alienblue89
It’s way worse than that.
WAY worse.
Ticketmaster and Livenation are both owned by the parent company Liberty Media. In addition to TM and LN, Liberty also owns/absorbed Pandora, iHeartRadio, ClearChannel, and SiriusXM. So not only do they own and control almost ALL live music, but also virtually ALL terrestrial radio, literally ALL satellite radio, and even a bit of streaming.
And it gets worse. The controlling share of Liberty Media is owned by ONE old man. Which means this one dude: A. Decides what new music you can hear on the radio or satellite radio, B. Decides which music gets ads (via ClearChannel advertising and the massive chunk of podcasts iHeartRadio & Pandora control), C. Decides who is allowed to play in the bulk of live venues across the entire nation controlled by LiveNation, and D. Forces you to use Ticketmaster to not only buy face tickets, but also controls any resale tickets.
Basically from the very first time you hear a new band until you see them live, Liberty Media is controlling and profiting from every single step.
(And that’s just music. Liberty Media owns a whole slew of other stuff too).
rieh
Yep. Liberty Media also owns Formula One, MotoGP, Quint (which provides ticket sales for F1, the NBA, MotoGP, Kentucky Derby / other major horse races, a few major NFL teams, NASCAR, and the NHL among others.) They have racing, horse racing and sports tickets basically cornered.
They also own SiriusXM, the Atlanta Braves, Charter Communications (Spectrum), TripAdvisor, and Qurate Retail (QVC, HSN, and a few other retail businesses).
Greg Maffei, the president / CEO / chairman of these companies, used to be CFO at Oracle and Microsoft. He's on record as having donated around $200k to various right-wing organizations during the 2016 election cycle (250k in the '14 cycle and another $150k from 2018-2020, no data on the latest cycle).
Dude basically owns entertainment for a big chunk of Americans.
Edited to add clarification to Charter
The gloves were expensive gloves that Nicole bought for OJ (& there was a receipt that proved he owned the exact same pair). Why does a guy who lives in LA need gloves? He traveled calling MNF games & needed them when he was in a cold climate. One bloody glove was found at the murder scene, the other one behind the guest house on OJ’s property.
The shoeprints in blood at the scene were from expensive Italian dress shoes that OJ was photographed wearing at a football game (& they were the same size).
Ron Goldman’s blood was in OJ’s Ford Bronco. Nicole had been in the car so her blood could have another reason for being there, but Ron Goldman’s blood had no other reason for being in there.
OJ was on the record as having creeped around Nicole’s condo after dark, peeping in windows watching her with other men & then bringing it up to her later. This puts him on her property creeping around after dark on any random night (& the murders happened around 10pm).
The murders also just happened to occur on a night where OJ had a late night flight to Chicago prescheduled (which could be seen as an attempt at setting up an alibi). Another odd coincidence.
Nicole’s 1993 911 call is an interesting listen if you haven’t heard it before.. They’re arguing over the kids at one point because Nicole doesn’t want them to hear the fighting. OJ says “you didn’t give a *** about the kids when you were sucking his **** in the living room, they were here”*. This is a reference to OJ peeping in her windows at night & watching her perform a sex act on another man. OJ confronted Nicole & the man at a later date & reportedly asked the guy "so, was she any good at it?"
Everyone knew he did it, but because interracial relationships were more rare at the time, it tended to put black men in a negative light. OJ was ultra famous & became a poster boy for an entire group of people - fair or foul.
People didn’t like this, so they decided to grasp at straws & use misdirection to focus on something other than the evidence. Mark Fuhrman gave the perfect misdirection & reason for people who were uncomfortable with the black/white dynamic of the case to deny that it happened & acquit OJ.
DNA also didn’t carry the weight it does now back then. IIRC they had to have weeks of expert testimony to even explain to the jury what DNA is & why it’s the best evidence you can have from a crime scene (short of a video of the crime happening).
Another fun fact most people don’t know. Johnnie Cochran - who was propped up as a hero in the black community- was married to an African American woman & had a family with her, but he also had a white mistress & a child with her in a different city. He met her when he acted as an attorney on a case for her. This was back at a time where just having different women in different cities was a pretty easy way to keep the situation a secret.
Johnnie Cochran also had a history that included domestic violence accusations made against him by an ex-wife.
And top comment response:
/u/pmyourthongpanties: don't forget the case was fucked from the getgo when the police didn't fully document the chain of custody on evidence.
There is a famous Harvard Business Review case study that is commonly used for MBA classes on Operational and Process Design called Benihana of Tokyo. I'm sorry it's behind a paywall but here's the link https://store.hbr.org/product/benihana-of-tokyo/673057 and I will reference bits of it here.
Basically Hiroaki (Rocky) Aoki opened the first Benihana in 1964 and it was a huge success. Most of what you see today in American hibachi culture is a copy/evolution of that model. I think you need to understand the operational design of Benihana to understand why it was successful and why so many restaurants chose to copy it.
The case study and accompanying lessons typically focus on how restaurants are chaotic production systems... people come in mostly in a huge wave a dinner hour, different size tables, different length of stay / duration, wait staff relay customer communication to the chef for preparation, menus require dozens of dishes to be prepared to unique specifications, wastage is significant, margins are low, etc. It's a NIGHTMARE if you think about it as a production system that you need to solve for. But the design of a Benihana was brilliant in mitigating so many of these issues:
Simply put, Benihana solved almost all the major issues of a traditional restaurant, making it highly profitable AND an exotic, popular destination for their clients. Of course successful restaurateurs would copy this model... and it's been simplified into fast-food and cook-at-home variations as the style remained popular for so long. But it all began with Rocky Aoki, possibly the most brilliant restaurant owner in history.
Greetings! You have been linked here because at some point, you gave a really shitty take on Daryl Davis by suggesting something along the lines of the idea that pacifism and dialogue are more effective tools in fighting racism than direct action, and using Davis as proof. This thread exists to explain why your take is so shitty.
To be clear, nobody thinks Daryl Davis has bad intents. But he does more harm than good. Let's look at a number of reasons why...
Daryl Davis isn't as effective at defrocking Klansmen as you think he is
Davis claims he defrocked 200 Klansmen. This has some truth to it but is misleading. Numerous individuals who left the Klan after conversations with Davis noted that they were already questioning their racist beliefs. Davis gave them a push over the edge - a good thing, for sure, but not remotely the revolutionary transformation that you're crediting him with.
In other instances, people who spoke to Davis left the Klan but remained active in racist politics. Or, in a few instances, Davis was just incorrect about them having left (whether he lied or was mistaken, I don't know). For example, Davis claimed that he convinced Richard Preston to leave, but Preston was arrested for firing a gun at Charlottesville. He has claimed that he "dismantled the entire KKK in Maryland," but the KKK is active in Maryland.
Side note: Davis posted Preston's bail. If Davis were an anti-incarceration activist, noting that the carcereal state targets certain groups, that would be praiseworthy. But I know of no examples of Davis posting the bail of any young black man targeted by the white supremacist police. Instead, he got an actively violent racist out of jail. That's who he chose to bail out and put back in society. This is what you call an anti-racist activist?
Which leads into the next point...
Davis looks at racism as an individual problem, not a systemic one
All the great civil rights activists understood that racism wasn't simply a matter of opinions amongst individuals, but structural power issues. To quote Stokely Carmichael:
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
There's nothing wrong with changing individual minds - it's a noble task - but it isn't a means of dismantling systems.
Punching racists treats fascism and racism as political, not interpersonal, problems, as it seeks to minimize the presence of racial politics in society by breaking up rallies and the like. Of course, it is not anti-capitalist activism in its entirety, but nobody claims it is. Real anti-racism requires we look at systemic racism, and neither Davis, nor you, have done this.
Besides ... 200 racists (if even that many) since 1983? Great, but hate group membership is skyrocketing, and to try to take these groups apart piece-by-piece, and not in more direct manners, is a waste of time and energy that people targeted by hate groups just can't afford. And that's especially problematic because...
Your reasoning puts the burden of anti-racism on the shoulders of its victims
Let's start by quoting Malcolm X:
"I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."
You are asking people who literally just want to exist to bear the burden of changing society, and not the people who commit or advocate for atrocious acts. Why do you have this condescending pacifist tone towards us, and not the Nazis themselves?
Davis has been physically attacked more than once when interacting with Klansmen. He's willing to risk his physical safety, and good and well if he chooses to, but why should anyone have to? Why do we have to bear the violence of people who want to commit it against us just for existing, instead of defending ourselves? Why should we have to put ourselves in danger in the search for an end to that danger?
Further, Davis himself has noted that his privilege in other areas has aided in his task: He said, “Sure, you’re in some uncomfortable environments with people who may not like you or share your views or who think you’re inferior to them because of the color of your skin — or that you have a smaller brain than they do, you’re prone to crime and welfare and selling drugs. You name the stereotype, I’ve heard it. But I know who I am. I don’t have a criminal record. I’ve never sold drugs. I’ve never been on welfare. I have more education than most of them put together.”
Does that mean that black folks who have criminal records, or are on welfare, cannot achieve his ends? Because to me, it sounds like Davis is only successful because he conforms to white expectations of black behavior. Forced assimilation is racist. Black people shouldn't have to meet white racist standards in order to have the right to exist. This, again, puts the burden on the oppressed: Sure, you can be accepted in our society; just behave like us!
In conclusion...
Davis is really just the Klan's token black friend. He enables racists to look reasonable and gaslight the rest of us by suggesting that maybe if we were nicer to the racists, they wouldn't be racists - even though never in history has a white supremacist uprising been quelled without violence. There's no appreciable evidence that he's meaningfully converted anyone, despite all his robes, and he has actively aided the well-being of those who would kill the rest of us. The Nazi Party had "honorary Aryans" - Jews who weren't so bad - and they used these individuals to legitimize their movement by suggesting that, hey, even Jews support the Nazis when those Jews are civilized enough! Davis fits that mold precisely. And by promoting him, you're promoting the idea that we have to risk our lives to serve your pacifist morals. Screw that.
Friday January 26, 2024
Just a reminder that the border "crisis" is a fake crisis manufactured by Republicans - A) immigration is way down from previous decades, including hitting a low not seen since the previous century in the last few years, B) most illegal immigration does not occur via the border, and C) the common metric pointed to is mostly repeats/the same people being counted multiple times as border enforcement is 20 times what the US had a few decades ago:
If someone wants to say "Even though the actual number of immigrants to the US is far below what the US accommodated historically, after increasing border enforcement by many multiples we are catching/turning away more immigrants," I would agree with that statement.
Do I think many, many aspects of the US needs to be re-analyzed in terms of "What can we learn from other successful developed nations"? Absolutely. But I think we too often get caught up in "That's what makes America unique" even if objectively we see that many other countries achieved better outcomes for citizens by doing the opposite of the US.
I've tried to include source links above to many statistics, but if anyone has other specific immigration stats they found helpful, I'd love to see them; unfortunately too often in recent years it seems like the numbers in most discussions are just around "encounters" (or court backlogs, which again, properly funding would go a long way to solving).
https://www.catholicleague.org/christmas-joy-eludes-atheists/
Bill Donohue This is the most joyful time of the year, especially for Christians. It is not a good time for dogmatic secularists, many of whom are deeply unhappy. If anything, Christmas brings out the worst in them. Take Freedom From Religion Foundation. The radical atheists paid well
https://abcnews.go.com/US/speaker-mike-johnson-daughter-profiled-attending-purity-ball/story?id=105785626
Years before becoming speaker, Mike Johnson and his family were profiled attending a "purity ball" in a German TV news segment, underscoring his deep conservative views.
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