You should look into Eileen Gu. Many sketchy things going with her citizenship status. Grandfather was a CCP official, no one knows who her father is. Criticizes the US through BLM but does not dare say a word about China’s human rights abuses. Her and her tiger mom are all about cashing in.
Feb 12, 2022·edited Feb 12, 2022Liked by Royce Webb
After reading the Woj article and some comments below, I feel that a decline in NBA viewership could be attributed in part to missing truehoop or daily dime like basketball coverage. Maybe I'm conflating my own personal experience, but truehoop used to get me interested in all different parts of the NBA. It was a great nexus to waste time reading about different teams and their situations. Something like daily dime was helpful in boosting interest as well as informing fans. It made me interested in watching NBA games that weren't just the warriors. I first started giving a shit about the NBA at large because of an ESPN the Magazine article in like 2003 that laid out all the playoff storylines. So did their nba blogs make espn money? Probably not directly, but using it as a place to foster excitement about a key product definitely did.
Making Woj their focus for NBA is such a mistake. It used to be great to go to a curated site to read about the NBA at large, with a collection of national and local writers. Maybe there's somewhere that offers that now and I'm just unaware. Now it's mostly transactional stuff that is great in the moment but doesn't create new fans.
Don't have a hot take, just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the Woj piece. NBA media and coverage is so bizarre. It really is almost like state-sponsored media (like you said in the callin.) LeBron has a media apparatus. There are people on tv whose job is to "argue" that LeBron James is great at basketball. With Woj, who seems like a lowkey sociopath, I don't understand the point of him. Information has never been easier to come by. Nobody cares if they hear about a trade at 11:34 am or 11:51 am except for him and ESPN. Then you have the social justice part, which I won't get into, and I even agree with most of the points, but I have to imagine there is a very low % of people who enjoy being lectured about what's wrong with the world when they turn on sports. It just seems like actual basketball games is down on the priority list for NBA media and coverage, which seems like a strange strategy.
The ESPN Lebron vs Steph/KD/Giannis/Jokic/whoever proxy wars are great once you see them for what they are. (great in the sense that it's just kinda funny and strange) I've enjoyed seeing Stephen A start gassing up Steph, but I don't think it's coincidental that after sitting next to Joe Lacob courtside he had a ton of positive things to say about the warriors.
It’s interesting to see how the science changes once polling shows these mandates are less and less popular. Also the coverage difference by the main stream media for BLM and the truckers is red pilling a lot of my very blue friends. Even they are coming around to the double standard.
Science won’t change - listen to virologists- check out this week in virology podcasts. They have been ahead of the curve on everything. They give out great info every week. I’ll believe people who have done it for decades over a loudmouth who has no grounding in the field.
Our institutions have damaged their reputations throughout this pandemic in my opinion. The fact that science and scientist are viewed through this god like prism that they can’t be persuaded by all other things that every other human can be is weird to me. I’m not sure if you were referring to me as a loudmouth or someone else but either way we all get to choose who we listen to and weigh their opinions as we see fit.
I don't think you understand how peer-reviewed science actually works. Scientific advancement is necessarily by trial and error, and repeated experimentation by independent parties constantly checking each other's work. Good scientists will not give a definitive answer on a subject they don't have deep, broad evidence for - that is why you will so often hear scientists equivocate or refuse to be conclusive. It is irresponsible for them to be otherwise, so their answers have to be limited by the evidence they have. It is not science that is at fault, but the way it has been politicised by bad faith actors and over-simplified by media demanding 5 second soundbites for questions with complex, nuanced answers. Also, science does not care about "public opinion", your opinion, or anyone else's - it is only about the evidence, and at what confidence level it has been proven. Properly conducted science is the antithesis of a popularity contest, but it becomes contorted when filtered through the lens of politics and economics.
I'm addicted to information. The podcast/substack/twitter/smartphone world has ruined my life. I need crap pumped into my brain at all times otherwise I'm bored. The information fills in for social interaction (Podcast conversation make me feel less alone), substacks makes me feel like I am part of club(Like the secrets of the stonecutters but without the social obligation), and twitter is just a info-faucet that is always on. Its always there and there is always more.
Everything bad that has happened the last few years is just the butterfly effect from Kenny Mauer's overturned charge call on Durant in Game 1 of the 2018 finals. Changed the course of history.
I think the Nets came out much better from this blockbuster trade than people think. Simmons is a perfect addition (distributor, great defender) that they need, and Harden's role was almost redundant with the scoring of Durant and Kyrie. Add in Drummond (top tier rebounder) and Curry (to go with Mills and Harris), if/when Nets get healthy I think they are going to be the best team in the NBA down the stretch and win the finals.
Our country would be in a much better place if the Republican Party was normal and tried to grow their base using policy and not IDPOL complaints. Especially in more lefty pockets like the Bay Area. Maybe have an actual platform for actual people instead of just trying to make democrats look bad, which isn’t even hard to do.
Here's a hot take for you - the US, UK, Australia and other countries that have mostly binary political systems that shut out other voices would all be a lot better off if they weren't two party systems. Most important political issues are nuanced and complex, and reducing it to red vs blue is utterly destructive to positive outcomes and progress.
in the same way that alcohol is a catalyst of inequality, so is weed. Rich people get to have their evening glass of wine or occasional gummy, or CBD dog treat and poor folks get to have their lives shattered.
Homelessness was at epidemic levels in the US long before weed was decriminalised. Poverty and lack of social infrastructure to support mental illness are far stronger drivers of the issue.
So, you are just trolling at this point, right? Your first point is a correlation not a causation. There could be a hundred other factors driving that, and homelessness is also rising in states that have not decriminalised, which suggests other factors. Secondly, poverty is caused by being able to buy weed legally? Really? You know how ridiculous that is, surely.
According to homelessness organisations - the people on the ground with homeless people - the main drivers of homelessness are: poverty (the specific measure used is 50% of income going to housing), unemployment, lack of affordable housing and acute crises in mental health, family breakdown, domestic abuse and addiction (substances or gambling).
Rates of homelessness across the US were significantly higher 15 years ago (somehow the US only started collecting stats on it in 2007, which is in iteself stunning) than they are today, long before any decriminalisations occurred.
Not sure where you are getting your ideas but they don't make a lot of sense if you listen to the experts on the subject.
Mental illness is a spectrum. Weed pushes the mentally I’ll towards the “chronically homeless” end of the spectrum. De-criminalized weed signals to people that it’s OK to use it.
Also, nobody who has seriously researched homelessness would be foolish enough to say that chronic homelessness has any significant link to employment or housing availability. (Granting that tons of homelessness researchers are unserious activists.)
Experts’ opinions are irrelevant when they avoid researching and discussing third rails of the progressive movement, such as the link between weed de-crim and the boom in chronic homelessness.
Weed was and is the most widely used illicit substance in the US and across the planet, and there has been many large studies in the US and internationally on whether decriminalisation affects usage. It does not. The National Academy of Sciences states: "there is little evidence that decriminalization of marijuana use necessarily leads to a substantial increase in marijuana use." So your premise is fundamentally flawed.
Housing AFFORDABILITY is indeed a major cause of homelessness - when people cannot afford a house, they cannot live in one. And there are other drivers as I have stated above.
Your casual ad hominem dismissal of "activist researchers" clearly shows your bias. No point continuing to discuss something with someone who ignores the research in favour of the absurd position driven by their politics.
I am doing my children a favour by shunning the Olympics in our house. The IOC is a morally reprehensible exploitive commercial organization and not an athletic organization emblematic of fair play and credible competition.
I worked in film development in 2000 and Jet Li was gaining credibility as an actor in hollywood with Romeo must die. Li was attached (from what i was told) to a really good sci-fi/time traveling script that was anti- china, anti communist- it was very similar to blade runner. Premise was we are in the near future 2020-2030 area and China controls the world (and the US). Little privacy and human rights abuses everywhere.
It was a good script, but the producers i worked for scoffed that it could never be made. No one wanted to piss of China even in 2000. The film script never went anywhere- and jet li did a different time traveling film instead with “the one.”
Jet Li complained afterward about china censors always disallowing his films and i have always been curious if that anti-communist film scripy he was attached to did it. And again, i am unsure if Li was ever really formally attached.
I thought it was crazy how verboten china criticism was even back then. It seemed natural that the movies would make China the big bad villian and supplant the red russians from the 80s.
The West's escalating internal culture war is actually a distraction constructed by the rich and powerful to hide in plain sight the real issue underlying pretty much every social problem we have - ever-deepening wealth inequity.
I’d encourage you to dive a little deeper. There’s nearly no evidence he was good with money. There are first hand accounts from people having conversations with him who said he didn’t know anything about investing (Eric Weinstein is one).
There’s also nobody on Wall Street who had ever heard of him before the sex scandals broke. Nobody knew anybody who invested with him or who is clearinghouse was. This is extremely strange in a small world where all the big players know each other.
He was almost certainly running a blackmail scheme and at that scale it’s tough to imagine it not being sanctioned by some powerful group.
There’s no need to “dive deeper”. The media and people who believe what’s written in the media are going to have their perception. People who knew are going to continue to know.
Disney ruined Boba Fett. That is obviously not a hot take. That's the internet consensus... And if we say that as a character he's ruined because he's something the opposite of the purpose of his character in our minds (for more than three decades) that is one thing but then I'll jump on the bandwagon that Robert Rodriguez is inappropriate as a director to fulfill our mind's eye of what made the previous mandalorian TV series so successful -- not being cheesy. What's interesting though is the context of the Mandalorian as a novel character and being what we all wish Boba Fett could have been as an entity. It would have been a slam dunk for them to just make a show called Boba Fett, to begin with, and lean into every fact we know about Boba Fett being a part of his series. So much of Hollywood is presenting and recycling known characters especially something as nostalgic as Boba Fett. They kind of went backwards with mandalorian as this new thing that was amazing and successful and then thought they would fall into success, with Boba Fett, no matter what. Yet did not come close to achieving the same amount of success or recognition.
Boba was simply terrible. The writing was pathetic (no arcs, dodgy character motivations, no story to speak of), the setpieces were taken straight from 80s movies, the retconning for laughs was pathetic fan service. I'm a huge fan of the SW universe, but it plain sucked. And it ruined the character. Well done, Disney.
Collectively, we should be emphasizing much more vocational education and much less phony academic "education." https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/
Yes, for sure.
Women's MMA is by far the best women's sport because it is not positioned or marketed as "women's sports".
It is a fascinating paradox
You should look into Eileen Gu. Many sketchy things going with her citizenship status. Grandfather was a CCP official, no one knows who her father is. Criticizes the US through BLM but does not dare say a word about China’s human rights abuses. Her and her tiger mom are all about cashing in.
It’s 2022. “Cashing in” is a good thing. More power to her.
After reading the Woj article and some comments below, I feel that a decline in NBA viewership could be attributed in part to missing truehoop or daily dime like basketball coverage. Maybe I'm conflating my own personal experience, but truehoop used to get me interested in all different parts of the NBA. It was a great nexus to waste time reading about different teams and their situations. Something like daily dime was helpful in boosting interest as well as informing fans. It made me interested in watching NBA games that weren't just the warriors. I first started giving a shit about the NBA at large because of an ESPN the Magazine article in like 2003 that laid out all the playoff storylines. So did their nba blogs make espn money? Probably not directly, but using it as a place to foster excitement about a key product definitely did.
Making Woj their focus for NBA is such a mistake. It used to be great to go to a curated site to read about the NBA at large, with a collection of national and local writers. Maybe there's somewhere that offers that now and I'm just unaware. Now it's mostly transactional stuff that is great in the moment but doesn't create new fans.
Don't have a hot take, just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the Woj piece. NBA media and coverage is so bizarre. It really is almost like state-sponsored media (like you said in the callin.) LeBron has a media apparatus. There are people on tv whose job is to "argue" that LeBron James is great at basketball. With Woj, who seems like a lowkey sociopath, I don't understand the point of him. Information has never been easier to come by. Nobody cares if they hear about a trade at 11:34 am or 11:51 am except for him and ESPN. Then you have the social justice part, which I won't get into, and I even agree with most of the points, but I have to imagine there is a very low % of people who enjoy being lectured about what's wrong with the world when they turn on sports. It just seems like actual basketball games is down on the priority list for NBA media and coverage, which seems like a strange strategy.
The ESPN Lebron vs Steph/KD/Giannis/Jokic/whoever proxy wars are great once you see them for what they are. (great in the sense that it's just kinda funny and strange) I've enjoyed seeing Stephen A start gassing up Steph, but I don't think it's coincidental that after sitting next to Joe Lacob courtside he had a ton of positive things to say about the warriors.
The Lacob SAS dynamic is funny. Joe watches Stephen A. every day and is a massive fan.
It’s interesting to see how the science changes once polling shows these mandates are less and less popular. Also the coverage difference by the main stream media for BLM and the truckers is red pilling a lot of my very blue friends. Even they are coming around to the double standard.
Science won’t change - listen to virologists- check out this week in virology podcasts. They have been ahead of the curve on everything. They give out great info every week. I’ll believe people who have done it for decades over a loudmouth who has no grounding in the field.
Our institutions have damaged their reputations throughout this pandemic in my opinion. The fact that science and scientist are viewed through this god like prism that they can’t be persuaded by all other things that every other human can be is weird to me. I’m not sure if you were referring to me as a loudmouth or someone else but either way we all get to choose who we listen to and weigh their opinions as we see fit.
I don't think you understand how peer-reviewed science actually works. Scientific advancement is necessarily by trial and error, and repeated experimentation by independent parties constantly checking each other's work. Good scientists will not give a definitive answer on a subject they don't have deep, broad evidence for - that is why you will so often hear scientists equivocate or refuse to be conclusive. It is irresponsible for them to be otherwise, so their answers have to be limited by the evidence they have. It is not science that is at fault, but the way it has been politicised by bad faith actors and over-simplified by media demanding 5 second soundbites for questions with complex, nuanced answers. Also, science does not care about "public opinion", your opinion, or anyone else's - it is only about the evidence, and at what confidence level it has been proven. Properly conducted science is the antithesis of a popularity contest, but it becomes contorted when filtered through the lens of politics and economics.
Super bowl commercials are not entertaining.
I'm addicted to information. The podcast/substack/twitter/smartphone world has ruined my life. I need crap pumped into my brain at all times otherwise I'm bored. The information fills in for social interaction (Podcast conversation make me feel less alone), substacks makes me feel like I am part of club(Like the secrets of the stonecutters but without the social obligation), and twitter is just a info-faucet that is always on. Its always there and there is always more.
Ben Simmons won't be in the NBA in 2025.
That’s fire.
NFT's are an incredible scam.
Well, duuuuuuuuh.
Everything bad that has happened the last few years is just the butterfly effect from Kenny Mauer's overturned charge call on Durant in Game 1 of the 2018 finals. Changed the course of history.
I think the Nets came out much better from this blockbuster trade than people think. Simmons is a perfect addition (distributor, great defender) that they need, and Harden's role was almost redundant with the scoring of Durant and Kyrie. Add in Drummond (top tier rebounder) and Curry (to go with Mills and Harris), if/when Nets get healthy I think they are going to be the best team in the NBA down the stretch and win the finals.
Our country would be in a much better place if the Republican Party was normal and tried to grow their base using policy and not IDPOL complaints. Especially in more lefty pockets like the Bay Area. Maybe have an actual platform for actual people instead of just trying to make democrats look bad, which isn’t even hard to do.
Here's a hot take for you - the US, UK, Australia and other countries that have mostly binary political systems that shut out other voices would all be a lot better off if they weren't two party systems. Most important political issues are nuanced and complex, and reducing it to red vs blue is utterly destructive to positive outcomes and progress.
De-criminalized weed is the root cause of the homelessness epidemic and, in a way, the spike in street crime in major cities.
No drug is a root cause.
in the same way that alcohol is a catalyst of inequality, so is weed. Rich people get to have their evening glass of wine or occasional gummy, or CBD dog treat and poor folks get to have their lives shattered.
Weed and alcohol are totally different, in countless ways.
they are also the same in countless ways
Homelessness was at epidemic levels in the US long before weed was decriminalised. Poverty and lack of social infrastructure to support mental illness are far stronger drivers of the issue.
False. Check the homelessness numbers in big cities. Then compare big cities in states that have and have not de-criminalized weed.
Also: Poverty is an effect, not a cause.
So, you are just trolling at this point, right? Your first point is a correlation not a causation. There could be a hundred other factors driving that, and homelessness is also rising in states that have not decriminalised, which suggests other factors. Secondly, poverty is caused by being able to buy weed legally? Really? You know how ridiculous that is, surely.
According to homelessness organisations - the people on the ground with homeless people - the main drivers of homelessness are: poverty (the specific measure used is 50% of income going to housing), unemployment, lack of affordable housing and acute crises in mental health, family breakdown, domestic abuse and addiction (substances or gambling).
Rates of homelessness across the US were significantly higher 15 years ago (somehow the US only started collecting stats on it in 2007, which is in iteself stunning) than they are today, long before any decriminalisations occurred.
Not sure where you are getting your ideas but they don't make a lot of sense if you listen to the experts on the subject.
Mental illness is a spectrum. Weed pushes the mentally I’ll towards the “chronically homeless” end of the spectrum. De-criminalized weed signals to people that it’s OK to use it.
Also, nobody who has seriously researched homelessness would be foolish enough to say that chronic homelessness has any significant link to employment or housing availability. (Granting that tons of homelessness researchers are unserious activists.)
Experts’ opinions are irrelevant when they avoid researching and discussing third rails of the progressive movement, such as the link between weed de-crim and the boom in chronic homelessness.
Weed was and is the most widely used illicit substance in the US and across the planet, and there has been many large studies in the US and internationally on whether decriminalisation affects usage. It does not. The National Academy of Sciences states: "there is little evidence that decriminalization of marijuana use necessarily leads to a substantial increase in marijuana use." So your premise is fundamentally flawed.
Housing AFFORDABILITY is indeed a major cause of homelessness - when people cannot afford a house, they cannot live in one. And there are other drivers as I have stated above.
Your casual ad hominem dismissal of "activist researchers" clearly shows your bias. No point continuing to discuss something with someone who ignores the research in favour of the absurd position driven by their politics.
I like wearing a mask in public. It keeps my face warm, lessens sun exposure, and helps make me more "anonymous."
They’re extremely handy for Midwest winters.
We had a skunk in our area - mask came in handy
I am doing my children a favour by shunning the Olympics in our house. The IOC is a morally reprehensible exploitive commercial organization and not an athletic organization emblematic of fair play and credible competition.
FIFA, the NCAA and the IOC—three of the most corrupt organizations in the western world. And all organize sport.
They are the worst- it’s sad because at high levels athletic competition is breathtaking.
Re: China discussion with Schwartzel.
I worked in film development in 2000 and Jet Li was gaining credibility as an actor in hollywood with Romeo must die. Li was attached (from what i was told) to a really good sci-fi/time traveling script that was anti- china, anti communist- it was very similar to blade runner. Premise was we are in the near future 2020-2030 area and China controls the world (and the US). Little privacy and human rights abuses everywhere.
It was a good script, but the producers i worked for scoffed that it could never be made. No one wanted to piss of China even in 2000. The film script never went anywhere- and jet li did a different time traveling film instead with “the one.”
Jet Li complained afterward about china censors always disallowing his films and i have always been curious if that anti-communist film scripy he was attached to did it. And again, i am unsure if Li was ever really formally attached.
I thought it was crazy how verboten china criticism was even back then. It seemed natural that the movies would make China the big bad villian and supplant the red russians from the 80s.
The West's escalating internal culture war is actually a distraction constructed by the rich and powerful to hide in plain sight the real issue underlying pretty much every social problem we have - ever-deepening wealth inequity.
Is it not blazingly obvious that Epstein was a Mossad / CIA blackmail operation, like Robert Maxwell and so many other operations?
No chance. Epstein was good with money and great at dinners. That’s basically the key to befriending the high falutin’.
I’d encourage you to dive a little deeper. There’s nearly no evidence he was good with money. There are first hand accounts from people having conversations with him who said he didn’t know anything about investing (Eric Weinstein is one).
There’s also nobody on Wall Street who had ever heard of him before the sex scandals broke. Nobody knew anybody who invested with him or who is clearinghouse was. This is extremely strange in a small world where all the big players know each other.
He was almost certainly running a blackmail scheme and at that scale it’s tough to imagine it not being sanctioned by some powerful group.
There’s no need to “dive deeper”. The media and people who believe what’s written in the media are going to have their perception. People who knew are going to continue to know.
Yes it’s quite obvious. Really the only plausible explanation.
The most controversial plausible movie I could dream up: Munich 2, with Eric Bana’s character creating this Epstein operation, directed by Mel Gibson.
Harden and Embiid will not mesh well on or off the court and the Harden trade will be Morey's first massive failure.
Disney ruined Boba Fett. That is obviously not a hot take. That's the internet consensus... And if we say that as a character he's ruined because he's something the opposite of the purpose of his character in our minds (for more than three decades) that is one thing but then I'll jump on the bandwagon that Robert Rodriguez is inappropriate as a director to fulfill our mind's eye of what made the previous mandalorian TV series so successful -- not being cheesy. What's interesting though is the context of the Mandalorian as a novel character and being what we all wish Boba Fett could have been as an entity. It would have been a slam dunk for them to just make a show called Boba Fett, to begin with, and lean into every fact we know about Boba Fett being a part of his series. So much of Hollywood is presenting and recycling known characters especially something as nostalgic as Boba Fett. They kind of went backwards with mandalorian as this new thing that was amazing and successful and then thought they would fall into success, with Boba Fett, no matter what. Yet did not come close to achieving the same amount of success or recognition.
Boba was simply terrible. The writing was pathetic (no arcs, dodgy character motivations, no story to speak of), the setpieces were taken straight from 80s movies, the retconning for laughs was pathetic fan service. I'm a huge fan of the SW universe, but it plain sucked. And it ruined the character. Well done, Disney.
Mild take Monday - "hot takes" don't feel hot anymore
You got to give credit to Woj to somehow replacing a press release and turning that into a 7 figure a year job.