Knicks Morning News (2018.08.05)

“Libertarians are just Republicans who don’t want the stink of the word “Republican” associated with them.”

This is the 2nd dumbest comment re: libertarianism from the other thread, so I’d like to address it.
Three differences off the top of my head, before I have my coffee:
– the ridiculous War On Drugs
– the pointless wars and interventions in other countries
– the cop sucking

Republicans do often come with small govt rhetoric, but that’s all it is – rhetoric.
Rand Paul is the most prominent libertarianish politician. I’d vote for him if given the chance, but that’ll never happen because he’s not demagogic enough.

It was inevitable that the festering boil which is politics would infest our otherwise civil (LOL) discussions about basketball.
But our idiot-in-chief went wack-a-doodle on LeBron. So be it.
I’ll bare my soul. I’m a left-leaning centrist. Most of my friends are more conservative than me. I like my friends, even with their flaws. Being conservative isn’t the flaw, but why they are so is. Almost to the person, they harbor a measure of prejudice. They honestly don’t think they are prejudice. This is just one example, but when they say “That’s not a good neighborhood”, they’re really saying “I don’t want to be around the people that live in that neighborhood”. And there are other examples.
I hate Donald Trump for everything that he is. I loved Obama for everything he was but I’ll say, with all honesty, that when I voted, it was a last second decision to elect Obama over McCain. I would vote for a healthy McCain today over Bernie Sanders.
All of those conservative friends of mine call themselves libertarians. They are, for the most part, successful white people. What Libertarians really are, are selfish. They want to hold on to all of their money, believing that they can do better for themselves than the government can do for them. They believe that people should fend for themselves and not take handouts. Honestly, I believe in some of that.
The “Rational Middle” believes that hard work reaps rewards. We want to encourage free trade and capitalism. We want peace and harmony but we also understand that there’s a need for strong security. I do feel the deck is stacked against the poor for the wealthy but LeBron found a path to wealth. So did Oprah and Don Lemon.
But Trump is a far right Nazi that must be stopped. He is destroying the country and any rational person can see that. Anyone that defends him is on the wrong side of history. He is the devil. I hope that the harm he has caused is not irreparable.

GoNyGoNyGo @4, thank you for this post. Based on what you said I think I understand why you would vote for McCain over Sanders, but would you mind saying a bit more? (Personally I would vote Sanders over pretty much anyone else today.)

Fair enough Bruno. Thanks for the well thought out post.

@1

+1

Glad I didn’t write what I wanted to last night… It is very difficult to write calmly about matters so fraught and personal; thanks to all here who have done so. Makes me feel just a tad more optimistic about the world.

That and studies showing that altruism is as much a part of human nature as greed. We are hardwired for good as well as selfishness. It just doesn’t always seem that way.

“I Got Mine, Fuck You!”

-Libertarians

I guess I was largely shaped by my mother and my poverty growing up. I hated food stamps, school free lunch tokens, free powdered milk and the like. Yet, at the same time, I can’t imagine where I and my three siblings would be without welfare.

Your anecdote matters, even if it’s not big-picture data. My mother’s family was a family of twelve that had to leave Yonkers in the mid-60s when my alcoholic grandfather got laid off by his construction-worker union. At that point, they weren’t yet twelve deep, but Irish Catholics aren’t very good at family planning, and so they had an irresponsible number of kids even after fleeing upstate.

My mom didn’t own a new article of clothing until she was an adult, and had never been on a vacation until she and my dad went camping upstate in the early 80s. The relief of free school lunches was offset by the constant ridicule she received for being for being poor. Stayed in high school when much of her neighborhood peers were dropping out to get their GEDs. Received state assistance to go to college, during which she worked at a Burger King and a hair salon, the latter of which was run by a sexual harasser who made his female employees’ lives living hell. After 8 years of part-time school at night, she graduated with a SUNY degree. Just finished a distinguised 30-year career as a unionized vo-tech educator.

My dad was lucky to get a union job with just a high school diploma, but I suspect that if my mom hadn’t had the resources to continue her education, she would have had far less opportunity in her career, in terms of both earning potential and social good.

That’s my anecdote, but I’m living proof of her success. And I have those social programs to thank for it.

@15

That’s the most annoying thing to me. People who were never in the position to need welfare or help in someway thinking they somehow know more about it than people who have gone through it.

I can safely say that without the opportunities given to me through academic programs in Brazil I would very much be dead or in a terrible situation. It was getting into a masters program, funded by the state with scholarships and free of tuition, that turned my life around after getting shunned from 90% of my family after coming out as gay. The pitiful scholarship I got, equivalent to about 400 dollars, was what allowed me to regain self-worth and to reconnect with my parents and be able to pursue an objective in life.

Our stories aren’t anecdotal evidence, they’re experiences of people who actually went through the situation and are thus more qualified to speak about them. Other people might have had different experiences and that’s fine, but don’t speak on my name.

@16
Bruno, I hope all is faring better for you with your family. I’ve never attempted to argue that my experience is typical of the welfare system, just that it does do SOME good for SOME people.

I lived in a housing project for 9 years and on a street in TN with lots of poor folks (after a brief stay in a “white trash” trailer park). Are some lazy? You betcha, but some were not. Fortunately, my mother saw education as the way out for her and her kids. It took some time, but I think the state’s investments in us eventually paid off.

@18

All is fine now! Could always be a bit better here and there but well, nothing to really complain about.

The conservative and the libertarians both use those examples in their own ways and that’s what’s hurtful. The lazy ones become proof that welfare is useless and the ones that succeed like we did become proof that “you can do it” because of hard work, so there’s really no way of winning that argument. I do realize I created most of the opportunities I took advantage of in my life, but without different forms of welfare I would never be in the position to seize those opportunities in the first place. That’s why I can theoretically agree with libertarians that the ideal world would be one without welfare, but my experience shows that there’s no way it can happen without major damage to underprivileged communities, and that’s not something I’m willing to sign up for.

I’m not going to go to into the whole politics of everything, but I am on the road a lot and do a lot of audio books listening. There’s been one book that has really made me look harder at my beliefs and I’m sure some of you have read it. “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck”.

A few main points from that book that I believe are important.
1.) It’s okay to fuck up and make a mistake. That’s how you learn.
2.) In the social media world where everything is perfect it is also just fine to not feel great every day even though everyone is going to make it look like their life is.
3.) We all struggle with making excuses for why we don’t want to do something or why we are a victim because we have a fear of failure. Yes it is correct that we can not control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we react to what does happen to us.
4.) You will always have problems. Warren Buffet has problems. The goal is to have better problems to solve. The feeling of not being satisfied is not a flaw of humans, it’s a motivator to keep building and improving.
5.) Happiness is achieved for a short amount of time through the process of solving life’s problems.
6.) Give a fuck about important stuff: family, friends, your favorite hobbies and passions, not the guy that cut you off.

I’m also a big fan of the Rich Dad Poor Dad book and the second one Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant.

The big thing I get out of the second book is that we teach the kids how to operate in an industrial aged economy when we live in an information economy. A lot of parents went to work for 40 years for the same company and got benefits and a pension so they encourage their kids to do the same and we put investment on a back burner.

I’d go further but I don’t have any more fucks to give for this comment. 🙂

. As an example, consider whether KP would want to resign here if 80% of his income was taken by the government.

That’s not how marginal tax rates work.

Brazil made several plans to keep rich folk here, and they largely worked out for the rich folk. The only problem is that instead of investing in development of crucial areas, competitiveness or industry networks they kept their money in the lowest possible aggregated value industries, the cheaper ones to get into, and in every financial market possible. So we gained fuck all as a country and these folks don’t pay taxes anyway because tax fraud is pretty much the norm around here.

So yeah, I kinda don’t give a shit if rich folk leave because of high taxes they can all go buy condos in Miami for all I care. Because of this and a new austerity plan to shore up state expenditure the main (and pretty much only one) state research grant institution is cutting every single scholarship for the year of 2019, because of a pitiful amount of 300 million reais, effectively killing all university based, non immediately marketable research in the country for 198 thousand students. That amount is equivalent to the net gain of 25 days for the richest man in Brasil, Jorge Paulo Lemann.

@27 You are correct. The business side and investment side of the spectrum receive far more latitude with tax benefits. I’m actually looking into incorporating and having all of my 1099 income paid to a corporation where I can then make myself a W-2 employee with a substantial benefit package that gets paid with pre tax dollars.

Obviously that would reduce my personal income which would create a new set of challenges as far as credit availability for myself goes.

The benefit is I could substantially reduce my yearly tax burden and invest that tax savings into my real estate portfolio I’m starting to build.

I’m just starting to look into it though so it may amount to a bunch of BS. I am going to line up some chats with a couple corporate tax attorneys to see what I can legally do and which of my theories are not realistic.

Not exactly breaking news tweeted by Woj, but it might as well be, when reading some of your posts. BOTH democrats & republicans are bought and paid for by “special interest” aka people with money. Very small real difference between the two.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter who is in the White House; relevance is marginal; here in NYC everyone controls their own destiny. Work hard; keep learning, master what you do & you’ll be a sought after talent in your field of practice;

Best book to read on personal excellence and what it takes to be great is “GRIT” – by Angela Duckworth.

It’s so interesting reading different stories on this board of other people’s experiences. Thank you for sharing.

Welfare has a massive stigma here in Australia. If you are seen to be receiving an unemployment benefit, you are deemed to be a “dole bludger”, yet the Government has just approved a decent hand out to support farming families suffering through drought that everyone is on board with (which they should be) that effectively works the same as an unemployment benefit (i.e. supplementing what ever earnings you make so that you can live). I may be over simplifying things with my example, but the experience over here is that the general populace is on board with Government assistance, so long as it is for a “worthy” cause.

@33

Ive been to Portugal quite a few times and I can tell you for sure that even them, the “lesser” cousin of the European Union, has a much higher standard of living then what I’ve seen in my few visits to the USA. I was legitimately dumbfounded by the amount of homeless people I saw in New York and San Francisco, and I’ve lived for about 23 years in Brazil by now.

In the end it’s about a philosophy in life: you either believe it’s fine and those people deserve to be on the streets, or you don’t. I’ve never suffered much from poverty but more from other types of disenfranchisement, but sometimes it gets to a point where you either felt the impact of being underprivileged and you understand the experience or you don’t.

you either felt the impact of being underprivileged and you understand the experience or you don’t.

I’d like to think that’s an open question, but you’re probably right. Which is very sad because it means there’s a real divide between people. It probably explains why we have to fight for every little thing we get in terms of the social support system, because the other side simply won’t see “our” point of view unless we make them suffer too.

In the US, unfortunately, even if the cause is seen as worthy, I think some people don’t want to give any assistance whatsoever.

My son is French. He got free education through his masters degree, free healthcare, and an incredibly strong employment contract in terms of what his employer needs to do for him by law. The democrat-socialist system is out there and it works.

Yeah… it works great if someone across the ocean is paying 70% of the defense budget for Western Europe (current figures which were probably higher in the past).

Ex out the US contribution for Euro defense and your taxes go way up…. unless you preferred speaking Russian under Stalin et al…….

I like the concept of democratic socialism and we have a bit of it here , but it is great until you run out of other people’s money to spend.

2) the military spending point is true (today) but don’t overblow it.

I don’t think I am over blowing anything. I merely stated the US is pouring an amazing amount of money into the collective defense of Europe. If that (along with the nuclear umbrella) disappeared a week from next Tuesday, GB and everyone else wouldn’t have so much to spend on domestic issues, and we would have a lot more.

@40 – a point which I conceded. But I took your post (perhaps wrongly) to suggest that all the public services described in, e.g. the French case would be lost if euro nations matched US defended spending and that’s not the case. It has more to do with the overall tax burden a nation is willing to bear/impose. If you weren’t meaning to imply that, fair enough.

This is just one example, but when they say “That’s not a good neighborhood”, they’re really saying “I don’t want to be around the people that live in that neighborhood”. And there are other examples.

I’ve used that phrase a thousand times and so has everyone else I know including the most hard core liberals. In every case it was because the neighborhood had a high crime rate, high drug use rate, low education rate, etc…

There may be some small correlations between those things and “people of color” and we can debate the causes of that, but most people have no control over the life choices of other people or the policies and prejudices that are contributing to these problems. What they do have control over is which neighborhoods to go to and which neighborhoods they aspire to live in. If they choose the “bad neighborhood”, well, then, they are just dumber than a bag of rocks regardless of their skin color or ethnic background and the color or/or ethic background in the “bad neighborhood”.

I have no desire to live in a white trash trailer park neighborhood any more than in some sections of Chicago, but the liberal mind is always looking for racism. Sometimes it find it where it doesn’t exist.

If I called Jessie Jackson “Crooked Jessie” I would immediately get called a racist by some people.

If I called Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” I would get a different reaction.

The cognitive bias operating among liberals is to be hypersensitive about racism and to always be on guard for it. So they often find it, sometimes even when it’s not there. And that in itself is also divisive. People resent being called racist when race has nothing to do with what they said or did.

Three comments —
– It was nice to read this chain in which people managed to express their opinions without resorting to name-calling and negative stereotyping — unlike yesterday’s thread which, in my opinion, represented a microcosm of everything that is wrong with typical political debate in this country. I think that the inability af the left to see any merit to the beliefs/opinions of the right, and vice versa, is ridiculous and counterproductive.
– Politically, I am an independent who leans right on most issues (however, most notably NOT gun control) and I think that that the negative caricature that most liberals paint of conservatives is absurd. Most of us are not racist homophobes, most of us agree with the value of investing in public education and most of us agree with the need for a safety net for people who, for whatever reason, are not as fortunate as we are.
– re: Strato’s comment about seeing racism when it’s not there. I’m a white male who is married to a black woman and have three bi-racial kids. I cannot claim to know what it is like to grow up black in this country but I have a different perspective than most white people do. Based on my personal experience, my opinion is that there is a lot less racism than most black people think but a lot more than most white people think.

I merely stated the US is pouring an amazing amount of money into the collective defense of Europe. If that (along with the nuclear umbrella) disappeared a week from next Tuesday, GB and everyone else wouldn’t have so much to spend on domestic issues, and we would have a lot more.

Nope. If other NATO countries doubled their defense budget the US would cut ours by exactly nothing. We spend what we do for a variety of reasons, but being able to act globally is a big one and that necessitates our spending levels. Absent any contributions to collective defense in NATO we’d spend just as much. What, you think the US would give up Rammstein airbase if Germany doubled their defense spending? Dream on.

Nice thread and I’d like to say, you are all more than decent chaps – I’m glad to have spent time on this board.

The recent conservative swing is really pushing the wealth gap to it’s most extreme. Unfortunately, the Rebups have found success by essentially cutting off education to their base so that they’re fairly easy to manipulate.

Extreme free market capitalism simply doesn’t work. The only trickle-down that happens is into luxuries for the extremely wealthy. In 1985 CEO pay was 50 times the amount of the average worker’s pay – now it’s 350 times that amount.

This period of not investing in our infrastructure (“Socialism, or whatever you want to call it) will really hurt us down the line, but I guess most rich people don’t care since they’re all trying to build rockets to Mars.

“In 1985 CEO pay was 50 times the amount of the average worker’s pay – now it’s 350 times that amount.”

The trouble with caps on payroll taxes is that they encourage this kind of pay inequality. Increasing the pay of highly compensated employees is less expensive for businesses than paying a living wage to the rank-and-file workforce.

@48

The issue for me is how you experience those instances where racism happens. I won’t get into racism much as I pass as white easily, but let’s use homophobia as an example.

I’m cisgendered, straight passing, so my life has been shaped by homophobia far less than even I think sometimes. However, the couple of times where it did happen it really fucking sucked and left deep scars I still cope with. Half of my family basically told me to fuck off and never appear again, most of the other half made sure to tell me they didn’t approve it but would try to tolerate it as long as I “kept to myself”. The other instance was basically when a guy threatened to kill me and my boyfriend over Facebook, then sent pictures of the apartment building where I lived and the place where we both worked, because we were perverts who deserved to die slowly.

So yeah, in my 32 years I have faced two unequivocal instances of homophobia only, but they have been very traumatic. So I might see homophobia where there’s none, but trust me, it’s really hard to consciously make that judgment without falling back to your fears and memories. However, whenever I accuse someone wrongly of homophobia I don’t get any benefit of the doubt and I’m just the fucking antichrist, but people expect me to be rational and understanding of heterossexual people who “just made a mistake”.

@56 well those people who physically threatened you are assholes and deserve any type of physical force you decide to impose on them. Your family members should be told to fuck off.

G-League & Minor League Baseball players don’t make a living wage. That’s s fact:

Our socialist sports stars who are quick to tweet, kneel, speak up or school us about merits of socialism & equality should set a maximum salary of (pick a number..example: a million a month, $12M a year) and put all the excess money in a fund where they share it with all other current and former athletes in the same sport who are struggling economically and barely able to survive.

It’s easy to say CEO should get paid 35x average worker and then sign a quarter billion dollar contract. Everyone want to get paid their value (including LBJ) and bitch, if they’re not paid it…regardless of how much they wheel in. Humans are faulted; that’s why the political & economic system that works best is actually faulted too.

No puppet!

Stats! They’re not just for basketball.

Our new site slogan.

holy cow, it is way cool that knickerblogger has so many folks from all over the world participating…

i’m somewhat familiar with the political beliefs people in the US may hold – super interesting to read the perspective of other folks from around the world…particular on stuff that goes on inside our borders…

bowie’s “i’m afraid of americans” always comes to mind…

seems a lot of people go through the same kind of struggles no matter where they live…

politics have never really held my interest, actually, a lot of what the world has to offer doesn’t really interest me…

i enjoyed my time in the military “serving the greater good”…when it comes to friends and family i do try to stay connected…the darn godkid’s have roped me into their lives with all their diabolical love and affection 🙂

by and large though – outside of my home, the workplace, friends, family – it’s a monster swamp out there…yeah, just thought i’d kick in with that little bit of sunshine right there…

@65

I generally tend to agree, but I would like to reassert that those are two different processes for those involved. When bigotry doesn’t affect you and you don’t see it when it happens, it’s just a bummer, oh well, I should pay more attention next time. But when you’re the one feeling discriminated against, the psychological process is completely different.

I’ve been the subject of homophobic jokes by super close friends, people I vouch for under any circumstances, who have proven me in many ways they are not bigots. However, your mind is set in a way that you still feel the hit, you know what I mean? It is a constant reminder that bigotry is always present, even in your closest circles sometimes, and that you are the one with the onus of having to deal with it when to the others it’s just an afterthought or something they would rather not do if they recognize it before.

Rationally it’s the same process, and trust me, it is possible to grow thicker skin and endure it better. It’s just that sometimes it seems omnipresent in your life and it gets tiring as all hell to deal with, specially because you can never really know for sure if the person is just naive or makings misguided remarks or if it comes from a place of hatred. It gets very easy then to be aggressive and just go ham on everyone that does it, be they deserving or not of the outrage, simply because you’re so fed up with being the one that has to grow thick skin all the time when others are free to say whatever the fuck they want AND get offended when they get criticized.

lists of interesting topics to discuss:

1) sports
2) sex
3) food
4) drugs/alcohol
5) video games
6) books/movies/tv
7) faith
8) work
9) travel
10) family/friends

hmmmm, seems, politics don’t even make my top 10…

i’m mixed (latin/white)…i pretty much look like a regular ‘ol caucasoid though…i remember once getting picked up and questioned by the police, because they had me confused with some other white guy…afterwards had to ask myself – did that really just happen…it was not a good experience…

concerning discrimination though – i remember when my god daughter was young (she’s african-american), she was having some troubles in school and mostly attributed those to the color of her skin…truth is – she just struggles following rules…

i remember telling her at the time – her real concern about being discriminated against shouldn’t really be her color – but, her gender…

talk about getting the short end of a bias…i have a feeling the ladies have a story or two over the last million years or so…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD

I’ve never in my entire life seen anyone not get a job because of the color of their skin. That covers almost 40 years of working for major NY corporations.

I’ve never in my life seen anyone that wasn’t getting along and the reason was the color of their skin.

I’ve heard plenty of race related jokes, but racial and ethnic jokes were the norm for decades. I sort of miss them. You can tell when someone is being good natured and when someone has maliciousness in their heart.

One day I made a joke like that, caught myself, and was getting ready for one of my black friends to lace into me. Instead he laughed his ass off and told me he had more respect for me now because I wasn’t afraid to tell the joke.

So who knows what’s right?

I can’t tell what’s in people’s hearts, but I never see racism where I work. It may happen in many places, but not in the major corporations that have employed me personally.

I mostly lurk, but I am compelled to state that this site represents an amalgamation around being long-suffering Knick fans of the most diverse group of diverse group ( in so many senses of the word) of intelligent men I have encountered among such diversity. I have learned to look at basketball in a totally new way.

you either felt the impact of being underprivileged and you understand the experience or you don’t.

My own experience runs afoul of this, but I recognize it is atypical. Grow up lower middle class ( got to chauffeur around Red & Selma Holzman, as well as Bill Bradley when he was campaigning for an anti-war candidate), became the first college graduate in my extended family, then professional school, and a variety of career moves that provided myself and family with a decent amount of security( though not enough to be willing to pay for Knick tickets at today’s prices.)
Became a NYC public school teacher 14 years ago, first in the South Bx and now in Harlem(kudos to Clash Fan for 29 years). This exposed me on a daily basis to the profound struggles of poverty and I looked at my station and that of my white privileged peers in a new way. I never complain about anything anymore, except health issues.
As a society, we seem to lack the quality of empathy and a lot of the tribalism we see today is in part due to that.
If such a disparate group of men on this site can find a common basis( Knick fan suffering) to hold civil discourse, one would hope that intelligent people of different persuasions can do the same.

2for18,

Legit question that I’m curious to get your opinion on. In the broadest sense, libertarians are supposed to be economically conservative and socially liberal. Yet almost every libertarian I’ve ever met is a Republican voter. They’re really social moderates (not social liberals) who want low taxes more than anything. Why is that? Shouldn’t libertarians side with Democrats as often as they side with Republicans?

okay then – i give up…

ugh, i can’t even remember what the hell i was talking about in the first place…

basically it had to do with biases/predjudices and women getting the short end of the stick…

stoopid moderation 🙁

@76

That’s the point.

I’ve never been directly criticized for being openly gay and studying a group of queer people as a sociological matter, but several colleagues have come to me already with the impression that professors and other colleagues were being harsher than usual in their critiques for my arguments or mistakes. One professor I remember very well once told me drag queens were not a “relevant social group” and that my work on the subjectivity involved in queer gender performance was irrelevant. Talking to other open LGBT colleagues, they were also met with heavy criticism of their works by the same guy.

He might not be a homophobe, but the two colleagues he most heavily criticized were the top 2 grades in all the entrance process for the PhD, meaning all the other professors in charge of the process thought they had brilliant researches and one guy, out of a sudden, thinks they’re dogshit and their work should not exist. It really makes you think.

Libertarians are all over the map on different issues just like democrats and republicans. Fundamentally though, I’d say most are for minimal government intrusion in business, economics, money, the affairs of foreign countries, and people lives. It’s exactly where to draw the lines that they argue about.

Right, which is why I dismiss blanket dismissals of the libertarian ideology — sometimes they’re quite reasonable (drug war) and sometimes they’re batshit insane (Evictionism).

That said, the kind of libertarianism that operates in Washington is of a repugnant sort: Koch-backed attempts to reduce corporate responsibility in virtually all ways. Libertarianism, as an active, well-funded, organized, right-wing movement, is responsible for the irresponsible, taxpayer-fucking tax cuts, Citizens United, and vicious, targeted deregulation in environmental protections.

The Libertarian Party allows all sorts of voices, including libertarian socialists and left-libertarians of all kinds. But you should also never forget who owns the Cato Institute, and what their end-goals are: to create an American oligarchy of corporatists who buy and sell political influence with greater efficiency than they have for the last sixty years. It’s repulsive. They do not work for you.

I think I predicted 28 last season, but I’m not sure….I might go like 24-26 this year.

Should race be one of the variables in the formula determining college admission or hiring?

If yes, consider this, if a specific company lacks certain race, gender, religion, etc…and there is an a open VP job for which you have been working hard to get via a promotion; you’ve put in 55-65 hour weeks; got a 12 months post-secondary industry specific certificate which cost you $12k and have been developing yourself to be the best candidate possible for this position; It finally gets vacated by an older retiring colleague which you have followed around – so that you can better understand the challenges of the position.

Job is open to public and you’re a final candidate but don’t get the job; Division President says wanted to improve diversity and hired a Middle Eastern Muslim Female as it turns out that they didn’t have a single Muslim female from middle east working in the entire division of 380 employees. But tells you that you’re valued employee…blah blah blah

When you finally meet this new gal, you learn that you were infinitely more qualified than her and they know that you were the losing candidate as the President told her to be sensitive towards you for a period of time. Than you learn than her family is super wealthy as they own multiple factories and construction businesses in Islamabad and all over Pakistan.

If this was your experience, I bet it would be a little difficult to embrace diversity with open arms and without prejudices.

@70 Try a post discussing the use, environmental impact, and/or banning of plastic straws, that should work.

O/U for the 2018 New York Knicks- at this early date I’m going with 26 – just outside the top 5 picks in next year’s draft. Because Knicks!

i don’t know giana…as open-minded as i like to kid myself that i am – i think it’s pretty impossible to completely:

embrace diversity with open arms and without prejudices.

our minds constantly look for patterns, classifications and shortcuts; and, that whole “tribalism” thing is definitely hard-wired in to most of our makeups…

bring in to the equation the component of competition – heck, it’s a minor miracle that humans aren’t in conflict more than what they already are…

hopefully you had the opportunity to slip a tack onto her chair at some time…

Vegas has the Knicks o/u at 29.5. Feels a bit high to my gut

Is that the initial line or has it been bet up? Seems a little high but not so much I’d put money on it.

you learn that you were infinitely more qualified than her

Based solely on your own criteria, not on the criteria the folks doing the hiring were using. And how is it relevant that she’s loaded? Diversity in staffing choices is about bringing in different viewpoints, not raising up the poor. Her experience overseas is just another advantage for her in that situation. Honestly, focusing on knowing how to do the details of the job was a strategic mistake. The protagonist of your story put themselves in the position of being 100% capable of covering for any lapses due to lack of knowledge thus freeing up the bigshots to hire someone with different advantages. The guys at the top get a win-win, only your hero loses.

This is the problem with ‘merit-based’ myopia. The people advocating for it have a very narrow definition of what counts as ‘merit.’

Bruno, I’d just like to say that I have appreciated your transparency, vulnerability, and candor in this thread. You have made just about every point I wanted to make about structural racism and privilege, but did not have the energy to do.

@94 +1

I almost didn’t want to post because Bruno makes every point I want to make in a far more comprehensible manner while demonstrating a much deeper understanding of the issues involved. I guess sometimes it’s just important to me to show where I stand. But yeah, anyone reading this thread from the bottom and wanting to know how to save some time should skip my posts and read Bruno’s.

Lmao Jowles. Don’t you know who the main benefactor of the Reason Foundation is?

As a leader of one of the very few selective but diverse schools in the NYCDOE (which is, by many accounts, the most segregated public school system in the country,) I find great joy in this conversation. At our school, we have tirelessly promoted the notion that diversity is as powerful of a learning tool as there is, especially when it comes to reckoning with our most daunting societal problems. In other words, it’s not really diversity if it’s just for show or just on paper.

It seems that on days like today, we model what is possible when people from across the racial/ethnic/economic/political spectrum their guard down, measure their words carefully, and truly listen to one other. It doesn’t mean that opinions and deeply-held beliefs will change much, if at all, but I would venture to say that it leaves an imprint. For my part, it’s been great to learn about all of you and from all of you. Cheers!

@Bruno, the others said it better than I could. Thank you.

Apparently Adam Silver is friends with Jared Kushner. Knickerblogger coming full circle!

Denouncements of Silver as a hypocrite for unclear reasons in three, two,..

The Koch lies have been fully exposed by this administration. I won’t give them another nickel. But as you can tell from the cover story, many of their articles are up my alley. Just get the fuck out of here with this Constitutional Convention bullshit.

racism/prejudice isn’t just limited to white men…it just gets a lot of well deserved press here in the states; racism and prejudice is alive and well around the globe…

Yeah, well here in the States, white men enslaved Africans and forced them to come here and work for free (all under the guise of “capitalism”, hahaha). This practice didn’t last for a few years, or even a few decades, but for 350 years. And now white people are like “that was a long time ago, get over it”, even though African Americans currently make up 34% of the incarcerated population despite being just 12% of the general population, which is only one of many stats that illustrate the institutionalized racism that lives on in this country.

I mean, we aren’t even over the Isiah Era yet, and that only lasted 4 years. Imagine if Isiah was GM for 350 years. We’d owe draft picks into the year 3000 at this point, while the rest of the league was like “you’ve had four GMs since Isiah, get over it already”.