
SL Xpress
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We need to do something about these private equity bastards
SL Xpress replied to Horn Under a Bad Sign's topic in Cloak Room
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I'm saying there are three options. Option 1: Fighting between the two groups until the end of time. Broken up by periods of peace, but only until one group or the other has someone come to power galvanized by the identification of the other group as an existential enemy. I do not believe the Palestinians have ever had anyone in leadership who truly wants to ensure the permanent existence of the Israeli state, but even if someone like that were to come into power, I do not believe they would last long. Maybe for the length of their lifetime, at most. I don't believe Hamas is going to willingly give up power in the Gaza strip. If Hamas isn't the titular power, the person who is in charge is going to have a difficult time running things if they're seen as toadies for Israel. October 7 will be celebrated as a great victory for the Palestinian people, regardless of the consequences suffered. I also don't believe the preponderance of Israeli leadership has ever seriously entertained the existence of a two party state. I do believe plenty of Israelis want it, but it's my opinion they are wishing for a pipe dream. For the most part Israeli leadership has seen the Palestinians as an existential threat to a Jewish homeland. Which means a lot of repression, insufferable living conditions, and under the worst conditions, rollbacks of the territory possessed. I suppose this could go on for a very long time. We're going on 80 years now. As long as they don't kill each other off, especially with a weapon of mass destruction, I suppose it could go on for another 800. Option 2: Arabs and Jews intermarry and have lots of babies together, blending the cultural identity together to the point of indistinction. Kind of like what happened to the Northern Kingdom in Biblical times after Assyria conquered them. I consider this option farcical. I put it out there mostly to show how intractable the problem is. As long as the possibility of widespread intermarriage/interbreeding remains nonexistent, the potential of violent solutions will always exist. Option 3: One group or the other is forced to leave or is decimated. Historically this is how these kinds of conflicts are resolved. It is only in modern times where we have this quixotic ideal that two groups that hate each other and consider the other group their historical enemy living on land that is rightfully their's can somehow live next to each other in peace. The only way that happens is when one group is forced into a marginal minority status, with its own set of issues. ____________________________________________________________ 1) Well, not all of them have to be removed. You wouldn't have to remove all the Israelis from Israel. If you remove 90% of them or so and the Palestinians were in power then the remaining Israelis would be relatively immaterial. No one killed all the indigenous people in the western hemisphere, Australia, or New Zealand. But they've been marginalized to where it doesn't matter. Shoot, plenty of indigenous people were removed from their lands before European colonization occurred. 2) I would argue India/Pakistan recovered from it. Not ideally, certainly, but that was a traumatic migration which separated peoples who had lived alongside one another for centuries. It's a horrible solution. There's never been a case of a people migrating from their land because they couldn't live there any more that wasn't tragic in one sense or another. Most of the time it leads to the disappearance of their culture and way of life. But just because it's horrible doesn't mean it's unthinkable. It's happened throughout human history. I'd argue that IS human history. Certainly the middle east is as replete with examples as anywhere on the face of the earth, mostly because that's where it all started. 3) Could be. We're on the darkest of timelines in this country, that's for sure. I don't think I fear the US going to war externally as much as I fear the decimation of the judiciary, control over the media, the military, and domestic security, and the loss of the ability to have peaceful transfers of power. But maybe you're right.
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I think the only two solutions for the area in the long term are either the Palestinians or the Israelis leave - "ethnic cleansing" in your parlance - or they interbreed with one another to the point there's no distinction culturally or ethnically. Otherwise there will always be people on both sides who use the historical grievances to gain power and then the cycle of conflict begins anew. The Palestinians want their homeland back - ALL of their homeland. The Israelis are not keen on giving it back to them. I don't see intermarriage ever being a realistic solution given the strong identifications on both sides. What is completely baffling to me are the people in this country who supported Trump because Biden and the Democrats were too pro Israel. That made no sense whatsoever. Now Netanyahu has carte blanche.
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Yes. College football was single platoon from 1953 until 1964. UT's first national championship was won under single platoon football in 1961.
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Legend. When GoBig12.com started they had a limit for handles of 8 characters, no spaces. I wanted something that reflected where I lived and grew up that also reflected my passion for high school sports. I never met him, although I talked to a lot of people who knew him. I did help campaign for the stadium to be named after him. At first they were going to name it for a past athletic administrator. But I wasn't the main person involved or anything. They don't talk about it in the article, but he suffered an ACL. Maybe on both knees. Still played for the Oilers with injured knees. ] I always tell the Bear Bryant story they quote in there. Bryant also relayed that on the Merv Griffin show during an interview. The key is Bryant wanted Hall to play linebacker and Hall wanted to play safety. Bryant wouldn't budge and neither would Hall. John David Crow said he never would have won that Heisman Trophy if Hall had continued at A&M. "He was a much better player than I was."
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The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
SL Xpress replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
I don't agree with that even a little bit. The key advantage for democracies are peaceful transfers of power. Because non democracies are just as liable to fuck things up. But if there's no system for peaceful transfers of power there's a decent likelihood the people who made the originial mistakes double down on their mistakes rather than take corrective action. This creates reactionary government policies, but that's better than simply going down with the ship. Look around the world. How many countries with totalitarian/authoritarian governments are people better off living in than countries with functioning democracies? Now, I'm not a big fan of direct democracies writ large, but I am a big fan of giving people an opportunity to vote for a change in power. -
The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
SL Xpress replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
Well, there has been a conservative backlash. It's been entirely ineffective and completely run over, with careers ruined. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. There are too many people willing to bend the knee, feeling like if they just offer obeisance they'll be spared from the leopards eating their face, too. -
Texas Basketball Recruiting Notes: It's Miller Time
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
I think so, too, but holy shit is it quoted all the time. Drives me crazy. -
Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
How are you supposed to tell the kids to get off your lawn with that? -
The Leopards Eating Faces and Unlubed Dildo of Consequences Thread
SL Xpress replied to Horn Dog's topic in Cloak Room
And the human blood. Don't forget about the human blood. -
Then there's this:
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There are all kinds of issues even deeper than that. There are plusses and minuses for the dollar being the world's fiat currency. All of those advantages go away when some other system replaces it, and whatever system it is will not be as stable as what we've seen since WWII. And once another system is implemented, it's not a matter of simply changing administrations and claiming backsies. It's like being in a long term relationship and suddenly your partner breaks up with you, gets addicted to cocaine and crystal meth, and starts fucking very bad people. Even if they have a change of mind in the future, a normal person is not simply going to take them back. And for what? To save money? That's been the hallucination among the ignorant. I can't tell you how many town halls I've been to in the last 40 years in rural areas where some yokel stands up and declares he could balance the budget in a moment's time - like a Thanos snap - by eliminating foreign aid. Never mind that the lion's share of foreign aid goes to Egypt and Israel, which is politically untouchable. Just today a report came out the Congress can't reach their budget goals without making severe cuts in Medicare or Medicaid. That's the reality that Americans don't want to hear. The big obligations for the federal government are Social Security, Department of Defense, Medicare and Medicaid, and those have been untouchable for the most part. So the Republicans keep implementing their popular tax breaks - starting with Reagan in the 80s - and every time the annual deficit balloons. It's crazy how many hard line Republicans there are who claim the budget is their big issue - way more than Democrats - and yet it's always been the Republican Party that's been chiefly responsible for the rampant escalation of the national debt. The principal asset we've been selling to the world for 40 years is our debt. Not just our government debt. Our private sector debt, too. Wall Street has successfully exported our debt around the world, helping the American people live beyond their means for decades, and the world has gone along with it because it's helped lift a number of economies around the world along with it. What happens when some of those countries stop investing in US debt? It doesn't take much. It's not like suddenly there won't be any buyers of US debt. But it's at the margins where prices are determined. And once there's a run on a country, it's challenging to reverse course. What the Trump Administration is doing in very fundamental ways is fucking around with how the global economy works. It's amazing how fragile and interdependent the world economies are at this point. A massive implementation of Just In Time management philosophies that attempt to keep stocks low to increase efficiency means even "minor" disruptions have huge impacts on the supply chains and the abilities of governments to manage busts in the economic cycle. Nobody had any idea the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers would lead to the freezing of credit markets around the world, and require an unparalleled international printing of money to cover over the paper losses on bank inventories so liquidity would return. And of course the lesson learned from all of this - much like bringing your heroin addicted son home and paying for his living costs - is to go back to making the same bad decisions because you'll be bailed out for it in any case. Modern economic history - since the establishment of capitalism as the preferred way of setting up Western style economies - is replete with tariff wars ending badly for everyone involved. This is the problem with populist policies. They're implemented - much like Caesar's bread and circuses - to make the masses feel good about what's going on, while the real power grab is elsewhere. No one in power truly thinks we're going to save a lot of money by ending foreign aid. It's a sop to the Average Joe to make him feel better that THIS government is finally listening to him, implementing the solutions HE'S been advocating since the 80s. America First baby! What could go wrong!
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On a long enough time line I'm dead and don't care any more. Saying this stuff always works itself out in the end isn't as helpful as you might think, whippersnapper.
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UT's next basketball coach - discussion/debate [Sean Miller Hired]
SL Xpress replied to alphahorn's topic in Basketball
The main thing a head coach must have is a strategic vision for a roster and the ability to manage it year over year. Coaches come to Texas and they get blinded by the ability to bring on high level talent without any real vision for how all the pieces are going to fit together. I'd also say they need to be able to identify, attract, and retain high level support personnel, from S&C, to the assistant staff, to support staff. It would be helpful if they had a bit of huckster in them to fire up the fanbase, because we kind of need that as a fanbase. I feel like what I just described is Chris Beard, without the girlfriend choking issues. So find someone like that. I like Tommy Lloyd best, but he's not a huckster by any stretch of the imagination. He's a little dull to listen to a great deal of the time. But I really like him as the head of a program. I don't know who the realistic options are. But I trust CDC to go after the best option he has available to him, whoever that might be. -
Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
And then the stupid Aggie band comes out and plays the same songs they've always played, marches the same formation they've always marched, and the ignorant exclaim, "Wow! What a performance!" Aggie: "That's right, ma'am. We always win halftime." Yeah, just wait until you've seen it for 40 years in a row. It's like the child with a face only a mother could love. The Aggies eat that shit up. I'm like, for fuck's sake, turn the page. -
Haha. This is not rambling. I don't feel like he has the judiciary firmly in his grasp. Most of the Supreme Court are not toadies, even if a couple seem like they've been willingly purchased. The overall federal judiciary is absolutely not toadies. There are plenty he has appointed that understand loyalty was part of the appointment, but plenty of others who either don't see it that way, or were appointed by someone else. It will take some time to purge federal law enforcement agencies. These are lifetime bureaucrats. This isn't their first rodeo. The military isn't going to suddenly do his bidding to enforce some kind of coup just because he's seeking like minded people to staff the highest positions. It's going to take a while and a lot of dismissals. Then there's the fact Trump is 78 years old. He's going to die relatively soon. Before that, there's a good chance he simply loses his faculties. It happens. Trump has done a lot of damage and we've collectively allowed it. I include myself in that category because while I've never voted for him and never indicated my support for him as the president, it's not like I've led some kind of popular movement to create a viable alternative. At most I've given token amounts to organizations who recognize what a danger he is. Still, all is not lost. It just feels like it could be. And that's strange enough. It's crazy to me that there's still a lot of people in my personal circle who get excited about Trump even right now. It's like a spectator sport, their side is winning, and who cares about democracy getting trammeled if it means their side is winning. It's frightening to me. I always felt like democracy is way more fragile than we realize. I've always thought that as horrible as what happened in Nazi Germany, the real problem is that authoritarian regimes can come about anywhere, and then once they do it's simply easier to be compliant than it is to fight it. But it's one thing to have that as an intellectual thought for basically all of my life. It's completely different seeing it come to fruition in front of my very eyes. By people I know and love. I just remember when people were saying this is the most important election of our lifetime prior to November, and I kept saying, if you think this election is important, wait until you see the next one.
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That's a significant danger with democracies. Tyranny of the majority, who happen to be morons. That's part of why the founding fathers purposefully made it so difficult to get anything done. It's not a bug. It's a feature. Newer democracies have all gone to parliamentary systems for that reason. Heck, when we helped institute constitutions in Germany and Japan after WWII we didn't have them emulate ours. It's too tough to get anything done. The problem is the United States became too powerful when everyone else wasn't, and so it took on aspects that the system of government wasn't ideally suited for. It worked when the Democrats and Republicans basically saw eye to eye with not a lot of difference between the two. Then Newt Gingrich got to Washington and led the Republicans to taking on a more belligerent opposition to the Democrats, basically calling out the manhood of his Republican peers for agreeing to go along with what was essentially a monopoly of legislative power for 60 years. Add in the polarizing nature of social media, the more precise gerrymandering capable with better computing power, and our instinctual need to seek out tribal affiliations by nature, along with a gradual diminishment of overall American might, and you have present day. But I'd argue any general democracy would have similar dangers. It's just always been a particular danger for the United States, mostly because we're too powerful for our own good, in some ways. If the United States was a minor country, none of this would have the importance it does right now.
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I don't know what the right way to move forward is. I do know sometimes it's best to give someone enough rope so they can hang themselves. I guess I feel like we've broken some seals that I knew as human beings we were capable of, but I hoped as Americans if we were going to do it, it would be after my lifetime. When someone has aspirations of being an authoritarian, which Trump absolutely does and the Republican Party by extension now believes the same way as an institution, regardless if individuals in that party - including me - do not believe that way, then playing dead just gets you dead. People are reactionary. We mirror the behavior of one another. We lose something if the opposition reacts in a way that diminishes the accomplishment of victory because we just end up with a replica of what was trying to be defeated. But better that in my opinion than resigning ourselves to giving up our ability to have peaceful transitions of power. To me that's what at stake here. Pretending like it isn't - which is what many members of the Democratic Party seem to be saying by their words and actions - simply cedes the field of battle to Trump and his cronies. It's like Chamberlain and Hitler to me. You pretend like things aren't so bad, and people who crave dominion will continue to seek as much dominion as they can gather.
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And playing to the masses who have never been sold on why we're involved in Ukraine in the first place. Why are we in Europe? Why do we protect Taiwan? Why do we send aid to all these foreign countries? Why do we have soldiers in Korea? Why do we have all these aircraft carriers? Why are we members of the UN? At one point it was about defending ourselves from the threat of communism and its support for worldwide revolution. But now Russia is not so bad. They have a lot of resources and frankly Putin has a lot of qualities to admire. A lot like Hitler. Strong people who are misunderstood and wrongly cast as villains. We should be more like them. We should be friends. Share some of your supply of hopium. I'm all out and desperately need a fix. Help a brother out.
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Oh, there's still more leverage to come, I'm afraid.
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I guess you and I have different areas of emphasis. I find you overly concerned about what you call bag games involving overpriced tweets or inflated 1 hour appearances. I'm saying who cares? The market is going to continue to grow at hockey stick levels regardless of what form it takes because that's what markets do when poorly regulated and ruled by Keynsian animal spirits. NIL is in the tulip mania phase of operation. See also mortgage notes circa 1990s-2008. The House Settlement is not going to provide the kind of regulation that will create a ceiling on NIL amounts, regardless if that's the intent or not. A systemic approach will not be possible through the court system. It will have to be legislated - by Congress - and we're a long ways away from that happening. I feel confident there will have to be some kind of serious or at least impending collapse of college athletics first. "How did you go bankrupt?" "Gradually, then suddenly." - The Sun Also Rises We're in the gradual phase right now.
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BTW, to play the whataboutism game, I never felt like Obama did enough when Russian took Crimea and took over the Donbas with proxies supplemented by the Russian military when the Ukraine government was still trying to get on its feet. I didn't feel like Biden went far enough in his support after the full on invasion. But that's not an apples to apples comparison to the sickening abandonment of Ukraine going on with this administration and the putrid cozying up to possibly the most reprehensible human being currently living on the planet.
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If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker. Edit - not advocating for this position, but that's what it's turned out to be.
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Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
So much angst over the dropoff in hitting from last year. It's good they're spreading it around to the fielding some. -
Negative Recruiting Your Own School: The aggy Screenshot Megathread
SL Xpress replied to texifornia's topic in 🤫$9.95🤫
Your grandfather sounds a lot like mine. That's a great memory. Thank you for sharing.
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