Doc Rivers, coach of the LA Clippers, after their blowout victory over the Dallas Mavericks, had things on his mind that go way beyond sports.
I’ve never been real fond of Doc Rivers. I may have to reconsider.
A Personal Blog
by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Really informative news. Thanks for sharing.
Did you need to post this to keep your job? Is this a signal to the hungry mob that you want to be eaten later, rather than sooner? Because there is no other logical reason Or evidence extant, to think that half of America wants to kill black people for the fun of it, because they are Republicans, or something.
Tell you what, to prove you are able to speak freely, go ahead and post something about how these NBA folks are in bed with companies and Communist China, which use slave and near-slave labor to make the shoes these stars want poor urban youth to buy for $150 plus a pop. Maybe note how their big investors imprison and sterilize Chinese Muslims so that they don’t try to screw up the amazing government they have over there. Maybe post THAT – or will you be reported by one of your Chinese students, Will you offend one of them, and get called to the Dean’s office, and forced to apologize for your attempt at free speech?
There is no virtue in virtue signals, Michael. Stand up for what is RIGHT, not what is momentarily in fashion.
I posted this, shortly after I saw it on TV, because I thought it was very real and very moving. That is how he feels. And I think it is not that far from how a lot of Black professionals feel.
If you can’t feel or at least acknowledge Doc Rivers’s pain, or if confronting that pain only produces the splenetic comment above and no more, then I feel very sorry for you and for your family.
(Last I heard by the way, Rivers was not in charge of the NBA’s china policy, the Commissioner was. And last I heard the NBA took a real beating when, after a few days delay, Silver announced the NBA wouldn’t attempt to silence Daryl Morey. But all this is utterly besides the point I was trying to make.
There are none so blind and all that.)
It’s not besides MY point. You posted this to let people know you were woke enough to avoid being cancelled by the students you are surrounded by. It was a preemptive virtue signal. You pay no attention to the NBA, as you admit, but you needed to post this.
I asked you to prove that you weren’t preemptively bowing to the mob by posting how the NBA is in bed deeply with a country that is completely at odds with the anti-racist ideas supposedly important. The use slave labor and harvest organs forcefully from prisoners, even sending the results of their “medical science” to the U.S. to tour as some sort of ghoulish sideshow. Yet you can’t, because you WILL get in trouble for it. No doubt your school, like many, has a number of students and investments from Communist China and you won’t be allowed to offend them with the truth. That’s fine. It’s what I expected.
As an African-American, don’t deign tell ME how to feel about the pain of racism.
Actually, I watch a lot of basketball. I just don’t blog about it, on the theory that most readers here and especially abroad could not care less. I don’t, however, spend a lot of attention on the NBA’s foreign policy.
I agree that what the Chinese are doing to the Uigers, and in Hong Kong for that matter, is quite bad. It’s a great shame that Donald Trump has so encouraged the Chinese building of concentration camps. I don’t know what we can do about this until after the election, however, and maybe not even then.
However, I totally reject as evil and misguided the suggestion that if a person or organization tries to do good in one way, they therefore are subject to additional criticism for not trying to do good in some other way. You could, I suppose, argue that the US should boycott China for its human rights abuses. But BLM supporters have no higher duty to do that then their opponents or the neutrals.
What I can’t quite decide is whether I find your harping on the idea that a tenured prof, who can’t even go into work for health reasons, has to post a video on a blog few students have ever heard of in order to achieve some local goal, is sad, stupid, offensive, or some combination of the three.
Because virtue signaling is all over the university community, as is mob cancellations. I’m sure you are aware of this. Recently a law professor was attacked for quoting a Court opinion that the mob found offensive, as if that professor should have to defend what occurred in some past case. There are specific issues, which you cannot be blind to, involving students from Communist China.
You are aware that Trump signed the bill condemning the Chinese treatment of the Uigers are you not? Considering the only source for your statement is the ridiculous Bolton book, there just is no need to wonder anything but how it didn’t fail the laugh test for you.
Considering the extent of Commie China’s crimes against humanity, I think it is far from evil to wonder about globalist corporations that fail to show any distaste for China, while finding endless fault with America’s relatively smaller problems. African-Americans are hugely discriminated against in China. We can’t even eat in a lot of the restaurants. Yet the NBA stars, African Americans themselves, defend China and those who criticize it, while highlighting only the injustices in the U.S. injustice is injustice. It is not evil to wonder if money makes some injustices, out of sight, a low priority. It MAY be, however, evil to get in bed with a country that has murdered over 50 million of its own people, enslaved many, and uses its prisoners as organ banks. I’d say that’s a scale beyond the dozen unarmed black men killed by police last year, even assuming the worst of them.
I am in much the same situation as you otherwise (health-wise, though for different reasons). I’m not sure why you insist on taking the opposite position of anything I say. I don’t suppose you’ve bothered yet to look at the new CDC numbers showing that less than 10,000 people actually are confirmed as dying from Covid? Or the NYT article showing how the vast, vast majority of positive test results don’t involve people with even enough of the virus present to get or pass on the disease at all? That’s actually potentially good news to me, and should be to you.
Insult me if you feel better, I don’t really mind, but I hope at least some of what I say gets into your brain sometimes.
I post something, you disagree with it, and I’m the one who disagrees with everything you say.
Then again, you are being disagreeable….
Also, the CDC number is obviously bogus. See for example this CNBC report.
That article doesn’t “debunk anything. It merely says what is obvious (that we can’t be sure of the actual extent of Covid’s influence) in a way to convince the gullible people that nevertheless we can. You are a lawyer, presumably, read that article like one. The only thing we know for sure is that the actual number is somewhere BETWEEN 9000 and 180,000, with no real way of knowing exactly where. Be a lawyer, Michael. Ask yourself the hard question of what that fact might mean?
As to you getting Mao-Mao’d (pun intended), you might enjoy:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/academics-are-really-really-worried-about-their-freedom/615724/
I think the entire human race is fundamentally cruel and this will never change.
People will always find a reason to disagree and subsequently hurt each other because it’s an inherent part of the survival instinct that results in a competitive, zero-sum game.
In all honesty, it boggles my mind that somehow the human race evolved past living in caves and clubbing rivals over the head in an effort to forcefully obtain the largest collection of shiny pebbles and scraps of meat.
I’m old enough to remember when we were able, as a society of intelligent people, to have discussions about things. This was, perhaps, before your time. The interesting thing is that sometimes, maybe even often, we had vehement disagreements on certain points. But you know what? It wasn’t considered “fundamental cruelty” and to disagree with a person was not attempting to “hurt” them. That’s right, it was just a difference of opinion. And after the fight, maybe we’d even have a beer together.
I am hard on Michael. I know that. Maybe harder than I should be. But he is a full grown adult, with a mind capable of defending his views for real, should he ever choose to. He just spends too much time around students, who have not yet achieved the ability to see him as their peer, as a colleague, rather than an authority. That kind of life makes a mind soft. I want him to remember the fundamental fact about being a lawyer: the entire profession is based on the idea that people will have differing views and defenses of those views – with no crying about being “hurt” by them. That was once the world, a world I hope he still has one mental foot in.
I’m sorry that you are growing up in a world where this is no longer true. You will have greater hurt ahead of you if the minor hurt of some random person having a differing opinion is so painful.
I was not referring to your discussion with Professor Froomkin in particular even though it does stem from the same fundamental desire of human beings to fight each other more often than not.
Rather, I was referring to the comments by Doc Rivers and expanding on its scope.
It seems to me that cruelty defines our world in general. The extent of human suffering transcends the racial injustice in America and is inherent in the human condition.
The racial injustice is just another symptom of the underlying disease.
In reply to Vic’s latest attempt to suggest we each ought to have the right to our own alternate facts (paging Dr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan…), I would note that there is very strong circumstantial evidence from the so-called ‘excess death rate’ that the COVID toll in the US actually is higher than the official number. Certainly any reality-warping claim that the actual human cost is far lower than the conservative consensus view should be seen through that lens.
And then there’s the small detail that there’s more to COVID than the death rate.
I’m old enough to remember when serious debates did not involve people invoking numbers based on misleading reports from agencies that have been subverted by neo-fascists, but I guess that really dates me.
Now you have ceased making any sense, you think MY CDC numbers are the result of political pressure from new-fascists, but that YOUR CDC numbers prove mine are full of it? Do I have that right?
Look, this is just making my point, which you have somehow failed to get over the course of weeks: We don’t really know what the true numbers are. We simply don’t. No evidence coming from “official sources” seems fully trustworthy. Many states have been found to be conflating numbers that have nothing to do with each other. The CDC is clearly being somewhat self-contradictory – as you can see.
I really don’t have the time to dig through these numbers right now, but I looked briefly at the CDC description of their tables where this data comes from. There was so much hedging and wobble-words like “estimate” and “average” in them that I would not simply presume that these numbers are not themselves estimates. It would take time to drill through to see what is actually there. Time I don not have at the moment.
Don’t misunderstand my basic theme in your zeal to prove I’m an idiot. I don’t think we KNOW what is going on, and I don’t think those with the numbers are telling us, either because they can’t, or they won’t. I am NOT stating as fact that the true numbers are higher or lower. The reason I have tended to show lower numbers here is because you show high ones. My point is not to contradict, but to show contradiction.
And any actual lawyer knows that “facts” can exist in multiple versions. Facts are what is in dispute. I present my ideas as facts, you do the same. They can exist at the same time. It’s the interpretation leading from them that might be deemed truth.
I no longer have time for this. I just hope you start questioning things, rather than swallowing things whole.