dougthonus wrote:jnrjr79 wrote:Re: the first bolded section, I think that the main reason the NBA supplied a pre-approved list of social justice slogans for jerseys, rather than letting players choose and submitting those selections to some sort of vetting process, is that they were specifically concerned that someone would decide to include something anti-China. This could come from Muslim players who feel solidarity with Uighurs, players who feel sympathy with people in Hong Kong who have been in the streets fighting for their rights (not dissimilarly than those demonstrating for the BLM movement), or just anyone with a functioning human conscience. I honestly would have a hard time with anyone arguing that the China issue *isn't* the most likely reason the NBA has approached the jersey slogan issue in the way that it has. It seems fairly clear that it is.
I don't think so at all. I think they were far more concerned with someone making anti-American or anti-police or divisive messages than Chinese messages. The NBA already announced they will not censor players when it comes to China. They did not make Morey apologize or fine him or censor him, and to my knowledge not a single player has come out about China since that point.
Players are regularly talking about, meeting about, tweeting about, wearing shirts for, and promoting BLM/social justice movements. They are literally doing absolutely zero, not a single example that I'm aware of, with China. Why do you think that no one will even tweet about China, but when they get a jersey name, they're going to go with Free Hong Kong? That just doesn't add up even remotely.
The NBPA also worked with the NBA on the list, if someone wanted Free Hong Kong and it was rejected, I think there's a good chance that news would have leaked.
We can agree to disagree on this. The idea that Morey wasn't severely reprimanded and that an internal "don't anyone talk about China" message wasn't conveyed internally in the NBA is naive in the extreme.
Re: the later bolded parts, honestly those sentiments are just gross and morally indefensible. Why should the NBA care about a country putting minorities in concentration camps, harvesting organs, and imposing forced sterilizations? I hope that is not a serious question. And the fact that the regime has raised the standards of living for lots of ethnic Chinese in no way excuses the human rights abuses of the government. Further, raising the standard of living would obviously be possible in the absence of systemic torture and murder, so I don't really understand the argument there. Would you really take the position that a little genocide against a small minority is ok as long as the majority's economic position improves?
No, I take the position that, sure if I could change this I would. Just like every other terrible thing happening in the world.
However, there is literally absolutely no reason for me to care or prioritize it over the millions of other ills in the world and that the vast, vast, vast majority of people care about causes close to home and not half way around the world. If you have a personal connection to China, then of course, you should care deeply about this issue. That's an exceptionally small number of people in the US or related to the NBA though.
Honestly, this is just terrible. This kind of thinking would have had the US sit out World War II because "oh, golly, so many bad things are happening in so many places, so why bother," and "it's halfway around the world." There actually aren't *that* many genocides happening across the world and the idea that you have too much tragedy fatigue to care about this one is not defensible. I am trying to moderate my response here, but "why should I care about genocide if it's far away from where I live" is a deeply troubling worldview and, frankly, reprehensible. I'm capable of being concerned about the US's very real social ills (which are less severe than China's) while also being concerned about fellow human beings elsewhere.
Some of this hits close to home as I've had family living there for the better part of the last 15 years, but the current Chinese government is Orwellian and evil. I'm also not going to boycott the NBA or other companies for doing business with China. But we should be having a thoughtful conversation in much of the world about the Chinese government's values and whether there are ways to decouple our economies and push for change there.
I agree with decoupling from China and did post as much later in the thread. That doesn't mean it's a moral imperative for the NBA to do that, and it certainly isn't a moral imperative to do it now while they're supporting a social justice movement by their players.
Nowhere did I argue that individual NBA players have a duty to do anything. But the idea that the NBA shouldn't care about whether a country it does business with is crushing democracy in Hong Kong and running concentration camps for Muslims - is that a thing you actually believe? I mean, my god. And the notion that pulling out the Chinese market would somehow be in conflict with domestic social justice considerations - as opposed to totally compatible with them - I fail to understand that line of thinking.
I get that this issue is being weaponized in bad faith by a lot of MAGA types who just want to dunk on the NBA because they enjoy sticking it to what is otherwise a progressive sports league that racists loves to hate. But I would hope that most fans could set that aside and recognize that the NBA's courtship of the Chinese market is extremely fraught and that it's worth considering the cost of the marginal revenue increase from doing business with that regime.
Comparatively, you could say the NBA's existence in the Chinese market is actually the least disruptive business that is dealing with China. It's actually something they're importing from us rather than something we're importing from them. It's helping build our economy instead of theirs like most of our trades with China. I hear where you're coming from, but if I was going to have complaints about our economies being entangled together it would be importing their products built on slave wage child labor rather than them paying us for TV rights for NBA games.
I think the NBA is actually has some chance to impact positive change in China.
So, what you're talking about here was the argument in favor of putting Western businesses into China. I totally agreed with this! But it turned out to be wrong. We thought through opening up China's economy that we would import western/democratic values to China and that China's foray into capitalism would be to its benefit. The opposite is true. China has used its business ties with the rest of the world to push *its* values to them, by demonstrating that if companies want access to the market of a billion Chinese people, they will have to play ball with China. This includes all sorts of small things like airlines not being able to show Taiwan as a separate country when you book a flight or China dictating American university curricula by holding the purse strings of its students abroad.
I would absolutely love it if the Chinese love for the NBA could help us export some positive change to China. But it's not gonna happen. You act like no consequence befell Morey when he tweeted a totally anodyne message in support of HK protestors. That's not true. It was widely reported that his job was in jeopardy, and then he ultimately issued a hostage-style apology to preserve his position with the Rockets. The NBA covets the Chinese market and will do quite a lot to make sure that folks in the league don't do anything to criticize a censorious, murderous, genocidal regime. I'm not cool with that just because China happens to be far away from the US. I don't necessarily need the NBA to take a stand on its own (though I wish it would), but it disappoints me greatly that it won't at least stand by people in the league who are inclined to speak up.
