{"id":234,"date":"2014-05-02T17:27:33","date_gmt":"2014-05-02T17:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/?p=234"},"modified":"2014-05-02T23:08:03","modified_gmt":"2014-05-02T23:08:03","slug":"donald-sterling-and-anti-semitism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/?p=234","title":{"rendered":"Donald Sterling and Anti-Semitism"},"content":{"rendered":"

So unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock, I don\u2019t need to explain too much to you.\u00a0 His lady friend released footage of a phone conversation<\/a> where she got him to question her Instagramming photos of herself with a black man, and now the world is clamoring for him to sell his team.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most striking to me about all this, is the strong whiff of Anti-Semitism in all this … the utter jubilation at the thought of stripping Sterling of his team, on such shaky charges, has the ring of Merchant of Venice.<\/p>\n

Is what he said cringe-worthy?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 Does he have a history of questionable behavior?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 He\u2019s a capitalist.\u00a0 And capitalists don\u2019t get rich writing checks.\u00a0 His behavior is quite typical of his class.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, in LA we have a nice case study of a slimy owner who we needled to sell his team: Frank McCourt.\u00a0 And regarding his situation, LA Times Business columnist Michael Hiltzik<\/a> said \u201cThe history of baseball ownership is a brimming cauldron of con men, hacks, racists, cheapskates and bankrupts.\u201d\u00a0 I promise you the bell curve doesn\u2019t shift significantly to basketball or football team owners.<\/p>\n

Of course, McCourt was embezzling money from the Dodgers, running the team into the ground.\u00a0 And yet, nobody clamored to force McCourt to sell, we had to patiently convince him to sell and pony up enough money collectively to make it worth his while.<\/p>\n

Compared to him, Sterling looks like a pretty decent guy.\u00a0 Taking a nothing team from a nothing market to a championship team that rivals the Lakers over 30 years? \u00a0I\u2019d say that\u2019s decent management.<\/p>\n

But the tune is far different with Sterling.\u00a0 We take a questionable phone conversation, one that would never be admissible in court for a number of reasons, and wave it around as the crowning jewel in a case to strip a Jew of his prize possession and achievement.\u00a0 And we celebrate that our consciences have been cleansed, with a nice new prize to boot!\u00a0 Everybody wins!<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the core of Anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s putting all our guilt and shame of the injustices of Capitalism and the innate bondage of wage labor, and transferring it into an impossible moral standard on the Jews who actually manage to claw their way into a piece of the pie.\u00a0 It\u2019s taking this opportunity to have all the players complain that they\u2019re being bought and sold on the market, like it\u2019s STERLING\u2019S fault, and not the entire institution. \u00a0It\u2019s accusing Sterling of doing all the things every other rich person does to get rich, while the rest stay conveniently out of the hot seat.\u00a0 \u00a0As Chris Rock<\/a> says, \u201cIt\u2019s all right, because it\u2019s all white!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the core of Anti-Semitism throughout history.\u00a0 And if I may claim an exemption to Godwin\u2019s rule, it\u2019s what the Nazis did.\u00a0 It\u2019s going from \u201cbankers run the world\u201d to \u201cJewish bankers run the world\u201d.\u00a0 And rather than expropriating the expropriators, as that Communist Jew Karl Marx said, they expropriate only the Jews to cleanse their guilt and live another generation.<\/p>\n

So, if we are to make some good sense ouf of this morass, there is one question to ask both players and the other owners.\u00a0 And that is, what is it about Sterling that really gets them and makes them want to get rid of him?\u00a0 The fact that he\u2019s a racist, or the fact that he\u2019s a JEEEWWW???<\/p>\n

But this is not a question for us to ask them in public.\u00a0 It\u2019s for their mistresses to ask them (remember, the oppressed players have mistresses too, I\u2019m looking at you Kobe Bryant), privately, needling the answer they want out of them, while recording the conversation and releasing it without their consent.<\/p>\n

Frankly, you could probably buy this out of any number of mistresses for a couple million.\u00a0 For Donald Sterling, this would be a trifling sum well worth the vindication.<\/p>\n

POST-SCRIPT: as if the universe were nodding in agreement, the New York Times just posted an article<\/a> about the one guy who went to jail for the 2008 financial crisis.\u00a0 And guess what?\u00a0 He\u2019s a Semite.\u00a0 (of course there\u2019s also Bernie Madoff\u2026)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock, I don\u2019t need to explain too much to you.\u00a0 His lady friend released footage of a phone conversation where she got him to question her Instagramming photos of herself with a black man, and now the world is clamoring for him to sell his team. What\u2019s most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[79,122,121,124,123],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrbiggs.net\/ron\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}