Always Cursing the Referee

A few years back, Freddie de Boer called us the “Planet of Cops”:

“I mean everyone — liberal, conservative, radical and reactionary. Blogger, activist, pundit, and writer, obviously, but also teacher, tailor, and candlestick maker. Cops, all of them. Cops everywhere.”

Huh? A few examples will clarify:

“The self-appointed Twitter police… People who want to scour test scores to get teachers fired are cops… Conservatives have always been cops, obviously…”

And this is where we are currently:

“You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything.”

And then we have the inconsistencies in stances. What one side sees as all-too-human consistencies in their side is seen as hypocrisy by the other side:

“In real life we’re all guards and prisoners at the same time. We are all informants on each other. Contemporary political culture is an autoimmune disorder.”

de Boer wrote all of that back in 2017. Flash forward to present day and you see a new trend, writes Alan Jacobs:

“I have come to believe that this is what almost all of our culture is about now: working the refs (referees). Trying to get the refs, whoever the refs might be in any given instance, to make calls in our favor — to rule against our enemies and for us, and therefore justify us before the whole world.”

Twitter users try to get other Twitter users banned. Football players dive “hoping that they will get a penalty called or a yellow card assigned to the opponent”. The UPA complains to the EC about Modi’s use of the army to gain votes. The NDA asks for an investigation into Rahul Gandhi’s British citizenship. You get the idea.

As Jacobs writes:

“In each case, it’s an appeal to the refs. These people are not trying to persuade through reasoned argument or to attract public opinion to their side through the charm of their personality. They’re demanding that the designated arbitrators arbitrate in their favor.”

And with great power comes charges of corruption and bias against the ref. Why did Facebook ban these users but not those? Why is there fake news on WhatsApp? Why does the CBI only raid the opposition leaders?

And so we blame the ref. Whenever Kejriwal loses, EVM’s are hacked:

“If anything that I want to go my way doesn’t go my way, it’s because the referees didn’t make the right call. It’s never because I made any dumb mistakes, or indeed had any shortcomings of any kind. Things didn’t go my way because, whether through incompetence or bias, the refs suck. I would’ve won if it hadn’t been for the stupid refs.”

Ironically, as Michael Lewis said in his podcast, the complaints about the refs have only increased as the NBA (American basketball league) has given them “unprecedented levels of training, and unprecedented opportunities to review and correct bad calls”. EVM’s have eliminated booth capturing, but that hasn’t stopped the continuous sniping that they have been hacked.

All of which is why Jacobs ends up with something we should all chew on:

“If refs are doing their job better than ever and simultaneously catching more grief for their errors, that just might be a result of our expecting more of them than is reasonable…. In society at large, we do better when we try to solve problems ourselves rather than try to manipulate the refs into solving them all for us.”