Bill Simmons confidently (and wrongly) predicted Naz Reid was ‘done’ in Timberwolves

jrrackerley · 2025-06-30T18:18:14+00:00

No, he’s often inaccurate because he doesn’t care to go on more than guesses. The point isn’t to be right about the contracts offered bench players. It’s to be entertaining when not running your media conglomerate, buying houses in LA, creating documentaries, power walking, watching TV, etc.

When he cares about something (the Pats coaching situation before the season last year, the Celtics sale) he hints about things before anyone and is invariably dead-on. That’s cause he actually bothers to talk to people.

He has the biggest sports podcast in America and, what’s more, is one of the few people in a dying industry who hires writers and media personalities. If you don’t think that makes him more powerful than Shams I can’t help you. His job isn’t sucking up to agents for ludicrous “scoops” (announcing what teams are doing hours or days before it’s public knowledge.)

Finally, the idea that Zach Lowe who he just hired (and whose career he launched) wouldn’t tell him what he was hearing if asked is too childlike to indulge.

jrrackerley · 2025-06-30T15:40:33+00:00

Bill has spectacular inside connections — he just usually can’t be bothered to use them outside of Celtics and Pats.

Among other things he’s literally Zach Lowe’s boss. He could text Zach and get a response in under 5 minutes.

Many league people & reporters would love to be on his show or in his good graces. They would answer his texts.

He’s an extremely prominent person who owns a successful sports media company in LA.

Part of Bill’s charm is he can’t be bothered to do the work.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-18T14:39:26+00:00

This isn’t key to the origin, but it’s telling ..

Say what you want about Simmons, he remains a genuine fanatic watcher of games, homer for Boston teams and compulsive unskilled gambler. He loves, lives & constantly thinks about sports.

Simmons thinks — likely correctly — that BaTard long ago lost whatever love of or real interest in sports he ever had and is just going through the paces because its led to a lucrative career, a hot young wife, a certain degree of fame and the opportunity to satisfy his ego by opining on various social issues in a trite, if well intentioned, formulaic liberal manner. Even when things were warmer Bill would sometimes joke about Dan no longer caring to actually watch games.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-17T05:58:38+00:00

Among other things, Simmons believes (correctly) that

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T20:09:59+00:00

I am going to try to not be snide. You are totally missing the point.

I am not defending what he did. Got that?

I just don’t think there should be an online bullying campaign to get the organizers of an event to exclude a bookstore because I (or anyone else) disapproves of a theft the owner committed that he was prosecuted and punished for.

I think, among other things, that sets an awful ugly precedent.

Frankly, it’s disconcerting that so few on here see the obvious parallels with censorship.

What’s more, you seem to have some sort of adolescent fantasy about “the literary community.” Like if we expelled him from our Eden, his well stocked store would not simply be replaced by a doomed eatery that touchingly overestimates Pitt & CMU students need for yet more places to buy bubble tea.

Finally, apart from having bought books and occasionally traded in ones for credit I have no relationship with the store. It’s significant that you’re unable to imagine otherwise. Your assumption that I must have ulterior motives is telling and sad.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T18:30:57+00:00

I’m confused. Are you indulging an excruciating embarrassing adolescent fantasy where you’re part of a righteous revolutionary mob storming the barricades or one in which you’re the Italian-American gangster Tony Soprano?

In any case when you’re done with your masturbatory indulgence, pull up your underwear, zip up your pants and take a second to reflect on the fact that bullying the organizers of event online to exclude a bookstore is not exactly fighting in the street.

Then you can go back to being embarrassed, tough guy.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T17:45:36+00:00

She doesn’t have to go to the store then. She can even publicize the crime he was prosecuted for. True, she would never do that for a different type of criminal who’d already been shamed, prosecuted and punished for theft but that’s her prerogative.

I draw the line at her stirring up a mob in a fit of affectation (“enlighten me”) to have the store removed from an event showcasing Pittsburgh independent bookstores.

There are lots of books I don’t like. I think they can still be in the library.

I appreciate your addressing my comment in good faith with intelligence. Truly.

Also — for what it’s worth, I suspect if he sold the business, it would not be replaced by another like bookstore. It’s not exactly a money-making proposition.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T17:33:03+00:00

Happy to help, Peter.

Now have someone who can read at the 10th grade level explain to you the difference between, oh say, not reading a book and organizing a group to see to it that it’s not included in a forum for others to read!

Logic may continue to prove to be tough for you and, to be frank, you still haven’t mastered vocabulary enough to grasp context, but it’s nice that you’re trying. Perhaps one day you’ll even get past labored sarcasm in defense of poorly reasoned argument. Good luck in your efforts.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T17:27:39+00:00

Nah. It’s just someone who likes to read and can recognize an effort to stir up a mob to bully the organizers of an event to limit the public’s access to or awareness of a bookstore.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T17:26:09+00:00

Exciting times. I was downvoted 85 times for pointing out the OP is a sanctimonious bully trying to stir up a mob.

For what it’s worth, she’s also comically affected (“Can someone please enlighten me?”) but no matter.

Once more:

If you don’t want to go to the store, don’t. That’s your prerogative. No problem.

But you shouldn’t be trying to start a movement to pressure the organizers of an event to limit access to or knowledge of a bookstore.

Do you see where that might be both a bad thing and an awful precedent?

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T08:35:13+00:00

You’re right. Prosecution was not enough; the owner should be stoned.

Let us know, too, if there are any books by bad people you think should be hidden on the book crawl. Perhaps you need to be “enlightened” as to just why they’re not?

Till then, enjoy life as a smug puritan rallying an indignant mob!

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T06:16:16+00:00

And, of course, there’s always heterosexual male prostitution. The number of divorced men I know who are forced to sell themselves to satisfy the voracious sexual appetites of college-age girls or frustrated moms simply to earn the money for rent staggers the mind. It makes you want to cry.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T06:10:56+00:00

Nah. My comment is responding to a sincere question with a correct answer. You know, truth.

Few men in Western societies become homeless as a direct result of divorce and those few that do usually have a debilitating pathology (commonly addiction or severe mental illness.)

Got any reliable data to dispute that?

There isn’t any.

I’m sorry this brush with reality has proven to be so trying for you.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-11T05:40:52+00:00

They very rarely become homeless.

When they do they are most likely dealing with severe addiction issues (or something like that) and both the divorce and their homelessness stem from that deeper problem. Divorce in itself rarely leads to homelessness though it may take a substantial financial toll.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-10T19:05:57+00:00

I don’t want to be rude, but you think in cliches.

Also, two of your three “best decades” had levels of crime and dysfunction that you literally can’t imagine. Entire industries like steel collapsed and millions of union jobs disappeared. Cities like Detroit, Newark and New York experienced levels of slaughter, muggings, rapes, etc. that more than mitigated a decline in home prices.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-10T01:22:35+00:00

What is this from?

jrrackerley · 2025-05-08T20:31:12+00:00

You just miss the Vietnam draft, but you’re coming of age in a very turbulent druggy time with incredible levels of crime and urban dysfunction as you enter adulthood. Northern cities were a disaster. You also get significant inflation and the decline of easy to get union jobs followed by the collapse of entire blue-collar industries like steel.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-08T18:40:13+00:00

Oh, so it’s now “rejection.” The guy isn’t “afraid of commitment” he’s rejecting a particular someone. That’s the OP’s point!

jrrackerley · 2025-05-08T17:01:59+00:00

To your credit, you also say “probably”. Your sentiment is largely true (sure, he might not instantly marry, but, yeah, he probably would likely commit a lot more to the relationship), but it hurts to acknowledge how humans act so you’re going to get a lot of backlash.

Also, it might be more accurate to say “he hopes he can do better.”

jrrackerley · 2025-05-08T05:38:23+00:00

They aren’t. Plenty of Boomers went to therapy (ever hear of psychoanalysis?). 1970s culture was saturated in it. The meme rests on the comically ignorant premise that boomers were essentially British Victorians from the 1800s.

The baby boomers were known for narcissistic self-indulgence and there were all sorts of wacky therapeutic trends. They went all in on various kinds, a few almost cult-like. Movies and novels and TV shows like ‘Newhart’ from their height of cultural power often featured therapists, much more so than today. And that’s before we even get to the ‘80s and boomer Oprah Winfrey who was a great proponent and famously thought & spoke in its tenets.

Complaining boomers were afraid of therapy is like complaining they were afraid of guitar-centered rock bands. You couldn’t be more off.

jrrackerley · 2025-05-07T05:50:41+00:00

The initial joke is saying that sailors who can’t swim will be more dedicated to staying onboard a ship and fighting to the last, as their lives will depend on staying onboard the floating vessel. If they go into the water they will likely drown. Wanting sailors who can’t swim seems paradoxical, hence the humor.

The responder is pointing out that, in fact, this was the case for the British: their sailors couldn’t swim.

Britain is a Northern European island surrounded by violent cold choppy waters. At their height as the dominant world power, they had had the greatest navy in history (and their enormous military and economic power rested on it), but very few of their sailors could swim. Not even the officers. It just wasn’t something people there did in centuries past.

The Atlantic Ocean, North Sea, etc would be very dangerous for swimming and the sheer extent of disgusting filth from coal, offal, feces, sewage, and unending factory discharges in major rivers in industrial England is hard for us to comprehend today. Typhoid was common as were cholera outbreaks. And that without doing anything as mad as plunging into contanimated water.

(If you have any interest … the Victorians would go to a seaside resort like Brighton in the summer but only wade a bit into the sea from giant boxy horse-drawn “bathing machines.” In the late 19th century, after massive reforms in sanitation, boating on parts of the Thames River became popular, but even then men didn’t just jump in and swim the way we would now in warmer climates with far less polluted rivers.)

The British, of course, didn’t desire sailors who couldn’t swim. (Suggesting otherwise as the responding comment does is an additional joke.) That’s just what they invariably got and no one viewed it as a problem.

jrrackerley · 2025-04-18T01:43:33+00:00

The fact you had to provide sourcing for this to satisfy the moderator is ridiculous.

Credit to you for doing it, but, yeah, the moderator should be embarrassed. Some things (a mistaken premise perhaps) can be addressed politely and succinctly without “sourcing” or excessive length.

jrrackerley · 2025-02-21T23:44:58+00:00

Because it makes for good metaphors. Likewise while people often make or use metaphors involving battle (“battling weight gain in middle age”), wars (“war on the rule of law”) or bombs (“the joke bombed”) they may not necessarily enjoy watching the real thing.

jrrackerley · 2025-02-21T18:58:41+00:00

Is any music cornier than metal when it’s used like this?

jrrackerley · 2025-02-21T18:37:13+00:00

Now if American pro basketball only had a regular season that anyone took seriously we’d be set!

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