Lord Ratner

There is no intellectual basis for the policies of the progressive left anymore. Even the marxist part of the party is at odds with the critical race theory nonsense. "Reason" implies that there are such things as right answers. Debate is a form of multi-party reasoning, so if you're entire ideology is based on falsehoods, debate is a threat. The only logical thing the left does these days is stifle debate. Reminds me of the conservatives when they were nonstop railing against gay marriage. A bunch of small-government warriors demanding the federal government protect their religious ceremony from copy cats. Funny seeing the parties completely switch which one gets to be insane over 20 years.

No, it was the government jumping in front of the parade. If you think the very famous incident you are citing was at the beginning, rather than the end of the process that led to the civil rights of black people being recognized and enforced in America, you are mistaken. Where does government get it's power from? How well does it work when the government does something that the majority opposes? Were all the civil rights advocates voted out of office during the next election cycle? The government could have stepped in 50 years earlier, why didn't it? Remember that Jim Crow laws were *governments* forcing private citizens to segregate their business. Those laws were passed because citizens were desegregating on their own.

Exactly. And when the federal government steps it it's usually well after the tide has shifted. Gay rights, civil rights, the legalization of weed, women voting, prohibition, unprohibition... All driven by the lower levels of society with national politicians jumping in front of the parade at the finish line to pretend like they were leading it the whole time.

Shack. It's absolutely insane that Amazon can hold a nationwide contest for which city can provide it the most tax breaks while any one of us would be laughed out of the room for asking for similar treatment of we started a small business. As long as conservatives keep reflexively defending the globalization of American jobs and the asymmetrical treatment of immensely powerful corporations, millennials and Gen Zers will continue flocking to the bankrupt and dangerous philosophies of Marx/Bernie/progressives.

Net neutrality had zero to do with the threats we are dealing with from tech companies. But then most NN supporters didn't know any more about it than a few reddit memes.

I spent hours looking at what was presented in the Chauvin trial. If not a single juror could find reasonable doubt to any of the charges brought against Chauvin, we have a real problem with media influence. I was in the "lock him up" group until recently. Now I can't help but wonder if the media is intentionally focusing on cases that are "questionable" in order to further divide the population. Michael Brown, George Zimmerman, and now Floyd. Either outright fabrications or very difficult to parse, but never clearly racist murders. Those cases seem to just fade into the noise. This man had 3 times the fatal dose of fentanyl in his system. Plus meth. He was foaming from the mouth, a clear symptom of Fentanyl overdose. "I ate too many drugs." Saliva covered pills in the back of the police cruiser. The prosecution witnesses were almost comically irrelevant in the first couple days, yet they were permitted to take the stand. The MMA "effort" witness was a joke. The prosecution's own witnesses confirmed the validity of the restraint method used by Chauvin. The paramedics had to drive three blocks away before administering first aid because of the angry crowd. The video showing Floyd fight his way out of the cop car, already screaming that he couldn't breath (also a symptom of Fentanyl and meth overdose). Innocent? Who knows. But not a single reasonable doubt? Between holding the trial in Minneapolis, a sitting congresswoman calling for increased confrontation, the mayor saying the police are at fault regardless of the verdict, and the judge failing to sequester the jury until the end, I hope his appeal judges have more courage than the jury did. I don't suspect this is going to do any favors to the rapidly rising murder rate in America.

Super impressive

🎯 The fed's attempt to control the economy with near zero interest rates has created a reality where the only place to make money is real estate and equities. But that's only for the ones that have any retirement at all... https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/baby-boomer-retirees-positive-about-retirement-savings-2020-10#:~:text=According to data from the,use the cash before retirement. According to this the boomers own half of all equities, but very concentrated at the top. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/17/older-americans-are-selling-the-stock-market-slowly-but-ceaselessly-to-junior-generations.html What I can't tell from that article is whether or not that accounts for pension funds. I'm far more worried about the state and municipal pension funds all across the country that have their money tied up in equities, because they're underfunded and can't grow the funds anywhere else. But it reinforces the problem of retirement savings... The wealthy have all the stocks. We'll see. Just seems... Implausible that this ride continues forever

I'm not crazy about the parallels between 1990s Japan and 2020's USA, but at least we are still the strongest economy in the world. The number of people investing is stocks and crypto without a clue as to what either one is scares me a bit too. The only philosophy behind the current trajectory is "stocks always go up." That didn't work great in 99 for stocks or 08 for houses. But I'm not sure the millennials can sustain the trading volume required at these prices to keep the prices high, especially when the boomers start selling for retirement income... Uncle Sam can keep buying, but for how long? A millennial buying 5 shares of amazon at $2000 will not cover dozens of boomers who bought it at $100 selling to pay the mortgage on their homes... It has the makings of a cascade, but bubbles always go longer than you expect.

You are mistaking the liberals with the marxists. The marxists are being quite consistent in their actions and advocacy, as well as in their tendency to hijack other political groups when they align on one or two issues.

Probably? What military are you in? Your interactions with flightline SF are regularly negative to the point that you think most are only *probably* decent people? Perspective takes effort. It's very easy use negative anecdotes to characterize entire systems in direct conflict with reality. We're seeing that with Americans' perception of policing now. But if an educated officer will let one stupid interaction that only impacted a training sortie drive his perception to the "probably" standard, what hope does the rest of America have when the news is now completely saturated with carefully filtered anecdotal cases of police malfeasance?

Source? That sounds like an interesting case to read.

You imply that there were options that weren't disgusting.

You missed this gem: "The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it."

Joe represented a return to a pre-Trump world. Politically moderate and not addicting to twitter bombs. What people didn't foresee, including myself, is that Joe would become *more* rather than less progressive after the primary. Usually it's the other way around. Personally, I believe that's due to a combination of two things: heavily relying on ex-Obama staffers, and his own cognitive decline reducing his ability to steer the agenda.

While I appreciate the bold idea that OAN and Newsmax are somehow equivalent to WaPo and CNN, I know you don't believe that. What's next, you going to tell us Hollywood is politically balanced because Kelsey Grammar and Melissa Joan Hart are Republicans? There's definitely a change coming, and the conservative outlets are making progress, but to imply "media" is balanced in 2021 is silly. Ironically, the outlets you cite are doing well specifically because of the wild imbalance in political leaning in the news media.

Yes? I think the latter causes the former, not the other way around. So, they're related, but not in the manner presented. And in this case we specifically referring to "gangster" culture, not all forms of hedonism.

The glorification of crime in poor black communities and the refusal of the media/political class to acknowledge such acts based on a racism narrative has nothing to do with Satan shoes. Further, blaming the hedonistic entertainment is misguided. As Walsh points out, it's the lack of a functional family unit, lack of community, lack of education, and lack of role models that causes this. If these criminal children are screaming "hail Satan" then maybe I'd give the shoes more attention. But I played a lot of video games where I massacred civilians and listened to "satanic" music, and I never committed a felony as a child.

Wait, do people really think Satan shoes are... Anything? How is that important?

I agree completely. Massive, massive deflationary forces from unfathomable progress on automation and exploiting foreign labor have made the inflation from runaway government spending invisible. But the geniuses at the Fed haven't put that together. Problem is, there aren't many places left in the world to get nearly-free labor. If we can't keep dropping the prices on TVs and t-shirts, the stagnation in wage growth for the past couple decades and the aforementioned spending spree is going to kick us in the teeth. And the Fed has nowhere to go with rates at zero. Get ready...

Ah yes, economics. Incredibly complex and counterintuitive answers to simple questions, requiring even more complicated explanations when the aforementioned answers prove incorrect. I really liked when the fed, which is fully staffed with economists, admitted that they simply can't explain the rates of inflation over the past years, so maybe they just need different goals... https://econofact.org/why-did-the-fed-change-its-framework-and-why-does-it-matter Sometimes I think economists were invented to take the heat off of meteorologists.

They want to manipulate the outcome in pursuit of "equity," but doing so with differential scoring criteria is to highlight the very differences they claim don't exist. The demonization of test scores in academia is evidence of this. Affirmative action in University admissions has been around forever, and that's just a form of differential scoring. Not good enough. So now we get rid of grades, leaving group identity rather than performance as the metric for measuring worth. Ugly stuff. As soon as you realize that the whole philosophy is corrupt, and the leaders of the movement know it, understanding the policy gets a lot easier. There's a reason the thought-leaders on the left have all but completely stopped engaging in debates with their counterparts on the right. They're lying, and you don't promote a lie by giving your opposition a platform to call you out on it.

Ok, but they *are* lesser or ineffective in certain combat roles. Those roles are quite specifically the ones requiring brute strength or extreme stamina. No test is needed, beyond common sense, but if you have doubts, I believe the Marine Infantry Officer Course was opened to women a few years ago with a predictable outcome. Fighter pilots? Cool. Navy SEALS? Nope. The story with the Army test is that they specifically attempted to create a test that would be gender neutral, yet still women are being overwhelmingly outperformed by men. And why was such a test constructed, with a goal of removing gender-based scoring metrics? I suspect because "gender-based" is a political hot potato when one half of our government is making a serious-yet-absurd argument that gender does not actually exist. Except most women aren't interested in fighting reality either, and they don't want lower PT scores on their evaluations because some SJW professor of reptilian rape culture considers it patriarchal to have different scoring criteria. We are allowing a very small number of very stupid people to create a tremendous amount of work and wasted effort in the well-intentioned desire to be inclusive. But there is such a thing as "too far."

I'm not sure if you're being held at gunpoint or something, but what's your point? Any physical fitness test that applies the same standards to males and females will yield a similar result. It is a silly and counterproductive rebellion against reality to expect otherwise. Women are weaker than men. If we came up with tests for cellulite prevalence, congenital heart failure, osteoporosis, or visceral fat, we would have similarly disparate outcomes. Women and men are not the same. We have done a rather marvelous job separating out the military specialities that do not rely on the specifically-male attributes of the species, and getting women in there. Infantry-and-the-like will remain a male specialty until they are replaced by robots. I'm sure you'll be back suggesting we are bitter androgynists for favoring the robots when we criticize President Beiber for unveiling the latest DOD combat banana hammocks at his first press conference in the middle of the droid wars on Venus.

How it matters, and the point I think Tucker Carlson was trying to make (poorly), is that our president made it a point to talk about pregnancy flight suits, which have zero-to-nearly-zero effect on our military readiness, while failing to talk about the litany of real military threats that face us. This is the go-to move of the political left these days. When you are failing to accomplish anything of substance, or in this case, failing to address a real and escalating immigration crisis at the border, do some low-impact SJW bullshit and know that your side will trip over their equity erections to attack the conservatives tripping over their social-collapse erections, and both sides (of voters) once again completely miss the chance to unite against our shared enemy, the politician class. Both the GOP and Dems had zero appetite for dealing with the most glaring threat facing us: China. Trump, in all his clownishness, saw it clear as day. Now he's gone and the politicians can get back to what they really care about: enriching their families. China has been great for that. Taiwan will be a great pawn in this. The US will "recognize" them in a variety of venues (a can of worms Trump opened), while doing nothing of substance to support them. China will feign outrage so our "leaders" can look like they're being tough on China, but as long as we don't actually do anything, China will be pleased, and the money can flow. You and I won't see any of it, of course, unless you happen to be invested in the same stocks.