Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

I'd submit that it's less like caching than it is rooting for your favorite sport team.

In the current context, how else to explain liberals justifying Obama's policies WRT the financial sector, or Republicans vilifying his healthcare bill? Ask both groups of people about those policies 4 years ago, in the absence of names and faces, and you'd get very different answers. And don't even get me started on "I'm either ok with or stridently oppose deficit spending".

That's the opposite of caching, it's tribe-based fist-pumping.

View on HN

That's why Tim Russert's Red States/Blue States map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states) is so significant -- it exacerbated the us vs. them mentality and created a deeper visual divide throughout the country. It is so effective because sports has already conditioned us to think this way.

The us vs. them mentality enables parties to get away with bundling "good" policies with "bad" because Republican voters will go along with the Republican party line even though they may not agree with all of the positions, likewise with Democrats.

The parties cycle every few years so the "good" stuff that doesn't pass and the "bad" stuff that gets pushed through is blamed on the other side. This wouldn't be so pervasive if we would focus on individual issues and not parties.

We are already conditioned to think that way, tribal unity means you beat the other tribe.

I'd say that the networks certainly exacerbate it by treating it as a sport, though. There's room for honest disagreement within a tribe, but we shouldn't be two tribes.

In some cases, the link between politics and sports isn't just metaphorical. The rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spanish soccer, for instance, pits Catalan nationalism, the Republican factions of the Spanish civil war, and anti-Franco sentiment against Spanish nationalism, the monarchist factions of the Spanish civil war, and pro-Franco sentiment. Likewise, in Scotland, the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic maps onto the conflict between Protestant, British unionism and Catholic separatism. This extends as far as Ireland. And, of course, countries that actually are angry at each other for political reasons develop passionate rivalries in the World Cup, like Argentina and England in the 1986 World Cup after the Falklands war.

>I'd submit that it's less like caching than it is rooting for your favorite sport team.

Does anyone know how political views correlate with how much one likes sports?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com