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Well, it finally happened. Last Saturday San Jose Sharks goaltender James Reimer, citing religious beliefs, refused to wear the Pride-themed warmup jersey in honor of Pride night, and accordingly sat out warmups. Reimer has started most of San Jose's games this season but has mostly been splitting time with Kaapo Kahkonen, but he did not start Saturday and instead was Kahkonen's backup. This isn't the first time this season that the Pride jerseys have led to controversy—Ivan Provorov of the Philadelphia Flyers declined to wear it back in January, citing his Russian Orthodox faith, and Pride nights were cancelled in New York and Minnesota (presumably because the refusals would be conspicuous enough to cause undue controversy, but I have no evidence of this). So it's been simmering for a while, but this was the first real big blowup. Getting mad at Russians for having "incorrect" beliefs doesn't get much traction (Ovechkin's support of Putin was never that big a deal) because it's presumed that they aren't exactly the most enlightened people. And individual teams cancelling events seems suspect but teams are already too easy to get mad at for a variety of reasons, though people certainly took advantage of the opportunity. But now, with Reimer, and Anglo Protestant. conservatives finally have their Colin Kaepernick.
Reaction was predictable. The Fox News comment section duly praised Reimer for his courage to stand up against the wokeness that has come to infect professional sports. Reddit, meanwhile, seemed disgusted that the NHL would allow one of its players to openly flaunt the ideals of inclusiveness. There was also a quite a bit of armchair theologizing, with people who almost assuredly aren't religious either making fun of religion wholesale or claiming that, actually, Reimer's faith should make him an LGBT ally. Nearly absent from this conversation, though, is Kaepernick, despite the obvious parallels. Conservatives had previously argued that "politics should be kept out of sports", and that Kaepernick's nonparticipation in a team-oriented civic ritual was tantamount to injecting his own politics into the game. Even Mike Tomlin's decision to keep the Steelers in the tunnel in an attempt to avoid controversy that may have resulted from a player kneeling backfired; participation was mandatory, and Alejandro Villenueva was praised as a folk hero for conspicuously entering the field anyway to stand for the anthem. Ditto liberals, who also failed to see that the idea of punishing a player for refusing to participate in a pregame activity because it was against his religious or political beliefs is something that extends across the board; we can't pick and choose which beliefs are okay to protest and which aren't. The only real difference is that conservatives seem to believe that Pride nights are an abomination that has to go, while I never heard any serious Kaepernick supporters suggest that the NFL should do away with the anthem.
What's surprising is the lack of self-awareness. It's not that people in these comments sections don't challenge people with the obvious Kaepernick comparisons, it's that no one seems willing to even engage. I have yet to see anyone on either side make a statement about consistency (i.e. I defended Kaepernick and I defend Reimer/I criticized Kaepernick and I'm criticizing Reimer) or attempt to differentiate the situations. People usually try to differentiate because they want to appear principled and not just reacting based on their own biases, but most controversies give a little room for it. The Kaepernick case is so familiar and so alike that it's almost as if the cognitive dissonance actively prevents people from engaging. I'd like to see one person try to justify their position in light of this argument. Just one.
This should just be filed under yet another case where the dissident right perspective generalizes where the Conservative perspective does not:
Conservatives want to claim that sports shouldn't be political, but the DR understands that everything is political, and the more relevant it is to social consciousness the more political it is inherently.
The Conservatives opposed Kaepernick because he was "bringing politics to sports", the DR opposed Kaepernick because it represented the subversive enshrinement of black grievance against white people in an important public arena.
Now Conservatives are going to do somewhat of an about-face endorsing athletes bringing political controversy to sports, whereas the DR can support the protest for the exact same reasoning it opposed the Kaepernick protests.
So, the DR perspective can defend Reimer and oppose Kaepernick for an internally consistent reason. Conservatives cannot because they continue to deny that these symbolically meaningful conflicts are real, they constantly want to say "it's not about race" or "it's not about opposing the LGBT movement" when these controversies are very much about those things.
This lends credence to my observation that a lot of what the dissident right does is to try to make leftist victim politics work in the service of white people / males / etc. rather than against them. In that sense, it is in spirit a leftist movement.
I actually cannot think of any popular modern political movement in the West that is not based on claiming to be the real victims.
This is an appealing belief but I don't think it holds up. There are perfectly rational reasons to dispute victimhood status even if you don't think it's actually important if your interlocutor thinks it is. If you're 5'5" tall and a 6'6" tall person behind you at a theater tells you that you should switch seats with him because it's easier for shorter people to see over taller people you can fully believe that they're not entitled to switch seats with you even if you were taller than them and argue that but it might be even easier to point out that you're not actually taller than them as that disarms their only argument and you don't have to go down the values disagreement about whether is legitimate to demand someone switch their assigned seat with you.
This same issue comes up with the gun debate. A lot of ink is spilt on whether guns makes people safer or more vulnerable. This is the sole position that the gun confiscation side of the aisle depends entirely on, if it's not true that getting rid of guns would make us safer then they have no possible justification for their policy proposals. The other side of the aisle also has some constituents that would switch sides based on the answer to the question but I believe them to be a vast minority. Listening to debates about gun control one could be understandably mistaken in believing that everyone only actually cares about whether guns make you safer or not despite that not actually being the universal motivation.
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Do the libertarians count, or are they being victimized by the Man?
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There's nothing about victimhood in my comment from the DR perspective, it's about conflict and how conflict manifests in public rituals and the hierarchy of civic symbols. The Conservative conflation of the recognition of conflict with the complaint of victimhood is another Conservative shortcoming.
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This lack of consistency from mainstream conservatism indicates a deeper philosophical problem with it. This cuts to the core of their neutered responses to easy divorce, gay "marriage," looser abortion stances, etc.. At bottom, neoconservatives have very liberal positions. This internal friction is caused by their implicit acceptance of the Enlightenment project's axiomatic positions, such as Mill's no-harm principle. Neoconservatives would generally not deny that all agents should be free, with minimal constraints on their behavior as long as all parties consent. They believe that absolute neutrality in the public sphere is an unmitigated good, and that "freedom" should be maximized -- to mean that we shouldn't enforce moral standards, even Christian ones, except by social means.
So when private businesses refuse service to customers not wearing a mask, the conservative can't object on any solid grounds. Unless they're willing to apply a similar standard to Christian bakeries refusing to service homosexual couples. Both are private companies and they can do what they want, under the liberal, egalitarian view. The best neoconservatives can hope for is a grassroots social change which effectively renders Christian morals the dominant position anyway, rendering the problem of enforcing this morality a non-issue.
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I think “conservatives” could be logically consistent about bringing politics into supports with one caveat
Thru this logic Kap added politics where there was none. And Reimer didn’t add politics it was the nhl adding politics by forcing him to be pro-pride politics.
As long as the anthem isn’t politics then theirs no logical issue with the conservative position. They just scold the NHL for adding politics.
"Didn't realize" begs the question by assuming that the position that someone "didn't realize" is the truth. We have a rule against consensus for this reason.
The national anthem is political in the sense that anything is political. Playing a game on artificial grass could be interpreted as support of the plastics industry and some player could claim that actually, the team has made a political statement by choosing to play on plastic grass, and that he's merely refusing to participate in politics by refusing to play on it.
That's not what "is political" means. The national anthem is controversial only among an extreme minority of people, and to the extent it is, most of the controversy involves opponents ascribing meaning to singing it that supporters don't. The national anthem is also something that has been used in sports for so long that it deserves the benefit of the doubt--it's always been there, nobody's bringing anything in. This isn't true for Pride themes.
Well that's pretty much the crux of the whole conservative/progressive debate isn't it? So handwaving that away is basically the (so to speak) ball game. How much benefit of the doubt old things should get just because they are old is a huge sticking point.
Segregated sports had been a thing for a long time, should they also have had the benefit of the doubt for example? Once pride flags have been in the NHL long enough do they count as well?
Segregated sports are politics which is about sports, not sports being used to promote politics about something else. If someone was prohibited from playing sports because he was gay, then sure, protest it.
If pride flags have been in the NHL for a long time without controversy, including external controversy, then sure,
That just doesn't seem like a great way to decide whats actually good to me (which is probably why I am not a natural conservative). It's just a form of status quo bias.
My view is that in deciding if something needs to change, both the status quo and the change should be analysed under the same lens.
If being expected to be standing for the anthem is a political act (and i think it is) then whether politics should be allowed has already been decided in the affirmative. We're just arguing over which politics get included. Which is fine to be clear. Its a reasonable position to hold that "good" politics should be in and "bad" politics be out. Its probably yhe most common position i wouod say.
And if standing for the anthem becomes controversial then would your logic indicate it should then be stopped because it is now controversial?
If playing on artificial grass is a political act, then....
Everything is political, if you ask the right person. "Keeping politics out" doesn't mean "keeping out everything that is political, if you ask the right person".
If it started as controversial and there was a substantial, continuous, controversy between then and now, yes. If it started as mostly uncontroversial and a couple of loud agitators made noise about it, no.
Again though that is just a history bias. Why does the controversy have to be continuous to count? What dead people think about today is irrelevant, they aren't here to experience it. So if enough people right now think it is a problem (whichever way!) that should outweigh whether people did or did not think it was a problem 250 years ago.
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Okay, that’s fine, but it does mean that conservatives had a pretty massive blind spot that they hadn’t even tried to consider very deeply, doesn’t it? You’d have to be a special sort of blinkered not to look at the actual semantic content of the National Anthem itself - not to mention the larger constellation of military- and state-affirming symbology which surrounds the presentation of the anthem at a sporting event - a presentation that very often includes not only the physical presence of active-duty military personnel but also a fly-over by genuine military-grade aircraft - and think, “This doesn’t contain any ideological content about citizens’ relationship with their government.”
This is what so frustrated me during the whole Kaepernick situation, because like every other American here, I was around during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and I saw firsthand the consequences of just rubber-stamping everything your government and your military decide to do. (“They’re fighting for our freedom,” etc.) I would have thought, naïvely, that maybe conservatives would have at least developed some awareness that there is actual political/ideological content behind all the flag-waving patriotic stuff, but apparently even all these years later they’re still using the patriotic symbolism as a license to turn off the analytical part of their brains entirely and fall back on “none of this is political, I just want to grill.”
To be clear, pride is the exact same thing from the left- progressives claim it’s not political, it’s just that some people oppose it because they’re bigots.
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