Author: VD

Mailvox: statistics are racist

An English reader reviews the penalties of past tournaments. It would be interesting to review the data of the French, Germand, and Dutch teams to see if a similar dichotomy is revealed or if it is a statistical outlier peculiar to the English team. 

Your posts about the Euro final and black players not being composed under pressure got me thinking about historical penalty results for England.  I went back to the 1996 Euro and compiled the data for their eight shootouts since that tournament.  

  • 1996 Euro vs Spain (W)- whites 4/4, blacks N/A
  • 1996 Euro vs Germany (L)- whites 5/6, blacks N/A
  • 1998 WC vs Argentina (L)- whites 3/4, blacks 0/1
  • 2004 Euro vs Portugal (L)- whites 4/5, blacks 1/2
  • 2006 WC vs Portugal (L)- whites 1/4, blacks N/A
  • 2012 Euro vs Italy (L)- whites 2/2, blacks 0/2
  • 2018 WC vs Colombia (W)- whites 3/4, blacks 1/1
  • 2021 Euro vs Italy (L)- whites 2/2, blacks 0/3

Total: whites 24/31 (77{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6}) vs blacks 2/9 (22{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6}).  

In other words, blacks playing for England would have to make 22 straight penalties to have the same conversion percentage as English whites.  That’s one of the craziest sports stats I’ve ever seen.  Also, one could make the case that black underperformance directly cost England victories in at least two, and potentially four, big games. Diversity is a strength?

A substantial point against this observation is the famous penalty shootout that settled the 2012 Zambia vs Ivory Coast Africa Cup of Nations final, in which the first 14 shooters all hit their penalties. My conclusion is that the sample size is too small to be significant. We don’t have sufficient data to have an opinion. However, it is possible that the English managers are so eager to be not-racist that they are selecting inferior penalty-takers on the basis of their race.

I blame the racism

If only the blacks in South Africa weren’t oppressed by racist white people, they wouldn’t be rioting and looting. Wait a minute….

Okay, let’s try this again. If only racist white people hadn’t made fun of black players who can’t make their penalty shots, blacks in South Africa wouldn’t be rioting and looting. That’s better.
South Africa is in the grip of its worst unrest since the end of apartheid with shopkeepers firing at looters and a woman throwing her baby from a burning mall roof as violence sparked by the jailing of ex-president Jacob Zuma entered its fifth day today. 
At least 45 people have now died – including 10 tramped to death during a stampede at a looted shopping mall – in riots centered around KwaZulu-Natal and Guateng provinces that began last week and raged through the weekend after 79-year-old Zuma was jailed for failing to cooperate with a corruption probe.
The army has been called in to help stem the unrest amid fears the violence could dramatically escalate after fearful citizens were forced to take the law into their own hands amid warnings that food supplies could soon run short if the looting doesn’t stop.

This is coming soon to cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington DC. It’s going to be fascinating to see what happens when a significant percentage of the American population figures out that the causal problem is not an excess supply of racism, but rather, an insufficiency.

Everyone who opposed the evils of apartheid must accept that this is the world they created. They were warned it would happen, but they refused to heed the warnings. And now everyone who is anti-racist, equalitarian, or “doesn’t see color” must be reminded: this is the future you have chosen.

It’s about time

 It never made sense to me that the NFL didn’t go back and compile sack statistics prior to the 1982 season. But now that they’ve been comprehensively compiled unofficially, it’s only a matter of time before the official statistics are updated. And given the way that the season has expanded from 14 to 16 to 17 games – I’m still a proponent of the 14-game season – it makes no sense to exclude them any longer.

The NFL has only officially counted player sacks since 1982, which means sack records and leaderboards present an incomplete history of pass rushing. In many cases we accept these holes in the official record and move on. After all, we don’t know how many rushing yards Jim Thorpe had, passing yards Paddy Driscoll had or even how many blocked shots Wilt Chamberlain had. Heck, we don’t even “officially” know how many tackles anyone had in 2020 (or any other season). However, thanks to Official Gamebooks, ‘unofficial’ tackle totals get published in many places (including here). In the case of sacks, thanks to decades of research by John Turney and Nick Webster, we have a very thorough accounting of the statistic all the way back to 1960. Given that accounting for these ‘unofficial’ statistics allows us to paint a richer picture of the history of the game, we think it is a no-brainer to present them on Pro Football Reference, allowing fans to gain a deeper appreciation of some of football’s biggest stars in the 1960s and 1970s. This isn’t terribly different from presenting RBI totals for baseball players from before 1920 (the first season the statistic was “official”). These additions allow us to print year-by-year and career sacks totals for not just legends such as Deacon Jones (173.5), Jack Youngblood (151.5), Alan Page (148.5), Carl Eller (133.5) and Joe Greene (77.5), but also for less recognized stars like Coy Bacon (130.5), Cedrick Hardman (122.5) and Jack Gregory (106.0) whose greatness and impact can now be more readily quantified.

The historic greatness of the Purple People Eaters becomes abundantly clear when one looks at the list of top 25 sackers. Three of the top 22 – Page, Eller, and Marshall – lined up together from 1967 to 1977.

Police it or lose it

Country music has been converged:

MEAWW reported that one-half of the Grammy-winning country duo “Big & Rich” recently dished on the disconnect between the country music industry and its fans.

Rich says that while most country music fans are conservatives, those who actually run the industry are mostly liberal. He says its this conflict that leaves conservative leaning country artists in a difficult situation.

“The industry of country [music] is, I would say, I can’t give you a percentage but let’s just say the majority is very liberal,” Rich said. “They’ve been that way for a long time. It’s interesting that the industry that puts out country music doesn’t really align with a lot of the audience.”

“A lot of folks that listen to country [music], and again I can’t give you a percentage but I can tell you a majority of the audience probably leans conservative,” he continued. “So you’ve got this gulf, kind of, between the two.” 

Rich went on to say that he has seen things change in the industry to swing even further left over the past few months.

“Over the years, the industry has never really come out really strongly about their liberal edge that they’ve got until recently, maybe in the past six to 12 months,” he said. “They’ve started coming out more and more and the problem you get is if you’ve got artists that are conservative but their record label, their publicist, their manager, a lot of the radio stations are being overseen by liberals.” 

Conservatives and everyone else to their right have to learn to stop taking the money bait and stop working with those who hate them, particularly when those who hate them are in the stronger, more defensible position. Nothing good is going to come of any such collaborations in the long run even if you are strong enough to refuse to sacrifice your principles.

I was told that I’d never be signed by Tor Books, but that was irrelevant because I never made any attempt to be signed by Tor Books. And when Thomas Nelson, a supposedly Christian, right-wing publisher tried to convince me to change what I was writing, I refused, and declined every subsequent approach from their editors.

It’s hard for young artists with stars in their eyes to understand that compromising at the start, even if it is a reasonable compromise, is going to lead to being controlled, if not owned outright. But you can’t sell just a piece of your soul.

Thou shalt not notice

An English comedian is cancelled for telling jokes about Africans missing penalties:

A string of venues have cancelled shows with comedian Andrew Lawrence after he made racist ‘jokes’ on Twitter about England’s football stars.

The comedian faced widespread condemnation after making the comments in the aftermath of England’s heartbreaking penalty shoot-out defeat to Italy last night.

In one comment the 41-year-old, who has previously featured on the BBC, said he was ‘sorry that black guys are bad at penalties’.

And in reference to the anti-poverty campaigning of Marcus Rashford – one of those to miss a penalty last night – he said he’d: ‘Rather he’d (Rashford) practised his penalties and the kids had gone hungry.’ 

Today, following a backlash on Twitter, venues have begun pulling planned shows with the comedian.

Meanwhile, Lawrence’s agents also revealed they had cut ties with the comedian. 

How dare he! After all, no one has ever criticized anyone who missed a penalty before, right? 

How long will it be before not applauding is sufficient cause for cancellation? Or even being the first to stop applauding…. 

What happens when you stop paying

Karl Denninger asks the obvious question about the proposed annual Covid vaccine licenses:

There are times that paying what amounts to a rental fee is a net positive.  If you fly into some city and need a car, it would be stupid to buy one.  You only need it for a week.  Odds are you may never need it there again.  In addition there is no cost to you beyond the immediate loss of use when you terminate the agreement.

Now look at Quicken.

Your data is in their format.  Stop paying, what happens?

Adobe?

Your data is in their format.  Stop paying, what happens?

See the problem?

Same problem exists when you build for a “cloud” platform.  It’s their data format and their application APIs, which are theirs.

Stop paying, what happens?

Ok, now think about this. Pfizer is already saying they think you need a booster Covid shot. Moderna has in the pipe a whole plethora of….. annual mRNA shots.

What happens if you stop paying?

Nobody knows in this case.

That would arguably be a better outcome than either the killshot theory or the sterilization theory. Of course, just because it wouldn’t make sense for Big Pharma to terminate its subscribers doesn’t mean that they might not inadvertently do so, so it’s clearly not an either/or set of hypotheses. 

Schizophrenia at Google

Google’s position on a free and open Internet is not so much incoherent as schizophrenic.

A free and open internet is under attack, according to Sundar Pichai, the head of Google. In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, the Google CEO said an open internet –information online being equally free and available to everybody – has been a ‘tremendous force for good’ that is ‘taken for granted’. 

While Mr Pichai did not directly refer to China, he did make the point: ‘None of our major products and services are available in China.’ 

He also called artificial intelligence (AI) more profound than fire or electricity, and said privacy is ‘foundational to everything we do’.  

Pichai’s firm posted whopping revenues of $55.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, but he argued against suggestions it’s a ‘surveillance capitalist’. 

Someone should let ol’ Pikachu know that one of evil those organizations attacking a free and open Internet is Google’s YouTube subsidiary, which is actively defaming, deplatforming, and demonetizing creators for making information online equally free and available to everybody:

YouTube is selectively enforcing its policies regarding ‘disinformation’ in what appears to be an attempt to silence content creators who oppose the platform’s penchant for censorship, political commentator Matt Orfalea told RT.

Orfalea is speaking from experience: Last week he received a ‘strike’ and had his channel demonetized for allegedly violating the company’s policy prohibiting “violent criminal organizations.” The flagged video was a seven-year-old satirical fake Starbucks ad, which referred to the coffee chain’s “insanely overpriced beverages for psychopaths.” YouTube later admitted it had acted “in error” and dropped the strike. 

Speaking to RT on Sunday, the YouTuber said he felt that he had been intentionally targeted by the company because of an earlier video he made in which he criticized the platform’s attempts to censor discussions about ivermectin, a drug that some medical experts believe could be effective against Covid-19. Orfalea pointed out that it was puzzling why a video from nearly 10 years ago would suddenly pop up on YouTube’s radar. 

“Why did they flag that? A video from seven years ago? Well, that tells me that because I had the recent unfortunate experience of YouTube banning me for a video covering YouTube censorship – that told the AI or whatever to keep digging and find more stuff,” he said.