Agreed with you wholeheartedly that Vardon shouldn’t been the one to write the explainer on the Rockets-HK-China thing. The issue itself isn’t rocket science—someone who spent a few hours on background reading would have gotten a decent grasp of the history and issues at stake—but nothing Vardon has written in the…

Mad respect for the response. And as other comments points out, the implication was discernible. Just that the content didn’t address the headline at all, which was a bit jarring.

It was just a little joke because scanning the names in the comment section reminded me of this tweet, plus the fact that in my experience, white men are most likely to get upset when they feel like their opinions aren’t being heard. If it didn’t land for most people, though - and I get why it maybe didn’t - that’s my…

If The Athletic wants a less-obvious way to prevent people from commenting they should just switch to Kinja.

In America, what’s happening in Hong Kong is about an erosion of civil liberties, like free speech.

I didn’t even know this was going on, just kept getting confused at some of those comments popping up on the most genial of articles.

every publication can (and frankly should) moderate its comments to keep out bigots and trolls, if only as a courtesy to readers.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for The Athletic had this explanation.

never one to defend white men but that headline is just nonsensical provocation on a good piece. feel for the author if they got saddled with that shit. 

What a strange world, where the phrase “Communist investors” exists.

The fuck is up with that headline?

I am incredibly dense, so could someone explain why White Men, in particular, would be upset by this? Seems like the Hong Kong protests are one of, like, two things that Americans across political/racial/social spectrum are united on.

A shorter workweek is an impossibility within the framework of capitalism, not without the extraction of concessions from workers.

The same mechanism we had when it went to 40 hours a week.. Well written legislation with meaningful penalties for violating these laws. It took decades of mostly republican attacks on Unions and existing legislation to get us to our present sorry state.

No, completely different. A nu-union. Or nunion. 

We can trot out the classic incentive:

this is a really horrendous nonsense post are you actually a libertarian trying to do some kind of mental gymnastics around your own terrible worldview because you’ve finally started to figure out that its just corporate feudalism or whats up here my friend. “workers don’t need unions they need something exactly like…

I’m a revolutionary socialist, but unions have always been a part of that, an organ of working class power. Obviously, union leadership, like leadership of all workers' organizations, gets co-opted. We need to point this out and use it as a point for organizing for our common interests, not write off something as…

No, we’ll need to call them something different but same. How about...Onions? It’ll be all the rage...

No, workers do not need unions, workers need to form their own organizations, independent of the unions and the two capitalist parties