Jump to content

Mole

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    2682
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Mole

  1. I’ve worked at institutions that largely dropped the term freshmen for more practical reasons. Since freshman, sophomore, etc. are often established by credit hours, it gets complicated these days. An incoming “freshman” with 30+ hours is somewhat common, so some designation that this is their 1st time in college is handy. TCU doesn’t seem to be doing this for this reason, but abandoning the term freshman isn’t all that new. Secondly, language and mores change with each generation. This isn’t even a small harbinger of some coming decline. It’s just a small change at a single institution. Your parents and grandparents thought the same way about the stupid ways you talk, as did their elders about them. You get old and complain about change. That’s life. Third, since this touches on the culture war, I predict that if this thread gains enough interest to reach page five, it’ll be necessarily moved to the cloak room.
  2. I’m sure the 1st person to suggest cooking their food rather than gnawing on the rotting carcass was roundly mocked, but now we have the Steel Shank thread. Advancement will ruffle some feathers but the payoff is huge. I’m well aware that my approach will likely never be popular. Starting with the standard rather than the number of teams is the only objective and truly fair way to do it. Every other method is just giving a trophy to the team that won the last game on the calendar. That’s no real test of a champion.
  3. In hindsight, she should have called 911 to alert dispatch that she believed a lunatic impersonating a public servant was trying to pull her over and to late them know she was going to wait until she found somewhere safe.
  4. If you want to watch highlights on their webpage, you have to sit through a 20 ad just to watch a 15 second clip, then another ad before the next play, etc. If you’re on a computer, good luck finding the standings or even the scores you want. But you’ll find plenty of Stephen A hot takes.
  5. If you want to get mad, check the Reddit cop threads. “Don’t flee the police” is the common refrain. Is the dishonesty self-selection or training? Why can’t they see that this stuff makes their job harder?
  6. I hope all those 2nd place trophies and romanticized mediocrity was worth the generations of suffering caused by the silence.
  7. This feels like another iteration of the HCQ discussions of last summer.
  8. All this discussion of Critical Race Theory in schools, and I’m still stuck on the definition of “is being taught.”
  9. The Rose vote was fan vote, so the moron was the royal us.
  10. I have no interest in anything Herbstreit says or does, but a late night trip to Skyline is one of life’s special pleasures that should be celebrated.
  11. But we have video evidence:
  12. Since Bird and Magic won titles as young pros in the early 80s, very few players have been the main guy on their team and won a title before age 27. Using Finals MVP as a proxy for being the guy on a championship team (with a few exceptions like the Warriors first run): Steph was 26 (didn’t win Finals MVP but obviously was the main star). DWade was 24, but he also had a hobbling Shaq. Duncan was 22 but had an aging superstar teammate and a well constructed team. Same with Kawhi. Tony Parker was 24 when he won the Finals MVP, but it was obviously TD’s team. Dumars was 25, but it was Zeke’s team, who was 27. Then you have Magic and Bird who did it young. Jordan, LBJ, Hakeem, Shaq, KD, Dirk, Zeke, all couldn’t win the big one until they were at least 27. Kobe didn’t do it without Shaq until he was 30. So in the last 35 years, the only guys who were led their team to a title before age 27 were Steph, DWade, and the Spurs.
  13. Could be, but my guess is that in about five years, we’ll be hearing about how these guys don’t have what it takes to be the guy either. Then, one or two will distinguish themselves in their late 20s. Great young players are exciting, but we get impatient and expect them to figure it out more quickly than it realistically takes. Early 20s stars can turn into mid 20s regular season MVPs who don’t seem to have it in the playoffs. Then some of them figure it out (and get great teammates) and we forget all of the questions.
  14. I brought MJ into this as the extreme example of what we so often see. In hindsight, MJ is some kind of otherworldly champion, but at 26, his reputation was that of a stat stuffer who couldn’t get past the great teams of his era. That was the MJ of my youth, not the guy who would surely will his team to victory. Dirk’s clutch play in contrast with LBJ disappearing in the 4th quarter was Lebron’s legacy until it wasn’t. Now he’s maybe the second best ever; then he was a superstar but also a punchline to lots of jokes. At 26, KD’s Thunder choked away a 3-1 lead. Now he’s an unstoppable force. He’s coming off a career-ending injury, just lost his MVP-winning #2 teammate, and it doesn’t seem to matter. The criticisms of Giannis, which are fair right now, could be tweaked and made of many all-time great superstars at the same age. We forget how young 26 is in NBA terms. I make the MJ, KD, LBJ comparisons only because there’s a reasonable chance that Giannis will be the guy after the decline of KD. Maybe he’ll instead be the guy who’s not quite good enough, but he’s a pretty reasonable candidate for the next unstoppable force — and we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s not that guy quite yet. There’s varying levels of greatness among MJ, LBJ, and KD, but the comparison seems apt for a guy who doesn’t seem to be quite there yet. Maybe they were closer, but they weren’t there either.
  15. These are all fair points, as is the the question about how his game works in the modern NBA during the playoffs, but mid-20s superstars having holes in their games and questions about whether or not they can lead a team to a title is a pretty common story. My guess is that in 2031, we’ll all be wondering why we’d ever ask such questions, but maybe he’ll never put it all together and KD’s NBA will be followed by the pasty Euro era a few years ahead of schedule.
  16. On the Giannis thing, he’s 26. At that age, neither KD nor LBJ had won a title and there were questions about their greatness and ability to lead a team to the title. Same with MJ before them. Winning an NBA title as a young player is really, really hard, even for the best players of their generations. We call into question their ability to do something just as they’re figuring out how to do it. The playoffs are a crazy puzzle. I suspect that in 10 years, the next rising young superstar will be compared unfavorably to Giannis for their inability to lead a team to titles. Or Giannis will be this generation’s hopefully less statutory rapisty Karl Malone.
  17. I’m a bit jealous of those complaining about wives putting items that are too big in small trash cans. In my house, the Starbucks stays sitting on the end table until I throw it away or the bugs turn it into compost.
  18. What about just sending out mass emails and texts with vaguely threatening messages about disappointing the REAL president and turning to godless socialism if they don’t donate? Throw in something about guns and CRT as well. It seems simpler, cleaner, and less fraudulent if you actually mail a naughty and nice list to Mar-a—Lago once a week.
  19. The “China made COVID to stop Trump’s re-election” theory assumes that being president during a national crisis is bad for re-election chances. In hindsight, he lost because of how unbelievably poorly he managed the crisis, but had he done what every other president in American history would have done, or even just nothing but cheerlead for the experts, he probably would have easily won re-election. That he would make disastrous decision after disastrous decision over and over again couldn’t have been assumed in late 2019. Trump used COVID to undermine his re-election.
  20. There’s a bit of a philosophical debate going on in the Mole household regarding cleaning. My approach to cleaning is to clean a room, then the next, and so on. My wife likes to put the system on trial and clean the entire house simultaneously. This involves taking out everything that’s put away and spreading it everywhere. A few items get shuffled around, a partial inventory gets made, and then it stays there indefinitely. When asked about the mess, I’m told that it only takes five minutes to put everything away, yet it all stays out. At some point, circumstances force me to pick up the mess, which takes far longer than five minutes, and I’m the bad guy for ruining the stalled inventory. This cycle repeats every six months or so. A few nights ago, I was the villain for not sharing her enthusiasm in downloading some app that plays Thomas the Tank Engine sounds; at 3 am. Our kid was awake and acting like you might expect an awake toddler would at 3 am. I had just starting working on my get him to sleep process, when she came in, grabbed my phone, and tried to download the app. The more it didn’t work, the angrier she got and the more wound up the kid became. I bit my tongue for about 10 minutes until she finally stormed out, mad at me for not doing something or doing something, I’m not sure. Then I got the kid back to sleep. I think we’re now paying $9.99/month to ThomasSounds.com or something, but it’s a small price to pay to avoid a return of that discussion.
  21. In many cases, these personal “north stars” are built on ever expanding conceptual houses of cards that don’t have much basis in reality. In their thinking, letting go of these other concepts means letting go of their north star. It’s a pretty foundational approach to a lot of preaching, both religious and political. It’s easier to convince someone to your way of thinking or acting if you make them believe that their core values are under attack. If we are unable to separate ancillary beliefs from the core belief (assuming the core belief is right, good, or helpful), there’s a certain gravity to the mess of core and ancillary beliefs that attracts new beliefs, creating some sort of intellectual black hole. Who knows what kind of degeneracy will attach itself to even good core beliefs? This past year has been pretty instructive. Even your statements about faith were perceived as some sort of indifference to human suffering. Historically that makes no sense, but in 2021 it’s a pretty reasonable interpretation.
  22. When my son was born, I became acutely aware of how much our culture feeds into the natural terror and angst of being a parent. If you listen to the “experts”, seemingly every choice is fraught with lifetime consequences. It’s scary enough being a parent, but our culture likes to amp that up to 11. It didn’t take long to realize how that baggage made everything, including parenting, harder. Most of the expert advice mostly boils down to loving the kid and staying involved anyway. I’m not sure how to square my experience with a parent being talked into faking a drive-by with his child and subsequently running over the kid. At least the father is engaged and actively listening to his child and they weren’t just staring at a screen.
  23. I can't decide if people watch too many movies or not enough. This is what happens when people are bored and watch a medium amount of movies.
×
×
  • Create New...