In a sign of solidarity, the Pittsburgh Steelers stayed in the locker room during the national anthem before their 1 p.m. ET kickoff with the Chicago Bears.Football players are not going to be bullied by some old, overweight, short-fingered white guy.
Players for the Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans did the same before their game.
An NFL official told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter that no fines are being considered for those players who stayed in the locker room during the anthem.
A guy who, mind you, thinks that brain-damage ought to be part of the game, while he has apparently never taken a punch in his life.
Trump says that his call to fire anyone who protests the National Anthem has nothing to do with racism. The hell it doesn't.
By the way, Tom Brady skipped the team visit to the White House in 2015 - President Obama didn't disinvite the team. But when Steph Curry said he wasn't going to go, Trumpelthinskin disinvited his team.
Yep. Nothing to do with race.
In a pig's eye.
'Taint racism. It's disgust at their actions.
ReplyDeleteYou too should be outraged by the players actions.
As for the players and teams, they (and the owners) are practicing their First Amendment rights, as guaranteed by the constitution. President Trump, in his statement, obviously needs to brush up on what the First Amendment is, what it covers, and who should be in trouble for infringing on those rights. No matter what folks think about Obama, having Bush II and Trump as bookends to his time in office can only make him look better in comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe civility and unity displayed in today's protests is noteworthy. The protest is an exercise in their first amendment rights. For the holder of the office of President of The United States of America to call those that choose to protest "Sons a bitches" shows that he has no grasp of what rights the Constitution gives to the people. One can disagree with them, their message, and their methods, but you can't deny their rights.
ReplyDeleteDale
They also keep forgetting the verse in the national anthem about killing slaves:
ReplyDelete“No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave”
I don't know for sure, but I imagine that if I was black, that would kinda piss me off.
-Doug in Oakland
As a 'decorated' Vietnam War veteran, '70-'71, I applaud these brave players and owners exercising their right of free speech. Like Kapernick, they risk censure, hatred and possible loss of a lucretive career. The vile racist coward and traitor trump has never risked a thing and does not understand our American rights.
ReplyDeleteTod
*Vietnam service medal, National Defense (Fire Guard Medal)
On my blog today, I have a photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of other protesters kneeling for peace, justice, and equality. For a certain white population, this made them dangerous radicals who needed to be rounded up and caged like animals.
ReplyDeleteThe more things change, the more they don’t….
- Badtux the Dejavu Penguin
BTW, I love it when people tell me how I'm supposed to think or feel about something. As if I need somebody else to tell me what to think or feel. Tells me a lot about their mentality -- that is, that they're dependent upon other people to tell them what to think or feel.
ReplyDeleteJust sayin'.
There's gotta' be a better way to express the sentiment, taking a knee is far too like bowing down to a king or a dog or something.
ReplyDeleteLike boycotting it in its entirety.
Yeah Tux, that cracks me up, (far too) rapudly rolling up on seventy years slappin' babbits and some greenhorn flatlander's gonna' come out here and tell me how I'm supposed to think or feel about something.
I had to laugh as tRump realized he'd backed the wrong horse and pivoted to locking arms good/kneading bad. He is a bully, a bloowhard, an impulsive child, an uneducated moron with regard to our liberties and rights. Historically, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Harding are cheering as he heads around the turn in a race to become the worst President ever.
ReplyDeleteFunny how dissent is treated by some like a Soviet apparatchik talking about Russian dissidents 40 years ago.
ReplyDeleteB, I am disgusted. I am disgusted by a portly rich man, a man who has a history of using the legal system as a cudgel, being upset because a bunch of uppity black folk are protesting. I am disgusted by people who only want protests that don't make them uncomfortable. I am disgusted by the mindset that protesters shold meekly appear, caps in their hands, to say: "Please, can the police kill fewer of us?"
ReplyDeleteNothing ever changes. Statist-conservatives love to define protesters as "the other" and then call for the cops to bust heads (or, in this case, the protesters to be fired). It happened over fifty years ago on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It happened fifty years ago during the Vietnam War. It's happening now.
B, you want to live in a country where it's required to pledge loyalty? Would you believe everyone, in that case? Would you believe your country was worthy of its demanded love?
ReplyDeleteWould you want a relationship where the other person pointed a gun at you and demanded you to say, "I love you," at their pleasure? No criticism allowed?
Kaepernick disgusted me. He was using a stage that wasn't his to promote a narrative that may be well intentioned but is still flawed at best. And demonstrating scorn for the nation as a whole stirs emotions, but offeres NOTHING constructive or useful.
ReplyDeleteBut nobody with sense disputed his right to do so.
Trump apparently wants us to be serfs and the Presidency to be a kingship (for him).
He displays no people skills, too. The kneeling issue was going away before he fired up the tweets.
Comrade: It wasn't just black men...Lots of white guys are too. And it ISN'T about race. It is about the disrespect they are showing to the symbols (yes, just symbols, but symbols are indeed symbolic) of our country.
ReplyDeleteThey are, in effect, disrespecting the US. And I find that terrible. Disgusting.
If they wish to DO something about the perceived racism, then yes, I can respect that. Are they donating a hefty percentage of their large salaries to help those folks they claim to be wanting to protest the treatment of? Are THEY spending time teaching them how not to get pulled over or shot at by cops when it happens? Are they actually, you know, FIXING the problem, or even trying?
Nope, they are (symbolically) spitting on their country. The one that gives them the opportunity for their fame, and fortune, and the freedom to be what they are.
you are trying to make excuses by making this about race. It isn't.
Can anyone tell me where is it written in stone that patriotism is mandatory at American sporting events.?
ReplyDelete1) We need to teach people how not to get shot when being pulled over?! What the FUCK!
ReplyDelete2) So waving the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, a flag that flew over troops attacking he United States of America, is A-OK but this isn't?! WTF, again.
3) Private citizens are required to pay to fix insititutional racism?! Fuck it, this isn't the shining city on the hill, this is a dark satanic mill.
4) Millionares, eh? Let's see...practice squad minimum, $7,200 a week ($122,400 for a full season)...NFL minimum is $465,000, only reaches $1,000,000 after 10 years. Remember, the average NFL career is 3.3 years, 6 years for a rookie making the team his first year. The average NFL player has career earnings of $4.000.000, after taxes, and a huge portion of that is the inflation of the average by the headline player salaries. Crunch the numbers and the real average player makes a bit below $2,000,000 (before taxes) in his career...a career that will result in large medical bills down the road and an impaired ability to do other work. Call it about $1,200,000 over a little over three years, to live on for the rest of your life. I don't know about you, but I can't do that from age 25 or 26.
3383, "demonstrating scorn for the nation as a whole"
ReplyDeleteWho said he did that?
B, the white guys who are taking a knee are, as far as I can see, doing it in support of their teammates who have been personally attacked by Trump. The original protesters were few and far between until Trump opened his yap on the subject.
ReplyDeleteReally, B. If you don't want to be called racist, you need to stop saying racist shit.
ReplyDeleteWhy *SHOULD* black men respect this country? They've never had equal rights here. Never. Not from the day they were brought here from Africa in chains. Oh sure, they've gotten lip service, but that's it. They have lip service that they have equal rights to employment, but reality is that the research shows they're predominantly shoved into segregated schools that don't prepare them for college or for employment, and if they do manage to escape with a college degree, research shows that simply having a stereotypically black name gets their resume shit-canned even before an initial screening phone call, where the same identical resume with a stereotypically white name gets a phone call. Yeah, so much for that fucking "equal employment rights" bullshit. If they do get hired, they get pulled over for "driving while black" ten times more often than white people, yet are less likely to have illegal drugs on them than white people as a percentage of those stops. And yeah, unarmed black men have the right to be four times more likely to be shot and killed by police than unarmed white men are, even adjusting for exact same observed behavior. And the right to be refused service in restaurants despite laws making that illegal -- yep, had it happen, Indian friend of mine who looks black, wife (also Indian) looks Hispanic, did a road trip and got refused service multiple times in small-town America because bigots thought they were a multi-racial couple, got stopped for Driving While Black Or Brown dozens of times (and let go without explanation once the officer saw the Indian name on their driver's licenses), etc., came back in tears asking "what is wrong with this country?" and I had to explain it to them... then there's the being followed around stores by the store detective (even though most thieves are white)... then there was that whole crack epidemic years ago where black people were demonized while white people on heroin today are not, yeah, a right to be demonized for the same fucking shit that white people do... and so on and so forth.
Basically, life is still fucked up for black people in this country. The fact that a few black men manage to make good money playing a children's game that's guaranteed to scramble their brains like fucking breakfast sausage and ruin their knees to the point where most can't walk without pain ten years after retiring from the game, that doesn't change that at all.
Shit, if I was treated the way black people have been treated in this country, I'd fucking spit on the flag every goddamned day. Because it is a fucking disgrace that people can wave that flag and spout goddamned bullshit about "equality" and "liberty", when the only "equality" that most black people have is the right to be spit on by wealthy oligarchs like our "President" (who was selected, not elected) and the only "liberty" that most black people have is the right to be shot and killed for shit that white people do every day with at most a "don't do that again." It's disgusting and a disgrace, and the fact that you don't see this shows that either you're goddamned blind, stump ignorant, or a fucking racist. Your call.
Nangleator- I said that. The national flag anthem represents the nation as a whole. The players are also part of this nation, and are equally responsible to do what we can as individuals.
ReplyDeleteI was a fan of Kaepernick, and believe that his abilities were misused by successive fools misplaying and miscoaching him who were selected by the incompetent ownership (York does have better smarts than Trump).
Badtux- That's a lot of text, but I will not let your contention that black people are shot and killed for shit that white people do every day with little consequence. That is not true- most other Americans, white and otherwise, more often have better sense than to commit stupid crimes, elude police, and resist arrest with all means at hand.
And you minimize how "normal" black men of African descent can be when they refuse to go along with the worse examples in their culture. Ten percent of my reactor operator division were black, and they were judged by the same standards everyone was. One of my coworkers should, according to you, spit on the flag every day, but he loves this country and his life. He also managed to not start trouble, instead putting himself through college with an engineering degree, a physics degree, and speaks four languages.
I'll ask him for you if he's been harassed by the police more than I have.
Dude, there are so many things wrong with you post that I don't know where to begin, so I won't.
ReplyDeleteYou need to stop with the self hate and start looking logically, rather than emotionally at this issue. Call me racist if you will, but you gotta get your shit together before we can communicate.
What's that high pitched keening noise? Just on the edge of Human perception, outside the periphery of "civilized" peoples' hearing...
ReplyDelete3383 -- I worked side-by-side with black professionals in black schools for years, teaching primarily black children. I saw up close and personal just how black *professionals* are treated by our police forces and society as a whole. I have references to research in reputable journals backing up every single statement I made above, from the rampant discrimination against black people in employment today to disparate treatment compared to white people *for the exact same crime*. Willie Nelson gets fined and sent on his way for an amount of marijuana that would have a black man behind bars for 5 to 10 years. And I will simply point out that while black men are 10 times likely to be stopped by police officers on suspicion of drug or weapons possession, they're *less* likely in those stops to actually have drugs or weapons compared with white men. This is fact. Thanks to lawsuits in multiple major cities where police were accused of racial discrimination, we now have these numbers. They are disquieting.
ReplyDeleteB -- I find it interesting that you find a recounting of facts to be "self-hate". Apparently for you, facts that you don't like are "self hate".
The reality is that we have treated black people like shit from the beginning -- a great-great-grandfather of mine raised black people as *livestock*, for crying out loud -- and we continue, as a society, to treat black people like shit. Them being annoyed about that and protesting about that doesn't make them somehow monsters who should be condemned. It just makes them human.
Thomas -- gosh, I dunno. Let me get a dog.... hmm. Said dog seems to be hearing something. I wonder what?
ReplyDeleteBoy howdy, at least three, in harmony.
ReplyDeleteSymbols. The Flag of these United States of America. The one we all pledged alliegence to all through elementary school. The pledge that we said one nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice FOR ALL. Apparently we have failed in that pledge. There seem to be some that are not experiencing the same Liberty and Justice that is given to others. So in order that their concerns be addressed they elect to kneel during the National Anthem. I believe that is one of the liberties that we pledged, freedom of speech, or was it the right to peacefully assemble to air grievances. Or perhaps it is a combination of both.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with the protests. I hope it brings about the change necessary so that people can live their lives, in peace, however they choose. But with the current administration, with its underlying tone of racism, I fell it wil be more difficult than it has to be.
Dale
3383, "The national flag anthem represents the nation as a whole."
ReplyDeleteAnd the nation promises free speech. Don't let the symbol become more important than the thing it symbolizes.
"The players are also part of this nation, and are equally responsible to do what we can as individuals."
Their responsibility is not to mutely hold the right pose, or say the right words at the right time. Their responsibility is to improve the country. They are doing that by highlighting a problem. Their protest is admirable. The people trying to destroy their protest are not helping the country.
Just as a thought, why do we even have the anthem before a game. Most other countries have the anthem before games between National teams, but not normal sporting events. The pledge of allegiance is the same way, it's kinda Soviet-esque. Hell, here they do the Texas pledge too, God help us.
ReplyDeleteAt the top of the list of the Fourteen Defining Chatacteristics of Fascism is:
ReplyDelete1) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Followed by number 3) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
Then there's number 4) Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
And 12) Obsession with Crime and Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
Concluding with 14) Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
Jehovah's Witnesses are allowed to pledge allegiance to no man or flag, only to God. This is their faith. It seems to me that the same people whining about black ball players "disrespecting the flag" would have the same complaint about Jehovah's Witnesses "disrespecting the flag" when Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to put their hand over their breast or etc. during the National Anthem and Pledge. Surely these people upset about "disrespecting the flag" would call Jehovah's Witnesses "sons of bitches" too. But funny, I just searched for any instance of Donald Trump doing so about Jehovah's Witnesses, and he hasn't. And I haven't seen the commentators here complaining about Jehovah's WItnesses disrespecting the flag either.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Jehovah's Witnesses are mostly *white*, while the ball players doing the same thing are *black*. I'm sure that has *nothing* to do with it though....
OK, so as was mentioned above, perhaps these athletes do want to help improve the situation. A quick examination of their resources for doing so yields the public platform they are given to be arguably the most powerful tool in their box, and they are using it.
ReplyDeleteI fail to believe that their detractors, if their brethren were being murdered by the police, would leave off the use of their most powerful communications asset.
-Doug in Oakland
I am disturbed by the "taking the knee" it seems subservient. I feel a much, much action would be turning your back to the flag during the anthem. Got raised with a "you shall kneel before no man only God" attitude.
ReplyDelete