I received some strong feedback from yesterday’s gallery of the rioting in Vancouver in the wake of the Canucks’ Game 7 loss in the Stanley Cup Finals. My original intention wasn’t to blame hockey fans for the disgusting display of violence and societal breakdown, because I know that there’s a deeper reason behind this riot and others that we’ve seen over the years. It’s not about sports as much as it’s about people just being generally unhappy.
Hold on, someone just threw a brick covered in feces through my window. Ah, apparently I’m wrong and the rioting is indeed the fault of sports fans. Male sports fans with tiny penises, to be precise.
“People invest themselves, their identity, very much in the sports clubs,” explained Professor Ervin Staub, a psychologist and the founder of the program in Psychology of Peace and Violence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “There is evidence that when a team loses, fans get a little depressed and when the team wins, they get a little high.”
Such biological effects, Staub explained, are directly linked to behaviors. Losers feel “diminished” and “powerless,” he said, and people then become tempted to “use destructive means rather than constructive means to regain one’s sense of effectiveness.” So they lash out. (Maybe the team lost, but I can bust a department store window!) (MSNBC)
To blame Vancouver’s riot solely on sports fans is lazy and unfair. This isn’t about thousands of young people being pissed off that the Canucks lost. Sure, it doesn’t help that they lost and it certainly gives people a good excuse to go out and get stupid, but this is about something so much bigger. All those people flipping cars, lighting fires, fighting each other, smashing windows and pillaging stores don’t give a crap about a hockey game. They’re pissed off at life.
You can look through hundreds of photos from Wednesday’s disaster and you’ll notice a very simple theme – the majority of people wearing hockey-related items are in the background. The people causing the damage are sociopathic anarchistic losers who hate their parents and the government because they’re so rebellious and unique, but in reality they’re conformist dicks. This wasn’t about sports and losing and lowered testosterone as much as it was about poor kids lashing out at an unfair society.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/1110/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.wl.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/Tyler-Faith-Bruins-180x180.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.wl.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/Collllllllllege-World-Series-180x180.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.wl.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/check-out-every-synonym-for-pass-that-nbcs-doc-emrick-used-while-calling-game-1-with-leather-180x180.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.wl.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/Tyler-Faith-Red-Sox-180x180.jpg)
I’d love to see the video of the beatdown Johnny Rotten there is about to be given.
I can’t even put a dollar value on how bad I want to see that.
Isn’t Roberto Luongo the one most at fault?
How can you be sure it really was sports fans? Maybe all those rioters engaged in a little looting of a sports store before they did anything else, and maybe they all decided to put on Canucks gear, and then maybe they all decided to burn police cars after that. It’s entirely plausible, if you don’t think about it too hard.
These “experts” are dickheads. The mayor and police chief of Vancouver have blamed the riots on anarchists.
@Otto Man Thank you, I’m glad somebody is buying into my theories.
I think we are all forgetting the main cause: they are Canadian. They have always felt inadequate to their neighbor to the south and its even worse they just got d*ckslapped in the only thing they think they can do better than anyone else. Man it must suck to be Canadian.
Ironically, the Boston Bruins have more Canadien players and the Canucks have more Americans
Remember the good old days when we could all hate the Russian players together?
@steve
It pays to know what one is talking about before one opens ones mouth and makes an ass of oneself. There are 4 Americans on Boston, and 16 Canadians. Not that it matters much to the idiots who destroyed their own city…..again.
Steve: you’re an idiot. Do you really think that Boston’s roster was composed entirely of Americans? Many Canadians were going for Boston just based on the number of Canadians playing for the Bruins. (Or, as CNN called them on their website, the “Brewens”.)
Guys, I’m just going to say straight-up: wearing a Vancouver jersey does not make one a Canucks “fan”. The entire city was caught up in the possibility of winning hockey’s hockey grail. That means that every moron who usually doesn’t give two shits about the game (yes, they actually exist up here) goes out to buy a jersey, just to be a part of what everyone’s talking about. Then when the team loses and those morons go berserk, everyone assumes that it MUST be the fans doing this, because they’re all wearing jerseys.
The truth is, Vancouver has serious anarchistic problems. When you get a city that liberal, you’re going to attract some people that do not like any type of authority. This sad, sad state of affairs was begun by a well-organized group called the Black Bloc, who usually only show up at G20 summits. Unfortunately, a herd mentality then took over among all the mouth-breathers I previously mentioned, and we get an otherwise beautiful city getting a black eye that’ll probably take at least a decade to recover from. It could easily happen to any city in North America, so please… get off your high horse.
Just don’t call those ass-hats “fans”.
I just finished crunching the numbers and it turns out the #1 cause of sports riots in North America is having a city full of assholes that also has a sports team that can make it to the playoffs.
@ Donkey: If that is true then when is Portland going start rioting over the Trailblazers?
Also, yeah, a little bit of it was that a large portion of the Canadian press spent every last drop of ink they had telling Canadian citizens how the cup was “on its way home” and that Canada would finally have the cup again and other misguided jingoistic bullshit. Lots of Canucks fans got their hopes up because of what the difficult-to-pin-down “THEY” were saying. When the promise of “they” failed, it left a lot of actual sports fans feeling lied to and cheated… which is exactly what a lot of the anarchist dickweeds felt that made them riot too.
@Lance
“assholes” and “pussy assholes” aren’t the same thing.
Liked the article Burnsy, couple things tho as much as you can’t blame this on hockey fans you can’t blame it on poor kids from uneducated backgrounds, sure there is the odd shot of the Johnny Rotten type moron as seen above but for everyone of those there is the same of the east indian, asian and chotchy white kid wearing the $400 luongo jersey that their rich mom bought them when the canucks made the finals and they decided they like hockey. To me this was just about idiots getting caught up with other idiots and embarrassing all us Canadians. Canada has this image as such nice polite people but for years now I’ve been saying that is no longer true. THe younger generation (my generation) are a bunch of assholes and douche bags (see afflcition). The other thing I wanted to point out is for some reason Vancouver just has tendency to riot, like you mentioned they did it last time the Canucks lost in the final but they also did it a few years ago when Guns N Roses canceled a concert.
Meh. I still want to visit to Vancouver more than other city. This riot had no effect on my perception of the city or the people. I feel like every city has some form of riots after their team wins (I wouldn’t know first hand, I’m a DC sports fan. I was ten when the Skins last won).
But Vancouver fans could have at least burned all their black, yellow and red jerseys from years ago. God, those are ugly.
@ nuck: GNR leaves a riot in every city they play (read: fail to show up to). No one blames Vancouver for that one.
Some rioters were probably Canucks fans too. Probably just a few, and the people you see in Canucks Jerseys standing in from of burning cars with their arms raised are mostly just people getting their photos taken in front of burning cars, they are not the people who flipped and burned them.
Also, what Screwball said. I was going to write that I think the serious rioting was done mostly by the type of group that takes things like protesting G8/G20 summits way too far. They hurt their casue and make everyone else look bad. Same effect here.
These are the same types who rioted and burned cars last summer in Toronto. Overindulged, usually middle class, young people who have no respect for anyone else’s property because they have no respect for anything. They are self-absorbed and act out because that is what they know. If any of these people knew actual hardship I would be shocked.
I love how the douchebags in the front of the pack are too scared to show their faces. Too scared mommy will see you being bad on TV, eh?
Hey dummys, I was referring to those angry Canadians who destroyed their own town. I would never disrespect this sports blog by talking about actual hockey players.
I think you missed the point of the MSNBC article, Burnsy, which was to selectively quote the researcher in order to make a broadly-painted statement on the back of academic research.
Look at how the MSNBC article quotes Staub. They repeatedly paraphrase in the first half of a sentence, and then quote him directly in the second half. Why? Because the guy was probably speaking like most academic researchers: in terms of correlations and implications–not direct causes and effects.
I read the article and interpreted it as, “Researcher says that disappointment (in sports teams or elections) can result in more impulsive/destructive behavior.” (Which doesn’t clash with your hypothesis that rioters are just unhappy, period.)
That said, there’s a lot of literature on mob mentality that suggests that people do get caught up in crowds, and do things they normally wouldn’t. So, add the mob mentality to the tendency for sports fans to be somewhat despondent and impulsive after a disappointment, and then you’ve got the potential for a lot of bad stuff. Add in generalized feelings of powerlessness, impoverishment, what have you, and yeah, ugly things can happen.
Although the MSNBC article was dicey in its selective quoting, paraphrasing, and general tone, I don’t think it was so bad as to lay the blame for the violence solely on sports fans (that is, the fans themselves, and not the social psychology of fandom).
My hypothesis why these things happen nowadays when they didn’t happen back “in the good ol’ days” has a lot to do with the Society of the Spectacle (there’s some Debordianism for you!). It’s almost as if people think that what they see on TV should be on TV.
dammit… I missed closing one of those italics tags
Also, it’s just fun to break stuff.
@Burnsy: Montreal didn’t win in 2008. Your other points are spot on. I just like to add that there are lots of misguided kids from wealthy economic backgrounds who are apart of the large anarchist group that resides in Vancouver.
We also just found out that the first truck that got torched belonged to one of the anarchist involved in the riot. It was put there on purpose and was going to be blown up win or lose.
Vancouver’s mayor is also a fucktard. The police had to stand there helplessly watching shit go down because the mayor had this idea that there would be no rioting win or lose, despite numerous sites like facebook and craigslist openly advertising the riot, and many people talking about said riot on the skytrain the day of. So, during the riot, they were calling in cops from cities as far as a 90 minute drive, to come and help break up the rioting.
They can’t be that angry They have new Nikes on and expensive cellphones live can’t be that bad for them.I think we should sell Vancouver to the USA or maybe Russia.
The people doing the majority of the damage weren’t “poor kids”…they were bridge and tunnel (suburban) punks who come into Vancouver proper, do a fuckload of damage, and then take transit or mom & dad’s beemer back to their safe community outside of the downtown core.
How do I know this? I was attacked by a group of these kids while I was trying to stop people from looting a store and destroying a car.
I would be very hard-pressed to imagine that the people doing the damage rested their head in the downtown neighbourhood that they violated, and yet are among the first to vilify Vancouver as a ‘no-fun’ city where outdoor events are rarely held.
These little assholes may not have been the match, but they were definitely the fuel, and unfortunately there were so many people standing by – watching and providing these entitled, narcissistic assholes with the audience they crave – that the few who tried to stop this from happening were attacked and beaten. I wasn’t the only one who tried to stop the looting by any means, but there were a whole shitpile of people who did nothing and probably pat themselves on the back when they tell their friends “I didn’t do anything.” Exactly.
We’re better than this.