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Jesus III posted:She makes 221k a year as a salary. We shouldn't have wasted time saving someone who made a dumb decision at a dumb time. you miss the point of my post. I'll address Griner this way: No person should be behind bars in a work colony or prison of any sort for cannabis. I believe she was only incarcerated as a bargaining chip that Russia could hold in negotiations with the US which makes it even worse. Most professional athletes do not make much money for what they do and the amount of training they put in. The other thing about professional sports is that that job does have a very real shelf life. As we age we naturally slow down, lose accuracy, our sharpness decreases, etc. In the case of football injuries can drastically speed up this process.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:15
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Rigel posted:The calculation from Sinema is pretty clear to me. She knows she hosed up her future with the party. I think that in 2024 she is now going to run as an independent and threaten to split the Dem vote. She probably wants to have the same deal as Angus King and Bernie Sanders where the party agrees to not strongly support a candidate against them.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:17
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Jesus III posted:She makes 221k a year as a salary. We shouldn't have wasted time saving someone who made a dumb decision at a dumb time. Take away the salary and your exact words have been used by every single person justifying locking up people on drug charges.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:25
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Madkal posted:Take away the salary and your exact words have been used by every single person justifying locking up people on drug charges. This is exactly what I mean. Drug users generally do not end up experiencing substance abuse disorder. Why lock them up or soak them for money in the legal system. The people that do experience substance abuse disorder end up in and out of jail which leads to a situation when they do end up getting clean of having a really difficult hole to get out of.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:42
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BRJurgis posted:I think people who actually create art can get a pass even if it's not a practical physical product necessary for living. I read once that evidence shows early humans created instruments before creating weapons of war*, and that brings me dangerously close to wielding the word "hope". Art and music brings people together and shares knowledge in a different way than straight up science and academia. This was a terrific post all around but I want to comment on the bolded part up there. I think that at their best, superior athletes ARE artists and that what they do IS art. They can transcend language and cultural barriers. Think Muhammed Ali, who was at one point the most famous person in the world and could captivate audiences globally without speaking a lick of any foreign language. Michael Jordan was celebrated everywhere he went. Jackie Robinson helped transform American society itself. Athletic competition is universal, similar to music (called the universal language) and is an art in its own way. At least to me. How old are the Olympics? The creativity of someone like Patrick Mahomes and how he's doing things that no one has ever seen on a football field right now is a form of art to me. Julius "Dr. J" Erving was like this in basketball. Bruce Lee was a martial artist who carved out new areas culturally for Asians in the US and abroad and, like Ali, was world famous. Even people Andre the Giant, Pele or Shohei Ohtani right now in baseball fit this mold. Regarding how artists are compensated, the problem is and always will be advertising and sponsorship. It's never enough to just sell tickets and share the take at the gate. The whole world seems to be for sale right now -and probably always was - but eventually, when people get famous enough, they need to be attached to Miller Lite, Nike, Gatorade and so forth in ways that can't help but compromise the individual driving it all. Think about ball players in the past hawking Camel cigarettes, Wheaties, Chevrolets and poo poo. It affects music and movies too. We get Matt Damon shilling for crypto currency and Rolling Stones concerts sponsored by Budweiser. Wilfred Brimley selling us health insurance. 20 minutes of ads before a movie starts. We install ad blockers on our internet browsers. The relationship between art and commerce has always been strained, difficult and delicate but when people are willing to pay money to watch these artists work, it's almost inevitable. A lot of the artists struggle with the concept of selling out and how it affects their work while still needing and wanting money. The other side thinks their crazy for not accepting every advertising dollar they can make. It's rather bipolar, or built on the reality that while everyone needs to make money, there are left brained and right brained people trying to do it. Not everyone can be a salesperson, not everyone can be a great writer, an actor or dunk a loving basketball. Not everyone can build a stadium, a museum or a concert hall to give artists a venue. One seems to need the other but the things that drive and motivate the individuals in each camp are often diametrically opposed mentally and philosophically. One thinks the art itself is the means and the ends unto itself. They just enjoy it so they work to become good at. The other thinks that the bottom line speaks for itself and that money is the only thing. Both are correct though. I've done some creative work for the music industry and I can tell you that musicians are very loving serious about getting paid, as they should be, similar to pro athletes wanting to be paid. Look at what's finally happening in college sports where, for decades, amateur athletes were not allowed to be paid while universities, coaches and TV stations exchanged millions of dollars. TL/DR: Good post. Money and art don't mix easily.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:54
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is pepsi ok posted:To add to this, Dan Snyder did a godawful job running the Washington franchise and an investigation just found that he fostered a culture of abuse and sexual harassment. In all likelihood he is going to sell the team in the off-season for a multi-billion dollar profit. That whole routine is barely even a joke, it's flat out instructive. A big part of the increasingly fading smokescreen of capitalism is the deliberate muddying of the waters of the rich and famous through aspirational social mobility. Sports are portrayed as means of success and tickets out of poverty, dangled before the poor and aspirational middle class, while also being 'rich kids at gym class' at the same time. And of course, can be treated as frivolous and silly the moment it becomes useful, like when maybe a sports star starts using their platform to support leftists. And with acting too you see this when a country slashes its arts programs and the only people who can afford to become actors, even if they are genuinely talented, are rich kids. The other end of this is academia and institutions like journalism, military officers, and increasingly academia- presented as being merit-based and actual jobs that require work along with their prestige- and once upon a time, maybe some of them were, but now they're all daycare for failkids with the job even all but the most useless of them can do- repeating propaganda. Automata 10 Pack posted:Can the Dems run a libertarian in Arizona to split the R vote to counter Sinema splitting the D vote? Been said before but it's far more likely Sinema splits the R vote than the D vote.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:58
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200k per year is also not very money when you consider that griner and WNBA players in general age out of the league in their 30s. it's not like she's going to be making that much playing basketball when she's in her 50s. fortunately she made a lot more playing overseas, unfortunately she got arrested for bullshit.
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Dec 10, 2022 18:00
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Athletes jobs are 24/7 since their physical condition matters. 200k for a job that never stops when you are also a public entity is not a ton
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Dec 10, 2022 18:54
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BRJurgis posted:I think people who actually create art can get a pass even if it's not a practical physical product necessary for living. I read once that evidence shows early humans created instruments before creating weapons of war*, and that brings me dangerously close to wielding the word "hope". Without ignoring the rest of your post, which was quite good, this would surprise me a little and sounds to me like it comes from an older school of anthropological/archeological thought which has been very much challenged over the last twenty-ish years. Starting with Lawrence Keely's stellar work in the mid-late 90s, we've come to understand that organized violence goes back much, much further in human history than previous generations believed, and that in the latter half of the twentieth century there was a concerted move to overlook/explain this away as those academic working in the shadows of the world wars and looming threat of global nuclear Armageddon were, consciously or not, groping for some period, any period, in which human behavior was less ghastly and bleak, and so recast pre-civilized human life in noble savage clothing. Which is not to say that we're not also a remarkably creative species and I don't doubt instruments came about very early in our development as well, but them noticeably predating weaponry smacks to me of this older, now-outmoded school of thought.
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Dec 10, 2022 18:56
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I objectively understand all the nuance and I agree that athletes should be valued/they generally control their means of production and are thus workers/etc (and at no point does it justify her being jailed in russia, jesus), but also it's more money in a year than I've made in my entire life so I can feel the sympathy leaving my body with every "it's not very much!".
Byzantine fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Dec 10, 2022 |
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Dec 10, 2022 18:59
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Jesus III posted:She makes 221k a year as a salary. We shouldn't have wasted time saving someone who made a dumb decision at a dumb time. Should I take it from that statement that you believe that spending 9 years in a penal colony is a reasonable sentence for 0.7 grams of cannabis oil? What do you think the annual salary cut-off should be for someone taken as a political prisoner, above which the government should do nothing?
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Dec 10, 2022 19:02
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The desire to replace parts of your personal political ideology with vibes and gut feelings is a strong one, and it's not coincidence that the successful projects have valued rigorous self-critique. If a train engineer was making 211k, as very well some may, but still said conditions were intolerable would anybody here be as dismissive or emphatic in their argument to the point they're saying no, this person must be crushed? Look at the wider picture of how sport has been so valued by all cultures that it's up there with laughter and language as most commonly seen valued things. Look at all the community building and revolutionary outreach that could be achieved by rebuilding sport as a thing that people organize around. Consider the fact that the best way to find left-leaning orgs to work with is to attend local wrestling circuits when they come around. Wrestling-as-opera is certainly an art if acting is. Imagine then the reception to just dismissing it out of hand while at the same time dismissing as frivolous any concern over the well being of a nationally respected athlete who ranks among the best in the sport because it's just not important stuff. People would think you're being a lunatic, and they'd be right. Capital is leveraging technology to impoverish and ruin artistic expression across all sectors right now, to spend energy making it clear to all effected that they have no ally in their fight among the left is political suicide. You're free to feel how you feel in your heart of hearts, we're all blessed and burdened with this after all, but how you comport yourself in these matters needs to be something you give long and serious thought to.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:13
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ManBoyChef posted:you miss the point of my post. I agree. But, if you make a dumb choice for your own personal gain, I don't think we should move heaven and earth to save you.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:13
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Should I take it from that statement that you believe that spending 9 years in a penal colony is a reasonable sentence for 0.7 grams of cannabis oil? If they got there through their own greed, sure.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:14
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uggy posted:Athletes jobs are 24/7 since their physical condition matters. 200k for a job that never stops when you are also a public entity is not a ton Also you're one turn away from a hosed up knee or one fall away from a broken bone and poof there goes your income forever.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:25
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Did Griner even admit to having cannabis oil? I thought there was a very good chance of the charge being a complete fabrication.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:29
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Eric Cantonese posted:Did Griner even admit to having cannabis oil? I thought there was a very good chance of the charge being a complete fabrication. Unclear. I think she probably did and then tried to make sure she didn't have any with her before going through customs but wasn't thorough enough in cleaning out her cartridges. If they were going to completely invent a bullshit charge, I think they would have presented a whole pile of "found" drugs for the cameras.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:36
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I believe she said something about having a couple empty/near empty vape carts in her travel bag that she may have forgotten about. She certainly wasn't smuggling hash into Russia.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:37
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so here, let's do some math. remember people are basically claiming she deserved it for going to play in russia rather than live on her US earnings. from: https://www.spotrac.com/wnba/phoenix-mercury/brittney-griner-29940/ grier's current contract is 3 yr(s) / $664,544 (to the end of the current season). she previously had one for 4 yr(s) / $554,000. before that, she was on whatever rookie scale the WNBA has, which I assume is not great but could not easily find, so I'm going to add in $300,000. she is currently 32. some googling suggests that average career length is not really reliable because it gets dragged down a lot by people who don't quite cut it and wash out of the NBA (relying on this rather than the WNBA just because there's more info on it), but that age ends careers between 35-40. so she can reasonably assume she'll play till about 37. so give her another 5 years, and let's bump her yearly earnings up to $300k/year (somewhat of a raise) for those remaining five years. in total, her career earnings will be about $3 million. note that this is assuming she never suffers a career-ending injury, which is a real concern for an basketball player. or that her final years aren't at a discount because of age. now, a normal person can expect to work from about 22 - 70 (or longer, if they want, but let's use 70). so, about 48 years of earnings. that means that a person who earns an average of $63k per year will earn about as much as brittany grier, perhaps the best female basketball player but certainly one at the pinnacle of her sport, over their career. now, there are three big factors I did not include: (a) investments: earning a lot of money early on and investing it can earn you extra money, so this is beneficial to grier; (b) tax brackets: if you earn a lot of (wage) money in one year, as opposed to over time, you pay a higher tax rate. grier pays an effective federal rate of 25% earning $300k; someone making $63k pays an effective federal rate of 10%. these counteract each other somewhat, but i did not bother calculating it. i also did not include time value of money/inflation/etc, just to be clear. now yes, she could probably get a job afterwards that might pay ok - but most likely nothing like what she is getting paid now (not like women's sports are well known for paying well, which is why she earns a fraction of what NBA players of her caliber make) and as people have noted she may have lifelong injuries. so basically people are bitching that this woman dared to try to earn extra money to supplement her salary that works out to about equivalent to someone who makes $63k/year over their working life.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:37
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Eric Cantonese posted:Did Griner even admit to having cannabis oil? I thought there was a very good chance of the charge being a complete fabrication. Whether she did or not is irrelevant, Russia had no problems with athletes coming in with drugs just a few years ago and the usual sentence doesn't even involve jail time. This was a nakedly political action and should be considered as such. All these arguments just trying to skirt around a reactionary call for lawn order to be respected are confusing to me. This is already a situation where law and order was respected at every stage.
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Dec 10, 2022 19:38
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Jesus III posted:I agree. But, if you make a dumb choice for your own personal gain, I don't think we should move heaven and earth to save you. Is that what happened? Care to elaborate on that? Some really weird "well, the law is the law" takes rolling in here in this thread.
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Dec 10, 2022 20:02
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Jesus III posted:If they got there through their own greed, sure. How was it greed? Athletes travel all over the world to play their sport. This just comes across as "someone tried to earn money and deserves to be punished as harshly as possibly for political gains".
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Dec 10, 2022 20:40
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ManBoyChef posted:The other thing about proffessional sports is that unless you are a star you really are not making a lot of money. Hopefully you paid attention in college and are going to actually use that degree because as it is you will not be able to live off of what you made after your body is destroyed if you are just some rando on the team. Yeah, people tend to think in terms of superstars or at least major leagues in popular sports but.. someone who is 1000th best in their sport in the world is probably... a career minor leaguer (except maybe for soccer), if they are lucky, and likely making a 5-digit salary. And that's for sports popular enough to have pro minor leagues. Others are probably semi-pro or pro not making a living wage.
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Dec 10, 2022 20:46
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I'm enjoying seeing more or less the same posts here than I'm seeing on conservative facebook groups: "She's rich, privileged, and there's some guy who would have better deserved to be brought home. She made her mistake, and she should have dealt with it on her own." But here, it's from The Left(tm) A rare moment of agreement and bipartisanship!
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Dec 10, 2022 21:00
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uggy posted:Athletes jobs are 24/7 since their physical condition matters. 200k for a job that never stops when you are also a public entity is not a ton I’m not sure most people get how much time is spent working out and practicing it’s an awful lot. Even like way below that level just college and not even D1 it’s absolutely nuts.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:06
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Epic High Five posted:Whether she did or not is irrelevant, Russia had no problems with athletes coming in with drugs just a few years ago and the usual sentence doesn't even involve jail time. This was a nakedly political action and should be considered as such. All these arguments just trying to skirt around a reactionary call for lawn order to be respected are confusing to me. This is already a situation where law and order was respected at every stage. I've just found it really off-putting that so many people have been calling her a stupid pothead and acting like she wasn't totally and obviously rail-roaded.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:10
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Jesus III posted:If they got there through their own greed, sure. Okay, so the key point is "greed". I am not sure how you can identify that someone you don't know and have never met is acting solely out of greed, and therefore make the not-at-ALL-subjective decision that she deserves to be punished, but I'll set that aside. Do you have a salary line at which someone goes from "not greedy" to "greedy"? Is it a general line, or one which shifts based on professions? In addition, here's another question. Since you think she should have been jailed for 9 years in a penal colony for greed, does it even matter if she brought in any cannabis oil? Would you have been okay with that sentence if there was no cannabis oil or anything else illegal found, and she was arrested and sentenced for literally no violation of law?
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Dec 10, 2022 21:14
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Jaxyon posted:I'm enjoying seeing more or less the same posts here than I'm seeing on conservative facebook groups: "She's rich, privileged, and there's some guy who would have better deserved to be brought home. She made her mistake, and she should have dealt with it on her own." Whichever guy russia is holding that people think is more deserving should have been a dues-paying member of the WNBPA if they wanted Biden to give a poo poo.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:16
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Yeah, like that!
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Dec 10, 2022 21:21
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As a reminder for everyone, please ensure an argument you're making hasn't been made before in the last several pages of the thread.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:22
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Do "leftists" protest this much when people get rescued from other countries or is this because she was captured by Russia? This all feels very bizarre that so many people are upset that this person isn't rotting in prison for some what weed oil? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 10, 2022 21:27
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Koos Group posted:As a reminder for everyone, please ensure an argument you're making hasn't been made before in the last several pages of the thread. I mean, it's taken a while, but I'm sure this thread is about to reach a definitive resolution on the income threshold at which "downtrodden worker crushed beneath the boot of capitalism" transforms into "parasite feeding off the blood of the working class."
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Dec 10, 2022 21:28
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I think a more useful idea is that any one critique is not universally useful. Sometimes it’s a mistake to rigidly apply the same way of thinking about the world to every event and doing so can make one an rear end in a top hat.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:31
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Byzantine posted:I objectively understand all the nuance and I agree that athletes should be valued/they generally control their means of production and are thus workers/etc (and at no point does it justify her being jailed in russia, jesus), but also it's more money in a year than I've made in my entire life so I can feel the sympathy leaving my body with every "it's not very much!". This is exactly how the capital class wants things to be. By dividing the workers and causing them to resent each other, they destroy the most valuable weapon the working class has: solidarity. The closely related ideas of "gently caress you, got mine" and "gently caress you, the capitalists treat you better than me" are a knife in the back of the workers' movement.
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Dec 10, 2022 21:57
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Madkal posted:How was it greed? Athletes travel all over the world to play their sport. This just comes across as "someone tried to earn money and deserves to be punished as harshly as possibly for political gains". You just want to be outraged. I allow you to continue. If I go someplace dangerous on purpose, that really doesn't like me personally or my country, so that can make money I don't need, with a controlled substance (in that country) I don't expect my country to save me.
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Dec 10, 2022 22:21
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Jesus III posted:You just want to be outraged. I allow you to continue. If I go someplace dangerous on purpose, that really doesn't like me personally or my country, so that can make money I don't need, with a controlled substance (in that country) I don't expect my country to save me. What level of income makes it "greedy"
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Dec 10, 2022 22:28
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Eric Cantonese posted:I've just found it really off-putting that so many people have been calling her a stupid pothead and acting like she wasn't totally and obviously rail-roaded. Yeah it's off-putting, but imho it's not a bad thing to first look for a class or power element in any event, the misstep here is often deciding it's figured out and drawing battle line prematurely, because when one does that it's amazing how often the lines are drawn between the like-minded compared to between the workers and the owners. We need to be...kinder? less bellicose? with one another here, this is an excellent venue to sort out among peers the grab bag of contradictory and embarrassing things that brought us here but that is all ruined with wagon circling and defensive lines over the lowest stakes one could possibly imagine. To keep in mind that to think an athlete is an enemy by virtue of her profession does not hold up to analysis, and also that it's perfectly possible and even likely for someone to get there anyway and enter a siege mentality because accepting the burden of building socialism also means accepting that it is forever under attack, but it's not under attack from everybody, and without the support of comrades who themselves are supported by you, suddenly everybody becomes an enemy because we are an incredibly low trust society. I'm just thinking out loud here really, I know I probably could word all this better but I'm waiting on food to cook and getting philosophical as the terrible loneliness of the season and the post-COVID alienation creeps into my brain, and sometimes you've gotta  and hope you've nailed it with the 2nd draft. I guess the short of it is that people should stop to think if they're coming off as lunatics as something separate from what they believe in their heart of hearts, and engage in critique and refinement of ones ideology and thought, and also people here specifically should be a lot happier if they stepped back and/or were a little nicer to each other. I'm guilty of all the worst of it and let me tell you it's a lot easier than holding onto everything. It's okay to be wrong, it's okay to be sincere, it's okay to be vulnerable, it's okay to be empathetic.Sir John Falstaff posted:I mean, it's taken a while, but I'm sure this thread is about to reach a definitive resolution on the income threshold at which "downtrodden worker crushed beneath the boot of capitalism" transforms into "parasite feeding off the blood of the working class." I thought YOSPOS had figured this out like a decade ago, in the war of "what does 6.5 figgies mean" that took place after the previous war was settled on the shaky ground of "about 6.5 figgies"
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Dec 10, 2022 22:29
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Ravenfood posted:What level of income makes it "greedy" I think it has to do with the direct exploitation of workers or syphoning off "profits" from said workers.
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Dec 10, 2022 22:36
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Jesus III posted:You just want to be outraged. I allow you to continue. If I go someplace dangerous on purpose, that really doesn't like me personally or my country, so that can make money I don't need, with a controlled substance (in that country) I don't expect my country to save me. This is some comment board on a news article level of posting. No one anywhere should be arrested on bullshit charges because their country is in a pissing match with another country. This is just victim blaming and the idea that going to another country to earn money all of a sudden makes you worthy of being sent to a penal colony on made up charges isn't some leftist ideal but one openly praising authoritarianism.
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Dec 10, 2022 22:43
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The argument that "Russia is a dangerous place she never should have gone to" is a ridiculous post-facto justification. This isn't North Korea, travel and tourism to Russia was extremely common before the war. Countless Americans have traveled to Russia for work and tourism in recent years (Both before and after the pandemic), and the vast majority of those people were obviously not detained and sentenced to a gulag. When the State Department issued a travel advisory last year, there was an opinion article in the Boston Globe mocking it. And hey, let's also not forget that Grier's arrest happened a week before the actual invasion of Ukraine, a time when huge numbers of people (including many on these forums) were absolutely convinced that the buildup was clearly a massive bluff. Grier may have expected some form of harassment, but she had absolutely no reasonable expectation that she would be arrested and convicted on trumped-up charges as part of an international power play.
Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Dec 10, 2022 |
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Dec 10, 2022 22:49
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