I think full spotter mode is the main problem, once you go into that it becomes okay to 'put you in a group'. Human beings are awfully tribal.
Remember, some minorities, unlike others are socially "okay" to take the **** out of in this country.
It's a bizarre world where talking the mickey out of a black person, or Jew, at least publicly is a strict no-no. Gay people used to get a lot of stick, now that's becoming less of a problem thankfully.
But if you are bald, ginger, or a train spotter, then it's oddly completely fine to really insult someone!
Other enthusiasts get confused with 'train spotters', because spotters are the visible group.
"We supposedly live in a liberal society which rejects bigotry and embraces a ‘live and let live’ philosophy. However, one cannot help but question what kind of a society this actually is when young people have to be warned of the likelihood of facing bullying simply for having a hobby. Perhaps, seemingly ironically, it may well actually be the growth of an institutionally mandated culture of tolerance and opposition to bigotry that has led to this phenomenon, or allowed it to emerge.
Human history contains numerous examples of minority groups and individuals being used as scapegoats, hate targets, and objects of ridicule. However, today, many of these outlets have been taken away. People can no longer freely bully, harass, and demean others based on things such as ethnicity and religious belief. Yet, it seems that this desire to bully and ostracise may well have roots in our evolutionary past and that the capacity to hate may be an essential component of what it is to be human.
Human beings enjoy being members of ingroups (of which mainstream society is the ultimate ingroup), they generally enjoy ‘fitting in’and a degree of conformity, and the flipside of this can be the rejection of non-ingroup members and even hatred of them. It is amazing how encouraging hatred of groups or individuals can act as a social glue that binds an ingroup together (Hitler, for example, didn’t simply promote a Germanic identity but did this througha hate campaign against the Jewish people). Indeed, ingroup hatred of outgroups can arguably lead to ingroup members feeling at home, comfortable, included, and ‘right’. Stigmatisation, as Robert Kurzban and Mark R. Leary note, is consensual, and therefore communal, and ‘[n]ot only do the members of a particular group mostly agree regarding who is and is not stigmatized, but they can typically articulate this shared belief’.
In an age in which the traditional forms of ingroup hatred of outgroups (based on tribalism, race, nationality, religion, and so on) are no longer socially acceptable on a wide scale, are people seeking new outlets (albeit on a lower level) for the same old hatreds? In the case of the vilification of rail enthusiasts this is arguably the case, and other groups also find themselves in a similar position of being victims of socially tolerated kinds of bigotry, as witness the insults, bullying, and contempt experienced by ginger-haired people n the UK."
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org...hat-this-tells-us-about-contemporary-society/
Depends on class and culture to be honest. You can stereotype a lot of groups, such as football fans or BNP voters as knuckle draggers, Daily Mail readers as right wing biggots, sun readers as celebrity obsessed and a bit thick, and Guardian readers as left wing yoghurt knitting touchy feely buffoons. And look at the way some people look down their nose at 'Chavs'.
I was listening to a radio phone in last night and a well know political person ended up calling someone a 'train spotter' as an insult. Yet, if he had said the some thing about a Christian or Jew as an insult, he would have been taken off air, probably been in the front of the papers all week!
Ditto, many comedians freely take the mickey out of ginger people, something a person cannot help. Yet, if they were black...
For me it's about balance. I think we should be able to laugh about things, in fact Harry Enfield and Jasper Carrot, the two people that really started the culture of talking the mickey out of enthusiasts are brilliant comedians. It's when people take it further to bully, mock or exclude people.
