The boyfriend was so utterly thrilled with the NYT Ballghazi story. He's an applied science sort of guy, so watching the academics fail was pretty fun for him.
I just like being right, even it if means someone in Massachusetts wins.
I am entertained that 1) The standard physicist pose in front of a board with equations has a totally understandable set of simple equations that you learn in high school chemistry; 2) A bunch of physicists messed up using the simple equations by applying them to relative instead of absolute pressure. That's almost as bad as forgetting to convert to Kelvin. Assume a football in a vacuum...
Why is that last guy using the Rankine scale? Just to be a douchebag and make it look more complicated than it is?
It's kind of surprising how long it takes for the media debate to catch up to wher my Facebook feed had gotten in around 6 hours. It is really weird that 0 PSI means one atmosphere, but it shouldn't take more than a few people before someone happens to know that bit of trivia.
That's no graduate student. That's Benedict Cumberbatch in a fatsuit.
So this thread is in lieu of an apology to Mr. Kraft and Mr. Dreamboat? Not good enough. I expect that this place will be shut down by day's end.
Let's not jump to exoneration so quickly, Von. There's still hope for guilt.
I mean, since the officials didn't write down the PSI before the game, how do we know the patriots didn't overinflate the balls and then let the air back out? Those devious bastards won't be able to blame that unprovable, nonsensical hypothesis on physics!
Really? PSIg is the magic ingredient? I feel... vaguely vindicated, since I mentioned it offhandedly in some earlier discussions, but I'm boggled that it was actually missed.
(Homebrewing: Apparently better-than-NFL-grade science!)
Homebrewing has very poor special teams.
The article in the OP doesn't address the impossible fumble statistics.
12: Maybe because that data analysis was bullshit to begin with.
About the Jeet Heer piece, sometimes I feel guilty skimming or skipping longform stuff. However, if he's explicitly trying to investigate why TNR has a reputation for racism, it's obtuse to spend fully half the article on events before 1965.
Sure, history is interesting sometimes. But if the question is, "why do people (today) think we're racist (today)?" and if you actually want to find the answer, a good starting point is living memory. Palestinians don't dislike Israelis because of what happened under the Ottoman empire, they dislike Israelis because of what they're doing now. (Forgive the analogy but it's better than my first one, believe it or not.) Likewise, black people aren't suspicious of TNR because it was merely average on race in the 1930s. They're suspicious of TNR because there was a huge racist at the helm for the past few decades.
I think living memory stretches back a little earlier than 1965.
13: FWIW, my friend at sports-reference.com didn't think much of that article either.
15: Fair enough. Would you accept "a good starting point is the past 50 years?" Generally, roughly, etc.
didn't think much of that article either.
Yeah, even I could tell that was fast and loose.
Which is usually a good thing, obviously.
17: I'd even go the other way, that perhaps it's even more tragic that in the last, what, 30 years they were demonstrably awful on race since they'd started out with excellent intentions, but I shouldn't need more than the knowledge that the last 20-30 years have been way past problematic to write them off.
14: The subtext is the shit that TNR got when current management took over, and most of the staff quit because they said the new team was out of step with TNR tradition. New management is proud to be out of step with Peretz tradition on racial issues. "We were a progressive magazine, except when those assholes who all walked out last month were running the show."
(although it seems that most of the best race-related journalism occurred under one editor who was in charge for two years in the 1940's)
Which I realize is what you said in your first comment, Cyrus, but I'm having trouble formulating what I want to say and have completely forgotten my train of thought at this point.
I took it to be a response to all the overwrought "O The TNR Tradition!" by saying, well, what is that tradition? Pretty mixed, at best.
Yeah, while the "owning up" part of looking at TNR's history really just needs to focus on the Peretz (and subsequent) era - a good article in 1967 wouldn't redeem any of the bad ones in recent history - a longer view is useful in pointing out that the Peretz era wasn't really an outlier anyway - with few exceptions, TNR has never been a home for racially progressive views (at least not progressive relative to the non-nakedly racist parts of the spectrum; I'm sure they were often better than average when the average included what we'd now consider hate speech).
It's not enough to say, "Peretz was bad, but that's over, and now we'll be better and live up to the TNR tradition," not if the tradition was never that great. Better to say, "TNR has always had a blind spot on race, and that ends now."
I hope I'm not the only one who has mental hiccups over the pairs of abbreviations (TNR, TNC) and (TNR, NR).
Does the article add anything really interesting beyond "Marty Peretz was really racist" and "the magazine employed a lot if putatively liberal white guys who got scared as hell when black people started burning things down in the late '60s." No time to read it now.
There's apparently a bunch of stuff on Edmund Wilson. It sounds like the kind of thing that could be interesting if you're interested in early to mid-20th century journalists/intellectuals. I've just seen various references to it on Heer's twitter feed.
I thought Heer was assuming most people at this point know about TNR and its recent history and race and that there isn't much to add to that. If that's all you care about, there's probably little reason to read it. It's just history; it's not important to the present.
Actually, reading it in the 90s when I lived in DC, the vibe was very specific. It was "I am a smarmy recent Ivy Leavue grad, likely Jewish, who is completely terrified of being mugged on my way home after work. Also Clinton is surrounded by too many goobers." I swear that basically is sufficient to define the magazine's politics in the early-mid 90s.
Dumb Arkansas redneck, but in the mind of my ideal-type TNR reporter it basically included anyone who wasn't exactly like them.
I hear you, fa, and I'd love to read a more expansive history, but this wasn't it, I thought. And to dalriata's second point, the 1991 rap article struck me as almost entirely of a piece with what I was reading in my parents' National Reviews in '91. The hard part of all of this is the people who had an emotional attachment to TNR trying to make sense of what they loved and how to justify and/or recreate it, right?
Deflategate really impressed me as a taylor-made stupid internet controversy. That guy with the bad graphs and crappy analysis of the Patriots fumble-frequency managed to get his links posted everywhere, including here. The quality of the work wasn't even important - in fact, it was better that it was crap because that generated more controversy and more clicks for him. And the shit coming out of major news sources wasn't much better, once the wurlitzer was in full force.
And now: Whoops! Turns out is was all baseless! Whachagonnado?
I took it to be a response to all the overwrought "O The TNR Tradition!" by saying, well, what is that tradition? Pretty mixed, at best.
I was more thinking of it as "The Magazine Tradition" and being saddened that the magazine's "publisher" announced all of a sudden that it would stop being a magazine and start being a content aggregation website. When this happened with Time or Newsweek (was it both?) I had no sympathy because they never said anything but the lowest-common-denominator conventional wisdom anyway.
21: Getting someone who's a serious culture writer and who's up-and-coming on the internet like Heer to write an Autokritik is a very canny move. The first few weeks of the new NR has felt a little curiosity-gap-ish, but this bodes well for Snyder.
Whoops! Turns out is was all baseless! Whachagonnado?
I was actually pretty impressed by the amount of brainpower that went into debunking it -- some very smart analyses that covered a lot of ground. Some guy live-tweeted a generalized linear model predicting fumble rates (conclusion: New England very good but not off the charts, no effect of domes, generally the teams with the best QBs have the lowest fumble rates).
33: has something come out to suggest that it was actually all baseless? Or is it just, as the link in the OP suggests, that the evidence isn't as plainly incriminating as it was first thought to be? I thought the investigation is ongoing.
Or is it just, as the link in the OP suggests, that the evidence isn't as plainly incriminating as it was first thought to be?
Right now there are two explanations being offered. One is that the a professional football team conspired to cheat in a way that was easy to detect, risked major embarrassment, and yet was most likely to have a negligible affect on the game. The other is that the laws of physics for the behavior of gas in relation to temperature continue to hold true. Yup.... its still a toss-up.
5: it was correct in the boston.com article with Mar/tin Schm/altz that I linked here last week.
One is that the a professional football team conspired to cheat in a way that was easy to detect, risked major embarrassment, and yet was most likely to have a negligible affect on the game.
Like videotaping an opponent's defensive coaches' signals from the sideline?
The other is that the laws of physics for the behavior of gas in relation to temperature continue to hold true.
Oh come on--this just means it's possible the balls weren't intentionally underinflated.
The important thing we learned from Deflategate is that America really, really hates the Patriots and Patriots fans. The whole thing has been generally positive and accurate in that broader sense. Go Seahawks, who are actually kind of awesome just as a team this year.
40: not just some slap-dick team-- the New York Jets. So negligible payoff indeed.
a professional football team conspired to cheat in a way that was easy to detect . . .
I just saw this which quotes Phil Jackson as talking about how the Knicks would deflate balls when he played there. Different era, obviously, but still a relevant anecdote.
[Jackson] had played on the 1973 championship Knicks, regarded as one of the smartest teams ever to play the game, and such tactics were not beyond their ken. 'We used to deflate the ball because were a short team and didn't want long rebounds,'... most of his teammates carried pins in their belts to deflate the ball when they'd get a chance. 'It also helped our offense because we like to pass the ball, and other teams couldn't run on us as well because the ball wouldn't come up so fast when they dribbled.' The nice word for it all is gamesmanship."
Like videotaping an opponent's defensive coaches' signals from the sideline?
Stealing signals is a time honored tradition in many sports. Heck, that's how the Giants Won the Pennant. Its also way more effective than jacking around with air pressure. Its "intelligence on what the other team is doing" vs. "Marginal and ultimately immeasurable effect on ball gripping" for a team that doesn't drop its balls much in the first place.
Former QB Jeff Blake offers a different take on the practice (at least in the pre-2005 era).
"I'm just going to let the cat of the bag, every team does it, every game, it has been since I played,"
The original analysis was stupid, the moral outrage was stupider, but the priors behind 38.1 and 45.last are pretty dumb as well.
||
Interesting twitter exchange between two who have graced the comments in the past.
Dan Davies @dsquareddigest:
Any truth in the rumour that Will Smith has hired @felixgilman for the gritty reboot of steampunk classic "Wild Wild West"?
Felix Gilman @felixgilman:
@dsquareddigest yes
|>
I saw that but forgot about gilman's connection.
Delurked for clown fucking, right?
Eh, I guess I shouldn't have asked, I was just surprised.
I'm not sure if he delurked specifically for the clown-fucking, but that's certainly where he came to prominence as a commenter.
I just remember his comments being pretty uniformly amazing and wondering who is this Felix person?
I don't think he'd published much, if anything, when he hung out here, he was just this guy. Maybe his first book was forthcoming or thereabouts. He certainly raised the tone of the conversation.
His first book was published while he was commenting here, because I judged it by its cover. He mentioned it in passing, and I looked at it in a bookstore, and on the basis of the cover art decided not to read it because it looked like a low-rent Piers Anthony knockoff, and I really didn't want to end up saying something evaluative about it to someone I liked having around here.
And then someone at CT talked about it, and I got over myself and read it (and, obviously, thought it was awesome, although not as good as his subsequent books have been).
You should always judge a book by its cover until somebody at CT says otherwise.
Are we believing the Twitter exchange at face value? Someone's honestly doing a gritty remake of WWW? I mean, if it were really happening, Felix would be the obvious person, but it seems like such an odd thing to be happening at all. The movie flopped, didn't it?
Robert Conrad runs Hollywood behind the scenes.
32 - Man, that article was really something. Whatever its continuing significance in the realm of racial politics, rap's hour as innovative popular music has come and gone. (I'll note, having looked it up, that an older Samuels did a longform on Kanye West in The Atlantic in 2012.)
62: Doing a couple of searches, I'd assume not. Various people seem to have described his later books as being similar To WWW, and I assume DD was riffing off of that.
Speaking of which, I got The Rise of Ransom City and read it and generally enjoyed it. More of a sequel to Half-Made than the excerpt available online led me to believe and to the extent that RoRC is sort of kind of resolving things from HMW it has a somewhat harder task. And now I see that LB covered all of that there and at CT.
He has a new(ish) one published about 4 months ago, that seems like something of a departure. Mixed reviews, but I got the impression some of the negative ones were because it was too hard for the reviewer. Has anybody read it?
68. Yes. It is a steampunky-theosophical weirdness set in late Victorian England. If you ever wondered about how John Carter got to Barsoom or what really went on in seances you might like it. I liked it but didn't think it was quite as good as HMW or TRoRC.
Oh yeah, the title is "The Revolutions."
Since this is the closest thing to a political thread that I've noticed, what, if anything, do people make of Reihan Salam's thing about (against) the upper middle class?
What's the overall agenda here? For the first half of the piece, I was with him, with suspicion, but then he moves to the Yglesian beef over occupational licensing. I confess I didn't entirely follow Yglesias's reasoning about all that -- I just registered "neoliberal" -- but what's going on here? How is Salam shifting the narrative? He's a clever guy.
69: I just looked at the piece, and read like standard paint-by-the-numbers Slate to me. I'd never heard of Salam before but he sounds like just another libertarian-ish asshole. Has he written something worthwhile in the past?
I also thought the first part was nice to see. The phrase "upper middle class" has always bothered me because it so clearly refers to the group of society that should be called "the rich" but isn't, which gives massive amounts of cover to basic rich-vs-poor class warfare stuff. The jump to licensing and zoning regulations on the other hand seems exactly like the sort of thing you'd go with if you wanted to use an example that upper middle class people would like. It lets you feel like you're more enlightened than other rich people while still not having to feel like you'd be personally inconvenienced by those policies (though actually a decent number of them might be). I guess this is true of a lot of libertarian-ish/neoliberal stuff though so it might just be an accidentally clearer version of that.
70: He's one of the less doltish-seeming Republicans in the upcoming (younger) crew. Not libertarian especially. He's not one of the stupid ones, not by a long shot, and by that I mean that he doesn't come across as an asshole. He shows up on talk shows from time to time.
68: I'd say almost exactly the same. Good, but didn't grab me like the Westerns.
I took Salam's point to be one that I have understood for awhile: The modestly wealthy are inferior to the very wealthy, and their needs really aren't any more important to consider than the regular middle class or the poor. Of the modestly rich, he tells us,
They are generally fine with raising taxes on people richer than themselves, including taxes on the investments that rich people make in new products, services, and businesses. I find that both annoyingly self-serving and destructive.
I take that back about Salam being not libertarian especially. I think I meant by that just that he's not a Rand Paul libertarian. He apparently
identifies himself as a neocon.
I can see why he'd want the left to put a higher priority on alienating UMC liberals. As time and demographics go on, and our current economic trends continue, maybe this will develop into a winning play (for left, not right) some day.
The licensing thing was just jarring. Hardly anyone cares about dental licensing in North Carolina -- which is apparently also run by UMC liberals, I guess. Or dentists. Same thing?
I didn't read the article, but I think saying "look, professional accreditation" is the new thing to shout when somebody says something about how big banks have captured governments.
I haven't read any of Salam's work for Slate (or, I think, any of his previous work), but my impression is that he's basically one of the young Republican types that people like Yglesias think they can find common ground with. They're probably wrong, but even if they're right the results are unlikely to be promising.
I know Salam for health policy articles/tweets showing he has a bit more of a handle on what the ACA actually is, is able to write without leaving spittle on the keyboard, makes some effort to explain Republican positions to other readers, and gets put on lists of "reformers" from time to time, but his actual positions demonstrate how little one can deviate from GOP party line before being ostracized. He still says we have to repeal the ACA, for example.
I don't see the linked article on the UMC as going any particular new direction, just a mishmash of observations filling a word count in a "liberals are hypocritical" vein.
The ACA, whose elements were borrowed from a plan enacted by the nominee of the GOP in their last, losing election. But, the ACA is different, because federalism. The Constitution says providing health care is the role of state government. Unless the person involved is 65 or over, in which case the trying to control federal health care spending is unconstitutional.
||
Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster" comes on. "Who doesn't love this song?" I say to Blume. "Nobody!" says Blume. "Nobody but jerks," I say, "and white power enthusiasts."
"White power!" repeats Zardoz.
|>
81: Awesome. You pointed out the death scream of the woman who was murdered during the recording and fell out the window, right?
For the first half of the piece, I was with him, with suspicion, but then he moves to the Yglesian beef over occupational licensing.
Slate does this thing with splitting articles into two pages, which is great because it means I never need to read the second half.
Let's hope she forgets before daycare.
God love Wikipedia:
A further variation had Cordet suffering permanent disfigurement due to the burns; she interrupted the band's recording session, threatening to sue, at which point the band's manager stabbed her to death in the control room. The latter scenario, however, is impossible as Ester Cordet is still alive
And from that wikipedia article, you are only a few clicks away from a human male lounge singer crooning a love song to a lesbian seagull
Interconnectedness of everything, d00d.
||
I'm chaperoning a kid's Minecraft party. Its like Heathers. But with Zombies and TNT.
|>
I have a hard time taking Salam seriously as a political operative, as opposed to as an ambitious personality embedded in conservative politics. The 529 thing came up, he generates some clicks and scores some political points by making it into a liberal hypocrisy thing, which is kind of right but not entirely so.
The NYT did a great job bringing the snark to the 3rd-percenters.
||
I linked this at the other place, but for anyone who didn't see it you should really watch this short film. Particularly if you like martial arts movies.
|>
88: adorbs. I'm trying to bribe Noser with Minecraft but he's not yet taking the bait.
81: I'm imagining Zardoz saying that in a helium-like voice.
The Salam article is largely things that are true. Except that, you know, isn't it better to want to tax people who are so incredibly rich that they won't even notice that they're being taxed? Isn't that the low-hanging fruit? Especially since those are the people who've actually been getting richer over the last 30 years, unlike the merely upper-middle-class.
Also, the point about how conservatives all love European-style welfare states, because unlike our unfairly structured welfare state the European ones are funded by regressive taxes, is certainly original.
92: I used a Waylon Jennings's voice. The one from the Dukes of Hazzard theme song.
92 is closer. It didn't help matters one bit that Blume and I both cracked up when she said it. You could see her eyes light up, like "this is a great thing to say!"
I know toddlers don't sound like that. I have my own preferences for internal narration, thank you very much.
I mean, Waylon Jennings's voice is adorable, don't get me wrong.
It's more the style of the delivery than the actual voice.
It won't be so adorable when Zardoz shows up with a picture of Bull Connor and holds it up, saying: "For you."
And I will say "I knew this day would come. For some reason, people on the internet knew that it would, and told me."
Oh, that's great. The Calabat repeats everything we say now, and I'm learning that I apparently tell him "careful!" a lot. The worse was when I accidentally kicked his annoying singing toy airplane, said "shit" as it fired up its annoying pop tune, and he happily repeated "shit shit shit shit shit" as he helped by kicking the airplane.
81, 95: More importantly, did she say it with a Southern accent?
102: or like Yosemite Sam: sheee-it!
102: no, the southern accent is only when she says "ipad".
Late coming back to this, but:
89: The 529 thing came up, he generates some clicks and scores some political points by making it into a liberal hypocrisy thing, which is kind of right but not entirely so.
It seems entirely right -- that's one reason I was interested. Some (very few, from what I've noticed) liberals have been making a similar point. See Ryan Cooper (who's very much worth following). Obama's 529 thing was an interesting trial balloon on his part; I sort of wonder whether he was trying to make a point.
Thanks, all, for the feedback about the Salam. I couldn't quite figure out what his agenda was: I figure Charley nails it in 76.