To the NBA, or the NFL or the NCAA, or … you get the idea, there is no issue more important than money.
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Not during the Cold War, that’s for sure. The Russians/Soviets were THE looming bad guys in nearly every action or spy movie out there. We had Presidents refer to the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire”. If anything, painting them as some combination of secretive, oppressive, paranoid, aggressive, and backward was encouraged.
This story was up on the AP this morning and I thought y’all might find relevant to the discussion: China criticizes Apple for app that tracks Hong Kong police.
In a nutshell, the app allows people to post things that are happening at a location which is then placed on a map of Hong Kong: police are gathering at this intersection; they’ve fired tear gas in this park; etc.
Beijing doesn’t like this:
They’re laying it on heavy, albeit through third and fourth parties at the moment:
I think people should get to work and make as many of these apps for as many different cities as possible as fast as possible.
This is so disheartening.
Clear illustration of how we can’t count on businesses, capitalism, or profit motive to ensure the safety, stability, or security of our society.
And “political correctness” has nothing to do with it. Ultimately, the NBA (and Hollywood, and anyone else) is being paid to say or not say certain things. And those organizations have decided that it’s in their own best financial interests to take the money.
Gotta love how the NBA went from abject kowtowing to just embarrassing obsequiousness.
''We of course support free speech, but gee he shouldna done that, there are consequences, tch-tch."*
*the gist of Adam Silver’s followup statement.
I definitely agree on sharpening the analogy that way. It’s not a matter of how ‘real’ the apology is. I get storyteller0910’s point that somebody who felt they deserved a real apology might well be dissatisfied with the NBA and related party statements*, but the point here is really whether the Houston GM did anything wrong at all, not a question of how the NBA dealt with something we all agree was wrong.
Stand with protesters against arguably the most murderous regime, by the numbers, in world history. Why is that to be ‘regretted’? That’s the key question to me, not whether private people in China view it as offensive (though many probably do), certainly not how the Communist Party views it.
Of course the much larger issue here is the tiny tip of the iceberg (actually much smaller than the proportion of an iceberg that sticks out of the water 
) this comment by the Houston GM represents compared to all the statements about the Communist regime in China not made by various people and entities in the US out of concern for commercial interests, and just plain blind spot by many ordinary people who follow the lead of the media and entertainment world in what injustices they talk about and which ones they ignore.
*note Rockets star James Harden did apologize, Rockets owner more directly rebuked the GM than the NBA did in English, and the English translation of the NBA’s Chinese language statement is more grovelling than the English version.
Steven A. Smith of ESPN is unsurprisingly coming down hard on China’s side.
This isn’t “political correctness.” This is the worship of money above all else. The NBA should be ashamed of itself.
To the extent that I am aware of them, yes.
I am aware of that, although my impression was that our Taiwan policy has always been wonky for kinda the same reason everyone else is folding. In the early days, the CCP knew that they couldn’t actually change our behavior, but made it a critical and non-negotiable part of doing business with them that we couldn’t acknowledge the state of reality. Judging (likely correctly) that we’d be willing to give up on some language for economic reasons, and that in the long term, that would compromise Taiwan, as it’d be pretty hard for Taiwan to really fully rely on an ally that’s not willing to even maintain that they really exist publicly.
Just a side point, the people of China love basketball. It’s huge, one of the biggest if not the biggest sport in that country. Europe and Latin America have soccer, the U.S. has tackle football, India has Cricket, and China has ping pong. What? Okay, I guess basketball is second to ping pong in China like baseball is second to football in the States. There’s nothing more American than baseball, and there’s nothing more Chinese than basketball. Don’t think too hard about it or you might disagree with me.
What is the point I’m trying to make? Look at it from a utilitarian perspective. Broadcasting the NBA in China will make a lot of Chinese people happy. It also will make the NBA a lot of money, but eh, that probably has absolutely no bearing on the NBA’s decision. Even if it did, the ends justify the means yeah? Okay, now how many people are unhappy because the NBA compromised what we consider to be core values? A couple thousand people, tops.
Now remember that all people are equal. Sure, China doesn’t necessarily have the same definition of people or equal as we do, but if we’re going to judge China’s actions we might as well use our own definitions and morals. They sure don’t use ours. Okay, so we’ve got two options:
[ul][li]Millions of happy Chinese people but a couple thousand unhappy American people[/li][li]Millions of unhappy Chinese people but a couple thousand happy American people[/ul][/li]Remember that all people are equal and making people happy is desirable to making people unhappy. Essentially we have a situation where you can have more happy people, or you can have more unhappy people. What do you choose? Moore happy people, duh!
Okay, now some people will say we would be letting China tell us what to do. That’s bad, because even though we don’t seem to care if Chinese people are guaranteed freedom from Chinese oppression, it’s still important that American people are free from Chinese oppression. This contradicts the notion that all people are created equal, but we’ll ignore that because the previous generalization might not apply to the people raising this argument.
The answer is that we aren’t giving up any freedoms by acceding to China’s demands. They can’t make us do anything, we’re coming to the conclusion that what the NBA did is perfectly moral. China doesn’t have a gun to our head like it does to the Chinese citizens. We aren’t being coerced to make this conclusion, we looked at the people involved and decided that the NBA made the right decision.
Now you might say, China might as well ask us to give them 30% of our income or they will shoot all of their people. The old slippery slope argument. Well it doesn’t work.
Look at it this way. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but poverty buys unhappiness. If you take 30% income from the American people and hand it over to China, you would be making the American people unhappy by plunging them into poverty. You don’t actually have to go into poverty to become unhappy, almost any reduction of benefits that you come to rely on will do it. And what exactly are you getting in return? China isn’t going to give that money to their people, we know that because China’s all corrupt and stuff. So you have no benefit in return; it’s a bad deal. Contrast with the NBA broadcasting in China, which has always been conditional on the Chinese government’s consent.
Okay but let’s look at the micro. Before I said money had nothing to do with the NBA decision. I was actually being sarcastic there, but now I’ll explain myself. You see, the people who work at NBA get paid. And further, they get paid to make more money. One of the big ways the NBA makes money is by selling the license to broadcast the NBA games. So essentially, people get paid more when they sell more licenses to broadcast. Naturally it follows that if the NBA employees sell less licenses, they get paid less. And we’ve already gone over how being paid less makes people unhappy.
So on the micro level you have NBA executives deciding what’s best for them and their families. I said before that all people are equal, but on the micro level, it’s usually “family is more equal than non-family”. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a good survival strategy at least. So you have the NBA executives thinking about things a little different. Let’s look:
[ul][li]Millions of happy Chinese people and a happy family but a couple thousand unhappy American people[/li][li]Millions of unhappy Chinese people but a couple thousand happy American people and an unhappy family[/ul][/li]But, families above other people,
[ul][li]A happy family[/li][li]An unhappy family[/ul][/li]Actually it’s a little more involved. You see, most business executives are men, and business executive men with families stereo-typically know that their wives and children will leave them if they get fired. Also, losing money for your company will get you fired. So for at least some of these people, the calculus is like this:
[ul][li]My family doesn’t leave me[/li][li]My family leaves me[/ul][/li]And I think the answer is clear. Nevermind that a male executive with a family had a temporary lapse in moral judgement. The NBA was absolutely in the moral right to issue an apology.
~Max, attempting to be a satirist
…and failing
It wasn’t that bad. He just needs more practice.
Sheesh, this has nothing to do with political correctness. China is about the least politically correct country on earth.
It’s plain and simple: China is asserting itself as a global power, and its leveraging its financial power to hit where it hurts.
A boycott movement by gamers against Activision/Blizzard is gaining steam. Lots of WoW, Overwatch, Hearthstone gamers quitting.
Agreed, PC is a form of censorship that you may like. What people are doing WRT China is a form of censorship that you do not like.
Agreed, they mostly just threaten violence to trigger a hecklers veto.
Oops, just saw this
To some extent this is the same dynamic we see in academic PC culture and liberal orthodoxy.