Lord Ratner

Because in the absence of a real, and active threat, the military is a vanity project for the general-caste. You are led by those who have been fantasizing about being generals since they were in elementary school. Yeah, I know, there are some good ones. But obviously not many, or we wouldn't have the military we have right now.

He's lucky to have such supportive fathers!

I know what Americans think. Are you implying that the Democratic Party supports abortion bans at a certain point? Or is the official position of the Democratic party that there should be no restrictions on abortion? Regardless, abortion is so far down the list of priorities, and always has been, it's hilarious that people still think Americans are going to pick the president on this issue. They aren't. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx Just because people have an opinion doesn't mean they care. And they really don't care when it doesn't even affect them. You think a liberal in a state with abortion access is going to pick who they vote for based on what other people in other states do or don't have? Nonsense. Everyone is looking for some excuse for why Republicans are doing so poorly, some issue or singular mistake. The party is in a transition and is splitting into two parties, neocons and populists. They don't agree on much and as such take no real stance as a party and pick shitty candidates that represent nothing. Politics in it's truest form. The Democrats would be in the same boat if progressivism wasn't so spectacularly distasteful that it can't get more than 9-10% of the population to support it. But the people still going on about abortion aren't even following the logic through. Once every state has voted and decided what their abortion policy will be, exactly who is going to carry the torch? If abortion is so popular, then nearly every state will pass a law protecting it. Then... What? The country is going to pick the president based on abortion access in 4 or 5 deep red states? Right. And if some states ban it and some states protect it, then it wasn't the slam dunk issue liberals said it was. Hell, that's why they wanted Roe so badly. They knew a voter-driven law would result in more restrictions. So much reluctance to let the people decide for themselves. I'm sure a lot of Republicans are disappointed with what happened in Ohio, but some of us are quite pleased with it, not because I like abortion or believe it should be legal, but because I believe it was always for the voters to decide. And they have.

It's crazy who the RNC picks to moderate the debates. It goes to show you that establishment Republicans are more concerned with being accepted in the political sphere by their peers than they are with being conservative and pushing conservative policy. And even after Trump they haven't learned. Being conservative in temperament and disposition is mutually exclusive from being someone who seeks the media spotlight, so it seems.

I agree that it's having short-term negative consequences for Republicans, but strategic considerations are generally long-term, not short-term. Strategically, this issue has been removed from the national conversation, *if* the Republicans can get it through their big fat stupid heads to keep it a states rights issue. You say that the dems aren't going to let it go, but then you also say that it's a fringe issue. It's either one of the other. It doesn't matter what the activists scream about, what matters is what actually impacts the average person. The average person now has a much greater ability to live somewhere that agrees with their abortion views, if they consider those views so important as to move to another state. This experiment has been run already in Europe, where the various countries have various laws, and it's just not a part of their normal political discourse. If the Democrats want to make this a national issue, that's all well and good, but they will suffer the same short-term consequences the Republicans are suffering now. Change is seldom good for those doing the changing. The alternative was to have this issue hanging over the heads of Republicans for all time, forced to accept a world of completely unrestricted abortions for all time. That's not a moral proposition that many conservatives can accept, but at least now they can redirect their moral concerns to the local level, as it has been meant to be. I can't speak to the forecast of the Republicans who pushed this, but if they expected no fallout, or even crazier, the adulation of the masses from killing Roe, then they were idiots. But I think many knew that there would be short-term consequences, and those consequences are more than acceptable for completely solving the legal problem, and partially solving the ethical problem. But I think this will be the last presidential election cycle where abortion is a headline issue. The abortion advocates will absolutely hate that reality, as will the pro-life absolutists, but the rest of us will be better off.

Counterpoint, this is exactly how the Roe issue is permanently removed from the conversation. Every state is now deciding what they want, which is going to appease a lot of people who now have choices if this issue is truly that important to them. The only way Republicans can truly fuck this up is if they try to nationalize the issue again with a federal ban. They will lose their asses in that case, but I don't think that's the strategy for most. A terrible legal decision has been undone, and one of the most contentious issues in modern American politics is being dealt with in the manner of the founders originally intended, locally. I know a lot of Republicans had the ultimate goal of fully banning abortion, but from a purely conservative and legal standpoint, this issue is resolving itself remarkably fast after 50 years of turmoil.

Finished my Texas LTC application waiting for the license and I've been completely blown away by the Sig P365X. I put a Holosun on it and ended up swapping it for the Holosun with the ACSS reticle (it's a single dot with a dashed 232 MOA circle that helps massively with initial target acquisition. I can see why it totally took over the market; it's a really, really nice pistol.

The post modernists made it absolutely clear, it's just that no one wanted to believe them.

I just spent the last few months digging into something I had no knowledge of, that at some point after I became an adult the education system decided that phonics was a bad idea. I'm not sure there's an example I've ever seen with a more precipitous and obvious decrease in results than when schools went from phonics based reading to contextual based reading. Same thing for math apparently. It's to the point where my wife and I are considering starting an Acton school just so we can have more control over exactly what is going on. While I'm sure there are a few good public schools out there, I'm as skeptical as brabus when you realize that the entire education establishment has been taken for a ride. It also doesn't cover the reality that our curriculum hasn't changed much in 100 years, yet the world has. Kids are still graduating with no idea what taxes or interest rates are, and that's ridiculous.

Can you give me a link to where you found that? I poked around his YouTube page and didn't see it, and I'd like to dig in to what he's doing. I played around with midjourney last night and it is remarkable how much better it is than when we were playing around with stability AI on this forum several months ago.

This is ultimately why I believe AI, at least in its current form, is massively overhyped. AI can't create anything yet. It's just a very capable search engine, that can combine the results into one output. There are a ton of uses for this, but the jobs destroyed by AI are creating AI jobs required to create things like, for example, prompts. So if you ask GPT to create a super prompt, it will fail, until there are enough human-created super prompts in its repository of data to output one.

Right up until they started defending themselves, roughly.

I wonder if he's shown his work. The prompting to get the right output is an art in itself.

Was that AI generated?

Doesn't actually take much effort in Washington.

Yeah, that could have something to do with it. Maybe medium probability? It's also possible that they realize things are spinning out of control on a global level. Again this is something I've said before that I consider to be inevitable, but if the usual power brokers are starting to fear a chain reaction, they're going to try to get ahead of it so they can claim to have been on the right side of the debate when things get really messy. I think the Democrats have been looking for an excuse to turn on Biden for a couple years now, but every time they seem to make a move they either lose their will or something works out well for Biden. Maybe the impending failure of Ukraine combined with their multi-cultural coalition falling apart over Israel has emboldened them to make a move. But I don't think they have a replacement.

What I'm more interested in is "why." They stalled out months ago, so why are the supporters in the media suddenly against the effort? I'm always fascinated by how the Democrat Machine shifts it's position and why. The Republicans aren't nearly as coordinated or consistent.

"The one?" You're going to have to be a little more specific. I was good, but I know plenty others in the FAIP Mafia who would not let me have that title without a fight 🤣😂. Yup.. Coming from an AD perspective there is absolutely no discernible difference between the unions.

I was wrong, but actually I'm still right. Nicely done.

Well, I know you won't be doing anything to make ALPA work anymore than you're doing anything to make APA work, so this conversation won't go far. For the outsiders watching in confusion, the majority of pilots have no idea how their contract or benefits work, until they need something from them. The only thing worse is their knowledge of the other Airlines' contracts and benefits, so you get very extreme cases of the grass-is-always-greener effect. But they get very angry that the people who do the actual work don't provide them a world of limitless pleasure and comfort. 🤷🏻‍♂️ And for the record, I signed a card for ALPA, but the outrage over a normal medical insurance challenge is absurd.

The question is more a matter of which existential threat is worse. The two-state solution is so entrenched in the modern narrative that people forget it was not the only option people were pushing for. The one-state solution was something the Israelis have had to fight for decades. The population imbalance meant that a one-state solution would immediately result in the subjugation (at best) or destruction (at worst) of the Jews as they would be immediately out-voted in their own democracy by a majority of Muslim Arabs who call for their extermination. So between a one state solution and the current mess, the current mess is still far more desirable, because under a one state solution there would be no Jewish state. Or, for that matter, Jews in the region. Fast forward to the two-state solution dominating the narrative, and the Jews have to deal with the sovereignty of a Palestinian state meaning that they can no longer just go in and root out terrorists. This is another reason the shifting borders have been so contentious. An independent state has very different implications for Israel depending on where those borders are and how they allow for defense against attack, which is guaranteed. And so what does statehood mean for Israel? Now they are being attacked by a sovereign nation. That just makes a military incursion worse, and at the end, they are now occupying a country instead of whatever the hell Palestine is today. Its a shit sandwich all around, but the Israel-did-this-to-themselves ignores that the Palestinians have been trying to wipe Israel off the map since the beginning, and have shown no evidence of changing that view. And before the creation of Israel by the Brits, Jews under the Turks were second class citizens. So, as with all things, "it depends." But Israel has certainly done bad things, I won't deny that. But worse? I don't think so.

Same. Best way to hone a position is to have it challenged. Because that's how lots of humans are? That's just how we act, we want other people to value what we value, do what we do, and fail how we fail. That's why drug addicts are always trying to make those around them addicts too. I however am not trying to do that, I think. I truly do commend your honesty. I hope that it's obvious we are debating the merits of the argument, not your honesty or what you should *say* rather than *do.* And that mostly we are talking about what we as a country should do, not as individuals. No, but that's not the only option. There are many ways to support. As far as doing enough, we have also tied their hands for many years, as much of the West has. Each administration approaches Israel differently, but we have certainly pressured them to take sub-optimal approaches to Palestine in the past. This is not happening. First, they didn't "tolerate" their existence, they whole-heartedly supported Hamas and voted for them. Second, the "innocents" are not dying for their support, they are dying because Hamas intentionally hides in hospitals, schools, and "refugee camps," even though there are no refugees in Gaza. The difference between killing civilians because they supported the bad guys and killing them because they are literally shielding them is huge, and a moral difference that separates Israel from Palestine. Poorly phrased, lemme try again. But when your adversaries, who demonstrate in the most blatant way possible that they do not value civilian life, use your morals as a shield when they build their military facilities literally in schools and hospitals, it is not immoral to destroy those schools, and the unfortunate children inside. It is tragic, yes, but not evil. It is, however, evil to use civilians as shields. Well literally, no. But for the purposes of exposing hypocrisy, yes. I assume you understand that, and the gif made me actually LOL. Reasonable as an argument, sure, but I don't think it's accurate. The foreign policy blunders of the US are often viewed in isolation of the often more-severe blunders (or outright aggressions) of the other countries. I believe the world of the past 80 years has been more stable that it otherwise would have been without our intervention. That doesn't mean we didn't make things worse at times. And of course you can, but we are here to debate those lines. Obviously. Because hypotheticals are vital to creating moral frameworks and testing moral hypotheses. They allow us to set the upper and lower bounds on a concept, then work towards the truth in the middle. And because the arguments made about what Israel or the US have done wrong to encourage/cause/instigate the current conflict are equally hypothetical, because they assume a different outcome if the inputs had been changed. That's an assumption. Good post.

BCBS is not the only plan administrator, and they were not contractually selected. They were chosen by AA, just like AA chose to use their network. We could have negotiated for that, but no one really considered that a priority. If AA wanted to pay them to do so, they could have BCBS and UNH create a fully customized network just for the AA plan. We wouldn't be able to do anything about that either, because we didn't negotiate for it. Sure, it's a change, but it's an allowed change. There's nothing to fight (other than what is already being fixed). There is only something new to negotiate, assuming the pilots care, which I doubt they will now that the out-of-network component is fixed. It was always a part of our plan, if desired, to max out the out-of-network caps so that you could go to any doctor at any location at any price and have it fully covered by AA. That's a pretty significant benefit that few Americans have.

I'm all for ALPA, but your insurer, which is AA, gets to decide what is in-network and out-of-network. And Supplement K (Now section 5) does not mandate what is in-network, it only mandates an out-of-pocket max for out-of-network care. The ALPA cheerleaders are going to be thoroughly disappointed with ALPA based on the myriad industry norms they seem to think only affect APA.