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In MTG's defense, millions of ignorant Americans improperly use reflexive pronouns.

Chip Roy may have a fundamental misunderstanding about what people who vote for Republicans even want.

I think they may also be trying to avoid libel suits.

If Tiger of the Year is a subjective vote, then I definitely can see Eduardo not winning, despite his superior half-season performance, since his antics across the last two years don’t really scream “Tiger of the Year!” to voters who are put off by him. This is my take only on the voters’ possible mindset.

Harris has said he will not acquire players who block current prospects, and the two top position player prospects ready for prime time at Keith and Jung, who presumably would split second base and third base between them. So if we get Kim, a player who projects as an All-Star at second base for a few more years, I would guess that means we are either putting one of Keith/Jung on the shelf for good, or sending at least one of them away in trade. And I would think Padres would want a guy back who can play second base in the near future, since they have none of those in their system. I know TR says Cronenworth, but he’s older and worse than Kim, who has only one more year at $8MM on their books right now, anyway. If their concern if that Kim won’t man second base for them beyond 2024 and they need more certainty at the position, I would be surprised if they don’t get a future second baseman back in trade, if they even send Kim away anyway.

I think Stavenhagen said something along the lines of, of the 25 guys who vote for Tiger of th year, maybe five of them cover the team every day? I can’t remember who Stavenhagen said he voted for, but he seems weirdly sore about the whole thing. I’m not real invested in Tiger of the Year, but it’s not really anything like MVP, is it? I always thought of it as steady player who might or might not be the best player on the team, but who writers think embodies being the most important cog on the team, or perhaps in the clubhouse, for either now or the future. I don’t think of it as being a ratification of the WAR champ. In that way, as a linchpin of the future who posted up 159 times, day in and day out, this year, and who actually improved substantially the second half, Tork is as good a choice as anyone else. I think of TOY as a kind of squishy award, anyway.

Remember when Campos was signed at age 16 as a defector out of Cuba after supposedly winning some adult tournament MVP at age 12, getting the most money the Tigers ever threw at a Latin teenager, something like $3 million, how nobody knew anything about him and how secretive it all was, but he was going to be can’t-miss super great, yet he wasn’t even on any of MiLB’s top prospect lists? How fun was that?

Send them Colt Keith or Jace Jung?

Is it BBC reporting this, or is it BBC reporting that another news organization is reporting this? Or is that a distinction without a difference? If BBC reports that Reuters is reporting this, is it BBC who are engaging in blood libel? What does the original Reuters report say about it, or doesn’t that matter?

Then Trump can accuse Biden of selling off the country and American jobs to CHEYE-na and campraise off it.

https://www.threads.net/@rbreich/post/CzmpbigJsj6/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ= Wanted to see whether this would post as a Thread. It does not.

You touch on something here that's been discussed before: TPTB, for lack of a better label, don't want people capable of self-governance for the same reason they don't want people capable of critical thinking: it doesn't serve their interests. George Carlin pointed this very thing out toward the end of his career. The way he put it was, TPTB don’t want a population of well-informed, well-educated citizens capable of critical thinking. They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly ****tier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. The problem with that is, once people get to a point where they have been led to believe they have nothing left to lose, that's when they're gonna start acting out. As good as the media tells us the economy is, it's not going to be good enough for a people who are being told over and over that, despite that they have a decent income, a nice place to live, a nice new Ford F150 gas-guzzler to drive, electronics out the ying-yang, and more than enough food to eat and games to play, that they are actually living through the worst economy in the history of economies, courtesy of Crooked Joe Satan. They don't believe their lying eyes. They believe Lying Donald Trump and all his lying flying monkeys in the media. Donald Trump is the one icon in these people's lives for whom they would gladly, GLADLY, throw Jesus Christ completely out of their lives, if Trump would merely say how unfair Jesus is to him. And if you think it's bad now, just wait until Trump is dead. They might even create a whole new bible just for him.

I think I have my answer. thanks.

I know you didn't say that, directly and in so many words. But I asked you a direct question seeking an answer, you joked your way around and out of it, and so I made a reasonable inference. And FWIW, you still haven't answered it! But that's OK, because you kind of did.

Maybe that provide some hope that right-wing radicalism will just melt away without incident and democracy will triumph.

I practically never summarize people directly, but good grief, aren't you just so giddily optimistic about everything! It must be a race in your mind as to what happens first in 2024: Trumpism is vanquished for good, or the Tigers win a ring! 🤣 Which, really, that is the best way to be, isn't it? Optimistic people are happier, and even if the optimism doesn't bear out, they are in the same boat, no worse, than anyone else. There's no penalty for being optimistic and wrong versus being pessimistic and right. So go on with your bad self, O-Man! Keep that sun shining here!

lol. So, bottom line, your answer appears to be, it will never stop and it can continue forever without breaking. Just looking even cursorily at history, I don't think that's even possible, that tensions can simply continue to stretch and stretch and stretch even more, like some sort of unbreakable rubber band, forever. Something is going to happen, it's all going to break, it's going to happen unbelievably suddenly, and the likelihood is high that a lot of blood will be shed. What I don't believe we will have is an American-style geographic civil war, which is really the only context Americans have for contemplating what a domestic civil war would even look like. (The war in the 1860s wasn't even an actual civil war, in any event. It was a war of two nation states, with one fighting and failing to establish its legitimacy.) I don't even think we will have a true civil war, the kind where neighbors fight house-to-house and in pitched battle with one another, basically because one side is practically unarmed by choice, while the other side is just itching to use their weapons. Because of that, I believe what we will experience is something closer to Rwanda circa 1994.

I remember on MTS in 2016 that the default position, borne of the ennui of cynicism, was that Trump will become just another politician in Washington, because that's what Washington does to everyone, and that no one can escape that. I don't know whether that was you as well, but that was most people, even though Trump was talking in much the same vein then as he does now, so his trajectory was not all that difficult to suss out.

So where and how does the relentless drumbeat of malaise and impending doom break? Or do things just continue to get worse indefinitely, for hundreds or thousands of years or more, without ever breaking, because it's a human condition for things to eternally get progressively worse at the same unchanging rate?

You think it'll happen next year because normal politics. I think it'll take decades because normal politics itself will be upended and suspended once the radical right wing takes over. And I don't even mean Trump, necessarily: he's not the alpha and omega of the whole thing. He's more like the celebrity spokesman who makes it all look tough and cool and accessible to those culturally predisposed to MAGA. But even if Trump loses or dies, the movement won't die with him. He'll just be held up as a martyr to its cause, and in his martyred name, at some point, the radical-right-wing takeover is going to happen. And they don't even have to have a military coup or anything like that, because people will just vote them right in, because people don't know things, and they will need catharsis to actually learn lessons like this. That's in part why we will need truth and reconciliation at the end of it.

I'm glad to see I am no longer the only guy on the Alarmist Non-Sense train when it comes to Trump. Took you guys long enough to board it with me. 😉😁 Now that it's becoming clearer to more and more people what kind of culture-based authoritarian dictatorship an unhinged and unrestrained Trump presidency would actually entail—basically because they are saying so in exact words—the $64 question will be what can be done to stop it, and I don't believe wishcasting oligarchs paying Trump to simply go away is even on the table. Personally, I think this country is going to have to cycle through some historically dark times, culminating in a comprehensive truth-and-reconciliation exercise, before it gets rooted out. That's probably going to be measured in decades, and many of us wouldn't live to see it all resolve. But if you have progeny, then you have a keen interest in that outcome.

You can't tell people who can't see beyond their fingertips anything about "someday". There is only today. They are basically human goldfish.

They also believe the Republican Party is much better with the economy than the Democratic Party. Why? Believe the media they consume has told them so over and over and over.

Well, of course everything is not great, but there's definitely nothing to worry about! Has the country ever succumbed to post-constitutional authoritarian dictatorship before?