One of the aspects of our neo-Puritan age is that being right is never enough if the Cult decides you have to be an example. Apologizing only confirms to them that you are the right guy to burn at the stake. The lesson here from the most recent public sacrifice is to never apologize and don’t bother defending yourself with facts.
Radio host Colin Cowherd no longer will appear on ESPN following comments he made questioning the intelligence of Dominican Republic players related to baseball one day earlier, the company said in a statement Friday.
“Colin Cowherd’s comments over the past two days do not reflect the values of ESPN or our employees,” ESPN said in a statement. “Colin will no longer appear on ESPN.”
Cowherd issued an apology later Friday via Twitter.
Cowherd had said Thursday that he didn’t believe baseball was complex, saying a third of the sport was from the Dominican Republic, which had “not been known, in my lifetime, as having, you know, world-class academic abilities.”
Major League Baseball on Friday said Cowherd owes Dominican players an apology for the remarks, and the MLB Players Association also condemned his comments.
Earlier Friday, Cowherd addressed his remarks from Thursday during The Herd.
“I could’ve made the point without using one country, and there’s all sorts of smart people from the Dominican Republic,” Cowherd said. “I could’ve said a third of baseball’s talent is being furnished from countries with economic hardships, therefore educational hurdles. For the record, I used the Dominican Republic because they’ve furnished baseball with so many great players.”
Cowherd on Friday also cited reports and statistics to back up what he said about the country’s ranking when it comes to primary education.
The median IQ of the Dominican Republic is 82 according to Richard Lynn. According to the people who study these things, the DR has one of the worst education systems on earth, which is quite an accomplishment. But, it is a mix of Latin corruption and African incompetence. The result is what you would expect. Of course, if you have ever experienced the Caribbean, you know this.
ESPN has been dominated by unhinged fanatics for years. They recently were promoting the mentally disturbed drag queen, for example. Every crackpot fad bubbling up from the fever swamps of the Cult of Modern Liberalism has been promoted enthusiastically by ESPN. A non-believer like Cowerd had always been on their list of potential wickermen.
At some point, people will figure out that there is no accommodating these nuts. The answer when they come after you is to go right back at them. Never apologize, never explain. Attack attack attack. You have nothing to lose as there is no reasoning with lunatics. Cowerd should have said he was the victim of a lynching by liberal crazies in ESPN. That puts the focus on them. You’re getting fired anyway. Go out with a bang.
I had this DR discussion online with Pete Abraham of the Boston Glob in a comments section three years ago. In Boston they (finally) abhor Manny Ramirez for his despicable behavior and three failed PED tests, hope that David Ortiz was clean in spite of the evidence, and worship Pedro Martinez, who could do no wrong. Pedro was roiding before either of them. I stated that at the turn of the century there was not a single Dominican who was not roiding, that as backward as the Dominican is, state of the art clinics operate there–beyond the reach of American law. That is a good thing. But the Dominican players had benefit of the best programs. Problems only developed for them when testing came into being, the type of test which any track and field athlete or bicyclist would be expected to beat order to compete, but which will over time present problems for users high in impulsivity and low in IQ, describing Dominican baseball players in general. In fact, the great majority of baseball players getting busted over the last few years are Dominican. Pedro is an outlier, highly intelligent and intuitive.
No one of course appreciated my contribution. but Abraham, to his credit, thought them to be “racialist” rather than racist. The war on noticing.
I’ve an acquaintance, an uber liberal-fascist who made the mistake of asking me why the DR was not the hell hole Haiti is while sharing the same island. I explained to him that in the revolution of 1806 the slaves murdered all the whites, but more significantly, all the mulattoes; that Caribbean islands of that type are all run by mulattoes, of which the DR has none, condemning it to being Haiti in perpetuity. I could see that he immediately understood, but he could not acknowledge that verbally.
James- Spot on on the first part of your post- as for the second I’m not sure I follow you- is or is not the DR the hellhole Haiti is? My sense, not having been to either nor wishing to live in either is that the DR is better. Or maybe I’m just thick!
Pretty thorough comparison of DR to Haiti: http://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/haiti.dominican-republic
The DR is pretty much Puerto Rico without the warping effect of US colonial rule. Haiti is what you would expect if Detroit was a country in a warm climate.
The naming and shaming is one thing. The state controlling so much of individual revenue is another. By the time of the Brezhnev years, the USSR didn’t need a lot of gulags. It could achieve the same effects by controlling employment, pension, authorized residence areas, etc. Waiting to see when the first laws are passed to dock SS, Medicare, and one-hundred plus other “entitlements” in response to some heterodox opinion or another.
It’s not just the stultifying PC on ESPN- it’s the way they cover things- their coverage of the British Open was appalling!
The bad news is every cable subscriber contributes $7 to ESPN every month. The good news is the number of cable subscribers appears to have peaked a few years ago.
The American TV oligopoly is in many ways a Ponzi scheme. When cable was rolling out 25 years ago, there were always new homes to add to the system. Broadband was what drove a lot of the expansion. I know I got cable TV when I wanted to upgrade by DSL to something faster. That was in the 90’s. The offer at the time was cable TV $30 per month and broadband internet for an extra $5 month. Imagine that!
With revenues going up every quarter, it only made sense for the cable companies to keep adding channels. Much of was funded with borrowed money at artificially low rates. Municipalities were offering all sorts of tax breaks and incentives to goose the rollout of cable. In Virginia, the state essentially paid for the infrastructure through tax deals.
The trouble is the number of new customers began to decline so rates had to rise in order to make the math work. That’s what undoes every Ponzi scheme. Instead of reducing returns to existing investors like a Ponzi scheme, cable rates have shot up. That’s what leads to a rush for the exits. In the case of video content, delivering it over the internet offers a low cost alternative to the cable scheme.
I’m fond of saying that reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. The fact is each household has a maximum of forty hours of TV time per week. The average home watched 35 hours per week. That’s one reality. Forcing people to buy even 10x that as part of the TV package is at war with reality. People will find a way around it in time. The music business discovered this with their bundled service (albums).
The reality for TV is people are willing to pay for shows and events like sports on a pay-per-view model. They are unwilling to pay for content they are unlikely to watch. That’s why the ad-based system worked for so long. If you got an audience, you got advertisers. Something similar will be the norm once again, probably through platforms like Apple, Google, NetFlix and Amazon. ESPN will go back to having a few shows they sell on-line.