I find this a bit tiring, because I'm really not sure Jaylen has done a lot wrong here. He's so far said he condemns "hate speech" but wasn't going to leave Dona because he felt like it did good things for the community. then he did leave donda, vowed to support the kids at the academy, and condemned antisemitism. Then he got mad because he thought the kids at donda were being punished (you can argue he should have been madder at Kanye, but whatever). Then he criticized Joe Tsai and Nike for hypocrisy (which is fair). He questioned the NBA's ability to suspend Kyrie for a tweet (also fair). The tweeted what he thought was a black group support of Kyrie, before finding out the groups origins/beliefs and saying he did not support that message a few hours later.
Again, what Jaylen is really guilty of is supporting a group (black men) even when members of that group are in the wrong. Its maybe not the best look, but I at least understand it. I don't know, maybe my love of this current team is giving me the green goggles on this one but I'm not sure I see the call for outrage a lot of people seem to.
Well, to repeat myself a little bit, what Jaylen is 'really guilty of' is repeatedly questioning whether the NBA's punishments for Kyrie's antisemitic behaviour were justified. What you are talking about in the second paragraph is the why Jaylen is doing this - Nick said much the same in his post.
And, just for the record: I'm not outraged - I just think the situation makes him look fairly stupid: it's been own goals and unforced errors.
And to explicitly repeat myself, is there anything here you disagree with?
Given Jaylen's comments to this point, it's reasonable to infer that Brown thinks the punishment for Kyrie tweeting out antisemitic propaganda without comment is over the top, despite the fact that Irving refuses to take any responsibility or show any real contrition for it.
And as this saga has gone on, he's doubled and tripled down on this stance - that, fundamentally, 'this level' of antisemitic activity shouldn't result in the sort of punishment Kyrie got.
This is what makes him look pretty stupid.
So, again, I put it to you that Jaylen can say that he's not racist and he's not antisemitic all he wants, but his actions seem to belie his words.
As to your "you'll never believe him" bit, I don't think that's reasonable. Now, I do find "I don't think that everything that is said or being done or being said is something I endorse or represent" to be flittering weasle words.
Look at this flyer:
https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/1594462258901417986
Regardless of how you feel about promoting folks of any colour, there's nothing stopping anyone from saying "yeah this is all bull---, but I appreciate they support Kyrie." Not "I don't think everything that they say is something I endorse." That's just that fence-sitting.
The whole topic is a difficult one. This is an entertainment business, so there is a legitimate interest of the employer to avoid deeply insulting its customers, but it is also a very creepy and dangerous path for any employer to end up policing the outside speech of its workers.
It is a legitimate point of view to be more concerned about the latter.
Our current social information culture undercut these types of sanctions. There is always an inevitable backlash that occurs now, supporting and hardening the behavior. The NBA gets to posture, a large portion of the public concurs, but the underlying antisemitism finds its audience and the sanctions become woven into the narrative of resentment.
It may have been more effective if the NBA and the Nets just condemned the speech but otherwise stayed out of it.
Regarding your last line, can you explain more? What does "effective" mean, in your mind?
I agree that punishing employees for outside speech can be slippery, but I think with entertainers it's different. They have massive platforms, and their speech doesn't only make their franchises look bad, but it causes real harm to the community. It emboldens other hate speech and actively makes fans of the attacked group feel lesser. Whether the speech be racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic, there's a social responsibility to punish it.
I too noted this is an entertainment business, so there are additional concerns that are legitimate.
At the core of this, Kyrie used his platform to signal certain beliefs in a narrative that claims that jewish people are a collection of mostly Israelite pretenders, are capable of huge, multi-generational international conspiracies, and that black people have been deeply harmed by their conspiracies.
Effectiveness here is reducing the overall harm of this message.
Are less people exposed the message?
Has Kyrie convinced people who originally were influenced by the message that he genuinely now thinks he was wrong?
Have the underlying falsehoods been discredited, and have such arguments made their way into the public debate in a way that changes minds in any significant way?
No to all of those. The way it was handled was that the NBA and the Nets signaled its strong opposition but only as a category of "hate". Kyrie didn't get into any of the specifics of the film's foolish accusations, only that he insists he wasn't anti-semitic and meant no harm. All very vague.
So what was the effect of the response? A weirdly amorphous signal that "anti-semitism" is wrong, but with no underlying understanding, and for some, that Kyrie messed with the wrong people and was brought to heel. I'm not sure that things aren't worse as a result.
Topic: Jaylen and his Anti-Semitic Friends (split) (Read 20073 times)