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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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While watching the Bears-Packers game last night, I saw an an ad defending Colin Kaepernick and how he protested against supposed police brutality and racism by kneeling during the national anthem during games. I was surprised to see at the end the commercial was sponsored by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly know as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

It seems like a very weird choice of issue to not just weigh in on but spend a huge amount of money advertising. My concerns break down to three issues:

  1. The commercial felt more like an attempt to make Kapernick's protest sympathetic and palatable than just a defense of his right to protest regardless. It focused on conveying that Kapernick didn't intend the protest to disrespect the military or the country. But if this is really a freedom of expression issue, it shouldn't matter!

  2. I am skeptical the core issue here is freedom of expression, not due to the content of Kapernick's expression, but due to the time and place. It was done as part of a televised entertainment project. I can't imagine anyone who thinks that an actor has a general right to choose their own lines rather than reading a script. The NFL exercises extremely strict control over on-the-field communications across the board. Athletes get fined for wearing different colored socks to promote uncontroversial social causes if they don't have official league approval. In addition, while it's definitely plausible the protests are why no one gave Kaep another chance, it's not cut and dry either. He was not immediately fired for them and he seemed washed up on the field before he even started protesting.

  3. I can think of other cases even just related to BLM within professional sports that are much less marginal. Cases where an athlete was explicitly fired for opinions expressed off the field. For example, Seattle Mariners catcher Steve Clevenger was suspended without pay and had his career ended explicitly for insulting BLM protesters on a private locked twitter account. Professional soccer player Aleksandr Katai was cut from the LA Galaxy because his wife insulted BLM protesters on social mediea despite the fact that he disagreed with and apologized for her comments. As far as I can tell, FIRE has never even commented on either case.

I would like there to be a non-partisan group devoted to defending freedom of expression. However, I worry there is some truth to Conquest's second law. My best guess is that FIRE chose this cause because they want to appeal to a wider audience including more left-leaning people. Will FIRE will eventually follow the ACLU in drifting so far left it can no longer serve it's mission? I'm a fan of a lot of work they did in the past and even contributed a small amount monetarily, so the possibility is troubling to me.

This is so little a legal issue (at least with the facts we have on hand) that it is surprising that FIRE would take it up as anything but a political signal. They are beginning to train their sights on some anti-woke laws that have been passed in red states recently, but that's not a high-profile enough way to signal friendship to the woke, apparently. The only question is whether this is FIRE's Skokie, a one-off they'll ride for fifty years while pursuing cases mostly for the other side of the political aisle, or if it signals a change in focus more generally.

That seems to be a complete misrepresentation of the ad. The ad is narrated by Nate Boyer, who is apparently an ex-Green Beret and a football player who played one preseason game for the Seahawks. This is the narration of the ad in its entirety:

"I'm Nate Boyer. I served as a Green Beret. The first time that I heard about Colin Kaepernick I thought, the guy hated America. I chose to do an open letter to Colin, and Colin ended up reaching out. He said, 'Would you kneel with me?' I said, 'I can't do that, but I will stand next to you.' You don't always have to like how people choose to express their freedoms, but we were both willing to just have a conversation. That's what freedom of speech is. You know, the right to speak out. That's what we fought for."

The visuals are brief clips of the two of them, a picture of someone holding a BLM sign, and a picture of someone holding a sign which says, "We [heart] our police."

That's it. How you can interpret that anodyne message of "everyone should have the right to speak / let's have a conversation" as an endorsement of Kaepernick's message, or as "conveying that Kapernick didn't intend the protest to disrespect the military or the country" seems quite incomprehensible to me.

Finally, you are certainly entitled to your opinion re whether Kaepernick's kneeling was not protected because it was really a time/place/manner restriction, FIRE filed an amicus brief in favor of the high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field, so their position that Kaepernick's speech should be protected is perfectly consistent with their past position, which tends to undermine the claim that they are somehow becoming woke.

The point of the ad seems to be getting liberals to agree that free speech & liberalism are still good ideas.

How you can interpret that anodyne message of "everyone should have the right to speak / let's have a conversation" as an endorsement of Kaepernick's message, or as "conveying that Kapernick didn't intend the protest to disrespect the military or the country" seems quite incomprehensible to me.

The part of the narration that says "the first time I heard about Colin Kaepernick, I thought the guy hated America" is immediately followed by an image you left out, text saying "meet Green Beret who advised Colin Kapernick to take a knee." It seems pretty clear to me the intent of the juxtaposition is "Colin Kapernick does not actually hate America, a veteran told him this was an appropriate way to protest." Thus "make Kapernick's protest sympathetic and palatable" is an accurate description.

So, you only watched the first five seconds?

How you can interpret that anodyne message of "everyone should have the right to speak / let's have a conversation" as an endorsement of Kaepernick's message, or as "conveying that Kapernick didn't intend the protest to disrespect the military or the country" seems quite incomprehensible to me.

Are you unfamilair with rhetoric of deplatforming enthusiasts? Insinuating that not banning someone means the owners actually agree with him, is their bread and butter.

This's why I don't like donating unless I know the people . Great, you just blew your $ to promote something that isn't aligned aligned with the original stated goal or understanding of the thing you donated to in the first place. Once you send the $, it's out of your control. How about putting your $ on something in which you do have control? How many people watching the game are going to care enough to be convinced to do anything or change their minds? .001%? Solidarity for overpaid, ungrateful athletes, i guess.

I can think of other cases even just related to BLM within professional sports that are much less marginal. Cases where an athlete was explicitly fired for opinions expressed off the field. For example, Seattle Mariners catcher Steve Clevenger was suspended without pay and had his career ended explicitly for insulting BLM protesters on a private locked twitter account. Professional soccer player Aleksandr Katai was cut from the LA Galaxy because his wife insulted BLM protesters on social mediea despite the fact that he disagreed with and apologized for her comments. As far as I can tell, FIRE has never even commented on either case.

This is why wokeness is so pernicious. It insidiously extends its reach to anything it can get a hold of.

To be fair, there is a steelman where Kaepernick's problems at least were partially downstream of politician opposition, and that these problems would be very hard to catch. And while Kaepernick's far from the most severe or most overt case, it still had the President of the United States wink-and-nodding about how much political support for the next stadium 'gratitude' an team owner would get for firing him.

To be a little less fair, FIRE keeps finding people to interview who say "until Goodell mentions Kaepernick by name in apology, I feel like he has violated the spirit of the first amendment in an egregious way" without even trying to square that circle, or apply that same argument or broader respect for the "spirit" of the first amendment to nearly any other comparable case.

This rhymes a bit to me with the Just Impact criticism (previous discussion here). It's not that there's something wrong with a utilitarian calculus that suggests making this the centerpiece of their big ad campaign is a way to buy "credibility on the left as a hedge against getting painted as secret Republicans", to borrow from JTarrou, and hopefully FIRE's ad campaign isn't 200 million USD. If it doesn't compromise your underlying principles, that could improve your absolute impact, or even the specific aspects that your original campaigns promised to focus on.

On the flip side... there's already people betting on how long it lasts before we find out that those principles weren't as universal, or at least as universally-applicable as they seemed.

FIRE has had to turn down donations from people who wanted to spend money just to "own the libs."

And if you look at what happened to the ACLU, which became an "own the cons" organization, that was a really good idea, assuming they care about their core principle and not "their side" of the culture war.

Their whole shtick (which I think most of the staff really does buy into) is that they're the last civil libertarians in Washington, and the spiritual heirs to the old ACLU. Everyone understands that they're at least somewhat right-aligned in the same way Cato, Reason, and the Institute for Justice are all right-aligned, so most of their marketing has to be geared toward convincing those good ACLU-donating liberals that they're not evil Koch shills.

For a supposedly "right aligned" organization, they sure have a lot of National Lawyers Guild members on staff. Along with libertarians, old school Republicans, Bidenesque Democrats, etc, etc.

I'm sure the personal politics of the staff are pretty diverse and FIRE probably employs more Biden voters than Trump voters, but it's an organization that was explicitly founded to fight growing illiberalism on college campuses (which overwhelmingly comes from the left), and which is very much tapped into the libertarian/conservative "liberty movement" network and fundrasing infrastructure. It's right-aligned in the same way the ACLU was always a little too heretical and libertarian to fit comfortably on the left, but was still almost universally understood to be left-aligned, even back in the Ira Glasser days.

Yeah. Just like the ACLU.

Any institution that criticizes the Zeitgeist gets attacked as being "right-wing" or "partisan." And being pro-free-speech itself is increasingly being portrayed as a right-wing ideology. FIRE likely does not want the taint of being seen as only being interested in free speech as a right-wing thing, it does not want to be pigeon-holed, and so it is going out of its way to publicize its association with a famous case of (alleged) supression of left-wing speech.

To me, this is a case of false neutrality or false both-sidisims. In going out of its way to show it has neither a left-wing or right-wing bias, it is highlighting a case of alleged speech suppression that does not deserve to be highlighted purely based on its own merits.

The idea that Kaepernick was blackballed out of the league seems like pure fanfiction to me. He was coming off his age 29 season and in the prior two years of starts, his teams went 3-16. His surface stats look OK, but he ate an enormous amount of sacks while being a checkdown machine resulting in him finishing just behind Brock Osweiler and Trevor Simian in advanced stats like QBR. His successful years in San Francisco relied heavily on his athleticism and an offense tailored to his strengths by Greg Roman, who specializes in drawing up offenses for limited, but athletic QBs (also the offensive coordinator for the Bills with Tyrod Taylor and Ravens with Lamar Jackson). At 30, his athleticism was fading.

Basically, he was already a huge liability that would be a shot in the dark gamble if someone wanted to try starting him. More realistically, he'd be employed as a backup for someone he's stylistically similar to. That's less appealing than more ordinary backups because you more or less need an offense tailored to deal with his lack of ability to run through progressions and inclination towards taking sacks rather than forcing tight window passes.

Realistically, someone would probably have done it anyway, basically viewing him as an old version of Mitchell Trubisky. Athletic QBs always get another chance, even if they kind of suck. But what was his inclination to play the role of the good veteran mentor, working hard to be ready to fill in if needed, but mostly just waiting on the bench? Would he be willing to do that? I greatly doubt it. Given that, what possible upside could come from selecting Kaepernick instead of just signing Matt Barkley and moving on with your life?

The main issue with an athletic quarterback is how good his arm is. Your QB may be able to do somersaults into the end zone but he's no good if he can't beat you with his arm if he needs to; otherwise, every play is a running play and he's just another running back. Guys like Michael Vick and Russel Wilson were and are athletic as hell, but they can also pass. Kaepernick's problem wasn't so much that he was incapable of passing, but that he didn't have the patience for it. On every pass play he would do his reads real quick and if nothing was there he'd leave the pocket and start running. And to make matters worse, he wasn't scrambling with an eye to pass—when most good athletic QBs leave the pocket, they're still looking downfield hoping something will open up. Kaepernick tucked and started looking for daylight. If he did look up again, he was completely lost and forced to check down or take a sack. As a Steeler fan (and Pitt fan), that's what's so encouraging about Kenny Pickett; he's mobile but he's always looking to pass until the play is completely blown, and even then he's not afraid to throw the ball away if there's no good running lane.

I think it really depends on the money he wanted, if you could get him cheap enough to hold down the position through a year or two rebuild, there probably would have been demand for him, but he wasn't going to be getting a franchise QB type of contract based on his age and the style of play he had.

Yeah. I mean worse players have managed to ride the pine for a couple seasons, but a combination of him being super-specialized and outspoken meant that he probably lost out on that kind of role.

Nah, it wouldn't have. The Colts under Pagano ran a West Coast Offense that revolved around Andrew Luck, who was more of a traditional pocket passer. See what I wrote above, but Brissett is basically the opposite of Kaepernick. He likes to stay in the pocket as long as possible and gun downfield, rarely checking down. He has enough athleticism to get out of a jam, but that's not his specialty. For the Colts to have gone with Kaeprnick it would have required them to retool their entire playbook (and, by extension, their entire offense) for one year only while Luck recuperated. If Kap had lit the league on fire in 2016 then it might have been worth it, but if that were the case then Chip Kelly probably wouldn't have been fired and the 49ers would have exercised their option. The main reason Kap was let go was because Kyle Shanahan wanted to retool the entire offense to a style more similar to the Colts, and Brian Hoyer and Handsome Jimmy were more suited to that style.

Will FIRE will eventually follow the ACLU in drifting so far left it can no longer serve it's mission?

Even if all people die eventually, that doesn't mean their lives are no good while they last. Assuming something will last forever is probably a losing bet in most any case, so I suppose it's best to be ready for change and work with what you have in the meantime.

The concern is less that something dies and more that it reanimates as a zombie hungry for brains.

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