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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:58AM
from the American-game-of-FOOTball-which-is-played-using-your-HANDs dept.
from the American-game-of-FOOTball-which-is-played-using-your-HANDs dept.
ESPN pays $2 billion a year to the NFL for Monday Night Football and one NFL wild card playoff game. I've written for the past couple of years that as ESPN's business collapses that ESPN's decision on whether or not to bid to keep Monday Night Football would be the first big test of how rapidly that business is deteriorating.
What's a deteriorating business look like? In the month of October ESPN lost over 15,000 subscribers a day in October per the latest Nielson estimates.
15,000 a day!
Losing 15,000 subscribers per day is a lot, but is that because of the NFL anthem protests or because cord-cutting has finally reached a tipping point?
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ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More
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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday November 01 2017, @05:30PM (5 children)
You're so full of shit, you could fertilize a continent. You can't spin these "anecdotal" instances. I used to think police oppression was just a claim.. till Rodney King. Then minorities told us that was their normal. I don't think they would've rioted it if justice had been provided, and only rioted *because* bad behavior by police was so widespread, so anecdotal, that they couldn't take the oppression AND lack of justice when there was a reasonable chance for them to finally have justice. That opened my eyes.
Fast forward 15 years and the ubiquitousness of cheap camera technology has changed anecdotal, to videographic evidence. Rare means it happens very little. When you can't go three fucking days without a VIDEO of a minority being oppressed, shot, and often killed, you went from anecdotal to widely believed to be true because there are fucking videos.
At this point I would believe a minority before I believe the cop. Cops need bodycam footage now because their integrity has fucking evaporated. It's ALSO worth pointing out that it doesn't just happen to minorities. Cops are KILLING WHITE PEOPLE [wikipedia.org] too. That's not anecdotal either with the video of the murder of a mentally ill homeless man by nearly a dozen cops was filmed, as well as them preventing emergency services from attending to the man before he died.
Rare anecdotal instances? You must be fucking oblivious. Cops are murdering, stealing from, and oppressing Americans of all races, colors, creeds, and religions. The evidence only keeps mounting that we let cops get away from us as a special class of citizen immune to the laws they ostensibly enforce, incentivized to steal from us (illegal and unconstitutional asset seizure), and protected by corrupt police unions.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:44PM (4 children)
Out of curiosity, do you even know the story behind King other than him getting beaten? The night before the event King spent it with friends getting drunk and high. They then decided to go speeding down the freeway which attracted police attention. King was worried about getting pulled over since he was still on parole from his latest crime where he had robbed a store owner, assaulting him in the process (with a bat). So he decided to go zooming down the freeway, while high and drunk, risking one can imagine how many lives. He then moved into residential zones driving at speeds up to 80 mph.
When he was finally stopped, officers demanded everybody get out of the car. King refused. When he finally did emerge he acted belligerently and can also be seen feigning to draw a weapon. The offers restrain themselves and move in for an unarmed arrest. At this point he resists and begins fighting and charges one of the police officers. The officers then physically engage him and it does get absolutely excessive as they continue to attack him even once he had been safely subdued. And there's no defending that, but at the same time I think people don't really have an understanding of that scenario. A TV station at the time made things even worse by cutting 10 seconds of the footage before airing it. Those 10 seconds were the ones in which King was charging at and assaulting officers. So all people saw was a group of men attacking a subdued individual. Terrible story all around.
The other side of the story is of course Reginald Denny. He was a truck driver with no past issues with the law minding his own business. What he didn't realize is that the path he chose to drive took him into the LA riots. As rioters crowded the streets he was forced to stop to avoid injuring any of them. In response to this they invaded his truck, dragged him out of his vehicle, and beat him to within an inch of his life. Even after years of therapy he was left crippled for life with speech and movement impediments. He tried to receive any compensation for the city but failed. Nonetheless he returned to a relatively productive life.
Rodney King by contrast sued the city and won 3.8 million. He would be charged with numerous more charges of driving drunk, domestic abuse, hit and run, he drove his vehicle into a house trying to evade police in another instance. He eventually married married one of the jurors from his trial, and finally died in 2012 (at the age of 47) having drowned in his swimming pool loaded with drug and alcohol.
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It's easy to empathize with these awful videos and just imagine 'wow, that could be me.' And that is true, regardless of the color of your skin. But in order for it to be true you would have to act like a complete thug and idiot to boot. Had a white man acted the way Rodney King had, I have no doubt the scenario would have played out practically identically.
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Finally, anecdotal does not mean something did not happen. These stories are absolutely true (though many may not know the context). And there are definitely semi regular stories of police abuse. You said one every few days. I think that's probably an exaggeration but let's go with it. That's about about 122 per year. There are 323 million people in the US, and about 100 million minorities. Put your incidents in terms of ratios and statistics. This is the reason that anecdotal evidence is useless. It tells you something is happening, but absolutely nothing about its frequency, rate, and ultimately its relevance.
You can find instances much worse than Rodney King. Charles Kinsey for instance is a disgusting travesty. And I wish these protests focused on genuine injustices like that instead of police going too far with genuinely awful people whose existence most certainly is not making this world a better place. It makes the cause seem so silly holding up people like King as a martyr. No, the police should not have done what they did. But in his case, he did absolutely everything he possibly could to provoke it leaving me with little empathy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 01 2017, @08:32PM
In America we let the courts proscribe the punishment, not the arresting officers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @08:32PM
Ok, so tell me about Malice Green now...
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday November 01 2017, @09:26PM (1 child)
My point wasn't about Rodney King, and the circumstances are irrelevant to my argument. I stipulate to the facts you provided, and as you noted, the media offered information only from one side at the very end. I do not hold him as a martyr. Rather that the public at large immediately empathized with Mr. King to such an extent, that their anecdotes of routine oppression needed more serious attention as they heavily rioted. People don't riot because they are just a little angry, but because they feel there is no other expression left except violence.
That's all I meant to say. Mr. King introduced video to the equation, which made the facts very unambiguous (as presented). After the strength of their riot (a protest gone wrong), I opened my mind to the possibility that instead of the average black person's story of abuse being untrue, to maybe it is true. In the years since, so many, many, many more videos have surfaced. Where there is smoke there is fire as the saying goes.
I agree, but somebody has to start the conversation. Rodney King really started the conversation for the first time because the other side saw evidence. After that it makes it easier for good people to come forward too.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:07AM
The question is whether the "conversation" is actually something that is being had with any actual understanding on what is being said.
Imagine the media leaned a different direction and they decided to start collecting instances of white individuals being assaulted, murdered, raped, etc by minority individuals. Here [bjs.gov] are the bureau of justice statistic's most recent figures. This happens extremely regularly and disproportionately. For instance even though blacks make up less than 13% of the population, they commit more than 50% of all murders. And then you can get to crimes that tug on the heart strings like rape. Rape is one of the most grievous crimes and there are thousands of black on white rapes and sexual assaults per year. By contrast, the converse of white on black rapes/sexual assault are statistically nonexistent.
Take these things out of context, as the media is currently doing with other types of crime, and you've have riled up mobs looking for vengeance forming. Ready to drag an innocent individual out of a truck and beat him to death simply because of the color of his skin. Or, in a very recent incident an a group gang raped a woman and urinated on her with one calling it punishment for her for "400 years of slavery". These are consequences of the completely reckless behavior of influencers, including the media. And they're completely predictable.
What I'm getting at here is that anecdotes of crime of any particular sort does not mean there is a problem beyond the act itself. What you want to do is to try to see where we're most likely to be able to effect change, and work from there. Instead what we seem to be doing is having a media that determines crimes most likely to provoke an emotional (and even better, physical) response and then blare it on a loudspeaker 24/7 while sitting on the roof, with a fiddle and bag of money in hand, watching the chaos they instigate burn civilization, or at least civility, to the ground.
And while it's certainly debatable, there seems to be some argument that said influencers are intentionally doing this. Why in the world is media holding up these sort of awful people as martyrs while ignoring people like the aforementioned Charles Kinsey? There's not a single objective mind in this country that wouldn't feel for Kinsey. Take the current version of the Black Lives Matter wiki page [wikipedia.org]. I can find no fewer than 17 instances of "Michael Brown." Charles Kinsey? Not a peep. He is a good productive member of society who did everything right, yet was nonetheless unreasonably victimized. Yet the media mostly ignored his case, while they continue to hold people like Michael Brown as their martyrs. That is inflaming, and I think intentionally, racial tensions.