Author: devangoldstein

Giving a Shit About Cheap Shots in the NFL

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In response to Drew Magary’s assertion that “No One Gives a Shit About Cheap Shots”:

  1. Magary’s obviously wrong to think this was just one weekend of hits followed by some out-of-the-blue media shitstorm. Coverage has been steadily increasing for years, especially this past year, when I’ve read about the issue in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the fucking Post-Gazette, and in perhaps a half-dozen other places—and that was all before week six. Hell, I even wrote about it myself last year.
  2. Every time I post a link to some article about brain injury in the NFL on Facebook, I get a long thread and the odd private message from people who either aren’t watching football anymore or who are but really wish it were different. I think hard-core sports fans—like just about everybody Magary seems to be in touch with—don’t give a shit about the hits, but they’re not as much in the mainstream as they might like to think. I myself turned off the RedZone in week six (of all weeks!) in part to give myself a break from all the carnage. It’s honestly more than I want to see most Sundays, and it’s getting harder and harder to watch.
  3. NFL players have indeed been subject to shorter life spans for a long time, but they’re getting shorter and shorter with every passing decade. And the argument that people know what they’re getting into is horseshit. When you’re in college getting drafted, you know what you’re getting into. But when you’re a fucking nine-year-old running back whose NFL dreams are already changing the decisions you make in life, you are in no way capable of evaluating the consequences of your repeated head traumas. Frankly, even high-schoolers—who get some terrible concussions and subconcussive brain injuries playing football—simply don’t have fully-developed cognitive architectures yet, and in particular, they’re terrible (on average) at thinking about futures and consequences (which is obvious on the face of it, but also backed by plenty of good science). In short, once you’re in the NFL, it’s way too late to back out. People are simply not equipped to back off of a dozen years of attachment to a dream because suddenly some team lawyer is reading them a bunch of legalese about the risks of concussion. (And that’s to say nothing of the overwhelming majority of high-school players who never get to the NFL. Where’s the payoff for their brain damage?)
  4. This is a societal problem, not a sports problem. Magary’s not the only one to miss that point. On SportsCenter, Trent Dilfer defended the as-it-has-been NFL by using the word “gladiatorial.” But there’s a reason dogfighting is illegal, a reason certain kinds of bloodsporty mixed martial arts are illegal, a reason we don’t fucking bait bears anymore. As a civilized society, we understand the dangers of indulging human instincts that may well be natural. (Or at least, we did at the time of the release of The Running Man.) That football has become gladiatorial is an argument against its current role in our society, not for it.

A Like-Button List

devangoldstein5 Comments

Had another list rejected by McSweeney’s, but I like this one enough to show you the whole thing. Without further ado:

What I Might Mean When I Click the Like Button Next to Your Comment on My Facebook Status Update

I like your comment.

I like you, though your comment leaves me disinterested.

I like that you left a comment, though your comment leaves me enraged and I don’t know how much I care for you anymore.

I don’t like you or your comment, but I worry about the consequences of your knowing my feelings.

I don’t like you or your comment, and I don’t care whether you find out, but I worry that others involved with this thread might think it callous of me not to acknowledge your comment, since everybody knows you have no friends and we all feel bad for you.

I don’t like you or your comment, and I don’t care whether you or anyone else finds out, but I’ve had a few to drink and in a moment of dizzy compassion, I thought I should Like your comment. I wake up to find myself mistaken, but I think that Unliking your comment the morning after would be too cruel a way to treat even you, given the night we’ve just had together, and given that I forgot my wallet and will have to borrow money from you for the breakfast we’re eating right now, while I check Facebook on my iPhone.

How to be Evil: A Lesson from Google on Non-Transparency

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For having released a policy proposal (jointly, with Verizon) that pushes transparency as a key element of Internet access, Google’s certainly acting shady on its public policy blog.

For starters, Google’s recap mentions only one tiny piece of the spooky Network Management section of the proposal at all. The section includes the monstrous sentence below, which seems to provide blanket allowance for traffic regulation by ISPs:

Reasonable network management includes any technically sound practice: to reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network; to ensure network security or integrity; to address traffic that is unwanted by or harmful to users, the provider’s network, or the Internet; to ensure service quality to a subscriber; to provide services or capabilities consistent with a consumer’s choices; that is consistent with the technicalrequirements, standards, or best practices adopted by an independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization; to prioritize general classes ortypes of Internet traffic, based on latency; or otherwise to manage the daily operation of its network.

I tried to find a key phrase or two to italicize for emphasis—but the passage has just too many nasty bits to single any out.

The Google-Verizon proposal also pointedly declaws the FCC (while also begging for federal funds to develop broadband Internet access in “unserved” areas). The document notes that the FCC is merely to “oversee” broadband Internet access, and includes the most bizarre sentence I’ve read this year:

Regulatory authorities would not be permitted to regulate broadband Internet access service.

Nasty, right? But Google’s blog post makes all this sound much sunnier, noting that the proposal creates “enforceable consumer protection and nondiscrimination standards that go beyond the FCC’s preexisting consumer safeguards,” and claims “the proposal also provides for a new enforcement mechanism for the FCC to use.” That enforcement mechanism seems to mirror what’s in place for broadcast television; the crucial difference is that in the broadband case, the FCC would be enforcing rules set up by the companies being enforced (since regulatory bodies wouldn’t be allowed to regulate). Sounds like paradise for the companies providing access, doesn’t it?

What a distressing lack of integrity from the company that looks to be taking over our digital lives.

Profitable Humanities, Cont.

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Since it came up in a discussion of my previous post (and in the comments there), here’s my position on the bigger question (that is, should we be measuring the worth of the English department [or others] in financial terms?):

For me, the problems with addressing the financial value of the humanities are two: first, an in-principle objection: That’s just not the right way to think about it. Many commenters on Facebook have countered this objection with a real practical concern for which I have no solution, namely, that financial considerations seem to be the only ones that matter to administrators.

But to take one example of why this line of thinking can be troublesome: If we start working on these terms, don’t we have to mention that part of the reason we can be so profitable is that our faculty make less than in other disciplines and we rely so heavily on adjuncts and graduate students?

My second objection is more pragmatic: There’s no way to win this fight. There’s no meaningful way to cut up the numbers in which we come out even or ahead. Implication: The author of the original article‘s net-operating-profit-or-loss analysis is not “meaningful.” I feel like if he had spent ten minutes with a VP of the University, he might’ve realized that the road he’s on leads to dark places for the humanities. But no, he asked the Assistant Dean of the Humanities—responsible only for the operating budget of the humanities division and its departments—to crunch some numbers.

This feels a little like arguing that there’s no problem with the economy because my accountant told me that my family is saving responsibly. The ship is sinking; it’s pointless to think about whether any one cabin has flooded or not.

Profitable Humanities: Too Good to be True?

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At first, I was entranced by a piece in UCLA Today about the extent to which departments in the hard sciences do or do not subsidize humanities departments. In it, Robert Watson, a professor of English at UCLA, notes that based on student fees and expenses, the English department there profited by $5.5 million (about a 10% margin), where “the physical sciences,” taken in aggregate, faced a loss of about the same size.

Lovely, I thought. This kind of fact appeals to the contrarian in me, because it gives me ammunition against detractors against what we do. I felt much as I did upon learning that the U.S. Postal Service hasn’t taken a penny of taxpayer money in decades. Ha!, I thought.

As I kept thinking, though, I ran into this problem: For every department to pay its own way is not enough, because a university is greater than the sum of its departments, from a budgetary perspective. That is, no students pay fees directly for many parts of the administration (from student affairs to the landscaping)—nor for the endowment, new construction, or other long-term considerations.

What’s more, the departmental fee-based income (or loss) is really small potatoes in a University’s operating budget1—or in terms of its overall income (or loss). The money that really matters comes in from donors. Case in point: In 2007-2008, UCLA received $481 million in new gifts and pledges alone.

That’s a huge chunk of cash compared to the English department’s profit or the comparably tiny loss from “the physical sciences,” with relatively little associated cost—perhaps a few million? And again, that’s just new gifts; the year-after-year stuff surely multiplies the number tremendously.

The more important question, then, is this: How much donor money does English bring in, as compared to engineering, medicine, athletics programs, and so on? Without any hard evidence, I can’t help but suspect those numbers are far more damning for the humanities than the short-term profit-and-loss figures presented by Prof. Watson.

(The flip side of this, which I’m invested in personally and professionally, is that general financial strength is probably the wrong measure for worth when one’s considering something like an English Department. But that’s really off-topic here, isn’t it?)

1 UPDATE: Further research confirms this “small potatoes” hypothesis. In 2007 – 2008, UCLA’s total spending on operations and capital expenditures (a mostly useless but dazzling figure) was $4,269,679,000. That’s over four billion dollars. At about one-eighth of one percent of that overall spending figure, how much can the English department’s operating profit really matter?