{"id":75837,"date":"2022-08-26T01:00:01","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T05:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75837"},"modified":"2022-08-25T09:33:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T13:33:13","slug":"qotd-the-warg-rating-wins-above-replacement-goldstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/08\/26\/qotd-the-warg-rating-wins-above-replacement-goldstein\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The WARG rating – “Wins Above Replacement Goldstein”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>No totalitarian regime has ever successfully solved what you might call the Emmanuel Goldstein Problem. They just can’t exist without some kind of existential threat to rally around; it’s their nature. In 1984<\/em>, the Party simply created Goldstein out of whole cloth, but they seemed to believe this was just another temporary expedient \u2014 they were counting on technology to do all the heavy lifting of mass mind control, so they wouldn’t have to resort to things like Goldstein and MiniTrue.<\/p>\n

Obviously that ain’t gonna work in Clown World, Cthulhuvious and Sasqueetchia being notso hotso on the STEM. They’ll always need a Goldstein, then, and that’s a real problem, because whatever else Bad Orange Man is, he’s also pushing 80 years old. How long would he have, even in a sane world? 10 more years, tops? And the candidates for Replacement BOM are generally a sorry lot … but even if they weren’t, they’re about to get purged, too. The WARG is already going negative …<\/p>\n

For overseas readers (and those not conversant with “Moneyball”: Baseball has these weird “sabermetric” stats that purport to compare players from different teams and eras in terms of absolute value. It’s acronymed (it’s a word) WAR, Wins Above Replacement; “replacement” being an absolutely average player. Like all baseball “sabermetrics” it quickly gets ridiculous, but see here<\/a>. According to this guy, then, Babe Ruth has a per-season WAR of 10.48 in right field. That means Babe Ruth, himself, personally, alone, was worth 10 and a half wins above your “average” player. If Ruth goes down for the season in a tragic Spring Training beer mishap, you can go ahead and take 10 wins off the Yankees’ record that season (assuming they replace the Bambino with some scrub just off the bus, which back then is what would’ve happened).<\/p>\n

WARG, then, is Wins Above Replacement Goldstein. I’d say that Orange Man set the bar for Goldsteins, but that’s not statistically useful, since Trump Derangement Syndrome is so far the apex of liberal lunacy. To make statistical comparisons useful \u2014 to find a “replacement Goldstein,” as it were \u2014 we have to have someone the Left considered an existential enemy at the time, but who didn’t really do much in the grand scheme of things. So I nominate George W. Bush. If Bush is the “Replacement Goldstein,” then his WARG is a nice round zero. Trump would have a Babe Ruth-ian WARG.<\/p>\n

This gives us a convenient measurement for looking at various Republicans, both current and historical. Richard Nixon would have a pretty high WARG \u2014 he drove them even more nuts than W. did \u2014 and Ronnie Raygun would be up there, too. Gerald Ford would have a slightly negative WARG, since not even the New York Times<\/em> could pretend Gerald fucking Ford was a threat to the Progressive takeover. Your steeply negative WARGs would be those “Republicans” actively working with the opposition, like Bitch McConnell.<\/p>\n

I’d argue that Ron DeSantis and maybe Greg Abbott still have positive WARGs … for now. But they’re going to get gulaged here in pretty short order. Who’s the next guy on the bench? Your Marjorie Taylor Greenes and whatnot drive certain segments of the Left insane, but she’s just too ludicrous to have a positive WARG. And then things start getting really<\/em> pathetic …<\/p>\n

The Law of Diminishing Returns makes the WARG problem even more acute. Freakout fatigue is a real thing. The Media will give it the old college try, of course, but you really just can’t convince people that a goof like Greene is some kind of existential threat to Our Democracy. Her WARG goes negative every time she opens her mouth.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Salon<\/em> Roundup”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-08-20.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No totalitarian regime has ever successfully solved what you might call the Emmanuel Goldstein Problem. They just can’t exist without some kind of existential threat to rally around; it’s their nature. In 1984, the Party simply created Goldstein out of whole cloth, but they seemed to believe this was just another temporary expedient \u2014 they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,28,53,41,18,13],"tags":[952,1037,354,668,1020,517,1462,290],"class_list":["post-75837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-sports","category-usa","tag-baseball","tag-donaldtrump","tag-georgeorwell","tag-georgewbush","tag-progressives","tag-republican","tag-severian","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jJb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75837"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75907,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75837\/revisions\/75907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}