Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2017

Your pre-combine, pre-free-agency dose of “Rickspeak”

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The deadest part of the NFL year is drawing to a close, as the post-Super Bowl quietude slowly changes to the excitement of the Underwear Olympics, the Legal Tampering Period, free agency, and the draft. Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spielman spoke to the local sports media on Friday, but he spoke in his patented “Rickspeak” mode, which uses ordinary words like finely tuned instruments to conceal rather than to reveal the team’s plans:

The art of deception and lying is one that takes years to master and perfect. Some people never do, and you can tell the second they open their grocery hole they’re a terrible liar. Some people are okay at it, and can tell a little white lie, maybe, but not a big one.

And some people are masters at it, creating a web of bullshit so convincing, so complete, that it’s almost impossible to separate from the truth. These people usually end up becoming politicians, but some become the general manager of an NFL team.

Vikings GM Rick Spielman is one of these people, because with him you don’t know where the truth ends and the bullshit begins. And honestly, when you get to the level of doublespeak (or Rickspeak, as we affectionately call it in this little corner of the Internet), that Rick Spielman is at, you don’t care that you’re being fed a load of crap so massive you could fertilize all of Minnesota’s farmland with it for five years. As a matter of fact, you kind come to enjoy it, in a weird Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

But still, you want to know the truth, and that’s where we come in, the fine folks that write for The Daily Norseman.* We sift through the bullshit, find out what the true meaning of Spielman’s words are** and translate it for you into common, every day language.***

*By we I mean me, because no one else would do this. As a matter of fact, Eric pestered me on Twitter to do this, because he knows that if anyone is going to get sued, it isn’t going to be him. Eric is smart. I am a dope, so here you go. Enjoy.

**It’s true we read it and come up with alternative answers, but I divine no true meaning. I’m literally making up every word. And seriously, we’re talking about the off-season plans of a football team, not some Zen-level philosophy on how to live your life. It’s just football, Fokker.

***So yeah, this won’t be in Aramaic. You’re welcome.

Updating the junior rank structure of the Canadian Army

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Earlier this week, Ted Campbell offered his suggestions on how to address some issues he notes in the lower ranks of the Canadian Army, based on both Canadian and allied armies’ experiences:

There was always a problem with the old (1850s to 1960s) Army rank structure: there was some need to tie rank to trade, but not as tightly, many military people believe, as […] in the Canadian Armed Forces today. Some branches (corps) used to have fairly strict rules; in the old (1960s) Royal Canadian Corps of Signals, for example, the technicians, amongst the very highest paid soldiers in the whole army, could not attend the long, difficult and expensive, advanced (3rd of 4 levels) technician course until they had passed the junior leadership course and they could not attempt the senior leadership course until they had passed the advanced technician’s course, and so on. But that system always excluded some good people. There were, and still are today, many people who can be excellent, even outstanding technicians but cannot lead or manage soldiers. The United States Army addressed this same issue by creating the “specialist” grouping which allowed soldiers to “advance” through part of the pay system ~ higher salaries for technical skills ~ but not the other ~ even higher salaries for leadership. In past years there were many different (paid) grades of specialist but now it is a “rank” equivalent to the US Army corporal for soldiers who have not yet or cannot pass the first level junior leader course. The British Royal Air Force has a similar and, in my opinion, better system …

… which recognizes both technical skill and leadership requirements.

In my opinion we should undo much of what Mr Hellyer did, while thanking him for addressing the pay problem, and restore the junior leadership positions, especially the tank and rifle section commanders, to the real, and younger, junior leaders: those in the rank of master corporal. This will restore the senior leaders to their traditional roles as “guides” and mentors to the junior leaders: both to the corporals and the lieutenants. The ranks of sergeant ~ in several “grades” and warrant officer are often, and very correctly, referred to as the backbone or even the “heart and soul” of the army. That is partly because, traditionally, they stood ever so slightly “aloof” from the rank and file. The lieutenants gave orders, advised, coached and mentored by the sergeants, to the corporals who, then, directly led the riflemen but were also mentored by the sergeants. It was, to repeat the words I used to describe the US constitution, “a fine and finely balanced system;” we upset the balance 50 years ago to solve a pay problem. We should, also, adapt the RAF’s aircraftman/technician to our own needs to allow some soldiers to advance “up” in their technical field (and be paid more) without becoming leaders (and being paid more for that, too).

To do that the Army will have to reform itself.

First, it will have to repose trust in its junior leaders; that’s something that will be hard to do, even after the Army, of absolute necessity, makes junior leader training ~ making privates into corporals and civilians into second lieutenants ~ its highest priority and the job it assigns to its very, very best senior leaders.

Second, it will have to restore the “sergeant’s mess” to its traditional pride of place in the Army by giving the sergeants and warrant officers back the senior supervisory and management duties that have, in far too many cases, migrated “upwards” until they are now done by captains and even majors. Once again, it is a trust issue and we live in a world where many of the most senior leaders are timid because they have been “burned” too often, by their own superiors, when a subordinate makes a mistake. Mistakes are part of human nature; they have to be corrected, forgiven, in most cases, and, very often, used as teaching aids.

Third, the government will need to revise the pay system so that junior leaders are paid more and, meanwhile, the gap between corporal and master corporal and sergeant is maintained.

Fourth, promotions, in the Army, at least, to corporal and to captain must not be automatic. Promotion to corporal must require that one pass a very tough junior leaders course; promotion from lieutenant to captain should be by examination.

But, doing these four things will, in my opinion, give the Army a firm foundation upon which to build and fight.

“Sophisticated and affluent Americans, as a group, are pretty gullible”

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

Andrew Ferguson on the gullibility of SAPs (sophisticated and affluent people) in social science fields:

Every few weeks, it seems, a new crack appears in the seemingly impenetrable wall of social-science dogma. The latest appeared last month with the publication of a paper by the well-known research psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, a professor at Emory University and coauthor of the indispensable primer 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology. Among other things, he is a great debunker, and he has trained his skeptical eye on “microaggressions.”

Sophisticated, affluent people in the United States (SAPs) have been trained through years of education to respect whatever is presented to them as “science,” even if it’s not very good science, even if it’s not science at all. Their years of education have not trained them how to tell the difference. Sophisticated and affluent Americans, as a group, are pretty gullible.

So when their leaders in journalism, academia, and business announce a new truth of human nature, SAPs around the country are likely to embrace it. The idea of microaggressions is one of these. It was first popularized a decade ago, and now the pervasiveness of microaggressions in American life is taken as settled fact.

We could have seen it coming. Already, by the time microaggressions became widely known, social scientists had invented the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test, administered online and to college students throughout the country, pretended to establish that anti-black and anti-Latino prejudice among white Americans was ever-present yet, paradoxically, nearly invisible, often unrecognized by perpetrator and victim alike. Even people who had never uttered a disparaging remark about someone of another color were shown by the IAT to be roiling cauldrons of racial animus. You know who you are.

The IAT thus laid the predicate for microaggressions. They were the outward, unwitting expressions of implicit racism; not only were they evidence of it, they were offered as proof of it. (Circularity is a common tool in cutting-edge social science.) Microaggressions are usually verbal but they don’t have to be. In their pathbreaking paper “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life” (2007), the psychologist Derald Wing Sue and his team of researchers from Columbia University helpfully listed many common microaggressions. Saying “America is a melting pot” is really a demand that someone “assimilate to the dominant culture.” Having an office that “has pictures of American presidents” on the wall announces that “only white people can succeed.” Also, an “overabundance of liquor stores in communities of color” carries the microaggressive message that “people of color are deviant.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

James May does his Clarkson impression! EXTRAS – James May Q&A (Ep 20)- Head Squeeze

Filed under: Business, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 17 May 2013

James rambles about barcodes and supermarkets before unleashing his perfect Jeremy Clarkson impression!

QotD: Redefining “White Fragility”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the spirit of reciprocity, I’ll attempt an alternative, and perhaps more realistic, definition. “White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.

As Hippogryph notes in the comments, the official definition of “white fragility” looks an awful lot like Kafkatrapping, a dishonest and pathological manoeuvre, a form of emotional bullying, in which the denial of an unproven and insulting accusation is instantly seized upon as damning confirmation of said accusation. The object being to inculcate pretentious guilt via some notional group association, making a person feel somehow responsible for the actions of others, even strangers long dead, over whom he or she has zero influence. It’s an attempt to induce a profound unrealism, and thereby compliance.

David Thompson, “Fashionable Malice”, davidthompson.com, 2017-02-15.

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