Protecting Our Boys: Part 1 in a series.

There are few things that chill my bones, and send a lightning bolt of fear through me, as fast as the rapidly-growing fetishization of men’s incapability and brokenness to serve the agenda that women are, of course, far more suited to everything from political office, culture, and even changing the way sexual politics may occur.

Look around the cultural landscape. Tell me the last pro-male thing you saw. The last unabashedly pro-male book, film, or television series you saw that celebrated men for the good they do, and the good and decent men they are.

Contrast that with the common way in which men are portrayed on television, films, and in other forms of popular culture. Men have been told, time and again, that they need to be reformed, to be fixed to fit the new model of masculinity. Our greatest examples of fatherhood on television are Homer Simpson or Phil Dunphy, joking simpletons who rely on their long-suffering and intelligent wives to fix every mess they make. Advertising tells us that men can’t be trusted to handle the hard work, to do the things women do every day, and eventually it’s started to be believed.

So, on this edition of the Rationalist, we discuss it. We discuss, in clear painstaking detail, if men are actually broken. And if they are, what we can do to fix the problem.

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.

The Rationalist: Why I'm A Men's Rights Activist

In the last edition of the Rationalist, I explained to you in detail what my problems were with feminist orthodoxy in the modern age. My fear in doing that, however, is that I may very well have ended up giving you only half of my political ideology. Here is the other half: I am a men’s rights supporter.

I know. Shock and awe and those very well may be the kind emotions right now, are coming from your computer. There are few things worse that you could declare yourself to be on the internet. I don’t even really know why this is.

Maybe it’s the idea that Elliot Rodger, the psychotic mass murderer, has long been believed to be part of the movement. Maybe it’s RooshV, the noted “pickup artist” who is supposed to be part of the movement as well,  and his frankly backwards understanding of sexual consent. But whatever it is, saying you’re a men’s rights activist appears to be the end of any discussion.  

So on this edition of the Rationalist, we’ll look how I got here and saw if I can’t help dispel, one myth and one step at a time, how it is that I repudiated feminism and became a men’s right activist.

New Star Navigation: Why We Need More Stars In Boxing, And Why The Keith Thurman-Shawn Porter Fight Is So Vital

For the past decade or so, boxing has been in an interesting place. Everyone imagines that the sport is healthiest when there is a dominant heavyweight champion who everyone has to aspire to defeat, and yet the presence of that exact archetype in Wladimir Klitschko seemed to make things less compelling slightly instead of more. The truth is that, for the last decade or so, the real excitement of the sport has been in the lower weight classes. Hell, the proof of this can even be found in the two most recent boxing movies, Creed, and Southpaw. Were the protagonists, or the antagonists, in the heavyweight division? No.
In the world of boxing that is not defined by celluloid, things look equally impressive. We have good-to-great fighters, and the potential for exciting fights, all throughout just about every division. However, bubbling just below the surface is an ugly truth of things, and it is the time to address it. Every one of those fights you could think of, with one or two exceptions, aren’t between American stars.
Canelo-GGG, Gonzalez-Inoue, Lomachenko-Salido are just a few examples. I am sure I could come up with more if I tried.
In fact, as you look further, where exactly are the American stars? This article seeks to find them.

________________________________________



Before we go too much further, a quick word on the graybeards who you may have thought of as soon as you saw the title of this article.
Hanging over the head of the sport of boxing like a sword of Damocles is, of course, Floyd Mayweather Jr. While his defensive acumen appears to remain sharp the rest of it is an open question. Does he want to box anymore? Can you find an opponent who will A: bring the best out of Floyd as an offensive fighter, and B: be someone we want to see him fight?

The 1st part of that equation might never happen. It’s sad to say, but the Floyd Mayweather who blended sterling defense with crisp combination punching died somewhere after the Oscar De La Hoya fight. If you seek to find the reason why so many people who criticize his "fighting" do so, his unwillingness to let his hands go is it. Not because we want everyone to fight in a blood-and-guts style like Arturo Gatti, because as hard as this might be to believe, that would get boring just as quickly. What we want, though, is for people who have the potential to be great to show the full depth and breadth of all of their skills.

As for the 2nd, that's equally difficult to find. You see, Floyd Mayweather has served boxing with distinction and glory. But, because he's done that for so long, people are tired of him. They're tired of the cars and the act and everything that comes with putting down your hard-earned money to see him.

And as long as that's true, you can't count on him anymore.

And that leaves us with the other graybeard, Andre Ward. Simply put, Andre doesn't fight enough. He has fought four times in 4 years, and against the sort of gallingly bad competition that the "Demographic" would draw and quarter Gennady Golovkin for. (And yes, before you ask, I will get to the demographic in an upcoming article. Suffice it to say; I disagree with their opinions.)
So now with the graybeards out of the way, it is time to move on to the younger generation of those who might be considered stars,
Terrence Crawford, Keith Thurman, Shawn Porter, and Errol Spence Jr. . 2 out of that foursome in the person of Keith Thurman and Shawn Porter will be fighting each other this Saturday night, in Brooklyn, for one of the small flotilla of belts that can be found in the welterweight division.
(Author's Note: This article was written before Thurman-Porter took place.)

To a man, the 4 of them are all still waiting for the fight that takes them from a star amongst boxing fans to just a flat-out STAR. It might be that Thurman-Porter, even after the postponement, gives us the kind of all-action and high-skill fight we don't get to see too much of anymore. Or it might be another one of those fights that look exciting on paper but turns around to be terrifically stultifying and one-sided in practice. No one will know, least of all the two fighters, until they meet each other in the middle of the ring at the Barclays Center.

The reasons for this gulf between talent and acclaim are myriad. But the most simple, the most basic to understand, are these two.

1: They don't fight enough.

Gone, perhaps for good, are the days when fighters fought more than twice a year. It is, as a result, harder than it should be for a young fighter to endear himself to the hearts and minds of casual sports fans when you aren't fighting enough to show them what you can do, and who you are. It also means that it's far harder to build demand for the sort of super fight that used to make stars, even ones that ended as more of a coronation than anything else. (See Roy Jones vs James Toney for an example of what I mean.) ¹
Couple this with the idea that there are few fighters now willing to risk their undefeated records for a real challenge, and we end up with a situation where no one moves past potential and what-ifs.

But that, to my way of thinking, isn't the real problem. This is the real problem.

2: USA Boxing is broken and in the late stages of dry-rot.

It used to be that we developed stars at the Olympic Games.

This will not be a referendum on which was the better team, the 1976 unit of Montreal or the 1984 Los Angeles contingent. Both teams gave us all-time greats, Sugar Ray Leonard and Michael Spinks in 1976 and Pernell Whitaker and Evander Holyfield in 1984. The argument over which team was better will go on as long as there is a combination of beer and people to discuss it.

Rather, the point is that even without those two supernova teams, the Olympics is always where our best and brightest have been found. Names like Ali, Foreman, De La Hoya, Jones Jr., Mayweather just to name a few.

But now? Now we're being forced to hope and wish that our guys get into position to medal. Gone are the days of our top amateurs coming home with gold medals and polished reputations where people expected a lot from them.

So, with that in mind, I have a useful solution to solve this problem.

Hey, Top Rank, throw some money at USA Boxing. You too, Golden Boy, Main Events, and hell the PBC. You want to be in a position to sign the next superstars, the next Ray Leonard, and Roy Jones? Easy. Build the infrastructure that allows it to happen.

Hopefully, it works. And hopefully by 2020, we have what we need to be elite again.

Video Footnotes:

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One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WFNxRhldoQ^↩

The Rationalist: My worldview going forward.

No matter how long you've been on social media, whether Twitter or Kik, someone will invariably ask you what your social worldview is. It just happens. Even if you wish it didn't, even if explaining it seems harder and harder, it does. So it's better just to deal with it and figure out the best way to handle the inevitable question that would come.

It used to be that I would call myself a feminist, full-stop. And for a while that seemed to be an acceptable answer to the question. But, as years went by and we moved from the 2nd wave to the 3rd and that 3rd-wave became increasingly tied in with political action, that became a harder and harder thing to deal with. I began to wonder what the feminism I grew up with, the feminism that dealt with real problems and figured out ways to solve them, had turned into while I wasn't looking.

A Return To Originality

If you remember that I write at all, you probably recall that I wrote for The Starting Five and the Wrestling Blog. While I hope that to be still true, the truth is that I need to get back into the business of just writing. And this blog, right here, is where I'm going to do that.

But it won't just be about sports. The reason for that is simple: because my life isn't just about sports.

 I will post about my life, my goals for it, and my search for someone to spend the rest of my life with.

This blog is called Dangerous O, for a very simple pair of reasons.
\
Firstly, it is a tribute to Toshiaki Kawada, the man who in every way is a representative of the sort of person I wish to be. Stoic, not given over to excessive emotionality, and highly skilled.

Secondly, it's because in many ways, the opinions that I post here, while not dangerous in the dictionary definition of the term, might very well be unpopular.

For instance, I no longer believe modern 3rd-wave feminism is a net force for good. I believe some of their tenets exist to serve the idea of narrowing sexuality further and further. I will explore this in an upcoming article.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this is the beginning of a beautifully fruitful creative relationship.

My Home Away From My Other Homes....

Hi there. You might know me from my work on The Wrestling Blog or The Starting Five.

If that's true, and you liked in any shape, form, or fashion anything I ever wrote, there's probably one thing you've always wondered to yourself.

"Why doesn't he write more?"

This is where that will be from now on.

Please, continue to follow me on twitter.

But also, start reading me here.

I promise one thing, and one thing only: I will not waste your time.

What I'm Watching: Mitsuharu Misawa vs Kenta Kobashi

Misawa vs Kobashi: Just as fun as Misawa vs Kawada, but for entirely different reasons. 

Part of the fun of being a wrestling fan, at least for me, is watching EVERYTHING. Some stuff you watch once or twice and then get tired of except for something really transcendent (shoot-style fits this for me, with the transcendency exception being Volk Han.) And then, there is some stuff that you can watch again and again with no hesitancy whatsoever. The 4 Corners of Heaven era of All Japan is one of these eras for me. Kawada, Kobashi, Misawa, Taue. Those 4 names, and the endless iteration of matches they produced, are some of the best and most fun heavyweight matches I have ever seen. 

And quite frankly, while everyone talks about the Misawa-Kawada rivalry and how important it was, there is one I enjoy just as much, because it has a slightly different aesthetic to it. Misawa vs Kawada is largely a battle of two stoics, and while that is fun, it can get tiresome (the exception of course being 6-3-94, which is as perfect a match as anything that has happened anywhere.) Kobashi is a lot of things, but a stoic is not one of them. He bursts free with energy, excitement, and charisma. And with Misawa vs Kobashi, you get someone who seems to have no emotion versus someone who defines all of his successes on it. It's a fascinating counterpoint. What I am watching now is their best match together, a match so good that Jushin "Thunder" Liger and Shinjiro Ohtani patterned their own classic of February 9th, 1997 after it. 

This is one of the matches that young wrestlers should be watching, and studying. Don't just watch the MOVEZ~!, although those are plentiful. Watch how the crowd cares. You can make that work, people in wrestling school. Just try a little harder.