a thrift store awkwardly interviewing international guests and grew from a tiny little low budget show into this phenomena before collapsing because they couldn't hold the core talent together because the budget was $20.

When I glimpse Fantasy League Football getting the clips for context, I see Skinner and Baddiel sitting on a crappy couch that looks like it is straight out of a public housing estate on a set and David Baddiel with an open beer on set and I think - this is two guys who were given a low budget show and it blew up. The kind of experimental programming that almost grabbed people off the streets, but the reality was they grabbed people from live music venues and comedy clubs in the 90s, much as industry grabbed women and other underrepresented groups and preferably both from live music venues and comedy clubs in the mid-2010s to redress a lack of diversity in front of camera, but without having the patience to resolve the pipeline issues, giving us UK panel shows featuring the talented Holly Walsh or the talented Jo Brand and three other (comedically) untalented women.

In the 90s there was a similar thing happening but it didn't have the pitfalls of identity politics which is namely the pipeline issue where they just went to a comedy club, in comedy scenes dominated but not monopolised by white men, they gave out development deals to the dominant. 

Now I want to stress I don't know what the actual context of Fantasy Football League was. I understand the gimmick, having celebrities play fantasy football on a show, and I take at his word that Baddiel says they thought of it as a fan show - from this I infer that similar to Kevin Smith's Clerks, and later Lena Dunham's Girls there was again this very grunge principle of suspending what would come to be known as the 'image crafting' of media, or to use Australian ratings standards the PG-13 illusion that kids don't say 'fuck' and 'shit' and 'retard' and 'cunt' and look at pornography and smoke cigarettes and do horrible things by age 12 - to an extent media has this tendency to try and benchmark the world as more presentable than it is, be it the finance segment on nightly news right before the fluff piece about Chippy the waterskiing squirrel or Joey the occassionally employed actor and Phoebe the unemployed daft hippy affording luxurious apartments in Manhatten on Friends, or SJP affording her own apartment and extensive wardrobe and shoe collection and martinis writing a sex column once a week in Sex & The City.

What I'd say contrasts particularly between then and now, was in the 1990s fascism was entirely inert in populist movements, between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the World Trade Center so 1989 to 2001 it was the end of history. Politically the UK and US had left wing parties in that had pretty much identical economic policy to the right wing parties of the 1980s, referred to as 'The Third Way' in Australia everything was reversed, we had a left wing party in the 80s, and right wingers from the early 90s through 2007, and virtually identical economic policy.

Furthermore, you had no fucking chance in hell at reviving Fascism or Communism in the 90s there were too many people alive to remember what a disastrous fucking idea they are, September 11 really gave permission globally to bring bad ideas back.

Don't get me wrong, things were very unequal, and in particular Neoliberalism was fucked, in Australia Pauline Hanson - our Trumpian figure emerged, and Berlesconi the pre-Trump was probably already active in Italy in the 90s, the bad idea that could not die and described to me by a local in 2007 already as a zombie, Trump I think was already doing his bullshit 'I'm going to run for president' and then abandoning it, like all the foundations for the worst shit in the world right now was there in the 90s, not even mentioning Gates and Jobs and Silicone Valley. Chomsky was already writing that the New World Order was in fact multi-national corporations, and that there was only one party 'the business party' you can watch Christopher Hitchens on Charlie Rose debate a panel of feminists including Naomi Wolf having a discussion where you have your answer to 'I wonder what Christopher Hitchens would have said about third wave feminism?' kids shows like Captain Planet and many others were already teaching kids about climate change then called 'The Greenhouse effect' leading to Sarah Pascoe's appearance on Frankie Boyle's New World Order where she responds to Gretta Thunberg with 'we were all taught about climate change in school too and then we grew up and got busy' and the Israel-Palestine conflict was a shit show and on the news, and the US did some unpopular war in Iraq that caused a Bush president to lose the Republicans the White House and then a Clinton became a presidential candidate. Artists were worried about their job security because of this thing called 'digital art' and was it art or was it garbage? Seinfeld aired an episode in 1993 called 'The Outing' that reflected the progressive actual attitude toward homosexuality of the time which was that it was okay to be gay, unless you were straight because you want to date women, and again Seinfeld was still less progressive than the much older sitcom Golden Girls and yet two decades ahead of "The Footy Show" on Channel 9 Australia 

The point being, I think it is very hard for people who didn't live the 90s to understand what a strange and myopic time 'the end of history' was. Relating to my speculative context of Skinner and Baddiel's Fantasy Football League sketches, I'm inclined to think of the South Park Episode "Chef goes Nanners" which aired in 2000 but is still pre-9-11-2001, so still end-of-history:

After this, she is able to continue her argument, on the basis that it's sometimes necessary to change symbols of a society as it naturally evolves to adopt new values and priorities. When the turn of Stan's team comes, Kyle gives their side of the issue by saying that killing is just a natural part of life and should not be a big deal. Shortly afterwards, Chef stands up and demands they address the racist aspect of the flag, only for him and the rest of the adults to discover that the children had not even perceived the flag as racist; Instead, they saw the flag depicting a man being hanged without registering his color, and they had just thought that the cause of the wedge issue was homicide.

Part of the end-of-history zeitgeist was color-blindness, kids were raised to understand as a priority, that all people were equal in dignity and multiculturalism was a big paradigm, what was on the DL was the LBJ great societies speech paradigm recognizing the cumulative effects of marginalization, but the end of history was this 'progress is a matter of time' Communism was defeated emphatically as an ideology and only Liberal democracy was left.

The rug-pull of the 80s of course, was the Neoliberalism had not defeated Communism, it was actually the post-war period that had vastly outperformed Stalinist-Russia and Maoist-China. Most of Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' predictions are neither as far reaching nor impressive, or even remotely accurate compared to Marx's writing in the prior century. Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' is proving to actually be a roadmap on how to get back to serfdom, rather than a cautionary profilactic. Keynes wins.

Anyway, that's all likely obtuse, but the point being, if you are stuck in the fishbowl of the end of history, and TV producers are doing these Nirvanesque experiments with just taking a bet on nobodies in the pursuit of authenticity, a complete lack of polish and artifice, then I think you get the situation where Baddiel comes out of a dressing room in blackface with a pineapple on his head and Skinner sees him and they look at eachother and they say 'alright.'

None of this, is to endorse the joke - because the one thing I can't get away from, and I experienced it in the 90s and 2000s myself, was that I think the incredible - as in hard to believe thing, is that Skinner and Baddiel didn't think there were masses of scary racist football fans.

For my experience, what came up more in my St Whites Coed school for White Children, Whitehaven was more embodied in Southpark's Mr Garrison, which was the closeted gay man as comedy, Seinfeld had said 'not that there is anything wrong with that' and I thought of this bit I could do, where I was going to 'come out' as 'homophobic' because there was this 'how is it "brave" to come out? Nobody cares' and in my cohort people were more confused and offended by effeminate men trying to act misogynestic and chauvinistic than they ever would be by a man being gay, and the first guy I tried my new bit on surprised me with 'oh good, the thought of men using their god given penises on eachother is just wrong' and I hadn't realised just how country that bording student was, and I told him I was doing a bit and gave him shit then, and then he went to another country boarding student and said 'hey he thinks it's okay to be gay' and that guy said 'yeah gays are good.' and my friend had this sudden and shocking revelation that he had been raised inside a snow globe upside down, and I haven't seen him in a while but we gave him so much shit then and we would give him shit about being homophobic at age 17 in the late 90s and a member of scouts still today.

For me though, that might be my first experience that moral progress is not uniformly distributed, that cul-de-sacs exist, and later I would arrive at being generally sceptical that moral progress is a communal thing at all. Which means that Skinner and Baddiel were wrong, and behind the curve in the mid90s but progressed far more in 25 years than John "Sam" Newman of The Footy Show and his fanbase that resonated with his anachronistic blackface that was widely condemned in the media in 1999 that not only related to a black people, but a devastated and grossly unequal indigenous people who excel in the AFL code as many of the finest athletes in the world.

But presentism is also wrong, to understand how the fuck that happened and why it took so fucking long to result in a personal apology - something very strange was happening.

Baptism vs Sobriety

It's a bit late in the piece for a subheading, but this is the last interesting thing I want to conclude on. It is my impression that most people don't understand forgiveness. Their intuition is something like that a grudge is power you hold over someone and forgiveness is a relinquishing of power, a forfeiting of a fortified position. Forgiveness is something you give yourself, and I feel Jason Lee is amazing, I'd never heard of him until two days ago, and he has put up with a lot of shit.

The 25 year avoidance by David Baddiel I think shows in the interview as preserving a rawness to the wound, and I think again Baddiel as a product of our times goes straight in with the unequivocal unreserved apology, and Jason Lee's impact statement comes later.

I feel it is impressive that Baddiel most likely is just sitting with his shame when he listens to Jason, and he is experiencing the emotions he spent 25 years avoiding and repressing through rationalization.

One of the best things I think Baddiel does say in his apology, is that he is going to keep apologizing for it and never stop apologizing for it.

I am calling this aspect 'sobriety' and differentiating it from 'baptism' baptism is the idea that one can be redeemed, to have your 'sins' washed away, an alchemical transformation from base lead into gold. 

Sobriety I'm appropriating as the recognition that in this case, you are a racist and always will be, and the racism just has to stop. In the exact same way that for example, It's not that I had a drinking problem, I have a drinking problem and so 14 years ago I stopped. 

Like I don't want to sound like Ibram X Kendi that guy is a fucking moron, and 2022 is not 2025. No that's not a typo, I think though that the zeitgeist has even moved on from this discussion. With each passing day it will grow harder and harder to explain to younger and younger people the context of 'Allyship' and 'doing the work' and why two men discussing a very personal racist bullying act from 25 years prior wind up discussing how to promote women's football.

What will endure is the constructiveness of the conversation Jason Lee skillfully has with Baddiel, where both are in a heightened state of emotion, and where it is actually between someone truly heroic who was made to feel small by someone who was cowardly hiding behind parochialism done in public when the shit went down. What will endure is that Baddiel is sober, not born again, and so instead of washing his hands you can just see him taking responsibility, but what happened was un-undoable damage, that reality of life that is the metaphysical amputations, irreparable damage, and god hates amputees