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Thread: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by Chip View Post
    There's something about team sports, some atavistic tribal thing, that stimulates aggressive displays and violent behavior, sometimes petty and sometimes worse.

    I remember the sports mania in high school: hazing, bullying, drunkenness, fights after games. I was on the basketball team and more than once we had to battle our way to the bus leaving an away game. In the individual sports I took part in—swimming, tennis, track— there wasn't that group aggression that surrounds football and basketball.
    Fortunately, this kind of violent behavior is less prominent now (I believe).

    Now we just have cops and metal detectors in schools every day.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Dave Chappelle is certainly getting some push back on his new special and now he's complaing about "cancel culture", so "what about dem blacks" may no longer be applicable.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by Chuck Naill View Post
    Dave Chappelle is certainly getting some push back on his new special and now he's complaing about "cancel culture", so "what about dem blacks" may no longer be applicable.
    Chuck, that was my line, and I may have misrepresented Kazoo's import.

    But your point stands that people of color have also been in the hot seat for their behavior and words. Especially if they are prominent cultural figures.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Chuck Naill View Post
    Dave Chappelle is certainly getting some push back on his new special and now he's complaing about "cancel culture", so "what about dem blacks" may no longer be applicable.
    Chuck, that was my line, and I may have misrepresented Kazoo's import.

    But your point stands that people of color have also been in the hot seat for their behavior and words. Especially if they are prominent cultural figures.
    I wasn’t complaining. Your point is appropriate and germane.

    Just wanted to insert the idea that the cancel culture is color blind.

    There are times when words get expressed while our better selves are not engaged. Learning how to provide an apology is required and never, “I’m not that person anymore or worse, “ if I offended someone….”

    Men especially can be such wimps while attempting to look strong. Owning your actions takes courage but apparently some men were absent that day it was discussed.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by Bold2013 View Post
    We have lost another sport. Cancel culture is in full swing in the National Football League.

    https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/...ers-head-coach

    Well at least we have books… until they start burning them again…
    This is nonsense, written as if the poster does not follow football. Bold certainly knows nothing about the Washington Redskins, Dan Snyder, and the NFL's investigation into what it concluded was Snyder's "toxic workplace" at the team he owns. Or perhaps Bold is a devoted believer in "l'il dan". The NFL examined thousands of emails; these Gruden emails were to and from Bruce Allen, president of the Redskins and Snyder's close friend...until Snyder fired him, changed the name from "Redskins" to "Name to be Named Later", and "Washington Team of Football" (WTF) meanwhile.

    The NFL refuses to release details of the investigations, but we know that many of the Gruden-Allen emails were cc'd to others in the Redskin organization. Good chance those emails went to Snyder, and that they included other routine targets of bigots, especially including bigots. Remember that the NFL was "persuaded" to investigate the Snyderskins after Redskin cheerleaders complained that they had been forced to "entertain" Redskin "sponsors" -- men -- at an "adult" resort one off-season. There, the cheerleaders posed for the team's annual calendar, as Redskin staffers constructed a video of "the good bits" for Snyder and Allen and a couple other Snyder favorites.

    In addition, the NFL was nudged into action after a former Redskin employee sued Snyder for sexual assault, and Snyder settled for $1.6 million.

    All that went into a Washington Post investigation:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...line_manual_10

    Lewd cheerleader videos, sexist rules: Ex-employees decry Washington’s NFL team workplace

    In “Beauties on the Beach,” the official video chronicling the making of the Washington NFL team’s 2008 cheerleader swimsuit calendar, the women frolic in the sand, rave about their custom bikinis and praise a photographer for putting them at ease in settings where sometimes only a strategically placed prop or tightly framed shot shielded otherwise bare breasts.

    What the cheerleaders didn’t know was that another video, intended strictly for private use, would be produced using footage from that same shoot. Set to classic rock, the 10-minute unofficial video featured moments when nipples were inadvertently exposed as the women shifted positions or adjusted props.

    The lewd outtakes were what Larry Michael, then the team’s lead broadcaster and a senior vice president, referred to as “the good bits” or “the good parts,” according to Brad Baker, a former member of Michael’s staff. Baker said in an interview that he was present when Michael told staffers to make the video for team owner Daniel Snyder.

    Snyder and the team provided no comment after they were given repeated opportunities to respond to this and other allegations before the publication of this story. In a statement released hours after this story was published online Wednesday, Snyder wrote, “I do not have any knowledge of the ten-year old videos referenced in the story. I did not request their creation and I never saw them.”

    “Nothing can be further from the truth. I was never asked to nor did I ask someone to compile videos as you described,” Michael said in an interview.

    Baker recalls otherwise.

    “Larry said something to the effect of, ‘We have a special project that we need to get done for the owner today: He needs us to get the good bits of the behind-the-scenes video from the cheerleader shoot onto a DVD for him,’” said Baker, who was a producer in the team’s broadcast department from 2007 to 2009.

    The Washington Post obtained a copy of the 2008 video from another former employee, along with a similar outtakes video from the squad’s swimsuit calendar shoot in the Dominican Republic in 2010 that included a close-up of one cheerleader’s pubic area, obscured only by gold body paint.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...line_manual_10

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    The standard response is to bash the Washington Post as a purveyor of fake news…roll eyes.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Sorry. That was a follow-up after the splash of the original report. Here is the first report:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...l-alex-santos/

    From dream job to nightmare
    More than a dozen women allege sexual harassment and verbal abuse by former team employees at Redskins Park

    A few months after Emily Applegate started working for the Washington Redskins in 2014, she settled into a daily routine: She would meet a female co-worker in the bathroom during their lunch breaks, she said, to commiserate and cry about the frequent sexual harassment and verbal abuse they endured.

    They cried about the former chief operating officer’s expletive-laced tirades, Applegate said, when she recalled him calling her “f---ing stupid” and then requesting she wear a tight dress for a meeting with clients, “so the men in the room have something to look at.” They cried about a wealthy suiteholder who grabbed her friend’s backside during a game, Applegate said, and the indifference the team’s top sales executive displayed when she complained.


    But most of all, Applegate said, they cried about the realization that their dream job of working in the NFL came with what they characterized as relentless sexual harassment and verbal abuse that was ignored — and, in some cases, condoned — by top team executives.

    Applegate is one of 15 former female Redskins employees who told The Washington Post they were sexually harassed during their time at the club. The other 14 women spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a fear of litigation because some signed nondisclosure agreements with the team that threaten legal retribution if they speak negatively about the club. The team declined a request from The Post to release former female employees from these agreements so they could speak on the record without fear of legal reprisal. This story involved interviews with more than 40 current and former employees and a review of text messages and internal company documents.

    Team owner Daniel Snyder declined several requests for an interview. Over the past week, as The Post presented detailed allegations and findings to the club, three team employees accused of improper behavior abruptly departed, including Larry Michael, the club’s longtime radio voice, and Alex Santos, the team’s director of pro personnel.

    In a statement, the team said it had hired D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson and her firm, Wilkinson Walsh, “to conduct a thorough independent review of this entire matter and help the team set new employee standards for the future.”
    The NFL took ownership of Wilkinson's investigation, concluding that Snyder had created "a toxic workplace", fining the team $10 million. Snyder agreed to sit on the time-out bench for a while, letting his wife run the team.

    The NFL refuses to release details of the investigation, but the Gruden-Allen emails leaked.

    Here are some recent stories about Gruden, Allen, and Snyder. Note that Washington's home stadium is half-empty when the WTF plays. It probably has the lowest attendance in the NFL and the fewest season ticket holders. (Long-time Redskin fans, like me, ignore the games.)

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...gruden-emails/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...team-cover-up/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...investigation/

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...investigation/

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Sally Jenkins, in The Post, wrote this last week. Incidentally, she mentions Aristotle, probably from the "Nichomachean Ethics" and the Milgram experiments. Just that would make any sports comment worthwhile.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...en-nfl-emails/

    Jon Gruden’s character was entirely formed, or malformed, in football. It’s hard to find someone who was more incubated in it. There is a sense that Gruden was not just speaking for himself in those emails but that he’s a representative NFL man in his blithe bigotry, that he is very much the football establishment in his talk of “queers” and fat-lipped Black men. And it’s going to be a challenge for everyone in and around the league who would like to separate themselves.

    What makes his casually superior, straight and center-parted chauvinism so creepy is the traditionalness of his upbringing in the game. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, home of Knute Rockne. Son of a scout and coach. Went to high school in South Bend, Ind., in the shadow of Notre Dame, where his father served as an assistant to the legendary Dan Devine. As a young man he worked for the most iconic and influential coaching-tree franchises: the San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay Packers. He spent years employed by ESPN and “Monday Night Football.” They all knew who he was and how he talked. Same with that unctuous scion Bruce Allen and the pervy trading of lewd pictures of topless women. It was learned inside the game.

    As NFL-quarterback-turned-observer Sage Rosenfels tweeted, “If you thought that these emails would have been reported to officials by those who were receiving them, well the problem is that these are the same people.”

    Gruden is not some bygone relic. He is the current NFL, and as the Las Vegas Raiders head coach he was at the very top of its pay hierarchy. He wrote those things between the ages of 47 and 54, some of them as recently as 2017, and it matters not at all that they are private expressions. In fact, that only makes them worse — there’s an unnerving divergence from his chatty charm-boy act for cameras that won him such rich contracts. He has spent his life culling rewards in a public-facing business, in which 70 percent of player-colleagues are Black and nearly half the audience is women, in which he had every opportunity to grow a respectful heart. His facile, favored-son abuse of position strikes at the heart of the league’s public meaning. He made a farce of it.

    The NFL professes to be at least partly about the cultivation of excellence regardless of background, and it fights a constant battle against cliche in that respect. If the league has any real import, if it’s something more than mere forum entertainment, it’s in the message that people should be able to become better; that we’re imperfect and start with unequal gifts but we can strive to be self-made; that, as Aristotle put it, excellence “is a state of character concerned with choice.” At some point, Gruden’s outlook became a willful choice. He chose to view others as servile to him and his blustering legend of manhood. The message: If football can be improving, for a certain brand of privy-council young alpha male it’s also an excuse never to grow up and remain a preening, self-impressed bully forever.

    Maybe the most cautionary part of Gruden’s NFL story is the danger of moral vanity. “I don’t have an ounce of racism in me,” he brayed. He said he didn’t have so much as a “blade of it” in him, as if he were a field of grass. Then what was he doing in those emails? Just leaking poison for sport?

    It’s another inescapable fact of Gruden’s background that he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when many of his peers were soul-searching on the subjects of racism, feminism, militarism and every other -ism. Among the things that happened in that era were some famous social psychology experiments, which hinted that we ordinary people, who conceive of ourselves as decent and anti-racist, should not be nearly so certain of our inherently good and stable characters. We suppose we wouldn’t hurt others, that we would reject any wrongful forms of authority. Then social psychologist Stanley Milgram came along and showed that 65 percent of us would administer electric shocks to a neighbor until they screamed if someone authoritative told us to.

    Gruden reminds you of nothing so much as that. Or of Michael Douglas’s character in the movie “Falling Down,” who is so blindly sure of his virtuosity that he doesn’t realize he has become a public menace. “We’re the same, you and me. We’re the same, don’t you see?” a racist storekeeper says to him. Douglas’s character replies, “We are not the same. I’m an American; you’re a sick a------.” And then the cops come for him, and he’s baffled, mystified.

    “I’m the bad guy?” he says.

    “I’m sorry,” Gruden said in a statement through the Raiders. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”

    Gruden’s exposure is a similar inverse fall, with a total lack of awareness that his outlook is slanted or that he might have caused harm with it. It’s a warning to his colleagues, who should ask themselves whether this game has made them the good guys or the bad guys.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by welch View Post
    Sally Jenkins, in The Post, wrote this last week. Incidentally, she mentions Aristotle, probably from the "Nichomachean Ethics" and the Milgram experiments. Just that would make any sports comment worthwhile.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...en-nfl-emails/

    Jon Gruden’s character was entirely formed, or malformed, in football. It’s hard to find someone who was more incubated in it. There is a sense that Gruden was not just speaking for himself in those emails but that he’s a representative NFL man in his blithe bigotry, that he is very much the football establishment in his talk of “queers” and fat-lipped Black men. And it’s going to be a challenge for everyone in and around the league who would like to separate themselves.

    What makes his casually superior, straight and center-parted chauvinism so creepy is the traditionalness of his upbringing in the game. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, home of Knute Rockne. Son of a scout and coach. Went to high school in South Bend, Ind., in the shadow of Notre Dame, where his father served as an assistant to the legendary Dan Devine. As a young man he worked for the most iconic and influential coaching-tree franchises: the San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay Packers. He spent years employed by ESPN and “Monday Night Football.” They all knew who he was and how he talked. Same with that unctuous scion Bruce Allen and the pervy trading of lewd pictures of topless women. It was learned inside the game.

    As NFL-quarterback-turned-observer Sage Rosenfels tweeted, “If you thought that these emails would have been reported to officials by those who were receiving them, well the problem is that these are the same people.”

    Gruden is not some bygone relic. He is the current NFL, and as the Las Vegas Raiders head coach he was at the very top of its pay hierarchy. He wrote those things between the ages of 47 and 54, some of them as recently as 2017, and it matters not at all that they are private expressions. In fact, that only makes them worse — there’s an unnerving divergence from his chatty charm-boy act for cameras that won him such rich contracts. He has spent his life culling rewards in a public-facing business, in which 70 percent of player-colleagues are Black and nearly half the audience is women, in which he had every opportunity to grow a respectful heart. His facile, favored-son abuse of position strikes at the heart of the league’s public meaning. He made a farce of it.

    The NFL professes to be at least partly about the cultivation of excellence regardless of background, and it fights a constant battle against cliche in that respect. If the league has any real import, if it’s something more than mere forum entertainment, it’s in the message that people should be able to become better; that we’re imperfect and start with unequal gifts but we can strive to be self-made; that, as Aristotle put it, excellence “is a state of character concerned with choice.” At some point, Gruden’s outlook became a willful choice. He chose to view others as servile to him and his blustering legend of manhood. The message: If football can be improving, for a certain brand of privy-council young alpha male it’s also an excuse never to grow up and remain a preening, self-impressed bully forever.

    Maybe the most cautionary part of Gruden’s NFL story is the danger of moral vanity. “I don’t have an ounce of racism in me,” he brayed. He said he didn’t have so much as a “blade of it” in him, as if he were a field of grass. Then what was he doing in those emails? Just leaking poison for sport?

    It’s another inescapable fact of Gruden’s background that he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when many of his peers were soul-searching on the subjects of racism, feminism, militarism and every other -ism. Among the things that happened in that era were some famous social psychology experiments, which hinted that we ordinary people, who conceive of ourselves as decent and anti-racist, should not be nearly so certain of our inherently good and stable characters. We suppose we wouldn’t hurt others, that we would reject any wrongful forms of authority. Then social psychologist Stanley Milgram came along and showed that 65 percent of us would administer electric shocks to a neighbor until they screamed if someone authoritative told us to.

    Gruden reminds you of nothing so much as that. Or of Michael Douglas’s character in the movie “Falling Down,” who is so blindly sure of his virtuosity that he doesn’t realize he has become a public menace. “We’re the same, you and me. We’re the same, don’t you see?” a racist storekeeper says to him. Douglas’s character replies, “We are not the same. I’m an American; you’re a sick a------.” And then the cops come for him, and he’s baffled, mystified.

    “I’m the bad guy?” he says.

    “I’m sorry,” Gruden said in a statement through the Raiders. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”

    Gruden’s exposure is a similar inverse fall, with a total lack of awareness that his outlook is slanted or that he might have caused harm with it. It’s a warning to his colleagues, who should ask themselves whether this game has made them the good guys or the bad guys.
    Wow, that is super-charged writing, welch.

    Sent from my moto g power using Tapatalk

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by welch View Post

    This is nonsense, written as if the poster does not follow football. Bold certainly knows nothing about the Washington Redskins, Dan Snyder, and the NFL's investigation into what it concluded was Snyder's "toxic workplace" at the team he owns. Or perhaps Bold is a devoted believer in "l'il dan". The NFL examined thousands of emails; these Gruden emails were to and from Bruce Allen, president of the Redskins and Snyder's close friend...until Snyder fired him, changed the name from "Redskins" to "Name to be Named Later", and "Washington Team of Football" (WTF) meanwhile.

    The NFL refuses to release details of the investigations, but we know that many of the Gruden-Allen emails were cc'd to others in the Redskin organization. Good chance those emails went to Snyder, and that they included other routine targets of bigots, especially including bigots. Remember that the NFL was "persuaded" to investigate the Snyderskins after Redskin cheerleaders complained that they had been forced to "entertain" Redskin "sponsors" -- men -- at an "adult" resort one off-season. There, the cheerleaders posed for the team's annual calendar, as Redskin staffers constructed a video of "the good bits" for Snyder and Allen and a couple other Snyder favorites.

    In addition, the NFL was nudged into action after a former Redskin employee sued Snyder for sexual assault, and Snyder settled for $1.6 million.

    All that went into a Washington Post investigation:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...line_manual_10

    Lewd cheerleader videos, sexist rules: Ex-employees decry Washington’s NFL team workplace

    In “Beauties on the Beach,” the official video chronicling the making of the Washington NFL team’s 2008 cheerleader swimsuit calendar, the women frolic in the sand, rave about their custom bikinis and praise a photographer for putting them at ease in settings where sometimes only a strategically placed prop or tightly framed shot shielded otherwise bare breasts.

    What the cheerleaders didn’t know was that another video, intended strictly for private use, would be produced using footage from that same shoot. Set to classic rock, the 10-minute unofficial video featured moments when nipples were inadvertently exposed as the women shifted positions or adjusted props.

    The lewd outtakes were what Larry Michael, then the team’s lead broadcaster and a senior vice president, referred to as “the good bits” or “the good parts,” according to Brad Baker, a former member of Michael’s staff. Baker said in an interview that he was present when Michael told staffers to make the video for team owner Daniel Snyder.

    Snyder and the team provided no comment after they were given repeated opportunities to respond to this and other allegations before the publication of this story. In a statement released hours after this story was published online Wednesday, Snyder wrote, “I do not have any knowledge of the ten-year old videos referenced in the story. I did not request their creation and I never saw them.”

    “Nothing can be further from the truth. I was never asked to nor did I ask someone to compile videos as you described,” Michael said in an interview.

    Baker recalls otherwise.

    “Larry said something to the effect of, ‘We have a special project that we need to get done for the owner today: He needs us to get the good bits of the behind-the-scenes video from the cheerleader shoot onto a DVD for him,’” said Baker, who was a producer in the team’s broadcast department from 2007 to 2009.

    The Washington Post obtained a copy of the 2008 video from another former employee, along with a similar outtakes video from the squad’s swimsuit calendar shoot in the Dominican Republic in 2010 that included a close-up of one cheerleader’s pubic area, obscured only by gold body paint.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...line_manual_10
    Thank you for helping me see the bigger picture. Yikes, what a foul place and group of people.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Hells bells, he wasn’t much of a player himself.
    Perhaps being humiliated as a player was the inspiration for his little man syndrome.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by kazoolaw View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by kazoolaw View Post

    Should we speculate what an examination of the texts and emails of the performers chosen for the Super Bowl half-time show would reveal?
    Sounds like you already have done this speculation: "What about dem blacks?"
    I have. I suspect that they are about the same, but won't be examined because the spectacle must go on. Bread and circuses.
    I have no idea what point your question is trying to make. Eminem is white.
    Sorry. I have trouble reading the tone of your short answers in the form of questions.

    I don't think that we should "speculate" on anyone's emails. And that's not why Gruden resigned, either (on "speculation").
    Correct: Gruden didn't resign on speculation. But 2 or 3 out of 650,000 is the halo on the head of a million angels dancing on the head of a pin. As in....

    Much of what follows is paraphrasing sports talk radio this morning:
    1. The Gruden emails were what, two out of 650,000? Let that number roll around inside your head. Can you name anything you have 650,000 of?
    2. If you're doing an investigation of massive numbers of emails, investigators often log them by date, subject, sender, receiver. Where did these two fall? The 10th and 11th? Did you stop looking after that? Was there anything similar in the first 9?
    3. There are sophisticated methods/software to search a data base like this using search terms, date ranges, to and from, and other ways I've never gotten familiar with. Did the media giant WaPo do that kind of analysis? Gotta think the NFL has. Which brings us to:
    4. With so many clamoring for full disclosure, why hasn't the NFL ownership pushed for that? Who, outside the Washington Football Team, would be outed in full disclosure? Did WaPo reporters get perks: tickets, access, luxury suites? Who, inside and outside the team, got invited, or told, about the alleged parties? Who sent/received the nude photos?
    5. Did anyone ever say "No" this is over the line and has to stop?

    Wild guess: the NFL owners are hoping this whole thing blows over as the games go on. Given our national short attention span there's a good chance that we'll move on to the next big thing in the next 140 characters.

    {Apologies if I'm repeating the more thoughtful posts above: I haven't made my way through them all yet.}


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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by kazoolaw View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by kazoolaw View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by kazoolaw View Post

    Should we speculate what an examination of the texts and emails of the performers chosen for the Super Bowl half-time show would reveal?
    Sounds like you already have done this speculation: "What about dem blacks?"
    I have. I suspect that they are about the same, but won't be examined because the spectacle must go on. Bread and circuses.
    I have no idea what point your question is trying to make. Eminem is white.
    Sorry. I have trouble reading the tone of your short answers in the form of questions.

    I don't think that we should "speculate" on anyone's emails. And that's not why Gruden resigned, either (on "speculation").
    Correct: Gruden didn't resign on speculation. But 2 or 3 out of 650,000 is the halo on the head of a million angels dancing on the head of a pin. As in....

    Much of what follows is paraphrasing sports talk radio this morning:
    1. The Gruden emails were what, two out of 650,000? Let that number roll around inside your head. Can you name anything you have 650,000 of?
    2. If you're doing an investigation of massive numbers of emails, investigators often log them by date, subject, sender, receiver. Where did these two fall? The 10th and 11th? Did you stop looking after that? Was there anything similar in the first 9?
    3. There are sophisticated methods/software to search a data base like this using search terms, date ranges, to and from, and other ways I've never gotten familiar with. Did the media giant WaPo do that kind of analysis? Gotta think the NFL has. Which brings us to:
    4. With so many clamoring for full disclosure, why hasn't the NFL ownership pushed for that? Who, outside the Washington Football Team, would be outed in full disclosure? Did WaPo reporters get perks: tickets, access, luxury suites? Who, inside and outside the team, got invited, or told, about the alleged parties? Who sent/received the nude photos?
    5. Did anyone ever say "No" this is over the line and has to stop?

    Wild guess: the NFL owners are hoping this whole thing blows over as the games go on. Given our national short attention span there's a good chance that we'll move on to the next big thing in the next 140 characters.

    {Apologies if I'm repeating the more thoughtful posts above: I haven't made my way through them all yet.}

    Kaz, I think the NY Times broke the Gruden story based on leaks from the investigation into Little Danny Snyder and the Washington Team of Football (WTF). The NFL was investigating what they called the "toxic workplace" that Snyder had created as he tore down the Redskins. After the Post released the stories from the women staffers and the cheerleaders, and after the Post discovered that Snyder had paid $1.5 million to a woman who accused him of sexual assault, Snyder hired a lawyer named Beth Wilkinson to investigate himself and to set workplace rules that would reflect the high standards he expected.

    The NFL took over Wilkinson's investigation to give it more impartiality, as best I can remember and understand.

    Meanwhile, Snyder fired Larry Michael, the Redskin radio broadcaster, plus the VP for player personnel. They had been named as having ordered the Redskin video team to construct a video for Snyder of "the good bits" as the Redskin cheerleaders undressed for the team's calendar photos.

    About the same time, Snyder fired Bruce Allen. As you know, Bruce was Snyder's replacement for Vinny Cerrato: the inside-football expert, the pal. Snyder's two minority partners were trying to sell their shares of the Redskins, but Snyder demanded that they sell to him for less than they had been offered outside. Either Allen or Snyder hired a set of private detectives to harass the lawyers for the partners. When that was revealed, Snyder suggested that Allen was the evil underling, the under-lord of misrule responsible for all bad things inflicted on himself and Redskin fans.

    After Wilkinson's investigation, the NFL released a one-page decision declaring that Snyder had created a "toxic workplace environment" inside the Redskins, fining the renamed WTF $10 million, and ordering Snyder to give up day-to-day control for a while. Snyder appointed his wife, Tanya, as temporary boss. The NFL refuses to release any of the famous 650,000 emails it -- Wilkinson's team -- says it reviewed.

    Someone inside the NFL office seems to have leaked Gruden's and Allen's emails to the NY Times. On them, the cc-list had been "redacted". They appear to have been exchanged in 2011.

    I don't know what sports-talk people -- hosts or callers -- might be saying, but you and I have been Redskin fans long enough to see that all of this fits with the way Snyder runs the Redskins. Looks to me like the NFL, meaning all the other owners, hope to cover over Snyder's way of running (down) the Skins. They probably have enough of their own garbage they do not want revealed. Maybe they like having Snyder own the Redskins because he arranges his teams to lose, although it might be awkward when TV cameras pick up the empty seats at FEDEX Field. Maybe Snyder had the Gruden-Allen emails leaked because Snyder expected focus and fury to shift to fall-guy Bruce Allen. Hard to tell...it's a bit like penetrating the swirling fog at the beginning of MacBeth.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Welch, right with you until "you and I have been Redskin fans." Although I appreciated John Riggins telling Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to "Loosen up, Sandy baby" my NFL team affliction of choice has been the Lions. As far as I know they're simply inept, not toxic.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by kazoolaw View Post
    Welch, right with you until "you and I have been Redskin fans." Although I appreciated John Riggins telling Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to "Loosen up, Sandy baby" my NFL team affliction of choice has been the Lions. As far as I know they're simply inept, not toxic.
    Wait a minute, Kaz. I know you had some sort of Michander "affliction", but I remember your appreciation of the team once connected to The Hogs. Maybe that was a passing "affliction"? It's probably good that you had connection to a team more reasonable that that once owned by George Preston Marshall and now owned by little danny Snyder. Me? I'm stuck, so I pay attention, now, to the Capitals and Nationals. Redskins lost dismally yesterday, by the way.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Just for the record, it appears that the Wall Street Journal broke the Gruden story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jon-gru...21045?mod=e2tw

    Lurking in the fog: ins and outs of fights between NFL players, the head of the players' union, DeMaurice Smith, and the owners. Fog in the Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/s...t-comment.html

    The real story:
    Gruden’s Emails Were Collateral Damage in Washington Football Inquiry

    The former Raiders coach’s toxic commentary emerged from a separate investigation that had nothing to do with him, and remained secret because the probe was designed to be opaque.

    By Kevin Draper
    Published Oct. 12, 2021
    Updated Oct. 14, 2021
    The former Las Vegas Raiders Coach Jon Gruden is out of a job in the aftermath of an investigation that originally had nothing to do with him. But now he is collateral damage in a tangled case that had focused on the conduct of Daniel Snyder, the contentious owner of the Washington Football Team, and his feud with investors in the team.

    Snyder has emerged with firmer control of Washington than before, even after Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, concluded that the workplace environment at the team was “highly unprofessional” and a place of bullying, intimidation and fear. The team was fined $10 million.

    A scorched-earth dispute has played out over the last year, with damning information and accusations of wrongdoing weaponized by those involved. Gruden’s high-profile football career, which made him a wealthy man and an avatar of the sport itself, meant that his misdeeds became leverage in a fight that wasn’t even directly about him.

    Snyder and the Washington Football Team have long been mired in controversy, whether for the previous team name that was eventually dropped because it was a slur toward Native Americans or the organization’s mistreatment of its cheerleaders. But the situation escalated in the summer of 2020 when The Washington Post published a report in which two dozen current and former employees described an atmosphere of pervasive sexual harassment, bullying and abuse at work. At least a half dozen employees were fired or resigned, others were pushed out and the team commissioned an outside investigation by the law firm Wilkinson Walsh that was soon taken over by the N.F.L. itself.

    Parallel to and often intersecting with the workplace misconduct investigation was a bitter internecine quarrel between Snyder and three of the team’s limited partners, Frederick W. Smith, Dwight Schar and Robert Rothman, who collectively owned 40 percent of the franchise. Attempts by the three limited partners to sell their shares devolved into acrimony with Snyder, and the N.F.L. appointed an arbitrator to resolve the matter privately.

    Their dispute did not stay private for long.

    Snyder soon sued an obscure online media company in India, accusing it of taking money in exchange for publishing defamatory rumors about him. In lawsuit filings, Snyder also accused a representative trying to help the limited partners sell their shares of wrongly telling a potential investor that Snyder would soon be forced to sell because of negative information spilling out into public.

    In effect, Snyder accused the men who had co-owned the team with him since 2003 of leaking negative information to The Washington Post and the Indian media company to attempt to force him to sell his stake in the team, too.

    Selling minority stakes in football teams valued at billions of dollars in full can be quite difficult, and if Snyder were forced to sell his stake in the team too, the limited partners could presumably sell more easily, and at a higher price.

    Throughout the end of 2020 and into 2021, both the investigation into Washington’s workplace culture and the N.F.L.’s mediation of the ownership dispute proceeded more quietly. In March, the N.F.L. tentatively approved an agreement in which Snyder would be allowed to take on more debt than the league traditionally allows in order to buy out his three partners. It was a sign that the outside investigation, while not yet complete, would largely exonerate Snyder personally.

    Three months later, in July, that was exactly what happened. The N.F.L. finally resolved the yearlong investigation. The Washington Football Team was ordered to pay a $10 million fine and reimburse the cost of the investigation, and Snyder said he would cede day-to-day control of the team to a new co-chief executive, his wife, Tanya Snyder. The team’s human resources department was ordered to be monitored for the next two years.

    But the investigation’s findings were not made public, and nothing was said about allegations about Snyder’s behavior toward female employees. Not only did the N.F.L. not release a thorough report, it did not even ask for one. Instead, Beth Wilkinson, the lead outside investigator, briefed the N.F.L. on her findings orally.

    “We felt it was best due to the sensitivity of the allegations and the requests for confidentiality,” Lisa Friel, the N.F.L. executive in charge of investigations, told reporters.

    Part of the investigation, however, involved the review of the emails sent and received by Bruce Allen, the team’s longtime general manager and president, and a close confidant of Snyder, until Allen was fired in 2019. The review of Allen’s inbox and outbox is what ultimately led to Gruden’s resignation, and showed that Allen participated in inappropriate and offensive conversations, including the sharing of pornographic images.

    Allen was a senior executive with the Raiders during Gruden’s first stint as the head coach there, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and both eventually went to work for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where they won a Super Bowl following the 2002 season. Both left the team in 2008. Gruden went on to work for ESPN as a color analyst for “Monday Night Football,” and Allen was eventually hired by Washington. As general manager there, Allen hired Gruden’s brother, Jay Gruden, who coached the team from 2014 to 2019.

    Though Jon Gruden and Allen ceased being co-workers in 2008, they regularly chatted about N.F.L. matters by email. Gruden used a private email address while Allen used his official Washington Football Team account. Wilkinson’s investigation collected those emails, as well as hundreds of thousands of others, which were analyzed and discussed by the league, but not noted in any report.

    Since 2014, the N.F.L. has been embroiled, nearly constantly, in misconduct scandals that necessitated external investigations. Most of them have been limited to accusations against players and tests of the league’s authority to punish their misconduct. One of the few that threatened to drag the league office and team owners into the harsh spotlight, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid’s accusations that they were blackballed from the league, was settled before that could happen.

    A number of questions remain unanswered about Washington’s workplace, and what the N.F.L. and the Raiders knew about Gruden’s emails and how those organizations handled them. But so far the biggest public revelations have centered on Gruden, not Snyder or anyone directly associated with the Washington Football Team.

    In an investigation of workplace harassment, the extent of the harassment is still unknown publicly.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/s...ssion_cut_3_MI

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    Chuck Naill (October 18th, 2021), TSherbs (October 18th, 2021)

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Thanks, Welch, for educating all of us.

    Kazoo: It doesn't matter to me how many pleasant emails, at other times, Gruden composed (and 650k isn't how many Gruden wrote, I don't believe. It is the total collected from the WFT account, as I understand it, some of which--I have no idea how many--were to and from Gruden). As at my place of employment, arguing that I usually or nearly often or 1 million other times have written acceptable emails will not excuse me from the consequences of violating my employee contract, even just once if it is considered egregious enough.

    Are you suggesting that Gruden has been treated unfairly, because....why?

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Thanks, Welch, for educating all of us.

    Kazoo: It doesn't matter to me how many pleasant emails, at other times, Gruden composed (and 650k isn't how many Gruden wrote, I don't believe. It is the total collected from the WFT account, as I understand it, some of which--I have no idea how many--were to and from Gruden). As at my place of employment, arguing that I usually or nearly often or 1 million other times have written acceptable emails will not excuse me from the consequences of violating my employee contract, even just once if it is considered egregious enough.

    Are you suggesting that Gruden has been treated unfairly, because....why?
    Same here. Don't send an email that you would not want on the front page of the NYT the next day. Ain't worth it. Thing it, Gruden must have thought he was gold or maybe Kryptonite.

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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Thanks, Welch, for educating all of us.

    Kazoo: It doesn't matter to me how many pleasant emails, at other times, Gruden composed (and 650k isn't how many Gruden wrote, I don't believe. It is the total collected from the WFT account, as I understand it, some of which--I have no idea how many--were to and from Gruden). As at my place of employment, arguing that I usually or nearly often or 1 million other times have written acceptable emails will not excuse me from the consequences of violating my employee contract, even just once if it is considered egregious enough.

    Are you suggesting that Gruden has been treated unfairly, because....why?
    Not even close. My point was that 1(1) we can't be sure how many other offensive Gruden emails there were, (2) no one has disclosed how many others wrote similar or worse emails, and (3) why haven't ALL of the emails been disclosed?

    None of your comments in your first paragraph reflect my thinking. At your workplace and mine it's clear we have no right to privacy in what are corporate property. Reread the first paragraph of Welch's quoted article and my comment about only the smallest sample has been made public.


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    Default Re: The cult of “anti racism” has fully taken over the NFL

    @kazoolaw

    gotcha

    Like I said, I have trouble understanding your basic positions from some of your comments, particularly when you ask questions.

    I feel Gruden deserved to lose his job. It's sad, and I wish it weren't so, but his emails are egregious and he is a figure head for his team.

    I think that Welch had answered those questions for you: the leak was selective (apparently) and the NFL has been sitting on the details in the typical way that the NFL does to protect its brand and ownership (this is speculative, of course).
    Last edited by TSherbs; October 18th, 2021 at 06:29 PM.

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