pavalercci

I'm sure you can appreciate that you know absolutely nothing about how Muhammed Ali was treated by whites his entire life.

Simply assuming that he was treated badly and therefore justified in his blanket discrimination towards others is academically lazy and ethically unacceptable.

Make sure you use that same logic next time you are in a discussion with someone about Nazis in the 1940's.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. In defense of my mentality:

> One of the best qualities people can have is to see the good in something/someone. The bad is of no value, so forget it, but celebrate the good.

This depends on your objective. If your objective is to be liked by others - then by all means ignore the undesirable aspects of people and things and only acknowledge those which perpetuate warm and fuzzy feelings all around.

My problem with this behavior is that it makes its way into the democratic process, and tends to override objective critical analysis.

I think as a society we need to respect and honor openness and critical thought. Censoring our interactions in a manner that perpetuates some kind of self delusion - although a happy delusion - is counter productive to progress.

> Likewise you can look at an online community and take heart at how people had a shared recognition of great achievements and are able to celebrate it together. It does no good to dwell on the negative and suppose that people would actually deify someone or support everything they do without hesitation in order to affiliate themselves in some way.

That might hold some weight, in this case, if there wasn't an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of grieving for someone whose life as an entertainer made little impact on the daily lives of others.

Sure, there was admiration and fantasy spread amongst the throngs of enthusiasts who followed the life and times of Muhammed Ali. But had he never existed the world would be no different today.

So I think it is absolutely incumbent on me to outwardly, vehemently condemn the intellectual class (Hacker News) for being so shallow, so superficial, and so sycophantic. We must rise beyond this mentality as a people in order to gain equality and value those who contribute in a more fair sense.

Comical request, given the extreme anti-free speech environment of Hacker News.

Ali was of little education, easily manipulated, and certainly was not an ideological leader to any degree.

Those words are sourced from the concepts of Elijah Muhammed, Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X and others.

Its fine to repeat Ali's words here...but lets not misconstrue them as original ideas or Ali as anything other than a follower and a mouthpiece fueled by his own anger issues.

I've read Hacker News for a long time and never published a comment until today.

Ranked by my earnings and by education I'm probably in the bottom 2% of users on this site...but I'm proud to see today that in spite of that fact I'm one of the very, very few who refuses to deify sports celebrities.

By and large the majority of you who throw adoration at Muhammed Ali never lived through his era. You never interacted with him. You never experienced him as a person other than retrospectively through his manicured public image. And yet you revere him unsparingly, without hesitation, without qualification.

How disgusting.

It is this trait in human beings, this desire to worship and affiliate with those one wishes to be like that enables power stratification in society...and always will.