Quotulatiousness

November 7, 2016

Vikings suffer first home loss to Detroit, 22-16

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:15

It was not a pretty game to watch, but it did have enough drama to keep watching to the end. As a rule of thumb, any time the fans on Twitter are bitterly complaining about the officiating, their team is losing … and I saw a lot of complaints about the refs on my Twitter feed during the game. Of course, if Blair Walsh had been able to convert an extra point, the game wouldn’t have gone to overtime. The Walsh death-watch may be back on the table in Minneapolis after Walsh missed and had a field goal attempt blocked (and the replays looked as if it was going to miss the target even if it hadn’t been blocked).

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Rolling Stone and the Nicole Eramo lawsuit

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The jury decided that Rolling Stone magazine and the writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely did defame University of Virginia associate dean Nicole Eramo. Tim Newman comments on the (to him, satisfying) outcome of the case:

As soon as that story was published it got torn apart on the internet. Crucially, those tearing it apart were not just the red pill/manosphere/PUA sites either. Plenty of moderate, mainstream sites cast serious doubts on the story and I read a few of them.

Common sense would have told you there was something seriously amiss. From memory, “Jackie” recounts being thrown onto a glass-topped coffee table so hard that it shattered beneath her and then raped where she lay. You don’t need to be a practicing rapist to know that any guy who did that would be risking serious injury to himself: there are arguments over the involuntary circumcision of males, but I don’t think they cover rapists going about their business in lakes of shattered glass. She would also have sustained major damage had she been subject to those levels of violence: lacerations, fractures, bruising which she could have shown to the police and would have needed hospital treatment.

It was bullshit, but that wasn’t what made people angry. Lots of stories in the media are bullshit and nobody cares. So what made this one different? It was because those who supposedly supported “Jackie’s” version of events and abused those who questioned it wanted it to be true. For them, it was a better outcome that she had really been raped than for the story to have been fabricated.

[…]

So have they learned their lesson? It would appear not:

    In a statement, the magazine added: “It is our deep hope that our failings do not deflect from the pervasive issues discussed in the piece, and that reporting on sexual assault cases ultimately results in campus policies that better protect our students.”

Those “pervasive issues” being complete fabrications which exist only in the minds of a handful of mentally disturbed students who were cynically exploited by some of the worst people ever to infest academia and journalism anywhere.

I hope the lawsuits keep coming and they are sued out of existence.

H/T to Jeff Scarbrough for the link.

Collision imminent

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jay Currie on the moment when one of the two bubbles collapses:

It is pretty easy to live online without being aware you are in a bubble. If all you read are liberal or conservative sites your understanding of the current American Presidential election is likely to be deeply distorted. There are even different sets of polling numbers depending on which side of the aisle you are getting your information from.

Whether you are in the “Literally Hitler” bubble or the “Most corrupt presidential candidate ever” bubble, you can pretty much avoid contact with any information which does not reinforce your views. But, in six days, the bubbles will collide and one of the narratives is going to collapse in the face of actual electoral results. The other bubble will take its victory as confirmation that its narrative was right all along and that the people who did not accept that narrative are either stupid or evil.

Which means that one group of Americans are going to wake up on November 9 disoriented, stunned, angry and feeling a deep sense of betrayal. Unlike previous elections where there has been at least a veneer of objectivity and non-partisanship in the media, in this election, the major media has been all in for Hillary. Which, in the post-election period may make it even more difficult for the losing side to understand and accept its loss because the “talking heads” will either be completely at a loss themselves or will spend their time congratulating each other on their perspicacity.

The collision of the bubbles will be especially nasty if, as I suspect it will be, the election is not even close. A tight win for either side will allow the other side to console itself with just how close it came. But a romp will bring into question the entire narrative of the losing side.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard far more stories of people “unfriending” long-time friends on social media for being too partisan in their support for one or the other of the two major candidates this year than I recall from other elections. But I also have to keep in mind that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.

QotD: American sports

Filed under: Football, Humour, Quotations, Soccer, Sports, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If Football is Handegg, then Soccer is Divegrass. Basketball is FlopDunk, Hockey is IcePunch, and Baseball is CrotchGrab.

Dave Rappoccio, “Soccer Rules!”, The Draw Play, 2015-04-01.

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