This would have been an interesting topic to post over in Living Car Free.
I think this issue comes back to something more basic. It's the old "us and them" mentality that seems to be such a feature of human nature. As someone said earlier, there are snobs in any group of people. I often laugh at the suburbanite snobs who get all excited about which suburb a person lives in. It's all the same thing really -- here on the Gold Coast it seems to be all about which side of Burleigh Heads you live on. Heck, even the touring forum had a discussion about whether or not supported touring was "real" touring recently. A lot of the roadies probably stereotype utility cyclists as being "poor", which just feeds the resentment on the other side.
In the end, I think it's just to keep people entertained as much as anything else. A quote I hear often suggests that it would be a rather dull world if we were all the same. You can extend that to point out that it's a much more entertaining world if you overstate the differences.
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I am clinically insane. I am proud of it.
That is all.