Arguing with the Ref

On giving those bastards the satisfaction

1.

Lots of different events have referees or umpires or judges. Even Model UN committees have Chairs in charge of keeping order and handing out awards.

When I was a freshman, at my first conference, I really respected my Chairs. I was shy and a bit scared of them, so would defer quickly to their judgment and follow all the procedures and so on. I won Best Delegate.

Over time, I came out of my shell and became more confident and, truthfully, got a lot smarter. Became right more of the time, and much more readily angry when others couldn’t see that I was right. So I started arguing with the Chairs. Only took a few points of order, and they would get fed up. I won fewer and fewer awards.¹

I realized something this year, though. I’d applied and been admitted to some colleges already, so the pressure to win had eased. And I realized what it meant to argue with the Chair: it recognized their authority. Confirmed it, validated it. I wouldn’t be saying “you’re wrong” unless I cared what they thought.

But I was into college! I didn’t have to care what they thought, not really, and so I let myself just be quietly and privately annoyed. Made a point of order or two, but for my own benefit. When they dismissed me, I just let it slide. (Of course, the next day they admitted I was right and apologized…)

I didn’t win any awards! But I also didn’t kowtow² to the powers that be, nor affirm their dominion with my complaints. Conscientious Disregard won the day.

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2.

I went to this soccer game recently. Guys I Know, playing for fun. I wrote that the whole spectacle sorta put me off. One reason for that was the referee.

He seemed like a very chill dude. Fine, whatever, I got no problem with that.

Then again, I myself was a ref for a little while. Granted, in a very different environment, but I know basically what the job entails. Actually, pretty much anyone who’s ever seen any sporting event would be able to spot what this guy did wrong.

He was standing to the side of the field, leaning against the wall, legs crossed, with the whistle in his mouth. Making calls from across the field without moving so much as a finger.

Basically, this guy wasn’t worthy of respect or authority or anything like it. Laziness serves as a desert base for scorn and contempt and so on.

But when he made a bad call, these Guys I Know would argue with him. They’d affirm his authority!

You know who deserves to have their authority affirmed? A competent figure.

When the Guys would argue with him, it was like saying they considered him competent. What an uncomfortably incorrect attitude to be around.

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3.

Yesterday was the Michigan Ethics Bowl. Today too, but not for our team. See the results for yourself here. I led WIHI: We Mill Locke You.³

The Michigan Ethics Bowl is run by an incredibly nice and incredibly smart University of Michigan philosopher named Jeanine DeLay. She thinks very highly of WIHI’s team.

It’s interesting—philosophy professors tend to think highly of WIHI’s team. So you might expect us to do fairly well!

In fact, not.

The Michigan Ethics Bowl’s judges are volunteers. So while some are supremely well-qualified—like the Assistant Director of Michigan’s Politics, Philosophy, & Economics program, or the few philosophy professors from Oakland University and Delta College—others are much less so. Like the MBA students and former high school teachers and lawyers who couldn’t find a better way to spend their weekend.

Unfortunately, the latter category makes up most of the judging staff.

After we presented a nice little utilitarian animal lib perspective, one of them visibly bristled. She asked us, “what if a woman was pregnant? And her baby needed to eat meat, cause of the amino acids and nutrients? Do you still care about the animals, you racists??”

Earlier in the day, we argued a case study titled “The Lesser of Two Evils.” About whether one should vote for a well-fitting third-party, or for their preferred major-party candidate. The answer’s right there in the title, isn’t it? What else are we doing here, with the whole ethics thing, if it’s not trying to lessen evil?

I used my fancy big-boy word, “modal,” and felt very comfortable making the case that “better worlds are better because they are better and so we should prefer them since they’re better.”

Then the judge asked if we’d considered that it might feel a little awkward to cast a vote for a lesser-of-two-evils candidate. Christ.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of the horrors of this event, really. But I’ll save the “most people are bad at ethics” rant for another post. This is about Arguing with the Ref.

Really, there’s no way to argue with an Ethics Bowl judge. Their scoresheets are submitted and sent off to the webmaster before you know if you’ve won. And they’re only released to teams a week or so after the Bowl.

By then, if the past is any guide, I’ll have mostly forgotten the injustices perpetrated against us. Be willing to accept their vague and idiotic complaints that “Team A’s presentation lacked consideration of opposing viewpoints” and let it all sit in peace.

Arguing with the Refs just isn’t an option. There are no recordings of each round, no auditors sitting in. Whatever shit they give you, you swallow it.

But! You don’t have to smile when you do it.

I mean, in a literal sense, you kinda do. You sit there and hear them declare the other side the winner and you clap and smile politely. Then you shuffle out and, if you’re me, start swearing as soon as you’re out of earshot. Fucking morons, all of them. Other team, judges, you name it. Fucking morons. (No, you’re the sore loser!)

The truth is, though, that some of them are fucking morons. And thank god there’s no opportunity to try and argue with them. Because if there was, we would. And if we did, we’d be admitting that they weren’t really truly fundamentally fucking morons. We’d be admitting that a world exists where that very same judge thought we were the better team. And what sort of a world would that be?

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4.

I hope all of the above hasn’t come off as deeply insecure and erratic, but I fear it has, since that’s what it is. Why can’t I admit someone has more power than me? More authority?

It’s just garden-variety teenage rebellion and insecurity and bluster tied up in an overwrought and pretentious way.

But fuck it, I’m a pretentious and insecure teenager, and I have a right.

So I don’t Argue with the Ref. Who does he think he is? He thinks he’s better than me?

Well, I fart in his general direction.

Cover Photo by RichardMcCoy via Wikimedia Commons

1. There are other reasons I stopped winning awards. Most notably, at the UChicago conference in junior year, they had some dumbass rule about not deleting other people’s work off a shared Google Doc. My partner and I, representing Samoa, had cobbled together and were de facto leading a massive bloc of countries. As Samoa! Really, we were good at this stuff.

Anyway, we all get down to writing our paper. A dozen or so countries, all on the same doc, and we only had so many ideas. By the end of it, the same thing was written in four or five different places. It offended me, so I took it upon myself to remove the redundancy.

But of course! I get pulled out and screamed at by the Undersecretary General of Whatever Fucking Bullshit for deleting work without permission. No awards won there. And it disillusioned me, or something. I’ve had a much harder time peacefully coworking in every Model UN committee since. Anytime anyone disagrees with me, I see USG Lucas the Dickhole’s puffy red face and dumb clipboard, and get a little too aggressive shutting them down. So it goes.

2. “Glaze,” as everyone I hate would say.

3. Which did not win the naming competition! That honor went to Hamtramck: Cosmic Consciousness (retches). Each team also submitted a song alongside their name. The winner? University Liggett’s random Rihanna song. Our entry? I Go to Extremes (Billy Joel) paired with the WIHI: Yogurt Parfits. A more heinous crime could not have been committed against us.