A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
For Seattle fans, it was what poker players call a “bad beat” – a big pot and a hand that’s nearly sure to win but then loses on the final, unlikely card. A loss like that can dampen enthusiasm for things beyond football, at least in the short run. On the other hand, a sudden and satisfying victory can whet other appetites.
PornHub, which purports to be the most popular place for porn, ran its data on traffic before, during, and after the big game (their full report is here). The chart below shows the data for the home cities of the two teams plus Phoenix, where the game took place.
(Click on the chart for a larger view.)
As you might expect, the Super Bowl took a bite out of porn, and more so in Boston and Seattle than in other cities. The folks who would ordinarily be checking in to PornHub started leaving early for an hour or two of pre-game hype, and of course they stayed for the real game. Even Katy Perry held their attention at halftime.
But after Pete Carrol’s game-losing call and Malcolm Butler’s game-saving interception, porn paths parted. The seekers in Seattle hurried back online while those in Boston apparently stuck with their TVs for some of the post-game ceremony.
Then, about an hour after the game, porn traffic in Boston rose and didn’t begin to taper off until after midnight. But in Seattle, the post-Bowl bump was shorter lived. Even though the night was young (8 p.m. PST) the Seattle fans lost their interest in PornHub. Phoenix, in the Mountain time zone, is a useful comparison. Even though the hour was later, Phoenix pornophiles were still checking in as their disheartened Seattle counterparts were logging out.
“I won’t do business in New York,” my father once told me. When I asked why, he described how New York customers would cheat in order to push down the price they paid for his steel.
I hadn’t thought about that for a while. The memory came back just after I saw “A Most Violent Year” set in the grimy and graffiti-covered New York of 1981. The hero, Abel Morales, is trying to expand his heating oil business, but someone is out to thwart him. His trucks are hijacked, the oil stolen. His employees are threatened and beaten up. In addition, the DA trying to clean up the heating oil business has gotten a 14-count indictment, and the bank withdraws the loan they had agreed to.
My father’s customers did nothing violent or illegal, just unethical and dishonest. Why would they do that, I asked my father. I was young and naive. “Guys in New York,” he said, “it’s a tough market.”
I was amazed that he could be so understanding. But he recognized that people in business acted not solely on the basis personal morality. In some markets, you had to be a little dishonest in order to survive. That’s the point that both Abel and the “A Most Violent Year” try very hard to ignore. Instead, the movie, at least on its surface, seems to be trying to convey the message – that cliche that runs from old Westerns to the latest thrillers – that even in a corrupt world, an honest man acting honorably can come out on top. The bad guys may lie, cheat, steal, kill, kidnap, or whatever, unconstrained by any moral sense; yet the good guy, using only honorable means, will win. The good guy’s goodness and the bad guy’s wickedness are never in doubt. Doubt, in fact, is usually irrelevant.
Because Hollywood prefers this simplified view of morality, we have very few honest films about business. In “A Most Violent Year,” at least we see a more realistic businessman – successful, even wealthy, but not all powerful, running a small company, dealing with everyday crises, trying to negotiate loans so he can stay afloat. More often in Hollywood films, businessmen are the sinister, greedy, and powerful CEOs of large corporations. The Montgomery Burns caricature in “The Simpsons” is not too distant from executives in serious movies.
I can think of only one movie centered on a businessman faced with moral problems that have no simple, untainted solution – “Save the Tiger” from 1973.
“A Most Violent Year” could have been such a movie, but Abel never admits to himself that his motives and actions are anything but pure. The trailer gives some suggestion of his resoluteness.
Others recognize that the the heating oil business is a compromised and compromising world. “Everyone in this room is fully capable of lying to their own mothers on their deathbeds,” says Peter Forente at a meeting of the fifteen important players in the business. Forente is the son of a mobster now in prison, but Peter is trying to do things differently to the extent he can. When Abel asks him for a much-needed loan, Peter tells him, “I don’t want you to be in this position. We are not nice people to borrow three quarters of a million dollars from.”
Abel’s wife – her father too was connected to organized crime – is aware of how that world works. She has been keeping two sets of books, and she’s been skimming money over the years, apparently without her husband – the head of the company – knowing. She has put enough money aside that Abel won’t have to borrow from the “not nice people.” She shows him a slip of paper with the sum on it.
ABEL
What do you expect me to do with this?
ANNA
Use it.... Abel...
ABEL
Is it clean?
[snip]
ANNA
It’s as clean as every other dollar we’ve ever made.
ABEL
That’s a fucking bullshit answer.
[a few moments later]
ABEL
I’ll get it done. And it won’t be as a cheat.
ANNA
(Yelling, but controlled enough to not wake the kids.)
Oh you are too much. You’ve been walking around your whole life like this all happened because of your hard work, good luck, and charm. Mr. Fucking American Dream. Well this is America... but it’s not a dream, and that wasn’t good luck helping you out all those years... IT WAS ME! Doing the things you didn’t want to know about...
Somehow, Abel acts as though he still does not to know about those things, continuing to believe in his own rectitude. In fact, compared with the other oil dealers, he is more honorable. Yet, despite the phony books (which he helps to hide under his house when law enforcement comes snooping), despite the felony indictment, despite all those dollars he made being equally clean (i.e., not so clean), he fails to confront or even acknowledge the moral ambiguities. Abel is like so many other protagonists in American films. All conflict is external. Life is about solving problems. Self-doubt would only get in the way.
The idea that the passive voice must be avoided at all costs is of course wrong-headed. Still, passive voice remains a refuge for writers who would rather not say who’s doing what.
Ross Douthat, in his column today (here) on the causes of political correctness, twice says that liberal economic policy proposals “are mostly blocked.”
the paths forward for progressive economic policy are mostly blocked — and not only by a well-entrenched Republican Party, but by liberalism’s ongoing inability to raise the taxes required to pay for the welfare state we already have.* Since a long, slow, grinding battle over how to pay for those commitments is unlikely to fire anyone’s imagination, it’s not surprising that cultural causes — race, sex, identity — suddenly seem vastly more appealing.
In that first phrase, Douthat allows that it’s the Republicans who are doing the blocking, but then he adds a clause about the “liberalism’s inability” to pass economic legislation as though this inability were something different from the Republican Party. This is a little like talking about “the Colts inability to score points” without mentioning the Patriots defense.
A few paragraphs later, when Douthat repeats this idea, he doesn’t even bother to go beyond the passive voice: “because the paths to economic distribution are mostly blocked, the more plausible way . . .” How about this rewrite: “Because Republicans block all tax and spending proposals that might discomfit the rich. . . .”
I am not saying that Douthat is wrong about the relation between the Republican’s disproportionate** dominance and the cultural left’s attention to political correctness – I think it goes beyond even what he’s talking about. But I hope that Douthat’s attempt to obscure the role of Republican legislators, in part by using the passive voice, has not gone unnoticed.***
-------
* Douthat announces this “we can’t afford it” view of Medicare and Social Security (which account for most of “welfare state we already have”) as though it were undisputed fact. It isn’t. Nor is there agreement as to how long it will be until these programs become unaffordable if nothing is changed.
** At the national level, more people voted for Democrats than for Republicans.
*** Yes, I am well aware that this sentence breaks not only the rule against passive voice but also the rule outlwawing “not-un–” construction.
Sunday, and no football. But we’ll always have Belichick and Brady.
I’m not saying that the Patriots are out-and-out liars. But they are outliers.
The advantage of an underinflated ball, like the eleven of the twelve footballs the Patriots used last Sunday, is that it’s easier to grip. Ball carriers will be less likely fumble if they’re gripping a ball they can sink their fingers into.
We can’t go back and measure the pressure of balls the Patriots were using before the Colts game, but Warren Sharp (here) went back and dug up the data on fumbles for all NFL games since 2010. Since a team that controls the ball and runs more plays has more chances to fumble, Sharp graphed the ratio of plays to fumbles (values in red squares in the chart below) along with the absolute number of fumbles (values in blue circles). The higher the ratio, the less fumble-prone the team was.
(Click on an image for a larger view.)
One of these things is not like the others. That’s what an outlier is. It’s off the charts. It’s nowhere near the trend line. Something about it is very different. The variables that might explain the differences among the other data points – better players, better weather or a domed stadium, a pass-centered offense – don’t apply. Something else is going on.
As the graph shows, when the teams are rank ordered on the plays/fumbles ratio, the difference between one team and the next higher is usually 0-2, there are only two gaps of 5 until the 9-point gap between #3 Atlanta and #2 Houston. From the second-best Texans and to the Patriots there’s a 47-point jump.
Sharp also graphed the data as a histogram.
It’s pretty much a bell curve centered around the mean of 105 plays-per-fumble. Except for that outlier. And the chart shows just how far out it lies.
The Patriots play in a cold-weather climate in a stadium exposed to the elements. Yet their plays/fumble ratio is 50% higher than that of the Packers, 80% higher than the Bears. They have good players, but those players fumble less often for the Patriots than they did when they played for other NFL teams.
Usually, the statistical anomaly comes first – someone notices that US healthcare costs are double those of other nations – and then people try to come up with explanations. In this case, it wasn’t until we had a possible explanatory variable that researchers went back and found the outlier. As Peter Sagal of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” said, “The League became suspicious when a Patriots player scored a touchdown and instead of spiking the ball he just folded it and put it in his pocket.”
UPDATE, Jan. 28: Since I posted this, there has been some discussion of Sharp’s data (“discussion” is a euphemism – this is sports and the Internet after all). If you’re really interested in pursuing this, try Advanced Football Analytics or this piece at Deadspin “Why Those Statistics About The Patriots’ Fumbles Are Mostly Junk,” (to repeat, “discussion” is a euphemism, and if you want more strongly voiced views, read the comments). Neil Paine at FiveThirtyEight links to some others. In sum, the evidence is not as strong as what Sharp’s version suggests. (One of the difficulties I suspect is that a fumble is a rare event. The difference between the teams with the surest grip and the most butterfingered is about one fumble every couple of games.
