Pft, next you’re going to tell me they saw sales skyrocket.
That’s probably true, but that’s because many conservatives are as flawed and partisan as many liberals are.
But regardless of whether they would or would not have used his image, the point remains the same. Tillman is a guy who knowingly sacrificed an NFL career in search of what he considered a greater cause. Kaepernick did something that seemed likely to just get him some publicity, and his response to the harm to his career was to sue over it.
You want to claim Tillman as a fellow liberal, that may or may not be true, but is irrelevant.
As DA said, there are different ways of expressing the same thing. As a practical matter, CK was refusing to express pride in a symbol of his country, so he expressed it that way (though he apparently misspoke in saying the flag, since - to my knowledge - no flags were involved, and he meant the anthem). But the whole point of symbols of the country is that they represent the country, and this is pretty clear from the context of what he was saying. So it’s the same thing.
You really don’t think police racism had anything to do with it? You can’t accept that it’s a real problem, a cause of national shame that we need to clean up, or what?
Really, dude? Tell us, what direction do you turn when you’re standing for the anthem? What is being played while you stare at the flag?
Maybe it would be better to make more people *want *to respect the country, and *want *to salute its symbols, than to take your denialist and personalized approach. Just a thought.
I’m not up on the details of this stuff, but it’s completely ancillary to my point, which is exactly the same whether he meant anthem or flag.
While I totally understand the impulse, this seems like a deeply uncharitable way to characterize things in order to make Kap’s actions appear selfish, venal, and petty.
Isn’t is just as reasonable to say that Kap “knowingly risked losing an NFL career over what he considered to be a greater cause, and then brought a lawsuit when it became apparent to him that he was being illegally conspired against?” I mean, just in the interest of balancing the rhetoric? Or is is important to the argument that Kap appear selfish, venal, and petty?
If we must quibble, and it appears we must, I do not recall his ever having been accused of not showing respect for the anthem, only for the flag, and, by corollary, the military
Then why did you bring it up?
And why *not *discuss what he actually meant, and if it’s a real problem we need to fix, instead of looking to avoid it and denigrate him personally?
I’ve never been an unarmed black man shot by the police, so therefore it doesn’t happen.
Another poster was attempting to distinguish between the symbol and what it represented, so this became a minor focus and I commented on which symbol was being discussed. But it makes no difference to my point which symbol it was. The issue is whether the distinction between the symbol and what that symbol represents is a valid one in this context. (It’s not.)
I think your interpretation of my post was “deeply uncharitable”. (Though I too “understand the impulse”.)
I don’t see anything that necessarily makes him “selfish, venal, and petty”. Only that he apparently did not foresee himself making any big sacrifices or was prepared to accept any. He was doing something which would possibly help the cause he was promoting, but the impact on himself was likely to be neutral-to-positive. Not remotely comparable to a guy like Tillman, who definitely knew he was making a major sacrifice.
You’re still focusing exclusively on the messenger, not the message. Why?
Try to follow the discussion.
Kaep did donate a million bucks to charity in support of his cause – that seems like a pretty large sacrifice for someone without a job to make. And this was long before he got this gig with Nike.
I disagree. The important issue is what the symbol represents.
To many, it represents the right and responsibility to protest the government; to others, the proposition that all men are created equal; and to still others, the need to promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.
Those are all serious issues, and should be the topic of conversation, not how good a quarter back one respectful protestor was.
Try not to divert it. If you can.
Possible. But that’s not what Nike is honoring him for.
But you said “Only that he apparently did not foresee himself making any big sacrifices or was prepared to accept any. He was doing something which would possibly help the cause he was promoting, but the impact on himself was likely to be neutral-to-positive.”
Donating a million bucks reasonably qualifies as a “big sacrifice”, and a negative “impact on himself” (financially, at least), even if it’s not as big as Tillman’s sacrifice.
I was talking about what he foresaw when he embarked on his protest campaign (which is what he symbolizes, to Nike and everyone else), not what he foresaw when he decided to donate a million bucks.
Unless you think his decision to donate so much was made on a whim, then he probably thought about it for a long time – he may have been prepared to make that sacrifice from the beginning. We can certainly say with hindsight “Kaepernick was prepared to make a large personal sacrifice in support of his cause”. That’s a part of what he symbolizes, at least to anyone who’s paying attention.
Hard to know. He might alternatively have been doubling down once he got an unanticipated adverse consequence football-wise, but conversely the protest movement got bigger than he anticipated, and he became mostly about the movement rather than the game.
Either way, it’s entirely reasonable to say that he was prepared to make a large sacrifice, since he did indeed make a large sacrifice. And not reasonable, IMO, to characterize him as you did, as someone unwilling to make a large sacrifice.