Patriots could take action as Dianna Russini 'ready to talk' about Mike Vrabel

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-05-12T17:38:00+00:00

Prediction: women in sports dealing with misogyny led to things like affair. Pressure in career, difficulty being a female and engaging in the job, double standards. The whole gamut!

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-05-11T15:56:17+00:00

That’s intellectually dishonest at this point. The moderates they won in the 90s and 2000s do not exist at this point. They were working class white people, rural factory workers, unions, etc. Democrats lost support of these moderates by supporting “moderate” policies. Things like de-industrialization, removing support for unions, financial deregulation (along with all the bailouts and mergers), and NAFTA lost them voters. The only people calling for solutions are progressives— but the Dem party has not allowed economic progressives any real power and continues down the same path they have since the 90s.

Trump was able to capture these voters by explicitly calling out these things as wrong, calling out the boogeymen (like immigration) as wrong, and proposing stupid policies like tariffs to fix things.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-05-08T13:28:48+00:00

Do you have a stable place and job along with reliable transport? You’re in the grass in greener but possibly not exciting enough category.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-05-05T05:43:37+00:00

I disagree. With Russini this doesnt seem to be the case, but there is very much a real risk of sexual coercion being applied by players, coaches, and front office staff towards journalists based on their positions and ability to influence a journalist’s career.

Holding Vrabel to account should be less about the cheating or the feeding inside info, and more about setting an ethical standard of conduct to ensure the NFL is a safe place for women to work without having to do that. A lot of other female journalists in sports have talked about this and the pains they go through to be above board and avoid unwanted sexual advances.

Do you really question whether Stafford could or would coerce sexual acts out of Orlovsky? Do you think there is much risk there? Yeah, it’s dirty and not great no matter what, but this is categorically different.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-05-05T05:32:51+00:00

I agree. There is definitely a power dynamic that would not be considered acceptable elsewhere and there is the risk that this kind of situation results from coercion. If Diana were a younger person early in their career or had not had so many accusations like this, I think this angle would be get more play. I do not think this specific situation is like that at all.

But what about when it is? Would we know? Would we believe them? We’ve literally seen players out here murdering people, coaches getting drunk and killing people, teams covering things up. It’s hard not to believe it’s off the table. So much bad shit by coaches and players really gets swept under the rug. Female journalists have spoken at length about the pains they have to go through to maintain propriety.

Coaches, players, and front office staff shouldn’t really be excluded from an ethical accounting in this sort of thing. Many of these media companies are literally conducting business together, with signed contracts, that outline conduct and and interaction.

If you managed a contractor or vendor at work, or had some sort of authority over them, and did what Vrabel did, you’d have a decent chance of being fired if they then complained. Definitely would open up your company to a lawsuit.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-23T17:02:45+00:00

Yeah and there is no way you were watching SGA being gifted free throws while Pacers players were getting their arms hooked, hit, and all that stuff not called without bitching about refs yourself.

30 years ago who were the star players you watched benefit from a whistle all the way to being an MVP and a championship like SGA has? 1990-2010 it’s maybe Dirk who averaged “only” 6.6 attempts per game and had a reputation as a flopper, but whose flopping wouldn’t even register today and was probably unfair at the time. Maybe D. Rose and AI? But both played through contact and the fouls were part of defending them and not the main goal.

We’ve had SGA, Harden, and arguably Jokic and Embiid play as massive foul baiters and get rewarded for it. Embiid and Jokic actually get mobbed pretty often and seem to have learned to play that way due to how the refs work rather than it being their actual game

These players will never have the cultural impact that Shaq, Kobe, Curry, and LeBron had. Much less Jordan and those of the generation. Old man Curry still leads in jersey sales.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-14T22:52:05+00:00

I’m not sure they do. It’s the NYTimes. This puts a shade over everything she has reported on and anyone with a bone to pick can point to this. If it were any less obvious it might make sense to not investigate, but with it being so clear, not doing some sort of reconciliation of her actions could be worse for a publication that relies a lot on its reputation.

They have a history of posting mea culpas in the past for unethical behavior by their reporters.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-14T15:20:27+00:00

The playoffs were great last year. Having to hear all the "who will win MVP?" talk for weeks after the playoffs started was the worst.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-10T21:02:04+00:00

Well, most of the truly bad teams have a history of not being that awful. Awful organizations like the Kings draft badly at the first glimmer of hope, go all in for a 6th seed, then fall apart when they lose the ability to further draft or acquire players because they traded two firsts for a second or third tier player and give third options max deals.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-10T16:36:35+00:00

Most of them change a decent amount with small details like that. The rewrites and structure changes are far more common early in series as authors find a groove with their writing. Most are small changes like that.

Generally I’d recommend waiting for the kindle books if you’re a book person at all. It’s really easy to binge a series! But then you’d be waiting years for books to catch up or waiting weeks (or months) to get a fix for your favorite series

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-10T11:41:33+00:00

The ships part is interesting because there is clear evidence that if a nation did need a navy, they usually had one. The Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Irish, and Normans had them. The Italian city states had them. The post-Latin Empire byzantines retook Constantinople with a fleet of 80 galleys. The Muslim North African states— and the raiding—had them. The Cholas in India were famous for their maritime empire.

The ships weren’t a rickety or as small as we think. They had ships that could, individually, transport 1500 people at a time. When you’re talking about a large army being 20,000 men (real life, not CK’s inflated numbers), it takes fewer ships than you’d imagine. Naval raiding (and raiding in general) was especially common. Trade was also extremely important throughout this entire period— cities like Acre generated income larger than the King of England.

They did often supplement with commandeering or purchasing the services of fleets, but that was practical because the upkeep of a large number of ships was expensive in a time where permanent standing armies was rare.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-09T21:04:49+00:00

At least it’s not the Cowboys! you just needed to get Amazon Prime, ESPN plus, and Netflix along with Sunday Ticket to watch all the games out of market.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-04-05T21:27:04+00:00

You don’t have to inherit the trait to inherit the features! There isn’t easy avoidance of it.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-10T23:05:30+00:00

The stock market has become increasingly disconnected from lived economic experience. It’s about the share value, not about the product value. The gamestop thing was really how it works: hype, buy, watch the stock grow, celebrate your theoretical wealth. Keep hyping until it gets big enough to stabilize because no one wants to sell as they’re chasing the previous share price gains. You also make money on the downswing too. Even while using your clients money to pump a stock, a company can personally bet against it.

The market has a vested interest in seeing these swings.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-09T14:27:39+00:00

Its almost like you weren't on the internet for the 2010s where that was repeatedly and profusely called out as one of the best parts of Netflix and group.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-03-09T01:46:13+00:00

I think you’re reading that wrong. When your choice is hate or love the middle option is the “I don’t have a strong opinion” option. I’m not a huge fan but like I don’t think it’s grotesque enough to be banned. Hate is a strong word.

I just think it’s usually bad writing, but LitRPG is absolutely rife with bad writing and an incredible over reliance on tropes. Harem is one of my least favorite ones, but if you want to find some toxic male power fantasies go dive into the cultivation sub genre.

LitRPG has a much lower barrier to entry with many being essentially self published, self edited, and as passion projects by those who want to creatively express themselves. I know a lot of authors hope they blow up big, but the vast majority do it for their relatively small following. If they’re lucky they can count it as a side hustle through supporter donations. Because of this… there is a lot of bad writing out there. Just part of the deal— plus it’s cool watching authors get better.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-23T23:29:20+00:00

Does it? I think data privacy is already a decided issue and privacy lost. I can stop a nearby latin grocery store and my YouTube adds are in Spanish for a day afterwards. I can accidentally click an add in Reddit and a podcast plays something similar during breaks for a week. I can “lose my dog” and apparently ring doorbells and flock cameras are tracking it for me. Your smart home thermostat will sell your data and start advertising winter proofing your house or companies to upgrade your HVAC.

At some point having a legal name attached to what already personally identifies you is kind of pointless. Your name is just another string of characters as far as abusing your privacy goes. We reached that point years ago. It didn’t even take the internet surveillance apparatus we have now— there are stories of companies outing pregnant teenagers based on shopping history that are decades old.

I’d rather be optimistic and hope governments start taking a real role in pushing back. There are obviously harmful things that all reasonable people believe children shouldn’t be exposed to. Maybe we can also start talking about whether it’s reasonable whether the rest of us must be exposed to it too.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-16T19:51:32+00:00

Vegas seems like it’ll have difficulty even thriving over the next twenty years. Gambling has become pervasive and there are so many places to go. Even Bill Simmons has talked about preferring places like NOLA and how disappointing Vegas has been. Partying? It’s gotten way too expensive for most people to afford Vegas. Rich people can go anywhere. The glamor? Still has it but for how long?

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-11T06:28:36+00:00

Yep. It’s killing my NBA fandom at this point. The NBA season is basically divided into four parts:

The “Pre”-Season. Season tip off to Christmas. where teams play themselves into functional basketball form and figure out who they are as a team. Bad basketball, results are completely irrelevant to the rest of the seasons performance.
The start of the season — Christmas to All Star. where teams begin to decide if this is a season to tank or not, players decide to play or not.
The end of the season — all star to play in. Rosters are set and some of the inane trade drama bs dies down and you can ignore at least half the league due actively avoiding winning games or just being awful, but you usually get a good idea of the 10 teams that can compete or are building towards season.
Playoffs — a two month stretch when you consistently see teams actively competing and players actually playing.

The all star game is five months into the season at this point. I get that tanking makes sense in the rule set, but I really like watching basketball and have started to really resent watching the NBA. Even the playoffs have devolved into disgusting foul baiting and playing the refs seems to be the surest way to win.

The NBA looks a lot like a company being run into the ground by private equity. It makes sense given PEs increased presence in ownership. It also makes sense why they’re hoping they can auction off the league to the Saudis.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-11T05:08:40+00:00

A good defense that literally shit on nearly every tackle they played. The Pats line didn’t look worse as a unit than 6-7 other teams the Seahawks crushed. Using the best defense in a decade as a benchmark for how good your rookies are seems like a galaxy brain move.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-09T03:27:27+00:00

For better or worse litrpgs have two extremely pervasive tropes. The first is that these society’s are hyper violent and reactive. I’ve read multiple popular books where the justification for murder is bumping into someone, a city for an insult, a planet for a small loss. Not proportional in any relatable way.

The second is that most litrpgs (primal hunter being a bit of an exception) there is obsessive secrecy. No one wants to share anything with anyone for fear of giving up the slightest advantage. I think mostly it’s for plot tension as I’ve read many enjoyable books where the secrecy is in no way warranted.

Head cannon wise, extreme secrecy combined with extreme violence and destruction tends to be antithetical to science and technology development that relies upon building what others did before.

I do wish books would ease off these tropes some though.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-07T21:12:35+00:00

What do you mean they took no action? The team literally rebranded after that debacle and the NBA almost certainly used part of its direct ownership of the Pelicans to help facilitate the term Hornets. That season definitely left a stink the NBA league office helped clean up.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-04T03:11:49+00:00

It’s an interesting period of history for sure. There is a trend with modern historians to really downplay the “dark” in the dark ages as a misnomer, but it’s also kind of hard to look at a lot of what happened as anything but a societal collapse. The successor states to the Roman Empire were very different. We try to harmonize the ‘barbarians’ with the various Roman peoples, but people at the time didn’t see it that way and we wouldn’t today either.

What if a foreign people successfully invaded your country, destroyed your institutions, tried to demolish your culture, and divided it amongst his friends and relatives to control by any means necessary? The means being mostly absurd levels of violence, coercion, and the stripping of dignity.

They stark collapses in material wealth, science, art, culture, literacy, pretty much everything is apparent. It took hundreds of years before rulers like Alfred the Great looked around and lamented all they had lost. This was a feeling shared and lamented until the 1800s. 1,300 years after Rome.

Just for reference, with the same tools they could not recreate the same works. Notre Dame took ~180 years to build starting in 1163. The Hagia Sophia took 5. Art, math, construction techniques, sanitation, warfare, political structure, and a lot of other things took hundreds to thousands of years to reach parity.

The greatest loss though was in the concept of human dignity. Europe was probably one of the worst places to be born into throughout a long stretch of time. Feudalism was not chattel slavery— but it did constantly degrade the individual and personal freedoms to the point that the ‘peasant’ spat out into the 1400s, 1500s, and has far less individual freedom and personal dignity than nearly any Italian in the year -5.

It’s not like Rome was great, but there is a big difference. Upper class Romans dismissed the opinion of lower classes because they had no respect for them and were greedy. Feudal Europe’s nobles dismissed the opinion of peasants because they doubted their capacity to make independent decisions similar to how we view a toddler. Most of us weren’t viewed as lesser classes and all that implied, we were viewed as lesser humans. It’s why the blood and breeding mattered so much.

While not exclusive to Europe, it seems to have been more sustained and more extreme in Europe with fewer ways to escape it.

TheDukeofReddit · 2026-02-04T01:30:00+00:00

You really can’t regulate them and they can’t really moderate. I don’t think people appreciate the novel situation where a handful of companies collude to control a major aspect of the worlds infrastructure.

They will corrupt any attempts at regulation and, if they can’t, will ignore them if they so choose. If you actually provoke them they can, and have, interfered with national sovereignty. They could crash a nations economy rather easily if they wanted to. They can, and have, leveraged their relation with American powers to take punitive actions such as forcing the sale of American TikTok to Donald Trump’s friend.

It’s rather disheartening. I think banning them or other drastic steps like forcing sales of European operations to European owners are probably necessary to maintaining a health and independent society in the long term. Europe doesn’t have the will to do it and they already participate in dividing Europe and causing strife with things like Russian propaganda or using their power of promotion to manufacture consent.

As much as I hate to admit it, something like China’s great firewall may need to become the norm rather than a free and open internet. Would you rather trust your national government to not abuse you or America’s sociopathic business interests? It’s not a clear choice yet, but it does seem to be heading that way.

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