Replying to
@elgringomexicano@mastodon.social
@elgringomexicano@mastodon.social Agreed! Even if I personally lack interest in sports, the disparagement of athletes is wholly unjustified.
There are certainly problematic aspects with lots of sports culture, but the same can be said for any culture. How many scholars have we seen demonizing trans people lately? Too many to count! Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss & Frances Widdowson all contributed to a single book, published on July 29, 2025, called "The War on Science" promoting anti-queer ideas like binary gender or intersex denial & defending various racists against "cancel culture" & "political correctness". That is just one book. Countless more, highly respected scholars have espoused anti-trans views, such as Norman Finklestein. I lost a lot of respect for Finklestein, who I previously respected very deeply, after reading his horrible blog post called "Transgender Cult", published on June 14, 2023 at https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/transgender-cult/
Prejudice is no more "treating X like sports teams" than "treating X like geopolitical blocs" or "treating X like political parties." Prejudice is a fundamental human tendency. Prejudice co-exists with & is balanced out by the countertendency that is allophilia, the love of groups one is not a member of. Varying levels of prejudice & allophilia exist between individuals & cultures. Humans have many tendencies & countertendencies. We have the tendency to sadism & to sympathy, to envy & symhedonia, to love & hate, to friendship & enemyship, to struggle for existence & mutual aid, to domination & mutuality. It was especially common during the Cold War, post 9/11 wars & such for people to treat geopolitics with great prejudice, but in recent years the eyes of the people have been being opened as warcrimes are increasingly being livestreamed on social media, making support for one's own country often untenable except for the most unsympathetic people.
The frequency of prejudice against other teams, women & so on within sports culture is certainly a problem, but prejudice also exists within other cultures. In scholar culture, we often see prejudice against people without degrees, against women, against racial minorities, against queers, against heterodoxers & very especially against heterodox queer racial minority women without degrees. Double-blind peer review is intended to prevent this, but only applies to journals & is a work around for, rather than an abolition of the prejudice of the culture. "Sports are only for dumb jocks" is just as much a manifestation of prejudice as "we are the best team even though we keep losing" or "women are bad at everything."
I would like to confess that I used to engage in the prejudice against athletes myself when I was less wise, & I regret this wholeheartedly. It has been more than a third of my life since then & I am now a better person. No one is wrong forever, even if bigots are unwilling to admit it. We all either self-correct or we die within no more than 122 years.
Many people believe prejudice is less harmful if does not result in systemic bias. These people would say that it is okay to be prejudiced against athletes but not black people, because prejudice against the former does not result in systemic bias unlike the prejudice against the latter.
I answer that: the fact that harms are small enough not to result in systemic bias does not make a prejudice any less harmful at an individual level, only at a systemic level. Systemic bias comes from a large number of individual behaviors, especially from powerful individuals. A single nerd supremacist of equal power, whose volition differs only in target of prejudice rather than in willingness to act on prejudice in a given way, does not do more harm than a single white supremacist. Given white supremacists are more influential as a group, they cause more harm as a group, but not necessarily as individuals. When they do cause more harm as individuals, this is due to either 1) greater power, such as leading a country, megacorporation or police force or 2) more will to harm, such as a willingness to commit a hate crime.
Please check out @mxchara@seattle.pink if you haven't already seen them, they post great things & are one of the best writers I have ever seen, on par in the beauty of their prose with Friedrich Nietzsche, which I was certainly not expecting from a mastodon account.
I love you comrades all & have a nice day! 😻
#sports #politics #bigotry #racism #transphobia #transrights #philosophy #sociology #humanities #waronscience
