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, got his certification today. A full dossier was released documenting his abuse of teammate Jonathan Martin. He appears to be a better asshole than a left guard, and he was a pretty good left guard.

The behavior detailed in the report outlines a Miami Dolphins locker room that formed a united front of racial slurs and sometimes physical sexual harassment against Jonathan Martin and another player.

Up until last week, Incognito was still confident he had done nothing wrong. There are others who believe this is misconstrued, old-timey locker room ribbing, and that Incognito needed to behave this way to feed his insatiable ego and be a world-class football player.

So do we need to be assholes to be great at what we do? Do others need to eschew their own dignity to allow assholes to exist comfortably?

The answer is no. There is no other answer.

The part of the world defending Incognito is citing the wussification of America. Incognito defenders are talking about recent overreaction to the dos and don'ts of language in the name of social justice. Those people do exist — they're called "social justice warriors," and their thought process is that language is so desperately broken that every single sentence uttered aloud is an affront to their identity.

These people are offended by passive uses of common phrases. They may have a point. They probably do not. We can argue about the utility of them later.

Nothing Richie Incognito and the Miami Dolphins did to Jonathan Martin was passive. Incognito was aggressive in his abuse of Jonathan Martin, and his team enabled him.

Let there be no confusion: Richie Incognito is an asshole, and the Miami Dolphins are assholes for defending him.

Martin's teammates called him a n****r repeatedly. They said they were going have sex with his sister in ways that would be deleted from comments sections on some porn sites. This went on for months. Then the Miami Dolphins took Jonathan Martin on a boat and taunted him so mercilessly he spent the trip crying in the bathroom.

Martin, a smarter guy in the presence of idiots, texted somebody asking why he even puts up with it anymore.

This is not about the toughness of Jonathan Martin. It's barely about football anymore. This is now about what the point is in being on this big, dumb moving sphere, which Jonathan Martin questioned in emails to his parents.

I just don't really see the point in things. It's a major accomplishment for me if I brush my teeth or eat more than 1 meal in a day on off days."

Nobody can know the point of it all, but one of the goals is to make everyone else's days mildly more livable, and not the opposite. It's what makes it so all of the green stuff isn't one big fire right now.

Martin was around people who believed the point of waking up every day was to play a game better than everybody else, and to tear down everybody around them -- including their supposed friends and allies -- in order to get there.

We may not know the point of this whole thing, but a potential divine creator did not put us on this Earth to protect the quarterback.

Still, Martin was made to feel stupid or weak or wrong for thinking the less destructive thought — or thinking at all. And when he left the team to deal with it, every single person with whom he'd spent the last 16 months of his life took the side of a man who said he would "bang the shit out of (Martin's sister) and spit on her and treat her like shit."

Again, that is just the start of it.

It is possible that Richie Incognito needed to be an asshole to get where he was. It is possible he needed to bully everyone around him for years to become a left guard in the NFL. (He had been suspended and kicked off of teams for it in the past, anyway.) It is possible that he needed to perpetually berate those around him to excuse his left guard size, to motivate himself, and to handcuff others to him with his abuse and call it community. We all need community.

It is even possible to have a team full of asshole professional athletes. We just learned that with the Miami Dolphins.

But that team finished 8-8. That team was not very good — not as a football team, and especially not as men.

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