Interesting weekend. Certainly blown up with my American FB friends being absolutely split down the middle.
The guys who have their flags outside their homes really do view it as an act of treason - all sorts of “where were you in Afghanistan” “When you serve your country you earn the right to protest” shit.
And then the other view - so well put by one on my Golf Media crew - Kevin Garside
It seems to be even more divisive than the usual Trumpisms, and is already polarising into a Race Problem.
So the point is should Athletes make political statements? (We had decades of “keep politics out of sport” in the Aprtheid era)
Is taking a knee a Political Gesture?
Should Saints do it against Stoke?
Has Trump bitten off more than he can chew? Will Redneck Sports Fans burn the witch or will they boycott Black players in their teams?
A Sporting Political debate for Pap and Bazza for a change.
Discuss.
(Me? I think they have every right to protest, free speech and stuff, BUT last year Kaepernick was the Devil incarnate and now is a folk hero - hmm)
All this flag code stuff was, I seem to recall was only dreamt up prior to WW2 (please correct me if wrong) and the right not to follow the “code” is enshrined in the right to have freedom of expression
Seems Trump is simply proving his ignorance and showing racial prejudice here.
Why the fuck should black folk _ever _have respected that flag?
For all the bollocks about “no taxation without representation”, one of the key reasons slave owners Washington, Jefferson et al went the way they did was because the rest of the world was pursuing an abolitionist stance when they rather fancied carrying on slaving.
It was. Hattie Jacques played a slave owners wife who had an affair with the afforementioned ‘blacked up Sid James’ character. Kenneth Williams played the outraged plantation manager and Babs Windsor got her tits out for some reason.
Don’t recall Jim Dale’s role but think he got castrated whilst dressed as a maid.
If you so desperately need everyone to be that respectful of a symbol in order to bring your country together, you need to work out what’s tearing it apart tbh.
Amazing how divisive this is and how thick people are to miss the whole point of the protests.
There is an issue in the US it’s not open to debate just look at the Police shooting stats - yet so many are ignoring the reason WHY everyone is taking a knee and ranting about the 1st amendment.
People aren’t missing the point out of stupidity. It’s deliberate misrepresentation and is itself an act of racism. The protesters are literally telling everyone who’ll listen what it is they’re protesting about. To ignore that and then pretend it’s about something else is to effectively say that those concerns are invalid or unimportant. That is racism from the top down. “The things you black folks have to say are unimportant and will be ignored. I’m changing the narrative to say that you’re attacking the values of us decent white folks.”
This is coming straight from Trump and it’s an act of shameless, naked racism.
