or maybe they didnt want to lose ad dollars protecting the stupidity of paul "fuckin" shirley. ever read "can i keep my jersey"? half of his journal style entries are him bitching about his shoulder and contemplating giving up basketball.
Honestly, I don't see a huge difference b/w Tiger losing sponsors (no one's complaining much about that) and Shirley losing sponsors. Neither did anything criminal. Neither's "work" suffered due to their actions, thoughts or opinions. But, just as Tiger's sponsors didn't want their name attached to an admitted adulterer, ESPN didn't want to have their name attached to Shirley b/c of the Haiti sensitivity. PC? You bet. But unwarranted? imho, I don't think so.
Brian, I will respond to some of your posts maybe tomorrow. It is my birthday today, so I'm going to be doing stuff now that i'm out of school for the weekend.
Agree to disagree about what? You don't think ESPN (or any other employer) should have the right to choose who the do, and don't employ? ESPN is a brand. The company has spent BILLIONS of dollars promoting that brand and making it a household name. They have every right to terminate the employment of any employee who they think has damaged that brand. In fact, they have an obligation to their share holders to take corrective action against an employee who makes comments that could diminish the value of the stock they own. You can trot out the political correctness card all you want, but it's just basic business. If an employee makes you money, you continue to employ him. If he's costing you money, you don't. It's as simple s that. In ESPN's view, Paul Shirley's statements about Haiti damaged the value of their brand and cost them money. They are well within their rights to terminate his employment. Even if they are wrong, it doesn't matter. It's THEIR choice. THEY are the ones signing his paychecks. If they are no longer happy with his job performance, they have every right to stop giving him those paychecks. BNM
In school, we learn of a bunch of freedoms we have. When older, we learn that this pertains only in matters involving the federal government. We don't have the same freedoms when state governments, private industry, or the media take a dislike to us. This motivates us psychologically to work harder for the national good. Our sweet tooth of idealism is satisfied, while in actuality, we have no more freedom than anyplace else. "Totalitarianism" is where all government, private industry, media, religion, and any other force you can name are merged into one. Its supposed antithesis, separation of powers, creates the illusion of them being separated, to create plausible deniability. For example, half of American forces in Iraq are hired American civilians, to get around Congress' rules on what the military can do. Blackwater, for example, can kill freely, and civilians can torture more freely. In our system, the government doesn't go after Tiger Woods, private industry and the media do. In a monolithic totalitarian system, the government would do the job. What's the difference in results?
No, I'm not going to read the biographies of politicians and dictators. Just because there are bad people doesn't mean it's our job to dispose of them. Unless you think it is. I have a feeling you do. Again, you're comparing WW2 and invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein with Hitler (I know Bush compared the two, but that doesn't make him right.) Wartime with peace. There is a large difference between fighting back an army who is legitimately attempting to conquer the planet, and starting a small war in order to dispose a dictator. Korea and Panama I don't know much about. Blah. When you "divorce military might from moral right" (did you write that yourself?) you can get many things. One could be the UN, another could be a country who doesn't selectively police the world based on their economic interests.
What you label as political correctness sounds an awful lot like freedom of choice to me. Paul Shirley made his choice. ESPN made theirs. BNM
FWIW, I favored taking out Saddam for humanitarian reasons. We shouldn't sit idle when 300,000 people die from some natural disaster, and we shouldn't sit idle when 300,000 people die at the hands of some despot. I was disappointed when we didn't send any help for the people mass murdered in Rwanda. These things are crimes against humanity, and recognized as such by all but a few nations run by those depot types. You didn't mention this book: http://www.constitution.org/vattel/vattel.htm It's hardly the earliest treatise on the relationship between nations and their obligations to one another. In fact, I seriously wonder about people who bash capitalism and describe it as 100% pure profit motive... I quote Adam Smith: The man of system . . . is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. The point being that Morality is such a huge part of it all. Morality simply being "what is right, and what is wrong."
What's with the personal insults? Feel free to attack my arguments. Feel free to disagree with everything I say. But there's no reason to attack me personally. BNM
I don't have a problem with someone disagreeing with me. I'd just prefer they do it without name calling and personal insults. BNM
I didn't disagree with your contention that Paul Shirley was free to say what he wanted nor that ESPN was free to fire him. My issue was with the oppression that is political correctness. It's the fact that ESPN chooses to buy into that kind of thought control.
Thoughts: "Agree to disagree" means that you're too lazy to spell out your reasoning. My Post #87 came out too abstractly. What I meant was that Shirley got fired by a private company, the same consequence as if the government controlled everything (no, he wouldn't have been stoned), so it shows the myth often claimed that our system is better due to having separation of powers. Separation of powers (capitalism vs. socialism) is an illusion. The net results come out about the same. 300,000 Iraqis were about to die? Do you always believe wartime propaganda? How were they going to die? From the nuclear weapons of mass destruction that he was 5 years away from bombing us with (and quickly buried in the sand so we couldn't find them)? Even if the preposterous number of 300,000 had been true, our side killing a million of them in this war, after killing a half-million children under Clinton from medical holdbacks, greatly exceeds whatever evil Sadam did.
Nope. It means that our positions have been elucidated and there's no "zone of agreement" (in the language of negotiation theory). It's a timesaver.
I don't have any inside information about ESPN's decision making, but my guess is they based their decision on what they thought would be good for ESPN, not on some sort of political viewpoint. barfo
