By David Futrelle
Caste Football is an online forum devoted to the premise that white athletes (sorry, White athletes) are terribly discriminated against in professional sports. According to the site’s posting guidelines:
The purpose of Caste Football is to root for White athletes and to see that they receive their due in American society and that they participate in athletic endeavors on a level playing field. We reject the institutionalized discrimination that exists against White athletes in sports, and the belittling and negative stereotyping of White athletes that exists in the media.
In other words, it’s a site filled with white guys who are terrified that black athletes are cuckolding white men in general and them in particular by simply existing and being good at sports. And I’m not jumping to any rash conclusions about their sexual insecurities here. Sometimes Caste Football commenters basically come out and say it.
Consider, for example, the weird worries of one forum regular called Shadowlight. The prolific Caste Football contributor, with more than 2000 comments to his name, apparently finds himself “in such a bleak mood I can’t even breath [sic] properly. I am currently lost in a fog of darkness don’t even ask.”
There’s no need to ask, as Shadowlight is eager to tell us.
The media is very good at playing the sadomasochistic /sadist game where white athletes are pummeled to death and black athletes are elevated into a spiritual realm. The breathless talk about Lamar Jackson today is outright pagan worship.
I’m not sure Shadowlight really understands what pagan worship looks like.
It seems to me there has been a major push for years to turn white athletes into a lesser species.
A lesser species? Oh dear. It’s only going to get weirder from here, isn’t it? (SPOILER: It does.)
Forget the strength factor. That is a 12th century concept that has little bearing on the modern world. Modernity is based on speed and the media is making the average Joe believe that this is only a black domain.
I would ask how exactly Shadowlight thinks the media doing this, but he doesn’t seem very big on providing evidence for his weird claims.
Imagine a future NFL where there really aren’t white wide receivers ( perhaps a few back up types) and maybe say 12 white defensive starters spread throughout the entire league and a few white QBs and TEs. Most white players will be willing white OL and kicker/punters.
The horror!
What do we end up with? A third sex and we are 3/4 of the way there as I post this.
A third what now?
White men will be relegated to a third sex which is pitched between women and black men. Black men will embody the masculine man with all the attendant glory that will afford. White men will be seen ( again we are close now to this in the public sphere) as little booty inferior boys that can’t compete with what society deems as real men and heroes ala black athletes.
“Little Booty Inferior Boys” is the name of my Little Feat tribute band.
Shadowlight’s brand of racist paranoia is hardly new; it’s just a slightly modified version of the “black brute” theories that have filled the overactive imaginations of sexually insecure white racists for centuries (and which I wrote about in some detail here).
As Matthew Hudson pointed out in an essay on Slate, white people viewing blacks as somehow “superhuman” isn’t really a compliment. In one study Hudson discusses, whites were more likely to attribute certain superhuman physical traits — like imperviousness to pain and hunger — to blacks than to whites. Whites also tend to see black men as tougher and more athletic than whites. Meanwhile, the popularity of racialized cuckold porn suggests that the old racist stereotype of black men as exceptionally virile hasn’t gone away either.
The flip side of all this is that many whites tend to think of black people as less intelligent as well — viewing them not so much as superhuman as more animalistic than whites. Indeed, when black people began to enter professional sports in a big way, Hudson quotes sociologist Matthew Hughey as saying,
commentators began to emphasize white cognitive superiority in contrast to the supposedly savage and unbridled physical superiority of blacks. Accordingly, a popular culture narrative of ‘black brawn’ versus ‘white brains’ emerged.
This is how white men with inferiority complexes and deep sexual insecurities manage to turn even their own self-doubts into support for white supremacy. Shadowlight’s exercise in self-flagellation isn’t just weird and a little cringeworthy; it’s a symptom of a deep and ugly racism that, unfortunately, isn’t confined to the virtual pages of the Caste Football forums.
H/T to the Blue Pill subreddit for pointing me to Shadowlight’s comment and r/GamerGhazi, which linked to Hudson’s essay.
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@Naglfar
Yes, he is Jeremy the Bear. “Jeremy” was his dubbed name in Canada. He was called “Barnaby” in the UK and “Colargol” in the French and Polish dubs. The statue is in Lodz, I think near the Sem-A-For studios where it was animated.
As for the guitar, it’s coming along okay. I’ll admit I’m less adept at the precision playing and more into the rhythm chords at the moment. I’m going to focus more on the precision finger movements and hone those for the time being.
As for style, I’m big on big crunch riffs. I’m a little disappointed in my current amp. It can do kinda surfy tones okay, but when you hear folks play on YouTube, they can get really sharp hard-rock sounds out of the same chords I’m practicing. I’ve played with the tone knobs a bit, but I just don’t think the SP-10 is capable of that kinda sound. *shrug*
Still practicing my F chords too. I use Yousician to practice most of the time. It gamifies the process in a handy way.
@Katamount
Regarding crunch tones, if you can afford a distortion pedal that will help. My favorite distortion pedal is the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi, but there’s a wide range of distortion pedals available at different price points.
In terms of resources, for tabs I recommend ultimate-guitar.com. They have a lot available for free and have a good community and forums. The pro membership (I forget the price) is nice, but not a requirement.
@TacticalProgressive
Coming in at number 8 on the features of ur-fascism: “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
So White men becoming a third sex between women and Black men, is negating the existence of men of other races, who might be better than them at something, which is total racial erasure! I demand equal time for paranoia about Asian men, and Latinos./s
Also, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of these men, that Black (and Brown) men have an incredible incentive to do well in sports. Sports is the surest way out of poverty. It ‘s one of the reasons why so much of Boxing is being dominated now by Latinos, and men from Southeast Asia, while a lot of Black men have mostly moved on from that sport.
@Naglfar
I’ll drop in to the Long & McQuade downtown and see what they’ve got! Thanks for the tips! 😀
@Surplus
That does sound like a frustrating bug you’ve encountered. However, given how few people play any one specific mobile game, you’re unlikely to find anyone else who plays that game to commiserate with on this blog.
Have you tried looking for a fan forum of the game you play? They’ll be able to understand your frustrations better and possibly even provide you with a workaround that works for you. I’m part of a forum for a mobile game I play, and everyone there is so sweet to the staff and thank them for their hard work and share tips and screenshots with each other to help each other out. It’s a really positive place and I think that’s a big part of why the staff is so responsive and always updating us on their progress and giving out gifts to apologize for delays. Perhaps a kind approach when reaching out to the devs about your game will work better for you, as well?
My favorite sports are baseball and tennis. It just occurred to me that I may just have a propensity for hitting things with other things.
@Talonknife:
I’m not athletic and the only sports that hold my interest as a spectator are sumo wrestling and caber-tossing, because I like to watch large men throw large objects/other large men.
I like to watch people sliding around on dangerous slippery surfaces while balanced precariously on absurdly small objects (figure skating, skiing, skateboarding, gymnastics), which is probably some sort of metaphor for my life.
One of the most fascinating things about faerie lore for me came about when someone presented the following activity:
Look at the descriptions of changelings, the faeries left in place of stolen children.
Now look at the description of how autism usually manifests in small children.
Look also at how anti-autistic hate groups like the anti-vaxxers describe their children being “stolen.”
“I’m not saying that autistic people are changelings, but we are totally changelings.”
@Allandrel
I’ve heard that idea before. Now I’m wondering whether we should embrace the connection (i.e. call ourselves as such). If we reclaim it, it can’t be used against us.
I used to develop mobile games! If you took the same tone in your emails asking for the unblocking mechanism as you did in the comment to a board neutral to the situation in the first place, I can tell you, as a developer, I would definitely not engage with you. There is no way to make you happy except an immediate fix, which may not be possible for numerous reasons. Rolling back the patch may not be an option. You may not be given the “unbricking fix” for the bug yourself because of privacy issues or other legitimate reasons. I would realise that responding other than to unbrick your game can only bring on more vitriol and develop a worse relationship with my company which can be mined for actual bad publicity quotes.
I realise you are upset, but you got months of fun out of the game previously, I assume, since you’re still playing it now and you said the original recommendation was months ago. Why be so harsh now because an update went bad?
Because of the poor way they handled it: rather Google-like, emulating the so-called “white monolith”. First response with actual information in it, the information was wrong; after that, no response at all; leaving their user base with no self-remedy so all they can do is twiddle their thumbs and wait, when it’s probably just deleting one scrogged cache file or some similar fix; and, of course, not immediately realizing the stove is hot and yanking their patch back at the first sign of unintended consequences.
When Microsoft sometimes does a better job of handling a bad patch that starts bricking people’s copies, then you are definitely doing something wrong.
As for “nothing would make me happy except an immediate fix”, well of course not. I expected to be sat down enjoying my game, not sitting around waiting for them to see that their inbox had new mail. I had a right to be sat down enjoying my game at that time. At no time was it communicated to me, as part of a T&C document or in any other way, that suddenly as of two days ago I would no longer be permitted to play it during certain hours of the day, and I don’t believe they actually enacted such a policy anyway. So, I had the right to be playing, and my rights were being violated as surely as if someone had physically broken into my apartment and stolen my phone. I’m not going to just roll over and accept such abusive treatment from anybody, and I’m not going to even merely tolerate it. The sooner everyone else in the world also refuses to tolerate high-handed, capricious, and cavalier treatment by opaque corporate entities, the sooner things will change for the better.
Oh, and they absolutely could fix it immediately. Once they got around to my email out of the thousands they must be constantly deluged with from users running into this new bug, they pushed some button somewhere and my copy was functional again. But they didn’t do it immediately. They waded for two hours through other people’s emails before getting to mine, the first time it happened. It was closer to four hours the second time, indicating that the problem is actually growing worse. There’s no way they can be handling this correctly, for the simple reason that if they were handling it correctly they’d have withdrawn the buggy update, or fixed it, or at least come up with a way to automate unbricking people’s copies, running some robot that goes in round-robin fashion through every user in turn doing whatever needs to be done to fix their copy. Maybe this means less efficient caching of something until they fix the underlying problem but at least people could go on playing their games without nightly multi-hour waits for tech support!
Making your users wait multiple hours for support every 24 hours simply cannot ever be the optimal course of action. It just can’t!
And if they’re worried about privacy, or that telling users enough about the game’s inner workings will enable some sort of cheat, then
a) They’re committing the cardinal sin of security through obscurity, and
b) They could still release an opaque, proprietary, closed-source “Diggy unbricking tool” that unfucks one’s copy, for people to download, with instructions like “if your Diggy hangs at the loading screen, exit it, run this once, and then run Diggy again”. Just a wrapper around a simple script that does whatever they’ve done remotely eventually after being emailed. I expect the bug causes a specific pattern of damage the repair of which can be automated.
Or perhaps they could even update the game to detect this damage during startup and repair it and restart if it detects it? It’s called fault tolerance, and most apps have that. If nonessential files such as caches don’t parse they just overwrite them with a fresh, empty one. I don’t know why this game doesn’t already do this. And I am pretty sure it must be something like that. If it was something much harder to fix, like corrupted save-game data, there’d probably be no way for them to remotely fix it either, at least not without the user losing some of their progress, and that (thankfully) hasn’t happened. At the same time they can’t be having to do a lot of thinking and delicate unique surgery each time or they couldn’t get around to mine even as late as hours after an email. There must be thousands of impacted users, after all. But if the fix isn’t so slow to implement that it takes days for them to fix it for thousands of users (only for it to break again within a day or two) then it is surely something easy to automate — very likely, deleting a single file that went bad and that the game can recreate on its own.
In short, based on my technical knowledge there is no excuse for it to be this difficult. And that’s ignoring the issue of their releasing updates after insufficient testing in the first place …
Surplus, this is a free game, right? Unless you buy the extras in-game, and based on your comments over the last year, that seems unlikely.
You know the old adages about free stuff. You get what you pay for, and don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
@Naglfar:
Are you not familiar with Puck? Not to mention Mustard Seed.
@Alan:
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Exceptionally easy to use, simply put on, reach in, wipe off, and leave behind: McDonald’s brand Aspirin Dumpster Kleenex. (Available at your local market.)
@ crip dyke
Well first I need to hoover up. Some bubble wrap burst when I was travelling on the escalator and now I have heroin all over my hula hoop and frisbee collection. But I’ll put up a reminder on a post-it note, or maybe a memory stick, before popping out on my roller-blades. Best pick up some band-aids in case I scuff my knees; or I could just superglue any cuts I guess.
@Alan, you lead an unusual and interesting life … 🙂
Sorry, bit late to the conversation because 1- Had a lot on my plate lately (nothing bad, just busy); 2- Sports in general aren’t my cup of tea; 3- I’m a master procrastinator.
Anyway, those idiots kinda have their slave-owning forebears to blame (only the most physically fit slaves survived the harsh conditions) and the more recent ones who enforced segregation and to a certain extent try to maintain it today (meaning that the socio-economic situation of blacks in North America gives them much more incentive to perform well in sports as it’s one of the most visible ways to somewhat overcome their often de facto second-class citizen status). And really, “black brute” stereotyping? I know it’s alive and well today, but that speaks more to racist non-blacks’ problems than anything else. So it pretty much makes them look weak and stupid in my books.
Wonder if they’ll try and take up hockey, which is pretty much the only big professional sport in North America where “whites” can be said to dominate (although there have been some notable inroads by black athletes in the last decade or so – my father (who’s much more of a sports fan than me) thinks the Montreal Canadiens’ owners were being prissy dumbasses for getting rid of P.K. Subban, who did pretty great job on the ice and was beloved by the fans).
@Paireon
I recall incels had a rather strange conversation about this a bit ago. Their argument was that slavery was ultimately good for black people because of this. Sadly, the idea that slavery was good is not really just a fringe argument. Dinesh D’Souza wrote a whole book about how nice he thinks slavery was. A friend of mine read it on a bet a few years ago and said it was quite possibly the most ridiculous and idiotic book he had read (this was pre-Trump).
The real fairies have been hiding in plain sight this whole time.
Alan:
*checks Wikipedia*
OK, now I learn that the name of hula hoop is indeed connected to Hawaiian dance – but only very tenuously. I’ve been recently wondering about this, because right now hula hooping seems to be the very latest fitness trend here in Finland.
I’m a fan of hula, or specifically hula kahiko, the old school ritualistic Hawaiian dance (as opposed to the more freestyle hula auana). I’ve been watching performances on YouTube, learning some Hawaiian words. I’ve studied Hawaiian history and culture on Wikipedia level.
The other day, it occurred to me that you could perhaps jokingly refer to hula hooping as “hula haole”, assuming this translates correctly as “whitefella’s dance”. It’d be a deliberate apocryphism and very in-joke.
(Apologies to any actual native Hawaiians. I won’t be ever casually using that joke, if only for the lack of opportunity.)
I’ll bet my fellow Jew-boy Julian ‘Squirrel’ Edelman just drives these fuckers CRAAAAAAAZY.