TKO Creations

More sportyball topic today.  I’m sorry, but bear with me.  It’s really only tangentially related.

Long story shorter, there is a basketball player named Nick Young, who is (presumably still present tense as of this writing) engaged to Iggy Azalea.  He decided to (allegedly) cheat on his fiancee because hey, NBA player and all, and then brag about it to his teammate D’Angelo Russell, who in turn was recording the whole thing and it somehow magically went public.

Now, Young is all pissed off (demonstrating the value of a USC education in the process), and the entire narrative that I have read so far centers on how Russell betrayed his teammates’ trust, and how it’s going to cripple his ability to be anyone’s teammate in the future.

It’s not that this sentiment is wrong inherently.  I can promise you Russell didn’t record and leak that video confession to be a valiant defender of the social contract of engaged people.  He did it to be a dick, and on that score… well… mission accomplish buddy!  I hope “getting over” on Young was worth being a pariah in your chosen profession for the rest of your career.

But I want to talk about Young, and more specifically the “boys will be boys” mentality that allows our talking heads to completely gloss over or outright ignore Young’s stupidity in their rush to eviscerate Russell.

Those that do address Young’s idiocy effectively couch it in the idea that “he shouldn’t have been engaged as a young athlete” and not “he shouldn’t have been cheating on his fiancee.”  The idea is that athletes are surrounded by women throwing themselves at them at every opportunity, and the temptation is simply too great to ignore.

Sure, there is a sizable amount of women who are perfectly fine with one night stands and the desire to be bedded by someone “famous.”  I’m not going to demean them.  You girls do you (or whatever star studded man or woman decides you’re a good one-night stand).

But this idea that there’s just so many of those girls out there that no man could possibly resist the temptation basically reduces men into hormonal balls of instinct, and that lets people like Nick Young off the hook.

Once you “put a ring on it”, to borrow the vernacular, the “game” changes.  Nick Young wasn’t helpless.  He knew exactly what he was doing, and decided that his fiancee didn’t matter in the pursuit of short term pleasure.

He then had the unmitigated gall to brag about his sexual conquests to his teammates, which would be a fairly stupid thing to do even if he trusted them implicitly.  It again demonstrates a man who knows exactly what he is doing, knowing exactly who he is hurting, and simply doesn’t care.

Nick Young isn’t a victim.  This isn’t “boys will be boys.”  This is a shitty human being doing shitty things, and getting those secrets exposed by an equally shitty teammate.

It is more than possible to hate the player and hate the game.  And it’s due time our society starts doing so.

Reddit’s r/shitpost should just redirect straight to reddit.com.

That is all.

I’ve got a real big problem with the Doomsday Clock.

In case any of you don’t know what it is, it was first unveiled in 1947 as the nuclear race was gearing up, and well meaning scientists and leaders wanted to put how close we were to nuclear annihilation into terms that the general public could understand.

Theory goes, if the utter destruction of the human race was 12:00am, people would see us at 11:55pm, and be stirred to action, demanding leaders to take their fingers off their respective buttons, and return to their senses.

Whether or not it is effective (let’s be honest, it’s not), it sounds like a perfectly noble cause.  So why do I have a problem with it?

It’s because of news like this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/doomsday-clock-feat/

No, it’s not inherently because the clock is currently three minutes to midnight, barely one minute behind a period where the U.S. and the Soviet Union were actively testing ever larger thermonuclear weapons and the Cuban Missile Crisis (although it is fairly silly).  It’s not that the doomsday clock is now factoring in things like climate change (because climate change is a very big deal, even though the original designers of the doomsday clock wouldn’t even shift the minute hand one angstrom over a calamity approximately 100 years off).

The problem is that in the entire time of its inception, the Doomsday Clock has never been dialed back to any point earlier than 11:43pm.  They created a mechanism that by the very advancement of humanity and the clock’s own precedent cannot possibly use anything other than a narrow window that insinuates dire omens.

Okay… so why is that a problem?

Let me put it this way; Americans may remember the ill fated Homeland Security Advisory System, the color coded “threat level” of terrorist attack brought forward in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  It was five step scale, ostensibly going from “Low” (green), “Guarded” (blue), “Elevated” (yellow), “High” (orange), to “Severe” (red), but it quickly became clear that the system wasn’t ever going to fall below the yellow, “Elevated” level.

As a result, the HSAS quickly became a joke, and summarily dismissed and ignored before finally meeting a ignoble end in 2011.  The problem that the HSAS had is the same problem that the Doomsday Clock has, and what any such ‘weighted scale’ eventually has… when everything is a problem, eventually nothing is a problem.

But why even do something like that in the first place?  Well, kinda for the same reason why your usual video game review magazine will have a 1 to 10 scale, but you’ll rarely (if ever) see something fall below a 6.

It’s to manipulate public opinion.  But unlike video game mags using a weighted scale to hopefully convince you Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t total puke garbage, the presenters of the Doomsday Clock and the Department of Homeland Security try to use the rhetoric of fear.

The goal is to scare you into doing what they want; whatever goal that might be.  Because a scared society doesn’t question.  A society that doesn’t question lets its leaders do whatever it wants so that its citizens can feel safe.

And it’s a horrible way to influence opinion… because eventually fear fails.  Eventually you cry wolf too many times over less pressing dangers, to the point where you have a people that simply aren’t listening by the time immediate dangers that need an immediate response come around.

To the operators of the Doomsday Clock; we are not three minutes to our destruction.  Stop pretending we are.

Thanks.

There is this ideal in American society that can be pretty easily summed up as this:

Your success, and your failure, is determined nigh exclusively by the amount of effort you put into your chosen task.

If you are not successful, it’s simply because you didn’t work hard enough.  If you’re poor, it’s because you don’t work hard enough to make money.  If you have a shitty job, it’s because you’re not working hard enough to find a better one.  Basically, there is near infinite room for advancement if you’re willing to apply yourself to that advancement and are willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

It’s a neat ideal, and the idea is a comforting one.  Too bad next to none of it is true.  This is “The Great American Lie.”

It’s tied to the concept of American exceptionalism, and in many ways is the centerpiece to the collective delusion that the United States is just, like, the greatest country in the world in every way, ya know?

That’s not to say that the amount of effort you apply isn’t significant.  But it’s but one factor in many, and possibly not even the most important next to the simple reality of knowing the right people.  It can very easily be argued that having the right people going to bat for you is the biggest factor in you getting that well-paying job rather than someone else (who might even be more qualified)… or even knowing that well-paying job has an opening at all.

Americans even know this.  We bandy about buzzwords like “crony capitalism” and complain our leaders are in bed with special interests.  We gripe when shamed political or business leaders deploy their golden parachutes and land in better situations then they were before.

Then we turn around, and spit on the homeless person on the street and tell them they just need to work harder (usually while denying them jobs or assistance because they’re homeless and obviously a junkie that can’t be trusted or some other excuse), willfully ignorant to the fact that perhaps if one or two things that had nothing to do with our talents was different, the roles would be reversed.

We perpetuate the lie while we boo and hiss when that lie is exposed.  Why?  Because it’s convenient, and if there’s anything Americans love more than anything, it’s convenience.  It’s easy to blame those underneath us for simply not putting forth the effort.  Because to think otherwise would complicate our lives, forcing us to take stock in our good fortune and even (gasp!) having sympathy for our fellow man… compelling us to (GASP!) maybe even… help those less fortunate than us.

It’s also silly.  There’s nothing wrong in accepting our good fortune.  You don’t need to give your every spare dollar or every free moment helping the needy and the poor among us.  But the very least we can do is regard them without scorn, and try not to actively obstruct their own paths upward.

It’s only by facing and confronting The Great American Lie that we can even begin to make it The Great American Truth.

Caution: there is going to be some very colorful, NSFW language.

Gonna dial it back a little bit to when I was an aspiring sportswriter.

Back when I had designs on such a career, one of the big guns at the time (and arguably still a big gun now) was Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press.  His career path was much like how many budding journalists hope it goes for them… build a reputation with a major newspaper, and use that audience to launch a solo writing career.

Albom certainly did all that, but certainly not without shortcuts that soured my opinion on him.  From his work of outright fiction passed as fact (Google up his article about Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson at the Final Four they never attended), to continuing to draw a paycheck as a sportswriter while not even considering himself to be a journalist any more (and denying headliner status and a potential audience that someone else could use to launch their own career)… to this most recent judgmental, misogynist piece of bullshit he uttered on the Sports Reporters on ESPN.

Most notably, I want to draw attention to this wonderfully sexist vomit:

“I’d feel a lot happier about this if the woman took that money and gave it to charity and said this is not what this was about… I always am suspect when people end up saying ‘well, I’m going to take it.’”

Allow me on behalf of every decent human being when I say, fuck off and die, Mr. Albom.  Your comfort is completely and utterly irrelevant, and your bullshit in the face of a woman who was railroaded by her school and Tallahassee police because she was raped by a star football player is out of line.

Your belief in her claims is irrelevant.  The evidence speaks for itself.  And your smug assertion that she should donate her settlement to charity while you sip Pina Coladas from your beach house in Malibu should get your teeth punched down your throat, you despicable little garden gnome.

Despite the soccer mom, Sunday School audience you cater to with your meandering drivel might think, you aren’t some arbiter of common decency or appropriate behavior.  Your own body of work wouldn’t even come close to meeting your own standard.  So please, be my guest and sit on a sandpaper dildo, you smarmy, greased up hobbit.

I’m not going to say you lost my respect today.  You lost my respect over a decade ago.  But your projectile fecal matter somehow managed to make me think less of you than I did.

I didn’t think that was possible.

Maybe you need to rethink your novelist career. After all, I doubt you could rightfully compose a book about heaven or the people you can meet there while you go straight to hell.

(Credit goes to Jeff Moss for the Youtube video linked in this post)

Warning: You’re about to enter my headspace again.  You read further willingly, and I am not responsible for any brain damage you may receive.

I am, ostensibly, a straight cisgendered heterosexual male.  In the most technical definition, this is true.  I have found women attractive in the past, and have never held any sexual attraction to a man.  I would, in the most literal definition, be a painfully solid 0 on the Kinsey Scale.

But technical and literal definitions don’t really tell the whole story.  In my thirty-seven years on this earth, the number of women that have earnestly interested me could be counted on one hand (you might need a second if your name isn’t Count Rugen).  I am probably far closer to non-sexual than anything else.

I am perfectly fine with the theory of sex and sexual contact, but find the practice fairly uninteresting.  My passions and hormones are at best stirred for a handful of days every few months at the best of times.  And I have had one relationship fall apart for those very reasons.

Why do I bring this up?  Because when trolls, creeps, perverts, and Men’s Right Activists accuse me of trying to suck up to women in the hopes that I can get in their pants, it is one of the few times that my temper boils, as if the only reason I could possibly defend women online was because I was thinking with my dick.

It can’t be because I find the treatment of women in public scenarios disgusting or distasteful.  I can’t be because I see how horribly skewed society is in favor of the male gender.  It can’t be because I think that just because a girl has a twitch channel and doesn’t wear clothes from neck to ankle, that she doesn’t deserve to be asked about the size of her breasts, or suggest she could make more money if she’d just “pull her fat tits out.”

No, it must be because I’m trying to score.  And that disgusts me almost as much as the bullshit a lot of women get just by existing.

I have next to no skin in that game, literally and figuratively.  That dog don’t hunt.  Try again.

So, apparently censorship means something wholly different in this day and age.

But ya know what?  Okay.  Language is an ever changing thing, and definitions shift over time.  So let’s just get over that.  If our society has decided that censorship means “any change made by a creator to try and make their work have more widespread appeal,” so be it.

But… why does it seem to be that all the cries of “censorship” specifically have to do with the push for less scantily clad women in video games?

Is this really the hill gamers want to make their stand on?  Especially when it pertains to 13-year olds with bikini costumes altered to cover more?  Is… that really the line you’re going to draw in the sand?

Or lingerie outfits for characters ostensibly locked in a horrific struggle for their lives and sanity?

Is this really what we want to define censorship as in the future?

Because, well, it doesn’t speak very well for you, even if you think your motives are pure.

Pardon me for getting a little political here.  Do forgive this dip into the sea of ichor and bile.  If there is a living analogue for the Biblical description of hell, a lightless void filled with the weeping and gnashing of teeth, it is likely manifest in our modern American political discourse.

I’m not really a moderate, at least, not in the way I define the term.  I am actually very strongly in favor or opposition to a good many political policies, and am quite unwavering in my favor or opposition.  But my political chart reads more like it got hit with a bundle of buckshot, with opinions that scatter much of everywhere.

On fiscal matters, I lean fairly conservative, though not Republican.  Republicans are “conservative” only in the sense that they actively oppose any Democratic spending.  Given their way, they’ve proven to be just as spend happy, merely on a different set of pet policies.

I’m not entirely fond of the attempts at universal healthcare, and personally think mandatory insurance is one of the greatest scams that state and federal governments have pulled on citizens.

I am wary of efforts to push the federal minimum wage to the lengths that the most liberal spenders desire, though I do think some increase needs to happen as we become more and more of a service based economy.  I think that such extreme measures don’t hurt the people who are actually causing the wealth disparity, and only hurt smaller businesses and entrepreneurs who are scratching to get by.

I’m not a particular fan of unions.  I feel they had an important role in the shaping of our current labor rights, but the majority at this point have become bloated bureaucratic nightmares that only exist to feed themselves, twisted into greedy monoliths that are no better than the corporate monsters they theoretically fight against.  At the very least, they need to be broken down and rebuilt by the workers who aren’t being well represented by them.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as “too big to fail.”  If a company has become so large and unwieldy that it will collapse under its own weight, that company needs to fall.  Companies that openly betrayed the public trust need to be forcibly ripped apart, their executives jailed, and the money they stole distributed as equally as they can to the people they hurt.  Not propped up by more tax dollars with a feeble promise that they won’t do it again.  Much like big, dying trees are burned away to clear the canopy for young trees to grow, so should businesses be allowed to thrive when the big boys invariably topple.

Yet despite all that, on matters of social and humanitarianism, I lean pretty ardently liberal, though not Democrat.  It’s amazing how so many have already forgotten that Democratic leaders were quite staunchly against rights like gay marriage until it was politically expedient to be so (I’m looking right at you, President Obama and Ms. Clinton).  I have not forgotten.  The Democratic Party frequently fails those they claim to champion.

I for one, don’t think it is any right but the woman’s when it comes to whether to keep or abort a fetus.  If she wishes to allow a husband and/or father to have their input, so be it, but the final decision should be hers, and no law should exist to deny or slow that decision, no matter what you believe her motives are.

I believe that any couple of consenting age should be allowed to join in a union in the eyes of the law.  I believe that transsexuals should be allowed to go into whatever bathroom they identify with (and the fact that this is somehow a hot topic of political debate makes me cringe).  I’m not even inherently against poly-amorous relationships, though I acknowledge making such unions a matter of law would likely be a minefield that cannot be navigated.  Consent and fair division of joined property, tax protocols, and rights of attorney is a quirky enough thing when it involves two people… adding more into the mix is probably something that our legal framework simply cannot handle.

I believe that women are still woefully mistreated by the law, as are minorities, and that the majority populations are dragging their feet far too much to purge that systemic racism.  It is despicable that it still lingers to this day, and it’s not just a “southern thing.”

I believe that such open access to firearms in this country is unequivocally insane.  We require registration of so many things in this country, that our government blocks such restrictions on the one thing in which its sole and primary purpose is to kill is nothing short of madness.  There is nothing in the Second Amendment or the Bill of Rights or any official document of our early government that advocates the lax gun controls we have now.

So, what does all of that mean?  Well, at the risk of offending minorities that have suffered active repression from voting, it leads someone like me to feeling disenfranchised.  It’s a failing of the two party system that our major political entities actively collude into maintaining.  There is no one that really encapsulates what I believe.

It means I find the current Republican party fleshy piles of insanity that would make Azathoth weep in jealousy; a babbling pit of proud ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and cultural blindness.  It means I find the Democratic party misguided at best, and maliciously deceptive at worst, deviously shifting in the winds of political convenience and lacking any real substance or grounding, be it financial or moral.

It means that around this time next year, I’ll likely fill in Hillary Clinton’s bubble on my ballot while holding my nose in disgust, all the while thinking that there has to be a better way than choosing between the lesser of two evils.