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wvParticipantId love it if they could play the Eagles or the Vikes again. I think they would beat both of those teams.
The Saints scare me. Atlanta scares me. Panthers scare me.
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vwvParticipant“….. According to letterpile.com: “Charles Dickens was involved in charities and social issues throughout his entire life. In early 1843 he read a government report describing the conditions of women and children employed in mines and factories, it described the abuse of the laborers. [Friedrich Engels read the same report, which documented that children as young as eight were hauling coal carts 11 hours a day.] He was stricken down by these victims. Dickens vowed he would strike a ‘sledge hammer blow,’ on behalf of the ‘poor man’s child.’”
“The idea for the Carol came to him in October 1843, while doing a talk [in industrial Manchester, England, where the average life expectancy of a laborer in 1842 was 17]; he thought the best way to bring attention to the horror that was happening, would be to write a story instead of an article.”
In A Christmas Carol, a boy and a girl, Ignorance and Want, are hidden in the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present. “‘They are Man’s, and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!’”
Is this so remote from our own time?…see link…
link:http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/08/inve-d08.htmlDecember 25, 2017 at 7:18 pm in reply to: Should the Rams rest their starters against the 9ers? #79547wvParticipantI say beat the 49ers with back-ups.
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vwvParticipantWe have a white christmas in WV today. Snow, that is.
Happy Holidays, people.
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vwvParticipantI watched it on Replay, and the thing that stood out most to me, (besides Gurley)
was just how much Goff struggled with accuracy today. Many of his passes were caught but the WR’s had to really twist and contort themselves to catch the ball. He was not very smooth today — and yet, at the end of the day — 4 TD passes and no INTs. (and the fumble wasnt his fault)So thats a great sign that he can be off, and the Rams still win on the road.
The second most obvious thing was just how much legatron does to help the special teams. The kick team aint so special without him.
The third obvious thing was how much better McV’s scheme and Offensive personnel were compared to plodding, predictable Tennessee.
The fourth thing i noticed was that the Rams great pass-rushers were just not getting to the QB today.
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vwvParticipantThe blue-man is an institution.
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vwvParticipantOk, so they get a home game win or lose. But a win or loss still has bearing on the opponent.
Interesting.
…btw, Goff needs almost 200 yards to get to 4000. I’d like the kid to get 4000.
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vwvParticipantI have to say, that is really surprising to me. I thought Seattle would get blown apart. Maybe i should give the Rams more credit for last week, i dunno.
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vwvParticipantSo is there any reason the Rams should play starters against SF?
Does the game mean anything as far as playoff scenarios?
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vwvParticipantFor me this was the biggest game of the season. The Seahawks were crippled and imploding. THIS is exactly the kind of game I wanted to see out of this team.
On the road, with a lot on the line, against a winning team, and they gutted out a tough meaningful win.That is what division champs do. Its what Seattle usually does.
To me they broke down a door today. There’s more doors, but this was a big one.
Such a fun team to root for, too. I have simply marveled at the way McV gets players open. It is night and day from the last ten years. Night and Day. And Im not talking about wins and losses — just the beauty of the scheme. Players catch it in stride and they are wide open and have lots of space. Reminds me so much of the old Bill Walsh offense.
What a great year.
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vwvParticipant“SportsCenter@SportsCenter
Todd Gurley is the first player to have 100 rush yards and 150 receiving yards in a game since Herschel Walker in 1986.”Damn. In this age of passing, that really surprises me. I would have thought that feat had happened a few times per season this decade.
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vwvParticipantI remember a time back in the 70’s when ram fans were bored with Coastal/Western Division Titles.
Not anymore.Eleven Wins. Wow.
E-leven…wins.
Wow.
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vDecember 24, 2017 at 1:41 am in reply to: Fisher says he left Rams in 'good shape,' lauds Sean McVay #79396wvParticipantBut I actually never liked Fisher as a head coach. There were too many little things he did that bothered me. I like McVay/Phillips just fine.
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Why didnt you like him?
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vDecember 23, 2017 at 6:12 pm in reply to: Fisher says he left Rams in 'good shape,' lauds Sean McVay #79383wvParticipantWell they had lots of high draft choices — cause of the RG3 trade and because they kept Losing.
But sure they picked some good players. They took a chance on Quinn and he did well. Brockers has done well. Tru Johnson. Ogletree.
Well first, Spags/Devaney took Quinn the year before. He’s not a Fisher/Snead guy.
BUT it wasn’t just high draft choices.
But first, the first round. Their existing 1st round picks include Brockers, Austin, Tree, Donald, Gurley, and Goff. You will be hard pressed to find many teams with a 1st round record THAT good, and that’s even with the GR miss. Donald and Gurley were both rookies of the year. Both are shining this year. Donald is one of the best defensive players of his generation. Goff sure looks like he will slowly achieve his potential.
Look at the secondary. They could afford to let both Jenkins (2nd round) and McLeod (UDFA) go and trade Gaines (6th round) as part of the Watkins deal (he’s a starter there) and STILL came up with not only Tru (3rd round) but also Joyner (2nd round) and Hill (UDFA). And Cody Davis (UDFA) looked good when he played. That is about as good as it gets drafting for the secondary, or as good as you will ever see without a 1st round pick.
The depth on the front 7 is good too–Hager (7th round), Littleton (UDFA), Longacre (UDFA), Westbrooks (UDFA) have all taken the field and done well, sometimes as injury replacements. Barron was a trade for, basically, a 4th round pick.
Special teams is monumental. That includes Hekker (UDFA), Zuerlein (6th round), Cooper (4th round), the aforementioned Hager and Littleton (2 blocked punts!) and Thomas too (6th round). Special teams won a whole game for them, and contributed heavily in the Seattle win.
Austin is stil a role player. McVay values him though I don’t know if he has a future. Higbee (4th round) is okay but is starting for now…at least he’s a blocker. There’s Hav (2nd round) and Brown (3rd round), both of whom do well in a very good OL.
That my friend is a lot.
I don’t think it can be legitmately downplayed.
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Well first off, i would think plenty of other personnel depts could indeed pick first round players just as good as those you listed, if they picked in the same high slots the Rams picked most of them in. I mean, Tavon was a miss as far as I’m concerned. GRob was a big miss.
Having said that sure, it was good personnel work. I think Snead is good. I give HIM better than a “C”. He might very well be an “A”.
Fisher failed to draft a topnotch Wide Receiver and he failed to find a good free agent WR. And his tight ends were not scary to opposing teams either. Its awfully hard to go deep in the playoffs with that kind of glaring weakness. It can be done, but its hard.
So what grade would YOU give Fisher? And would YOU hire him if you were a struggling team?
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vDecember 23, 2017 at 6:04 pm in reply to: Fisher says he left Rams in 'good shape,' lauds Sean McVay #79381wvParticipantI would hire Fisher if I were a downtrodden team like Cleveland or the Rams used to be. With the secret plan to fireplace him once he got some decent talent in and violet up the defensive Roster.
Remember Marty Schottenhiemer? He could really build a talented team. I would have done the same thing with him.
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Really? You would hire him if you were the Browns?
I would not.
I would want a more entertaining offense.
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vDecember 23, 2017 at 5:35 pm in reply to: Fisher says he left Rams in 'good shape,' lauds Sean McVay #79378wvParticipantWell they had lots of high draft choices — cause of the RG3 trade and because they kept Losing.
But sure they picked some good players. They took a chance on Quinn and he did well. Brockers has done well. Tru Johnson. Ogletree.
McQuade, Legatron. Hekker.
P.Cooper, Gurley, Havenstein, Goff on offense.Lots of good players picked by Snisher.
But they totally fucked up the Wide Receiver Unit year after year after year. Jarod Cook. Britt. Etc.
Again, for me Fisher will always be a rather “ordinary” NFL coach. I dont think he’s terrible, but i wouldnt ever hire him if i were an owner. I never saw in Fisher any real “separation” from the vast majority of NFL coaches. If Fisher were a QB he’d be Andy Dalton. You can win with Dalton but he’s no Drew Brees. Ya know. Fisher was ok. He was better than his record i think. But i never had much faith he’d be able to outcoach the really topnotch coaches in the NFL.
Course this isnt like math. Just an opinion based on my gut intuitions and stuff.
To reduce to a report card — Fisher was a “C”. Not an “F” but not more than a “C” either. When he was hired i was thinking he’d be a “B”.
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vwvParticipantTo me it really means they’re a year away.
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I would not jump to the conclusion they are a Year away ; I think they’ll be ready by the summer Solstice. Thats only 182 days away.
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vAnd if the earth’s orbit shifts?
I know, I know…that would just be another “excuse.”
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Injuries to the Earth have happened lots of times in the last four billion years.
The elite planets overcome those kinds of things.
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vwvParticipantI think thats a very very good point he’s making,
and it always just bounces off of Americans-brains,
especially rightwing-brains.The military-industrial-game would crumble if
voters really allowed that to sink in.w
vwvParticipantTo me it really means they’re a year away.
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I would not jump to the conclusion they are a Year away ; I think they’ll be ready by the summer Solstice. Thats only 182 days away.
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vwvParticipantA nice Marx quote from the Robin Kelley article:
“…For my generation, the formal classroom was never the space for deep critique precisely because it was not a place of love. The classroom was—and still is—a performative space, where faculty and students compete with each other. Through study groups, we created our own intellectual communities held together by principle and love, though the specters of sectarianism, ego, and just-plain childishness blurred our vision and threatened our camaraderie. Still, the political study group was our lifeblood—both on and off campus. We lived by Karl Marx’s pithy 1844 statement:
But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.
Study groups introduced me to C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Chancellor Williams, George E. M. James, Shulamith Firestone, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Turé, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Chinweizu Ibekwe, Amílcar Cabral, and others. These texts were our sources of social critique and weapons in our class war on the bourgeois canon. As self-styled activist-intellectuals, it never occurred to us to refuse to read a text simply because it validated the racism, sexism, free-market ideology, and bourgeois liberalism against which we railed. Nothing was off limits. On the contrary, delving into these works only sharpened our critical faculties….”
wvParticipantWinter Solstice until Summer Solstice: 365 / 2. So 182.5 days.
On a bright note, the days will get longer from now until then…
Sure, you have to put a damper on things. Damn you.
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Well the Spring Soltice is only 182.5 / 2,
so dont yellow the snow over this.w
vwvParticipantThe great ones can shake it off but not all kickers can.
In Ficken, he has fresh snow, so to speak….
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If Ficken yellows the snow Sunday,
were all gonna be pissed.w
vwvParticipantI was merely playing off the disagreeing about disagreeing about agreeing with the agreement stuff that happened earlier in the thread. Though, admittedly, it was always a wobbly train from the beginning. Anyway…
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I dont get the wobblies on a train metaphor at all.
Although maybe you were just talking about special teams.
Still, I think the special teams are more like Trotskyists on a jet-ski.
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wvParticipantThis team is truly blessed,
to have so many opposing players getting injured.Its a blessing.
I feel the blessedness.
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vwvParticipantAgreed. Fisher had plenty of just-plain-bad-luck. He woulda done better with good-luck.
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vDecember 22, 2017 at 11:17 am in reply to: Titans color commentator Dave McGinnis has personal insight on Rams #79315wvParticipant[Gurley] had a down year last year, he wasn’t healthy
Well that’s interesting.
And, not previously known or said.
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I hope someone asks Gurley about that.
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vwvParticipantThe article mentions Robin DG Kelley who i had never heard of. I found this whole article interesting…”being in but not of the University”….:
Kelley:http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle
“…Instead I want to draw attention to the contradictory impulses within the movement: the tension between reform and revolution, between desiring to belong and rejecting the university as a cog in the neoliberal order. I want to think about what it means for black students to seek love from an institution incapable of loving them—of loving anyone, perhaps—and to manifest this yearning by framing their lives largely through a lens of trauma. And I want to think about what it means for black students to choose to follow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call to become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security.
It is fair to say that most black students have minimal interest in joining the current wave of activism. Many are not politically radical, while others feel that they do not yet have the discernment to know if they are. Others fear that an activist past may haunt them in the future, while the majority is simply trying to get through school and join the ranks of professionals. This essay does not attempt to offer such students an invitation to activism, although that would be a worthy project. Rather, I am interested in speaking to those who are already activists, specifically about the ideological fissures in their movement and what these might tell us about the character of contemporary black movements, the future of the university, and what I believe is a crisis of political education. And while crises reveal contradictions, they also signal opportunities.
In particular, I challenge student activists to not cleave their activism from their intellectual lives or mistakenly believe that because the university does not offer them the education they crave, it is beyond their reach. There is a long history of black activists repurposing university resources to instruct themselves and one another—to self-radicalize, in effect. This is not to say that today’s student activists should do exactly as was done in the past, but historical models may provide valuable insights for those seeking novel solutions. Moreover, I encourage student activists to carefully consider the language they use to frame their grievances. In particular, I argue that while trauma can be an entrance into activism, it is not in itself a destination and may even trick activists into adopting the language of the neoliberal institutions they are at pains to reject…..
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….Recently, Rodney’s notion of the guerrilla intellectual has been resuscitated and transformed in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.Harney and Moten disavow the very idea that the university is, or can ever be, an enlightened place, by which I mean a place that would actively seek to disrupt the reproduction of our culture’s classed, racialized, nationalized, gendered, moneyed, and militarized stratifications. Instead they argue that the university is dedicated to professionalization, order, scientific efficiency, counterinsurgency, and war—- wars on terror, sovereign nations, communism, drugs, and gangs. The authors advocate refuge in and sabotage from the undercommons, a subaltern, subversive way of being in but not of the university. The undercommons is a fugitive network where a commitment to abolition and collectivity prevails over a university culture bent on creating socially isolated individuals whose academic skepticism and claims of objectivity leave the world-as-it-is intact.
Unlike Rodney’s guerrilla intellectuals, Harney and Moten’s guerrillas are not preparing to strike, planning to seize power, contesting the university (or the state; the difference isn’t always clear)—at least not on the terms they have set. To do so would be to recognize the university and its legitimacy and to be invested in its regimes of professionalization. Instead Harney and Moten argue that the university’s power over our lives is illusory. It lulls us into believing that politics—to lobby for access to, or control over, such institutions—is our only salvation. The book is a clarion call to think together, to plan together in undisciplined assembly. When The Undercommons hit the Internet—first as a 2008 essay and then as a 2013 collection of essays—it spread like wildfire among the PhD precariat and radical-thinking graduate students. For many young scholars cobbling together a life adjuncting, Harney and Moten’s critique of the university spoke an essential truth: “It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.”….see link….
wvParticipantTo me this is more of a ‘statement’ game than the Seahawk game. (The Seahawks were so crippled i just totally dismiss that game.)
The Titans are a winning, desperate team, playing at home. This is the kind of December game, teams like Pitt and New England WIN. Its usually close — but they find a way to win in the fourth quarter.
If a Field Goal gets blocked I’m going to complain about picking a kicker who relies on a ‘low trajectory’.
Win this one, and they can have a bye against the 49ers.
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vwvParticipantWell i agree with all the points made in the thread (Gurley worked harder, More weapons, the Move, Whitworth, Experience, etc)
But i also think
the difference between McV and Fisher is Significant. I dont think its a small difference. McV is a SIGNIFICANTLY better coach than Jeff Fisher. And yes, its about the Offense.w
vwvParticipantWell what i take from that vid is….we can have our individual meta-notions about the Utopia we want and all that, and there’s nothing wrong with thinking about that, but we have to start ‘where we are’ in the real world. So, whether we are socialists or marxists or whatever — a National single-payer health care policy would be a good thing. An important thing.
Granted its not “the Revolution” but its still a good thing, and getting people to think about that kind of policy also gets people to think about
the meta-issues too, only from the opposite direction. If that makes any sense.
It gets to the Meta through the Policy analysis. Rather than the other way around.I suspect almost every activist wrastles with ‘reform’ vs ‘revolution’ in some way or another.
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