Good day, loyal DFOers! Litre_Cola, Gratliff and WhyEaglesWhy here with the Eagles at the bye post. We all know what happened to Deadspin and this is a sports site, so before we get censored by our Puerto Rican overlords – we will stick to sports.

Have you seen the paper towel catching competition in San Juan? Heyyyyooo!

Season Overview via Litre_Cola:

Living up here in your toque, our political landscape is a wee bit different and thank Bleergh we didn’t elect the milquetoast xenophobe to be our Prime Minister. But Litre you say, “What about the West completely voting Conservative except for one pin prick of sanity in Edmonton?” I say to you these #wexit people are fucking backwards and it’s become even more of an embarrassment to live in this province. The premier of Alberta just gutted our social services and gave a bunch of money to oil and gas companies (because JOBS!) but he’s using the ole’ misdirection by starting a Western Separatist movement. It is the biggest watch this hand but don’t look at the other hand I have seen here in some time.

Here are my points.

At this point the Eagles are tied with the Cowboys and how dumb the season has been I will take it. No one can catch, and no one can cover but Jordan Howard has been a nice surprise. If Desean Jackson was healthy it would have made a huge difference. He is not healthy. The season will come down to the next game vs the Cowboys. That is it, that is all.

Season Overview via Gratliff: 

In the entire world, there are few things that enrage me to the degree of failson millionaires and billionaires imposing their will on our reality. If you work for a private company with more than 10 employees and even the slightest amount of profitability, you’re probably going to get to experience the joy of dealing with the vague “Corporate” entity. Google—Fucking Google—isn’t even its own entity. They answer to Alphabet, Inc. Outside of finance and tech nerds, how many people even know who the fuck Alphabet, Inc. is? Accel? They’re the ones who bankrolled Facebook way back when Zuckerberg was more concerned with girls he couldn’t fuck at Harvard, after they started exploding thanks to half a million from Peter Thiel, whose name you may have heard at some point. 

Twitter on the other hand, was backed by DFJ, which was co-founded by Tim Draper, a third-generation venture capitalist, who somehow gets stories written about how he built his fortune off of shrewd early investments, as opposed to the reality which is that he built his fortune off of his family’s fortune. He tells this really cute story about how his first job of selling apples convinced him of the evils of socialism at age 8. By that time, his dad had already started his THIRD venture capital firm. As a young adult, his father was one of the most influential financial figures in the entire world, being appointed to President of the Export-Import Bank of the United States by Reagan. This motherfucker talks like he ran a lemonade stand and turned it into an empire when his family hasn’t had to look at their bank account in fucking generations. Mitt Romney raised a lot of eyebrows when he argued that he earned his money the hard way instead of inheriting it because the money daddy gave him was actually in the form of interest-free loans. 

Not every venture capitalist has this story. Some find a means to exploit the system before everyone else. Some are ruthless sociopaths who don’t care how many bodies they have to step on in their attempt to get the high score. Some, like Intel, aren’t even people! Very few actually do something worthwhile and extremely profitable when they’re young and just spend the rest of their lives playing the game. The results are pretty much equally awful, regardless of how they got into their positions of power. 

As part of the working/middle/whatever-pundits-want-to-call-it-come-election-time class, it’s annoying and further entrenches me in my cynical worldview where nothing good can ever happen in the world because it’s controlled by idiots using money they don’t deserve. However, my hatred runs much deeper than that. My parents were homeless when I was born and rented from slumlords for most of my childhood until I was a teenager. I scraped my way through college to become the first in my family with a degree, graduating just in time to walk into the buzzsaw of the Great Recession caused by the same types of dipshits mentioned earlier. It quickly went from competing with people with Master’s degrees for entry level tech jobs to competing with people with Master’s degrees for hours at a grocery store. 

In lieu of starving, I moved into lumber and learned some fairly desirable skills just to make sure my kids never go hungry the way I did, working 60 hours a week doing literally backbreaking physical labor for over a year before slipping into some higher-skilled positions. The saw mill I worked for changed hands three times while I was there. At one point, we were part of the same parent company as Red Lobster. Each new “Corporate” brought about a less effective management system that valued my abilities and work ethic less and less. One day while I was particularly tired of the bullshit, I applied for an entry level tech position half a state away and got in. I grinded and leap-frogged most of my coworkers trying to get remotely close to where I thought I could be job-wise. Eventually, I was told I was getting promoted. The next morning, that manager and myself were both laid off as the finance firm that owned my company called for a workforce reduction at most of its properties. 

Luckily, there was a job that opened up in the public sector shortly after that was looking for the exact skillset I exemplified in my previous position, and I was pretty much able to slide right in and keep the momentum going for myself. However, that’s the problem with my story. Even with the skillset, even with the grinding, it came down to a lucky break to take me from barely scraping by to not having to figure out what necessity I was going to sacrifice to make rent. That’s all the game of life is in the end: Luck. One bad break, and you may never recover, but be the product of the right people fucking, and you’ll never even have to try. Most who took a similar path to mine see it as something that everyone should have to go through in order to pay their dues or appreciate what they have. My take is that it’s something no one should have to go through. Life shouldn’t be that hard just to improve the bottom line of people already living in luxury, and many people who are currently suffering because of it aren’t going to have an opportunity to claw their way out of a meager existence the way I managed to. 

I guess what I’m really trying to say here is that Doug’s neither the infallible genius he looked like after SB LII nor should he be dumped into the Schuylkill like people want to do after week six every season since. He’s a good coach with an offense capable of explosive production that can make up for its non-existent secondary when they actually decide to execute. They have a fairly easy back half of the season save a nightmare matchup against New England, and I still think they’ll take the division and get skull-fucked by a wild card team with 3 more wins than they’ll have. Doug’s boss, though? Him and all his billionaire friends should be thrown on a conveyor belt that comes to an abrupt end halfway across the Grand Canyon. 

Season Overview via WhyEaglesWhy: 

I love living in Australia. But aside from having to get up at 2:30am on Monday to watch the Eagles perform “Who’s On First” every week, the most frustrating thing about it is that I have to pay attention to the batshit news from TWO crumbling democracies.

Staying engaged with American news alone is enough to make one self-defenestrate. Watching Republicans play that “Hey dog, look, I’m pretending to throw a ball!” game and seeing the Democrats chase the ball every time is disheartening to say the least. Astonishingly, Democrats are so terrible at this sort of thing that Republicans regularly dunk on them. The same Republicans that think helping Israel will get them raptured and support the personal freedom to die of smallpox.

Consider that I also have to endure Australian politics. Until the last few years, Australia’s two major parties were both significantly left of their American counterparts. There are the Liberals (the right-wing party, comparable to centrist neo-liberals like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton) and Labor (the left-wing party, comparable to leftist Dems like Elizabeth Warren and AOC). They are like their American counterparts; the Liberals are generally incompetent, but Labor, in a proud display of one-upmanship, is constantly stepping on rakes.

This changed a bit starting in 2016 (hmm…) when the Liberals started adopting a YOLO-style disregard for facts, a cogent train of thought, or anything resembling common sense. They were definitely emboldened by developments in the US, culminating in the decision by Prime Minister Scott Morrison (whose appearance, demeanor, and rhetorical style remind one of nothing so much as a potato) to openly help Bill Barr investigate the origins of the Mueller Report. He didn’t even get $391 million of military aid for his trouble! He was just starstruck and wanted to feel like an Important World Leader Guy. Not to be outdone, just this week former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce speculated that those who died in the horrific Sydney-area wildfires “most likely voted for the Greens”, prompting a collective ‘Huh?” across the land.

Having said all this, imagine my surprise when my refuge from this sort of dumbshittery is repeating the pattern. The NFC East is like both of these dumb countries. The Cowboys, like a right-wing party, are run by a crazy person and clearly incompetent, wasting a very talented roster and even finding a way to lose to the New York Jets. However, the Eagles, reminiscent of a left-wing party, constantly find ways to make the Cowboys look good, doubling down on losing strategies (fielding a secondary, throwing the ball to…anyone) and refusing to do things that can help them win (let Carson off the leash, tailor the game plan to the personnel) on principle.

But you know, I’m going to keep reading the news and I’m going to keep watching football, and I’m going to keep open the option to self-defenestrate.