It Isn't, or Shouldn't Be, the NFL's Job to Punish Crimes

So apparently the official talking point in the Boston sports world about the four-game suspension of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for what seems to have been his role in actually seriously cheating, at least in the AFC championship game last year right before the Patriots' Super Bowl win (and possibly, like, for many years prior) is that it's an outrage that Brady was suspended for twice as long as Ray Rice was for his domestic abuse. And like, so, the thing is, my instinct about Brady is that the suspension is an outrage, in that it should've been for a whole season. And so the Ray Rice comparison line annoys me, because I basically agree that the Ray Rice thing was handled disgracefully and that he got off awfully light. Certainly the point that, y'know, abusing footballs shouldn't be seen as worse than abusing women or whatever is an accurate one. But like, I dunno... I kind of feel like it isn't, or shouldn't be, the NFL's job to punish crimes? Like, domestic abuse is an offense against the victim and an offense against the state; it's not an offense against the National Football League, and cheating at football in the semifinal game of the NFL playoffs is. We wouldn't want the U.S. government, or the government of Massachusetts, to punish Brady for his cheating at football, I don't think, because it's not that kind of offense.

In my Criminal Law class we discussed at one point the idea of "shaming penalties," where instead of directly, like, punishing the (typically low-level) offender, e.g. by imprisoning or even fining them, but rather just basically publicizes their offense. There's a sense that these punishments manage to be less cruel than, say, incarceration, while still being unpleasant enough to be a deterrent (indeed, perhaps more of one) and maybe even, if done right, having some rehabilitative effects. One line of criticism is that they're humiliating, to which the defenders rather powerfully respond, have you seen our prisons? But another line of attack is that there's something a bit disturbing about where exactly the punishment comes from in these shaming punishments. It comes from everyone in the community. In the most troubling cases, the government seems pretty explicitly to be trying to foster a mob mentality that will enlist the public to carry out the sentence, basically, by basically making the offender persona non grata in that community. And this is kind of troubling. It's almost, like, an embrace of the lynch mob by the government, or at least it can approximate that. Obviously imprisonment often leads to that same kind of informal social sanction afterward, but I kind of think that it shouldn't, or at least not insofar as those sanctions are meant as sanctions rather than as sensible precautions against a potentially dangerous or untrustworthy person. I tend to think that we should let the state punish people, and then once it's had its say, we should welcome people back into society as full citizens, though without turning a blind eye to any dangers they may represent.

Which brings us back to Brady and Ray Rice. Like, it really, really shouldn't be the NFL's job to punish Ray Rice. And people who do bad things, including beat their girlfriends which is a very bad thing, shouldn't just stop being able to be part of society. The idea that sports leagues should have the policy that people who've committed crimes of a certain level should never be allowed to participate in them strikes me as a terrible one. The problem is that this all takes place in the shadow of the well-known fact that the state isn't doing it's effing job with regard to domestic violence, so basically if the NFL doesn't punish Ray Rice, no one will. And in certain ways the NFL is even in a better position to punish him than the state is, because it doesn't need to hear the victim testify, it doesn't need to get proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it can just say, hey, we saw the video, we know what we think went down, we're gonna suspend his ass. But that's a huge problem! For those of us who believe in the ideals of the criminal justice system, and of innocent until proven guilty and the like, the idea that when someone is known to have done a bad thing, this should be handled by having anyone in society who has power over them and who isn't bound by the Bill of Rights should just punish them any way they can, it's, like, it's really problematic, and it really does kind of feel like mob justice.

Now, that doesn't really point to a solution, since it's not like the general unenforcement of domestic violence laws is gonna change any time soon, and I'm not really saying that I think the NFL shouldn't be allowed to discipline its players for their off-field misdeeds. But it's wrong, I think, to reason from the fact that domestic violence is worse than cheating at football to the conclusion that the relative lengths of the Brady and Rice suspensions say something so terrible about the NFL's priorities. The NFL isn't in the business of outlawing domestic violence. It is in the business of making sure dudes don't cheat at football.* One of these things is much, much more its responsibility than the other, and that's not something wrong with the world. That's something right with the world! The NFL shouldn't just decide that, because domestic violence is so bad, it's going to assume as much responsibility for punishing and deterring it as it does for cheating at football, no more than any one of us has the right to go out and become a vigilante.

So, I'm sorry Boston, but pointing at Ray Rice doesn't give you a great argument for why Tom Brady is being treated unfairly.



*Well, arguably it is. Or at least it should be.

White Male Victimization Makes Sense If You Think White Men Are Superior

Jonathan Chait has a nice little post slashing to tiny little bits the assertion by one Joseph Epstein that Barack Obama and, if she is elected, Hillary Clinton would be "affirmative-action Presidents." He notes that Epstein educes precisely zero evidence that Obama or Clinton are unqualified on the merits to be President, or especially that they are uniquely so in American history. Moreover, he notes that the period when Epstein thinks Presidents were chosen purely on the basis of merit just happened to produce 43 white men in a row, the last of whom was the son of a different President. Epstein's argument that these 43 men were elected because of their "intrinsic qualities" rather than on the basis of "accidents of [their] birth" is flatly absurd. Chait goes on to note that the general thrust of the piece, viz. that white men have become a "subaltern class," is hard to square with the fact that today's elite is still overwhelmingly comprised of white men. All of this is true.

Unless, of course, you believe that white men are categorically superior to people who aren't white men. Which, y'know, used to be a pretty mainstream position. "White supremacy" is not just the belief that white people ought to subjugate non-white people; it's the belief that white people are better than non-white people. Now, this belief is what we might, if we were being polite, call "demonstrably false," and if we were not being polite we might call "crazy." But that doesn't mean plenty of people don't still believe it. And if you have this belief, and the analogous, equally crazy belief vis-a-vis women (and mind you, the belief in its truest form isn't just that most white men are superior on the merits to most non-whites or non-men, it's that there's a categorical distinction between white men and others in terms of merit*), then the fact that any of the social elite aren't white men is evidence of a great big problem. Specifically it means that they must have attained their position through "social justice" and "victimization" politics, not through merit, because it is impossible that they have merit. If you believe in white supremacy as an axiomatic principle of reality, then Barack Obama is not, cannot be a counterexample that disproves white supremacy. He is still an inferior black person, and therefore something must be wrong with any system that allows him to be President. And when that system elected 43 white guys in a row beforehand, that was it functioning well, and on the basis of merit, since all the merit resides with the white guys.

So any time someone talks about how Obama or Clinton don't really deserve to be President, and are just "affirmative action" candidates, they're tipping you off to the fact that they are a good old-fashioned, totally unreconstructed bigot who really, truly believes that white men are superior to everyone else. Nice of them to let us know, really.



*Specifically the kind of merit that's required for things like holding public office or otherwise wielding power in society. Women are perfectly meritorious, for some things; those things just aren't being President, or anything remotely resembling being President. (...is what the crazy bigots, think, of course.)

Introducing the Bartolo Colon Saberhagenometer

In 1994, Bret Saberhagen, of the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, did something rather impressive, something no one had done since 1919: he had more wins than walks. In 24 starts, he went 14-4 (the season was, you recall, strike-shortened), and allowed a meager 13 walks. No one who's thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title has done that since the deadball era. Two of the three people who did it between 1901 and 1919 were Christy Mathewson. A few relievers have done it in the interim, and plenty of people who didn't pitch a full season or anything like it, but no one with at least 65 innings pitched. Of course, Saberhagen's feat is slightly tainted by the strike, since he didn't get to keep it up over a full season, but that wasn't his fault.

Anyway, the point is, Bartolo Colon. He just won his fifth game of the season, out of six starts (the other being a rather tough loss because the Mets' offense got atrocious for a while there). In his first start, on Opening Day, he walked a dude. He hasn't made that mistake again. So, yeah, that's 1 walk, 5 wins. So I am hereby introducing the Saberhagenometer, a statistic defined as Wins Minus Walks. Bartolo Colon 2015 is the all-time leader in the statistic, at +4. (Well, okay, Christy Mathewson put up a +4 season in 1913, with 25 wins against just 21 walks, Dick Hall was +4 in 61.1 innings over 32 relief appearances at 10 and 6, and Deacon Phillippe was actually +5 in 1910 in 121.2 innings over 8 starts and 23 relief appearances, but he's bloody well close enough.) And like, I dunno, it seems like he could keep it up. He really gives off the impression of simply having decided that walking people is a bad idea, so he's not gonna do it. So this will be something to keep an eye on over the course of the season. And if he does get it done, the fact that the only two to do it in the modern era will both have been New York Mets is just pretty damn cool.

Oh, also, Matt Harvey is currently at +1 on the Saberhagenometer at 5 W, 4 BB, as is Michael Pineda of that other New York team at 3/2. That doesn't seem like nearly enough of a cushion, although since Matt Harvey is going to go 33-0 this year I guess he's got a chance.

Of Course Gangs Can Come Together More Easily Than the Parties

So I was just watching tonight's Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and the panel (Dana Perino, Lewis Black, and some I think comedian that I didn't recognizing) were talking about a number of things but one of them was the truce between the different Baltimore gangs. And the way they were talking about this was, like, isn't it absurd how these gangs can come together but the Democrats and Republicans can't. And I was just thinking about how fundamentally wrong an understanding of politics such talk reveals. Because, like, of course! Lewis Black was saying something about how, like, these gangs, they want to kill each other, literally kill each other, and the Democrats and Republicans are just talking ideology, or whatever. But that's the thing: wanting to kill one another is way less insoluble a conflict than genuine ideological disagreement. The Crypts and the Bloods or whatever don't have any very serious disagreements about what the world should be like, except that one of them thinks the Crypts should be in power and the other think the Bloods should. They're just rivals, each striving for the same position and hence coming into (violent) conflict with one another. Democrats and Republicans, on the other hand, have the genuine moral belief that the things the other side wants to do with power, should they achieve it, would be terrible things that would make the world a much worse place. And so the truth is that it's a hell of a lot easier to compromise over an actual blood feud (or whatever exactly the divisions between gangs are) than over an ideological disagreement, especially when there's some sense of a common higher good that comes along. Like, all the different gangs are made up of people with a fairly similar political worldview, viz. the basically liberal view of race in America, and so when the city they've been fighting over suddenly gets caught up in this broader battle about race in America, well, suddenly their little struggle for power doesn't seem so important anymore, and they'll all agree on this. The Crypts think it's more important to work toward racial peace and justice than to fight for control of Baltimore, and the Bloods don't respond by being like, "oh hey, that's an opening for us to take over Baltimore!", they respond by joining in! But Democrats and Republicans cannot do this, because they do not agree about fundamental moral principles. Like, what could conceivably come along that was at such a higher level and involved issues where there isn't partisan disagreement? If, I dunno, aliens appeared and tried to invade us? Yeah, that might create partisan unity, on the issue of, let's not get conquered by aliens. That's pretty much the closest analogy to what's going on in Baltimore. And the thing is, this is not a problem. This is the nature of ideological politics, which is way better and more sensible than non-ideological politics given that, y'know, politics is important and people have different fundamental beliefs and hence if politics isn't the forum in which for those beliefs to clash something weird and probably terrible is going on (e.g., massive disenfranchisement of the underclasses or whatever). Politics where the only thing at stake is which faction gets to enjoy being in power, we've seen that. That was the Gilded Age. They call it that for a reason: it was terrible. Its politics, in particular, was terrible. Going back to that would be terrible. Now, maybe it would be nice if our society didn't feature such stark divisions along fundamental moral lines, if there were more broad consensus and solidarity about basic values and political cleavages were just about implementing those values. But why should we expect to see that? I would expect/hope that it's easier to get consensus about empirical questions, i.e., about what policies will effectuate which values, than on the values questions themselves, especially if we're stipulating the lack of the kind of major values divides that can produce divisions in empirical beliefs through motivated reasoning. Also there's always gonna be a tendency for the politics in any given place to "zoom in" on however much fundamental disagreement there is in a given society, I think. (E.g., there stop being overtly pro-slavery people, but even though the spectrum on racial issues gets narrower after that it doesn't get less contentious because the position of, say, no slavery but yes segregation stops getting coded as moderate and maybe an ally of the egalitarians and starts being coded, properly, as The Enemy, and of course people with that position suddenly start coding the egalitarians as The Enemy in return.)

Basically, politics is all about fundamental moral divisions, and those divisions are categorically less easy to overcome than a simple "we want to kill each other" sort of feud. That's natural, and anyone who doesn't instinctively see the obviousness of the Bloods and the Crypts being more reconcilable than the Democrats and the Republicans doesn't understand politics.