Life & Wisdom Quote by Mike Davidson

Davidson’s line is a tidy little grenade: it sounds like a shrug, but it’s really a boundary being drawn with relish. The opening clause, “the tiny percentage,” does rhetorical damage before the argument even begins. It turns dissent into a statistical rounding error, making the harmed feel both small and slightly ridiculous. Then comes the kicker: “they can just get their sports somewhere else.” That’s consumer-talk masquerading as moral clarity. It reframes a standards debate as a market choice, not a community obligation, and it does so with the casualness of someone confident the audience is on his side.

The subtext is a familiar one in tech and media culture: progress always breaks something, and the people it breaks are expected to treat inconvenience as the price of admission. “In the meantime” is doing a lot of work there, too, implying the pain is temporary while offering no guarantee it won’t become permanent. It’s an assurance wrapped around a dismissal.

The hospital-care comparison is the tell. By invoking a stark moral baseline, Davidson pre-emptively polices the emotional register of the conversation: don’t act like this is life and death. It’s clever, because it sets the ceiling for acceptable outrage. It’s also a bit cynical, because it uses an extreme to make any lesser complaint seem petty, even if “lesser” still means real exclusion for some users. In the standards wars context, it’s less a plea for reason than a declaration of who gets to be left behind.