
NBA commissioner Silver says Chinese government asked him to fire Rockets GM - bdz
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/nba-commissioner-adam-silver-says-chinese-government-asked-him-to-fire-rockets-gm-daryl-morey-after-tweet/
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AnimalMuppet
The NBA commissioner probably has the _power_ to do that. Note that he,
essentially, fired the _owner_ of the Clippers. So, in principle, he probably
could do it.

In practice, there is absolutely no way he could do so. He'd destroy the NBA
for at least a decade, maybe a generation.

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remarkEon
> "We made clear that we were being asked to fire him, by the Chinese
> government, by the parties we dealt with, government and business," Silver
> said. "We said there's no chance that's happening. There's no chance we'll
> even discipline him."

Okay fine, but thus far it’s felt like the overriding concern here is the
financial fallout. I don’t know how else to explain LeBron’s behavior
recently. Maybe players are acting more independently now, hoping to get their
_own_ China deals and that the Player’s association would back them up?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
LeBron is not the NBA, though. If he wants to not tarnish his personal brand
in China (at the price of tarnishing it here in the USA), that's _his_ choice.
Don't blame the whole NBA for it.

As for the NBA, I don't think that Silver _had_ to say this. By saying it,
he's shining a spotlight on China's attempt to destroy anyone who says
anything bad about them.

~~~
djmips
He wasn't going to say this and probably didn't want to bring it to light
since it's possibly damaging to the NBA relationship with China but it's a
calculated risk to try shore up the NBA's reputation in America. That's my
take.

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ngcc_hk
When you have 100 million, getting only 50m is hard. That is how chinese ccp
play the game. That is how at least one nba player play the game.

They will relax, tight, find some weaker ... they have taken control of 1.4
billion people. They know politics.

God bless America.

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NicoJuicy
So, they don't want us to think about lives in Hong Kong.

But they interfere with other countries to literally try to get lives
destroyed.

Yeah, so people were wondering why i was Anti-China i suppose? :p

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nodesocket
The NBA is absolutely huge in China, while it would be a big hit to owners and
franchisees, the NBA should announce they are pulling out of everything in
China indefinitely.

This strategy would reverse the pressure back onto China, as Chinese citizens
will be very upset to not have NBA games and merchandise available. It would
shift the focus back onto the Chinese government from its own citizens.

~~~
rjf72
Reverse the situation and imagine how you would feel.

Say China was running extensive media in favor of an increasingly China-
friendly group within the US equally unpopular with both average US citizens
and the US government, but quite popular with Chinese citizens and the Chinese
government. And now a Chinese executive in charge of a Chinese product popular
in the US, spoke out in favor of this group. Following US pressure with
implied economic threats, he not only refused to retract his statements but
chose to completely pull his company's product from the US - perhaps iPhones,
which we'll pretend could be made nowhere other than China for the sake of the
hypothetical.

Are you going to be mad at the US government? Most likely this would just work
to further evangelize anti-China and anti-China-friendly group sentiment
within the US. And I think this is true without even getting into the cultural
differences in terms of things like nationalism. I think in your comment
you're probably transplanting the average US citizen worldview onto the
average Chinese citizen. In that case your idea would very much work, but
that's not the case here.

~~~
klingonopera
> _Are you going to be mad at the US government?_

Yes, absolutely. I'd expect the US government to just shrug their shoulders
and go about " _Whatever_ ", and not interfere in such petty issues.

It's probably a key difference between China and the US/Western hemisphere,
concerning government. We don't want to be nannied and would be appalled, if
so.

~~~
rjf72
That's awesome to hear, but I expect you must see you would be a very small
minority. Most people now a days seem to base their worldview not on any
system of consistent ethics, but instead on who's being benefited and who's
being hurt.

For instance on what precipitated this particular issue (the Blizzard stuff),
many are framing it as an issue of free speech. But that's incredibly
disingenuous because there's no doubt that many of the same people outraged
ostensibly about a violation of free speech would have been the first ones
lining up to cheer and rejoice had Blizzard chose to ban a player who chose to
show up in a MAGA hat and screamed "Build the wall!" in an identical venue.
It's safe to assume they also would have taken it further and done all they
could to try to get said player banned from any other gaming venue as well, in
an effort to kill his livelihood and, by proxy, him. In other words, they
couldn't care less about free speech - but only speech that they support, or
oppose.

This example here (in our reverso world China) would take this to an even
bigger extreme since you would be expressing support not only of a group with
next to no national support, but simultaneously expressing support of a deeply
unpopular foreign government which could be framed as borderline treasonous.
And all of this being done in a highly nationalistic nation? That's a tall
order for sure.

~~~
jackvalentine
> For instance on what precipitated this particular issue (the Blizzard
> stuff), many are framing it as an issue of free speech. But that's
> incredibly disingenuous because there's no doubt that many of the same
> people outraged ostensibly about a violation of free speech would have been
> the first ones lining up to cheer and rejoice had Blizzard chose to ban a
> player who chose to show up in a MAGA hat and screamed "Build the wall!" in
> an identical venue.

I've seen this argument so many times in relation to this and I don't get it -
this isn't what happened and you can't presume to know what "many of the same
people" would do. It's such a shit argument because you can state that "many
of the same people" would do anything you want to frame as bad and it's
impossible to disprove.

Why not just address what actually happened?

~~~
rjf72
The original post I was responding to was pondering what would happen if the
NBA pulled out. In order to try to predict this it's important to try to
_accurately_ characterize how people would behave in response. In the US we
ostensibly value free speech, but especially in modern times this is
increasingly often set aside faster than you can blink when it becomes an
issue where somebody says something we disagree with. See for instance
practically every major social media platform that has been censoring
increasingly loosely, largely to stabilize (and ideally increase) their profit
by satisfying advertisers. When people dislike the groups censored they not
only could not care less, but are often genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Think of the countless times people have, rather enthusiastically, argued that
'free speech doesn't mean you're free from the consequences of your actions'.
Yet when it's a group that individuals ideologically align with they rapidly
segue from free speech being a technical legal requirement as defined by the
first amendment of the US constitution, to a value - an ethos. And we are not
speaking in hypotheticals - this _is_ happening, right now.

In modern times people increasingly seem to not like defending the right of
groups they disagree with. We could debate the reasons there, but I suspect a
large part is because we now live in an era of never-ending social media
virtue signaling. That's actually what makes what I wrote above so easy to
show. If you are genuinely arguing in good faith and do not believe people are
engaging in wide-spread hypocrisy, you could go obsessive-compulsive and
digging through people's post histories and find many of the same people upset
about corporate censorship today cheering it on not long ago. Because they
felt that by cheering on nasty groups getting censored, that they were showing
their own virtue in being so adamantly against such things. We are, in effect,
living out the "First they came ..." poem. As always, what's new is old.

~~~
jackvalentine
When the original poster didn't respond the way you wanted them to you then
decided to switch tracks and claim they're in the minority.

Have you considered that in the public there are so many people that you can
arrange people in to groups that say anything? You've not made a convincing
case that 'the same people' 'rapidly segue' \- merely that groups of differing
opinions exist and are vocal about different things.

~~~
rjf72
I think you make a great point. From my perspective there are some things that
cannot be reasonably proven that people may have different views on. For
instance I'm sure you'd agree that social media "platforms" (as well as
various other "platforms") over the past ~6 or so years have been engaging in
increasing censorship. And that censorship has been not only accepted but
applauded by some segments of the population. So where we probably diverge is
on who are these segments of the population? How big are they? What are their
views on this recent censorship?

I've been unable to find any sort of polling or other objective data (for that
matter even poll data on Hong Kong is basically nonexistent) so we're left to
rely on anecdotal data. When stories of censorship against unpopular topics
came out in times past, what was the zeitgeist in your view? In the Hong Kong
story as of today, does that vary? I took as an assumption people sharing a
_roughly_ similar view on this question. But I think it's a fair point that
perhaps this is an invalid assumption. If I've learned anything on the
internet it's that we all live in our own little bubbles, try as we might to
escape them.

Of course I'm certain I could dig up plenty of examples of people
contradicting themselves but that no more proves your [implied] view incorrect
anymore than you finding a examples of people remaining consistent would prove
my view incorrect.

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atonse
That's admirable that he is showing restraint. But bigger moneyed interests
might play into this over time.

