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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Lebron James is upset that he was asked questions about Kyrie James’ potential anti-semitism but was not asked about Jerry Jones potential anti black racism. For those not familiar, Kyrie is a basketball player that posted a video link to a movie that I understand is making the claim the blacks are the real Jews. Kyrie refused to apologize until he eventually did. A photo of Jerry Jones emerged that showed Jones was in the crowd that was attempting to prevent Arkansas from de-segregating schools. It isn’t clear from the picture whether Jones was participating or merely watching a spectacle. Also of note Jones was only 14 and it was about sixty five years ago. Jones is an owner of the Dallas Cowboys, a football team (the real football; not the silly sport being played in Qatar right now).

Below is a link to ESPN.

This seems like Lebron’s attempt to revenged racism as “whites against blacks” instead of the conversation that blacks (eg Kanye, Kyrie, other athletes) have an anti semitism problem. The reason I think so is because the situations couldn’t be very different.

  1. Kyrie did these actions today; Jones was photographed 65 years ago. People change.

  2. Kyrie is a grown ass man. Jones was 14.

  3. It isn’t clear Jones was even being racist.

  4. It is more natural that Lebron was asked about something happening in the NBA as opposed to something happening in the NFL.

I am curious if this will be successful. The dirty secret is that the black community does have some pretty big racism issues (eg anti antisemitism). It’s also interesting that instead of leading the charge, Lebron wants to redirect. It makes it seem that he doesn’t give a damn about justice but just special pleading for his own race. Now of course I’d believe that because I dislike Lebron. But curious to hear other thoughts.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35153937/lebron-james-faults-media-not-asking-1957-jerry-jones-photo

Lebron and Kyrie won a ring together. If you watched the series that year, it was so important to Lebron to bring that championship to his hometown team. He left his heart out on the floor every single night against the 73 win warriors. And without Kyrie it wouldn't have happened, Cleveland would still be waiting, Cleveland sports fans would be hoping that whoremonger on the browns would break the drought.

So rather than criticize the hypocrisy, I want to celebrate the loyalty. Kyrie is his friend, and he's going to stand by him. If you offered me irrefutable evidence that my friend or my brother did something wrong, I'd tell you black is white and up is down in public before I'd criticize them.

I find the opposite tendency, where former friends and colleagues drop a cancelled guy like a hot potato as soon as the accusations come out, cowardly and inhuman, unworthy of a celebrity. So let's pass over this one, or celebrate the loyalty.

Loyalty is one thing (eg Kyrie messed up but he is a good dude). But proactively trying to shit on someone else due to loyalty when said other person wasn’t relevant to the story?

It’s also a pattern for Lebron to only care about social issues that impact black people (eg sided with PRC)

My firm had a me too incident. I stood by my friend who was accused (I don’t believe he did everything he was accused of; I do think he asked for sex but that’s it). But I didn’t try to shift the conversation by hurting others. Instead I said “X made a mistake but he also does a lot of good.”

I get where you're coming from, and good on you for sticking by your buddy, but Jerry Jones is a lizard person so he can't be hurt, and Lebron can't hurt him any more than Dak Prescott already has anyway.

I kid, I kid.

I guess. Sterling was brought down due to racism.

KD almost certainly is — he liked doe pretty dicey shit posted by Desean Jackson if memory recalls.

But yeah, there is a real racism problem in the black community

The cool woke intellectual guy HBU-grad in all these celebrities' circles is definitely hotep, where "wokeness" means the original "the CIA created AIDS and crack to keep the Black Man from realizing his natural superiority and unlocking the melanin-activated pineal gland powers of our Egyptian ancestors." You can hear threads of it in the lyrics of every rapper that's trying to be an intellectual, like Immortal Technique. I've been listening to more Kanye recently and noting every time it comes up.

These guys always have a ready explanation for why the celebrity's "fake jew" accountant says he doesn't have any money left, and why it doesn't have anything to do with buying his entourage expensive cars. So imo there's just this general attitude of mistrust for white/jew authorities plus a healthy dose of "all my homies know-..."

These guys always have a ready explanation for why the celebrity's jew accountant says he doesn't have any money left, and why it doesn't have anything to do with buying all his friends expensive cars.

Or it might have something to do with Jewish record execs and young rappers and the things that record execs did to anyone unequipped to stop them.

These complaints have gone on forever, on everyone's part. But I suspect black people have more cover to just notice certain demographic facts and be racially explicit/bigoted about them because they're seen as lower on the stack.

What percentage of their earnings do you think average mega successful athlete/musician is keeping vs their agent and manager?

Interesting that I said record exec and you said manager.

One outcome of this is that you seem to be debunking my point by saying that agents and managers were likely acting in good faith but the rapper was negligent. But you really aren't because a manager and record executive are different. A record executive is, imo, widely accepted to have his own set of interests which intersect with making an artist successful but can diverge in other, crucial ways, while a manager is supposed to work for the interests of their lord.

Beyond that, another outcome is that you completely pass by my point that complaints about record executives are universal in the music business to tell a different story about ungrateful financial naifs blaming their managers.

Those people obviously exist, but the point is that everyone shares the same disdain here - even successful artists. Blacks just seem to get away more with making it racial. Though they seem to be running out their string now.

This is a classic Marxist complaint about capitalism, but assuming you aren’t a communist it isn’t clear that the CEO of Lockheed Martin (who i presume has a handsome equity comp plan) is “more unfair” about the surplus value he extracts than the CEO of Sony Music.

I'd disagree here. The CEO of Lockheed Martin is in charge of a giant bureaucracy, consisting of many moving parts, and where no single employee is vital or irreplaceable. The value is in the product

This is not the case with musicians or athletes. Jerry Jones relies on Dak Prescott to win football games way more than the Lockheed CEO (Jim Taiclet, apparently) relies on any single employee to make war machines. Similarly the record execs need artists, who are disproportionately important to the business of selling music.

That's why it's particularly relevant to American blacks. They are almost exclusively wealthy through entertainment, not business or manufacturing or entrepreneurship. And therefore the American blacks who get rich are almost always in these positions of producing vastly more value for their employers than your average employee, or even your average millionaire.

You can argue the unfairness is the same, but I'd argue that LeBron on Kanye (or Taylor Swift) is irreplicable in such a way as to give them credence to their complaints.

This is an entirely rational and reasonable take. What percentage of musicians and athletes do you think are entirely rational and reasonable?

Congratulations! You've fucked around like an idiot and wasted an insane fortune! Would you like to:

A. Take personal responsibility for your bad choices and work on your self-control and behaviors.

B. Blame the people you hired to manage your money and tell yourself you did nothing wrong.

I'll bet there is also a more general psychological/narcissistic element. Those agents and managers and financial advisers and lawyers are mostly the only people in some superstar's life who can pressure them to do something. Imagine being a musician who is drunk off Speaking Your Truth To Power, and then noticing that all the Powers in your actual life have names like Greenblatt, Rosenbaum, Goldberg, etc. As you mentioned in another comment, sure the Jewish attorneys and accountants are mostly in NYC and LA... but that's where the successful artists go, too. Pick a city in the South - how does the rate of Jewishness compare between the general population vs the legal and financial arms of the local music scene or sports teams?

Again, I think you are entirely correct... but I think that this kind of venal, dipshit antisemitism is an entirely predictable failure mode for sacred victims with more money than sense.

Kyrie James

You mean, Kyrie Irving, his former teammate. They aren't related.

Haha yeah — typo.

this is the photo people are up in arms over. it's not even new, jones talked about it a decade ago, saying that he was just there to see what was happening, which... the kid just looks like he's craning his neck for a better view. the guardian thinks he should have brought it up just because.

People today lose out on college and employment opportunities when their youthful indiscretions, however old, are unearthed. The NBA’s Kyrie Irving had to satisfy a list of six requirements before he could return from a team-imposed suspension.

kyrie shared that documentary like three weeks ago, what the hell is this guy talking about?

People are obsessed with this issue for different reasons. On the right it’s a “muh based” form of copery in which Kanye’s schizophrenic views reminiscent of the average alleyway Hotep will somehow mainstream antisemitism back to the 1920s. On the left it’s that another Trumpist has been outed as a “real nazi” and must therefore be purged from public life with maximum prejudice. Some famous black people are upset because Jews in the entertainment business largely tolerate low-key black antisemitism as long as it doesn’t escalate and so they are annoyed that, in the heightened Kanye climate, they’re getting called out more than usual.

For those of us who hate the whole cultural marxism / "progressive stack" ideological edifice and want to see it torn to the ground, and who believe that the Jewish community punches above its weight both in terms of political power and in terms of specifically promoting the "progressive stack" ideology, and who are neither black nor Jewish and therefore have no dog directly in this fight, it's delightful.

As a wise man once taught, if you want to tear down an edifice, you heighten its contradictions. One towering contradiction in the progressive stack ideology is that, on the one hand, its foundation is an argument from disproportion ("Blacks Less Likely"), but on the other hand, the Jewish community (IMO its principal architect and custodian) is More Likely than anyone. Kanye and the ADL are doing hero's work right now to heighten that contradiction. It would be lovely for the Jewish community to be as explicit and vocal as possible about why they are excepted from the rules that govern this system, and I appreciate Kanye's efforts to solicit that explanation, even if there's little that I otherwise agree with him about.

I'm genuinely curious if you see a flaw ("muh ___") in my reasoning.

The stuff that black people are supposedly institutionally annoyed by whites at, like police shootings, don’t have anything to do with Jews (who rarely become police officers, certainly outside NYC), and Jews are also very rare in the Deep South, where the great majority of American black people live. Hotep complaints are quite different to the complaints of the average black progressive racial activist, in general many fringe black nationalist or conspiracist groups are socially conservative, patriarchal /misogynistic, and at odds with black progressive activists.

If you look at the “progressive stack” in your average Deep South town where the average African American lives, there may be whites, but there are no Jews to place.

None of my comment relates to the Deep South nor to the classes of whites and blacks who live there, all of whom are all but irrelevant to The Discourse. Kanye and the ADL influence elite discourse; Billy Bob and Jamaal don't influence it and probably aren't even aware of it; at best, they are objects of it, when the coastal Eye of Sauron fixates upon some squalid incident to elevate above the hundreds of thousands of quotidian but equally depraved behavior to advance an argument or storyline in the Great Culture Game (e.g. that black jogger guy who got shot by those white rednecks -- Arbory Aubery or whatever). This is a struggle that plays out in the commanding heights of culture, wherein I hope it isn't controversial that the Jewish community participates well in excess of its share of the population, such as when the Sulzberger dynasty manipulates the gimbals of Sauron's Eye to find his sordid teachable moment du jour.

No doubt. But that’s what makes lebron’s comments so BS. He is upset people are calling out his group’s problem, but yet he talks about an injustice anywhere being an injustice everywhere. He doesn’t really believe that.

Nobody puts that into practice, not even MLK.

It was a mere rhetorical tool to guilt white people who might otherwise dismiss the issue as not their concern.

You mean the guy who makes no effort to distance himself from the CCP or sweatshop labor doesn’t actually believe his own rhetoric about injustice anywhere, it’s just special pleading for his own race?

I’m trying not to be overly sarcastic, but it’s not like this is the first example of Lebron being woke about black racial issues while ignoring whatever social justice issues it doesn’t benefit him to condemn. I mean that’s assuming you’re going to count a basketball player endorsing someone else’s schizopost about ethnic origins as a social Justice issue.

Lebron has a very regime-friendly, Disney type of media persona. Lebron is also friends with Kyrie. Saying "yeah antisemitism is real bad and all but what about this old white NFL owner guy" is just the most acceptable way to defend him.

Frankly, it seems like the same tedious racial narcissism that sets the tone for every one of these "conversations".

"When I watch Kyrie talk and he says, 'I know who I am, but I want to keep the same energy when we're talking about my people and the things that we've been through,' and that Jerry Jones photo is one of those moments that our people, Black people, have been through in America.

Somehow, someway everything is about how put upon black people are. Lebron James is a billionaire from playing basketball, but he's still obsessed with somehow being oppressed by things that happened decades before he was born. Jerry Jones is an octogenarian that idolizes young black men, but the expectation is apologies forever, with no hope of redemption.

I don't know, what's the punch line? What are Lebron and other people that are upset with Jones expecting to get from harping on it? The desire to do another lap around something that none of us have experienced first-hand and pretty much all condemn does not encourage me to a spirit of reconciliation, it makes me think that black grievance will spring eternal across the United States until well after I'm dead.

There’s no evidence he’s demanding any weregeld from jerry Jones- he’s just lashing out at an unpopular billionaire to move the ire from him and his buddies’ irl schizoposts. Of course with Kanye now going on the Alex Jones show to praise Hitler and probably also running for President, something tells me this particular issue of black celebrities schizoposting IRL in politically incorrect ways is not about to retire from the limelight.

People are actively being trained to think in a less charitable and principled manner. I can't tell you how many times I've seen "but a man/white person would get away with this" used as a defense, even if this other person was purely hypothetical.

I think tying a specific person to it - so you can call down the fires of cancellation on them instead of being asked a tough question - is particularly despicable though. But this is nothing new with LeBron. This is the guy who put out the information of a cop saving a black girl from being stabbed cause he shot a knife wielding assailant.

I expect nothing from him.

I suspect he would like to get the two minutes hate focused on a new target/off his friend's comments.

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