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Does Believing in Big Conspiracies Cause Small Conspiracy Theories, or Do Small Conspiracy Theories Cause People to Believe in Big Conspiracies?
Or: Why the Fuck is Luka a Laker?
I’ve always thought that one of the primary philosophical values of athletics is that it is a direct connection to capital R reality, in a way that is otherwise possible to avoid for many people. When I was in law school was when I got really serious about weightlifting, for the same reason that a lot of my friends got very into drinking: 1L year is a hell of feeling unmoored from any evidence of how you are doing. Traditionally, as my school did things, you have no feedback until finals. You are working all day every day studying, but you only really ever get tested on it in a cold call, which more depends on your professor’s mood and style for how it goes than it does on how good you actually are. And you might only get cold called ten times a semester anyway across all your classes. You’re working constantly and you have no real idea how you’re doing. But, as Henry Rollins put it, The Iron Doesn’t Lie to You. You can lift the weight, or you can’t. So I got really into the Olympic lifts. The Snatch, the Clean and Jerk, the Clean and Press (I’m old school). The numbers went up, or they didn’t, every day in my notebook. And if they went up I could feel good about myself, regardless of the fact that I was sure I was going to fail CivPro (I didn’t). Lifting weights, or running, or biking, gives you instant feedback on where you stand. You have a number you can pin your ego to, a baseline reality. You can lie about it, you can cheat, but you’re only cheating yourself: you know you’re a fake. In law school I needed that anchor to reality to keep me sane, to keep me from getting lost in my anxieties about things that I could not have knowledge of or control over.
Competition of course, is the ultimate reality check. I’ll confess to having become a bit of a hermit in my workout habits over the years. I have a very extensive home gym setup, the only time I worked out socially was the occasional climbing trip. Switching to BJJ has gotten me obsessed with fitness in a way I haven’t been in years, in that every time I go to the gym I’m getting my ego crushed. I’m getting dominated, submitted, and that’s reality: there was nothing I could have done to stop it. But, the victories are as real as the defeats. I can feel myself improving, and when I get a minor win, it means nothing it’s just a casual roll in a suburban strip mall in Eastern Pennsylvania, no one gives a shit. But it’s real, it happened.
And I think that athletics are necessary for that reason: they provide a tie to reality. There’s a reason that the study of decision making in economics has come to be known as Game Theory: you create a circumscribed ruleset for competition and use it to model greater decision making. This has value both in personal practice of athletics, and in the greater world of spectator sports and athletics. Moneyball taught more people about statistical analysis and strategy than any textbook. Sports are the one real thing on TV, you watch it and something happens, or it doesn’t. Your team wins, your team loses. This is important in that it keeps people grounded, it tells people things about reality. It teaches kids growing up to accept defeat, that sometimes the breaks beat the boys, that sometimes bad things happen. Sport was so important to national and ethnic pride, to civil rights movements, over the years, because sporting success is an inevitable fact. Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson were, and remain, so important because he went on the field and did it. When they went in against whites and won, the lie that no black man could do that was untenable. There was no denying that reality. Trans competitors in girls' sports has been such a controversy, not because anyone gives a damn about the purity of high school girl's track, it's because it is undeniable. Contact with reality. Black and white.
Unless, of course, the product on the field is fake. The ultimate crime against the public, as Fitzgerald put it:
Then sport becomes just another case of one’s emotions being manipulated by some power on high.
I bring all this up in reference to the recent blockbuster NBA trade that came out of nowhere over the weekend. In the middle of the night on Saturday, the Dallas Mavericks chose to trade Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis and a 2029 First Round Pick, plus some spare change going around. This trade is so off the wall that many people assumed that the reporter who first put it out had been hacked. It simply makes no sense by standard NBA strategy: normally a team will never part with a top-5 player in their prime like Luka under any circumstances. If they did choose to trade a guy like that, then the team would accept that their current project was torpedoed and sell everything for future value, young players and draft picks to build the next great team. The Mavericks did neither: they got older and worse switching from Luka to AD, without acquiring any high end draft capital to help them build in the future. They lost a potential all-time talent, a face of the franchise and the NBA, a player who had just lead them to the NBA Finals as a number one option last year; and in exchange they got a slightly worse player several years older. It makes no sense. Writers call it The Dumbest Move I’ve Ever Seen. The Lakers have a player who virtually guarantees them a competitive team for the next ten years, and for it they gave up an aging star who was a key piece on a championship team five years ago, but didn’t look likely to win one this year.
And inexplicably, Mav’s GM Nico Harrison didn’t try to shop his player around at all. The players involved heard at the same time everyone else did, from a twitter account they thought had been hacked. Luka bought a house in Dallas less than a month ago. Players around the league reacted with shock. Fans are apoplectic. Had Luka been shopped, it is likely that Dallas could have stocked their team with bright young players and future picks to build a juggernaut years from now. A package vastly better than AD and change. They chose this very specifically. Leading many fans to ask why?
Conspiracy theories popped up immediately. From the mundane, Luka is injured or Luka is about to be MeToo’d or Luka fucked the owner/GM’s wife. To the more baroque: the Mavs chose to make this trade at the behest of TPTB within the NBA, who wanted their marquee franchise in LA to get a fresh star with the LeBron era winding down. Send the best young player in the league, and certainly the best looking most photogenic and charismatic player in the top ten, to the traditional top franchise in the league. The Mavs perfidious new owners, the (((Adelsons))) went along with this because they want to move the team from Dallas (a small market I guess?) to Las Vegas, and they needed to destroy the franchise and its fanbase Major League style in order to do it.
And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it. I wander, if one polled /r/nba fans, what would the correlation be between believing that the Luka trade was fixed and believing in RussiaGate?
Now we reach another question where Sports is a low-stakes microcosm of life: assume that the uproar was so severe that it actually threatened the legitimacy of the league. That so many fans were so convinced that the Luka trade was fixed by the NBA, that it threatened to ruin the NBA’s ratings and destroy the fanbase. Assume also, that it isn’t true, that Nico Harrison really just thought he was that much smarter than everyone. You are the NBA commissioner. Do you exercise your power to rescind the trade, in order to preserve the appearance of fairness, or do you allow it to go through, knowing that it will create the appearance of unfairness?
Sports is full of actual corruption and conspiracies like many endeavors. I have no familiarity with NBA and any theories but conspiracies happen constantly.
Including fixing matches. Football (aka soccer) that I have some more familiarity is notoriously corrupt.
Generally this happens too! Mechanics do deliberately do shoddy work and charge people more. Certainly not all mechanics, all of the time, but it happens. Which is why it is so important to find an honorable mechanic, or at least to know enough to not be taken easily advantage of.
Someone who always assumes best would be wrong plenty of time, and same as someone who always assumes people are acting nefariously.
With sports there is also a certain type of people who always assume that their team loses because everyone is conspiring against them which is of course an incorrect way to see reality.
Conspiracies and bad behavior and plots to screw others over, is a constant of history. It is a bad idea to always assume best, or worse, I would say. Unrestrained anti-conspiratorial thinking is extremely irrational. Except it is often pushed by people who actually do support people shutting up about corruption and side with people who a) are screwing over others and support the faction that is accused of wrongdoing b) might be screwing over others and still support the faction. The priority being to shut down any dissent.
You actually do need to be vigilant against being screwed over and to organize to keep down people doing so. Easier said than done when it comes to various institutions that the corrupt have captured control. Even then, how far and openly they push things can be controlled to an extend through backlash.
Honorable behavior can't be taken for granted but requires both having a community of moral, honorable people, but also everlasting vigilance against those willing to behave in the more dishonorable manner. Suspicions can have a protective effect when they combine with some control mechanism to test for wrongdoers, catch them and punish them. The absence of people willing to put 2 and 2 together and call corruption out, and try to stop things then will of course lead into things getting even worse. The healthy instinct is to worry about people who want to cover up for Epstein network, rather than worry about people who care. Even less high on the food chain, we see rapists like the former school coach Jerry Sandusky who benefited from other members of the stuff of his school, helping cover things up.
Of course, that is one thing, and there are some people who believe they saw big foot, pyramids build by aliens, and have a more fantastical way of seeing the world that is less about being antagonistic towards criminals, or bad people coordinating. These people aren't really useful at opposing corruption and conspiracies, but also their way of viewing the world is not going to lead to purges of innocents falsely accused. I find the fearmongering about conspiracies it self suspicious and the whole conspiracy theory as bad word tm, has probably been pushed by intelligence agencies and influential non governmental organizations that would rather not be opposed. Ironically, there is too much unjustifiable paranoia about the harm of people not trusting authorities, and not enough fear about the dangers of people being too conformist towards authorities. The issue being that paranoia towards the problems of nonconformism can lead authorities to double down on stupid, wrong and even disastrous decisions and also allow the corrupt, criminals and bad actors with more sinister agendas, to take advantage. Not to mention that it can lead to persecuting people for not buying into what a) could be false b) actually is false.
One other example of this is accusations of Russians bombing Nordstream not getting the label of engaging in "conspiracy theory" and being "conspiracy theorists" but those who accused the USA of doing so, getting the label. Establishments, and even some rival establishments of different countries have always lied to their people, whether through false flag attacks, false pretexts, or one sided narrative of how geopolitical issues are presented. And really all sort of issues. In Roman history they deified emperors which is of course was a lie. So part of the conspiracy issue is about establishment narratives and following them as one is told, or dissenting from them. To an extend the conspiracy theory label is thrown for people who oppose George Soros activities for another example and the whole issue relates with dissenting from a politically correct discourse that deliberately avoids criticizing the favored narrative.
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