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This is a little harsh, but I see what you mean. It’s defensible to be irked at the idea of someone being practically celebrated for something that would lose most people their jobs. The difference here is that Austin Meadows is a star employee, and star employees in some industries have the ability to leverage their star status to obtain this kind of leeway, while the vast majority of us do not. I’m pretty sure this same industry would not give this kind of leeway to Zack Short or Jacob Barnes, guys who are a couple bad games from having their careers end for them, anyway. File that one under “Life Ain’t Fair”, I guess.

Exactly. They are public personalities by choice, and part of that bargain is that people talk in public about them. They can’t expect that we regular people will only cheer for them, and shut the hell up about them otherwise. Life in the fame lane doesn’t work that way. It’s not as though our speculating into what’s happening behind the scenes on some no-account message board is breaching their privacy or inhibiting their comeback. And besides, I don’t recall anyone here being disrespectful to either Rodriguez or Meadows, even if we are wrong about what’s going on behind the scenes which, given the recent tendency of the press to respect public figures’ private affairs, we’ll probably never know, anyway.

If it were painkiller addiction Meadows was dealing with, would he be hanging around the clubhouse and dugout every day, as he has said he has been and will continue to? Painkiller addiction sounds urgent enough to have to take time away from the team to address immediately. Otherwise, either he’s putting his addiction on pause to hang around the team for the next month, or it’s not a serious-enough problem to address immediately even though it’s serious enough to prevent him from playing.

True, and it’s not just that he’s an asshole. His garbage explanation can’t work if he doesn’t have willfully, aggressively stupid acolytes who will accept it.

He actually said much more: “They’re against God, guns, oil, law enforcement, tax cuts, regulation cuts, the Constitution, and they’re against our Founding Fathers. Other than that, they’re actually quite good …” How about him slyly slipping “regulation cuts” in there? That’s the big magilla [sic] right there. Nothing capitalists want more than the freedom to operate without any restrictions whatsoever.

I know. I wasn’t criticizing you or suggesting you’re naive. I was building on what you said.

How popular was the deadly public violence against Jews and other marginalized groups in 1930s Europe? How many in the Aryan majority actively cheered it on? How many of the majority contributed to the marginalization of these people by firing them from their jobs, cutting off cordial relations with them, and excluding them from public spaces they managed? And how many of the majority simply kept their heads down, trying to ignore it so they could try to just live their own “normal” lives? I’m not sure we’ll ever know the actual numbers, but I do know this: only a small percentage of people in Germany were actively engaged in the actual violent repression, and the rest of Aryan society succumbed to the pressure to accept it just so they could get along with as little drama in their own lives as possible. That could be instructive for America today. It doesn’t take a majority of people answering a poll to politically approve of a violent anti-democracy to make a violent anti-democracy happen. All that’s really needed is a highly-motivated, well-resourced, establishment-supported minority to put it in motion, coupled with a well-fed, constantly-entertained, moderately affluent majority base that will passively accept what’s happening in the background so they can just live out their lives in comfort. That majority base doesn’t have to be active red hats, participate in pogroms, vote for Trumpy candidates, or anything like that. With their well-bring and livelihoods being a higher priority than any group representing a small fraction of the population, groups who are constantly demonized as “leftists”, “Antifa”, BLM”, “marxists”, “groomers”, or as an otherwise dangerous threat, all the majority will need to do for it all to succeed is to overlook the real threats to the red hat targets and mind their own fucking business.

Come on. To be fair—I do believe your concern about your military friends and how they might as a group react has some basis in legitimacy. A lot of people the past few days have portrayed red hats as being butt-hurt crybabies who will simply retreat and suck their thumbs. But some of the people you refer to have done military stuff overseas before, are willing to do it again here, and are out training for that right now. So while I don’t anticipate them waging anything like years-long quasi-military campaigns against liberal enclaves and slaughtering civilians by the tens of thousands, I can envision them doing guerrilla strikes here and there, perhaps even attempting the assassination of certain government executives. I agree they are a threat that needs to be monitored and dealt with appropriately, and I’m trusting that the federal police are amping up surveillance of them in the wake of this speech, and will continue to do so after future aggravating events.

MAGA ideology being fueled by foreign-influenced right-wing media seems as likely to simply fade away as does a tea kettle settling back to room temperature while sitting on a lit stove. I don’t know what, but it seems likely something dramatic, much more dramatic than J6, will have to happen to finally wake this country up. I saw that someone recently referred to what’s happening now as the beginning of our own version of The Troubles. That’s imaginable.

You’re being serious about reeducation camps for red hats?

This one I believe because the idea that Rodriguez and his agent were in touch with the team, but that Al Avila lied and said they weren’t, makes no logical sense. It could have been disproved as easily as Mato publicly saying that the team is lying, which he would have been motivated to do having been publicly accused of doing something that essentially breaches his clients’ contractual responsibility to the team.

Yeah, I saw that, too. He looks a little more weathered than 24.

I like being evenly matched with an opponent. Makes for a more interesting game.

In his statement, Austin Meadows says he has been in the clubhouse and will remain with the team through the end of the season. That would seem to rule out painkiller addiction, right? Because if that were it, wouldn’t he be away from the team so he could urgently deal with that?

Man, what a laser by Willi. I did not imagine that liner going out.

Eduardo Rodriguez and his camp deserved all the criticism they got for ghosting the team for those several weeks.

The comment was about the Tigers damn terrible luck. It would not have mattered to our season one way or the other anyway, but wouldn’t it have been nice to have him come back for the last month? But no, we can’t, because of course we can’t have even one goddamn good thing.

He’s out for the season because of course he’s out for the season.

We've all read the news stories along these lines: I think the only move Democrats have in response is to remind voters that Republicans are not scrubbing references to abortion on their sites because they are changing their minds on the issue. Republicans definitely want to make abortion illegal, and jail the women who get them and the doctors who perform them, and maybe even the legislators who go on record to support it, at minimum. They have to hammer home that point over and over and over again. Maybe even take a page out of the Trump playbook: they're not just going after doctors who perform abortions, the women who get them, and the Democrats who enable them. They're going to want to jail anyone who's even on record supporting choice, whether videoed at a pro-choice protest, posting support for choice in emails and Facebook posts, or overheard and turned in by Trump spies while whispering about it in public spaces. Is any of that true? Could any of that happen? Who knows? Wanna take that chance? 😏

I think we all knew that once Joe crossed this Rubicon, it was going to be an inflection point for the red hats: either they see it as a call to arms and coordinate attacks, or they just lip off like they're going to and then get their bluff called. Personally, I think the truth is in the middle: I doubt we will see full-scale militia attacks on gatherings in cities, college campuses, music festivals, tech companies, etc., in which they slaughter hundreds or thousands of people at a time. But I bet we do see a rise in lone wolf attacks in which dozens are murdered in an attempt to defend Trump's besmirched honor. We may even see two- or three-person coordinated attacks. Point is, if the choice is ignore Trump and let him do whatever he wants in the hopes he merely gets thwarted at the ballot box in a free and fair election at the risk that they just steal elections and destroy democracy completely in a bid for one-party control, which that might happen; or mobilize an effort to both discredit him and hold him accountable for his crimes at the risk of murderous uprisings that might not happen after all, I think we have to choose the latter and hope for the best. Preserving democracy is worth that risk.

It helps when Republicans run economies into the ground and make golden opportunities to create new jobs.

Devil We Know alert!

The Tigers have now been shut out 18 times this season. Even with only 131 games played, if the season ended today, that would make them one of 179 teams, out of 2,632 total teams in the modern era, to get shut out that much. If we look at just the first 131 games played in a season, the Tigers are one of 67 teams to have been shut out so often. That puts them in the 97th percentile for individual game scoring futility. That's actually not as bad as things were on July 21. After the second game of that day's doubleheader, in which we'd been shut out for the 14th time, we were one of 53 teams blanked so often in a season's first 94 games. #progress

One thing is for sure: Biden is all in now.