Sam Coonrod: The anti-Kaepernick

Giants Pitcher Explains Refusal to Kneel for Black Lives: “I’m a Christian”

Hemant Mehta

July 25, 2020

During Friday night’s baseball game — their first of the shortened season — San Francisco Giants relief pitcher Sam Coonrod refused to take a knee with the rest of his teammates in honor of Black lives and the fight against racial injustice. The preplanned act of symbolism took place just before the National Anthem.

Coonrod later said that as a Christian, he didn’t want to kneel for anything other than God...which might have made some sense if he didn’t go on to spread right-wing propaganda about what Black Lives Matter represents.

“I’m a Christian,” Coonrod said. “I can’t get on board on a couple of things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter, how they lean toward Marxism and said some negative things about the nuclear family.”

He was referring to comments made five years ago by a Black Lives Matter co-founder, acknowledging she was a Marxist, cited repeatedly now by some conservative commentators.

“I meant no ill will by it,” Coonrod said. “I don’t think I’m better than anybody. I’m just a Christian. I believe I can’t kneel before anything but God, Jesus Christ. I chose not to kneel. I feel if I did kneel I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

He’s just a Christian, but most everyone else who was kneeling is...what, exactly?

Most of those players are undoubtedly Christian too. Somehow, they understood the difference between using their platform to draw attention to racism and injustice through the act of kneeling and staying true to their personal beliefs.

Had Coonrod kneeled who exactly would have called him out as a religious hypocrite? It’s a bogeyman that exists only in his mind.

But he decided the simple gesture was actually an act of Christian Persecution, as if Major League Baseball wanted him to violate his religious freedom. The selfishness right there is unbelievable. Christians who have similar mindsets routinely want everyone pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag...but kneeling for Black lives is somehow crossing the line?

The controversy is less about his not-kneeling and more about Coonrod’s bizarre misunderstanding about what BLM represents, as if one person stands for the entire movement, or as if everyone who’s been protesting these past several weeks gives a damn about every word written on the Black Lives Matter website.

To not even understand what his colleagues are doing, and then to cite his faith as a shield against criticism, just reveals how little he knows about the moment we’re in as a nation...

Coonrod shouldn’t be penalized for not kneeling. His manager already said there was no issue in the clubhouse. But no one should pretend this has anything to do with faith when plenty of other players who share his religion knew better.

This wasn’t some Colin Kaepernick act-of-courage moment. This was ignorance masquerading as faith. He’s lucky there weren’t fans in the stands able to react to it in real time.

From democratic underground:

Everybody is missing the point about anti-Maskers

TV pundits talk about saving lives, sciency stuff, whether they really work, freedumb, tyranny, the heavy hand of government. That's all a useless discussion.

Fifty years ago people said the same things about seatbelts, but nobody back then beat up bus drivers, nobody assaulted car salespeople, nobody had screaming finger-pumping swastika-brandishing fits, nobody tried to unfasten your seatbelt if you wore one, nobody murdered anyone, nobody waved military weaponry around about seatbelts.

So what's different? Why are they so enraged about a fucking mask?

Their very reality, their universe, their way of perceiving and relating to reality, their very existence is threatened.

50 years ago 40% of the population didn't live in Fantasyland. They weren't fervently committed to belief in Faux News Fantasyland. They didn't claim that nobody died in traffic accidents or that traffic accidents didn't actually exist or that being in a traffic accident was no different than stubbing your toe. They didn't think that the standard of determining truth vs. falsehood was to simply believe whatever they wanted to believe. 

All your sciency stuff is meaningless to dumbfucks who tremble in terror at the very sight of an equation. You can talk until Doomsday about virus transmission and all sorts of what normal people consider "evidence," but that has no meaning to them. 

The only "evidence" they accept is what wingnut media says, what Donald Trump says, and what they want to believe. That's how they can "know" instantly that something is fake news---they don't want to believe it, so therefore it's fake news.

If they want to believe something, then it's true; if they don't want to believe something, then it's fake news. If they don't want to believe it, then it's just nonsense that smarty-pants educated people who know how to use equal signs say. The virus is a hoax because that's what they want to believe. 

And when actual reality starts to impinge on their Faux Fantasyland, it's obvious to them that the entire universe is conspiring to promulgate a fake universe: all those deaths are lies, all those nurses in overrun ICUs are faking it, all those pictures of people being treated in hallways are staged by the Soros-Hillary-Satan conspiracy, four billion people have all gotten together to conspire against them, their Dear Leader, and their cult. They know that all that crazy-ass shit is true based on the one piece of evidence they accept as real: they want to believe it.

Their entire Faux Fantasyland universe is under existential threat. If the virus is real, then their fantasy universe is not real. If the virus is real, their way of determining truth (truth=whatever they want to believe) crumbles. If the virus is real, their entire universe crumbles into non-reality, non-existence; and if their universe doesn't exist, then they are in an existential crisis...

Since their very universe is hanging by the thread of the non-existence of the virus, they're particularly vulnerable to fear and rage caused by any suggestion that their Fantasyland isn't real. Wearing a mask makes them fear going poof into non-existence.

America's wet markets

Patient, heal thyself

Mother Jones

Kevin Drum:

I was finally prompted to write about this because I’ve had a higher than usual engagement with the health care system over the past few weeks. It’s gone the way it always goes: it’s massively inefficient and prone to errors, most of which end up falling on patients to fix. 

There’s the hours spent on hold making appointments. There’s the constant checking for medication errors. There’s the endless arguing with insurance companies. There’s the back-and-forth process of telling doctors what some other doctor said because they never talk to each other. There’s the miscommunications caused by the fact that doctors typically know nothing about the actual operation of their own industry, etc.

These are all things we’re familiar with, and they’re basically elements of the health care system that are outsourced to patients themselves. It never gets accounted for, but for all practical purposes the health care system relies on the unpaid labor of patients to keep itself in operation. It’s a real cost, but it’s hard to measure...