NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts • Hacker News Board

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#271

Post by i_am_nomad » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #163

i_am_nomad wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll expand on this by pulling two sequential quotations in the article from NBA commissioner Adam Silver: "It is inevitable that people around the world -- including America and China -- will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the NBA to adjudicate those differences.” Bullshit, see North Carolina. “However, the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, empl…

>Bullshit, see Donald Sterling. Yeah, blatant racism, including against some of the biggest stars in the NBA's history, is definitely the same thing here. That's not regulating political discourse - that's not allowing a racist to be in a position of power over the very people he is prejudiced against.

No one said anything about political discourse, just about differing opinions on various issues. Surely, racism is one of them.

And just so you know, the prevailing Chinese opinion on that is quite a bit different that what we believe in the West.

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#272

Post by dang » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

5trokerac3 wrote: post #108

madiathomas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an African country. I know what China is doing in my country. This is what they are doing -> Investing billions of rands and they never supported an unjust government like US which was sponsoring apartheid government in my country and listed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist for fighting against their favourite government which was oppressing black people in their own country.

Yeah, the Han Chinese have zero history of considering other peoples inferior. Give me a fucking break. You sound like someone who was on the Shah's payroll in the 70s.

Flamewar comments and personal attacks like this will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines and either make kind, thoughtful posts to HN, or no posts to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#273

Post by darepublic » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #169

paggle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Michael Jordan didn't say... "Republicans buy sneakers too." Billionaires didn't get to be billionaires by leaving money on the table. We need large scale political action against China.

Let's look at some large scale political action in the past: 1. Invade Iraq. 4000+ Americans dead, over 1 million Iraqi died. 2. Bombed Libya, it is now a $democratic_wonderland. I'm not putting Afghanistan here because I think it's justified, but then why are we still there after Bin Laden's dead? How about just minding our own business. If China don't want to watch NBA, then so be it. If you don't want to buy shit…

why would afghanistan be justified?

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#274

Post by swebs » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

habitue wrote: post #208

chongli wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public companies can’t afford to do that. They’ve probably been aware that this can happen for many years. They simply had no choice because their competitors might beat them to market and their shareholders might sue them for shirking their fiduciary duty.

So Google pulled out of China, and their shareholders didn't sue them (that I could find. Though even if they did, apparently it didn't cause them to go back into China). The shareholders did sue them to halt their plans for a censored Chinese search engine (which failed, but they tried). Yes, a company has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, but there are lots of ways to fulfill that duty. There's no requirement that…

>Though even if they did, apparently it didn't cause them to go back into China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#275

Post by filoleg » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #80

i_am_nomad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it only shows that they essentially have no principles at all, or at least none that they’re willing to lose money over (which is ultimately the same thing). It’s always useful when someone reveals their true moral fiber, as the NBA has done.

Why are both the same thing? If it doesn't cost me anything to fight injustice and I don't do it, that is strictly worse than if it doesn't cost me to fight injustice and I do. Suppose the NBA gave the middle finger to Saudi Arabia but cozied up to China, would that be worse than if they cozied up to both? Your stance is wildly illogical.

It isn’t about what they did, it is the justification they gave for doing or not doing it.

If they said “we cozied up to China, but didn’t cozy up to SA because it made business sense in the former scenario but not in the latter one”, that would be one thing. But if they said “we cozied up to China because we want to stay out of politics and be neutral” while still not cozying it up to SA and flaunting how morally righteous they were for giving SA the finger, that’s a very different scenario.

At best, it is just dishonest and hypocritical.

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#276

Post by godot » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #237

tyre wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner of the Nets is an executive at Alibaba. He will follow the party line and has (calling Hong Kong protestors “separatists”, etc.) The jersey sponsor of the LA Lakers is Wish.com, a company doing drop shipping from China. LeBron James is sponsored by Nike (as are all of the jerseys) and Nike has significant interest in keeping the Chinese market open. LeBron is leading production of Space Jam 2. He won’t jeop…

> He will follow the party line and has (calling Hong Kong protestors “separatists”, etc.) Is 'Hong Kong separatist' any different to 'Ulster unionist' in acceptability to each side? It sounds like a neutral description to me.

I don't know if it's neutral or not, but it's just factually incorrect. The five demands of the protestors (now six actually) do not include anything about separatism/independent state. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_protests#Object...)

The fact that someone as prominent as Joe Tsai made such a factually incorrect public statement is a bit bothersome; and seems to suggest that there's truth in that Chinese media really wants to portray the protests as separatists movements (which is not true) to its people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2019_Hong_Kon...)

The thing is, Joe is right in the rest of his post -- everything about China's sensitivity to territories and separatists movements. It's that his categorization of Hong Kong's movement is wrong, which makes the whole argument invalid.

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#277

Post by cco » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #235

tyre wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner of the Nets is an executive at Alibaba. He will follow the party line and has (calling Hong Kong protestors “separatists”, etc.) The jersey sponsor of the LA Lakers is Wish.com, a company doing drop shipping from China. LeBron James is sponsored by Nike (as are all of the jerseys) and Nike has significant interest in keeping the Chinese market open. LeBron is leading production of Space Jam 2. He won’t jeop…

The counterpoint is that LeBron James already makes over $35 million per year (not counting endorsements -- his net worth is in the hundreds of millions) and therefore is actually in an excellent position to take a stand against a dictatorship. After some threshold, ludicrously rich people aligning themselves with dictators just so they can become even more rich makes them just as bad and worthy of denigration.

And provide a powerful lesson for the children in his sponsored school, there is more to life that money and standing up to bullies is the right thing to do even if you must have consequences.

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#278

Post by Rebelgecko » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

behringer wrote: post #182

Rebelgecko wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that stat is only true for Chinese people that are in prisons and have been convicted of crimes. If you count ALL people being held against their will (e.g. including the Xinjiang "Reeducation" camps), China has more than the US.

Source?

China is coy about the actual numbers, but US Asst Sec of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs estimates that as many as 3 million people are being held in the reeducation camps (link below). That alone is already more than the total US prison population. Even if you prefer to go with the more conservative estimates (which are mostly around 1-2 million), that's more than the US prison population when combined with the 2 million or so Chinese in traditional prisons.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-concentrationca...

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#279

Post by danharaj » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

i_am_nomad wrote: post #271

cthalupa wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bullshit, see Donald Sterling. Yeah, blatant racism, including against some of the biggest stars in the NBA's history, is definitely the same thing here. That's not regulating political discourse - that's not allowing a racist to be in a position of power over the very people he is prejudiced against.

No one said anything about political discourse, just about differing opinions on various issues. Surely, racism is one of them. And just so you know, the prevailing Chinese opinion on that is quite a bit different that what we believe in the West.

Do you think that the extent of racism is what opinions you hold?

Re: NBA's China dilemma: $4B at risk as Chinese TV cancels game broadcasts

#280

Post by cco » Tue, Oct 08, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

KerrickStaley wrote: post #229

chrischen wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because I’m sure you know what's best for billions of Chinese. They must be all dying to overthrow their government. Your rhetoric is naive at best and racist at worst. It’s racist because you are disenfranchising the potential voice and sovereignty of a whole ethnicity and country because private interests in your own country can’t get their way over there. The hong kong protestors have started getting their way…

There is a difference between the Chinese government and the Chinese people. The parent is (presumably) calling for action against the Chinese government, because what the Chinese government wants is harmful to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and other basic rights. This is not an attack on the Chinese people. In general, one has to be careful about conflating the interests of the Chinese government and the C…

This is the second time I think I've seen this on hackernews in two days, no one is conflating the two anymore or less than when someone says, "America runs terrorist campaigns in the Middle East." People understand that the meaning is the state, nothing is a monolith although everybody must step up to the table and own up to the fact that we are all in part responsible for the actions of our comminutes.

We know who the dictator is, it isn't billions of people, it is one man.