Shocker: NBA’s Commitment to Social Justice Not Operative in China [Updated]
[guest post by JVW]
Update, 7:30 pm: Somebody is apparently feeling the heat and has gone to CYA mode. Earlier today some intrepid fans discovered that you cannot order a custom NBA jersey from the online Fanatics NBA store with “Free Hong Kong” printed on the back in the name area. After several people began tweeting about this, including Florida Governor Rick Scott and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the ban was quickly (and quietly) lifted. According to this Fox News report, the NBA is blaming the problem on Fanatics, but given the NBA’s craven nature it’s not hard to imagine that they were behind the original ban.
—- Original Post —-
Today begins the resumption of the NBA regular season after a four-plus month coronavirus shutdown. Last night ESPN let loose with a bombshell report about the mistreatment of basketball prospects in NBA-sponsored youth basketball academies in China. The report does not paint a flattering picture [all bolded emphasis is added by me]:
Long before an October tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters spotlighted the NBA’s complicated relationship with China, the league faced complaints from its own employees over human rights concerns inside an NBA youth-development program in that country, an ESPN investigation has found.
American coaches at three NBA training academies in China told league officials their Chinese partners were physically abusing young players and failing to provide schooling, even though commissioner Adam Silver had said that education would be central to the program, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the complaints.
The NBA ran into myriad problems by opening one of the academies in Xinjiang, a police state in western China where more than a million Uighur Muslims are now held in barbed-wire camps. American coaches were frequently harassed and surveilled in Xinjiang, the sources said. One American coach was detained three times without cause; he and others were unable to obtain housing because of their status as foreigners.
That’s right: the league which believes that pampered millionaires are appropriate figures to instruct us in the intricacies of daily interactions taking place in high-crime areas between law enforcement and members of underserved communities is standing by while business partners from a totalitarian police state physically abuse minors, some of who are from ethnic minorities within China’s borders. Flash back to this past fall when Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted out support for dissidents in Hong Kong fighting the repressive policies of Beijing, which caused the communist government to pull NBA games off of state television and ban the sale of Houston Rockets gear within the country. This in turn led to star players such as LeBron James and James Harden criticizing Morey for taking the side of a beleaguered people fighting for freedom, partly because it hurt their ability to sell signature overpriced athletic wear made by low-paid Indonesians working for a grandiose shoe company who also styles themselves as painfully woke.
Now of course those same NBA players and coaches have adopted in toto the agenda of Black Lives Matter, treating fans to pre-approved social justice messages in place of the player’s name on the backs of uniforms, but “Free Hong Kong” and “Uyghurs Have Rights Too” are not among them. Nor is “Hands Off of Young Athletes.”
One American coach who worked for the NBA in China described the project as “a sweat camp for athletes.”
At least two coaches left their positions in response to what they believed was mistreatment of young players.
One requested and received a transfer after watching Chinese coaches strike teenage players, three sources told ESPN. Another American coach left before the end of his contract because he found the lack of education in the academies unconscionable: “I couldn’t continue to show up every day, looking at these kids and knowing they would end up being taxi drivers,” he said.
Not long after the academies opened, multiple coaches complained about the physical abuse and lack of schooling to Greg Stolt, the league’s vice president for international operations for NBA China, and to other league officials in China, the sources said. It was unclear whether the information was passed on to NBA officials in New York, they said. The NBA declined to make Stolt available for comment.
The NBA salivates over the 1.4 billion residents of China, where 150 million of them watch an NBA game at some point over the course of the year. ESPN, who is an NBA broadcast partner and thus has a seat on the league’s board of directors, estimates that the Chinese market provides $5 billion in revenue to the league each season. In addition to the marketing opportunities, NBA teams dream of finding the next Yao Ming, who averaged nearly 20 points and 10 rebounds over a seven-year NBA career and cemented the relationship between the league and the communist dictatorship for good. Indeed, the coaches whom the NBA sent overseas to work these academies report that they were given instructions to be on the lookout for “the next Yao.”
But the NBA would learn the lesson that Apple, Google, and so many other U.S. companies have learned about engaging in commerce in a semi-closed society: business is done on their terms, not yours.
The NBA employees who spoke with ESPN said many of the league’s problems stemmed from the decision to embed the academies in government-run sports facilities. The facilities gave the NBA access to existing infrastructure and elite players, [NBA Chief Operating Officer Mark] Tatum said. But the arrangement put NBA activities under the direction of Chinese officials who selected the players and helped define the training.
“We were basically working for the Chinese government,” one former coach said.
And forget the idea of finding and developing the new Yao. The Chinese government is keeping their most elite young players in government-sponsored basketball academies far away from the American coaches, leaving the NBA to deal primarily with second-tier youth players. Hearing stories of player abuse, heavy surveillance and occasional harassment of U.S. coaches, abandonment of the promise to provide an education for the young athletes, and lack of access to the cream of Chinese youth basketball, and facing bipartisan criticism from Congress about their cozy and subservient relationship with a repressive dictatorship, the NBA has apparently quietly pulled the plug in Xinjiang:
Sometime shortly after Morey’s October tweet, the [Xinjiang] academy webpage was taken down.
Pressed by ESPN, Tatum repeatedly avoided questions on whether the widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang played a role in closing the academy, instead citing “many factors.”
“My job, our job is not to take a position on every single human rights violation, and I’m not an expert in every human rights situation or violation,” Tatum said. “I’ll tell you what the NBA stands for: The values of the NBA are about respect, are about inclusion, are about diversity. That is what we stand for.”
Nury Turkel, a Uighur American activist who has been heavily involved in lobbying the U.S. government on Uighur rights, told ESPN before the NBA said it had left Xinjiang that he believed the league had been indirectly legitimizing “crimes against humanity.”
One former league employee who worked in China wondered how the NBA, which has been so progressive on issues around Black Lives Matter and moved the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, North Carolina, over a law requiring transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates, could operate a training camp amid a Chinese government crackdown that also targeted NBA employees.
“You can’t have it both ways,” the former employee said. “… You can’t be over here in February promoting Black History Month and be over in China, where they’re in reeducation camps and all the people that you’re partnering with are hitting kids.”
Unsurprisingly, in order to avoid embarrassing their Chinese clients the NBA made no announcement about the closure of the Xinjiang academy, and they deny knowledge of the harassment of league coaches even though one of them, Corbin Loubert, confirmed these practices in a tweet to CNN last year. The decision to close the academy appears to have been made on the spur of the moment, not after a period of careful deliberation. Up until the moment the academy was shuttered, an anonymous coach told ESPN, the league was still trying to hire staffers to send to Xianjiang. And as far as I can tell, the other two academies in Zhejiang and Shandong remain open, as does the NBA China office in Shanghi.
Business interests who want to operate in China should carefully consider the ramifications of doing so, and they should have the honesty to reconsider their strategy of hyper-woke marketing at home when they enable brutally repressive regimes in far-flung corners of the world. Just as Apple’s Tim Cook ostentatiously calls for boycotts of U.S. states which don’t conform to the Silicon Valley ethos on sex and gender while simultaneously seeking to sell his product to countries where homosexuality is still illegal and in some cases punishable by death, the NBA needs to think through its abject pandering to the shrillest elements of the wokerati while happily partnering with deep-pocketed police states. I’ve come to expect so little from multi-billion-dollar entertainment conglomerates, but is it too much to ask that “Uyghur Lives Matter” be stenciled on an NBA court once or twice this season?
– JVW
And, as if on cue, Dianne Feinstein to whom it will forever be 1995, found herself unable to oppose a proposed bill that would allow Americans to sue China for conronavirus-related matters without throwing in a misplaced and completely gratuitous reference to China as “a country growing into a respectable nation amongst other nations.” She’s a real piece of work, that one.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:25 pmI’m sure Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich will let us know how outraged they are.
beer ‘n pretzels (368b0a) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:33 pmI’ve loved playing and watching basketball since I was eight years old. I’m old enough to have seen the Lakers play at the LA Sports Arena… West, Baylor, LaRusso… a fan since the 60s. But no more.
Not sure if the NBA minds losing a fan in his late 60s, but they’ve come close to losing both of my BB-crazy sons. Very close.
Colonel Haiku (607a84) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:34 pmSince I shared with everybody my disgust at the modern NFL a couple of years back, perhaps this would be a good opportunity to tell you why I quit watching the NBA about ten years ago (before the whole rancid social justice thing became a big deal). Maybe I’ll do a post about that once some player returning from a secret visit to a strip club infects the NBA bubble with coronavirus.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:42 pmThis, this, this:
The only reason the NBA “quietly” closed the Xinjiang academy was fear of what bad publicity would do to them. It was not because of any human rights concern, etc. And, if one coach could confirm what was taking place, then you know that any number of coaches, and most definitely the young players, could confirm as well. The NBA doesn’t want to know. They want to keep the status quo. IOW, they are doing everything in their power to have it both ways.
Dana (292df6) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:48 pmI used to be one of those sports junkies that could recite lineups, stats, best players, defenders, etc. Melo going to the Knicks ruined basketball for me. Kaepernick ruined football. BLM has now ruined baseball. Is hockey next?
NJRob (8a4a68) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:49 pmMelo going to the Knicks ruined basketball for me.
Ugh, Carmello Anthony. Seems like generally a pretty nice guy (my buddy the fishing guide taught him to fish when Mello played for the Nuggets) and was a terrific player for USA Basketball when he was surrounded by superstars, but still perhaps the single most overrated NBA player of his era. Teams spent a decade trying to make him into a star, never understanding that he was really a role player at heart.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 2:55 pmThis just kills me:
What happened to those boys at the basketball camp that was closed? Are they now in some hideous Uhygher prison camp?
Dana (292df6) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:25 pmOne cheer to the Biden campaign: they have apparently banned the insidious Chinese app TikTok from being installed on any campaign worker’s phone or tablet. The Trump Administration earlier mulled banning the app in the U.S. altogether.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:36 pm8-
mg (8cbc69) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:45 pmThey are making Nike parts in a work camp.
China owns Nike and the NBA
First, they take my Sonics from Seattle. Now this.
Paul Montagu (1ef895) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:48 pmWhen will professional sports address the real problem plaguing the NFL, NBA, and MLB: The players all tripping over their Phi Beta Kappa keys?
nk (1d9030) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:50 pmBusiness interests who want to operate in China should carefully consider the ramifications of doing so, and they should have the honesty to reconsider their strategy of hyper-woke marketing at home when they enable brutally repressive regimes in far-flung corners of the world.
As opposed to ‘business interests’ [oil, banks] who want to operate in Saudi Arabia… or Russia… should carefully consider the ramifications of doing so…
The stink of free-market capitalism is oh-so-sweet.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:55 pmKaepernick ruined football.
Greed ruined football–with an assist from Roone Arledge and Howard Cosell.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:56 pmAs opposed to ‘business interests’ [oil, banks] who want to operate in Saudi Arabia… or Russia… should carefully consider the ramifications of doing so…
Up until the past month or so my bank wasn’t telling me how to be a more woke citizen. And oil companies for the most part still aren’t doing so, unless their campaigns are so subtle that I am missing them.
If a company wants to be 100% removed from considerations of how their operations affect the social fabric of society then I won’t begrudge them making that decision. But once the NBA, or Bank of America, or Mobil/Exxon, or Nike, or Apple, or whomever starts to assert itself as the arbiter of proper social behavior then it is completely legitimate to point out areas where they operate counter to their proclaimed message.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 3:59 pmBut once the NBA, or Bank of America, or Mobil/Exxon, or Nike, or Apple, or whomever starts to assert itself as the arbiter of proper social behavior then it is completely legitimate to point out areas where they operate counter to their proclaimed message.
They do that already. Sometimes subtle; sometimes overt.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:08 pmBelieve me, DCSCA: the NBA’s advocacy is anything but subtle.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:09 pm@7.It’s an entertainment enterprise; a limelight business.
JPMorgan/Chase or Exxon/Mobil, less so.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:15 pm^17.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:16 pmNext time you dine on some of The Colonel’s extra-crispy chicken wings watchin’ the NBA or the NFL just remember KFC is most popular fast food chain in China since it was introduced there in the 1980’s. – source, businessinsider
KFC is operated is China by Yum China Holdings Inc., a fast-food restaurant company incorporated in the United States and is headquartered in Shanghai, China,(operational) and Plano, Texas, USA. [Red Texas?!] With US$6.8 billion of revenue in 2016 and over 7,600 restaurants, it is one of the largest restaurant companies in China. It operates 8,484 restaurants in over 1,100 cities and towns located in every province and autonomous region in Mainland China, and has a workforce of 450,000 employees. -source, Wikicommies.ropetohangyou.gov
Reaganomics. 😉
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:29 pmAgain, DCSCA: as far as I know, KFC has never tried to instruct me as to which trendy social beliefs I need to espouse. The NBA most assuredly has. I’m not sure why you keep missing that point. If you would like to direct me to other American businesses who do business in China or Saudi Arabia or Russia or wherever, please read this comment again before wasting your time.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:33 pmThanks a lot, NJ Rob…
urbanleftbehind (08b3a1) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:51 pmhttp://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/ethan-bear-edmonton-oilers-cree-name-syllabics-1.5667325
fantasy football ruined football
mg (8cbc69) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:58 pmBut spandex doubled its fan base.
nk (1d9030) — 7/30/2020 @ 4:59 pmallowing receivers to get off the line of scrimmage untouched is a game changer
mg (8cbc69) — 7/30/2020 @ 5:00 pmTy Law Rule
fantasy football ruined football
Music to my ears.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 5:14 pm@21. You have it backwards– and missing the point. The NBA is a business w/an entertainment product to market- worldwide. Perhaps not as overtly as KFC, but as it is an entertainment product [not a ‘sport’– which is a bogus moniker anyway.] It is just like KFC, or Exxon/Mobil… or even Donald Trump. Products w/an image to market — and they’ve been ‘influencing you’ for decades. They have loads data on it. That you object to their messaging is fine, so don’t consume the product. But like KFC, the NBA is merely a product to be marketed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KFC_advertising
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:02 pmThe WNBA, which is wholly paid for by the NBA, opened their season this past weekend, and they’re all about Black Lives Matter. Their cause is Breonna Taylor, who was killed when her boyfriend opened fire on the Louisville Police as they were executing a no-knock warrant. Miss Taylor was never charged with a crime, and her boyfriend supposedly thought the police entering was a break-in, and opened fire.
The WNBA have “Say Her Name” emblazoned on their warm-ups, and her name on the backs of their jerseys, below the individual players’ own last names. Black Lives Matter is painted on the basketball court.
But, let’s get real. Miss Taylor was the ex-girlfriend of a notorious drug dealer, and her car had been seen parked at that dealer’s residence several times recently. The police claimed that was probable cause to suspect that the dealer was stashing some of his supply at her house, and a judge signed off on the no-knock warrant. The woke and the BLM crowd want to make it seem as though Miss Taylor was as angelic as George Floyd — which, in a way, she was — but she was the ex of a drug dealer; how good a person could she have been?
The regular NBA has Black Lives Matter painted on their court as well.
Of course, the games are being played in empty arenas, and they’re just not the same. The NHL is starting the Stanley Cup Playoffs in August, and they, too, are playing in an empty arena. At least Major League Baseball is being played in the teams’ home cities, but the ballparks there are empty as well.
Professional sports leagues in this country are killing themselves with this bovine feces. There’s little excitement, and, quite frankly, if you are interested in the outcomes, you might as well just look up the box score in the morning paper, it’s that bad.
The Dana in Kentucky (e49c8b) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:06 pmDCSCA wrote:
Monday Night Football wasn’t a bad idea, but for those of us in the Eastern Time Zone, the 9:00 PM starts meant that the games lasted beyond when working people had to go to bed.
The expansion into Thursday Night Football was a killer. With high schools playing on Fridays, and colleges on Saturdays, that left only Tuesday and Wednesday as football-free days. The market became over-saturated.
But the real killer? My Oakland Raiders moving to Las Vegas!
If you want to see football as it should be played, watch the Army Black Knights! CBS Sports Network, channel 221 on DirecTV, carries all of Army’s home games. The network also carries Navy and Chair Force football, though they come second and third in priority.
To quote the Cadets after they sing their Alma Mater, Beat Navy!
The Dana in Kentucky (e49c8b) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:14 pmJVW wrote:
I met Colonel Sanders at 3:00 AM in the Toddle House, a greasy spoon diner on Euclid Avenue in Lexington. By then he had already sold the franchise, but not the recipe, to John Y Brown.
My darling bride, of 41 years, 2 months and 11 days, played in the University of Kentucky Marching Band, and she complained that to every away game they traveled, the host team always fed them Kentucky Fried Chicken. Her best friend in the band, a really cute and always braless redhead, whined about that even more, ’cause she was a vegetarian.
The Dana in Kentucky (e49c8b) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:19 pm@21. You have it backwards– and missing the point.
Oh good Lord, DCSCA. I concede the point that the NBA, KFC, and virtually any other three-letter acronym company you can think of is marketing to me. I never disputed that and have no idea how you wandered out to that tangent.
But can you please address my actual point, which is that the NBA is hypocritical for playing up to Black Lives Matter while at the same time bending the knee to the gross human rights violators in China? If we can agree on that then this discussion will be closed. If not, well then I think we’re best off just closing the discussion anyway.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:32 pm@28 That is one of the problems with no-knock warrants. People with perfectly legal guns might shoot the police thinking they are defending themselves and instead get killed, along with people around them.
Also, sometimes nice people have terrible taste in significant others. There were a lot of lovely Irish and Italian girls who ended up married to the mob. It happens.
Nic (896fdf) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:50 pmUpdate: Somebody is apparently feeling the heat and has gone to CYA mode. Earlier today some intrepid fans discovered that you cannot order a custom NBA jersey from the online Fanatics NBA store with “Free Hong Kong” printed on the back in the name area. After several people began tweeting about this, including Florida Governor Rick Scott and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the ban was quickly (and quietly) lifted. According to this Fox News report, the NBA is blaming the problem on Fanatics, but given the NBA’s craven nature it’s not hard to imagine that they were behind the original ban.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 7:47 pmBut can you please address my actual point, which is that the NBA is hypocritical for playing up to Black Lives Matter while at the same time bending the knee to the gross human rights violators in China?
No more hypocritical than ‘KFC’ selling chicken the Chinese or any American banks [or NASA for that matter] doing business w/Putin’s Russia. It’s business; and hypocrisy goes hand in hand w/it. It’s what made MadMen tick. The NBA has identified an audience, a market and want to reach it.
No issue w/it. But then, once an ad man, always an ad man
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 8:03 pmOK, DCSCA, we’re seeing this through two entirely different lenses. Thanks for your perspective, but we’ll accomplish nothing further by continuing with this debate.
JVW (ee64e4) — 7/30/2020 @ 8:05 pm@35. It’s just business.
Besides, a few years in Indiana gave me three lifetimes of basketball. The game sucks. 😉
DCSCA (797bc0) — 7/30/2020 @ 8:10 pmOh no. Not hockey… I still remember the joy from ’94… now it’s gone.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 7/30/2020 @ 8:21 pmhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2xvGV7k1sw
I denounce myself in advance.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 7/30/2020 @ 8:23 pmIt’s been simmering for at least a couple of weeks from when I first heard about it. You could type in FreeAmerica, FreeNewYork, etc, but not FreeHongKong. Didn’t help that you could order @#$^America too.
NJRob (eb56c3) — 7/30/2020 @ 8:27 pmJVW wrote:
The NBA needs television revenue, but I have to ask: just how many white fans are going to keep watching when the players have anti-police and, quite frankly, anti-white slogans on their jerseys? The games are bad enough with no fans, really just glorified scrimmages, and now they’re going to add divisive politics to the mix?
The Dana in Kentucky (e49c8b) — 7/31/2020 @ 6:15 am@40, if Nascar thinks they can ban the confederate flag and survive I think the NBA should be OK.
Time123 (7cca75) — 7/31/2020 @ 6:17 amThe NBA’s position in Free Speech is appalling. I’d say I’m done with them because of their stance. But I don’t follow the NBA anyway.
Time123 (7cca75) — 7/31/2020 @ 6:18 am40, Dana in Kentucky (who dodged the Colonels after the 1976 ABA-NBA merger), the NBA is the generally a 5th or even 6th most popular professional team in most places east of the Mississippi as it is, especially where it shares winter with an NHL team and has good slice of its semi-woke whites and new arrivals sucked into MLS. The emergence of Atlanta United FC soccer guarantees a low ceiling of willing non-black persons taking a chance on the Hawks, who like the Bullets/Wizards, dread their lower seating looking like a Tyler Perry film audition to the TV viewer.
urbanleftbehind (08b3a1) — 7/31/2020 @ 6:56 amI watched a couple of the NBA games yesterday for a few minutes to get a taste of the action and the quality of play. I missed the anthems…but in a way….whatever….it looks like the Anthem will be hijacked for the foreseeable future. It seems to be more about probing a raw nerve…for some… than anything truly substantive…unless one thinks “defunding the police” actually serves lower-income or minority-dominated communities.
The social-justice slogans on the back of most of the jerseys bugged me….but not because of the general silliness of it….but because for many players….I simply don’t know who they are. It made it harder to know who was doing what….except for the obvious tier-1 players like James, Davis, Leonard, and George. I was also not a fan of the production value…..not sure if it was primarily due to the lack of an audience and the sound of the game missing…but visually it was underwhelming too. My team isn’t playing so it does attenuate my interest…..but I guess whatever..
AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 7/31/2020 @ 8:03 amWow, that’s huge. Anyway I half-watched one of the NBA games and found it even duller than ever. No crowds made it feel like I was watching a practice game. Further, almost every camera angle was the same wide sideline one. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have put some courtside camera men in their, after all they can wear masks, be tested and put in the bubble too.
But the NBA as a whole has always been dull. Its always had the same problems. An overlong, meaningless regular season. And overlong playoff season that lasts two months. And because its a star driven league only 8-10 of the teams are watchable. And finally, there’s the domination of a few players. I looked it up and was surprised to learn since 2008, Lebron James has been in 9 NBA finals – that’s 9 out of 12. Meanwhile Step curry and warriors have been in 5. If you go back to the early 2000’s you find that between 2000-2010 Knobe went to the finals 7 out of 11 years.
And its always been that way. From 1980-1991, Magic went 9 out of 12 years. Bill Russell went almost every year he was in the league.
rcocean (fcc23e) — 7/31/2020 @ 1:33 pmHilariously, my prior comment is in moderation. I think its because I mentioned the Washington y’knows. Maybe i should have said the Washington R-words.
rcocean (fcc23e) — 7/31/2020 @ 1:45 pmThe fans in China and around the globe will more than make up for any non-people of Color fans in the USA. The NBA seems a gold mine in the overseas markets and is hell-bent on becoming an Global, international game. Like Hollywood, it merely located in the USA, its not really American anymore.
rcocean (fcc23e) — 7/31/2020 @ 1:49 pmThe NBA is more interesting to talk about then watch. As for the anthem, why even play it, if they’re going to all knell and show contempt for the country? Its just a business, and the only reason they started to play it in the first place, was show the audience that the NBA were patriots, so we’d like them more. Now, they don’t have to show anyone they’re patriots. They’re unpatriotic and proud of it. So, just get rid of it.
rcocean (fcc23e) — 7/31/2020 @ 1:49 pmNic (896fdf) — 7/30/2020 @ 6:50 pm @28 That is one of the problems with no-knock warrants. People with perfectly legal guns might shoot the police thinking they are defending themselves and instead get killed, along with people around them In a notorious case in Kentucky this year, the person who fired the gun didn’t get killed, or wounded, but a person next to him did, Breonna Taylor.
I think both the occupant and the policeman fired through the door, without seeing who was on the other side. The occupant fired first, one shot. A policeman fired back several shots.
he initial police report said nobody was hurt.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/05/12/breonna-taylor-louisville-emt-not-main-target-drug-investigation/3115928001/
This got suvked into the mythology that blacks are targets of the police.
Sammy Finkelman (fe6a9b) — 7/31/2020 @ 2:06 pmThe reason for the warrant is that a drug dealer was believed to use that address as a place to receive packages. That could be a reason her boyfriend thought it was criminals breaking in. The police apparently did not find anything in the apartment.
Sammy Finkelman (fe6a9b) — 7/31/2020 @ 2:09 pm