An open letter to Kobe Bryant

You are angry that there are people telling you to shut up and dribble . Fair enough, sounds demeaning. But did you even for a second consider the implications behind this? People like you because you are good with the orange ball. It in no way means you are good with words, knowledgeable in politics or able to come to the right conclusions from such points. You could as well be but your insistence to speak from a position of authority is really not backed up by anything here.

But wait, maybe you are using your platform? Speaking for the folks that can not be heard? Well, how about you bring up those folks and let them speak? Because you do realize how it sounds when a black man worth 350 million talks about racial injustice and inequality to white folks who barely meet ends and still spare $200 to watch the NBA? These are the people that made your 350 million bucks Kobe. And do you know how these money gathered? By digging in mines, cleaning up the city streets, putting their lives at risk so that you can walk around safely, by cultivating the crops we get for almost free. That sounds like a real inequality to me. These guys left their health at the bottom of some hole for a few bucks. And from those few they most likely took away 200/month so that they can watch you. Watch you play ball. Play ball for 350 million.

Inequality has many axes. If you bring up just one and keep linking it to skin colour that's racism-plain and simple. Social Justice circles are coming to terms with that lately and more and more openly admit their "whiteness" talk is racist and they are racist themselves. It's up to you and the rest of us to decide where we stand on the issue.

Quick debunking of the "that wasn't true communism" meme

The neo communists like to repeat the "that wasn't true communism" meme to oblivion. As someone who spent his childhood under one of those not-so-real-communist regimes my childhood I can see what is wrong with this claim with ease. Let me entertain just one argument that does not require deep knowledge of our recent history tho. Approximately half of the world's population lived under communism until the 1990's. As any governmental system the authorities in these countries were recruiting people to do the planning for how and where the state would move. There was more or less a system of meritocracy in choosing the rulers of these countries too(we can all agree that never goes just one way-full nepotism or full meritocracy). Communist countries had intelligentsia that was in no way worse than the one the West had. Given how one of the most prominent American thinkers of the 80's was Camille Paglia with her "deep analysis" of the works of....yes, Madonna, I'd say ideological rigor actually did a huge favour to the East. Now if you think of this-selected from 2 bill + people that's awful lot of smart, little cogs in the wheels of the communist machine. And all these cogs have read and well understood the works of Marx and Engels. Now how did none of these thousands and thousands of really smart people not understand their countries only call themselves communist but are in fact on wrong track? Well, if you read even a tiny bit of history of these countries(and this tells you how "well read" the neo commies are) you would know and understand why that was. But if you are a know-it-all 19 year old you think that you actually vastly exceed all these people and you understand the world better than they did. This is the only logical explanation of the "that wasn't true communism" meme-you know it all and they didn't. The fact that just a tiny drop of self reflection should make you step back and look at your argument from more than one angle but they fail to do it is telling of the integrity and cognitive ability of those throwing it around.