gehringer_2

Do you think Obama would have won if he could have run in 2020? I wonder anymore.

I suppose no advocate wants to lose a high profile case but if they are bumbling it's hard not to ask how seriously they want the conviction. Then again, as the OJ trial demonstrated, there are some pretty poor prosecutors out there. I wonder if they get too used to only facing perfunctory public defender defenses.

She needs some major image building.

What indigenous culture anywhere in the Western Hemisphere or sub-Saharan Africa survived to become an equal trading partner with the Euros? I would say you are downplaying the overall scope of history to favor heroic narratives. History has pretty well demonstrated the inevitability you say I've fabricated. I guess I can think of one counter case, which is that I'm told the Iroquois nation had a modus vivendi relationship with the French until the French got booted after the 1754 wars. There is some inversion to the pattern in the sub Saharan, where diseases they susceptible to largely kept any number of Euros from wanting to go there.

this is a simplistic view of technology. Learning to use a rifle is not mastering the technology of arms production. What indigenous population ran their own smelters, manufactured their own tooling, controlled their own production resources or even manufactured their own steel plows? Borrowing tools is not controlling or possessing technology at a societal level. The Spanish could and did eventually resupply men and weaponry (manufacture and logistics!) to Cortez in a way the Aztec couldn't match. Regardless of Corez's short term luck, gall, barbarity or stupidity, the Aztecs were going to lose any battle with Spain once Spain committed to it.

I think you overestimate Cortez. His luck was that his tech looked like magic. 🪄 Actually he did have the luck of arriving in the midst of a climate change catastrophe as well which left the Aztecs more than a little pissed off at their current gods. Mexico city was a lake when Cortez got there but it wouldn't be for much longer.

I wonder if Chris I will entertain approaches by agents trying to cut out his FO or if in his process Avila and maybe even Hinch would be pulled in before he ever made a decision over the head of the club management in the way his father appeared to have done on occasion.

it depends on what part you are talking about. When Cortez arrived in Mexico disease had yet to take any toll but the Aztecs had no answer to Spanish steel. In the interegnum smallpox, TB etc took their toll which made the early English settlements sustainable, but long after disease had run its course the US indian wars were matters of trains to move troops, better weaponry, and far superior economic power allowing greater resource commitment. That's in part demography but a demography only made possible by the technology that demographic possessed. If Euro settlers had only indigenous technology they could not have out populated the indigenous inhabitants and certainly couldn't have gotten here from Europe in numbers either.

well if you want to call the defeat of a fundamentally neolithic culture by one with chemistry, metallurgy and steam engines an 'accomplishment.' It strikes me more along the lines of a participation trophy for having shown up. But it was war - and war and moral failure are pretty synonymous. And tend to be on all sides.

can you put these in teal?

But the "accomplishments" of Western culture should be separated from things like the conquest of indigenous peoples - they are different things. In the US we had papered over what was done in the name of the progress of Western Civilization, but what was done in the new World was no different that anything Genghis Khan did. The "Progress of Western Civilization" was never actually served by "Manifest Destiny" et al - that was always just old fashioned greed and tribal imperative -- unchanged as it has been from the beginning of history. But the truth is that the "West" has always talked a better game than it has played - going right back to Greece, which was chock full of internecine warfare one a scale that would boggle anyone's mind. Now that's not to say that the political and philosophical constructs the West has generated haven't proven their value in the rise in the quality of life they have produced, only that they have been and continue to be falsely invoked too often in the service of less noble atavism.

Avila loves AJ. I can't imagine them bringing in someone he has objections to. OTOH, the idea that AJ has a problem with Correa is the purest speculation at this point.

Running FF 94.0 with AdBlockPlus in linux and tweets are rendering OK. But yes, I have seen this behavior. It has come and gone with various updates. But I'm usually on Fedora Linux which is such a fast moving target that by the time you figure out where the bugs are they've fixed them and something different is broken. I have also had Safari not load tweets in Big Sur - but it looks different - it doesn't just give you the text and refuse the image, you just get a blank area and have to double click in the empty field to get it to load.

See - look what Kreidler has already done for you - imagine what he can do for the Tigers!

Nothing worse than having to wait to be misinformed. ⌛⏳

That would be good for JV but TBH, velo is usually not JVs problem. He could gear up and throw harder even in 2015 when he was hurt but it was flat. It's the spin on that 96 mph 4 seamer that makes JV, JV. If he's got that, he'll be good.

From the engineering perspective ( ) one can only come to the conclusion that regardless of the morality of it, all technologically inferior societies are doomed when they come into contact with a more advanced one. Every human on the planet wants life to be easier and that means harnessing energy and matter to do what you want, and that is technology. And of course not only are advanced technologies more desired in general, but they also provide their holders with the economic, organizational and force projection capabilities to get their way. Those facts transcend anything else in the way of sociological or moral factors. Probably one of the things we don't teach enough of is CTT (Critical Technology Theory), because of course engineers aren't interested in writing history and the average historian (Philip Morrison excluded) doesn't understand technology.

Right - it is politically possible to direct resources to where they can be part of the solution, but workable political solutions need to be sold (and preferably truly structured!) as win/win.

IIRC back in the 60's we covered Columbus moderately heroicly as an explorer but the point was made that the Spanish killed and enslaved the locals. We also read Frederick Douglass and John Howard Griffin. And this was before the bottom fell out and the while residential exodus began.

the thing is the GOP shouldn't be fooled about what they bought. They may have coerced Trump to stay on board, but if he has decided his love is lost for the GOP, then he is doing no more than biding his time until he has wrung them dry for what is useful to him, and he will yet throw them overboard. With Trump you can count on it being the scorpion and the frog writ large.

always about $$$ - esp with Trump

this is the logic you apply when you call someone up from AAA, I'm not sure it's what is going to apply when you decide to spend a quarter billions dollars. I think when you do that the question is more like - 'is this exactly the guy that is a good long term fit with the team we are trying to build?" That is a higher bar. It's interesting to try and weigh up all these guys on various kinds of scales, but the only yardstick that is going to matter is the one that Avila is going to apply, and it's a good bet that is not one anyone of us are using. So basically I'm ready to be a little surprised by where they end up on this.

Zadina was noticeable tonight - in a good way. One guy I thought had some rough patches tonight was Hronek again. He seemed to be on the losing end of too many puck battles - though he picked it up in the offensive zone late in the game.

I'll go back to what Lee said about Avila - he tells you what he's going to do. Avila has said repeatedly that he wants to build a lower strike out offense. I do think that will give them reservations about Baez -- but I suppose anything is possible given the right alignment of circumstances.

Just watching Seider not mindlessly passing the puck up ice and giving away possession is such a reminder that is doesn't have to be the way it's been.