Rov_Scam
5d ago
To be clear, I'm assuming that these people would have to compete against Vance running with a Trump endorsement. It's possible that Vance doesn't run or that Trump doesn't endorse anyone, but I don't see that happening. VP is a traditional springboard to the presidency. If Trump had wanted a skilled insider who could negotiate with congress or provide behind the scenes advice, he would have gone with Rubio. Instead he picks a guy whose political experience is a year and a half in the Senate and who won't win him any votes he wouldn't otherwise get. The only reason Vance made sense as VP pick was because Trump wanted a young guy who owes pretty much all of his political success to him. As for Vance himself, I don't see him leaving a Senate seat to be VP for four years before going back into private life. With that, let's look at who you mentioned:
Noem: She had little national profile before becoming DHS Secretary, and none prior to Trump becoming president. And, for whatever it's worth, she had trouble winning the governorship in 2018 in a state where it should have been a blowout. I don't think she has the juice to resign from her cabinet position and win the nomination over Trump's objection.
Rubio: He's the candidate you listed who has the best chance of winning, but I only see this happening if Trump endorses him. But if that were going to happen, why not make him VP? Without Trump's approval, he has the same problem of running against the incumbent administration, which may require him to resign and stake his entire political future on a presidential bid, since it's doubtful that Vance would bring him back into the fold if he were to become president. Even in that case, his current position makes him too tainted by Trump for Republicans looking for a change to support him in the primary, and for independents and moderates to consider him in the election.
Desantis: His tightrope act of refusing to embrace Trump as governor and refusing to criticize him as a candidate backfired horribly; it still isn't clear what his opinion on Trump is. Unless he starts criticizing the administration soon, he's going to lose all credibility as a possible Trump alternative, and it's a long shot even then. He also has the face of a dogcatcher and absolutely zero charisma. When Nikki Haley does better in the primaries than you do, you know you're in trouble.
Cruz: He could win the nomination over Trump's objection, but he has too much of a history as a far-right firebrand to win a general unless the Democrats nominate a real lefty.
Hawley: He has a decent record of going against the grain, most recently with his opposition to Trump's spending bill, but he has the same image problem as Cruz.
Abbott: He might win the nomination over Trump's objection, but he's unelectable nationally. First, he's a Texas product, but without the homespun relatability of George W. Bush. Worse, he's another firebrand who is most known for ignoring the Federal government. That kind of thing might play well in the South, but whether he'd be able to beat Vance plus a more moderate candidate elsewhere is another story. The way the primary calendar is set up he'd have to withstand early losses and hope for a big Super Tuesday just to remain competitive. In the general he'd be dead on arrival.
Youngkin: He's the only one I can see winning over Trump's objection. He has shown he can win over moderates. He hasn't leaned into MAGA, but he hasn't done anything to piss them off, either. I only see him winning the nomination over Vance, though, if there's a massive blowout in the midterms, followed by a series of Trump boo boos, such that only the real MAGA diehards will vote for Vance in the primary.
Compounding the problem is that it isn't likely that one of these people gets a shot against Vance head-to-head, but that two or three of them will by vying to be the Vance alternative once primary season gets into full swing, splitting the vote. Any of them will have the same problem Desantis had the last go-around. Every Republican I talked to with an IQ above room temperature preferred Desantis to Trump, and I argued here repeatedly that if Trump ran again, he didn't have a chance. I was excoriated for this opinion, but the Desantis campaign did miserably. The problem for Republicans is that enough Trump voters will lose interest in voting for another candidate that it will keep them from winning the general, but not enough to keep Vance from winning the nomination, if only due to establishment inertia. Anyway, I'd love to hear why I'm wrong and what kind of scenario you think would lead to any of these people winning the nomination over a Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I don't believe anyone from Jan 6 was charged with obstructing an ICE agent performing his official duties, or any corollary that would apply to the National Park Police or DC Police.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
If they're actively in the process of arresting him you'd be interfering. If they were gathering across the street in preparation for a raid, and a group of protestors gathered on the sidewalk in front of your neighbor's house, the police would have to ask them to move before they could be arrested for interfering, and at that they'd only have to move enough to let the police through. In the 7-11 raid the guys would have to let the cops in, but they couldn't be arrested for just protesting outside. The rock throwing would be covered by assault, and may also be impeding, but it would depend on the circumstances. Suppose for a moment that the protestors in LA knew nothing of the ICE raids, didn't know ICE was there, and were having an unrelated protest about environmental policy or something else totally unrelated to ICE. It did, however, make it difficult for ICE to execute the raid. Should all of the protestors in that scenario be charged with impeding official duties?
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I'm not sure you're really raising any good arguments here. Most elections feature a major party candidate who has lost a primary. Regan, Bush I, Dole, McCain, Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Biden had all sought the nomination in the past and failed, and that's not counting Harris. I don't see how you could argue that having lost in the past somehow prevents you from getting the nomination. And to my knowledge Gretchen Whitmer never entered a presidential race, so you can cross her off of that list. I don't see what Shapiro not being selected as vice president has to do with anything. Literally every Democrat not named Tim Walz wasn't selected. I'm not going to go through a list of names, but there are plenty of people out there who can be nominated, and I can probably name more moderates than progressives at this point.
I feel like it's trendy now to see the Democrats as a party in disarray, and while those criticisms are valid, the Republicans might actually be in worse shape going into 2028. We've spent the past decade-plus wondering why Democrats have underperformed the polls in the past several presidential elections, which is especially baffling considering that the polls have been more or less accurate in other elections, and have even gone in the opposite direction, with Democrats winning against the apparent odds. This is coupled with MAGA candidates regularly losing any election that isn't a 100% safe Republican lock. While various theories for these phenomena have been proposed, I think the reason for this is pretty obvious at this point: There is a huge mass of traditional non-voters who will only vote when Trump is on the ballot. Since these people traditionally don't vote, pollsters don't get to them, because pollsters have traditionally only been looking for people who are likely to actually vote.
The upshot is that the Republican nominee in 2028 can't expect to get the same amount of support as Trump did in 2024. For instance, suppose it's Vance. Vance is a MAGA creation and Trump's heir apparent, and nominating him is as clear a signal as you're going to get that the party intends to continue riding Trump's legacy. Well, Vance simply isn't going to get 100% of the Trump voters, and it's difficult to see him pulling in enough non-Trump voters to make up the difference. In fact, Vance seems to offer the worst of all worlds politically, considering he'll have been in office just the wrong amount of time by election day 2028. 6 years total, 4 of them completely subservient to the president. He can't run as an outsider, he can't run as an insider with tons of experience, he can't run as a maverick who forged his own path, he can't run as a bipartisan dealmaker, he can't run as a moderate, he can't run as an arch-conservative, he can only run as a continuation of an administration that will undoubtedly enter election season with net negative approval ratings. The only case in which a Vance nomination has a ton of upside is if Trump pulls off some miracle where he gets his approval rating up among Independents and Democrats, but that seems like a longshot. Ronald Regan he is not.
This wouldn't be that bad if the Republicans had enough of a buffer where they could afford to lose votes. But Trump won the "Blue Wall" states by razor thin margins in 2024 and lost all of them in 2020. Winning any of them in 2028 would be a tall order in any election, and they don't have the votes to spare with Trump off the ballot. Of course, the Republicans could always nominate someone else, but that would suggest that Trump's star has faded even within the party, and would probably be an even worse outcome. It would be like McCain in 2008—The Republicans nominated a good-natured moderate war hero who was well-liked by the opposition and had the misfortune to represent a party that was in such disarray pretty much everyone who mattered had stopped trying to defend the incumbent president. Now imagine what would have happened had the Republicans nominated Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld instead, and tried to sell it as a continuation of the Bush presidency. Because Bush at least had the self-awareness to largely sit that election out. Now imagine the party tries to move on with Trump constantly talking about how anyone who doesn't back Vance is a traitor to him personally. Because that is what is going to happen if Trump doesn't get to pick his own successor.
Beyond that, I haven't seen any suggestions that the Republicans have a particularly deep bench. And for all the criticism I see of Harris's performance in 2024, no one seems to realize how close she came to winning. Trump had a 1.7% margin in Pennsylvania, 1.4% in Michigan, and 0.9% in Wisconsin. Take away the Trump Bump. Take away Harris being tied to an unpopular incumbent. And take away it being Kamala fucking Harris (who isn't getting the nomination, though she has a better shot than Newsome), and the Republicans have their work cut out for them.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
If you're trying to analogize based on yesterday's event's, it's unclear what crimes, if any, were committed, besides normal low-level protest crimes like failure to disperse and whatever charges you can levy against people throwing objects at police. Getting someone for interfering with an investigation or official duties would require showing both that the agent were actually engaged in official duties and that the person took a specific action to interfere. Realistically, this would look like ICE trying to make an arrest and the protestors physically impeding the officer from doing so. The reports I've read suggest that ICE was merely staging for a raid (which is itself just an interpolation from the authors; there's been no official word that I'm aware of) so there's no official duty at this point to interfere with. At this point it looks like there was a raid that was about to go down but got called off because of the protests. Charging everyone present because their protesting made it inconvenient to undertake a planned future action is already stretching the law beyond anything it's been used for in the past, but it comes with the additional complication that actions that you are claiming are obstruction are core First Amendment activities. So even if you could show that the elements of the crime were satisfied, you still might not be able to get a conviction due to constitutional issues.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Newsome is a clown whose chances of winning the presidential nomination are approximately zero. Ironically, he's generally making the same mistake you are wherein moderation is confused with accommodating and/or praising the Trump administration. While I believe that a moderate is going to win the nomination in 2028, it's going to be a real moderate like Shapiro or Beshear who has show that they can govern moderately and give pointed criticism toward the administration when it does something bad for the state, as opposed to governing like a lefty and trying to compensate for it by schmoozing with Republicans. That, and Newsome has no record of outperforming Biden/Harris is red districts.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
If Musk had simply acquired Twitter and quietly relaxed the moderation policies, I don't think it would have been seen as a big deal, and would have probably led to a better outcome overall. But between the explicitly political motive, the drama surrounding its acquisition, the Twitter Files, and the obvious boosting of favored viewpoints, to someone like me who was neutral through all of this it looks like he just swapped one ideological bent for another.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
GamerGate isn't known to as many people as this board thinks it is. People act like it was some watershed moment in the culture war, but I was in my late 20s at the time and couldn't tell you now what it was about without looking it up. I remember hearing a story on NPR about it, and it was presented as some sideshow drama among people who didn't matter, having about s much relevance as an internecine dispute about racism in the stamp collecting community or whatever. Sitting here today, I couldn't tell you what it was about if you put a gun to my head, beyond the fact that some people who played video games made misogynistic comments or something. I doubt most of my IRL friends could tell you any more. I doubt my parents or many people from their generation have even heard of GamerGate. A search of my archives shows that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran exactly one article about it, and it was an op-ed that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. In the fall of 2014, that paper ran more stories on the coup in Burkina Faso than on GamerGate.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I think the problem is less centering one's life around politics as it is centering one's life around politics but not going beyond vague, slacktivist methods like calling people out on social media or even attending protests. Actual politicians and people who work for political or community organizations for a living don't seem to have this problem. If she were concerned about the "little people" who Trump was supposedly leaving behind, it might have done her better to do legal work for people who couldn't afford her services, or get involved with a charitable organization, or even picked up litter along the side of the road. It's not like there aren't a lot of people out there looking for volunteers. But I don't think that was ever on the table because I think her political centerdness was downstream of mental health problems, not the other way around.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
The second. I used to work for the Boy Scouts and he would come up during summers and run the business end of things at camp. He was originally from Pittsburgh and came up regularly to visit his parents so we'd all hang out. There's a whole extended friend group of people who worked there at one point or another, and a lot of us still see each other regularly. I haven't seen him in years, because the Principal job keeps him in NC year round and his parents hate his new wife and her parents hate him. But anyway, as I said in my above novel of a post, I don't get involved in other people's drama. I was friends with him and not his ex-wife, and though I agree he's the one who fucked up and she deserved better, I'm not taking sides. He's never done anything to me personally that pissed me off enough to cut him off completely, and if he called me right now to go out for beers I'd go. That being said, I was in North Carolina a few years back with an extra ticket to the ACC Championship game and I didn't call him to see if he wanted it, so there's that.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
It means they serve mediocre wedding-at-a-country club dishes in a venue that has the ambience of a funeral home.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I don't blame you for this mistake (for lack of a better term), because I didn't notice it until the second time I read your post, but I think our tendency to allow the present to inform out perceptions of the past can lead us toward explanations that don't make sense. At no point in 2015 was any of the smart money convinced that Trump was a viable political candidate. The perception of him before the 2016 primaries was that he was an unserious candidate who tapped into the resentments of a certain kind of person who typically didn't vote. Given the amount of vitriol he received from pretty much everyone in the Republican establishment and his questionable standing among Evangelical Christians, it was assumed that he was good at getting headlines and winning in too-early-to matter polls but as soon as the people who actually mattered started paying attention his standing would drop like a rock.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, her marriage was pretty much over, she was making intimate details of her relationship with her husband semi-public, and she was burning bridges in her social circle—I'm hesitant to conclude that gay marriage disagreements had anything to do with that; if she was oversharing with people such as yourself who barely knew her, you can only imagine what she was telling people from church.
I had a friend in college who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy suburb. He always had this outside fixation on status and success. He majored in business, and read books by Donald Trump and other motivational people that he took literally as business advice. He wanted to go to law school and be a sports agent, and he interned with a sports agency and got to meet Barry Sanders. But his obsession was entirely superficial. For example, he'd read in his popular business books about the importance of budgeting time, so he'd block off time in the evenings to do homework and study. But this consisted of him watching television with a book open, which he'd close at 9pm or whatever and say that he'd already done his studying for the night and was keeping on schedule. When I told him I didn't much like scotch, he told me I should develop a taste for it because that's what the big dogs drank. When his aging Volvo got totaled after a drunk driver rear-ended him at a traffic light, he started test driving cars like the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition (new, of course) rather than buy whatever the insurance payout would get him.
At some point he got the idea that taking prescription opiates recreationally was a high-status thing to do. When he first mentioned that he liked painkillers, I thought maybe he was just finding a silver lining in dental work or something. When he started talking about it more, I tried to disabuse him of the notion that it was cool by noting its nickname of "hillbilly heroin" and pointing to a bust in West Virginia that had been on the news. He assured me, though, that top businessmen and all the hip young Wall Street traders and attorneys used it to unwind. I never actually saw him take anything, but he came into my dorm room one day junior year asking if I had any painkillers. I pulled a bottle of gin out of my desk and told him that was the only painkiller I needed, and he laughed but said, no, seriously. When I informed him that I didn't (which wasn't entirely true because I had most of a Percocet prescription left over, though I wasn't about to commit a felony for a few bucks), he asked my roommate, who was a bit of a stoner but not a junkie and also someone he barely knew. My roommate seemed taken aback that he would make such a request, and I was inclined to agree.
The problem became more serious later that year, when he started stealing from his roommate. They had been together since Freshman year without incident, and there was enough trust between them that the roommate would leave his wallet out on his desk when in class. This guy would then fill his gas tank and be back before his roommate returned (this was in the days when most credit card purchases required a signature; gas stations didn't if you paid at the pump). After the roommate found out he informed the administration and this guy was banned from the dorms. He still attended the school, though he had huge gaps in his day with nowhere to go, and he was embarrassed for other people to find out what had happened, so he'd hang around the dorm entrance and wait for somebody to go in, and since everyone recognized him as a resident he'd usually be let in, and he'd find a not-too close acquaintance to hang out with until his next class. I let him in once after he supposedly forgot his keys and he decided to hang out in my room for a couple hours, which I thought was odd since that never happened in the preceding two and a half years, but whatever. By this point, my roommate had withdrawn and I had a single room, and a day or so later this guy asked my if I'd mind letting him stay in the extra bed for a couple nights. By this point, I knew what was going on and asked him what was wrong with his own bed down the hall, and he gave me some bullshit answer about not some unspecified problems with his own roommate, and in the spirit of malicious compliance I told him that if it was that bad I'd be happy to have him for the rest of the year so long as he put an official request in, which in my experience would be approved by the end of the day. But if there was something he wasn't telling me then absolutely not or I could get in serious trouble. After I informed the rest of our friends of this exchange it was agreed that the administration had to be informed, and everyone in the dorm had to know that they weren't to let him in under any circumstances. After we reported him, he was expelled.
For a long time, I've had a personal policy of not getting involved in other people's drama, and it's served me well. What I mean by that is that if two people I know are having a dispute and one confides in me I tell them that I can sympathize but since I'm not involved I don't know everything about what's going on and, he (or she) hasn't done anything to me personally, so I'm not going to take sides in a matter that's really none of my business. That being said, if I am involved, and the offense is serious enough, I'm not going to pull any punches, even if it ends up destroying your life. I was friends with this guy, but we weren't exactly close; we hung out a lot, but I primarily was friends with him through other people. As all his other friends dropped off, I tried to remain aloof and neutral. When he asked me to do something that could land me in serious trouble so he could keep up the facade of still living in the dorms, that was the last straw. He seriously thought I didn't know he was a thief and would have no problem letting him live with me; for all I know, he had plans to steal from me had I been sucker enough to let him stay.
I don't know if the drug use was a way for an insecure guy to try to look cool, or if the claims that it was cool were justifications for his using it to cope with insecurity, but I really don't know that it matters. What I did learn from this, as well as from every situation similar to this that I've witnessed, is that people who are intent on destroying their lives aren't going to listen to reason, and are going to continue alienating everyone around them until there's nobody left and they're forced to face God alone. I understand the virtues of loyalty, but it's a two way street, and patience runs out if the other person doesn't show loyalty in return and tries to take advantage of you. To my friend's credit, as far as these things go, he never tried to guilt trip anyone or talk crap about anyone or intentionally create drama. The numerous times we told him that his behavior was unacceptable, that narcotics addiction wasn't cool, and that he'd never achieve his goals by going down this road, he wouldn't get angry but just roll his eyes and tell us we didn't know what we were talking about, or just say "okay" and then keep doing what he was doing.
The good news is that this story at least appears to have a somewhat happy ending. I lost touch with this guy as soon as he was expelled, and haven't talked to him since. A year or two later I heard he had gone to rehab and was back in some kind of school, though this may have been community college. All of this info comes from a friend who was closer to him than I was and who I used to talk to on the phone regularly. When the subject came up, he said he didn't know much but the situation while we were in school was worse than I realized at the time, though he either didn't provide details or I don't remember them. About a decade ago I found out he was selling industrial supplies for some company in the exurbs. More recently, I found out he married a girl who did the kind of low-level bookkeeping someone with an associate's degree in accounting does and they were living in a fairly nice area with a kid or two. The friend didn't know if he worked for the same company or what he was doing now.
It's certainly a decent life, but it's a far cry from what he wanted to be. Sales guys can make more money than I do, but money does not equal status. The best he can hope for on that front, where he is now, is hanging out with local contractors and small-town bank managers at steakhouses housed in strip malls, and a couple times a year taking his wife out to one of the restaurants with dazzling views of the city that attract the kind of people who say "ooh, classy" when they walk inside but that no one with any kind of real status would be caught dead in, not least of which because they serve overpriced "funeral food". Then again, maybe had he been more mature he'd have realized that this was a life worth pursuing, since those of us who ended up working in Downtown offices with floor to ceiling windows and personal secretaries realized that all that gets you is invitations to impossibly boring parties hosted by judges and politicians that everyone attends out of obligation and no one actually enjoys. Then again, maybe the whole status thing was a phase he would have grown out of, or maybe he would have just been to untalented or lazy to ever have a shot at the big leagues to begin with.
Circling back to Lana, I'm guessing that she had a personal crisis that she couldn't handle, and for whatever reason she found herself looking more for validation than practical advice, and when the people in her life started telling her things she didn't want to hear, she lashed out and cut them off. It's not like her family and friends were all Republicans who supported Trump and she couldn't take them anymore; it seems like she alienated people on all sides of the political spectrum. And when you cut yourself off from everyone in your life, what's left? It's not just you and God alone now, because there will always be internet message boards where the friendless will always be able to receive unconditional validation for their poor choices or get endlessly berated, depending on which board it is and who's logged on at the time. Something tells me that neither is what this woman needs. I hope she gets help and can lead a happy, productive life again, but I don't think politics has much to do with it.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
Unless she worked something out with the father, it's doubtful she'd get primary custody after moving to another state. About ten years ago a friend of mine decided to dump his wife after she caught him running around on her. At the time of the divorce, they were both teachers in the same school system who made similar money and lived a couple miles away from each other in the same district in North Carolina, so it was a pretty simple case of shared custody with minimal child support. Around the time the divorce was finalized, he quit his job in North Carolina and accepted a position as an assistant principal at a school in West Virginia. That is, until his attorney found out and informed him that if he moved out of state the custody agreement would disappear.
That much he expected; what he didn't expect his attorney to tell him is that if she ended up with primary custody after him moving out of state, there would be no downside to her moving out of state. His ex was originally from northern Minnesota, and he knew she'd move the kids back home with her if there were no repercussions. He got incredibly lucky and was able to take a different teaching position at the school he had just left, despite his old position having been replaced, and was eventually able to find a principal job down there. That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
As one of those moderates, I don't see the problem here. The rule of law imposes no requirement on the Supreme Court to hear appeals, and doesn't require any justification for a decision to hear or not to hear a case.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
I think the concern is that if they rule on this case while the others are still pending (assuming they strike it down) they get one state law struck down and several others where the courts carefully craft their decision to avoid running afoul of whatever logic the Supreme Court uses to justify their decision, in which case they have to keep hearing the same kinds of cases over and over again. And even when they do rule on it, they're just going to get new legislation that tests the limits of the decision. This is what happens when you have a constitutional right that a sufficient number of states simply choose not to recognize as such; look at how many southern states kept passing more and more onerous abortion restrictions to get around Roe. The court simply doesn't have any interest in turning into the Gun Control Review Board or whatever, so they're just going to keep denying cert. Some people may wonder why they say they're too busy when they still hear tax cases and bankruptcy cases and approximately 16,000 cases per term involving the Uniform Arbitration Act, but it's because those cases involve questions that need answers, and they don't worry about state legislatures and lower courts trying to dodge their rulings.
This may seem like an unfortunate situation to gun rights advocates such as yourself, but it's better than the alternative. The entire reason the court is in this mess is because they want to preserve restrictions that almost everyone agrees are necessary, and while you personally may not care if fully automatic weapons or sawed-off shotguns are legal, as soon as there's a high profile incident with a lot of casualties, the anti-gun protests would make everything we've seen thus far look like a dress rehearsal. There's a reason that most gun-friendly NRA A+ congressmen aren't introducing bills to repeal the FFA, or the Gun Control Act of 1968, or whatever law makes post-1986 guns illegal. This doesn't even get into sales restrictions, or background checks, or any of that. At that point the argument about cosmetic features, or DFUs, or whatever go completely out the window, and whatever rights you think Heller isn't protecting are going to vanish along with Heller itself, and in the ensuing backlash states aren't going to be shy about clamping down the screws.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I didn't mean zero women in the grand scheme of things, I meant zero women among the 4 or 5 you're trying to simultaneously date.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Sambas were originally designed as indoor soccer shoes, and they've reached the point of acceptability for casual wear that publications like GQ suggest you can wear them with a suit (not recommended, as most suit pants aren't cut like jeans). It does appear that what he's looking for is available in an indoor model, but one thing I'd caution is that shoes made for soccer might not be the best for wearing around town. I definitely wouldn't wear cleats around town, as, aside from all of the other concerns, they'd be damn uncomfortable.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
I saw this just before I left work yesterday, and it inspired me to look up who the best players for the Pirates were during their memorable 20 years of losing seasons. The Dave Littlefield era (2001–2007) was particularly interesting, because while his predecessor and successor both tore the team completely down for a rebuild (the latter of which was successful), Littlefield seemed convinced that, following a failed rebuild, the team was just one or two tweaks away from success. They had some good players during those years, but also a lot of bad luck, and the whole time was marred by home-grown talent who would have a few good seasons before fizzling (Jason Bay, Oliver Perez), free agent acquisitions or trades who wouldn't live up to expectations (Matt Morris, Sean Casey), and players who were mediocre here but found success on other teams (Aramis Ramirez, Jose Bautista). So even if you went into the season knowing they were going to be bad, there was always something to at least make you think they had an outside shot of having a winning season, or maybe even at least still having a realistic chance at a winning season after the All-Star break.
So going through those old rosters gave me a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and regret, and then I came across a name that got me pissed off heading into the weekend: Cesar Izturis. I had totally forgotten that he had played for the Pirates briefly in 2007, at the tail end of the Littlefield era. But it wasn't what he did (or didn't do) in his 45 games with the Pirates that pissed me off. It's what he did (or didn't do) with the Dodgers in 2004. I have a theory that when it comes to Gold Gloves, unless there's an obvious "defensive wizard" who wins every year, the award is usually given to a good defensive player on a prominent team. In the case of shortstops and catchers, that player' offensive performance usually contributes way more than it should (see Derek Jeter's five Gold Gloves, which he wouldn't have won if he were on any team other than the Yankees, and which he wouldn't have won as a Yankee if he hit like a typical shortstop).
There was no natural Gold Glove shortstop in the National League in the 2000s, so in 2004 they gave it to Izturis because he hit .288 on the first-place Dodgers. Jack Wilson was the Pirates shortstop during that era, and he was one of the best in the game. Accordingly, he had one of the biggest contracts on the notoriously cheap Pirates, and as Littlefield's days were obviously numbered after the Matt Morris debacle (which itself only happened because his days were obviously numbered and he needed to make a big move), they were looking to cut salary. Izturis was a Gold Glove shortstop who was younger than Wilson and had a club option on his contract. He had also played under manager Jim Tracy while in Los Angeles. So they quietly traded for Izturis, the idea apparently being that they could start him and trade Wilson, giving the next GM some salary relief and some prospects. Except Izturis wasn't qualified to hold Wilson's jock strap, and the Bucs kept Wilson and declined the option on Izturis.
To be fair, Izturis's star had started to fade long before he arrived in Pittsburgh, and his Gold Glove season seems like an anomaly. But he hing around the league for over a decade, so he couldn't have been that bad, and would be an every day starter after that, and while his bating average never recovered, I doubt his defense was much worse. Jack Wilson was better in every defensive statistical category in 2004, and everyone who watched the Pirates regularly knew that he would have at least won a few Gold Gloves had he played for a better team. To add insult to injury, he was also much better offensively than Izturis ever was, batting .308 in 2004. He should have easily won the Gold Glove that year, and I'm still pissed off about that one.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
There are a lot of things I dislike about Pennsylvania law, but one thing I do like is that they got rid of the stupid redemption period nonsense. The idea is that after you lose property to tax sale you have a certain period of time to redeem the property by paying the back taxes on it. What this means in practice is that someone buying property at a tax sale has to cut a check now and then wait a year or years before they can actually take possession of the property. PA still technically has a redemption period, it just happens before the actual tax sale. In other words, if your property is put up for tax sale, it was already delinquent for several years and any possible redemption would have happened already. The New Jersey process appears to be even stupider, where you have to buy a certificate that then gives you the right to foreclose, which really means a right to spend even more money on a lawsuit at some point in the future when back taxes will only continue to accumulate. This just goes to show how a lot of aspects of property law exist as relics from the 1800s when everybody lived on farms and courts used complicated common law pleading procedure. And since none of this is a big enough deal for the state legislature to act on, it just keeps rolling along as a rather constipated discipline.
Other than that, I always find it remarkable when people do absolutely nothing for a decade and when something adverse happens they're suddenly motivated to not only file a separate suit but also appeal that suit. The guy doesn't open an estate for his father, doesn't see that the property taxes are paid, doesn't attempt to redeem the property after the auction is announced, doesn't respond to the foreclosure suit, yet immediately before the property is sold to a third party he files suit challenging the default judgment, and is motivated enough to appeal that judgment when he loses. The worst part of this is that he doesn't even attempt to claim some kind of hardship that may excuse him from not responding to the initial suit (other than that he wasn't on the best terms with his brother), but raises the cockamamie defense that service was improper because they served the brother instead of the estate, except they couldn't serve the estate because the estate didn't formally exist. If the court actually bought this argument, then anyone who inherited someone's house could avoid paying taxes on it indefinitely by simply not opening an estate and claiming improper service.
Beyond, that, though, and I don't think this was mentioned in the opinion, whether the estate was properly served is irrelevant, because the action technically isn't against the property owner but the property itself. Since they weren't seeking a judgment against the father but possession of the house, they only have to notify "the house", which they did by mailing notice to the owner of record and by personally serving notice to an adult at the residence, who happened to also be an heir and possible estate representative. It's hard for me to see what the defendant here thinks the reasonable course of action should have been.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
I took fin for a few years a long time ago and I'm convinced that while some people do experience real side effects, it's mostly a psychological thing based on internet message board catastrophizing. I think the biggest part of the problem is that most guys start losing their hair in their 30s and 40s, at a time when sex drive is diminishing anyway. They might not have been paying much attention to it otherwise, but when you start taking a drug that has "sexual side effects" as the number one concern, you're going to be more alert to that sort of thing than usual. I imagine that if the rate of sexual side effects were the same overall but there were a higher rate of gastrointestinal effects, sore throat, knee pain, or something else unrelated, everyone would be getting those and few people would notice any decrease in libido.
And then, of course, there are the people who will blame any and everything on whatever medication they are taking regardless of whether it's a listed side effect or not, and go on these sites to warn people that they will ruin your life, at least until you stop taking it. My favorite of these is the guy who claimed that fin made him depressed to the point that he was borderline suicidal. He also happened to start taking it at a time when his business was failing and he had to lay off a bunch of people, and got so invested in some video game that he rarely left the house. Right around the time he stopped taking it was when business picked up and he started having a normal social life again. Yeah, it was the finesteride.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Probably nothing, assuming she's allowed in. She has civil judgments against her, but so do a lot of people. Theoretically, if she opened a bank account or bought real property they would be subject to levies/liens from her creditors, and if she were to get a job her paycheck could be garnished if she were in a state that allowed garnishment for normal civil judgments, but any of that would require additional litigation.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Criminal copyright infringement requires that the infringement be done for purposes of financial gain. The classic case of this would be somebody selling bootleg copies of movies or other copyrighted material. As she's giving the material away for free and has long been outspoken about her ideological motivations, it would be very difficult to prove that Sci-hub exists for commercial purposes.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
If every guy puts in incredible effort to up his game, to make his profile as slick and impressive as possible... then NOBODY actually improves their status relative to the others much. Its a lot of effort burnt for no real improvement in the overall situation.
Maybe in an ideal world where nobody does stupid shit and then complains about the consequences of their actions,but if we ever get there, then the fact that it may make online dating slightly harder would only be a minor downside.
For a woman who already thinks you're unattractive:
Isn't this woman doing exactly what you suggest women should be doing, i.e. settling for men she doesn't find attractive?
As for the second two videos, yeah, some women shallow, self-centered, high maintenance bitches. That isn't exactly a groundbreaking revelation. I don't see the point in cherry-picking the worst of Tik-Tok and acting like its representative of half the population. And as for the second one, when exactly does she suggest that she doesn't find average men attractive. She's obviously high maintenance due to her attitude, but the substance of what she's suggesting isn't even controversial. If you want a world where women settle for you out of necessity, you're going to have to pay for a lot more than flowers and dinner.
This is my point with my earlier post. The Pool of women who are actually appealing to marry is small, compared to the vast number of single guys fighting for their attention.
As @FiveHourMarathon and others pointed out, to which you didn't respond, the vast number of men fighting for their attention is only a problem if you don't apply ridiculous nine-point tests to determine whether any "reasonable" woman would want to date them. It's ridiculous that you're complaining that women won't lower their standards when it comes to looks (which is a dubious assertion to begin with) and with a straight face point to your own set of criteria that excludes 99% of the female population.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
It's supposed to mean that he clerked for a Supreme Court justice, which is a position that only goes to those with the highest academic qualifications, and means that he has actual experience working in constitutional law, which is something that few lawyers possess. He also specializes in appellate Supreme Court work as part of his current practice. I'm not sure what kind of resume you're looking for when it comes to one's qualifications to comment on the judicial system.
I don't think it will lead to a global recession, since it isn't even a real business making real money. I think it will lead to a recession in the tech industry though. The problem as I see it is that they've probably reached the limit of how much cash they can shovel into research and development without seeing any real results in terms of people actually paying for the product, and so much has been invested thus far that the product will have to be fairly expensive to recoup those costs and actually generate a profit on the whole venture. The whole business model relies on them being able to give it away for free, and companies seeing enough potential that the productivity gains make it worth it for them to start paying. But while you hear about billions of dollars tech companies invest into it, you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases. The whole thing is unsustainable.
Keep in mind that single sectors leading to huge recessions are rare. The tech bubble in 2000 is one example, but that was a relatively mild recession, and the amount the overall economy was invested into tech at the time was far beyond what we're seeing today with AI. Back then any company that was somehow related to computers was getting massive financial investments, and ladies' investment clubs were investing in IPOs. Most of the AI bubble is centered around a few big players, and big players see stock price dips due to localized circumstances all the time, we just don't think too much about it. I used to work in the energy industry, which saw pretty big collapses in 1999, 2014, and 2019, but they didn't lead to national recessions, let alone global ones.
For another example, the US housing market actually crashed in 2006, but and it did cause a global recession, but only because the mortgages had been securitized and the banks had a ton of exposure. It took a full two years for this to play out, and no one payed much attention to the crash at first because it was initially presumed to be localized to the mortgage industry. And then there's the farm crisis in 1985, which wreaked absolute havoc in the Upper Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers were committing suicide in the barn, having lost farms that were in the family for over a century, while the banks that foreclosed on them became insolvent due the inability to resell the land. A new chapter in the US bankruptcy code was created specifically to deal with family farms. Yet the entire thing only gained national notice once musicians started raising awareness and holding benefit concerts. I see an AI slowdown having local effects, with limited influence on the wider economy.
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