Ben Carson credits the track he took to achieve success. It's the optimal path to change one's life. It would be foolish to not encourage others to do the same because these tools for success already exist. That does not mean existing tools are high quality.
You brought up Ben Carson, I didn't. That Ben Carson himself speaks eloquently in his books how these programs were an integral, critical path to his success I think speaks volumes.
And I absolutely agree these programs alone are not enough, as the study posted show. Some people work hard and luck out, some people leverage the fact that come from a rich family or are not a minority, etc.
Yeah, I brought up Ben Carson and you chimed in with your agenda. And I don't think an outlier like Carson is a good foundation for you to do that. Pretty much stated all the reasoning for that in my other posts.
You mean facts? I quoted his own book, and you certainly didn't dispute it. Don't blame me because you don't know who you're talking about.
I stand corrected��
Nathan, I’m here to chat with you my friend...... Did you check out those two fellas I hipped ( introduced ) you to?
You rang??? Do you really want to expose yourself on this public forum? Nathan is a big boy, he doesn’t need you to put on the capeWhat poop must I get together kind sir?
People stop fighting change ( to those whom this applies ); we all have something to offer! Embrace and laugh at our differences vs talking like damn fools on a basketball message board! BTW I love San Antonio, I was born in bexar county, east side....... Go Spurs Go
It doesn't seem we are focused on the same crux in this conversation so it's pointless to proceed further. Especially after this many comments.
Had something else typed up but it got deleted.
Fold noted.
Desperate for that elusive "W".
Did you check out those gentlemen?
Don't know if this NY Times column by Maureen Dowd has been posted yet . . .
An Anti-Trump Slam Dunk
On the issue of race, America’s Coach boxes out America’s Cretin.
by Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist
June 13, 2020
WASHINGTON —
“Shut up and dribble.”
Those four words sum up the at ude of Donald Trump and his acolytes toward athletes who speak out when the president uses sports to foment racial animosity and rile up his base.
LeBron James, who has a new group with other sports stars designed to protect and inspire the black vote, dunked on Laura Ingraham the other week. He tweeted: “If you still haven’t figured out why the protesting is going on. Why we’re acting as we are,” it’s because of the utter fatigue with disparities such as this: Back when King James told ESPN in 2018 that Trump did not care about the people, comparing him to a bad coach, Ingraham commanded him to “Shut up and dribble.”
But Ingraham reacted quite differently to Drew Brees’s recent comment (since rescinded) that he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag,” when asked whether players should kneel this season. “He’s allowed to have his view about what kneeling and the flag means to him,” the Fox anchor said.
The classic 1968 Esquire cover of Muhammad Ali shot through with arrows comes to mind as we watch the dynamic between sports and politics become more torrid in this season of racial pain and introspection. The two indelible images of this American chapter are a quarterback kneeling on the turf to protest police brutality and a policeman kneeling on a man’s neck in a rancid display of that brutality. (Trump’s new campaign ad mocks Joe Biden for kneeling.)
I’ve been trying for three years to talk to Gregg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs and the U.S.A. Olympics basketball team. At 71, he’s an N.B.A. legend who has long called race “the elephant in the room” and argued that we are all just an “accident of birth.” He’s a passionate Trump critic thriving in a red state.
He graduated from the Air Force Academy with a degree in Soviet studies and a yellow Corvette and toyed with the idea of a career in military intelligence. He’s a celebrated curmudgeon with sports reporters and an oenophile.
Raised by a steelworker and a secretary at the Inland plant in Gary, Ind., Popovich is as open-minded, principled and curious as Trump is narrow-minded, unprincipled and incurious.
“Pop,” as he’s known, is very private, but he finally agreed to pop off on a phone call. He wouldn’t pose for a picture, however, explaining that he should not be the focus.
He has spent 25 years in a dialogue about race with his teams. He took players to see “Hamilton” on Broadway, Ava DuVernay in L.A., the African-American Museum in D.C. and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. He gave players copies of “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
“Especially if you’re a white coach and you’re coaching a group that’s largely black, you’d better gain their trust, you’d better be genuine, you’d better understand their situation,” he tells me. “You’d better understand where they grew up. Maybe there’s a black kid from a prep school. Maybe there’s another black kid who saw his first murder when he was 7 years old.”
But in recent calls with the Spurs’ players and staff he has been amazed at the level of hurt.
“It would bring you to tears,” he says, his voice cracking. “It’s even deeper than you thought, and that’s what really made me start to think: You’re a privileged son of a and you still don’t get it as much as you think you do. You gotta work harder. You gotta be more aware. You gotta be pushed and embarrassed. You’ve gotta call it out.”
He tells of a recent Zoom town hall with Spurs employees. “A black mother said, ‘My son is angry with me.’ I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Well, because he’s 16 and I’m basically lying to him and dragging my feet and giving him excuses because I don’t want to take him down to the D.M.V. to get his driver’s license because I don’t want him in a car.’ So her own son is angry with her for that but doesn’t realize that she’s scared to death for him.”
I wonder if the former Air Force officer thinks the law-and-order militaristic approach can work for Cadet Bone Spurs in the campaign.
“I honestly do,” he says. “I feel badly for the military around Trump because they’re dealing with the guy who is the poster boy for the aggrieved wannabe. And he’s taking it out on the world and it’s ruining our country.”
About Trump’s refusal to consider renaming military installations named for Confederate leaders, Pop says of U.S. soldiers, “They didn’t go to war for General Bragg; they went to war for our country.”
About Roger Goodell’s mea culpa that the N.F.L. was wrong for not listening sooner to players who wanted to speak out and protest — an apologia he made without mentioning Colin Kaepernick’s name — Popovich is skeptical.
“A smart man is running the N.F.L. and he didn’t understand the difference between the flag and what makes the country great — all the people who fought to allow Kaepernick to have the right to kneel for justice,” he says. “The flag is irrelevant. It’s just a symbol that people glom onto for political reasons, just like Cheney back in the Iraq war.”
He continues about Goodell: “He got intimidated when Trump jumped on the kneeling” and “he folded.” Popovich says it is analogous to Republican lawmakers who support Trump out of fear “that they’ll get tweeted out of their office and not get elected the next go-round.” Don’t Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have people at home they are embarrassed to look in the eye, he ponders.
What does he think about the fact that seven N.F.L. owners, including Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft, each gave a million to Trump’s Inaugural Committee?
“It’s just hypocritical,” he replies. “It’s incongruent. It doesn’t make sense. People aren’t blind. Do you go to your staff and your players and talk about injustices and democracy and how to protest? I don’t get it. I think they put themselves in a position that’s untenable.”
When he trashed Trump soon after the election, the suits at the Spurs told him people were turning in their season tickets.
“I just said: ‘I don’t care. If they don’t come, I don’t care. That’s the way it is,’” he recalls. “From ownership, not one phone call, not one look, about dialing it back.”
Is he worried about starting to play again on July 30 at Disney World, with that other plague still on the loose?
He passes the ball to Adam Silver, the smooth N.B.A. commish.
“Ah, the Covid,” the coach murmurs. “I’m just counting on Adam to make sure we’re all safe.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/13/o...4604a52bcf055e
didn't claim any W... that you think all this is about scoreboard is reassuring though, really means you're all talk. That's good newsDesperate for that elusive "W".
Wow.....ol’ nathan��
Why not?
Seems a lot of people have messages for white people.
The peaceful protesters of Paris are sending a message.
As much as board leftists hate religion they sure seem to latch on to dogmatic views every opportunity they get.
They cannot be questioned.
They cannot be criticized.
If they disagree with the message, then they automatically shift to ad hominems and attempt to ostracize the message bearer. That's why they revel in mob anonymity.
Of course black lives matter, the problem is that the very act of legitimizing someone's views based on the color of their skin (or their alleged level of victimization) runs completely contrary to what MLK and other Civil Rights activists fought for.
Leftists can't be reasoned with. Their ridiculous manipulation and cherry-picking of statistics is absurd. The omission of other stats is equally troubling. It keeps the blind sheeple under the control of the MSM-Leftist-Liberoacademic machine.
Black men are responsible for 60% of all violent crime in the nation DESPITE only comprising 6% of the population. A deeper look at the crime statistics reveals that the overwhelming majority of these crimes (>95%) are being perpetrated by people in the following age band: 15-34. That means that young black men ages 15-34 are responsible for 57% of all violent crime in the nation DESPITE only comprising 2% of the population.
THE look the other way ("nothing to see here") dynamic being applied to the staggering implications of such a statistic are the reasons why the claim that black men are being TARGETED by law enforcement don't hold any water.
Police are CALLED to respond in areas where violent crimes are reported - this job function intrinsically places them in a position where confrontation with dangerous criminals is inevitable, regardless of race. If the folks responsible for these crimes are predominantly young black men, it follows that most of the stats would be biased by THE PREPONDERANCE of the frequency of those interactions and not because of the race factor alone. To argue otherwise is highly flawed.
Subjectivity bias doesn't even enter the equation in assessing the above statistic. Violent crimes are discrete quantifiable events that are qualified as either violent or not violent. Murder, Armed Robbery, Aggravated Assault are not subjective crimes. No one sits in an office somewhere saying, "Someone died, oh wait, was it caused by a black person? Then it was murder! Let's skew the statistics against them."
Do we need to restructure some of our law enforcement departments? Sure, perhaps we even need broad-sweeping police reform, and perhaps a defunding of their unions (which have made it difficult to purge 'bad apples' out of law enforcement roles). But the fact remains, law enforcement is required to maintain law and order - and that function will invariably put officers in the path of violent criminals. In the last 15 years an average of 1,000 - 2,000 people have been killed by law enforcement officials per year, out of a pool of just over 38 million total such interactions between law enforcement officers and violent criminals per year (or a death rate of 0.0026% - 0.00526%).
Last edited by Phenomanul; 06-17-2020 at 03:40 PM.
If pop was so concerned he'd step down and advocate for a black man to take his job but he's privileged in the systemic racism that makes up the upper echelon of the nba. him!
My simple question is why are these athletes your heroes in life? They don't follow ANYTHING up with the people that will actually change things. They just say or play to YOUR emotions/long held thought process and bail. That's not good enough. Change takes hard work. These athletes have to take care of their own careers which they frequently remind us takes "a lot of hard work, countless hours". That's fine but then when do they have time to follow up with their "change wish-list"? Thought so. They only give a about being popular and getting clicks. If you worship these superior athletes but very flawed humans you're a shallow... stupid ass idiot. BTW Pop. Trump just endorsed Kap... not to mention ALL that he's done for the forgotten. Now what? You all are blind.
I agree we need both police and criminal justice reform.
cool story
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