Guy Chamberlin

You'd have to get something in a trade for Draymond, and if you could find a taker you could get at best a solid role player. Which you're gonna need. If you let Klay and Chris Paul walk there are no transactions involved and you suddenly have $75 million to spend. No free agent worth that kind of money yet, but there are always a few surprises and unhappy stars cropping up, like AD. Kerr is coaching the Olympic Team, the best assembly of talent since the 1992 Dream Team. Doesn't hurt for him to spend the summer coaching and socializing with the superstars.

That's my era. I didn't really need a student loan in 1980, but I took one out anyway because the rate was 7.5% and I could put it in a 13.5% money market account.

Well this same Warriors team finished 27-11, one of the best records in the league since January, so they are able to win with this lineup. But something always seemed janky, and in a sudden death game against an injured team that had faded in the stretch, Warriors gave up to a Sacramento team that by all appearances wanted it more. Warriors did not appear to be having fun. Much is made of Klay going 0 for 10, but Curry had six turnovers, most of them sloppy and unfocused. That's going to linger. Upside is that the young guys looked good when given the chance. They will do more when given more minutes. You keep Steph and let any combination of Klay, Dray, Wiggins, and Chris Paul go, use that money to buy one legit star and some key role players, bid farewell to the dynasty and see if you can't climb back into the ring with reduced expectations. Don't know how much playoffs I'm going to watch, but I like the Nuggets and Thunder in the West. I have little rooting interest in the East, where I only liked Jimmy Butler's Heat. 76ers could make things interesting this year.

In case anyone is wondering, there's a lot of drama and finger-pointing in Warriors land right now.

And half the rich white guys thought the other rich white guys weren't serious about letting non-land holders vote.

As mentioned in past threads, it's interesting to revisit American history and realize how much of our patriotic founding is based on acts of vandalism and aggravated police confrontation, designed to escalate resistance and create martyrs.

Would you consider the Minutemen more Antifa or J6?

We can talk about what Make America Great Again means to the people who've adopted the slogan. It's a common and understandable yearning for a better time in America, although it has more to do with age, nostalgia and selective memory than policies we should return to. But MAGA the acronym is a brand, and the display of it announces reverent loyalty to Donald Trump and profound hatred of Joe Biden.

And some people totally understand the consequences of biting the hand that feeds them. Props to Zach Galifinakas.

There's also a great case for boycotting all Apple products, but that's a line Apple-addicted social justice warriors can't cross.

Someone looked at the poll numbers.

So what happens when the facts lean in one direction? And by that I mean the body of evidence, not the anomaly that gets people excited.

It seems to me that you have grabbed the worst possible strain of narcissistic leftist agitator to represent everyone who would protest on behalf of Palestine. That allowed you to ignore the points I was making and common positions I was conceding. There was a revolutionary Marxist contingent in the Vietnam and Civil War protests, too, and they did hinder the larger movement to some extent. But they were also the folks at the ramparts who forced the conversation, and allowed the more moderate to make the stance more reasonable and ultimately mainstream. i.e. you were an idiot to have a poster of Mao in your room, but you weren't wrong about the Domino Theory. Martin Luther King benefitted from having Malcom X and the Black Panthers to his extreme left. Sounds like you don't think the conversation has shifted on Gaza, nor should it. But a disturbing common thread to Gaza, Vietnam and the Civil Rights era are the bystanders in the middle, often women and children, being killed in pretty horrific ways while people debate whether trying to stop those deaths is political posturing. If you know your history you obviously know Netanyahu's history, and why it's lazy, unserious and dangerous to support him unequivocally. It's an easy but false equivalency to think that equates to supporting Hamas. Israel itself is divided on what should happen next. If you don't think protesting college kids really care about the people of Gaza, you have at least one thing in common with them. Of course we can agree to disagree, but I still find it a worthy conversation, even with all the laughy emojis I'm getting. There's also a distinct possibility that we agree: the worst possible strain of narcissistic leftist agitator is really irritating. Now let's join hands and solve the Middle East!

NPR's official statement in defense of Berliner's claim was pretty thin and mealy. So who out there has a news source they like and trust and seems nonpartisan?

Sorry man, but there are nothing but common threads in this kind of activism and protest. That it hasn't yet reached the scale of Vietnam and the Civil Right movement doesn't change the motives, the players, and the public reaction. You don't have to like it. Folks back then didn't either. But it's entirely possible they've shaped the conversation. While you contend they are "shrieking about a ceasefire" they've been joined by politicians of every stripe and nation, who agree it's a more than viable option for stopping the death and starvation of innocents on a massive scale that Hamas clearly anticipated. And possibly avoiding a global escalation. The conversation has changed significantly in six months, and a lot of that wacky left stuff has gone mainstream. I don't agree with coddled self-satisfied cosplaying college protestors on plenty of things, and I go out of my way to de-romanticize their melodrama. But I do have to bring my A-game because they actually are well-versed on the history of the region. More than most. Forced to do my homework, I realized how much s#!t I'd forgotten. Or had wrong. And yeah, they didn't hesitate to bring up Yemen, either. I implore them to understand that the difference between Biden and Trump remains just massive enough to deserve their vote. It's a tough sell. Seems to me they actually do care about the Gazans, but your mileage may vary. If you think a cease fire isn't even viable, there's nowhere to go but down.

You'll each get your own lecture, customized to your previous posting history, delivered in a PM with emojis.

I think Election Night 2016 broke a lot of people's brains. I no longer trusted my own opinion. Donald Trump had already declared war on journalism, and it was probably hard not to fight back. You can find tons of historical precedents for White House vs Journalist adversity, but I don't think it was ever this clear cut or dangerous. If we're comparing Fox News to CNN, would we compare NPR to Newsmax? Joe Rogan? Infowars? In terms of both bias and integrity, it doesn't seem like an equivalent. Maybe it's more like the Wall Street Journal, generally solid reporting, but leans right in what it chooses to cover.

In the early days of lazy 24/7 news reporting, you just grabbed a spokesperson from both sides and gave them air time. Voila --- fairness. But you can't presume both sides are making an equally good case unless you research their claims, a job that reporters are paid to do on behalf of the average less-informed viewer. If you have a partisan agenda --- and I'm assuming every journalist casts a vote -- you have to be ready to report some inconvenient truths. But....if you uncover some shoddy intel on Russian collusion or a legitimate theory of a Covid lab leak, does that wipe out the larger stories about Russian electoral influence and pandemic response? It shouldn't, but of course it does. There are even people on this board who think Donald Trump was exonerated by the Mueller Report, even when Mueller went to the trouble of literally declaring the opposite. Kinda makes me think of the steroid era in baseball. The drug-free players watched the roid heads elevating their stats and salary, apparently facing no consequences from the league. Until some said f#&% it: if we're not playing fair, and I'm getting no love for playing clean, I'll take the short cut, too. Fox was tv news on steroids, and CNN and MSNBC realized they better juice, too.

Geez, I thought I was supposed to be the crabby old man here.

You're presuming the young peson's interest is entirely self-interest; motivated to avoid being drafted rather than drawing attention to the immorality of the Vietnam war itself, waged by people they couldn't vote for. It's comparable to every social justice movement where young people have a natural and often knee-jerk rejection of authority, and align themselves with the underdog. In terms of foreign conflicts it's always about anti-Western colonialism, Palestine being the latest in a long line. Some of the protesters are just anarchist d******ds larping out. Many are not. The d******ds will always get the camera time. People used the same disgusted language to describe white kids attending sit-ins with negroes and being arrested protesting the Vietnam war in the early '60s. Now those same kids are celebrated in black and white retrospectives. Gaza could be a blip on the radar, neither Civil Rights nor Vietnam, but the way the narrative has flipped in six months and the potential for a full scale Middle East reckoning suggests the young protestors may have a case.

Sure. But that's the case with most social movements, including Civil Rights and Vietnam. The original message was also considered extreme, naive, and/or unrealistic until it started getting echoed by more establishment sources. People block traffic and bridges and take over lunch counters insisting their cause can't be ignored. Because, in truth, it's pretty easy to ignore. People still mock the protestors, but chances are they are now using language the protestors introduced to the Gaza debate. I have to use the Golden Gate Bridge Wednesday. Let's see if I remain forgiving.

Again, while everyone hates their methods, their key messages have been gaining a lot of support from mainstream sources. It happens without you even noticing.

Yeah, as soon as you get off your a$$ and start blocking traffic. You can spell Sunni without "u" Teach.

Appears to be. Thanks.

If you hate Donald Trump and love wordplay and memes, this is the most glorious time of the internet.