22-23 NBA Season Thread

[Digby]

1 minute ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

I'm sure it's a huge relief to the Celtics. Now he's another org's problem and no longer a legal liability. Maybe.

 

The fact that they're apparently letting him go without any demands for compensation suggests this to me. My next question is wondering if the Nets decided an hour's due diligence was enough, or if they've been doing it for months while sharpening the knives for Nash.

[dont care]

15 minutes ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

I'm sure it's a huge relief to the Celtics. Now he's another org's problem and no longer a legal liability. Maybe.

I could see the Celtics being petty and not releasing him but force the nets to trade for him. What the nets have in tradable assets I don’t know. The Celtics don’t want kyrie back, I’m pretty sure they got no draft picks worth trading for. But to completely scalp the nets is well deserved

[Digby]

 

Kyrie’s got a COEXIST bumper sticker on his Lambo.

[Discrim]

Kyrie tends to strike me as an enigma...one of those folks who's smart...just not nearly as smart or deep as he thinks he is.  Not helped by the headscratching stuff he believes and tends to say.  Going somewhere beyond Carl "Dinosaurs weren't real" Everett level.

[The_Admiral]

This whole blacks-versus-Jews moment we're in is gonna get way worse before it gets better. I don't think there's any amount of overanalyzing Wu-Tang Clan lyrics that can reunite them now.

[FiddySicks]

I’m so so SO damn tired of Kyrie. Nothing that guy has ever been about has been cool in the slightest. He may be one of the most off putting pro athletes in the history of sports. Really excited for the day he just :censored:s off and disappears. He’s not even fun to hate. 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

1 hour ago, FiddySicks said:

I’m so so SO damn tired of Kyrie. Nothing that guy has ever been about has been cool in the slightest. He may be one of the most off putting pro athletes in the history of sports. Really excited for the day he just :censored:s off and disappears. He’s not even fun to hate. 

 

Yeah, he's definitely crossed the line.

 

I also think that anti-Semitism among NBA players is a rock you have to be careful about turning over, because you're going to see probably a lot more than you want to. Kyrie probably feels emboldened in part because he's likely far from the only one to share those beliefs.

[The_Admiral]

 

 

confirmed Black Hebrew Israelite OHHHH IT'S ON BABY

[TrueYankee26]

Suspended 5 games w/o pay.

 

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/34942326/nets-suspend-kyrie-irving-least-five-games-pay

[FiddySicks]

His entire act is so needlessly stupid. 

[The_Admiral]

Twitter right now is hot. On one side, journalists like "as a Jew, I modeled my entire game on Allen Iverson and this is NOT okay." On the other,  it's "A. C. The Realness Productions Presents" who's like "kanye and kyrie are just telling us what THEIR media doesn't want us to know, if it wasn't true, you wouldn't be mad." The spectacle is definitely worth $20 a month. Okay, fine, $8.

[DoctorWhom]

Ime has to ask himself, do you really want to step in this flaming pile? 

[Digby]

34 minutes ago, DoctorWhom said:

Ime has to ask himself, do you really want to step in this flaming pile? 

All Ime’s worried about is that the female trainers travel with the team and that his hotel room is far from everyone else’s on road trips.

[IceCap]

4 hours ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

I also think that anti-Semitism among NBA players is a rock you have to be careful about turning over, because you're going to see probably a lot more than you want to. Kyrie probably feels emboldened in part because he's likely far from the only one to share those beliefs.

So it's probably worth asking why it's something we as a society are haven't done much to combat. 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

2 minutes ago, IceCap said:

So it's probably worth asking why it's something we as a society are haven't done much to combat. 

 

Ask away. It's messed up.

[IceCap]

18 minutes ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

 

Ask away. It's messed up.

Well it's complicated as best I can tell... and I may move into borderline forbidden territory... but  it. A NBA superstar just got suspended for this crap so it's fair game to an extent. 

 

A big part of it tends to revolve around how messed up race is a concept in America, socially. Like you have to go back to properly analyze this. I'm not sure if it's something that's necessary appropriate for this message board so I'll keep it broad. 

 

But antisemitism in the Black community is due to a confluence of African slaves identifying with the Biblical Exodus story to the point of subsuming a portion of Jewish cultural identity, mixed with a white American establishment that is understandably hesitant to get too critical of the Black community's own issues of identity. 

 

This, combined with the theory of intersectionality which holds that all struggles against bigotry are inherently interconnected, leaves many white people believing that Black Americans can't be bigoted towards other groups, especially if they support other social justice movements. When this proves to  not be true- ie when Kyrie Irving or Kanye West or Nick Cannon say something blatantly antisemitic- white people who are broadly good intentioned get squicky because to either admit that you can support a good cause and still be a bigot, or to even criticize the Black community as a whole, is problematic. 

 

The result is that while white Americans are more than willing to shout down neo-Nazis and other white  supremacists who traffic in antisemitic tropes they are fundamentally uncomfortable with holding Black antisemitics to account. 

And so antisemitism in the Black community tends to grow unchecked. 

 

Which leads to a lot of haphazardly applied "standards" of racial or social justice, doesn't it? 

 

Like Kyrie, Kanye, and Nick Cannon have all gone on about "Black people being the real Jews." 

 

Which is cultural appropriation if I ever saw it... because no. African Americans, who are primarily descended from West Africans, aren't related to Jews. They just aren't. Yet it happens and it becomes "a complex issue." 

But a white girl wears dreads and it's an unforgivable sin. 

There are reasons for all of this... but at the end of the day what's the goal? In my estimation it's a society where bigotry of all stripes is recognized as the danger that it is. 

So the complexities of why Black antisemitism is prevalent are ultimately going to have to be set aside for the academic arena while the ing bigots get slapped down right and proper.  

[Digby]

Totally embarrassing for the Nets to wait a week to hand down a suspension — the guise of “we were hoping he’d educate himself and say sorry” passes no smell tests I’ve ever heard of — but obviously in character for the team considering how they handled his vax situation last year. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

 

I just feel bad for the nice old Jewish man with the “you’re gonna miss” act at their home games, and I never thought I’d feel sorry for that guy!

[The_Admiral]

10 hours ago, IceCap said:

But antisemitism in the Black community is due to a confluence of African slaves identifying with the Biblical Exodus story to the point of subsuming a portion of Jewish cultural identity, mixed with a white American establishment that is understandably hesitant to get too critical of the Black community's own issues of identity. 

 

This, combined with the theory of intersectionality which holds that all struggles against bigotry are inherently interconnected, leaves many white people believing that Black Americans can't be bigoted towards other groups, especially if they support other social justice movements. When this proves to  not be true- ie when Kyrie Irving or Kanye West or Nick Cannon say something blatantly antisemitic- white people who are broadly good intentioned get squicky because to either admit that you can support a good cause and still be a bigot, or to even criticize the Black community as a whole, is problematic. 

 

The result is that while white Americans are more than willing to shout down neo-Nazis and other white  supremacists who traffic in antisemitic tropes they are fundamentally uncomfortable with holding Black antisemitics to account. 

And so antisemitism in the Black community tends to grow unchecked. 

 

Part of it, as I've said before, is that we're talking about two cultural groups that have played an outsize role in the shaping of American culture -- particularly the upper register of American culture -- for a very long time and have been senior partners in a political coalition for some time as well. Usually, whenever the issue of black antisemitism gets mass attention, it seems like the reaction is "okay, look, the world is on fire, we are not dealing with this right now," but right now with Kanye and Kyrie, I have this bad feeling that there are some really dark clouds on the horizon, that we're going to go beyond black guys in show business popping off with dumb hotep crap.  I don't think we can put off getting rid of this lingering Farrakhan garbage much longer. It's tough, because the ridiculousness of Kyrie is fun to laugh at for a minute, but still, I see this going to bad places that we've been avoiding the last seven or eight times it's happened.

[MJWalker45]

On 11/1/2022 at 12:11 PM, DG_ThenNowForever said:

 

Wow! That franchise is cursed.

 

(Move it to Seattle. )

And leave Kyrie in New York.

[tBBP]

Okay, before this gets too out of hand, let me split some joints from narrow here...

 

- Kylie, Kanye, and Nick do not speak for all Black Americans (any more than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson fo, which is to say...they don't.) Let's get that out the way right now, as a precursor to the next statement: be careful about using broadstroke  blanket phrases such as "Black antisemitism" which semantically implies 100% participation. Not all blacks think that same way. 

 

- Mike's point about the conflation of "Jewish" and Black identity is valid and true. I airquoted "Jewish" for good reason, and it's nothing against the Jews, but it does tie into what Mike wrote about the BHIs: most don't even understand the difference between "Hebrew" and "Jew". Historically speaking, all Jews were Hebrews...but not all Hebrews were Jews. The Jews descended from Judah, one of the twelve (really thirteen) tribes of Israel (Jacob), who himself was Hebrew. So there's that. And the basis of this conflation? Slavery...the history of the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt and prophecies of future enslavement--which the BHIs have equated to the period of slavery here in the States. There's more to that, but I don't care to get into it here plus I don't even subscribe to all that stuff anyway. I think for myself.

 

- All that said, another thing many people don't pause to consider is that Kyrie, Kanye, Cannon (& certain others) may only be speaking on certain individuals within the Jewish community, but sometimes their phraseology and many people's quickness to react without stopping to think for themselves leads many more to think they're talking about all Jews at large, which is highly unfortunate. That that never gets checked in/by the media greatly perturbs me. (And trust me, as a Black man in this country, I know a thing or two about being unfairly generalized with a whole group based on the actions of just a few of that group.)

 

- Lastly, and I'll land this plane here, this is my appeal to anyone who will listen: don't be so quick to broadstroke and/or generalize, or draw conclusions without making an effort to understand root factors/causes. And think about what you're thinking about and ESPECIALLY what you say and how you say it, especially in this highly sensitized day and age. There's a way to say anything tactfully that doesn't make the truth any less true, if it is true. But that's why we people got to learn to research stuff, and think, for ourselves. 

 

Aiight I'm off my soapbox now; thank you for your time.