Top 13 Takeaways From Paul Shirley's Views On Haiti

Paul Shirley, for those who haven't had the middling pleasure of reading his book about being an NBA bench body, decided today that publishing a remarkably callous diatribe about Haiti was more important than the continued goodwill of vast portions of the populace. Go read, I guess, if you must, or just go with these more or less straight summations of his views...

10) People who make huge sums of money as utterly superfluous employees earn their money, but homeless people who scavenge and degrade themselves for change do not

9) Just because the survivors of a ghastly human tragedy are still being pulled from the wreckage, that doesn't mean we should wait to judge them for their flaws

8) Unconditional sympathy is for people who aren't bright enough to dribble a ball for money

7) Earthquakes are completely predictable, so anyone who is on the ground for one must be at fault for being there (sorry, San Francisco Bay Area!)

6) People who live in poverty should do a careful fiscal analysis before deciding to breed, and should sterilize themselves if they are below the line

5) Everyone on the earth should choose to live in places without natural disasters

4) New Orleans deserved what it got from Katrina, because of the sea level of the city (centuries of relative safety from properly maintained levees are, it would seem, just a cheat)

3) Haitians who might have liked any part of their lives -- say, their families, their country, their jobs, etc. -- before the disaster were wrong

2) If you accept aid in a natural disaster, you should also renounce your sovereignty to whoever gives you aid, since they must be better than you

1) People who are poor and the victim of a natural disaster are not behaving like adults

Oh, and these last few are my takeaways.

3) Just because athletes can use the Web to self-publish, it does not mean that they should

2) Shirley must have saved enough from those 10-day contracts to buy his own compound, and

1) If the Sixers want people to actually watch them, they'd hire Shirley and televise him going 1-on-1 with Haitian Sam Dalembert

Update and Bonus Takeaway...

Shirley will no longer get to be friends with Bad Tooth Simmons...