Lord Ratner

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.

If ever there was a time to brush up on the fifth amendment....

It's one part depressing and one part amazing how many people will say just about anything with supreme confidence, then completely fall apart when you simply ask "why?"

He's a fucking moron. The fact that they haven't come out and told vaccinated people that they can do whatever the hell that they want, now that all the data has been collected on the vaccine, is nearly criminal. Our entire system of government is predicated on protecting power from any individual or small group, and this pandemic has been a resounding reinforcement of those dangers. I don't suspect there will be much honest analysis from the left on the pandemic, but thank god Florida, Texas, and a few other states had the nuts to do things their own way, so we can at least look back with definitive proof that the totalitarian answer to a pandemic was not successful.

The only aspect to a Tesla that appeals to me is the self driving. For a long time Waymo/Google was the only player, but Tesla has played catch-up in amazing fashion. Now it looks like they will beat Waymo to the market with a fully self-driving vehicle, and without the use of LIDAR. Rather incredible. Whatever the first sub-$50k self driving car is, I will buy. I'd prefer it not be a sports car, but honestly even if it's a wheel barrow I'd ride it if I could be sleeping on the way to work.

Yet NATO is an invaluable tool for diplomacy in 2021? Right. Honestly it's a miracle China hasn't already taken our place as sole superpower.

Probably because he's stupid. You don't have to wait for him to stutter to come to that conclusion. The guy has been a joke for 40 years. Now we're supposed to pretend he's not? He's pants-on-head stupid, and pretending otherwise is just as absurd as the Trumpists denying that Trump was a habitual liar.

Shack. Boycotting ≠ Cancelling

It seems like a lot of the perceived racial offenses of the 2020's are minorities confusing assholes with racists, and assuming white people aren't subjected to the same treatment by the aforementioned assholes.

It was free (actually you get paid) and you could be a *very* unpopular cadet with leadership and still get a pilot slot. And for people like me with problems self-motivating for academics, you don't have the freedom to skip class or slack off. That's about it. Otherwise, USAFA --> Active Duty : ROTC --> Guard/Reserve.

So... It takes *a lot* longer to fill up, and you have to modify your route to accommodate EV charging? Doesn't meet the threshold for "full of shit"

There's a problem in what you just said, and it's *exactly* what the professional DC people want you to do. (But I agree with your point, obviously) There is no longer any connection between the political class and the voter, including on the right. We are now in the phase where we-the-people need to figure that out. "The left" cannot encompass the activists, journalists, professors, politicians, and voters. It's too broad, and intentionally so. Their power comes from making us hate our neighbors. If we can't talk to each other, we won't realize we have far, far, far more in common with our opposing-side neighbor/coworker/friends/etc than we do with the people we're voting for. The left love their polls, yet no polls on transgender sentiment. American voters overwhelmingly agree that men shouldn't play women's sports, and kids shouldn't take puberty blockers without parental consent. The Democrats (professionals, not voters) are trying to are trying to convince their constituency that conservatives hate transgender people and wish them misery and harm. That way the liberal voters don't have to vote for conversion surgery for five-year-olds, they can just vote "against bigotry." This is the same strategy employed in the BLM fight today.

Yikes

You haven't figured out that good dude ≠ good leader? The system is designed to select for exactly this type of action. Every single step of the process. There's only one option: quit. Your country doesn't need you right now. And when it does, these careerist clowns will be the first to go.

By a logical standard? No. By the standard we have established through other disasters in other states? Yes. The most important reason Texas (and all other states) shouldn't get disaster aid is that it diminishes the concept of and support for States rights. Rights fine with responsibilities, yet we are in an era of anti-responsibility.

The only reason Cuomo is in the news at all is because competing progressives (DeBlasio, mainly) smell blood and want his job.

Huh? Is my sarcasm detector inop or did you suddenly become an idiot?

That's all well and good, except the most regulated parts the the country still have grid failures. This is where conservatives start talking themselves into knots. Do I want my power costs to go up so I can avoid a blackout every one or two decades? No thanks. I'll spend a few hundred bucks on a generator. Obviously ERCOT fucked up. But the measure of a fuck up is not how far it is from the perfect hypothetical. It's how far it is from other functioning systems. By that measure, not much to see here. We don't need government regulation to weather proof a nuclear reactor sensor that government wouldn't have caught beforehand anyways. That sensor will never freeze again, no red tape required. The beautiful thing about government is they can blame failures (that government also failed to recognize) on a lack of government. Then they claim the addition of government, not the usual process of identifying a new problem and solving it, was what prevented a reoccurrence.

Mostly false parallels here. It is absolutely wrong that he's being criticized. He is a federal official that has *nothing* to do with the power crisis in Texas, and other than getting an emergency declared, which he did, he's useless. When exactly would you like our politicians to spend time with their families? When they're needed most, or when they are not? Ted Cruz is not the leader of Texas. If Abbott had run away to Mexico we'd have a very different conversation. Dodging a deployment? That's your parallel? Do better. No one had to be there in Ted's absence, hell the reduced power usage from his family leaving marginally *helps* the crisis. Generals telling people to quit? What on Earth does that have to do with anything? Acting like "giving the appearance of working" is somehow a virtue is *exactly* the problem I'm identifying. If you want a military analogy that actually applies, how about the generals that expect their staff to stay at the office till 8pm even when they could get some of that work done at home, with their families? How do we feel about that? Saying that "symbolism matters" implies that *all* symbolism matters. It does not. A graduation ceremony recognizes a particular accomplishment of individuals to the people who care. If I forced you to go to my cousin's graduation, would the symbolism matter to you then? We can and should expect our leaders to be where they are needed, when they are needed. We should stop pretending like our government officials are supposed to be superhuman public servants. For the people, *by* the people. Regular citizens engaging in the practice of self governance. We need to stop holding them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to. This is just a case of people not liking the person first, and finding reasons second. It was nonsense when conservatives did it to Obama for golfing, it's nonsense now.

It's not hypocrisy if you're not doing something that you said others shouldn't be doing. California has had rolling blackouts for decades, as far back as I can remember. Texas had them once during a once in a generation storm. Not much of a parallel. Words matter. And I actually just listened to Crenshaw's podcast on the power crisis. The fact that wind turbines freeze is not the problem. The fact that they get preferential selling priority on the grid is. For all the ceaseless babbling about renewable energies and the green new deal, no one on the left seems interested in discussing exactly how renewable energy would have made the Texas power crisis better. Spoiler alert, it wouldn't.

Like I said, if we value symbolic gestures, we get symbolic leadership. If we value leaders who chose symbolic acts over their families, what hope do we have of getting politicians who place value on the American family? You don't have to give weight to a bad argument just because the opposition is making it. He does not "deserve" irrational criticism. If the only problem with what Ted did is optics, then there's no problem at all.

My civics lessons are a bit old, but what would a federal-level politician do when his state has a problem with power generation? In what universe does this fall to a Senator to deal with? If you have irrational expectations, you will get irrational politicians. If you value gestures over practicality, you will get politicians who specialize in the former and fail in the latter. Our representatives represent us, often quite a bit more accurately than we'd like to admit.

It seems insane that I have to say this, but YES. It's a fucking kid. If we don't even expect the cops to take that level of risk, then we have no standards at all.

I'm with you on Castile, for clarity. It's the perfect example of a failure of policing, and why we need better training and better funding for the cops. But it is not representative of American policing as a whole.

I have faith in the country that enslaved black people, imprisoned japanese people, and wiped out the Native Americans, and a military that played with prisoners at Abu Ghraib and killed civilians at My Lai because I'm capable of recognizing failures without using them disproportionately to characterize the entire system. The perpetual insistence in characterizing "the system" as broken when it is by far a successful and predictable system, with notable deviations, when compared to the rest of the world, is troubling. Just another case of anecdote over statistics.