Quotulatiousness

February 28, 2018

Let’s go for a spin on the Minnesota Vikings’ quarterback carousel

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

With the NFL’s league year coming to a close, Minnesota has four quarterbacks on the roster, three of whom are going to become free agents at the start of the new league year. The three potential free agents are Sam Bradford, Case Keenum, and Teddy Bridgewater. The sole remaining player under contract is Kyle Sloter, who the Vikings grabbed from the Denver Broncos on cut-down at the end of the 2017 preseason. Bridgewater’s contract situation has been in question as he was not activated off the PUP (physically unable to perform) list until after the sixth game of the 2017 season — the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement with the players’ association seemed to indicate that the final year of his rookie deal would “toll”, putting him under contract with the team for an additional year at the same salary as in 2017. A report on Tuesday said that the Vikings would not press that claim, and Bridgewater would be considered a free agent this coming league year.

Since the career-wrecking knee injury to Daunte Culpepper in the 2005 season, the Vikings have started games with 15 different quarterbacks. If ever a team has been desperate for consistent, high-quality play at the quarterback position, the Vikings are that team (okay, if pressed, I’ll admit that the Cleveland Browns have had it worst of all). Aside from the 2009 season’s Brett Favre revenge tour, the closest the team has seen to consistent, high-quality quarterback play was with Teddy Bridgewater under centre. Sam Bradford looked great for the first few games of the 2016 and the first game of 2017. Case Keenum had a career year in relief of Bradford, but the last few games appeared to show him regressing to his career mean at just the wrong point in the season. Nobody outside the Vikings organization knows how well Teddy has recovered from his knee injury, and I don’t expect the team to share that knowledge until Bridgewater is under contract with them or with a different team.

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China: Triumph and Turmoil, Episode 1 – Emperors

Filed under: China, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Niall Ferguson
Published on Jan 31, 2018

Niall Ferguson shows how the vast apparatus of the Chinese state has always been called on to subjugate individual freedom to the higher goal of unity. Ferguson also examines how, on the other hand, centralized control produces tensions that threaten to destroy the country.

Psychology’s replication failures – “many casualties of the replication crisis do indeed bear a strong resemblance to voodoo”

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Psychology Today, Lee Jussim says that once upon a time in the benighted, ignorant past, we generally believed in magic. In these more scientific, advanced, de-mystified days, we believe in psychology. He wonders if there’s actually much of a difference between the two:

Are some of the most famous effects in psychology – priming, stereotype threat, implicit bias – based on smoke and mirrors? Does the widespread credibility given such effects in the face of very weak evidence have a weird kinship with supernatural beliefs?

Many findings in psychology are celebrated in part because they were shocking and seemed almost magical. So magical that psychiatrist Scott Alexander argued that many casualties of the replication crisis do indeed bear a strong resemblance to voodoo — the main difference being an appeal to mysterious unobserved unconscious forces rather than mysterious unobserved supernatural ones.

Belief in the efficacy of voodoo itself can by psychologized: Curses work, some say, because believing you are hexed can kill you. There are similar mind-over-matter tales involving implausibly strong effects from placebos and self-affirmations. Priming studies claim that even thinking about the word “retirement” can transfer the weakness of old age into a young body, and make young people walk slower. The idea that people gravitate toward occupations that sound like their names bears a strange resemblance to sympathetic magic: If you name your daughter Suzie, she’s now more likely to wind up selling shells by the seashore, whereas your son Brandon will be a banker.

Supernatural beliefs are a universal feature of human societies. For people in many tribal societies, magic is serious business — a matter of life and death. Sorcerers can make good money by selling their services, while those accused of sorcery might be killed. The same was true in medieval Europe, where many were executed for supposedly using evil magic against their neighbors.

Belief in magic has retreated in modern times. Science has rendered the world less mysterious, technology has given us more effective control over it, and bureaucratic rules make life more predictable. Magic retreated.

Or did it? Any belief as universal as magic may be marvelously adapted to well-worn ruts in the human brain and encouraged by common structures and rhythms of human interaction.

Great Blunders of WWII: A Bridge Too Far 6

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Anthony Coleman
Published on 4 Nov 2016

From the History Channel DVD series “Great Blunders of WWII”

QotD: Words as “physical violence”

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

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.

This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”

Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.

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