Two Things I Think I Know: The NBA Season preview

We're Playing Basketball!

With the NBA season quickly approaching, a quick look around the sport reveals an interesting phenomenon.

It is not difficult to argue that the 2 best teams are already set in stone. Golden State was a juggernaut of absolute destruction, losing 1 game all playoffs long behind some truly gorgeous representation of offensive basketball genius the type of which we couldn’t have imagined seeing. 

If you love ball movement, slick offensive sets, and elite shooting, the Warriors are your baby. In fact, it would not be ridiculous to say we should just send the Warriors as our reps for the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020 and have that be that, as it were.

But all is not good in the kingdom. The Cavs have rebuilt their armaments for what everyone believes to be their last strike at the throne by trading for Isaiah Thomas, as LeBron James is widely expected to be leaving after this upcoming season. Boston has Kyrie Irving, Gordon Hayward, and still a good part of last season’s #1 seed coming back.

Out west, the Thunder and the Rockets have restocked as well. Oklahoma City added Paul George and Carmelo Anthony to the human personification of dark matter that is Russell Westbrook, and Chris Paul and James Harden joined together in Houston to provide us with either the sort of offense Mike D’Antoni wishes he could have had in Phoenix, or a massive blow-up of chemistry.

For this season, there will be questions. Here, on this blog, I do my best to answer some of them.

The Rationalist: How To Be An Old-School Rugged Gentleman, And Why You Should Want To Be.

All of these are the virtues of being a good man.
How many do you follow? 

If you ever had a desire to start a wild brawl of ideas on the internet, there could be few better places to start than to question the accepted orthodoxy of toxic masculinity. But while some might shy away from a deep questioning of it, for fear of ending up in that brawl of ideas I mentioned earlier, I am nothing if not the sort who doesn’t give a god damn about offending people. I don’t fetishize the idea of safe spaces, or not saying something because someone may take offense to it. Obviously, I try very hard to not be a dick. But I do so based on a set of standards I’ve set for myself.

My standards: You say something, you should be able to back it up with facts and research. No one who makes a statement and then tells me to do the work of checking their hypothesis will ever be taken seriously.

Do not use absolutes.  Never, for any reason, imply that an entire class of people possess one similar personality, or psychological, trait just because it makes your argument easier to make. It’s childish.

There, that’s the whole list.

Back to our story. Toxic masculinity is defined as the mores that make up the bad, and worst, parts of socialized masculinity. 

Things like an excessively high lack of emotional expression, a defaulting towards violence as a need to solve problems, and sexual dominance are all things that have, at various times, been explained to be examples of toxic masculinity.

But, and this is a fear I find increasingly founded, what is a better way? Can there be one out there?  

In this edition of the Rationalist, I move to answer that question, and explain how an archetype of cool from the era of World War II can give us all the answers we need.

The Rationalist: A Primer On How To Think, Pt. 2

In the last edition of the Rationalist, I explained what I thought were good principles upon which you should base your entire intellectual life. To be clear, it’s not that I wish I could control you into thinking a certain way. I know I can’t, and to be quite honest, I don’t particularly want to.


But what I do want, what would make me happy, is if you took the advice I gave you seriously. In this world, nuance is in short supply. Being willing to admit you are wrong when the evidence points you in that direction is a skill both vital and in shamefully short supply.

More to the point, there can be no greater danger to the American civil religion than the sentence I am about to write. If Americans no longer believe there is anything that unites us, the endless striving towards right and good that we attempt as Americans are meaningless and pointless.

Now if you believed that before, and will consider anything I say as serving “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, there is nothing I can do to change your mind.
There is a chance, even, that you will be one of those people who look at this and proclaim it no longer necessary for America.

You might even not say America how I say it, instead preferring to say Amerikkka as though this is some original thought.

But that is not the point. The point is that I promised to tell you who you should avoid. In my last article, I showed you how by not following certain patterns of thought you could fall into being snowed by those feigning intelligence. This time, though, we’re going to be a little bit more blatant. This time, I’m naming names.

The Rationalist: A Primer On How To Think, Pt. 1

There are things about political discourse in 2017 that are right, perfect, and wonderful.

For instance, we now have more ability than ever before to know what our ideological allies and opponents are using as the underpinnings of their research. This is vital, as eliminating bad ideas and finding good ones is key to an increasingly educated citizenry capable of handling, and properly understanding, the detailed and complicated problems of both foreign and domestic scope that define the world in 2017, and for years to come. 

In fact, if you were so inclined, you could watch full-length debates between some of the world’s sharpest minds discussing truly complicated issues.

All of this, every bit of it, is wonderful.

The trouble with all that knowledge, all those educated thinkers being a literal fingertip away, is that no one tells you how to tell the truth from the fiction. In fact, there are men, and women, who will speak the language of the intelligent, of the well-read and well-educated, to fool you with ideas that are not researched to rigorous completion.

Finding them is easy. Pointing out the mistakes so you don’t fall into the same trap so many others, your humble scribe included, have already fallen into once or twice? Well, that’s the noble thing. Noble is valuable and vital.  So, it’s with that standard in mind that we begin this edition of the Rationalist.