Musings from an iconoclast and hater of nonsense
Buckle up. We can expect Trump’s efforts to confuse and divide Americans against each other to shift into overdrive. Don’t fall for it.
— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) October 28, 2017
Now you know why the horseshit uranium story was getting pushed so hard https://t.co/WpFuIopvcn
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) October 28, 2017
Sometimes, The Stupid, it hurts.
And sometimes it goes beyond stupid into the For Fish’s Sakes zone.
The really bad arguments against NFL players have just gone into that zone.
There is a multi-part narrative (I’d call it a theory, but that would be giving it way way too much credit) that comprises the following assertions (again, I’m not calling them arguments because they never have any evidence to back them up):
1. NFL players cannot be oppressed or treated unfairly because they are paid a lot of money to play the game
2. Therefore, NFL players should shut up, be grateful, and play the game.
3. And they should respect the flag and stand for the National Anthem because…if my employer told me to stand to attention for the National Anthem every day I would have to do it, therefore those greedy whiny-ass NFL players should damn well do it too
(3) is bullshit and hokum, and I already wrote about it here. Only idiots, assholes or totalitarian regimes think that it is OK to demand respect and fealty to symbols. Despite the whining of the POTUS, the NFL is not going to mandate that the players stand for the anthem for two compelling reasons:
(1) it is not a requirement in current player contracts under the NFL CBA,
(2) it will likely be ruled a violation of the Constitution by SCOTUS, which has ruled multiple times in the last 75 years that nobody can be compelled to perform those actions. (This is why Roger Goodell, a lawyer, deliberately uses the advisory “should” and not the instructive “shall” when commenting about the current NFL rules).
The argument about other employers not allowing employees to protest on company time is a false equivalence. Technically, the anthem ceremony is not part of an NFL game, and it did not exist prior to 2009 except on special occasions. Any employer, especially in the IT or tech sector, that tried to implement a rule forcing the players to stand daily for the national anthem would immediately drop to the bottom of the list of places to work, and would rapidly lose most of its best people. Young, mobile or highly qualified knowledge workers have a low tolerance for totalitarian horseshit. Most employers would not touch this idea with an extremely long barge pole. They are not stupid.
(2) is also bullshit. Being well-paid confers no obligation on any person to surrender their rights to public comment on any issue. If that were true, we would not be hearing a peep from corporate CEOs, television and movie stars, and famous musical artists. The idea that people should shut up because you might not like what they have to say reeks of totalitarian, intolerant conceit. it’s also an argument I have been reading and hearing for years. It has been bullshit all of that time, and it will continue to be bullshit.
I mean, I want world peace, but I am not entitled to get it any time soon.
NOTE to Daniel Snyder: You can claim that 96% of NFL viewers want the players to stand (wherever that claim came from), but here’s the reality, you authoritarian dickweed; opinion polls and fan surveys do not trump legal or constitutional rights.
(1) is also bullshit, for two reasons.
Firstly, most NFL players do not initially enter into freely negotiated contracts with their employers. They are drafted. A team selects them, and their consent to be drafted by a specific team is legally immaterial. (One or two players, most notably John Elway and Eli Manning, managed to maneuver themselves into playing for the team that they really wanted to play for, but the rarity of such outcomes tells you about how invariable the process normally is).
Secondly, once drafted, NFL players have next to no ability to negotiate their contracts. They are bound by the rookie wage scale, which “slots” player remuneration according to position and draft selection sequence. Any variation is financially minor. The deals are all for 4 years with the team having the option to unilaterally extend for a further year.
Once upon a time, in England, people could be “pressed” into service in the Royal Navy by being, essentially, kidnapped, and placed on board a navy vessel. They were then informed that they were serving in the Royal Navy. No way out existed, since by the time they were actually untied, the ship was already at sea. To me, the NFL entry process for many players looks remarkably like the press gang.
Most NFL contracts are not guaranteed, and a team can essentially fire a player at any time. Now…some players mitigate this via pre-paid bonuses. However, the bottom line is that players are, in most cases, press-ganged into the NFL, and are vulnerable to being fired at any time. I cannot recall that I was ever press-ganged into joining an employer like that.
Now…did the players enter into that sort of arrangement as part of the NFL collective bargaining agreement? Well, yes, and No. The NFLPA agreed to the CBA. However, college football players are not members of the NFLPA, and they certainly did not agree to the CBA. So the players entering the NFL, in most cases are stuck in a process they did not agree to that they cannot vary, where they have no real freedom to negotiate. Now, is that slavery? In the sense of them being forced to work in perpetuity while enduring grinding poverty…No. However, they have a lot less freedom than most regular folks to select an employer, negotiate a contract, and change employers.
Secondly, as most people soon find out, money does not cure all ills or guarantee happiness. The idea that if we all had 10 million dollars we would be happy is a superficially attractive one, but most of us eventually meet people in life, who have a lot of money, who are some combination of miserable or assholes. So the idea “you make a lot of money so you should be happy” is total bullshit. As the old saying goes, money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a better class of misery.
Some final thoughts.
An example of the reality that leading practitioners in sports do not forfeit their rights to push for improvements in their sport simply because they are well paid.
When he was driving in F1, Jackie Stewart began campaigning for improvements in car and circuit design and safety, and guess what? Exactly the same arguments being deployed against the NFL players were deployed against him, including “just shut up and drive, you highly paid ungrateful so and so”. People said that motor racing was intrinsically dangerous, and the drivers volunteered to drive, so they knew the dangers and therefore deaths were simply part of the sport. If you want to understand the results of casual acceptance of bad circuit design at the time, Google “helmuth koinigg” (WARNING – Not pleasant viewing).
Jackie Stewart ignored the pushback, and partly due to his advocacy, Formula 1 slowly changed from a sport where at least 1 driver died a year in an accident, and several were forced into retirement due to crippling injuries, to a sport where any serious driver injury is now a rare event.
The NFL is a collision sport, and this always carries risk of injury, although the worst effects seem to be occurring long after players retire, due to body damage and brain trauma. However, the idea continues to be espoused by many NFL fans that the game should be dangerous. This is nothing more than a relic of the prize-fighting mentality, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that a lot of the people making arguments that the NFL is being “wussified” are pretty much the same people who are demanding that the players STFU and stand for the anthem. They are also, from my personal Twitter analysis, mostly elderly white guys (some of them are bots, but that’s another story).
In other words, a lot of the people making the most noise about those nasty un-American players are precisely the sort of people the NFL should not be listening to, because they will not be watching the sport very much longer.
Every man and his dog is claiming (especially the Twitter bots) that NFL viewership is down because of the anthem protests.
There’s only one problem with that claim.
It’s almost certainly bullshit.
The reality is that live sports viewing is declining across the board, and the NFL is not immune.
I have noticed that people who think that they are qualified to pronounce or judge on who is a Real American always seem to determine that the Real Americans almost always turn out to be…people who look, behave, think, talk and act just like them.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, you could easily spot the intolerant corners of the internets by the speed with which they would remove critical comments and ban or block people.
Now, the game has changed completely. Banning people is no longer seen as useful. Instead, the owners of forums merely call up sockpuppet users and bots to flood the comment threads of the social media platform with supportive comments or snark about opponents. Gaming the system has changed from trying to abolish opposing views to simply drowning them out.
No, you blustering bloviating authoritarian asshats.
No.
NO.
Shut it.
People who disagree with you and your cockanamie ideas of “freedom” are NOT guilty of Treason.
Treason has a very narrow definition, as explained here. It is narrowly defined in order to guard against the sort of fuckwittery that I read from you on social media.
POSTSCRIPT – This website, which is claiming that George Soros should be arrested for Treason sedition and just about anything else anybody can think of, takes today’s award for insult word salad with its deployment of “Globalist PedoSatanic Supporting Libtard Crybullies”. A few too many syllables, but it sure reads well…and the few comments on the post are delightful. Intolerant eliminationist keyboard warriors? Oh no. Absolutely not…scribble like those comments always reminds me of this XTC song.
…represent two slightly different outcomes of the same underlying pathology.
The pathology that is on display here is the excessive tolerance of assholes simply because they are perceived to be successful.
Weinstein had been, by all accounts, behaving like an asshole for decades, and not just towards women. As this article explains, he really should have been fired a long time ago, not necessarily for abuse and harrassment of women, but simply because he was, most of the time, a weapons-grade jerk.
Bob Sutton has documented the many reasons why corporations should not tolerate jerks and assholes in the past. They poison the entire corporation in which they operate, and create other little monsters who emulate their behavior, on the grounds that, gee, it sure seemed to work for the guy at the top.
At the same time, a long and dishonorable tendency for the NFL and most of its teams has been unfolding, with the teams seemingly doing their best to turn a blind eye to misbehavior by players off the field, as long as those players are perceived as important performers for the team. Beginning with the Ray Lewis affair, where Lewis ended up being arrested on suspicion of being an accessory to a murder, and was defended by his team until and after he accepted a plea bargain conviction, through the Michael Vick dog-fighting conviction, the deeply unsettling Ray Rice domestic abuse incident, and numerous other examples of players engaging in domestic violence, the NFL has shown itself to be astonishingly willing to ignore or minimize player misbehavior. And yes, Michael Vick, post-retirement, is now a television commentator.
But…then Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel for the National Anthem. Suddenly, he was the Devil Incarnate, the personification of un-American-ness, the lightning rod for every faux-patriot ranter in the USA. He terminated his contract with the 49ers after being informed that he would be released anyway, and has now been passed over by just about every NFL team. He remains a free agent in a league that has a severe deficit of capable quarterbacks, and where almost every week, at least one starting quarterback leaves a game with a significant injury. (Two more starters suffered injuries on Sunday that will probably end their seasons).
Kaepernick’s example is a polar opposite one, of how the NFL treated a player who started a structured, peaceful protest against racial injustice by engaging in an unofficial boycott of that player, while tolerating and sometimes willingly embracing numerous other players who behaved like assholes, in many cases committing felonies. The double standard is glaring.
The examples of Weinstein and Kaepernick show just how far we really are from a mode of operation where being an asshole is derided instead of venerated.
Yesterday I ended up having a spiky exchange with a TSA agent who treated me in a pompous and dickish manner. There was no need for her to have behaved that way, it is actually quite easy to not be a dick. However, I remain fairly convinced that the entire paranoia-based training ethos of groups like the TSA, coupled with the need to hire people who will show that they can be unvarying enforcers of petty regulations, is very likely to result in those hired people determining that being a dick is actually OK, and might even be required.
Dickish behavior aside, my main frustration with the sudden confiscation of my toothpaste was that I was being treated to a prima facie example of totally inconsistent application of rules. For the last 3 months I have been shuttling backwards and forwards most weeks to Kentucky via DFW, and for nearly all of those trips, I came through the same outbound gate at DFW. I was carrying an identical tube of the same brand of toothpaste all of that time (with varying amounts of toothpaste in it), and yet not once was I stopped and informed that this was a breach of the rules. Not in DFW, not in Louisville KY.
Of course, the sudden change in the level of enforcement might have had something to do with the fact that there was a completely different crew of TSA people at that gate on Sunday, a crew who clearly had a far more humorless and censorious approach to enforcement. I was brusquely told that I could not put my shoes in the same container as my toiletries, and when I asked why, I was informed “new rules last week”, in a tone of voice that suggested that it probably would have sounded a whole lot better in the original German.
and lo and behold, when sat down in the regional jet en route to Louisville, I was informed in similarly brusque terms that I could not put my laptop on my lap for takeoff. It had to be “stowed”. By this time I had had quite enough of petty officialdom, and having swapped seats, I told the flight attendant “you give me my bag, I will stow it”. I then ended up being told that my stowing the bag next to me on the floor was insufficient, and it had to be under the seat in front. So I jammed it under the seat in front.
All the time this was happening, with the plane taxiing, the woman across the aisle was talking to somebody on her cellphone…and she continued to talk to the other person until the plane was several hundred feet in the air.
My respect for authority is formed on the basis of equitable enforcement of sensible rules, by people who don’t behave like dicks. Respect is not given, it is earned.
None of the groups of authority figures that I interacted with on Sunday at D/FW airport did anything to cause me to respect their actions. They were attempting to enforce arbitrary and non-sensible rules (strike 1), hopelessly inconsistently (strike 2) and were being dickish about it (strike 3).
All of this is part of the charade that Bruce Schneier memorably termed “security theater”, an expensive, time-consuming and irksome game of charades designed to create the illusion of order and safety, while assuring neither. Schneier’s essay is as applicable now as it was when he wrote it in 2009.
