lostfan

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Sep 8, 2016 -> 04:02 PM) Hold on, we're gonna need some photo identification before we can take any votes on how you should kill yourself. Well played.

This multi-page voter fraud argument has me considering killing myself. Anyone have any suggestions on how to go about doing it?

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 8, 2016 -> 03:17 PM) The only thing I think needs to stop is the "Are you prepared for " questions. Just prep him to see if he is prepared, don't ask if he is. Obviously he isn't. But my favorite was trump correcting the veteran that actually the statistic was worse, but Trump was in fact wrong and the veteran was right. Trump was actually right about the "22" number, there's the #22challenge and everything. But there was noooooooooooo reason for him to correct her. Everyone understood what she was asking.

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 8, 2016 -> 02:30 PM) Lester Holt will be good and honestly Chris Wallace will be fine. Last night was a weird set-up, but in future debates Hillary can challenge and create the check. Honestly, I think media thinks regular folks are way stupider than they are. Nobody watched Trump say that s*** and think "wow that makes sense" That happens in Republican primaries, but if he does that in the general election debate format people are going to see it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 8, 2016 -> 11:41 AM) Yeah, but that will never get posted. Only the soundbyte, because that is what the electorate understands. The operatives have their marching orders, and off they go. He literally just posted it lol. What trends online isn't what the media decides, it's us. If an article about a terrorist attack in Europe gets 100k shares on Facebook, but an article from the same media outlet discussing a terrorist attack in Nigeria or Lebanon only gets 400 shares, which one's getting put on the front page?

I don't really have an opinion one way or the other on what Apple did (I don't use an iPhone in any case) but I will call bulls*** on the following: -Apple trying to force everyone into their own, overpriced proprietary standard -Everything going all-digital, which means DRM will become the norm, and interoperability will die As wireless becomes more of a mainstream standard, it will improve, and people will deal.

I didn't know everyone was still so attached to headphone jacks, I've been doing everything wirelessly for a couple of years now. A couple people have refuted this to me, saying Bluetooth quality is not as good as wired headphone quality, but that's really not what's going on here. The vast majority of people upset at Apple are not people listening to high-bitrate, lossless audio on a pair of $200 headphones, they are probably streaming music on a pair of cheap headphones and can't tell the difference (but like pretending they can).

QUOTE (DrunkBomber @ Sep 8, 2016 -> 09:14 AM) Welp, Gary Johnson just Aleppo'd his political career lol. Back to the drawing board. Yeah that's like Syrian Conflict 101 right there. He was trying to downplay it after, but he was pretty embarrassed (as he should be).

Bears just gave Kyle Long a massive extension. Biggest ever for a guard, 4 years 40 million, 30 of it guaranteed. That's left tackle money but Kyle is worth it.

Literally the best possible defense of what NC did is "they didn't do it to suppress black voters, they did it to suppress Democrats" which, if you are actually going to roll with that, holy s*** you're a hack.

QUOTE (brett05 @ Sep 7, 2016 -> 12:07 PM) The reason a law is made does not necessarily devalue the law itself. Voter ID issue is basic common sense. I need an ID to do so many things, including attend a baseball game for the Wrigley Rooftops but not one to vote? There is nothing stopping anyone from voting multiple times in an election. I could go to my local precinct and cast votes all day long. Try it. Watch what happens. Let us know how it turns out.

Assange has a personal vendetta against Clinton from her time as SoS, he's not even pretending to be objective.

Trump can, and does, benefit from rock-bottom expectations. He went to Mexico and really accomplished much of nothing (except getting called out on a bold-faced lie, twice, not that anyone really cared) and managed to not urinate on Nieto's shoes or blurt out racial slurs, so the chattering class talked about how he "looked presidential" (whatever the f*** that means).

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 7, 2016 -> 10:37 AM) I will say though the stretch that we went 3-5 was pretty brutal schedule where every game we lost was to a pretty damn good team. The year before was more heartbreaking, after we beat the chargers they looked on fire, then Jay goes down and we saw how bad Hanie was. That broncos game will haunt my dreams forever. I'd say the Seattle game was definitely winnable (Cutler got them in position to win the game twice IIRC and the defense blew them), and they choked against the Vikings, but they never really stood a chance against the other teams. Any team with a pass rush or that was capable of heavy blitzing wiped the offense out and the game was decided in the second quarter. However, f*** Marion Barber forever for that Broncos game. He's also a big part of the Tebow nonsense from that year.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Sep 6, 2016 -> 09:30 PM) The late 90s were just dreadful. Then after the Super Bowl with Lovie, they were just right on the cusp of the playoffs year after year but rarely good enough. From 2007-2013, they went 60-52 but only made the playoffs once in 7 seasons. The year Lovie was fired, and the Bears went 10-6 but missed the playoffs was a microcosm of Lovie's entire time in Chicago. That team was good enough to be talked about and noticed, but came up short every time when it mattered.

QUOTE (Y2JImmy0 @ Sep 6, 2016 -> 11:39 AM) Not even the average fan. People like David Haugh ( the lead columnist in the #1 newspaper in the 3rd largest market in the country), Laurence Holmes (670 the score host), others on Bears beat, and Michael Wilbon (national boob and blowhard) questioned the decision making process. It's all mind numbingly insane. Gould was bad. They didn't bring in competition because they didn't love the options. They liked Connor Barth better. He became available. They released Gould, saved money, and signed a different kicker that they were familiar with for less $$. The whole thing is really quite unbelievable. Wilbon has a tweet from last December pointing out that Gould was bad enough to replace. This weekend he tries to make the Bears front office out to be incompetent. Maybe they are, but not because of this. That's just Wilbon's reflexive anti-Chicago everything being the "Chicago guy" who knows nothing about the teams or the fanbases.

The shock, disbelief, and outrage over the Gould release shows you how much attention the average fan actually pays to things as they develop. Gould was mediocre last year and the release didn't happen in a vacuum, preseason showed his decline probably wasn't a fluke. He hasn't really been the same since his injury, really. He was being paid top dollar for a kicker. It just didn't make sense to keep paying him regardless of how much cap space they had. Kickers as accurate as Gould over the years are hard to find, but decent kickers aren't. It's not like Gould was groomed and drafted, the Bears plucked him out of nowhere after their kicker got hurt early in the season (I forgot his name, it was Paul Edinger's replacement).

Had a wedding I was in on Saturday, Baltimore Comic Con on Sunday, did chores on Monday - then I had someone call the cops on me for Gardening While Black (the cops asked me about a 5'10" black male wearing a blue shirt and blue shorts carrying a "butcher knife" (my gardening spade) walking around my neighborhood. So that was fun.

The oath of enlistment I took said "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same..." The words in that oath are specific. The allegiance is to the Constitution, which at least in theory guarantees peoples' rights and certain freedoms, not your ideas about what you want it to mean. I don't have to necessarily like or agree with what people do with that freedom so long as nobody else is being directly harmed by it. Nowhere in that oath did I swear to defend a flag. Or a song. The symbols mean absolutely nothing to me without belief in the ideas behind the symbols. Beware anyone who shows blind loyalty to symbols but completely ignores the meaning behind them. I didn't just stop believing this because I was discharged from active duty, so if we are going to talk about who is disrespecting me because I'm a veteran, I feel much more disrespected by you, if you fail to understand this and instead use me (to you, a faceless entity and not one of a diverse group of people) as a buffer for your own views. Stop patronizing me and pretending to be offended on my behalf. Besides, I didn't join the military so everybody can think, believe, and behave exactly how I want them to. That's fascism, and I'm not a fascist. Maybe you are, if you thought that's what it was about.

Phyllis Schafly is dead. So if and when we get a woman for president it will be exactly the way she wanted it - over her dead body.

CFL salaries are a fraction of what they are in the NFL. The biggest stars in the game might get 250k a year, also the CFL regular season is half over right now (it starts in June). It's not that the CFL isn't popular in Canada (it is), they don't have the massive TV deals the NFL has.

The other day, I was talking to my childhood best friend about his toddler and our 401(k)s. Man, wtf, we used to talk about Hennessy and b****es.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 26, 2016 -> 01:38 PM) Eh. I think the national view of religion is what has really changed here. It used to be pretty assumed that someone's religious views were going to be largely what their political views were based on. I don't think it is a case of this being a step forward towards religion, I think is more of a case of a good portion of the country taking a step back away from religion so it just appears differently. For example, it has been a pretty consistent theme to use the bible as a justification for the separation of the races. It is just today that more and more people have turned their backs on that sort of stupidity. It isn't that this sort of thinking is new, it is that it stands out more today than it used to because it was more commonly accepted. Things like divorce, kids out of wedlock, gay rights, etc all fall under that same umbrella. It stands out more today, but it isn't new. In fact I would argue it is precisely this revulsion towards those lines of thinking that I feel tells me more that people are moving away from those lines of thinking than to it. Otherwise people in large numbers still wouldn't be getting upset about it like they weren't 50, 100, 200 years ago. Abolitionists used religious justifications to do what they were doing too, FWIW

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 26, 2016 -> 01:31 PM) This is election is kind of the opposite of Romney. The right wing pretty well abandoned him. They knew he wasn't one of them, and they just largely pretended he didn't exist, but they sure didn't actively go out to cut his throat either. A great deal of the GOP has either gone silent to Trump, or flat out is public opposing him. I can't ever recall a major party candidate who has seen more of his own party ditch their Presidential candidate in public. Reince Priebus said he thinks Trump will be tied or ahead by Labor Day, which sounded more like "if he hasn't gotten his s*** together by then, forget everything and just start cutting our losses"

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 26, 2016 -> 01:05 PM) And in that same vein, we really should quit pretending that the true right wing is a new thing as well. There have always been ultra-nationalists in politics. There are always been some pretty extreme religious views in politics. Their have also been some pretty disgusting racists to even hold office. I know Indiana had a Klan member for a governor in the 20's along with most legislators. Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation IN the White House. None of these things are new. In modern politics, the GOP always needed those people's votes (it's not like the people who were throwing bricks at MLK ever went away, some of them are still alive), but obviously they weren't comfortable with it. Then here comes Trump blowing everything up. It was pretty telling that the rest of the Republican leadership hasn't said much of anything in response to that speech, like "how dare you call our candidate racist!" like they'd have done with someone like Romney. They just want this over.