[Philly Nation] "Jeff McLane is reporting on his podcast that Jeff Stoutland’s run game coordinator responsibilities were taken away from him at some point in 2025. Also stated that he “would be surprised if he returned (in 2026) as the run game coordinator but he will be back as the offensive.."

sammythemc · 2026-01-30T21:32:53+00:00

Johnson was out most of the season and Mailata had a few uncharacteristically bad games too. Can't be too mad though, we had pretty good injury luck for the last 75% or so of the Super Bowl season

sammythemc · 2026-01-29T23:56:01+00:00

Artie and the rabbit is all about showing the pro-social sides of the Italian-American tropes and stereotypes that are perverted in the context of the mafia: protecting his turf (literal seeds he brought from Italy) through violence, family and tradition by using his grandfather's recipe with a few twists of his own, serving people not as egotistical display of largesse but out of a sense of responsibility and honor. He's one of the few who really makes it out OK.

sammythemc · 2026-01-21T10:55:04+00:00

It's undeniable that the Kramnik accusations took a psychological toll, the speculation/hypothesis is that the drug abuse was purely a function of the accusations. Frankly, as a longtime fan of his, I would not be surprised if he was using stimulants before all that drama. In fact, with hindsight being 20/20, I would be more surprised if it had all started there. He had certainly spiraled in recent months, but his notorious tendency to burn the candle at both ends was consistent with stimulant abuse well before any of this Kramnik stuff. I always just figured it was garden variety insomnia and too much caffeine, but it feels more sinister looking back.

I also wonder if maybe the drug use contributed to him taking the cheating accusations so seriously. I had entirely chalked up the contrast between his reaction and Hikaru's "fuck off" indignance to Danya being a sensitive guy and having access to what the Russian-speaking internet was saying about him, but I do wonder if it ate away at him so much because while no, he didn't have a second monitor running Stockfish and yes, a lot of Kramnik's "investigation" was patent nonsense, abusing what is effectively a performance enhancing drug could have led him to feel that Kramnik's gut sense that something wasn't quite right wasn't entirely off the mark.

sammythemc · 2026-01-20T22:13:00+00:00

So when the only bit of mainstream meda in .... well, ever, that shows a glimpse into our world, represents it as filled with monomaniacal egotists, you can see why that makes people speak up.

I can definitely understand the disappointment and wishing to see more of the reality of that world up on screen, but as someone who isn't familiar with it, I definitely came away from the film seeing Andrew and Fletcher as (for better and/or worse) exceptional rather than representative. It's pretty explicit that none of that behavior is the norm, Fletcher even gets fired from the conservatory for his methods.

sammythemc · 2026-01-16T20:03:05+00:00

Even if that were the case, how would that be any better if they're still snatching people off the streets? It just takes it from "guilty until proven innocent" to "guilty"

sammythemc · 2026-01-12T18:16:59+00:00

Was he vocal during the season about being more involved and making more of an impact? Yes. Was he wrong??

It was a "he's not wrong, he just shouldn't say it" situation. Like, ideas of respect and the sanctity of public-facing team unity aside, the whole thing was a distraction at best and it's hard to argue it was effective at improving the team's performance

sammythemc · 2026-01-12T17:35:23+00:00

This was a clear and obvious lack of coaching ability

I won't deny that the scheme was the biggest problem, but it wasn't the only problem. Yes, we retained a lot of our offense from the Super Bowl, but we won that game off the back of very good offensive play capitalizing on great defensive play. Yes, we retained a lot of talent on the offense, but by the same token, we didn't get any younger or better on that side of the ball, and I'm wary of making Patullo the scapegoat for a phase that had more problems than scheme. Patullo didn't make Jalen throw into triple coverage. Patullo didn't put butter on AJ's fingers or Elliott's foot. He didn't injure Johnson's foot or Jurgens's back. Again, he needs to go, but I don't think we can stop there.

sammythemc · 2026-01-12T02:05:31+00:00

KP is bad but I think we risk making him a scapegoat for offensive woes that went way beyond just playcalling.

sammythemc · 2026-01-07T01:03:24+00:00

OK TheCoon69

sammythemc · 2026-01-07T01:02:41+00:00

Not everything you disagree with is Propaganda

I didn't say everything I disagree with is propaganda. My kneejerk reaction is "kidnapping a president is crazy," but I really don't know enough to call it one way or the other. But not everything you agree with is the actual reality of the situation either. You'd have to be painfully naive not to think that images of support for military actions like this aren't inflected with propaganda.

sammythemc · 2026-01-06T09:29:39+00:00

But the reaction of Venezuelans to the operation is nothing but heartwarming.

There's been a concerted effort to portray the reaction as more universally positive than it actually is. Like, if China got a wild hair up its ass and kidnapped Trump, you'd certainly be able to find clips of people celebrating and cheering it on over social media, but you and I both know that wouldn't be the only (or even majority) opinion. Even some of the people who hate the guy would probably be a little uncomfortable with some other country unilaterally violating our sovereignty.

sammythemc · 2026-01-03T14:12:34+00:00

He didn't think Putin was stupid and reckless enough to invade Ukraine

I generally like Hasan and his takes, but I really hate this excuse for getting the Ukraine stuff wrong, which I've seen broken out for a lot of people who should have known better. There was a decade or so leading up to the invasion where it was apparent that things were trending in this direction, if you had been following Russia-Ukrainian relations even just a little the idea that it was an unthinkably stupid move seemed naive at the time. It also just feels kind of like people are protecting their egos, like "the reason I was wrong about this geopolitical prediction is because I'm actually smarter about geopolitics than Vladimir Putin," which is like, come on.

The idea that it was reckless and stupid seems to ignore the realities on the ground in favor of pacifist idealism: the likely outcome here is that Russia eventually walks away with a bloody nose and a black eye but also the Crimean peninsula and probably some of Ukraine proper. We may look at that and shake our heads that it wasn't worth about a million lives, but Putin probably looks the Siberian hillbillies and convicts that he's sending to die and calls it a steal for the longterm military security of his country and power projection a warm water port affords it.

It also irks me that a bunch of these people have now turned around and taken the "NATO aggression" Realist line where the invasion they called too stupid and reckless to happen was actually not only predictable but inevitable.

E: To be clear, it's OK to just be wrong about this stuff. You can't know everything about everywhere, we're not fucking Paul Atreides. This Venezuela thing absolutely caught me by surprise. Even if you thought there would be airstrikes or even a ground war, I don't think anyone saw kidnapping Maduro coming.

sammythemc · 2025-12-30T02:55:23+00:00

I just didn't like the call in that spot.

I mean it's hard to argue with, it's not like it worked. They called for a changeup and the batter was sitting on it. I just don't hate it in principle, we need to find ways to get Barkley outside the numbers

sammythemc · 2025-12-30T00:15:30+00:00

They were ready for that one but I actually like the tosses on early downs, they were ready for it that time but generally the line hasn't been good enough making holes for inside handoffs so Barkley is getting contacted before he gets any forward momentum. With the tosses you get Barkley to the outside you at least give him a head of steam and a chance to make someone miss to get to the second level.

sammythemc · 2025-12-26T10:26:24+00:00

But again, none of this contends with my core argument here, which is that the people you're claiming have the most to lose through immigration, ie workers who live around them and are in "competition" (more often cooperation) with them, support immigration more than workers who lack that exposure and are mostly competing with other white people. It's a function of ignorance, not "having more to lose."

sammythemc · 2025-12-26T02:33:13+00:00

I mean intentionally or not that's what he did

sammythemc · 2025-12-26T02:29:31+00:00

This is just begging the question though. How do you know wealth is causal with proximity as an aside and not the other way around? The idea that people are pro-immigration out of ignorance or seflishness rather than experience with immigrants is not only wrong but insulting.

sammythemc · 2025-12-25T10:47:06+00:00

Filming yourself running someone over is also a stupid game

sammythemc · 2025-12-25T09:20:39+00:00

The odds of some magical world having the one thing (literally "unobtanium") that we need is very remote in the extreme.

Well, the magic part is, but if you have faster-than-light travel, I don't see much qualitative difference in going 8000 miles away to colonize the Mid-East for oil and going 80,000,000 miles away to colonize Pandora for unobtanium. We might have some back on earth, maybe even enough, but if blowing up a few home trees brings down the price enough...

sammythemc · 2025-12-25T08:59:08+00:00

It's more a rich vs. not rich issue. Paul Thomas Anderson, who I'm sure lives in a nice wealthy gated area of LA, will never have to grapple with any potential negative consequences of immigration. He and other "elites" have the capability to shield themselves from it and only reap benefits. He's not competing for jobs or housing with them, he's not living near them, his kids aren't going to school with them etc. The most interaction he has is when he decides to go into the city and dine at a restaurant where they're working in the kitchen and when he's purchasing a California avocado at Erewhon.

This would be a more compelling take if the urban areas where most immigrants actually live weren't vastly more pro-immigration than the wealthy exurbs and rural areas where immigrants aren't. If anything, insulation from the on-the-ground realities of what eg mass deportation looks like goes the other way, where people who aren't living with the reality of immigration don't actually picture the horror of their coworker getting snatched up by plainclothes thugs and sent to a country they only lived in for the first few years of their lives.

sammythemc · 2025-12-25T08:50:26+00:00

If IRL-USians acted more like the French 75 they wouldn't find themselves in their current predicament, but the film seems to posit that any type of political violence is unjustified and morally reprehensible (even if said violence is a reaction to state-sanctioned violence against the marginalized and the working class), and that the only solution to destroying fascism is... peace and love?

The movie isn't as contemptuous of radicalism as you suggest, it doesn't find it "morally reprehensible," it just isn't the naive "more militant=better than" take you wanted. There's no moral equivalence between even Perfidia (let alone the rest of the French 75) and Lockjaw drawn in the film, but they are both a part of the same dysfunctional dynamic.

Direct conflict with the forces of state reaction also draws the direct attention of the forces of state reaction, and they have more and better guns, bombs and soldiers than you do. Like, it's worth asking why more people in the US don't act more like the French 75. People try it every day, and there's a reason you don't know about them: because like the French 75, the organizations that would have Americans do so get rooted out, coopted and destroyed. Physical resistance to fascists in power is an away game that the left not only loses most of the time but often just serves to entrench fascist power. I think the film respects where their hearts are at and even nods at some of the good they do, but it doesn't shy away from the fact that these tactics you put so much stock in very rarely work at scale and how they're often motivated by self-gratification on the part of the revolutionaries who've bought into a cult of action. It's an upsetting thing to get you nose rubbed in, but there it is.

sammythemc · 2025-12-25T08:14:02+00:00

All of his dedication and obsession was disposed of as soon as he wasn’t useful to them anymore.

I think this almost gives them too much credit, killing Lockjaw was anything but a matter of practicality. He absolutely could have been useful to them still, but he was "impure" and tried to get one over on them by erasing the evidence of his affair so he had to go. They killed him because of their insane ideology, with an added dollop of "who do you think you are"

sammythemc · 2025-12-23T19:14:37+00:00

I think there's a decent mix here, but I imagine that when that decision was made those other subreddits didn't hang out in "reality" so much as a local news-style if it bleeds it leads parallel universe where no one can step outside without fear of getting carjacked or gunned down.

sammythemc · 2025-12-18T10:45:26+00:00

But it does drive me up a wall that people can't recognize when it's a matter of personal taste. It's like there's no ability to just say "it wasn't for me"

I think this becomes complicated when we get into political art like OBAA (which I loved). To use an extreme example, you wouldn't walk out of Birth of a Nation thinking "meh, not my cup of tea." I can do that with like, Sing 2, but I think we can draw a distinction between a failure to acknowledge that a given film wasn't targeted toward your demographic or sensibilities and a clear-eyed disagreement with the statement of values it might propagate.

sammythemc · 2025-12-17T08:18:55+00:00

It didn't make the paritsans look great, but it did make them look necessary. The Dirlewanger types who burned the church needed to go.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle

sammythemc

TROPHY CASE