Shoney'sPonyBoy

Most coaches with similar levels of talent can beat Saban. Maybe not every time they play him, but they can split games with him. uat has been given a completely free pass to cheat for around 15 years at this point. And no, that doesn't mean no one else cheated during that time frame, but they were allowed to cheat. Ha-Ha Clinton-Dix. They got caught doing exactly the same thing we got two years of probation, no bowl, no championship eligibility, no t.v. even for one year, loss of scholarships, and a 60 Minutes segment dedicated to how scandalous we were, and they got...nothing. Not even an investigation. They. Didn't. Even. Get. Investigated. And that's on an infraction that they didn't even deny, and that there was a paper trail to prove it and that was a national media story. Saban won a NC at LSU (but so did Les Miles and so did Ed Orgeron), but other than that, before going to uat Saban's record was somewhere between mediocre and pretty good. He was not SUPERCOACH until he was able to buy more talent than everyone else. Not sure why winning when you have a giant talent gap is considered so impressive. I remember SI doing a story a few years back on the four teams in the playoffs because uat had more five star players than the other three teams combined. That kind of talent hoarding happened organically. Sure it did. All that is to say that with NIL, that advantage is going away. And Saban knows it, and he knows what's going to happen as a result of it. That's why he whined about A&M pre-season so hard that the league sanctioned him. He knows that if you want to see how hard Nick Saban is to beat when you have as much talent as he does, you need only look at the uat-UGA games from last year. He doesn't dominate, he splits those games. NIL hasn't had time to even things out yet, but it will. Now everyone is allowed to buy players. Give it three more years, and I predict that Saban won't be any bigger factor than half a dozen other coaches in the SEC, just like he was before he went to uat. He'll either go ahead and retire at that point (I guess he'll be 73 or so) or just stop winning championships. He's not the one you've got to worry about. Kirby Smart is the one you've got to worry about.

Clemson is an interesting outlier. Not saying they haven't had a couple of very highly ranked classes, but if you go back and look, they have had their biggest successes with pretty pedestrian recruiting classes. (They also had them when the ACC was probably at their weakest point in who knows how long.) But if you look at the four years prior to their first playoff appearance and go forward through last year their recruiting classes are as follows: 10th, 20th, 15th, 16th, 9th, 11th, 16th, 7th, 10th, 3rd, and 5th. For comparison's sake, Auburn's recruiting classes over the same time period were: 5th, 11th, 10th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 9th, 12th, 11th, 7th, and 19th. So for seven of those years Auburn out-recruited Clemson, and in an eighth year we were only one spot lower.

I agree and I think it's more fundamental than that. He doesn't need the money or the fame and I think he sees coaching at a historically black college as a personal mission.

O.k. I have no idea what any of that has to do with what I typed. I know health care a pet topic of yours. The bottom line is that you can't have a massive centralized federal government and expect that people aren't going to—one way or another—attempt use it to exert control whenever and wherever they can to benefit themselves. Anywhere there is a massive sword laying around, people are going to fight for the ability to pick it up and swing it in furtherance of their objectives. If you voted for Hillary Clinton for POTUS you voted for probably the individual most willing to sell government influence and generally all around greediest grifter to seek that office since I don't know who. So if you did that I can't see that your concern about American greed is genuine. It's likely just an excuse to give yourself a moral high ground to argue for the policies you favor. But tying this to your recent hysteria about guns, the more powerful the tool, the greater the capacity for damage. Also the greatest capacity for good. The guy who makes drive-by cryptic statements as though they are fact yet never substantiates them may call that simplistic, but I challenge anyone to actually refute it (what he does is not in any way a refutation). The problem is that you think you can limit the damage while preserving the good. And you are willing to do violence to the first amendment to accomplish this (and btw, calling a person's own campaign for a candidate "dark money" might play well in certain audiences, but all you're talking about is telling citizens that they don't have free speech when it comes to politics). And, as usual, you completely ignore the direct questions I asked about how you plan to accomplish this practically. Yes or no: Posting "AU9377 For President!" would become illegal under your plan? If not, you've done exactly nothing to achieve your goal. Again, more people will see that on a decent online platform than they would on a billboard. The internet IMO has made what you want to do impossible, so there's no point in considering it, really.

That's the whole point. If it's so important to them, why do they include it with a bunch of stuff that they know—or at least SHOULD know—is a non-starter? They guarantee its demise out of the gate, same as with the Republicans and Obamacare. It's a political strategy, not a real attempt to change anything. Then they (and you) can claim they are standing up for the people and fighting for what's right (while violins play and an American flag waves in the breeze in the background), all the while knowing that it won't pass. So instead of taking responsibility for that themselves, they get to blame the other party for "blocking" all of their snow-white attempts at virtuous governance. Again, the Republicans do it too. They are the masters of it. I have come to believe that they don't even want to be the majority party any more. They love that position of not having to do anything they campaigned on because the evil Democrats won't let them.

The constitution is not a "guiding document" in our system of government. It's a governing document. It is the highest governmental authority we have. It trumps lower court rulings, legislative actions, and executive actions. The examples you gave are both examples of constitutional contradictions. Specific instances that contradicted the overall principle of the document. In other words, instances that were in and of themselves unconstitutional because they violated the spirit of the rest of the document. How is placing a limitation on political speech similar to those examples? Do you really think censoring political speech goes against the intent of the 1st Amendment in the same way that excluding minorities from possessing the same inherent rights as white men does? "I don't like the consequences of upholding these inherent rights," isn't the same as violating the notion of inherent rights. Plus, like I said earlier, there's a way to fix this without ignoring the constitution. It would take a long time to fix and would be difficult, but it's not a complicated idea. You just reduce the size and scope and reach and power of the federal government. The people who conceived of the idea of a constitution that guaranteed inherent rights never intended for them to co-exist with a behemoth federal government like ours. Faced with a choice between the federal government that by your own words is the enforcement arm of the very problem you describe and the constitution, I'm taking the constitution and the 1st Amendment.

No, it's the truth. If they really wanted to have done something about it so far they would have. They've had opportunities.

Yet you want the federal government to exert even more control over society. Do you not realize that the federal government exerting so much control over society and having to grow so large to support that control is exactly how we got to where you just described we are in the first place?

Yeah, I already knew why you were saying what you were saying, but you didn't address the practical reality of what you want to do. You'd make it illegal to type "AU9377 FOR PRESIDENT!" on the internet? And people in Australia are not as free as Americans. They do not protect the right to bear arms either.

I understand why you say what you say, but we're really going to censor citizen's speech when it comes to political candidates? If it is illegal for me to take out a billboard that says, "AU9377 for President!" then how can it be legal for me to post that very same thing on a message board or on Facebook? Arguably more people will see it online than on the billboard. It doesn't even seem possible to do what you're saying we should do. Also—and I don't mean any offense by this—but you seem awfully dismissive of not just the constitution, but the whole notion that liberty has a price, for a lawyer.

But the Citizens United ruling upheld the right of corporations and citizens to spend as much money on their own campaigns as they want to support (or oppose) a candidate as long as they aren't giving the money directly to the candidate and operate independently of the candidate's official campaign. So even if PACs went away, you'd still have influence.

No, it's correct, and the one who hasn't done his homework is you. Either that or you are very gullible. Name a bill the Democrats have introduced that ONLY addresses campaign finance without bundling it with other stuff that they know Republicans won't pass. In the case of HR-1, a bunch of stuff making voter fraud easier. The Republicans do the same thing. They introduced what—6 different bills to dismantle Obamacare...when they knew there was no chance for them to pass. As soon as they got a majority they magically couldn't agree on a single one. So how serious were they about overturning Obamacare? Not at all is my answer. Same with this. You introduce legislation you know won't pass so that you can claim to be battling the evil other party who won't cooperate. It's just a PR campaign. And it looks like you fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

"That and the fact that this data isn't evidence of anything except that people were walking around in public spaces near voting boxes." Dozens of times (they didn't even qualify as a "mule" unless they had gone to a voter box at least 23 times). Usually between 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. And mysteriously wearing latex gloves only after a voter fraud indictment came down in Arizona with the key piece of forensics being fingerprinting the ballots. And ping analytics from 2020 identifying many of them as the same people involved in riots during the 2020 runs who were associated with Antifa groups and BLM. And video from the collection sites showing "mules" taking pictures so as to get paid to deliver ballots—which is illegal in and of itself. And interviews with some of the "mules" confirming the payment and revealing that non-profits were the source of the funding, which is also illegal in and of itself. And confirmation of inflated voter rolls in the states and counties investigated. Again, if you haven't seen the movie you simply don't know what you're talking about. Doesn't mean the election was stolen. Doesn't mean there was enough of this that it resulted in a needle move, just like the voter fraud you mentioned. There's always voter fraud in every election with dead people voting and people voting multiple times and the like. From both parties. But this was very shady. Like I said earlier, if you can watch it and still refuse to admit that there was some shady !#$@ going on here, you're just a partisan tribseman who wouldn't admit fault for your team no matter what evidence was presented. I find several posters here to be of that character.

1. I would be willing to bet that not a single poster completely dismissing the movie has actually seen it. So talk about constructing an argument to support a pre-conceived prediction. 2. Aren't there pretty tight time constraints involved in contesting an election? So collecting data like this to present wouldn't really be feasible to actually contest an election (for those using the, "Well if there really was evidence, why didn't it get presented?" argument). 3. And if so, it would appear that the FFs either didn't anticipate finding evidence well after the election that fraud had occurred or they figured even if that happened it would be better for the country to just move forward regardless. 4. Did the movie claim the "100 foot" perimeter or is that just the popular criticism? Geotracking is quite accurate...it's what Uber and Lyft drivers use and it tells you what side of the street a fare is on. It brings you right to them. So if the movie is the one using the "100 feet" criteria then I would think that would significantly weaken their case. If it's just the popular criticism, it's a BS criticism. 5. I'm not saying that the election was stolen and I don't think this movie proves that it was. However, if you can't at least admit that the behavior in the movie looks shady as hell—to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy—you might be a tribal partisan.

Neither do Democrats.

1. Homosexual sex being illegal in the 1920s or 1950s isn't the same as any state "outlawing" gay marriage in 2022. It's a bogus comparison. You two really think any state would make same-sex marriage illegal? As in, arrest and fine or imprison someone for holding a same-sex marriage the way people were sometimes arrested and jailed for being caught having gay sex back then? Or are we just talking about—as I said—refusing to recognize a same-sex marriage as a legal marriage? 2. When and where? I was unaware that one had ever been passed when citizens got to vote on the issue. 3. Yes we do. That reason is that our system was designed to be a constitutional representative republic in which citizens didn't vote on many issues directly, but elected representatives to vote for them and the constitution is supposed to be the highest authority in the country, far higher than popularity. It's accurate to use a form of the word "democracy" as an adjective to describe that system, as in, "The US system is a relatively democratic form of government," but the insistence of people on the left of using it as a noun—which is a usage that is not very accurate IMO—I think is deliberate. I believe that you were the one posting upthread, for example, that abortion has 70% approval from the public. So what? That has nothing to do with whether it's constitutional or not. That statistic a completely irrelevant detail in the context of this debate, but the insistence on calling our country a democracy implies that it is relevant and should sway the debate somehow. I personally cannot fathom how anyone reads the 14th amendment and comes away from it having concluded that a "right" exists to have an abortion. I've never seen anyone explain it, either. If you can connect those dots, please do; I will have learned the answer to a question that I have been asking about for around four decades. It sure looks to me in Roe V. Wade like the court simply ruled on an issue based solely on popularity and just made up a legal justification for it. I'm sure that manufactured legal justification was based on other court cases that also did violence to the 14th amendment, but ultimately they named the 14th amendment as the constitutional basis for the ruling. Back to your statement, "We have a constitution for a reason." We do. It's supposed to stop things like that from happening.

Well, you're riding a corndog on a lake.

The distinction is that no states ever outlawed gay marriage. They just didn't sanction it. No one went to prison for holding a same-sex marriage. It just wasn't granted legal status. People talk about the US on this board almost universally as being a democracy. Did same-sex marriage ever win even a single state referendum in any state in which one was ever held? I guess it's only a democracy when convenient.

There already are laws telling men what they can and cannot do with their sperm. More than one. Men can't do anything with their sperm that poses an unwanted or harmful externality to another human being.

That dichotomy only makes sense from the standpoint of the adults in question. It's nonsensical when considering the unborn contingent.

So I'm white. A white, hetero, cis male, in fact. I have no interest in social justice or racial equality other than my values and opinions. I shouldn't apply them to that situation?

A few random thoughts: 1. Fewer than 20% of Americans use Twitter. Our REPUBLIC will be fine no matter what Twitter does. 2. I find it interesting that so many people assume that just because Twitter will presumably no longer censor true reports about Hunter Biden's laptop and other conservative viewpoints, that it will have no moderation at all. That seems like a very false dilemma. It seems highly unlikely to me that Twitter will have no moderation of any kind. $44 BILLION dollars is a lot of money to flush down the toilet. 3. If, as someone posted above, it is a danger to our REPUBLIC to allow people to post online without moderation because the majority of people are not thoughtful enough to handle such a liberty, then the 1st Amendment is not the first right we should be worried about. If our REPUBLIC is in danger because too many people aren't intelligent enough to be trusted to post online responsibly, what the hell are we doing allowing any citizen who can fog a mirror vote? And no, the point I'm making is not that we need to start making voting contingent upon passing knowledge tests or intelligence tests. It's that if we feel like we can trust the REPUBLIC to the citizenry in something as important as electing our representatives (and since we are a REPUBLIC and not a democracy, other than state referendums on usually minor issues, electing representatives is the most important and significant act of self-governance we have access to), I think we can trust the same people to post online without fearing for the ruin of the country. Even unmoderated. Though again, I don't think that's going to happen.

It's amazing that our system tolerates this sort of thing. And you might be amazed/disgusted to learn that there is no legal way to force the issue. This is exactly what Bryan Stevenson has been fighting his whole career. I would have gone crazy with frustration long ago if I had been in his position. The only pressure that can be applied is political pressure and/or media pressure. But even after "Just Mercy," you see that this still goes on.

Continuing on, I do not believe in the death penalty. At all, in any case. I don't believe that government can handle that sort of responsibility adequately, and the numbers for capital punishment are my evidence for that claim. it's applied unjustly with regard to race and far, far too many people are convicted and sentenced to death who are innocent. Also, the only reason IMO that the death penalty even exists is that we follow a mostly retributive model of justice, which IMO is the worst model possible. I don't believe in the state punishing citizens. I believe in the state removing people from the general population to protect other citizens. I believe in the deterrent model (which seems to be irrelevant to the death penalty, but which does seem to have some value for lesser crimes). I believe in at least the possibility of a rehabilitative model, although we are far, far away from even attempting that. I believe in a restorative model, at least for some crimes. Instead of rotting in a tiny cell trying to avoid prison rape, what if the inmate was instead doing something productive to compensate his or her victims in some way? But we are too obsessed with the retributive model for any of that to get much traction. Our societal goal is to punish people as much as possible, so people go into prison maybe non-violent offenders and come out with a master's degree in crime that now includes violence. Can't get a job on the outside, but the ex-con did learn several things inside and he can't earn honestly, so he puts those new tricks into action. Ends up going in for a second run and now he comes out with a PhD. And we've got to stop with this War on Drugs that Nixon's cabinet member admitted was just to put black people in prison. Enough already.

I sometimes have time to write long posts, but not always. So I may have to participate in this thread in pieces. I have voted mostly Republican in most representative elections. POTUS: two Democrats, three Republicans, the rest 3rd party. To me the Republican Party is useful mainly because they don't do anything. They are a space-holder. So when the Democratic Party wants to to something that would IMO end up being detrimental to the country, the Republican Party generally stops it from happening. But they have no offense, only defense. I honestly think they have become more comfortable as the minority party so that their constituents won't expect them to accomplish anything. Don't get me wrong. I think the individual players want to keep their jobs, but I think they like it when they are the minority party overall. Then they are only expected to play defense. The Democratic Party just keeps wanting to enact policies to move the country into being a European style social democracy, which I don't think would work well in this country. They also want to enact legislation and manipulate regulation regarding environmental concerns that they don't understand and that will end up being a real problem. Actually, they want to enact legislation and manipulate regulation about a lot of things they don't understand and that will have negative unintended consequences. So it's apparently not the desire of the board to boil things down to simple terms, but IMO the Republicans don't do enough and the Democrats try to do way too much, specifically way too much that they don't understand or haven't thought through. IMO the latter is more destructive than the former, so if the Republicans can get rid of Trump and nominate someone else, I'll probably vote Republican again. I won't vote for Trump if he's the nominee. One specific issue I have time to make what I hope will be an appropriately "serious" post about this morning is the gun issue. We'll find out if the expectations communicated above apply equally here or only to the opinions the board agrees with, because my opinion isn't shared by many that I have met so far. But IMO, the mainstream opinion regarding guns is not based on any sort of logic. It's 100% primitive emotion and non-understanding on par with showing a child a nickel and a dime and the child picks the nickel because it's bigger without realizing that the dime is more valuable. AR-15-style guns kill roughly 200 people per year in the United States despite there being tens of millions in circulation. Handguns kill roughly 33,000. There are more in circulation, yes, but not so many more that the numbers even out. AR-15s are still less deadly than handguns. They aren't potentially less deadly than handguns. In terms of potential for damage, they win, of course. But the fact is that they kill significantly fewer people each year—both in terms of raw numbers and per capita—than handguns. Yet for some reason (I actually think I know why), people are only willing to consider the issue in terms of potential danger while ignoring the actuality of what happens. I think the first reason is simple human nature, which has many people ignoring that a few hundred children die every year in swimming pools every year, but being afraid for them to swim in the ocean because they are afraid of sharks, which kill 1-2 people per year. Sharks are simply scarier than swimming pools. AR-15s are scarier than .38 revolvers. They are. They're bigger, look like military weapons, louder. But they don't kill anywhere near as many people as the .38 revolver. That's the fact. I also think there's an element of white privilege involved. Handguns overwhelmingly kill minorities, and white people don't give that a second thought. Facebook doesn't light up like a pinball machine every Monday after 15 minorities have been shot and killed in Chicago and Detroit in individual incidents, but let 15 white people get shot in a mall at the same time and see what Facebook looks like in the aftermath. White people get shot like that with AR-15s (actually, that's not even true...last I checked, handguns were still the number one weapon of choice even in mass shootings, but that's the mainstream media fueled perception, so we'll go with it here). I think we white people identify with the people getting shot in the mall in a mass shooting and we do not identify with the minorities getting shot on 8 Mile. Therefore, despite the facts, we are outraged by the weapon involved in the former and barely notice the latter. Also, to people who actually do believe in the 2nd Amendment, IMO if you view it in the historical context in which it was written I don't think you can escape the conclusion that it was not written to protect the right to hunt, or target practice, or even for personal protection. The reason for the amendment is to protect the citizenry against government—both foreign and domestic. Right now is when those of you who 60 days or more ago would be rolling your eyes and ridiculing the idea of the citizenry successfully resisting an army, but that's largely what is happening in Ukraine right now. So there was a reason for my challenge regarding the AR-15 style weapon comment above. Which—not to make this the central issue of the post, but both the original comment and the fact that my challenge was originally arrogantly dismissed as being non-serious and non-intelligent were IMO just as snarky as anything I had to say in the matter. Go back and read the original comment regarding people who would carry an AR-15 in public and tell me it wasn't dripping with contempt for anyone who would do such a thing. Anyway, I think society would be better off by banning handguns while keeping long guns—including AR-style weapons—legal. Fewer people would have guns, that's for sure. They are a lot more expensive, as is the ammo. Fewer people would have dozens of guns...how many ARs do you think one person would choose to buy? You'd have lots fewer people carrying firearms in public. It's a lot harder to commit suicide with one—someone would have to be familiar with the weapon just to chamber a round, which is not true of a revolver. Since they are legal now and there are only tens of millions in circulation rather than hundreds, you probably wouldn't see overall ownership go up much. But I expect some ridicule for suggesting that we do something that could potentially reduce gun deaths by a huge percentage. Because, you know, AR-15s are scary.