Questions

Sports Violence

Why do European and South American soccer fans riot more often and more violently than American ones? What about Asian, African, and Australian soccer fans? What about fans of other sports?

When I raised the question online, one response I got was that American fans riot too, it just doesn’t get as much attention. Another was that the European problem was the fault of the British, a consequence of the class system, with teams identified as either working class or bourgeois, their rivalry fueled by class conflict. Any British readers are invited to confirm or rebut.

Looking at accounts online, violence in US sports is spontaneous, sometimes a result of an upset win, with the loser’s fans angry, sometimes the result of a team winning something important and the fans celebrating, some of them violently. Soccer violence in Europe is, for a significant minority of the fan base, what they are there for, part of the product. Fans identify with a fan club, the clubs often identify with a political faction, extreme left or right, linking the violence to right/left political rivalry. It looks as though European soccer has acquired a double role, both a sport and a context in which people who enjoy violent conflict, mostly young men, can engage in it.

I participated for more than forty years in a much tamer version. I was an active participant in the Society for Creative Anachronism, one of whose activities is medieval combat as a sport, most commonly with (nonlethal) sword and shield. Much of it is single combat but there are battles with hundreds of fighters on a side.

As best I can tell by a web search, the combination of a sport with recreational violence is now only found in soccer and only in Europe; commenters are welcome to offer other examples. The closest historical example that occurs to me is the chariot races of the Byzantine Empire; fans identified with teams, frequently rioted, often played a role in politics.

There is soccer violence elsewhere:

At a recent soccer match in Nzérékoré, Guinea, a controversial refereeing decision led to unrest, resulting in crowd violence that claimed more than 50 lives.

In 2022, violence at Indonesia’s Kanjuruhan stadium during a match led to the deaths of 135 people, as security forces responded to pitch invasions with tear gas, triggering chaos and ultimately a crowd crush.

Port Said Stadium Riot (2012, Egypt) – After a match between Al-Masry and Al-Ahly, fans attacked each other with weapons while exits were blocked. Seventy-four people died and hundreds were injured.

The most notable case in Australia was the chaotic Melbourne Derby in 2022, when fans stormed the pitch at AAMI Park after a flare was thrown back into the stands. Melbourne City’s goalkeeper, Tom Glover, was struck with a metal bucket, leaving him concussed and bleeding.

All from Why is soccer fandom so linked to violence?

Judged by those incidents, it not the same sort of violence. The same is true of riots that occur in other sports; none seem to fit the pattern of violence as part of what some fans go to the game for.

Climate Change vs AI

Why is climate change treated as an urgent problem and AI not? Despite the popular talk about warming as an existential risk, the IPCC projections imply temperature change within the lifetime of present adults of two or three degrees C, comparable to the difference between adjacent states in the US or countries in Europe. AI, on the other hand, has had visible effects on life within the last two or three years, can be plausibly argued¹ to pose a threat to our species by creating smarter competitors within a decade or two. National governments adopt policies costing billions of dollars in the attempt to slow climate change, do nothing substantial to slow AI or make its consequences less threatening.

Is the difference only that climate came first, already occupying the niche of “threatened catastrophe to obtain clicks and use to argue for policies” when AI came along? It would be interesting to plot the pattern of previous threatened catastrophes to see if the decline of one leads to the rise of another. The previous ones that occur to me are nuclear annihilation and population growth, the other current candidate population decline, but:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” (H. L. Mencken, 1918)

Which provides one possible explanation.

Low Cost Cooling

A common hot weather strategy, especially for people living in big old houses without air conditioning, is to open windows at night when it is cool out, close them in the morning. It should be straightforward to automate the procedure, using windows or vents that can be set to open when the temperature outside is cooler than the temperature inside, close when it is warmer, with fans to increase the airflow when desired. I would expect both the capital cost and the operating cost of such a system, used to replace or supplement air conditioning, to be trivial relative to the cost of air conditioning itself. Yet I do not think I have ever seen such a system.

Have I missed it? Or is there some non-obvious problem with the idea?

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1. I raised the possibility in Future Imperfect some twenty years ago. For a book-length version of the argument see If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies..