Guy Chamberlin

Do you know who beat Oklahoma early in the season last year? Kansas State and Iowa State. Are Kansas State and Iowa State too lofty for Frost and Moos to role model? FFS.

Someone just needs to remind M.J. Morris that as soon as Logan Smothers throws his first interception, Morris will become the most popular player in the state.

My opinion is that you know the multiple changes in voting requirements are specifically designed at the state GOP level to discourage Black voters, who predominantly vote Democrat, and that you're okay with it because you're a Republican. Arguing that it's simple to get an ID lets you ignore that this strategic voter suppression is pretty ugly at the core, and few can deny its racist underpinnings with a straight face. Of course I may be wrong. But I'm betting not.

I think when people remind you to "be careful" when answering a post, it's simply because you''ve already walked into a corner that's either willfully ignorant or offensive, and you will likely have to pretend you're merely debating a point of order rather than the unpleasant belief system behind it. This is based strictly on everything you've posted.

A Black colleague of mine was wearing a sports coat, carrying a briefcase on his way to a business meeting in Los Angeles, when he was confronted by police at gunpoint and ordered to lie facedown on the sidewalk. He complied, although he kept getting plenty of verbal abuse while bystanders watched. Turns out there had been a burglary in the general area involving a Black man. My friend was shaken but not surprised. Something similar had happened to almost every Black friend he knew. It's happened to zero white guys I know. I tend to avoid strictly anecdotal evidence, but c'mon man.....

No.

I stated from the outset my rejection of Reparations as a solution. The issue was really whether the American timeline of racism from slavery until today is more cause for hope than concern, and given the police shootings, voter suppression, and having a President of the United States endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, the notion of progress has taken a serious hit. Suggesting that Blacks not focus on the distant past and thank America for its caste-less system could quite literally be interpreted as "stop whining, move on." Acknowledging that racist people will exist far into the future is the opposite of nothing being discussed here. This thread is full of links to factual articles about racial inequities, disturbing trends, and problems we thought have gone away, yet haven't. You chose not to address those. So the presumption that FBI hate crime stats somehow negates all this is telling. Especially if the takeaway is that the rise in anti-Semitic and anti-Hispanic hate crimes means Blacks have less room to complain. https://apnews.com/article/hate-crimes-rise-fbi-data-ebbcadca8458aba96575da905650120d Yes, Black people can now enter the front door of the grocery store. Again, you seem to dismiss that as something from a deep past that's no longer relevant. Do you know what still happens to Black people in America on a daily basis? s#!t you would never, ever tolerate if it happened to you or your family. Those videos of over-reacting cops and unhinged Karens that go viral aren't outliers -- they just mean everyone has a cell phone camera now, and we're seeing things that have been happening all along. That discomforting reality forces some people to blame the Black people themselves. Maybe I"m old-fashioned, but that's f#&%ed-up. Replace my dad's grocery store with a modern Denny's, Walgreen's, or Anthropologie, and you'll still find Blacks being systematically profiled and treated with suspicion. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/05/as-black-buying-power-grows-racial-profiling-by-retailers-remains-a-problem.html

This notion that we've put racism in the rear view mirror, and Black grievance is just whining, and that cherry-picked stats and straw men arguments will show them how wrong their grievances are might be part of the problem. There are indeed some statistics on race and hate crimes and poverty that might surprise the average limousine liberal, especially when removed from the larger context.. But you really shouldn't use them to dismiss persistent issues. The GOP doesn't want any Democrat to vote, and they are overtly targeting Black populations with voter suppression. This would tend to cause a Black person to think your "slavery WAS bad, but it's time to move on" argument a tad insensitive. I don't know if you trust any source, but there are plenty of state Republicans who've freely admitted racist tactics to achieve their conservative goals. https://time.com/5902729/black-voter-suppression-2020/ https://truthout.org/articles/georgia-bill-would-criminalize-giving-water-to-voters-waiting-in-long-lines/ Also, white supremacism in both tacit and violent strains is most definitely on the upswing. You know that fear some people get that a liberal is coming to take their guns away? Replace that with facts and multiply by ten. But don't tell the rest of us America is "moving forward." Tons of other sources for this — including a very recent FBI assessment if you want to fish around. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/06/25/white-supremacist-terrorism-on-the-rise-and-spreading/?sh=3d5e6c2e5a0f Say, as long as you brought up dirt poor Iowans, here's a little something about my Dad, who passed away a couple months ago. When I say dirt poor I mean Tobacco Road, no car, no phone, dirt floor rural Iowa. As a teenager he worked triple shifts at the small town grocery store to make a little money for his family and save a little for himself. Unlike the rest of them, he wanted out of there. There was one Black family in town, and the father would come around every week to the back door to get his groceries. The owner told him he could use the front door, but the Black father didn't want to make trouble. The lesson was that even the poorest white kid with the crappiest job was socially superior to any grown Black man. Some people appreciate any power they can work to their advantage. My dad knew it was wrong as a boy, and lived the rest of his life knowing the difference between hard work and institutional racism. For most of my life, the story was that my Dad worked three shifts to put himself through college. It's the American story, and it's not entirely untrue. But about 10 years ago he added a qualifier: all his hard work wouldn't have gotten him into college, that bar was still too high. He had volunteered for the Army during World War II and served in the Occupying Force in Germany and Belgium. Only through the money and entry provided by the GI Bill when he returned home was my dad able to afford the University of Nebraska. He spent the rest of his life with the understanding that leveling the playing field isn't socialism, it's equal opportunity. And it can make all the difference in the world. You're right, Archy. Writing this stuff does make me feel better. Thanks for listening.

How far back in the past should we go? 7 years ago when they started gutting the Voting Rights Act and kept going? Two months ago, when the President of the United States told Confederate flag waving insurrectionists "you're special, we love you." The stunning rise of violent white supremacists and millions of their barely-cloaked enablers, happening as we speak? Or at some point do you realize this goes on every single day in ways you choose not to imagine, and 150 years ago means nothing because it's one long horrific history that white conservatives want to blow off with anecdotal pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps horse s#!t. The mere suggestion that this is the "far past" and Black people need to let go of something that would outrage you to the very core suggests a profound lack of empathy.

Yikes. My grand-parents were dirt poor Iowa farmers, too, and my Dad was also the first to go to college, but apparently we've gone in different directions in both statistical analysis and human empathy.

No time to read? Start by telling me how this angry Black woman is wrong:

Pretty sure those issues were covered in the long academic research paper I provided and you never read.

Hey, I used to be like you. I considered 150 year old grievances to be unrealistic and opportunistic. I wasn't about to take the blame for something my ancestors did, and they weren't even MY ancestors. I believed it still came down to personal choices and personal accountability, and if you looked around modern America, you'd find every opportunity you needed to move up and create your own future, regardless of race or gender. But as I got older I realized how much I had wrong. I had avoided a lot of inconvenient truths because they made me uncomfortable.

That's what I was warning Archy to be careful about.

Man, if there were only some connection to keeping a race in a constant state of poverty, and a cultural history of families being torn apart.

Hey it just occurred to me: does it make a difference if we can trace current injustice back to slavery, or is the fact that there's current injustice damning enough? Anyway, it turns out the slavery link is not an uncommon theory, one of many factors to be considered. Here's one of the more clear-headed and academic, Archy. Dig in! https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/sugar_16_04_2019.pdf

Will do. Meanwhile, I'd like to hear your explanation for why Black families have a considerably higher rate of broken homes than Whites, Asians, or Hispanics. Be careful.

good for you. But I’m sticking with the people who’ve painstakingly researched the problem.

Right. We need to concentrate on the awesome playcalls we would have made that Scott didn't.

Well.....not exactly. I mean, yeah, slavery took place all over the world, including Africans enslaving neighboring tribes, a fact that often gets pulled up to distract from the current issue. So while reparations may not be the answer, there is still justice to be found for slavery, and all involved are not gone. Systemic discrimination in wealth, property, equity, and broken family units continue in the Black community in a way they don't in other minorities without slave histories, and the people who will happily continue that marginalization have risen to the highest seats of power in America, including national news media that clutch their pearls about last summer's black lives matter protests while downplaying January's white supremacist coup attempt and, wait for it.....blaming it on leftwing instigators. I'm against Reparations because they allow too many people to claim Black people are demanding too much.

Opposing reparations might seem selfish and racist. Yet writing a check to salve your guilt seems like another patronizing and ultimately shallow gesture of liberalism. And are we talking about grievances from systemic inequity? Cause that's a looooooooooong list. Slavery wins priority hands down. Unless you stop to consider Native-American genocide. Generations of gays might tell you they were more likely to be shunned, fired, beaten, and killed without consequence than Black Americans. And what would be the price of justice anyway? Who comes up with that incredibly controversial figure, and how exactly does that change either the past or the future? It's a third rail issue with a lot of counter-productive baggage attached. When Jeff Bezos' ex-wife made huge unrestricted donations directly to a few Historically Black Colleges, that was more genuine remediation than putting the pro-rated cash in millions of hands. If Republican redistricting and voter suppression are simultaneously marginalizing the Black vote, reparations hardly matter. We've got to make investments in all kinds of underserved sectors of America -- and promote them as investments, not handouts -- because they will have a significant positive return on the economy as well as the social fabric, a fact that gets lost in the Maker/Taker narrative horses#!tt.

It's a tough list because the worst Riley losses confirmed we weren't moving past Bo, we were plummeting back to Callahan 2007 Nebraska football. But the Frost losses might have felt worse because he was Scott Frost, and if he couldn't turn it around, who could? I think the talent question took a hit in last year's Minnesota game when a middle-of-the-pack Minnesota team down to its third and fourth stringers outplayed and out-coached the Huskers, including our Junior quarterback who had been a Heisman hopeful just two years earlier. It felt impossible to have a conversation about forward motion after that game. The turnaround is still coming. Statistical probability says it has to. Of course I'm rooting for Frost, but can you imagine someone in 2018 telling you: "just wait until Year Four when Scott gets some real offensive linemen in here — we'll have a very good chance of going 6-6."

Given the chance, Republicans cut taxes and deregulated everything in sight, and pursued wars of intervention that had long been in the conservative think tank playbook. The funneling of money up to the 1% has informed almost every policy since the Reagan era, and direct action has been taken to discourage voting by the opposition party, take hard line immigration stances, and fight things like healthcare and civil rights. It's been a long struggle for conservatives, but they could not be more thrilled by the success of the Bush and Trump administrations, and the c$%k-blocking of Obama. What country have you been watching?

That's a pretty good summation. I do think the majority of fans were tired of both Bo's antics and lack of forward progress, but I think a majority were also willing to give him a couple more seasons and didn't like the look of firing him. Mixed bag, as a lot of other fans wanted him gone after Iowa 2013. I'm betting alums and donors weren't all on one side. But everyone -- and I mean everyone - could have rationalized the sideline behavior if Bo had delivered just a little more than he did. If the clock runs out against Texas, this whole conversation might be different. But it would mostly be a matter of time. That famous locker room tape and Bo's post-Nebraska career suggests Perlman and Eichorst weren't wrong to get him out of there. I believe the damning stat around the time was Bo's really poor record against ranked teams, and sub-.500 record against teams with winning records. IIRC, there were only two Power 5 schools that had fewer "upsets" over higher ranked teams than Nebraska during the Pelini years. Duke was one of them. As mentioned, I'm sure some fans and Athletic Department folk loved having Mike Riley to cleanse the palate, but he was most definitely hired to win at the same time. Nice Mike felt the heat the moment BYU caught that Hail Mary.

But these were boilerplate GOP policies before Trump ran or became President. Go back and watch the 2008 Republican Presidential debates. The guys on stage were trying to our right wing each other. John McCain's centrist leanings actually got booed. Party stalwarts knew he wasn't a True Believer. Ron Paul was dismissed as a libertarian looney, though he commanded his own sizable wing. Mitt Romney was held suspect by party stalwarts too. But when Republican voters pulled the lever, they went for McCain and Romney the next two elections. Was it those two losses that turned the party farther right? How did guys like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson get as far as they did? They weren't bringing new ideas as much as they were declaring themselves cultural warriors. Sensible and less-frightening Republican candidates suddenly found themselves on the inside looking out. But for all the cult of personality stuff, almost all of these candidates would have advanced similar agendas and policies. Yet none of them would have been willing to subvert democracy and try to remain in office as dictator other than Donald Trump. The most un-American president in history is now the golden idol of millions of Republicans and Christians who don't get the irony. It's really creepy.