There’s nothing to own up to. the last statement contradicts the previous two paragraphs. At least that’s the way I see it.
It’s good to see the media choose now to come to the defense of a politician plunging in the polls because his words were taken out of context. Wish they’d been there for John mcCain.
Let me offer an alternate explanation.
Suppose two colleges play a football game; one has a student body of several thousand, the other has only a few hundred. Forget all the complications of big-time college sports; the facilities, recruiting, scholarships and such. Each has the same admissions standards. The larger school should still be expected to win. Why? Because the larger the talent pool you draw from, the more gifted individuals you expect to find, both in quantity and level of achievement. To cite the extreme case, If you have only 11 students to draw from, you have to take them all. If you have 11,000, you can take the top 1/10 of 1%.
If most athletes do indeed come from less-than-privileged beginnings[sup]*[/sup], that could be why. Most families aren’t wealthy. If the next Michael Jordan is to be born tomorrow, somewhere, at random, in the U.S., chances are excellent that his family will be middle class or below.
That’s also an argument in favor of education, school lunches, children’s health care, and the like. Making sure they all reach their potential increases the size of the national talent pool, which increases the quality of the most superlative individuals you can expect to find within it.
Most athletes don’t come from the middle class either. They mostly come from the ranks of the poor. If there’s one thing the poor have, it’s time. and many kids that grow up poor have the kind of drive that a more pampered middle class kid wouldn’t understand. Every kid wants to be a baseball player or basketball player, but they also like to play video games, collect comics books, and watch movies. If your only possession life is a basketball…
Now I understand.
The wish to pay less taxes, to cut back on govt spending, to give less support to those that most need it is not out of self interest, greed or a fuck you attitude.
Rather it is driven by altruism. It’s driven by a genuine and realistic desire to drive more people into poverty so that they have more time to practise with the single basketball they own.
Gotcha.
It’s very clear to me now.
Thanks for your hard work, effort, altruism and very generous support of the sporting youth of America.
Not the point I was making. I observed earlier that the athlete discussion was taking us off topic.
Although it does show that a welfare state is not a help with positive risk taking. A person can come up with all kinds of plausible reasons why any spending program might help contribute to people’s success, and these plausible theories are one way these programs get sold. Problem is, very few of them actually have such wonderful results.
Which is why politicians like the President choose to focus on the cheap, noncontroversial spending items, rather than the things that actually are the reason we pay such high taxes.
This is really going to depend on the sport in question because that is certainly not universal. Your top golfers, skiers, swimmers and dressage jockeys usually aren’t coming from poor families. This in many ways proves that someone success is dependent on what the society offers. The poor can manage to practice and excel at sports like basketball because our society is willing to provide them publicly maintained courts they can use at no cost. A poor person might have the potential to be the best dressage jockey in the world but that will never be realized because we aren’t paying for the horses needed to participate.
That’s true, but the big money is in sports that the masses like, and the masses tend to like sports the masses can pick up and play.
yeah - it’s probably not a good idea to talk about motor racing here…
How much do those guys make anyway? As much as basketball players?
Excluding endorsements etc - can easily be in the $30 million USD range per annum for the top drivers.
Do you have any facts to back that up?
Certainly some athletes come from very humble backgrounds. They make for compelling up-close-and-personal background stories, and maybe we remember their stories more than the sons of bankers and equipment managers. But if you want to assert it as a fact that athletes predominantly come from poor backgrounds, I’m gonna need more than just your say so.
And what about my larger point, that you’ll find more, and more highly talented, people if you have a larger pool to draw from? Should we try to make our pool as large as we can, or not?
BTW, how many of you have seen the RNC ad that pretty much just lets the President talk for a full minute?
Does the last line that they didn’t show really put into context all that came before?
You mean this line:
Yep, there’s a whole mess of missing context right there.
The commercial makes the point that the more of it you hear, the worse it’s supposed to be. Funny that they still edited it.
If the last sentence is merely a reiteration of what he already said, then why would it need to be there to put it in context?
Or is it not a reiteration, but actually a correction?
Because some ideas take more than a minute to explain properly. What he said in a few paragraphs we’ve spent 675 posts debating and dissecting. To suggest that his last sentence can be cut because it’s either superfluous or contradictory is ridiculous.
The way it’s said, it is a summary of what he just said. Again, if the details are already there, why is the summary absolutely necessary?
Show me a country without public schools or bridges where the PPP per capita is a third of the US. It’s a necessary, though not sufficient factor of success.
Murray Rothbard.
Define “success” and explain why it should be in our interest that people excel.
Disingenuous. Payroll taxes fund sociall security, which is currently running a surplus. Why does it require rescuing?
Golden mean fallacy. Norway has a much lower disparity of wealth and a much more progressive taxation system, with under half the unemployment of the US.
Define individual success and explain why it is useful for the average American.
Hyperbolic discounting, tragedy of the Commons. They may want more money in their pockets, but they also want to survive after they’ve retired (despite not meeting your pecuniary criterion of individual success, perhaps). Unemployment benefits have a stimulative effect, presumably Social Security benefits do too.
Again, define your terms.
For people who have a hard time grasping the point. Which appears to be a lot of people.
Well, I do agree that his comments were misunderstood and taken out of context. I just object to the contention that the right is lying about what he said. When John McCain’s words were taken out of context, it was an obvious lie on the party of the Obama campaign team. This is less obvious. I’m inclined to believe the President when he explains what he meant. I misspeak all the time. But I also don’t accuse others of being liars for misunderstanding me, or rejecting my explanation of what I actually meant.
And again, a guy complaining about his words being taken out of context when he’s made a habit of using such out of context remarks against his political opponents is simply whining of the first order. If he thinks it’s so wrong, he shouldn’t have done it himself.
Except the right IS lying about what he said by being disingenuous and taking his quote out of context.
And two wrongs don’t make a right, nor are those two wrongs necessarily of comparable distribution.
He’s clarifying his position because Romney’s campaign team has gone on this crusade to make it sound like Obama was completely discounting intelligence and hard work, which is the exact attitude you’ve put forth in this thread on multiple occasions. It’s in Obama’s interest to expose Romney’s weaseling in this case, especially when both candidates have basically said the same thing (the Daily Show clip posted earlier makes this painfully obvious when they cut back and forth between the two speeches).
It’s a misleading tactic from the right, so of course people are going to complain about it when they pull such an obvious stunt. The context of his initial speech was obvious and people didn’t have any trouble understanding what he was saying.
You’re seriously arguing/asking why people summarize? Summaries are useful for wrapping up entire bodies of ideas into easy-to-digest chunks. They relay the primary points.