Hacker News Reader

Comment by XCabbage | Hacker News Reader

Citation needed. I don't know the sports world, but I know in my bubble, those "weasel words" are something that only SJWs would approve of. If this sort of thing existed in sports contracts in the pre-SJW era, that is an interesting point that to my mind fractures tomp's narrative... but it seems unlikely to me and so far you've simply asserted it without evidence.

I note that the exact phrase "offends a portion or group of the public" has only ever been used in Blizzard's rules as far as I can tell (you can use a date-filtered Google search to confirm; prior to today there are only a handful of results, all Blizzard-related). So at the very least, they didn't lift it verbatim from sports contracts. If there used to be equivalent language in sports contracts a decade ago, I'd like to see it.

View on HN

I admit I tend to reflexively look down on comments that throw around terms like "SJW" unironically. But the rest of your comment belies some of the most profound ignorance I've seen in awhile. Did you Google "offends a portion or group of the public", and, finding no literal matches prior to GamerGate circa 2014, conclude that moral clauses did not simply exist before the "pre-SJW era"? Do you believe it was SJWs that forced the U.S. Olympic Committee to punish Tommie Smith and John Carlos for holding up their fists on the Olympic podium?

> The USOC issued an apologetic statement condemning the athletes’ “untypical exhibitionism,” which violated “the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States.” [0]

Morals clauses for athletes have existed since for athletes at least 1922, according to Wikipedia [1].

Also, there's an argument to be had over the unbacked assertion that "SJWs" were the reason behind the "offends a portion or group of the public", as opposed to, the actual thing that that clause is now being used to punish. You know what else happened around the same time as the "SJW era"? China becoming a world-dominant economic and political force.

[0] https://www.outsideonline.com/2402740/john-carlos-tommie-smi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morals_clause

I honestly struggle to conceive of the educational history needed to conflate the long history of censorship with "SJWs". Some of the greatest works of western literature in the twentieth century directly address the concept, and the majority of texts that influence "SJWs" were incredibly subversive and likely to be banned at their time of release due to their attack on conventional power structures that had the ability to censor them (Black people voting! Women voting! Anti-religious scientific heresy! Human rights!).

This strategy of demanding proof for something that is easily discoverable through any simple google search ("history of censorship") is such an exhausting argumentative tactic.

How do you think Kaepernick was benched and then fired, or do you think that the NFL is filled with a bunch of SJWs who also somehow think we should all stand for the flag?

As far as I know:

1. Kaepernick wasn't fired. He simply wasn't signed by anyone team after his contract with the 49ers ended.

2. It's a matter of factual controversy whether his treatment by the NFL was affected by his advocacy at all. As far as I know, no manager has explicitly admitted to making different choices about how to deal with him based on his kneeling.

3. It was never suggested by anybody that Kaepernick's kneeling might be a breach of his contract.

4. Kaepernick was not denied his pay for matches he'd already played in as a consequence of his kneeling.

Assuming I am correct on the facts, there is, at the very least, a significant difference in degree between that case and this one. Do you claim that anything I say above is wrong?

It also seems relevant here that basically all coverage I saw of Kaepernick's case - from the nearly-exclusively right-wing commentators I follow - was harshly critical of the minority on the right who were calling for him to be punished. By contrast, I have never seen anyone on the left criticise speech codes or corporate censorship. I do not think it is reasonable to try to draw an equivalence between the right and left on these issues by comparing the positions of a minority on the right, heavily criticised by other right-wingers, with the position of an unchallenged hegemony on the left. There is a real asymmetry here, both in terms of what the majority position of each coalition is and the extent to which they actually punish the speech they disfavour in practice.

If Kaepernick's advocacy didn't adversely affect "his treatment by the NFL" in any way "at all", then isn't it strange coincidence that the NFL went out of its way to pass a rule banning kneeling during the anthem after the controversy? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/05/24...

Seems strange for the NFL to risk a First Amendment controversy with that rule if the NFL were truly unperturbed by Kaepernick's advocacy.

You're right, Kaepernick had an option on his contract for an additional year, but he declined that option and decided to test the free market because he wanted a guaranteed starter job and he wasn't getting that in San Francisco.

And I'd like to add that the deal with Kaepernick isn't that no team would sign him. It's not even if it was due to his political stance. Kaepernick's entire beef was whether or not the league was colluding to keep him from being signed.

To put it as simply as I can: It's ok that teams like the Patriots who don't need a quarterback didn't sign him. It's ok if a team didn't sign him because of his opinions. It's ok is no team at all wants to sign him.

What isn't ok is if hypothetically the Browns and the Bills agree that neither will sign Kaepernick. You don't even need all 32 teams in on it, 2 would have been enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com