Well, the MLS has been steadily growing in popularity under the existing model, so perhaps it could be argued that the phrase "Keep the League Mired in Mediocrity" is not truly an accurate one, seeing as the league was stteadily growing under an even harsher labor regime.

That's not what I was saying. What I was saying is that if the MLS piece of the contract was simply deadweight, the owners could shut down the MLS and be perfectly fine, either now or at the expiration of the contract. The notion that the owners, and their broadcast affiliates, can't tease out which parts are how…

But if the MLS was hemorrhaging money and the SUM is making money, then what the owners would do is just shut the MLS down and continue to operate the SUM. The outside world may not be able to divine what the financial status of the MLS is, but I'm pretty sure the owners know exactly what kind of profit they are…

Telling someone they are wrong without telling them to go fuck themselves is not appeasement.

Perhaps, but I would argue that most professional sports have grown in a much similar manner. They all resisted free agency, they all fought pretty hard to avoid giving the union power, and they all enjoyed some degree of success at those things even as they grew in popularity.

Which, I don't think your last point is a bad thing. The more ways owners can monetize their investment in soccer as a whole, the more likely it is that they'll stay invested in it and other people will be attracted to it.

Why shouldn't they care more about using their business for the purpose they set it up for as compared to the purpose people would like to assign to it?

I don't. I care about winning, as compared to just getting my rhetorical rocks off by giving some stupid bigot what for on the internet.

That put the thick middle class of the league in a difficult spot. Should they continue to try to fight for what they believe is right, even when so many of their friends, coworkers, and even union leaders want them to agree, or should they settle now in order to get back to what they really care about, which is…

Except the issue is that people don't think "You told me to go fuck myself, so now I'm going to stop saying x".

But he's not saying that. He's just telling him to go fuck himself.

But above you said you hated bigotry. Hating a person for believing"I think it's wrong, but we can all coexist", which is what Murphy expressed, is not something reasonable people do. It's something that people who are more invested in stroking their own sense of moral superiority than they are in seeing the world…

Note though, that the article itself says that you shame the movement but do not humiliate people.

Saying "go fuck yourself" is not hating bigotry. It's hating a person.

I think if you got in the middle of them, you might only get 1 or 2. If you could get to the edge and you were a halfway decent skater ... maybe most or all of them provided they never got around to coordinating together and taking you down like a little legion of devil children on skates.

With the caveat I'm not sure you can call Murphy's particular brand of anti-gay sentiment dangerous" even if it is reprehensible, even if we agreed that it were such, how is telling someone to go fuck themselves going to convince people who don't already agree with you that these are beliefs that should be stigmatized?

Why? What does it accomplish?

But, I've never been a bigot before, so I'll continue to tell Mr. Murphy to eat a big bowl of flaming hot dicks instead of talking to him like I'm not a crazy person in an effort to get him to come around!

It probably helps that Bean's job in this is to work on changing Murphy's attitude, instead of speak his thoughts into an echo chamber where insulting and disparaging bigots is part and parcel of the job.

Why? The guy he made his comments about (Beane) provided some pretty compelling reasons to find ways to take the high road, chiefly that by doing so it increases the odds of ... you know ... actually changing people's attitudes and beliefs.