Do Conservatives Need a Trigger Warning Before NFL Games?

The Dale and Holley show on WEEI took a phone call when they were discussing the NFL's declining ratings.The caller posited that many, like him, were turned off by the players kneeling during the National Anthem. Michael Holley retorted, "If Greg Hardy choking his girlfriend, Ray Rice knocking his fiance unconscious, or any of the other examples of violence against women at the hand of an NFL player didn't turn you off from the game, why now?"

The whole exchange made me think of Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory. Holley is referencing the care/harm principle when speaking of violence against women. The caller is referencing the authority/subversion principle when speaking of Kaepernick.

The fact that liberals are more upset about domestic violence and conservatives are more upset about kneeling during the national anthem should come as no surprise. Haidt's research shows that not all principles are created equal.

As you can see above, the more liberal you are, the more you only care about the care/harm principle and the fairness principle. Likewise, the more conservative you are, the more you care about the authority/subversion principle. Rather than argue who's right and who's wrong, I'll just paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer and say that while we can choose what we do, we cannot choose what we want or even care about.

Reading and hearing about the outrage against Kaepernick, the word I hear the most is "offensive."  People are offended by his action. Interestingly, this is the same word I hear when I read about arguments in favor of trigger warnings.

Will this be a teachable moment when conservatives understand the plight of those easily-offended, oversensitive liberals? Will liberals extend an olive branch to conservatives and respect their right to not want to be exposed to images they find offensive. Of course not, this is 2016!

Ortiz and Brady know now what they knew then...and can still bring it

There must be something in that dirty Boston water.

At ages 38 and 40, Tom Brady and David Ortiz are doing something remarkable. Not only do these guys have a combined 7 rings but their performance is peaking when it should be declining.

So let's go where no Boston sports fan wants to go and talk about what every other loser fan base believes to be true: steroids. Don't worry, I'm not about to micturate upon everyone's Kellogg's. In fact, I'd like to argue in favor of steroids.

One of the favorite phrases of middle aged men is "If I had know then what I know now." A bromide that seems to suggest the peak of our youthfulness takes place well before we've ascertained enough knowledge and experience to put it to good use.

According to Wired, most athletes start to decline physically after age 26. So that should have been the best years of Ortiz and Brady, no? Let's look at how these old men compare to their younger selves:

• David Ortiz, 2002: 125 games, 20 HR, 70 RBI, .839 OPS
• David Ortiz, 2016*: 92 games, 25 HR, 84 RBI, 1.071 OPS
  *(as of July 28)

• Tom Brady, 2004: 16 games, 60% completion, 3692 yards, 28 TD, 14 INT, 92.6 rating
• Tom Brady, 2015-16: 16 games, 64.4% completion, 4770 yards, 36 TD, 7 INT, 102.2 rating

Let's assume both are taking steroids, at least in this stage of their careers. Are we to assume that it not only staves off the aging process, but it makes them better physically than their supposed peak physical years, or is something else going on?

Here's what I think: What we're seeing with seasoned athletes like Ortiz and Brady is the culmination of professional experience that allows them to see a two-seam fastball and read a Cover 2 defense like never before. Should steroids be a factor, all it's doing is preventing the decline of their physical abilities, allowing us to see—perhaps for the first time—what it would look like to put the mind of a crafty veteran into the body of a youthful rookie.

Why should we waste valuable minds because their bodies can't keep up? Steroids are allowing us to see athletes like we've never seen before. And the difference is not because of their bodies, but their minds.

The Tyson Zone

Bill Simmons coined the term "the Tyson Zone" to describe a person who's ridiculousness has reached a point where you can't tell which stories about them are made up and which are 100 percent true.

I think it's safe to say Donald Trump has reached the Tyson Zone.

Did he call Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists? Yep. Did he attempt to win over Latino voters by posting an image of himself eating taco salad with the caption "I love Hispanics." Oh, yeah.

One of my favorite columns from the now-defunct Grantland was titled, Unreality TV. The author came to the realization that it's difficult to see the distinction between parody sites like The Onion or political news like The Daily Show, from actual news sources like Fox News. (I spent a long time trying to think of a progressive equivalent. While there are many mediums as transparently biased as Fox News, nothing quite reaches its level of absurdity.) To quote the author:

"But who gets their news from real news anymore? We get our news from morning-after viral videos attacking the real news, or from videos attacking the videos. Our entertainment becomes a kind of horror. Our horror becomes a kind of entertainment. The lines between irony and truth blur in ways we barely notice...So many Facebook users mistake Onion links for real news that the social network is testing a “satire” flag."

After watching a Seth Meyers bit about how underpaid teachers are, and a John Oliver segment on how often scientific studies are misrepresented in the news, something struck me: This is what real journalism is supposed to look like. There was actually a lot of work behind these stories, and it wasn't just writing jokes.

It's easy to brush the two hosts off for a lack of seriousness but the topics are so tragic that they're actually funny when someone points out the absurdness of it all. And I would argue that it takes more work to deliver the story in a way that makes us laugh. How else could we take it?

Why Fiction Fans Should Watch Basketball

One of the things David Stern did to build up the NBA to what it is today is to change it from a "team" league to a "players" league. It went from the Showtime Lakers and Bad Boys Pistons to Magic's Lakers and Bird's Celtics, eventually culminating in Jordan's Bulls.

My favorite sport to watch is NBA basketball or my St. Bonaventure Bonnies men's basketball. The NBA is the only sport I  will flip on just to watch a good game.

In the NFL, if it's not the Patriots or one of my fantasy players, I'm not interested. Same with baseball and my Red Sox. Coming to the very place I work is the Hoop Hall Classic, bringing some of the most talented high school players in the country. It will be a packed event, and yet, I have no interest.

I realized that I'm not really a sports fan. I don't like the game of basketball. I follow narratives. Because the NBA is such a players' league, I know a lot of the backgrounds of the players and can follow their narratives as they play out before me.

When my wife and I went to a Bonnies game recently, I was pointing out all the narratives: "There's Dion Wright. We're the only school in the country to offer him a Division I scholarship. Now he's leading the conference in double doubles." "There's Jaylen Adams. His promising first year last season was cut short by injury. Now he's quickly becoming the most dominant player on the team."

I cheer for the players because I am cheering for their story. I appreciate the complexities of the game, but it always comes secondary. Without a narrative, it's not enough to sustain my interest.

The Dying Dialectic

The worst thing about social media is that it gives a voice to the stupid.

I worry that we are losing the concept of the dialectic. In fact, I wish we could eliminate the word "argument" from our language and replace it with "conversation." Dialogue should be about two people, eschewing pathos, logically laying out their points and counter points. If done correctly, the end result is that both parties are better informed than before the conversation began.

The second worst thing about social media is that the first person to make a Nazi comparison wins the argument.

Watch two people on Facebook have a debate about guns. With all the red herrings and strawman arguments it's like a logical fallacy convention. Any attempt at rationality is drowned in a sea of over-the-top accusations.

If you want to change abortion, gun culture, healthcare, or foreign policy, you'll never get there by insulting the other side. You will need a good portion of those people to come to your side and shaming them will never work. You'll have to find common ground and that will only happen through a dialectic approach.

What, exactly, are we arguing about?

Whenever controversy arises—like steaming diarrhea out of the toilet of a highway rest stop—you can always count on the citizins citizens (who got the Departed reference??) of this country to obstinately and stubbornly refuse to have the same argument.

Take Kim Davis. The law changed the duties of her position. She refused to bend, based on religious conviction, and went to jail for it. The strawman arguments amount to "Why do you hate Christians," and "Why do you hate gay people?" When the question should be: at what point does a person's religious freedom end?

It's dicey because it requires something both sides don't want to admit; that you either have no respect for another person's religious beliefs or that you don't care about discriminating against a minority group. (Side note: you obviously cannot kill someone if your religion says so. But scripture has been used to justify everything from banning interracial marriage to slavery. But discrimination? As someone once said, "People don't derive their values from scripture. They insert their values into scripture." Let's be honest, if you oppose gay marriage it's because you don't like gay people.)

Same thing with abortion. If you boil down the debate to a single image, that image is a fetus. That's what gets aborted. Pro-choicers try to turn that image into a woman, saying "this is who's rights you are violating." Pro-lifers try to turn that image into a baby, saying "this is who you are killing." Once again, people refuse to actually have the same argument.

Going Meta

"I see a crimson cloud in the horizon. You tell me it is a mass vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for the red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow ... and you have not touched the secret of that influence." -Henry David Thoreau

There's a moment in the movie Up in the Air when George Clooney's character and Anna Kendrick's character are having an argument. Clooney is talking about accumulating enough sky miles to join an exclusive club, one of the benefits being his name airbrushed onto an airplane. From memory, here is how the conversation plays out:

Anna Kendrick: "What is it with men always trying to put their name on everything?"
George Clooney: "And why do you think that is?"
AK: "It's probably because you can't have babies."
GC: (in a very condescending tone) "The baby argument."

The argument ends there and the viewer gets the feeling that Clooney won. But why? He simply "went meta." He stepped outside of the conversation and put a label on her argument. Isn't that sidestepping the argument? At best, it's a weak ad hominem attack?

Going meta is something that happens in fiction all the time and it's considered writing for an erudite crowd.

• Tyler Durden tries to free people from their white collar, corporate "slave" jobs in Fight Club. When they join Tyler's "army" they unknowingly become slaves to everything he asks them to do. 
• In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is pegged to star in a play with the intent that he will fail and the play will bomb. The producers realized they will make more money if the play is not a success. The play is The Producers, which is essentially the same plot. 
• In Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, the author becomes a character in the book.

Today, we seem to equate a person's ability to "go meta" with intellect. If you don't see this, you are the dumb one. The dummies don't realize they're using the "baby argument." The dummies don't realize how they traded corporate slavery for Tyler Durden slavery. The dummies don't realize the reference to The Producers in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But what if they're wrong? I admire those who can get so caught up in the moment, so entrenched in pure experience, that they don't allow themselves to be distracted by meta-fictional references.

Because once you step outside the plot or label the argument, you lose it. It becomes a whole different experience where we feel proud of ourselves for identifying the author's clues. We place ourselves in a pseudo-intellectual class, where we are better than those who don't get the joke.

I'm even doing it now as I'm going meta on going meta.