College Football Playoff Predictor - After September

 Doing monthly updates on this because I am lazy.

Part of the reason for the monthly updates is that the clear top three teams we started the season with have a) all looked the part, remaining roughly a touchdown clear of the field on a neutral field and b) passed all of their tests thus far.  But as promised there's been a fair amount of movement beneath that, with Oklahoma and A&M disappointing, NC State holding serve, and USC and Minnesota (?) surging.  Perfectly cromulent September all things considered.

Conference odds reflect two paradigms.  For the Group of Five there is effective anarchy.  Cincinnati appears to be the class of the American again, but other than that the only thing I can promise at this point is chaos.  Get ready for an unranked 11-2 team to make the Cotton Bowl.

For the Power Five, things look a bit more normal with chaos lurking just beneath the surface.  Kansas State is 28% to make the Big 12 title game.  Washington is at 37% for the Pac 12.  And no team is more likely to make the Big Ten title game than Minnesota.  Everything still could get weird-ish...stay tuned.

 

Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 3 of ???

As the proxy war between Russia and NATO rages on, the phenomenon of reflexive left-bashing (which I commented on previously) has continued as well.  This post from a couple of weeks ago is as illuminating of an example of this as I could ask for, so let's blog about it.  While I won't go through every point, I did want to touch on a couple of specifically rage-inducing mistakes the author makes.

First is this list of supposed "lies and idiocies":

"I think it’s worth recalling all the lies and idiocies that have been repeated since the start of the conflict: First, we were told war was impossible, it was a figment of the Western imagination; then we were told war was inevitable, because it was provoked by the West; we were told that they intended to trick Putin into a destructive quagmire; then we were told this was part of Putin’s grand master plan to defy the West and create a new world order; then, that Russia’s total victory was assured in a matter of hours, then days, then weeks, and that news of Ukrainian success was all propaganda; then, that Russia’s serious reversals were actually pre-planned and a new offensive would eventually overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. This moving, parrying, retreating discourse seems to follow or anticipate the retreats of the Russian army itself, trying to dig in to new positions, only to have shift again."

I'm not going to claim all of these assertions are true, as it's clear in hindsight that some of them are wrong.  That said, it's important to note that a) I'm not aware of a specific person/group that has held all of these positions (the author makes no effort to elucidate this either), and b) lumping all of these statements together helps to hide the fact that some of these things are undeniably true.  What this rhetoric accomplishes then is to establish a respectable narrative of the war from a liberal perspective that treats any deviation, legitimate or not, as immediately worthy of suspicion.

"But how about the people who buy it, repeat it, and create their own variations on its themes? What could possibly account for all these contradictory and absurd positions, which have been uttered at different times by the same people? All these sentiments are all the product of a single proposition: the Western democracies are always wrong, both morally and practically. When the West struggles and fails, it’s because of its decadence and senility, a sign of its imminent collapse, when it prevails, it’s because of its dastardly wiles and the limitlessness of its ill-gotten resources. Russia’s appeal in the West, which crosses the traditional boundaries of right and left, is irresistible for those who believe the worst crime imaginable is Western hypocrisy. Since this hypocrisy is the only unforgivable sin, Russia’s crude and cynical exercise of power, it’s barely plausible justifications for its actions, its overt gangsterism at home and abroad, is seen as a virtue."

The author makes two key mistakes in this passage.  One is that his argument essentially equates critiques of US power as being exclusively attribution error, which forecloses the possibility of very real structural critiques.  Two, it ignores the reality and the omnipresence of actually existing US hegemony.  Even if we grant that the US is not the primary instigator of this conflict (which is not a given), it is clear from their lack of diplomacy and their surplus of arms shipments that they are using their position of power to support and perhaps even encourage the continuation of this conflict.  And if one is a subject to this hegemonic power, I would argue that it is actually a moral imperative to speak against it.  More to the point, as much as the term "leftist" signifies anything specific, it signifies anti-capitalism.  The US is undeniably head of the global empire of capital, and as such, should be the primary adversarial state apparatus of anyone who claims allegiance to the left.

"This leads to mind-bogglingly absurd positions: self-avowed Marxist-Leninists cheering on Lenin’s great enemy, Russian chauvinism, self-declared defenders of European Civilization and “traditionalist” Christians rooting for the destruction of the cradle of Slavic Christianity at the hands of who at other times they would deride as Chechen bashi-bazouks. In the coming months and years, we will likely see the one turn into the other: Red becoming Browns, Browns turning Red, Christian becoming atheists, atheists becoming Christian, “new systems” declaring the essential compatibility of Orthodoxy and communism, of international socialism and national chauvinism, politics shrugged off and then adopted as any other affectation, like health fads or sudden tastes for the exotic Orient, but having the added benefit of granting the appearance of serious conviction and purpose. Here we get an insight into the unifying principle of all these supposedly disparate tendencies: a type of base, moronic cynicism. More than anything else, it is this moronic cynicism that takes itself to be devilish cleverness that is the governing ideology of the Russian state and society, and it attracts all its global admirers."

Unlike other paragraphs, there isn't necessarily anything here that is factually untrue.  The problem instead is more one of degree.  Ganz does not name anyone specific, but the only knowledge I have of "self-avowed Marxist-Leninists" matching this description are sex pests and literal cryptofascists.  Not only do I question if these people I assume he has in mind are "leftist" to any meaningful degree, but it's not clear that there are all that many of these people or that they hold any significant purchase in any larger left-oriented power structures (which barley exist in the first place).  By building what is effectively a straw-man argument against an unnamed, unrepresentative other, and then claiming this will lead to the dreaded "red-brown alliance," he is implicitly smearing anyone who might advance anything approximating this vague position as a potential fascist collaborator.  To this, I will again ask the questions: What does this suspicion of others accomplish?  Who does this serve?  Does it actually help the people of Ukraine?  Or does it help further entrench the premises that will lead to their continued immiseration?

Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 2 of ???

 A few months ago I wrote this post about suspicion.  The central thesis was this point from earlier:

"Many Americans hold essentially Manichean views of the world, but those views are mostly a direct consequence of our hegemony and our political system.  Our two party system leads to a red team/blue team mentality where people who identify with one team view anyone who doesn't adhere to all perceived tenets of that team with suspicion.  Similarly, people who view American hegemony to be "good" tend to be suspicious of those who voice concerns to the contrary (and vice versa)."

Since then I have seen this sort of thing transpire time and time again.  But today I saw an example so clear and so illustrative of this disconnect that I had to document it.  It started with this post from Edward Snowden about Biden's recent speech, the gist of which is contained in its introduction:

"“What’s happening in our country,” the President said, “is not normal.”

Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise—the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry—is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden’s propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.

Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.

Are we right to think that?"

I think his argument that follows is largely true, if a little narrow in scope.  Yes, the CIA and other covert organizations are fundamentally un-democratic, but that's just one part of our wretched nation and not necessarily the one I would focus my argument on.  Regardless, I think his instinct to question Biden's premises in this manner is spot-on.

Not everyone agreed, of course.  One such dissenter was moderately good pundit/writer Ryan Cooper:

Cooper's characterization of Snowden's argument in the second tweet is perhaps the most clear example I've seen of someone who thinks America is "good" completely mischaracterizing the argument of someone who doesn't.  Snowden explicitly doesn't engage with Biden's argument but rather his premises.  Equating that with saying "Biden's wrong" misses the point entirely.  It's entirely possible (or even probable) that Snowden actually prefers Biden to Trump, but that preference is not cogent to the specific argument he's making, so he rightfully doesn't include it.  

What's more is that Snowden is in exile specifically because he exposed our government's crimes, and yet people use this extremely understandable reason for his opposition to our government to cast further suspicion on him:

What we end up with here is a demonstration of how the two axes of my thesis on suspicion often become entangled.  Someone opposed to the currently existing American state is also unlikely to be a blue team/red team partisan, and thus someone who is such a partisan may conflate an argument for the former position with a sort of softly peddled argument for the opponent.  Or more likely, they may view any argument that doesn't center their partisan views as being implicitly for their partisan opponents.  I think this is wrong obviously, but it's also just such a small way of seeing and interacting with the world.  Don't we want something better than this?  If so, isn't it our minimum obligation to avoid an appeal to suspicion when we see something we don't immediately agree with?

College Football Playoff Predictor - Year 8

With news that a 12-team playoff could happen as soon as 2024, this exercise is nearing its completion.  But until that time we beat on, spreadsheets against the current, borne ceaselessly into debugging my R code.  Here are the playoff odds that were calculated before the action of Week 0 and last two nights that I was too lazy to post until now:

A couple brief remarks:

1. Yep, the same teams dominate the top that always do.  A clear top three that are seven points clear of the field in the computers and a post-hype Clemson that could be dreadfully competent make up the top four.  While this certainly could indicate a very boring playoff race, the top ten games of the year (in terms of playoff odds at stake) show that each of these teams faces at least some resistance from their moderately strong schedules.  And do recall that two of last year's playoff participants were outside the top 20 in initial playoff odds.  So chaos, as muted as its been over the last eight years, is still possible.

2. That said, I would tend to take the under on Clemson's number above, which means that the fourth playoff spot may be more up for grabs than you might think.  And there are enough interesting squads in the space below the top four to suggest that something approaching "fun" could happen with the race in November.  This might not quite equate to "chaos," but it does suggest that something more compelling than you might expect could come to pass.

3. The alternate view one could take based on these initial playoff odds is to simply ignore the playoff and enjoy the broader scope of what college football has to offer.  Go see your local D-III team.  Pick a week to watch the Mountain West and CUSA action on CBS Sports Network for an entire Saturday.  Follow Oregon State around like they're the Grateful Dead.  Sure, I'm going to watch every stupid Alabama team until my eyes bleed but that doesn't mean you have to.  Allow these words to liberate you from your burden.

4. And if nothing else, it's an NC State hype year.  We only get one of these every five years or so.  Cherish it.