We appreciate you and your efforts. Please take care of yourself everyday and thank you again.

I was just telling a friend about how much I appreciate my kids teachers and how I’d never be able to do it.

Sorry you don’t hear it face-to-face enough, but the parents all recognize it

You are the real heros to us parents, not the dumb jocks.

I’m a teacher myself. I watch basketball and I the sports as an escape. I hate to say it but it is extremely stressful and in my case is not rewarding or fulfilling work.

They’re all below grade level everywhere. What are we going to do about it?

No, his last name is Anunoby.

The people’s champ

Meanwhile, Kash Patel personally made Shaq an honorary FBI agent. Shaq’s probably a low-key Trump supporter

It’s too bad the post title didn’t mention that.

Not on the Epstein list and not a pedophile, unlike Orange boy though.

And bracelets

Saunas?

For me it’s not that they’re paid so much. I actually think most athletes are paid fairly. (Not UFC fighters but that’s another discussion). It’s that the sports they play generate so much money. If my place of work makes billions upon billions of dollars, and I play a central role in that, I should be making millions.

You’re right.

I got confused by things he said a few months earlier (similar stuff), in July 2026.

There’s a lot I’d add: farmers, sanitation workers, engineers, scientists, and so many others.

It actually reinforces his claim only naming those 5 because it shows how little he’s had to think about where food, water, or where waste goes.

Realistically we need all kinds of people to keep our society functioning. Stockers, cashiers, middle managers, mechanics, insurance, engineers, medical admin, educational admin, janitorial, and on and on and on.

Even though there’s issues in some of those industries because of the world we live in (health insurance, insurers that operate in bad faith, bloated health admin, engineers who cut corners for large corps, etc…), the basis of even those jobs provides important work.

There’s nothing even wrong with basketball player being an actual profession. The issue is the way wealth is distributed, how our system overwhelmingly allocates power based on that wealth, and how that wealth is wielded. It creates a lot of the issues with necessary professions. Our health insurance and medical care systems are a great example.

Yeah I think his point is less about having a truly all inclusive list of “important” jobs and more pointing out how ridiculous it is that athletes are celebrated this way

I’m an electrical engineer and I know you’re right, but I don’t think anyone in my family(nurses, construction workers, teachers, farmers, ranchers) understand what I actually do for a living so I never push for my profession to be included. I just let everyone get surprised when I can explain things like a mechanical system I’ve just seen and let them say, “But this is mechanic stuff. Not electrician.”

farmer. ..

And librarians!

So in your world, the only way to show genuine gratitude is to give away all your wealth to them and/or adopt them into your home?

Did I get that all right?

I’m not sure where you’re getting this. Unless you’re taking Shaq’s scat hobbies and charitably classifying them as some sort of volunteer sanitation work.

Whaaaaaaaat. Huge if true

Now don’t tell me RuPaul is bald too!

The Slim Mound of Rebound

those clear glasses aren’t doing him any favors though

firefighters get paid well if the state has frequent forest fires or big metro areas. they dont get paid that well in poverty states even relatively

Nurses that work in hospitals make good money but not ones at nursing homes, primary care or schools

Especially (and unfortunately) police. Most veteran nurses can’t hope to make what a 3rd year muni officer can make.

It all depends….yes, they face danger everywhere they go but the OT the accumulate is crazy……and the opportunities to accumulate OT is outrageous itself.

I’m a construction worker and statistically my job is more dangerous than a police officer

Their job doesn’t even crack top 20 for danger. Cops love to play victim while they roll around on fucking tanks and harass and abuse regular people.

Fucking cops are so fucking fragile they have to go to “cop friendly barbers” so they can get their shitty fades without having to see a Black person

I drive Uber/Lyft around 20 hours a week and I’m pretty sure what I do is statistically more dangerous than policing

This is a lie. There are SOOOOOOOOOOO many jobs that have a much higher death rate. In fact, you are more likely to die delivering for uber than you are as a cop. Plus, the most consistent danger cops face is from themselves, either accidentally shooting each other or by needlessly escalating simple public encounters.

Over 300 officers in the LAPD made over $300,000 last year.

High salaries have nothing to do with profit. Grocery stores are for profit but the salaries are not high. Salaries are high when you are one of few people who can do what you can do and it’s also in high demand.

Edit: wording

I’m not saying all cops are good or bad, and I wish we didn’t have a boner for guns in America. But look, when some delulu decides to pick one up and do a mass shooting, the first person whose job it is to protect and serve is who I’m calling and thanking

It’s lame and smug because you said so? Address the actual point being made. The average police officer isn’t doing some crazy “real” job. They’re sitting on their ass all day and collecting overtime doing it.

There’s actually a really interesting book that talks about this stuff too, The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I highly recommend it!

There’s a difference between the organization and the individual members. It’s a 100% volunteer service, so you should appreciate that those individuals are doing a job so you don’t have to.   Because if we didn’t have enough volunteers they would conscript like they have in the past.

So have plenty of other armies, what makes it different? Maybe every army has people who are capable of evil and crime instead, I wouldn’t generalize armies like this

If you’re not American, you have no experience with American cops.

“anywhere in the Western world” cops are fucking hated in both the UK and Hungary, speaking from experience living in those two countries.

Australia is doing some pretty American things lately and calling the UK anything but a police surveillance state is out of touch with reality.

Nope, there are plenty of places where people protest police actions.

I mean you only see the shitty side because it gets views. There’s thousands of cops doing good work every day, but I know this is Reddit and a lot of you have hate boners for every single cop so carry on.

It’s not really controversial in America. 75% of law enforcement have a favorable rating with their community per a Harvard study.

It’s controversial for the terminally online, but anyone who walks outside their front door can see that police officers are generally respected (or neutral at worst) in their communities.

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I feel like this is a bit of an overreaction to what’s being said

We all know that there’s a lot of good cops. The problem is that both the system is rotten and people blindly support that system because “it’s the police”

We would be able to make progress toward fixing that broken system if people who didn’t fall for simple propaganda could just look at the situation and go “yeah you’re right, it’s kinda fucked up that cops can just kill people with virtually no consequences”

Lol I wish I could be this stupid.

They should do it right now, also calling everyone punks, are you a character in a movie from the 80’s? Not to mention your grammar mistake makes it look like you said the cops are the bad people in any group of people hahahahaha

lmao why would cops go on strike? They’re hastily trained, paid incredibly well, and face no consequences when they do naughty stuff like murder

Only ppl like you depend on cops . With all the technology cops barely do anything. They collect overtime and hide in the bushes to give speeding tickets . A lot of ppl defend themselves. Most ppl who defend cops like you either have cops in your family or are such a punk that you walk around scared and depend on others to defend you

“Survive”

What do you mean by that? It’s not like cops are legally obligated to PREVENT or even STOP violent crime. All they have to do is arrest the offender. So if cops went on strike there wouldn’t be much difference in that regard because they weren’t really a buffer against violent crime to begin with. But to be fair, you can say their presence and the fear of arrest is a deterrent in some way.

The way some of you bootlickers talk about cops you’d think they were all heroes just for taking the job and without them all the big bad criminals will kill and rob your families. Bro. You live in the suburbs lol

I can understand needing police, but fuck the military. After years of sucking my taxpayer money into a whirlpool of super duper advanced weapons research, we’re getting clowned on by Iran and their shitty army. Either show me on a map where you stopped the nuclear missile aimed at my house was, or get a real job and bring some value to the world.

You’re right, both are respectable positions in society that matter. However, you cannot blame people like the person you’re replying to for losing that respect after decades of failure by both to expel white supremacists, internal gangs, and abusers from their ranks. The dividing line between cops and occupying armies (and likewise between a national military and a suzerain or colonial power) is the legitimacy ascribed to them by the populace over which they extend their jurisdiction; the prevalence of the take that you are responding to is a direct result of the sabotage to that legitimacy committed by the aforementioned supremacists, gang members, and abusers.

To convince people like the person you’re responding to (who, by the way, probably votes, for what it’s worth), demonstrations of an ongoing commitment to rooting out those elements is necessary. If you want to entrench the beliefs of people like the one you’re responding to, dismiss their opinions as “cringe shit” and “clown takes”, like you’re doing. You can’t disrespect people out of disillusionment.

as someone who has gone to war (Iraq vet), the thing that gives troops aboard most comfort is watching sports, watching movies. Catching NFL games in the middle of the night is the best part of the week.

Why can’t people understand that entertainers have a lot of value too? They provide an escape from the monotony of everyday life. Everyone has value if they’re contributing to society in some way. Everyone in Egypt wasn’t there to carry around those large bricks, some were there to entertain, even back then.

All Cops aren’t bad but they sure as hell aren’t built to help poor communities…..they are built to keep the interests of the rich unaffected and cull any “slave” that goes out of line with massive bills that eventually turn into due cause for them to arrest you over petty shit.

When was the last defensive war the United States fought? World War II. Everything since has been unnecessary imperialist wars

Not really. No other country does the insane things America does toward their cops and army, despite the fact that their police departments have fucking tanks and sound wave cannons, and their military attacked more countries and killed more civilians than any other in the last ~40-50 years. Show me another place where you delay the start of a basketball game every time because you “pay tribute to the veterans”. Meanwhile those veterans died to steal oil from the Middle East.

You literally don’t even need a college degree. Some of the dumbest people from my HS became cops.

I mean everything is pointless if you really zoom out lol. We’re living on a rock floating through an endless void and we’re all gonna die one day. Sports provide entertainment, bring people together, give a bit of extra fulfillment to people’s lives.

Look how much joy and unity a championship can bring to a city and tell me that’s ’basically pointless’

I’m saying he’s talking about this stuff that doesn’t matter, all it’s doing is bringing up divisive issues to add to the debates that are distracting from the actual issues, he is talking more about this stuff, even during the season, bro is like, “men shouldn’t play in the WNBA and it’s crazy to think that’s ok,” ok men don’t play in the WNBA, what’s your opinion on what’s going on with the actual WNBA playoffs or something

I’m just saying that Barkley has done more talking about nonsense than he has during the season about basketball,

*people have jobs paid by taxpayer money

People don’t know what socialism is lol. If you’re a fan of socialism, you’re seeing the most socialist President in U.S. history right now.