Hey Mark,
may I suggest the following. Go to a match in which
you have no particular interest in the teams. Turn your back on the
pitch, don't watch the match but watch the crowd. Try to be an
observer. See the grimaces, anger, the name calling; hear the jeers and
the insults. Maybe you will see grown men acting like apes whilst black
players go onto the field, maybe you will see them throwing bananas?
Ask yourself what the fuck are they actually doing! This sort of thing
has been going on throughout recorded history: they once had to close
the stadium at Pompeii due to excessive violence between rival
"colours".
What is it exactly they are doing when they jeer and cheer? How is it
different from Sunnis and Shiites; Protestant and Catholic; US GIs and
Germans; Persians and...

Mark Earnest wrote:

Why does it feel so bad when one's city's football team falls fast behind?

Why does it feel so good when your team scores a touchdown?

It wasn't you doing it, right?

So why does it matter so much?

Maybe we instinctively all know that we are in a race:

and we know that when our city wins, or our football team wins, we win.

There may be many group competitions in life.

We seek to win, and win big.

Why does that last seven points scored by your guys just feel so great?

Mark Earnest wrote:

Just like the sheep whose lambs fall behind!

Becasue you are part of the herd.

It was your tribe.

Becasuse you are a sheep

A race to nowhere

You are a looser

Yes like wars and other forms of conflict.

Al to kill and be killed

Becasue you are a fucking looser like the rest of the mindless dickwads
that follw football. Why not go whole hog, join the army and get told ...

"chazwin" yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1163374739.730029.310230@k70g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Mark Earnest wrote:

I think there are several things going on:

1. It's an attempt to live vicariously through the lives of others.
Most of us aren't blessed with the skill to perform these feats, and
watching (or in my case, fantasy football ;-)) is as close as we can
get to the real thing.

2. We instinctively tend to identify with one "tribe" or the other. The
fact that we live in a particular city is pretty arbitrary after all.
It fulfills our tribal instincts without the danger of real warfare.
Being "for" and "against" things is behaviour that, for evolutionary
reasons, has benefitted us in the game of survival.

Mark Earnest wrote:

"Mark Earnest" yahoo.com> wrote in message
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chazwin wrote: