The Politics of being J.D.

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Adrian's Dome

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Not at all. Or that a multimillionaire would be either. But this is not about whether he goes R or D. Its about two expressions of his beliefs that, IMO, are quite offensive.
IMO, he probably doesn't give a shit what you think. Nor should he.
 

curly2

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Yeah, both of these seem like pretty mainstream conservative republican views: staunch second amendment/anti-gun control, and fiscally conservative, anti-safety net. Positions I don't agree with , but I think it's a big reach to label either racist or hate speech. Dumb use of the Hitler meme, which has been largely de-bunked, to be sure. Beyond that, this feels like it's mostly a nothingburger, forgotten by the weekend.
To me there's a MASSIVE difference between "Obama supporters want an overly-large safety net" and "Obama supporters don't have jobs."
 

nvalvo

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Hey guys! I recently uncovered some social media posts from 2012 in which the Cleveland baseball franchise advertised hats embroidered with a grotesque racist caricature! Shocking!
 

joe dokes

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IMO, he probably doesn't give a shit what you think. Nor should he.
I agree. As Francona once said, once you start thinking with the fans, you end up sitting with them.

But just as JDM used a forum to express an opinion, that's kinda what we do here.
 

The Needler

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To me there's a MASSIVE difference between "Obama supporters want an overly-large safety net" and "Obama supporters don't have jobs."
Great. Some people crudely disparage members of the other party. Sometimes even candidates themselves (e.g., "deplorables").

But it's not like this trope has only been applied to Obama voters. I saw the same thing during the last Presidential election:



This all seems like a pretty small molehill to me.
 

cornwalls@6

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To me there's a MASSIVE difference between "Obama supporters want an overly-large safety net" and "Obama supporters don't have jobs."
I don't think it's as massive as you do, but fair enough. Even revising it to fiscally conservative, anti-welfare, or some such wording, still doesn't, IMO, on its face, make it racist or hate speech. Not without more context and detail about the person expressing it. It's a fairly mainstream, if, IMO, wrong-headed, conservative republican sentiment. We haven't as yet seen evidence of JDM holding racist views. If something further is revealed, in what will now undoubtedly be a deep dive into his social media history, obviously that would change my view considerably. If this is all there is, I think it's largely a non-story.
 

ricopetro6

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Equating unemployment with being African American is also racist, isn’t it? Thankfully, minority unemployment is also near all time lows.

The meme doesn’t have any racial tinge to it at all. Dems favor a somewhat larger safety net than republicans. Thus, people dependent on the safety net vote Dem. Duh.

Yet, the posters here are reading race into it.

Only a dog can hear a dog whistle.
yup..I didn't take that as racist....but we are in a day where some people look to find racism anywhere they can
 

JohntheBaptist

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I don't think it's as massive as you do, but fair enough. Even revising it to fiscally conservative, anti-welfare, or some such wording, still doesn't, IMO, on its face, make it racist or hate speech. Not without more context and detail about the person expressing it. It's a fairly mainstream, if, IMO, wrong-headed, conservative republican sentiment. We haven't as yet seen evidence of JDM holding racist views. If something further is revealed, in what will now undoubtedly be a deep dive into his social media history, obviously that would change my view considerably. If this is all there is, I think it's largely a non-story.
I tend to agree. This makes him a douchebag more than anything else for me. Remember Mike Timlin's "footprint of the American chicken" locker sticker?

These guys aren't Mensa members. He can be a bomb-throwing Republican if he wants, but the Hitler imagery means this will get talked about, which I'm also fine with.
 

AB in DC

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There's some truly vile, hateful stuff going around on social media these days. I'm totally on board with settibg some kind of bright line against things like that.

But stupid Internet memes are nowhere close to that line.
 

jose melendez

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Jd martinez has bad political ideas and expresses them poorly on Facebook. So what? They’re well within the realm of normal political stupid.

This isn’t anywhere close to a Schilling type line. Of course, when he played Shilling wasn’t that close to the line either.

If players want to use heir platform to express political views, I think that’s good. If the positions are stupid, hate on that.
 

bsj

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I mean curt schilling is the biggest moron this side of Alex jones. He got us a ring in 2004. He is a Red Sox legend. You can be an awful person and be a Red Sox legend. There are other examples
 

teddywingman

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JDM talking to the press went ok. Being from a Cuban family gives him a little cred when it comes to dictator memes I guess.

Essentially, "I'm just thinking about winning a championship, and I love this country."
 

Adrian's Dome

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yup..I didn't take that as racist....but we are in a day where some people look to find racism anywhere they can
Haven't you heard? Everything IS racist, everything IS offensive, and the line between being a good person and a shithead is that exact same line between the two major political parties.

Holy shit a lot of you are fucking exhausting.

JD Martinez is a douchebag because he posted a meme six years ago you don't particularly like when you were absolutely fine with him beforehand. That, right there, entirely changing your opinion on someone over a slight difference in political opinion (not fact, I repeat, opinion) is the sign of a real douche.
 

JohntheBaptist

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Holy shit a lot of you are fucking exhausting.

JD Martinez is a douchebag because he posted a meme six years ago you don't particularly like when you were absolutely fine with him beforehand. That, right there, entirely changing your opinion on someone over a slight difference in political opinion (not fact, I repeat, opinion) is the sign of a real douche.
Hey, at least no one posted any math for anyone to get mad at.

You're surprised that someone would form an opinion based on a person posting the Obama meme? Sort of like how you're forming an opinion on people for also having an opinion?
 

ricopetro6

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I mean curt schilling is the biggest moron this side of Alex jones. He got us a ring in 2004. He is a Red Sox legend. You can be an awful person and be a Red Sox legend. There are other examples
van jones maybe
 

InsideTheParker

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Haven't you heard? Everything IS racist, everything IS offensive, and the line between being a good person and a shithead is that exact same line between the two major political parties.

Holy shit a lot of you are fucking exhausting.

JD Martinez is a douchebag because he posted a meme six years ago you don't particularly like when you were absolutely fine with him beforehand. That, right there, entirely changing your opinion on someone over a slight difference in political opinion (not fact, I repeat, opinion) is the sign of a real douche.
You are the one making extreme comments. A number of us expressed regret over a comment that seems intolerant and not at all thoughtful and that is unfortunate given that he is a member of a team some members of which might find those remarks hurtful. I can't reread the whole thread now, because I have to make supper and watch JDM gets some rbis, but I do think you are overreacting to most of the reactions.
 

curly2

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Haven't you heard? Everything IS racist, everything IS offensive, and the line between being a good person and a shithead is that exact same line between the two major political parties.

Holy shit a lot of you are fucking exhausting.
Never, ever did I say being a Republican equals being a shithead. I'd be willing to be no one on the site in any forum has ever said that in any forum.

Maybe the person who create that meme didn't mean it to be racist. I can't know what's in their heart. What makes it hard to tell is the first election to take place in the social media age was 2008. If Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. had existed before, and there had been memes saying Al Gore or John Kerry voters would all be the ones to get to the polls first because they don't have jobs, I would know there was no racism behind it.

The timing coincided with the first person of color to be a major-party nominee, so it's impossible to know if a white Democrat with the same policy positions would have gotten the same treatment.

The Needler points out that it was used for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Maybe it a race-neutral meme, or maybe it's people recycling the greatest hits of memes.

Honest to God I don't turn over every rock looking for racism and I don't automatically think GOP/conservative is synonymous with shithead.
 

nvalvo

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Equating unemployment with being African American is also racist, isn’t it? Thankfully, minority unemployment is also near all time lows.

The meme doesn’t have any racial tinge to it at all. Dems favor a somewhat larger safety net than republicans. Thus, people dependent on the safety net vote Dem. Duh.

Yet, the posters here are reading race into it.

Only a dog can hear a dog whistle.
This is pretty obtuse. Your expressed position right here is that evincing even a baseline cultural literacy on these issues means that the person noticing the racism is thereby exposed as "the real racist." Instead, I gather, we're supposed to approach each new utterance as if it were sui generis, as if it could not allude to any other language or culture, as if there were no history. To do otherwise would be to read race into it, and we wouldn't want that.

My position in this thread is that JDM's post was a bit racist. They were also par for the course in GOP political discourse (itself, in 2012, more than a bit racist, even if it looks quaint in retrospect), such that it would be ridiculous to single out an individual baseball player for expressing those views. And in any case, Major League Baseball should maybe change the names of a few franchises before it — or sports media, TBH — makes a fuss about something like this. All of which is to say that I interpreted them in their context. Strictly forbidden!

Look, I suspect you know, as I do, that a large plurality of the social support benefits that survived the Clinton administration are consumed by white people, in part because most Americans are white, and in part because Massachusetts and NY, the two states that still provide long-term welfare even though the Feds don't make them, are pretty white. Outside of MA and NY, there's barely even a welfare system anymore, and the results have been catastrophic — to the point that almost one percent of American households are living on under $2/day at any given moment. In Arizona, families can only access 12 months of temporary assistance. Labor participation among single mothers has increased since 1996, but their rate of poverty has not improved.

But our broader political conversations associates welfare benefits — which barely exist! — with people of color — who are a minority of the recipients of what benefits *do* exist! — to the point that every so often a politician has to apologize for saying that out loud. That's just real life. Those apologies should be read as a tip of the iceberg, of a few individuals too stupid or undisciplined to recognize the boundaries of what you can say in public — which, given their positions of responsibility, is pretty terrifying.
 

Cuzittt

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I never intended to create a thread because I didn't believe this is a big story. I was merely posting because I was (and am) curious if there will be any MLB repercussions or team acknowledgement and felt we should know what is being reported in a newspaper about our players, regardless of the news source or its leanings.
Since the thread has been keerpluunked, I figured I would take this opportunity to address the issue of why I split this out of the initial thread it was in and why us Dopes have continued to bang out the mantra "Start New Threads" for seemingly forever. Canderson, please do not take this as a rebuke strictly against you as I am only utilizing your comments above as a jumping off point.

There once (and now once again) was a thread about J.D. Martinez's quest for a potential triple crown. The thread is named in such a way that it would be difficult to ignore that the thread is about a very specific topic. It was not called the J.D. Martinez omnibus thread. It was not called the J.D. Martinez and everything about him thread. It was (and is) a thread regarding his on-going quest for one specific goal.

Now, I suppose, one could carve out a reason to wedge Martinez's political posts into that thread... perhaps by saying that the media attention is going to affect him so he won't be able to continue his great hitting. But, it would be a stretch and you clearly state above that was not your thinking.

So, where would such a post fit? Given that there is no J.D. Drew omnibus thread or any thread regarding players off-the job... the obvious answer is it fits in a new thread. If you did not want to start a thread... then I guess it didn't actually fit anywhere and could have been tucked away and we wouldn't have this mess of a thread.

[As an aside, I do not have an issue with the concept of this thread and I don't have a major issue discussing players outside the context of the game. This thread, however, is a cautionary tale about how difficult it is to keep such a thread on the rails. It was correctly shut down by Nip.]

From a technical standpoint, it is FAR EASIER to merge one thread into another one then it is to extract large number of posts out of one thread to make a new one. And while we all realize that sometimes threads morph simply due to discussion (and us dopes have to make a decision on whether to move the new discussion off or keep it where it is), that simply was not the case here. Your post was a completely different thought that did not evolve from on going discussion. It never should have been in a very specific thread. But, it had J.D. Martinez's name in the thread title... therefore it must be an omnibus thread. That has been the thinking by too many posters here for too long.

So, let me reiterate. If you think you have a thought that is worthy of posting but it doesn't fit any existing thread... START A NEW THREAD. It's OK to start new threads. In fact, it is HIGHLY encouraged to start NEW THREADS. Please, do not stuff an extraneous thought into a thread where it doesn't fit. START A NEW THREAD.

Thank you.

PS: More threads are good. Seriously.
PPS: Since this thread is close... any discussions regarding this post can be had in Backwash.
 
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