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Sports mania represents some of humanity's most base impulses: namely, violent tribalism. Sports fans regularly riot after sporting events, either to celebrate "their" victory or mourn "their" loss. This is not harmless enthusiasm. They cause property damage and public unrest for no reason more worthy than that a group of overpaid athletes failed to outperform another group of overpaid athletes. The stakes are kept artificially high in football, ensuring that fan enthusiasm remains at a dangerous peak throughout the season, thus ensuring that riots are more likely.

For some reason, though, we encourage this behavior as a society. A victorious team regularly imports hundreds of thousands of people into the downtown core of their home city to have an officially sanctioned parade. Buildings both public and private proudly display their sports colors for the world to see. This violent, destructive tribalism is celebrated as something that "brings the city together" or some such bullshit. And it's true: bonding over our hatred of the Other as been a popular activity throughout human history.

Comic 1480 is asking us to just try to understand and accept an impulse we should be trying to stamp out of society. We live in the future. Microsoft is making some phenomenally dorky AR goggles. Google is making self-driving cars. We're taking actual good pictures of Pluto and Ceres. We landed on a fucking comet. Are we not civilized enough to find violent tribalism a deplorable and base impulse rather than something to rally entire cities behind?

It's not as if sports fans are a rare minority, struggling to be heard. You can't throw a stick without hitting a sports fan even in otherwise progressive cities like Seattle. This isn't one of those moments in the Nerd Empowerment Film genre so popular in the nineties, where the popular kid makes an effort to understand the nerd's eccentric hobby. There is no magical moment of bonding and understanding that dawns. At best you get temporarily accepted into the tribe, so long as you continue to smile and nod, and so long as you don't indicate that you like anything about the enemy tribes.

And make no mistake: we're in a worst-case scenario this year. Whether or not the allegations have any basis in reality, the Patriots have become embroiled in a cheating and corruption scandal. For Seahawks fans, they are no longer simply the Other, who must be destroyed to prove that Our Tribe Is The Best Tribe. They are a corrupt and evil Other. If the Seahawks (who, let me remind you, are a group of overpaid athletes, many of whom are not native to the city and who would gladly play elsewhere if the pay were right or the situation were different, and who do not have any meaningful interaction or connection with the vast majority of their fans) fail to achieve victory over the Patriots (ditto), the Seahawks fans will react with not just tribal outrage that their gods have fallen, but with moral outrage that their gods have fallen to demons. If the Seahawks achieve victory, they will have conquered the demons of corruption. In either case, when the inevitable riot occurs, it will only be newsworthy if the police treat them as harshly as they treat demonstrators agitating for free speech. The damage and disruption to the city is already a foregone conclusion. The question is not "will it happen?" but "how bad will it be?"

And here we have this comic smugly assuming a position of moral superiority, chastising those among us who attempt to make their displeasure with this violent tribalism known by raising their voice above the din. "You need to listen," it says. "You need to be nice. It's not nice to try to find commonality with others who feel that these violent impulses have no place in a civilized society." It's smarm. It's weaponized niceness. It's moral cowardice masquerading as moral superiority. And for someone like Randall, an avatar of nerd culture, a man who champions progress both societal and scientific, telling those who are looking for like-minded friends that they are morally inferior is not just in poor taste. It's a betrayal.

this is hilarious oml

when u force yourself to write a comic about how smart you are, u will have lots of problems. But a site dedicated to how bad the webcomic is is something else (even though I agree with most of it)

It got really meta, dude. There was actually a blog called xkcdsucksucks

as far as I can find it has gone up to xkcd sucks sucks sucks sucks

man dudde this really made me realize again how bad xkcd is, jesus there is an entire forum for people to one-up each other about how much of the comic they understand; this entire strip is perfect reddit humor

I agree. What's your favorite one though?

ok since you answered by posting on my page my next question was gonna be: what do you consider to be an example of intelligent but unpretentious humor?

I'll let you know when I find it, I can think of specific examples but let me find a real good one

I will put down calvin & hobbes as my champion; the strip can exist without knowing what it's about, but because it's based on the happiness you find in a cynical world and not how much better the main character is than everyone else (he is presented as both worse and more aware) nobody identifies with Calvin being Super Cool Guy

Even SMBC is less pretentious than xkcd

Yeah Calvin and Hobbes is a good example. I think when I think about it, the main difference is that Calvin and Hobbes uses these intellectual concepts as a means to an end, whereas in xkcd they are an end to themselves. In xkcd the joke is that they are talking about something smart. If you don't know what that is, the joke doesn't work. So it's about figuring out what the joke means and feeling smart because of it. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing because some of xkcds are funny like the math one.

On the other hand, even though Calvin will touch on a myriad of scientific and philosophical or religious ideas, you don't necessarily need to know them because that's not the end point. The end point is that Calvin is being a dumbass. Perfect example is when he wakes up his mom to ask her if love is really meaningless and just a biological survival tactic to make sure that a species survives. Now that's an interesting philosophical concept about the meaning of love and if it has actual meaning or if we just assign meaning to it. But the joke of the strip is that Calvin woke up his mom for fucking bullshit reasons lol. A lot of strips follow the formula of Calvin saying something really smart and way ahead of his years and then ending by doing something really stupid and childish. Now, would it be as funny if Calvin just said something like "I'm doing my math homework, what's 2+2?"? Probably not, it is funny how grandiose this random question is. But even though it helps out the joke a lot, it itself is not the joke. If he asked a different philosophical question, the joke would remain the same. So it enhances the joke but is not the core of the joke.

I take your silence as agreement