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My position is that normies are, almost definitionally, people who don't notice or care about these things. They just want to watch football.
Circa 2002, when I was watching football as a youngster, watching Andy Reid coach Donovan McNabb and the Eagles to the playoffs every year but fall short in the playoffs, it was liberals who noticed and complained about things. I remember this because I was there, if you want me to dig up a bunch of NYT and Atlantic and Slate articles about it if you want proof. They noticed all the Iraq-War Era "Support Our Troops" and called it jingoism, they noticed that all the coaches and owners and pundits were white and all the players were Black, they noticed that there was no place or respect for women anywhere in the NFL unless they're wearing a slutty cheerleader outfit. And they complained about it, constantly. In print and in person. They called it toxically masculine, they said watching players get injured and carted off the field was to prepare us for American soldiers dying overseas, they said the idea of white "owners" "trading" and "bidding on" black players was bad, etc etc etc.
This kind of thing marked those liberals as weirdoes, and cut them off from a significant part of the mainstream. Normies shrugged at all that stuff, they just wanted to watch the game not get lectured by the politically correct. When Tim Tebow kneeled, atheists seethed, my grandmother thought it was great, I mostly just wanted to watch the Broncos (I still think they should have given him another year).
Today, it's the opposite. Because the NFL has sought to address all those criticisms. There's a lot less jingoism than there used to be. There's all these efforts to say they care about women, there's less of the cheerleaders and they wear more clothing. They have tried in many ways to force teams to hire some Black coaching staff (and I actually think there are a lot more white players outside of the QB and OL than there used to be, so there's that). They talk a lot about racism, and domestic violence, and all kinds of other causes, many of them liberal coded.
Now, instead, it's the edgy right wingers who want to lecture me on politics that they notice while I want to watch Andy Reid coach Pat Mahomes and the Chiefs. And political correctness is calling out affirmative action for Black coaches and not for white wide receivers, and calling Travis Kelce Captian Vaxxxx.
Sorry for the off topic question, but it's the first time I've seen it in the wild -- are you intentionally capitalizing "Black" and not "white?" If so, may I ask why? I always thought this was just a progressive journalist signalling thing.
I think it's a useful separation. Black is referring to African Americans, American Descendants of Slavery and those later black skinned immigrants who have assimilated into that community. It's a proper noun because it's a proper community, with a sense of itself and some unifying customs.
White to me isn't. Whiteness is much more fraught with questions of community and boundary drawing. I prefer terms with more precision like Amerikaner, redneck, SWPL, etc. Whites in America are more defined by class, politics, profession, religion. And speaking about whites as a group necessarily involves Europeans, in ways that are fraught.
I'm not really that committed to the bit, but I thought all that at some point, and autocorrect started doing it for me.
Interesting, thank you.
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Did you and I listen to the same sports media in 2020? The sports media is absolutely still populated by a class of chattering scolds who are determined to bend sports leagues to their will by relentlessly manipulating narratives. This includes commentators who are employed by the NFL itself! I was there in 2020 when Steve Wyche and Patrick Claybon went on the Around The NFL podcast (an official NFL-owned media product) to literally drum up political and financial support for Democrat candidates.
I listened to these same commentators - Wyche, Claybon, Gregg Rosenthal, Mina Kimes, Cynthia Frelund - *refuse to say the name of one of the NFL’s teams (the Redskins) out loud for about a year, in a blatantly obvious attempt to force the league to force the owner to change the name.
Every time I listen to an NFL podcast I have to hear Cynthia Frelund read a long and lecturing ad about how the NFL is sponsoring programs to get more women involved in men’s sports.
I could bring up myriad examples of the same behavior by NBA commentators, NHL commentators, etc. (I finally stopped listening to the No Dunks guys - AKA The Starters, AKA The Basketball Jones - because they also had a whole episode where they fawning interviewed a Democrat political operative urging people to vote for Raphael Warnock. There was not a single piece of basketball commentary during the entire episode.) It’s just fundamentally not true that liberals have stopped hectoring people about politics just because they’ve had so many successes already; I’m sure I’m going to hear yet another offseason of incessant carping about why Eric Bienemy hasn’t gotten a head coaching job, and hmmmmm isn’t it interesting how so many other white retreads are getting offers but not him, our league still has so far to go, etc. Conservatives may be indulging their own cranks momentarily, but the left still absolutely owns the “can’t shut up and let people enjoy things” label.
Yes, but 2020 was four years ago. It was a whole presidential administration. A lot has happened since then. The BLM overreaction effort they put in is exactly what I'm talking about when I say they've done a lot to soothe liberals.
It used to be that sports media was more or less conservative, and the liberal media criticizing it was made up largely of people who hate sports. Now the sports media is largely liberal. And the right wing attacks on it are from people who seem to hate sports, like Vivek.
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