On bad calls, working the refs, and politics etc.

Following up on Scott’s hockey post:

Fan complaints about lousy/crooked refs can be sorted into an ascending chain of legitimacy:

Complaints about bad calls that weren’t actually bad calls.

Complaints about bad calls that were actually bad calls, but that involve egregious cherry picking of examples, thus ignoring that the bad calls went both ways in some roughly equivalent proportion.

Complaints about bad calls that were actually bad calls, in cases where the bad calls were in fact very one-sided.

Complaints about bad calls that were actually bad calls, in cases were the bad calls were in fact very one-sided, and in contexts where it’s plausible that the imbalance was a product of nefarious factors rather than mere chance.

Nefarious factors include, in ascending order of nefariousness: successful intimidation of the refs ( aka working the refs), unconscious ref bias, conscious ref bias, and outright corruption (buying the refs).

This template can be applied readily to politics.

For example, where does James Comey’s letter fit in all this?  I’d consider it an example of unconscious ref bias, because he’s probably a sufficiently sanctimonious jackass not to be able to recognize his own bullshit. So that puts it pretty high up on the hierarchy of legit fan complaints.  The media coverage the letter got is a nice example of the successful working of the refs on the part of the right wing scream machine over the past 40+ years.  And by the time the smoke clears it may turn out that the Russians bought themselves a ref or three.