quote:

Glorifying Meek Mill is not a good look for the Sixers | Christine Flowers

A few days ago, when the Flyers were still in the playoffs and the Sixers had just taken a 3-1 lead in their series against the Miami Heat, I was feeling so overjoyed by this year of Philly sports success that I wondered on my Facebook page: “What is God going to ask in exchange for this? Hide the firstborn sons.”

On Tuesday night, God called in his chips on my (purely hypothetical) firstborn.

Despite years of die-hard Philly sports fandom, I am no longer rooting for a home team in the playoffs.

By allowing Meek Mill, just hours after his release from prison, to ring the bell in their pivotal game against the Heat, the Sixers did something that was unnecessary, irrelevant to the sport, and designed to alienate the simple, crazy, decades-loyal fans like me. And now, as Michael Corleone would have put it, they are dead to me.

Some may ask how I square my anger at the Sixers with my very public, very proud support for the Eagles, considering that players like Malcolm Jenkins have supported Mill by attending rallies in his honor and playing his music in the locker room. My answer is this: While individual Eagles may support him, the team itself didn’t take a position. (Yes, I know that Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie sat with Mill at the Sixers game Tuesday night. I maintain that he is an individual. If every Eagles player and front-office staffer had been there, I’d be having a different conversation with myself.)

The Eagles didn’t shove Mill down the throats of fans. The Sixers did. They gave him a very high-profile platform. They glorified him. And by doing so, they endorsed his behavior — and I’m just not cool with that.

Some may argue that true fans support the players. They will speculate that the players may have had no say in the move, and that it was a PR stunt from the suits in the front office. But that doesn’t matter, because how a team presents itself is just as important as how it plays on the court.

These optics are more horrifying than a marathon of The Walking Dead. The fact that a team that I have loved and supported would give a platform to a convicted felon who has whined his way to freedom on a night when they should have been thinking of the fans who have embraced them for long, winless seasons is profoundly offensive.

I’m sure that more than a few Sixers fans were happy to see Mill’s cat-ate-the-canary smile flashing from his courtside seats. There are plenty of people who believe he got a raw deal.

But I’ve followed the Meek Mill saga for more than seven years, and I believe that instead of glad-handing with celebrities and politicians at the Wells Fargo Center, he should be viewing the playoffs from a rec room while seated next to his orange-suited peers. The fact that he has the ability to speak in syncopated rhymes does not give him the right to be treated more leniently than other parole violators.

But special treatment is exactly what Mill wanted. And he got just that, first from District Attorney Larry Krasner, who campaigned on emptying the jails. Then from Mayor Kenney, who spent an hour visiting this one convicted felon in prison. (Has he visited any other inmate for that long?)

And then, unbelievably, Mill got it from the Sixers, a basketball franchise that should have been worried about winning a championship but instead sent a message to all the law-abiding Philadelphians who worked hard to pay for their playoff tickets that they were fools and chumps. The felon got courtside seating. The rest of us work 9-to-5 to afford a few hours of joy.

The bell that Mill rang on Tuesday night was the death knell for my Sixers fandom.

Whorelord posted:

https://gatesofvienna.net/2013/12/open-letter-to-his-holiness-pope-francis/ posted:

In your exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (paragraphs 252-253) you state that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

Reality does not confirm this statement. The Koran is full of bellicose and hate-mongering verses against non-Muslims. Your Holiness will be able to find them if he reads the Koran
[...]
We must speak the truth about Islam —the largest threat to mankind in this present age

je1 healthcare posted:

The 'different experience with appropriation' probably amounts to most people in Asia being more conscious of the fact that their own cultures are the products of appropriation (as are all cultures)

90% of Japanese culture is directly derived from China and the west, so there's probably not much room for Japanese nationals to complain, since most advances in Japanese culture for the past century has just been them copying and modifying whatever western things they liked. From fashion, to music, cuisine, to Christian-themed weddings. They've become preferred over traditional shinto weddings solely due to the aesthetics.

Like, if there was a population of white expats in Japan complaining every time a piece of Japanese fiction used medieval Europe or the wild west as a setting (which is all the time), then they'd also be rightly seen as insecure weirdos

WampaLord posted:

Because we're tribal animals at heart and she's part of their tribe.

More people need to become sports fans and treat politics like politics and not sports. Sports is where you can exercise your tribalistic nature in a fairly healthy way.

je1 healthcare posted:

The 'different experience with appropriation' probably amounts to most people in Asia being more conscious of the fact that their own cultures are the products of appropriation (as are all cultures)

90% of Japanese culture is directly derived from China and the west, so there's probably not much room for Japanese nationals to complain, since most advances in Japanese culture for the past century has just been them copying and modifying whatever western things they liked. From fashion, to music, cuisine, to Christian-themed weddings. They've become preferred over traditional shinto weddings solely due to the aesthetics.

Like, if there was a population of white expats in Japan complaining every time a piece of Japanese fiction used medieval Europe or the wild west as a setting (which is all the time), then they'd also be rightly seen as insecure weirdos

Pirate Radar posted:

But it’s also that the Japanese-American community has experienced discrimination in ways that Japanese people in Japan have not, and that Japanese in Hollywood have dealt with being typecast or exoticized and then get to see a white director pull aspects of Japanese culture into his movie because it’s safely exotic but also twee.

Like, the takeaway here is not that you can’t make movies that feature other cultures, it’s just that you gotta think about why you picked that culture and how that will go down in context or you risk coming off like a bit of a dick.

Pirate Radar posted:

Wasn’t the point of that article (about IoD) that it’s an American movie that exists in the context of Hollywood and that Asian people in Asia have a much different experience with appropriation than Asian-Americans do?

icantfindaname posted:

I watched that movie and IMO 'cultural appropriation' is a really weird way of framing it. The movie portrays the Japanese people as a dehumanized Other, that's the problem, not that a white director is making a movie with taika drums and kimonos in it. Like it would almost have been a less racist movie had he literally removed all the Japanese people and left all the cultural artifacts in place. The problem is that white people like Asian cultural artifacts but very clearly consider real live Asian people to be less human than they are, and I feel like the dominant postmodern discourse of cultural appropriation really fails to identify that. Of course, I'm a pure amateur so maybe I'm wrong here

Pirate Radar posted:

No, that’s also part of it. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that appropriation was the only thing at hand, we just got into talking about it.

tractor fanatic posted:

asians in america face a totally different set of circumstances than asians in asia, so there's nothing wrong with the take that asians in asia don't really get a say in american race issues. the cultural appropriation part gets way tricker if you take that stance though, since asians in america can't really claim ownership of asian culture either.

Whorelord posted:

Dreddout posted:

https://twitter.com/WeWuzBoomers/status/989008072726196225?s=19

https://twitter.com/_johar_ali_/status/989009505311776770?s=20

Dreddout posted:

https://twitter.com/WeWuzBoomers/status/989008072726196225?s=19

https://twitter.com/_johar_ali_/status/989009505311776770?s=20

VectorSigma posted:

lol not only were we like the last modern nation to abolish slavery, we didn't really abolish it, only restructured it.

Pirate Radar posted:

It’s super tiring though to see arguments like “well I found a [minority] who thinks [x] therefore arguments to the contrary are invalid”

while we’re on that subject, how about those Kanye tweets?

TetsuoTW posted:

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/956507441306525696

MizPiz posted:

https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/989337846749323264?s=19

MizPiz posted:

https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/989337846749323264?s=19

TetsuoTW posted:

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/956507441306525696

ikanreed posted:

I've got my own hot take that's been cooking for a while.

Leftists: labor theory of value
Also leftists: gently caress work

Serf posted:

simple fact of the matter is that advancements in technology have made it so that less work needs to be done, and eventually virtually all the work will be done by machines

ikanreed posted:

I don't disagree with that but it does contradict labor theory of value

ikanreed posted:

I don't disagree with that but it does contradict labor theory of value

ikanreed posted:

I don't disagree with that but it does contradict labor theory of value

je1 healthcare posted:

"Upon seeing this mayo and corn-covered abomination of a "pizza" being served on a Japanese menu, I suddenly felt as if my entire heritage was torn from me. Is this how they see Italy's rich culture? Are we anything more than a collection of stereotypes, cheap English lessions, and 'quirky' dish ideas? Did they even consult a single white person before appropriating? I quickly let the manager know the severity of his error, but alas, all they did was film me and laugh at my less-than-perfect translation abilities"

Strangelet Wave posted:

e: lol u got the reds all got and bothered

Goon Danton posted:

Hey, you can't expect us to read that huge fuckin book and not want to show off a little about it