Marcus Smart is the real community leader that the media and fans were so quick to wish cast on Jaylen.
Kyrie went 5-16 in getting eliminated and we have schadenfreude.
- Thread starter jose melendez
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I found myself thinking that he needs someone who can tell him at least to look before he leaps, and then I was like, “Isn’t that having an agent is fo—
“Oh.”
Marcus also made some missteps in how he handled the Udoka “suspension”. That’s better than what Jaylen is doing but I think it’s the same impetus.
I think a lot of athletes see a black man being “attacked” by white media and their natural inclination is to stick up for them
I have almost no tolerance for intolerance (and struggle with the irony) but I believe Jaylens explanation and he certainly seems nuanced enough not to step there on purpose.
They all need to take a couple steps back from publicly associating with Krazypants. Staying off twitter might become easier.
They all need to take a couple steps back from publicly associating with Krazypants. Staying off twitter might become easier.
I don’t remember, did Kyrie have odd opinions before he joined the Celtics? Or was he the misunderstood other guy on LeBron’s teams?
He was a flat earther, but people couldn't quite figure out if he was serious. I don't remember any real red flags other than that.
There was the reports that he didn’t talk to any Cavs teammates for weeks, but I ignored it at the time lol.
I do remember that, but I wouldn't categorize that as "having odd opinions." It was also odd that he was asking to be traded away from the best player in the league (with whom he'd won a title just 13 months earlier), but nothing like the off the court stuff now.
That’s what I thought. All the real crazy happened after he got here. Is Kyrie the chicken or is he the egg here?
It makes sense if you think about it. Young star with enormous ego, as all young stars do or they wouldn’t be young star, who just took over NBA Finals games in winning a ring while playing in LeBrons shadow. It’s logical that this player would want his own team to make the next leap to superstardom.
Kyrie said a lot of crazy shit before coming to Boston. He said JFK was assassinated because he wanted to end global banks, and I remember him having very strong opinions on dinosaurs.
Biggest difference is the flowering of social media since 2017; Twitter’s revenue has more than doubled since that time. But he’s always had weird ideas and questionable character, and it was known before the Cs traded for him. I remember people thinking Brad would bring him around
He knew as we all did that Lebron was leaving, so it was better to get out early rather than be left behind.
I believe he only asked for a trade after he learned that Lebron tried to trade him to the Pacers for Paul George.
He both was and was not serious, imo.
I recently did a sorta deep dive on his comments in light of more recent stuff, which is kinda difficult as there’s so much stuff on the flat earth and not his subsequent explanation. It suggested to me that as much as anything, it was about him being a dickhead. Like, he said he really loved conspiracy theories, but ultimately it was about proving to other people that they hadn’t really thought about what they thought they knew whereas he dug deeper to understand how superficial our knowledge was. Like, how do you know the Earth is round? And did you know that there’s never been a picture taken of the whole moon??
What really came across is that it was about proving to other people that he was a free and sophisticated thinker unlike the rest of us sheep, and him wanting to make a point about it.
But it seems he got high on his own supply. Like, I don’t think the antisemitism aspect is the focus for him—which doesn’t excuse him, it just clarifies what an asshole he is as he is too self-involved to understand how important and harmful it is. It appears to me that he’s on a specific “spiritual awakening” trip which is not an uncommon convergence point of a lot of these conspiracy theories. Specifically, one strain of the convergence is about how there is a true nature to human spiritual awakening—spiritual enlightenment, even—that the powers that be intentionally deny us in order to control us. You can find any number of TV shows, movies, etc. about precisely this. If you know a bit about the subject and look at his statements and Twitter etc. it appears he’s on the spiritual awakening trip where he believes he’s figured out that the true lesson of all religions etc. is this availability of spiritual enlightenment and he “gets it” unlike the rest of us unwashed benighted masses. And you can see how this knowledge if his flatters his own ego.
In this sense, I think the antisemitism is kinda ancillary to his thinking. However, to deny it would be to deny the truth of the stories he needs to believe that he’s a fucking bodhisattva or some shit, which he seems to have wrapped his bullshit identity up in. So, hey, if he has to ignore the radical harm and suffering that these ideas have wrought on a class of people to maintain his sense of self as the awesomest enlightened person to ever “get it,” then so be it.
It’s not an incredibly uncommon “system”’of thought, although I think it is more common among people in their late teens and early 20s… but we have a lot of reason to believe that he’s very immature—and, if course, he is unaware of that, which is part and parcel of the thing. But whether or not he “believes” in the conspiracy theories is, I think, a bit of a red herring: He’s said that he’s fascinated ny them, and the key is that they are many threads that, if investigated, lead to this theory of spiritual enlightenment (and how could it be wrong if so many theories converge there!) that he pretty clearly, to my reading, believes that he has discovered and, by discovery, attained.
So to deny the truth of the movie would be to deny that he’s reached the mountain top.
So it’s not about whether he believes that bullshit or not, because what it’s all really about and him talking about such things is that he’s a raging self-involved asshole.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk:
He Is: Understanding Just How Much of a Raging Self-Involved Asshole Is Kyrie Irving.
That's a great post. It's been on my mind to note that Kyrie seems to be a 2nd order anti-semite, not one whose entire political identity revolves around hating Jews. Hard to say that w/out excusing the inexcusable, but I think Reverend gets it right.
Wait...what? This wasn't on my radar and makes me very sad.
This chicken/egg joke needs a bit of love -- made me giggle, anyway.
Stop defending Danny Ferry. He was seriously one of the most incompetent GMs in NBA history.
Yup. His wife has or at least had a really dreadful twitter account too.That's a great post. It's been on my mind to note that Kyrie seems to be a 2nd order anti-semite, not one whose entire political identity revolves around hating Jews. Hard to say that w/out excusing the inexcusable, but I think Reverend gets it right.
Wait...what? This wasn't on my radar and makes me very sad.
This chicken/egg joke needs a bit of love -- made me giggle, anyway.
Great post. It kind of reminds me of this quote of Kyrie's:
Agitation over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not yet occurred, or else are occurring at an inaccessible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the inoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the object of our distress. Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthlies – nowadays, this is described as ‘taking an intelligent interest in politics’; St John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietude’s sake.
Wait, I'm mixed up. That wasn't Kyrie. It was Aldous Huxley.
Damn, that is impressive.Great post. It kind of reminds me of this quote of Kyrie's:
Agitation over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not yet occurred, or else are occurring at an inaccessible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the inoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the object of our distress. Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthlies – nowadays, this is described as ‘taking an intelligent interest in politics’; St John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietude’s sake.
Wait, I'm mixed up. That wasn't Kyrie. It was Aldous Huxley.
Listen to this dude, WBCD, he knows what he’s talking about.
So, even before reading that, on a lark—as is my wont—I punched into The Google Machine “Kyrie Irving bodhisatva” (Yes, I sppelt it wrongly; sue me.) and this was the first hit:
https://clutchpoints.com/celtics-news-kyrie-irving-said-hed-be-a-buddhist-if-he-wasnt-in-the-nba?amp=1
View: https://twitter.com/handsome_jake_/status/947642576047366145
That’s from 2018.
What’s that saying? “If a theory consistently yields accurate predictions, then it’s science?”
All this damage, hurt, ranging from legitimation of antisemitism to mere interference with enjoyment of the NBA season and so much in between… is because of Kyrie’s ego trip?
Seriously: Fuck that guy.
Lost somewhat in the drama with Nash/Udoka/Kyrie/Simmons mess is that Durant is currently second in the league in total minutes played (1 minute more than Kyle Lowry, which is it's own separate problem). Durant is 34 and has missed 27 and 37 games over the last 2 years (after missing the entire season 3 years ago). The Nets need to keep putting him out there just to keep their heads above water, but it seems almost inevitable that he'll need a month or two off at some point, which could bury them.
So my curiosity got the best of me and I ended up downloading (through Pirate Bay) and watching (or at least trying to watch) the movie that started this controversy, Hebrews to Negroes.
Here are my impressions.
So I think McCollum was right when he suggested that Kyrie didn’t even watch the movie. Why? Because it’s unwatchable.
If an unmedicated Kanye took one undergraduate class in filmmaking and at the end of that class dropped some acid and created a 3 and a half hour “documentary” - this is what it would look like.
It begins with 20 minutes of ridiculously overdramatic commercials for itself, before finally shifting to an opening sequence that focusses on a heavily accented African talking, though it’s impossible to ascertain what he’s talking about due to poor sound mixing and the fact that the loud intro music continues to play over the dialogue.
Eventually the movie shifts to multiple “chapters” of narration, which attempts to describe the “true identity” of the Old Testament Israelites. Most of the “evidence” presented is from biblical genealogies mixed with what I guess you’d call amateur archeology and linguistics. Either way it’s unintelligible, and considering how controversial the movie is, remarkably boring. In the end, I couldn’t get through more than a third of the movie - and I seriously doubt Kyrie could have even gotten that far.
I will say that one of the most blatantly anti-Semitic sequences does come in the first twenty minutes. This is when the director chose to insert a random slide that list the “five lies” perpetuated by “the Jews”. That’s where we see the “lie” about the Holocaust, that has garnered some attention by the media.
So if Kyrie saw the movie at all, it might be hard to miss that part. That said, it wouldn’t be shocking if he had stopped watching before that point or simply spaced out during that section, as again, it cannot be overstated how unwatchably amateurish this whole movie is.
I know there are a couple other disturbing quotes, including one fake one from Hitler, that reportedly appear later in the movie, but I can’t imagine anyone watching the movie could endure long enough to actually view them.
Here are my impressions.
So I think McCollum was right when he suggested that Kyrie didn’t even watch the movie. Why? Because it’s unwatchable.
If an unmedicated Kanye took one undergraduate class in filmmaking and at the end of that class dropped some acid and created a 3 and a half hour “documentary” - this is what it would look like.
It begins with 20 minutes of ridiculously overdramatic commercials for itself, before finally shifting to an opening sequence that focusses on a heavily accented African talking, though it’s impossible to ascertain what he’s talking about due to poor sound mixing and the fact that the loud intro music continues to play over the dialogue.
Eventually the movie shifts to multiple “chapters” of narration, which attempts to describe the “true identity” of the Old Testament Israelites. Most of the “evidence” presented is from biblical genealogies mixed with what I guess you’d call amateur archeology and linguistics. Either way it’s unintelligible, and considering how controversial the movie is, remarkably boring. In the end, I couldn’t get through more than a third of the movie - and I seriously doubt Kyrie could have even gotten that far.
I will say that one of the most blatantly anti-Semitic sequences does come in the first twenty minutes. This is when the director chose to insert a random slide that list the “five lies” perpetuated by “the Jews”. That’s where we see the “lie” about the Holocaust, that has garnered some attention by the media.
So if Kyrie saw the movie at all, it might be hard to miss that part. That said, it wouldn’t be shocking if he had stopped watching before that point or simply spaced out during that section, as again, it cannot be overstated how unwatchably amateurish this whole movie is.
I know there are a couple other disturbing quotes, including one fake one from Hitler, that reportedly appear later in the movie, but I can’t imagine anyone watching the movie could endure long enough to actually view them.
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not quite Siskel & Ebert but this is the Anti-Defamation League's review
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/hebrews-negroes-what-you-need-know
I had actually read this before watching, and it’s clearly a good summary of the movie’s antisemitism. I think what this - and other reviews like this- miss is that few if any people are likely to absorb much of what the movie presents (including the antisemitism) due to the the filmmaker’s ineptitude.
And as much a movie like this getting this type of attention is never a good thing, the fact that it’s unwatchably incoherent is a bit of a silver lining. Because of this, and despite the attention Kyrie has given it, I don’t think the Black Israelites are converting many people to their views because Kyrie posted a link to this "documentary".
And in the end, I think it’s most plausible that Kyrie’s only interest in this movie is the idea it espouses about Africans being the true Israelites - as this fits his general orientation to black empowerment and all things conspiratorial. Where he got that idea from remains unclear, but I doubt it was from this movie. Also unclear is how much of the antisemitism that goes along with those beliefs he understands or absorbed. My guess is that these Black Israelite beliefs were passed on to him by someone similarly incoherent (like his friend, Kanye) and this movie was at some point brought to his attention. He then liked it without ever taking the time to view it. Alternatively, he might have tried to view it, understood very little of what he saw and liked it anyway, thinking perhaps that because it was so incoherent it might actually be really deep.
If he really didn't see it, that of course begs the question of why he wouldn’t just admit he never saw it, as that would seemingly make it easier to back away from his apparent support of the film. Of course the answer to that and all such questions with Kyrie is actually pretty simple: his narcissism requires that he acts the way he does. In this case -or any other- he is never going to admit to anything that suggests he made a mistake or deserves blame.
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That may be true - I have no idea. But even if it is, I have no doubt that Kyrie understands and buys into the major tenets of the theory promoted by the film. Because he'd been laying down hints about this through his tweets and his interviews for a while leading up to this scandal. The fact that he stubbornly, repeatedly refused to denounce what is in the film is only one piece of evidence against Kyrie, and frankly, I think it's letting him off easy every time someone says "He probably didn't even watch the movie."
Not as to any posters here, but is some of the slowness in condemning Kyrie (and Kanye) perhaps rooted in some soft bigotry of low expectations or whatever that phrase was?
I’m sure that Kyrie and Kanye know exactly what they’re saying every time they speak or type. The idea that these guys are so stupid and careless and reckless they’re throwing away millions and billions of dollars over things they don’t even believe in. Like shit, they’re just bigots. It’s not that deep.
I’m sure that Kyrie and Kanye know exactly what they’re saying every time they speak or type. The idea that these guys are so stupid and careless and reckless they’re throwing away millions and billions of dollars over things they don’t even believe in. Like shit, they’re just bigots. It’s not that deep.
I liked this piece by Damon Young in the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/11/29/damon-young-how-we-got-here-with-kyrie-irving-explained/
He admits Irving was his favorite athlete and overall goes pretty easy on him, but makes some interesting observations and points too.
Some highlights:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/11/29/damon-young-how-we-got-here-with-kyrie-irving-explained/
He admits Irving was his favorite athlete and overall goes pretty easy on him, but makes some interesting observations and points too.
Some highlights:
Damon Young has been a favorite writer of mine for a few years now, going back to his time writing for the Root. Thanks for the share, an excellent article @The Gray Eagle
I think the latter part was less spoken but many believed it before as well - "I did nothing wrong, it's you who are wrong," is a classic narcissistic reaction to criticism, is it not?
Because of the internet, those people are now much more likely to actually run into someone(s) who will challenge them on their bullshit AND their reactions get more widely publicized which allows like minded shit heads to jump on their bandwagon and reinforce the idea that they have done nothing wrong which solidifies the idea that criticizing someone's intolerance is the real intolerance.
That's interesting. I wasn't so much looking at it from the narcissistic ("I did nothing wrong") angle as the faux-freedom angle, which I think predominates. But, as you say, they do feed on each other.
Yeah there's something to it.
Not to excuse anyone's actions--they own their actions, as do we all--but when you're this kind of elite athlete, folks have been telling you that your shit doesn't stink since about fifth or sixth grade. I wasn't that guy, and most of us probably weren't. But coaching middle schoolers, I had high school coaches trying to corner a couple of sixth graders on my team and recruit them. Grown ass men who wouldn't stop to give you the time of day, but you would not believe how complimentary that guy is of a ten year old kid who has "it". I can't even imagine the fawning and drooling that occurs when these cats saw a 10yo Kyrie playing. Kyrie probably spent a solid ten years of his life without being checked by anyone, maybe more. He's probably confused by the negative feedback since he refused the vaccine, and it has only gone downhill since.
Amazon won't remove the movie.
https://apnews.com/article/brooklyn-nets-nba-entertainment-technology-sports-be59946e0620997b8f1e2ac267bb9e4c
https://apnews.com/article/brooklyn-nets-nba-entertainment-technology-sports-be59946e0620997b8f1e2ac267bb9e4c
I looked for fun, and you can buy Mein Kampf on Amazon but not nazi paraphernalia or the Turner Diaries.
https://africa.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35153937/lebron-james-faults-media-not-asking-1957-jerry-jones-photo
Lebron playing the false equivalency game. It's really weird that they can't stop defending Kyrie.
Lebron playing the false equivalency game. It's really weird that they can't stop defending Kyrie.
Ah yes. The recent antisemitism of Lebron's former teammate, Nike ambassador, and NBAPA Vice President is the same thing as the Jerry Jones situation (which was the resurfacing of story from several years ago that involved an owner from a different sport).
I would expect Lebron to immediately stop his Amazon NFL telecast in light of the Jerry Jones (old) news if he finds it so abhorrent, right?
Athletes are generally pretty dumb and get no pushback from the sports media on these quotes because they are all access merchants.
I would expect Lebron to immediately stop his Amazon NFL telecast in light of the Jerry Jones (old) news if he finds it so abhorrent, right?
Athletes are generally pretty dumb and get no pushback from the sports media on these quotes because they are all access merchants.
Jones was just a teenager when he did what he did, and it was a long time ago. But Jones’s obviously false present-day explanation of his actions back then has a lot in common with Kyrie’s initial bullshit non-apology. Kyrie suffered consequences for his failure to offer a sincere and unequivocal apology. So far, Jones has not.
When I speak of “consequences” I’m not talking primarily about league discipline. I’m talking about sponsors not rushing to distance themselves from the Cowboys the way they distanced themselves from Kyrie, media not hammering away at the questions with Jones the way they did with Kyrie, and so on. There are a lot of reasons for the difference in treatment, some of which are legitimate, but I think it’s clear that one of the reasons is because a lot of people don’t think it’s important for people like Jones to accept responsibility for what they did to people of color over the years. I think LeBron is right to be salty about that, and I think his words were very clearly a criticism of the lack of consequences faced by Jones, not a defense of Kyrie.
I don’t know, the whole thing was framed as “why didn’t you ask me about Jerry Jones?”, which takes away from what I think he meant to say that you outlined above.
And there are some obvious reasons why he wasn’t asked (he doesn’t play in the NFL, I’m sure people don’t want to take up his time asking him questions about things that aren’t related to him)
Another part is that the NBA has positioned itself as a socially conscious league so I think people expect more..whereas I think everyone knows that Jerry Jones is a complete dirtbag. That picture being released doesn’t surprise me in the least. I think Jerry Jones fucking sucks and that picture helped confirm what I already knew.
I really wish that LeBron had framed his point more like you did instead of the way he did because what you said is a very interesting point and LeBron could have called for more accountability from sports media as a whole when covering controversies
It was a rhetorical question/statement. He didn't want a response and reporters were ready to reply because it is obvious why they are different.
Bron can be "salty" if he wants but he has every media outlet, ESPN, Google, Showtime, CNN, etc at his beck and call. He also owns/produces numerous TV shows where he discusses systemic racism or any topic that's on his mind.
The fact is Bron & his team are a big part of the sports MEDIA. It's been over a decade since LeBron hosted the Decision, & he has the largest Twitter following in American sports. He and Kyrie are certainly not voiceless to express an opinion on Jerry Jones, which was his complaint
better question: Why don't reporters ask LeBron about what is going on with present-day Uyghur/China Protests? That's far more relevant and he could probably provide much more light since he is a lifetime partner with Nike.
Someone can clarify this for me please, and this is not a defense of Jones. But all I've seen is the photo of Jones standing there off to the side. There is nothing in that photo that automatically tells me that the was resisting desegregation there. Now I don't know much about Jones, no clue where he stood on that issue as a younger man. All I've seen is the photo, and the photo doesn't tell us that Jones was a participant in the fight against desegregation; he might have just been a bystander watching what was going on. Because it seems clear that there are some people there who are just bystanders (with cameras) and I don't know what his role there was.
But that's why I would like for someone to clarify.
But that's why I would like for someone to clarify.
It's a bunch of nonsense. He was asked about Robert Sarver- an NBA owner.
Maybe they should ask him, "Are you going to pull your NFL TV production because Jerry Jones chairs the NFL media committee?
Maybe they should ask him, "Are you going to pull your NFL TV production because Jerry Jones chairs the NFL media committee?
Effective activists usually focus their efforts on one or two issues for which they have particular passion, often because of a personal connection to the issue. This is especially true for folks for whom activism isn’t their day job.
I can’t recall a white person ever being criticized for this. For example, I don’t remember anyone, ever, suggesting that Dolly Parton is a hypocrite because she didn’t focus on starving children in Africa alongside her efforts to promote literacy and HIV/AIDS research, or that Leonardo DiCaprio* is a hypocrite for not focusing on women’s rights as much as he focuses on the environment. Which makes sense — it would be stupid to criticize these people for not being engaged with every issue that might be worthy of their attention.
Yet, when a Black man like LeBron decides to make civil rights his cause, there’s suddenly a symphony of voices calling him a hypocrite because he doesn’t also devote himself to addressing an unrelated issue affecting people halfway around the world. It’s a double standard. And it’s not much different than folks who called Martin Luther King** a hypocrite 60 years ago for not focusing on black-on-black crime as much as he focused on Jim Crow.
*-DiCaprio might be criticized for maintaining a lifestyle inconsistent with the concerns he espouses, but that’s different.
**- To state the obvious, school will always be open on LeBron’s birthday. I’m comparing the criticisms (i.e., LeBron’s critics now to MLK’s critics then), not the men being criticized.
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This article is a good primer.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/jerry-jones-black-coaches-nfl/
It’s not that large a group of kids; most of the school’s white students stayed away. Jones’s football coach specifically ordered the team to stay away. But he went anyway.
It would probably matter less today if Jones hadn’t, just a few years ago, threatened the livelihoods of Black men in his employ if they chose to protest for civil rights in a manner that he deemed inappropriate (i.e., kneeling for the anthem), in a manner that almost certainly violated federal labor laws. I don’t think LeBron would have brought up Jones if Jones’s record on racial issues was comparable to, say, the Davis family’s.
wait, Lebron brought up the Kyrie issue as a comp to the Jerry Jones situation
He has the attention of the biggest sports platforms in America. He can talk about that dirtbag Jerry Jones to his heart's content on his many channels
Comparing it to Kyrie's tweet is silly
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Did you listen to the press conference? I’ve been very vocal on my views of what Kyrie said and support of him being highly problematic. Lebron’s comments aren’t because the point he’s making is that both Kyrie and Jones did unacceptable/wrong things and the media treatment of them is disparate. Lebron obviously has his own platform, which he just used, but he’s also allowed to call out the media for how they use their platform and I take his message to be calling for raising the bar across the board, not lowering it, which is an entirely appropriate position to stake out.
As full disclosure, I’ve only watched the ESPN link above, not the full press conference, so there may be nuance I’ve missed.