Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2014

Facebook‘s 58th gender and the (in)flexibility of language

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:04

Chrissie Daz discusses the rise of the “third gender” (should that be 58th?) and earlier attempts to make language conform to an idealized view of how life should be, as opposed to how it is:

The legal recognition [in passports and other legal documents] of intersex people and others who cannot properly be said to be either male or female is probably a good idea, but this should not impact upon the vast majority of people who have no problem living in a binary-gendered world or using binary-gendered language.

History is replete with failed attempts to re-invent or modify language, from Esperanto to the feminist PC language of the Eighties. But this campaign to institute a third sex in language and law may well prove to be the most unstable project yet. The ever-changing and ever-expanding taxonomy of words and identities aimed at respecting difference among transsexuals, always seems to cause undue offence among transsexuals themselves. To use the word transsexual, for instance, as a noun (rather than as an adjective) is said, by some, to diminish a person’s identity down to a single trait. The very term transsexual has been replaced, first by transgendered (to assert that fact that it is about gender not sexuality) and now by Trans*. The capital ‘T’ is obligatory and the asterisk is meant to represent inclusivity. Apparently, to simply call someone ‘Trans’ implicitly denigrates the experiences of cross-dressers and gender-queer folk who are not intent upon making a full transition from one gender to the other.

Amid all the offence being taken over these linguistic acrobatics, the one thing trans campaigners, and now Facebook, fail to realise is that language does not respond well to being artificially manipulated. As Wittgenstein once remarked, language is like a toolbox, you use the best tool available for the job in hand. With general use, over time, words and their meanings change to reflect changing forms of social consciousness. It is not the other way around. Any attempt to force language to respond to the presumed delicate sensitivities of marginal groups not only underlines and reifies these presumed vulnerabilities, it also undermines the responsiveness of language to real experience.

Carl Sagan and when warnings about a new ice age switched to global warming instead

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

As a youngster, Robert Tracinski was a huge fan of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series. It was a formative experience for him, yet he found that Sagan’s concerns about global warming were not convincing … because those warnings were actually antithetical to his larger message:

It might seem strange to say it, but I am a global warming skeptic because of Carl Sagan.

This might seem strange because Sagan was an early promoter of the theory that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are going to fry the globe. But it’s not so strange when you consider the larger message that made Sagan famous.

As with many people my age, Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos, which aired on public television when I was eleven years old, was my introduction to science, and it changed my life. Cosmos shared the latest developments in the sciences of evolution, astronomy, and astrophysics, but its real heart was Sagan’s overview of the history of science and the distinctive ethos behind the scientific method. Sagan returned again and again to one central theme: that the first rule of science is to follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of one’s wishes or preconceptions. He spoke eloquently about the Ancient Greek Pythagoreans and their attempt to suppress the facts about “irrational numbers” that didn’t fit their theory. And he spoke admiringly about the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, who started out pursuing a theory in which the planets move in circular orbits reflecting the ratios of the perfect Pythagorean solids — and ended up being driven by the evidence to reject this theory and discover completely new laws of planetary motion.

I didn’t end up becoming a scientist, but I absorbed Sagan’s basic lesson and have tried my best to adhere to it in my own field: follow the evidence wherever it leads.

But this can be a difficult rule to follow. It is easy to spot the unexamined assumptions of others, but harder to root out your own prejudices. A few years ago, while watching Cosmos again for the first time in 25 years, I was reminded that Sagan did not always practice what he preached, and his error sheds light on the global warming theory’s original sin against science. It is a sin that has only gotten worse and which explains the scandalous state of today’s debate over global warming.

[…]

This is a bit of a cultural time capsule, preserving the precise moment at which scientific alarmists were switching from warning about a new ice age, in the 1970s, to warning about runaway warming.

February 25, 2014

A contrarian speaks out on Ukraine

Filed under: Europe, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Brendan O’Neill isn’t comfortable with the widespread media descriptions of Ukraine’s change of government and calls it regime change instead:

Even in this era of rampant political spin and platitudes, where George Orwell’s claim that political language is used and abused to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’ has never been truer, the commentary on Ukraine stands out for its dishonesty. Western observers tell us there has been a revolution in that benighted nation. They claim revolutionaries have overthrown a dictator. They say the people of Ukraine have risen up and deposed their despot, and are now ‘experiencing the intense emotions expressed so eloquently by Thomas Paine in 1776 [in his writings on the American War of Independence]’. It is hard to remember the last time political language was so thoroughly used to obfuscate reality, to impose inappropriate historical narratives on to a messy modern-day event. For what we have in Ukraine is not revolution, but regime change, set in motion far more by the machinations of Western politicians than by the stone-throwing of Ukrainians.

Orwell was right – too much political writing is less about clarifying real-world events than it is a collection of pre-existing phrases ‘tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse’. So it has been in relation to Ukraine, where the words selected by Western observers tell us more about them and their prejudices than they do about events in Kiev. So the word ‘meddling’ is used to describe Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine, but never to describe Angela Merkel’s or John Kerry’s cultivation of the oppositional forces – that is ‘mediation’. Ousted Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovich is now widely referred to as a ‘dictator’, confirming how exhausted and meaningless that word has become through overuse: unlike serious dictators like Gaddafi or Assad, Yanukovich won a free and fair election, in March 2010. As for the word ‘revolution’ – that has been knackered by misuse for decades, but its deployment in Ukraine takes its bastardisation to a new low: there has of course been no replacement of one social order by another in Ukraine, or even the instalment of a people’s government; instead various long-established parties in parliament, some of which are deeply unpopular among certain constituencies in Ukraine, are forming an interim government. Revolutionary? Hardly.

The Western debate and coverage of Ukraine has cast a massive political fog over events there. It may not have quite made ‘murder seem respectable’, but it has certainly made externally generated regime change seem revolutionary, and the Western-assisted anti-democratic removal of an elected leader seem like an act of people’s democracy. It has exposed a severe dearth of independent critical thinking among the Western commentariat. Even those on the right who are normally passionately anti-EU are now lining up like lemmings behind Brussels’ dishonest moral narrative about being a mere observer to a glorious revolution in the East. And even those on the left who condemned regime change in Iraq or Libya are buying the idea that Ukraine has undergone a revolution of Paineite proportions, with the Observer giddily declaring that Ukraine is currently experiencing ‘an intoxicating sense of liberation from an old guard’. Across the political spectrum, narratives about Ukraine that don’t add up, and which are being promoted by people normally seen as untrustworthy, are being accepted as good coin – among both a right excited by the prospect of a return of the neat Cold War-era divide between good West and bad East, and a left so desperate for evidence of revolutionary behaviour in the twenty-first century that it will lap up even staid, grey, distinctly unrevolutionary Brussels’ claims about a revolution being afoot in Ukraine.

Note: This article is posted at Spiked Plus, which is normally a pay site. They’ve made the site available to non-subscribers for a limited time to mark their second anniversary. If you’re reading this post at a later date, the link to the whole article may not work unless you’re a member.

QotD: The power of the right accent

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

We assign 20 extra IQ points to anyone who speaks with a British accent, redistributing them from the people who speak with Southern accents.

Dave Weigel, “Shut Up, Piers: Thank goodness Piers Morgan Live is dead. Finally.”, Slate, 2014-02-24

February 24, 2014

Terry Teachout interview on Satchmo at the Waldorf

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Marc Myers talks to author and playwright Terry Teachout about his latest play:

Satchmo at the WaldorfAs Terry Teachout was finishing Pops: A Life, his 2009 biography of Louis Armstrong, he had an idea. Realizing that Armstrong’s final performance at the Waldorf in 1971 was an operatic moment — a meet-your-maker crescendo in the life of a great artist — Terry wrote a theatrical work where the trumpeter reflects on his life, and his white manager, Joe Glaser, adds his thoughts. The radical device was having the same black actor play both parts.

The result is Satchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man play now in previews at New York’s Westside Theatre Upstairs. The show, which opens March 4, stars John Douglas Thompson and is directed by Gordon Edelstein. Terry, of course, is the Wall Street Journal‘s drama critic, which places him in the tricky position of walking the talk — putting himself out there as a playwright. It’s one thing to critique plays and performers and quite another to become the artist behind the work and face criticism.

Flying back from Boston yesterday, I posed five questions to Terry a week from Satchmo at the Waldorf’s premiere…

JazzWax: Why place Louis at the Waldorf Hotel—aside from the event being his last performance?

Terry Teachout: One of the themes of Satchmo at the Waldorf is the extent to which Armstrong had lost touch with his original black audience by the end of his life — a fact of which he was well aware, and one that hurt him deeply. It struck me that to use a high-priced uptown hotel as the play’s setting would serve as a powerful and telling symbol of this transformation. Even the title ties into it. You hear it and you ask yourself, “What is Satchmo doing at the Waldorf?”

In addition, the setting is an aspect of what I hope is the complexity of the way in which I portray Armstrong, who wasn’t a simple man by any means. He’s proud, rightly so, that a black man who was born in the Storyville section of New Orleans in 1901 can now play and stay in a hotel like the Waldorf. At the same time, it breaks his heart to look out at the all-white crowd and realize that his own people have turned their backs on him. There’s nothing remotely simple about that situation, or about his emotional response to it.

February 22, 2014

Here’s a mash-up for you – symphonic music and professional sports

Filed under: Business, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:36

In Maclean’s, Colby Cosh explains that the future of classical music may well lie in the ballpark:

The Colorado Rockies have commissioned and recorded a theme song from composer Charles Denler, creator of introductory music for Oprah and NBC’s Dateline. According to the Denver Business Journal, the new Rockies theme, “Take the Field”, will come with multiple versions for particular game situations.

    Denler, who has a trunkful of TV and film soundtracks to his credit, said some 80 members of [the Colorado Symphony] recorded “a big ‘Star Wars’-y variation and a very serious, pensive, we’re-going-to-make-it-through-this variation, and the main theme, which is very upbeat and very aggressive in a good sportsman kind of way.”

It is hard to hear of this idea without reflecting on the fact that orchestral and big-band music is a killer app of Western civilization, but one whose frontline practitioners, in the form of regional orchestras, are said to be in a state of permanent crisis. Sports fans love Sam Spence’s lumbering NFL Films soundtracks and still wriggle orgiastically at the sound of “Brass Bonanza”. There would appear to be space for creative enterprise here: I wonder, for example, if Mr. Denler’s contract would allow him to sell a full-on three-movement Rockies Symphony once his main theme becomes familiar to fans. Different variations for different game situations is a good idea, but perhaps only a first step; maybe each inning should have its own theme? Individual players represented by their own Wagnerian motifs?

February 21, 2014

Michael Sam and the NFL combine in Indianapolis

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In USA Today, Tom Pelissero says that former Missouri defensive end Michael Sam will have to convince team representatives that he has the skills to play in the NFL, rather than how he might fit in as the only openly gay player in the locker room:

One of the largest crowds ever for a media session at the NFL scouting combine peppered Manti Te’o with 36 questions last year, almost all about a hoax involving the death of a girlfriend who didn’t exist.

The crowd for Missouri defensive end Michael Sam’s session Saturday may be even bigger. But behind closed doors, it’s unlikely NFL teams will show near the same interest in Sam’s announcement that he’s gay.

As Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spielman put it Thursday: “What are you going to ask him? He just came out and stated his position.”

[…]

With Sam, who earned All-America honors after coming out to teammates before last season, his answer already became public record Feb. 9 — he’s gay.

“If my area scout’s any good, he already knew that anyway,” an NFL personnel director said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

All the other questions — Will Sam be accepted in an NFL locker room? Will the media horde chronicling the NFL’s first openly gay player create resentment? — will be answered once he lands with a team.

The dynamic is different when entering a transient NFL locker room than in college, where players grow up together over four or five years. But Missouri’s excellent 2013 season suggests such questions are overblown anyway.

“One of the key differences between this and the Manti Te’o story is Manti Te’o wasn’t really in control of that situation,” said former NFL punter Chris Kluwe, a gay rights advocate who was at Sam’s coming out party the night before his announcement. “Mike is very much: ‘Yeah, this is who I am. Deal with it.'”

February 20, 2014

Cracking Facebook‘s news feed algorithm

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

Sean Davis does the analysis on how Facebook‘s internal process works to determine who gets to see what in their newsfeeds. This was for an organization’s page, so the analysis may not be the same for personal Facebook pages, but the bottom line is that the money you may spend for ads is worth it, but you’re wasting your money with promoted posts:

If you manage your company’s Facebook page and have ever wondered how the Facebook news feed algorithm decides how many of your fans will see your content, then wonder no more. We’ve cracked the code (or we’ve at least cracked the code as it pertains to The Federalist’s Facebook page). And yes, for those of you who don’t feel like reading through the entire post or grappling with the math and statistics below, the Facebook news feed algorithm absolutely rewards the purchase of Facebook ads.

According to our analysis, five simple variables explain the vast majority (nearly 75 percent) of how the Facebook news feed algorithm works: total likes, daily paid reach, site page views from Facebook, weekend vs. weekday, and posts per day. The full magnitude of each factor’s effect is discussed in detail below.

[…]

Facebook can deny the charge all it wants, but according to extensive data for our Facebook page, the Facebook news feed algorithm clearly rewards the purchase of ads. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that — Facebook has every right to charge whatever it wants for the services it provides. The company’s advertisers and publishers, however, need to understand the extent to which Facebook uses ad purchases to increase a page’s news feed exposure. That’s why we conducted the analysis we did — money doesn’t grow on trees, and we need to have a very clear understanding of how money invested in advertising affects our overall bottom line. But it would be nice if Facebook were more transparent and specific about how its news feed algorithm works.

The company’s continued opacity is what led us to do our own digging, and according to Facebook’s own numbers about how our fans interact with our page, it turns out that a dollar spent on Facebook might not be worth as much as a dollar spent somewhere else.

ESR examines the “Dark Enlightenment”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

Remember that “Dark Enlightenment” we’re all supposed to be terrified about? ESR is looking at the phenomenon (it’s not really a movement, or at least, it isn’t a single movement):

The Dark Enlightenment is, as I have previously noted, a large and messy phenomenon. It appears to me in part to be a granfalloon invented by Nick Land and certain others to make their own piece of it (the neoreactionaries) look larger and more influential than it actually is. The most detailed critiques of the DE so far (notably Scott Alexander’s Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell and Anti-Reactionary FAQ nod in the direction of other cliques on the map I reproduced but focus pretty strongly on the neoreactionaries.

This is the map ESR is referring to:

Scharlach's affinity diagram of the Dark Enlightenment movement, grouped according to their major themes

Scharlach’s affinity diagram of the Dark Enlightenment movement, grouped according to their major themes

Nevertheless, after we peel away clear outliers like the Techno-Commercial Futurists and the Christian Traditionalists, there remains a “core” Dark Enlightenment which shares a discernibly common set of complaints and concerns. In this post I’m going to enumerate these rather than dive deep into any of them. Development of and commentary on individual premises will be deferred to later blog posts.

(I will note the possibility that I may in summarizing the DE premises be inadvertently doing what Scott Alexander marvelously labels “steelmanning” – that is, reverse-strawmanning by representing them as more logical and coherent than they actually are. Readers should be cautious and check primary sources if in doubt.)

Complaint the first: We are all being lied to – massively, constantly, systematically – by an establishment that many DE writers call “the Cathedral”. Its power is maintained by inculcation in the masses of what a Marxist (but nobody in the DE, ever, except ironically) would call “false consciousness”. The Cathedral’s lies go far deeper than what most people think of as normal tactical political falsehoods or even conspiracy theories, down to the level of some of the core premises of post-Enlightenment civilization and widely cherished beliefs about the sustainability of racial equality, sexual equality, and democracy.

[…]

Complaint the second: “All men are created equal” is a pernicious lie. Human beings are created unequal, both as individuals and as breeding populations. Innate individual and group differences matter a lot. Denying this is one of the Cathedral’s largest and most damaging lies. The bad policies that proceed from it are corrosive of civilization and the cause of vast and needless misery.

[…]

Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It has produced a race to the bottom in which politicians grow ever more venal, narrow interest groups ever more grasping, the function of government increasingly degenerates into subsidizing parasites at the expense of producers, and in general politics exhibits all the symptoms of what I have elsewhere called an accelerating Olsonian collapse (after Mancur Olson’s analysis in The Logic Of Collective Action).

Even when he does nothing, Justin still gets great press

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Paul Wells discusses the upcoming Liberal Party convention in Montreal, and the evergreen topic of Justin Trudeau’s ability to get loving press coverage even when he’s not doing or saying anything at all:

… Justin Trudeau, whose party has led the others in national polls for 10 months. Since Trudeau has been the Liberal leader for the same length of time, he has become a figure of some fascination, not least among the members and supporters of other parties. They are convinced the coltish young man, who first set foot in 24 Sussex Drive at the same moment he first set foot anywhere at all, has been given a free ride by the press gallery. Not just a free ride: a leg up. Perhaps even a leg over. In my own case I’ve gone about it in odd fashion, by publishing a 400-page book about Stephen Harper whose thesis is that the Prime Minister is eternal, but you knew I was devious when you walked in.

The Liberals’ opponents have compensated for the gallery’s failure to give Trudeau proper scrutiny by scruting him as hard as they can. The Conservatives have spent millions of dollars on commercial radio ads — in Punjabi, Cantonese, Mandarin and English — warning parents that Trudeau will give their kids marijuana. The Liberals have spent large sums rebutting the Conservative ads with their own. This fight has been going on for four months and may now stand as the most sustained bout of pre-writ campaign advertising in your lifetime. Newspaper reporters, who do not listen to commercial radio and are not sure they believe it exists, have covered almost none of it.

But if the Conservatives attack Trudeau for four months on the radio — and every day in the Commons, and almost as often in email blasts to Conservative donors — and the Liberals still lead, are the Conservative attacks failing? Hard to know. Maybe the Liberals would be less popular if the Conservative back bench and Ezra Levant stopped talking about him. Or maybe they’d be riding even higher, carried aloft on the praise of complacent scribes. Politics rarely lets us test counterfactuals properly.

But if Trudeau’s big mouth reliably gets him into trouble — a proposition routinely argued by his opponents while they are on breaks from trying to get him into trouble — then the Liberals’ Montreal convention is a risky proposition for him. He has two big speeches scheduled there, one on Thursday and a second on Saturday. If his jaw is a shovel custom-built to dig his political grave, he will have two chances to dig deep.

I must commend whoever it was in the Liberal war room that suggested the Tories get “Justin”-themed rolling papers printed up. Even the Conservatives — who have been known for generations for laughably bad political notions — might not have come up with something so dumb without help.

The Lego Movie – blatant anti-authoritarian propaganda

Filed under: Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

Anton Howes says that the recently released film is sheer individualistic and capitalistic propaganda:

The Lego Movie shows us a compelling dystopian world of conformity, regulation and authority where everyone “must follow the instructions” or be “put to sleep”. It is a tale of the battle between the chaotic, creative destruction of freedom, and the rigid, forceful regulation of bureaucracy.

The run-of-the-mill protagonist Emmet is blatantly shown to be brainwashed by repetitive and generic tv shows, corporatist celebration days like Taco Tuesdays, and a perpetually playing propaganda anthem called “Everything is Awesome” with clearly collectivist undertones: “everything is cool when you’re part of a team”. He works with other construction workers to tear down the “weird” and diverse buildings and replace them with generic ones.

But it gets so much better. The dystopian dictator’s position as both the CEO of the Octan Corporation and President of the World perfectly encapsulates the problems with corporatism and monopolies on force. Indeed, his evil plan is stultifying regulation taken to the extreme: he wants to use superglue to literally stick everything permanently into the “perfect” position, relying on a robotic army of “micro-managers” to make sure that everything is exactly how he wants it to be before being stuck into place. There could be no clearer metaphor for the perils of intruding technocrats.

February 19, 2014

QotD: Down with LEGOification!

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

Even as a child, I was vaguely annoyed by the LEGO kits that allowed you to recreate something you’d seen on TV or in the movies. The greatest thing about LEGOs is that you can use them to build anything your imagination can create. Castles, cars, airplanes, you name it: If you had the blocks and a mild spark of ingenuity, you could do just about any damn thing you pleased.

But the LEGOification of every aspect of popular culture is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the triumph of imagination. This ideal asks you to take something endlessly changeable and shove it into a tiny mental space already dominated by every other facet of popular culture. It’s a perversion of the LEGO ideal, a slap in the face of everyone who grew up tinkering with their building blocks in the hope of creating something new and exciting, something just for themselves or their friends.

Also, if you could get off my lawn, that would be great.

Sonny Bunch, “Knock It Off with the LEGOs, Jerks”, Washington Free Beacon, 2014-02-19

February 18, 2014

Michael Sam, latent homophobia, and the NFL draft

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Jim Geraghty looks at two sides of the Michael Sam story: the media side and the football side. They’re very different stories.

Good luck, Michael Sam.

Those of us who are sports fans are going to have a fascinating couple weeks ahead, as the national political and cultural media insists upon interpreting the events of the National Football League draft through the lens of identity politics. They will attempt to shoehorn events into a made-for-TV movie storyline about Michael Sam, defensive end for the University of Missouri, and aspiring NFL player.

Our media used to writing one kind of identity politics story: a person comes out of the closet and becomes the first openly-gay person to achieve a particular goal, gets saluted for bravery, is elevated to hero status, and then spends the next few years going to black-tie awards dinners and being the subject of overwrought documentaries.

[…]

The NFL Draft comes with its own movie-ready drama. Unlike the Super Bowl or any other sports championship, the draft is a major annual event that involves every team, as every almost every team has a first-round draft choice. (Sorry, Washington Redskins fans.) There’s a near-complete reversal of fortune, as the league’s worst team has the first and most consequential choice, making a selection that could ignite a quick turnaround back to respectability or be remembered as one of the all-time flops. Every fan of every team has a reason to tune in, to see who their team picks, hoping to have gotten a future star. The NFL draft is one of those rare high-drama sporting events with no real losers.

But there are indeed big winners. For the players, draft day is their real graduation day, where they stop practicing their craft to ensure the prosperity of a university and finally cash in on their years of effort with, in most circumstances, a multi-million dollar, multi-year contract. Guys who grew up with next to nothing bring their mothers and their whole families to New York City, where they learn where they’ll be living for the next few years, pursuing their dream of stardom. Genuine tears of joy flow. At age 20 or 21 or so, these young men have achieved their childhood dreams.

I suspect most fans’ biggest question about Michael Sam is, ‘if my team drafts him, how much better will our pass rush get?’ NFL fans care about the off-the-field behavior of their favorite team’s players to a certain degree; nobody likes rooting for a thug and a player prone to off-the-field trouble represents a higher risk of getting himself suspended or in legal trouble someday. But it’s hard to believe that NFL fans who can come to terms with a one-man population explosion at cornerback or shrug off drug busts, assault charges, DWIs, public intoxication, and all kinds of other misbehavior will stop rooting for a team with a gay defensive end.

A large chunk of the media will insist upon interpreting every triumph and setback for Michael Sam through the lens of his homosexuality and their belief that he’s a flashpoint in a battle between ‘tolerance’ and ‘intolerance.’ But the career of an NFL player can rise or fall on a thousand different factors and twists of fate. Do the coaches use him correctly? How complicated is the defensive system, and how quickly can he pick up the signals, terminology, and strategy? Is he in a system designed to showcase his natural skills, or are the coaches trying to use him in a new or different role that takes time to learn? How good are the other players on the team at his position? Does he twist an ankle or tear an ACL? Sam seems to have a good head on his shoulders, but how does he handle the pressures of being a professional athlete?

In addition to the questions about whether Sam’s collegiate talents will be enough to allow him to flourish in the NFL, and whether a given team would welcome an openly gay team-mate in the locker room, there’s also the “Tim Tebow” problem … the team that drafts Sam will be in the unrelenting focus of the media’s publicity floodlights. Just drafting Sam would only be the start of the media’s attention. Everything to do with Sam will draw TV cameras, paparazzi, and the team’s beat writers for local media outlets.

Where is he going to live? What kind of car does he drive? Where does he shop? How do his new neighbours feel about him? What kind of clothes does he wear away from the team’s facilities? Where does he go for entertainment? Who is he hanging around with?

And that’s just the start of it. Once the pre-season routine gets underway with organized team activities, mini-camps, and then training camp, the team (probably the head coach, but also the GM and the defensive co-ordinator or the linebackers coach) will have their every word analyzed for Sam-newsworthyness. If Sam does poorly in a drill or a scrimmage, it’ll be all over the media. If he isn’t in the starting rotation, it’ll be interpreted (by some) as proof that the team isn’t serious about giving him a fair chance to play.

This might be acceptable to a team if Sam’s skills were top-10 quality, but most of the reports don’t indicate that. A team will put up with a lot if the player drawing the attention is an athletic superstar, but for what seems to be (at best) a player with fair-to-adequate skills, it may deter them from drafting him at all.

Each team starts the regular season with 53 players, but they take nearly twice that number to training camp. Players who are drafted will have a better-than-average chance of being on the opening day roster, but the chances go down significantly the later a player is drafted. All first and second round picks are going to be on the roster, but not all sixth or seventh round picks will be. Sam’s skill set indicate he might have been a mid-round pick before the news broke about him coming out. Now, he might not be picked until the sixth round or he may not be picked at all. If that happens, many will decry the NFL’s homophobia, but as you can see, there’s a lot more in play than just Sam and his NFL playing potential.

February 17, 2014

QotD: Not a hipster

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:33

I listen to the strangest assortment of music.

No, I’m not trying to tell you I’m a hipster, bustin’ a moby at the table saw while only listening to totally deck obscure artisanal free-range amazeballs beats. That would be so midtown. I just find myself interested in odd things.

Sippican Cottage, “I Like Puddles Pity Party’s Early Stuff. You Probably Haven’t Heard Of Them”, Sippican Cottage, 2014-02-16

February 16, 2014

Is it climate change or is it just weather?

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Ant O’Fearghail has developed a useful model to help you determine if a particular situation is caused by climate change or if it’s just ordinary weather:

Climate change or weather

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