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(02/05/10 10:00am)
Slightly less than a week from now we’ll all wake up and congratulate ourselves for electing a new Young Trustee.
The majority of the more than 6,000 undergrads here, as per usual, will self-referentially smile upon their democratic fairness and think themselves exceedingly smart. The powers that be have already tooted their own horns for organizing the first student-wide YT election. For these supposed geniuses, it’s as though they’ve done what no other gubernatorial body has done before: organize a campus-wide election to “democratically” cast a student into the ranks of Duke’s hallowed conference rooms.
No one is inclined to disagree with the universal suffrage approach either. The new YT electoral system is pretty much invincible to criticism in the same way no one can knock Tim Tebow for loving Jesus. To attack the idea of student choice is to suggest not everyone should have a voice, which in 2010 is clearly a politically indefensible position.
It’s fairly obvious, however, that not everyone should have a voice. Profoundly misguided people once allowed to have a voice are responsible for, among other things, slavery, genocide, economic depression and the inclusion of Allen Iverson and Tracy McGrady in the 2010 NBA All-Star Game. The merits of widely inclusive decision-making processes are extremely dubious.
Democratic processes at Duke, ranging from plebiscites to Duke Student Government elections, are an exceptional case study in stupidity. Pretty much all of these votes are done via Internet and are entirely optional. With more than 6,000 undergraduates, it’s highly likely you know nothing about the majority of candidates on a given ticket and are similarly unlikely to find out anything of note about the ones you’re unfamiliar with. Better yet, the voting process is easily manipulable. Swinging a few hundred votes is within the realm of possibility just by bombarding list serves with pandering emails. There is virtually nothing anyone can do to distinguish themselves short of maniacally papering bulletin boards and acting like Ryan Seacrest. Pluralities rule voting day, accompanied not long after by a general animus toward student leaders.
The YT position, to its credit, is infinitely more important than any DSG seat, and consequently should be decided by an infinitely better voting process. Seeing as it is the most powerful and respected position a student here can hold, logic would dictate that undergrads here would care enough to find out who was running and think long and hard before voting. With this rationale in mind, I went to Tuesday’s Town Hall forum and Wednesday’s Great Hall debate to get a better feel for the candidates.
Apparently, more than 99.5 percent of voters were busy one or both of these days. Tuesday brought out about 15 students to Social Sciences 136, half of whom seemed to work for The Chronicle and the other half for the purpose of heckling the candidates via Twitter. Wednesday saw a slightly better turnout, albeit one less invested in the views of the candidates (“Is everybody awake out there?” was heard more than once by the candidates). Potential attendees were invited to submit questions via e-mail before the event: I found out later from moderator Lauren Moxley I was one of two people to send questions her way.
In one of those unintentionally funny moments that happens when people who don’t really care about something are accosted by people who do really care about something, I had the undivided attention of all three candidates after Moxley announced my softball submission (“How have your individual leadership positions on campus prepared you for the position of Young Trustee?”). It was tantamount to trying to get Jon Stewart to take politics seriously. This quality may have been the weirdest wrinkle to the whole debate set-up: three of the most accomplished students at Duke urgently appealing to people who a) were more focused on recording what they were saying for journalistic purposes than thinking about the meaning of their words, or b) treating the whole enterprise as comedic entertainment. Alanis Morisette’s “Ironic” could be distantly heard over a heated debate about interfacing and fiscal minorities (yes, both of these terms were thrown around multiple times two nights ago).
So, the evidence appears to be clear: Pretty much no one has any vested interested in who is elected YT, which means that ironically, the committee that spent hours and hours picking the final three will leave the ultimate decision up to people who constantly check Facebook and Duke WebMail. Two of the three will feel horribly accountable for losing and the winner unabashedly proud for winning when in reality the correlations between how well they ran their campaigns and the final vote tallies will be small.
The kicker is that no one will read this column because no one reads The Chronicle and YT will continue to be chosen by about 6,000 undergraduates, roughly 5,937 of whom have midterms next week and don’t want to be bothered by Chelsea Goldstein, John Harpham or Zach Perret.
Don’t forget to vote Tuesday!!!
Ben Brostoff is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Friday.
(01/29/10 10:00am)
ESPN.com’s Streak for the Cash competition, like a whole host of other things in life, visibly encourages reckless and reactionary decision-making. The goal of SFC is to string together more consecutive correct predictions about the future than anyone else over a set time period. Outstreak the world and receive monetary empowerment: a cool hundred thou.
(01/22/10 10:00am)
Ayla Brown is the type of person you feel inclined to hate simply because she is better than you at pretty much everything.
(01/15/10 10:00am)
Given the choice, would you rather have your life consist of an abundance of hyper-important, fate-riddled moments or long periods of anticlimactic but ultimately reality-bound existence? This choice is better known in some circles as The NFL Blitz Conundrum.
Midway’s late ’90s video game franchise offers players two sets of rules that govern NFL game play: arcade and tournament mode. These contrasting modes roughly parallel the choices presented by the afore-stated existential quandary.
Choose arcade, the game’s default option, and the CPU does its best impression of Tim Donaghy in the 2002 Lakers-Kings series by giving the inferior team every feasible advantage needed to tie or win the game. If the ’97 Patriots are down 27-10 to the Cowboys, Drew Bledsoe suddenly becomes a cross between Drew Brees and Chris Johnson and Troy Aikman morphs into JaMarcus Russell.
Enable tournament-mode, however, and it’s as though you’ve meshed rudimentary graphics with Reagan-era politics: the government (or, in our case, the CPU) is a complete non-factor in the competiveness of the game. Blitz’s default setting inevitably makes every game come down to the final 15 seconds. The alternative mode, strangely enabled by a cheat code, more or less results in the best player winning (albeit without the melodrama of physics-defying turnovers and inexplicably blocked field goals). Playing Blitz isn’t exactly two roads diverged in a yellow wood, but it’s as close as you can get at 64-bit speed.
Any avid Blitz player would tell you that most games are played under the game’s default gameplay setting. This trend can in part be blamed on a lack of appealing alternatives. Turn on tournament mode and you might as well be watching a weekend of football in which 75 percent of the games are duds: under this setting, the game bears a depressing resemblance to reality. On the contrary, Blitz in its purest form escapes every rational person’s conventions about reality: in the Blitz universe, equilibrium is not some tendency toward entropy and the balancing of energy and matter, but rather a sort of profound epicness that has no regard for pass interference. Blitz, as it was meant to be played, is never mundane.
Furthering the allure of arcade-style Blitz is that it’s self-esteem friendly. Essentially, a typical 30-minute session of NFL Blitz consists of two people with more or less equal skill passing back and forth the influence of some unruly and illogical god by mashing buttons on a controller, thereby creating the façade of a strategy-based game. Winning can be conveniently attributed to skill and losing to a fluky turn of events. Again, this experience is strictly preferable to a no-nonsense best-man-wins contest, wherein the loser would assume full accountability for his loss.
Did the inventor of Blitz construct the game with these ideas in mind? I e-mailed NBA Jam and NFL Blitz creator Mark Turmell for his thoughts on arcade and tournament mode. He noted that experienced users enjoyed testing the limits of the CPU god that can transform the passing accuracy of ’99 Kordell Stewart into that of ’09 Peyton Manning. Turmell remembered: “A mini goal became trying to come back from a large deficit, get within one possession and score on the final drive to win. Others would simply try to see how large a margin that [they] could win by, even with the behind the scenes ‘catch up code.’” Even Blitz masters feel some meaningful affinity towards arcade mode (unless, Turmell acknowledged, money or bragging rights are on the line).
The inception of arcade mode derived—rather appropriately—from Turmell’s knowledge of arcade psychology. The master of the Blitz universe wrote, “The reason all of this came about is because in the arcade, where you’re asking for money to continue into the next period, it becomes less enticing to add in more money when you are losing by more than a touchdown. So we endeavored to keep the games close to maximize buy-ins.” Turmell knew where most people stood on The NFL Blitz Conundrum and accordingly devised a wildly successful financial model.
So, in a virtual reality, it seems the answer to the NFL Blitz Conundrum is that people prefer non-stop excitement to self-aware realism. In reality, this is obviously not the case, as there’s something to be said for knowing where one stands. Most people deal with the fact that they’re not and never will be the best at anything, however uncomfortable this admission may be. The rest lead lives of self-delusion or go into finance (not coincidentally, a psychological study several years ago found a group of traders at an investment bank believed they were controlling the random movements of a line by pressing buttons. It is highly possibly NFL Blitz was the impetus for this study). In this respect, Blitz at best is only a rough psychological profile of humankind.
Ben Brostoff is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Friday.
(12/07/09 10:00am)
A recent political debate program helps illustrate the critical balance between fact and opinion.
(11/24/09 10:00am)
One of the better perks of a Thanksgiving Break in Massachusetts is visiting Plimoth Plantation. For a mere $28, one can visit stunningly accurate recreations of the Mayflower, an English village as constituted in 1627 and a host of other historically important sites.
(11/10/09 10:00am)
To Future Young Trustee Nominating Committee Member X:
(10/27/09 8:00am)
Imagine an alternative reality where Kyrie Irving is white.
(10/13/09 11:05am)
Christopher Columbus was not an American, but he might as well have been.
(09/22/09 8:00am)
It’s always been difficult for me to discern the mentality of a typical Duke basketball fan, likely because I hail from Boston. The striking thing about Cameron Crazies, for me at least, is that they rarely publicly express discontent with their team.
(09/08/09 8:00am)
There’s a certain scene in “Space Jam” in which Michael Jordan and his Looney Tunes teammates find themselves in the precarious position of needing to score a basket in a very limited time frame or face enslavement on an alien planet for the rest of eternity.
(08/25/09 7:00am)
You're going to get swine flu.
(07/01/09 7:00am)
The distinguishing feature of summer for any student is freedom. There's no better time for creative enterprise than when restrictions and opportunity costs are low: if college qualifies as a full-time job, then summer is a full-time experiment. May through August is prime time for the outrageous and unpredictable, which, depending on your standpoint, is pretty exciting. You can literally do whatever you want, whenever you want.
(06/11/09 7:00am)
I don't really remember much from my debut at Shooters. Like most who have ever visited Durham's most notorious nightclub, my memory is, at best, selective, when it comes to sifting through the details of my time there. I do retain a distinct vision of an old man wearing a large hat with a bunch of shiny, metallic fishing hooks walking over to where I stood chatting up a female acquaintance. He must have noticed I was thoroughly enjoying myself, as he commented, "Ain't this the good life, kid?" before stumbling back toward the bar.
(05/28/09 7:00am)
Lifeguarding is a journey into fiction. In my several years guarding the lives of dozens of entitled patrons, the books on my shelf have increased exponentially while my save count has flatlined at zero. It is a job that invigorates the mind, if not the body. Sitting in a chair all day with no companion except a damp paperback, you start to question the impassioned cry of your high school English teacher that art reflects life.
(05/14/09 7:00am)
There is a tendency among Duke students to not believe the tale of the poor twenty-something-year-old who lives off soup cans and beer until he gets a lucky break at the office. To think that a career could be solely determined by catching a few breaks after going to a school like Duke!
(04/14/09 7:00am)
I don't sum up. Summing up is something you do at the end of summer camp, when the counselors make you play "One Rose and One Thorn" or whatever catchy nickname has been assigned to oversimplifying experience nowadays. Summing up is for overly emotional high school girls at the end of prom night. Summing up is poorly retelling something that has already happened in a manner that doesn't begin to capture the complexity of what actually happened (See: Tyler Hansbrough post-game interview).
(03/17/09 7:00am)
Spring break generally seems to go one of two ways.
(02/24/09 9:00am)
Youth basketball is full of injustice. For all the terrible officiating that goes on in ACC play, the incompetence of the referees in the college game pales in comparison to that of volunteer refs in middle school gyms. This sad reality became evident to me in fourth grade, when my prepubescent opponent was not whistled for holding my jersey, elbowing me in the face and kicking me in a sensitive area. At the end of the game, I angrily approached my oppressor in hopes of setting the record straight. Before I could say anything, he simply stated, "Don't hate the player: hate the game," and sauntered off to his mom's minivan.
(02/10/09 9:00am)
There are few things more annoying than picking up a newspaper and seeing things you were already aware of disguised as breaking news. Consider this past week's headlines, courtesy of The New York Times: "Consumers are saving more and spending less," "Partisanship is a worthy foe in debate on stimulus," "Retest of Bonds's urine sample from 2003 yields positive result." Each day generally is filled with reiterations of knowledge that are in no way new to us.
