SharoneWright wrote:beanbag wrote:
Again, he was fired by rich TV executives protecting their own pockets, not the woke left.
No matter how badly you want that to be true, it just isn't.
Ok. Going down that road... Who are the they protecting their pockets from? Where is the pressure coming from these days?
I think this is the main problem with this idea. It assumes that anyone can understand the composition of any group of people discussing any topic. That is simply unknowable. Topics like the Paul Pierce incident are talked about all over the internet by so many people. Opinions are either for or against. Some may want him fired, some may want him to get a raise. Some may already hate him, some may already love him. It is impossible to understand what all these voices want, and what agency is behind it. We then hear reports like "Paul Pierce faces backlash over so and so", and we think, that's ridiculous. What is the composition of that backlash? Who is even talking about it. Imagine if 1 billion people (there are actually more than that on IG alone) were all screaming at each other with megaphones and we were then trying to listen to them all and understand what they were saying. We then conclude that a discussion, in the form of nuance, and lack of nuance, anger and rationality, object and derision all added up to a simple headline in the media. The media informs us people are upset about this. All discussion has been filtered down to something that can be understood but is actually not knowable. So where do we go from here? Post-Hoc fallacy, every single time. The result is based on the reaction, and not the original event. All that is knowable is that Paul Pierce did something, and ESPN fired him for it. The noise is irrelevant since it is unknowable. Saying ESPN is afraid of them is possible, but ESPN is equally ignorant of what the "mob" wants. They could easily be siding with the wrong side. Maybe only 1% of the people discussing it actually want Paul Pierce fired and only a small percentage actually care what he said or did. We make a determination of what people are saying based on a corporate decision (again this is a post-hoc fallacy). Businesses don't care about social agendas unless the perception of those agendas can make them money. If you think they are catering to a minority opinion, I would say that is a bad business decision, but they may have their reasons, but ESPN isn't going to lose money simply to push an agenda.
If you actually care about the truth of this, you can challenge ESPN (and possibly Disney, there's no evidence that Disney had any say in this for the record). Aside from anecdotes of individuals in a mass of over 1 billion voices, ESPN is the only definitive opinion on this topic we can look at. The above would also be true of conservative values, and in many cases they are. What Paul Pierce did could be looked at as an objection to a more classic puritanical conservative faux-pas by the way. We frame it as a liberal progressive transgression because it fits the narrative.