Pooter

This concept of "the patriarchy" is nowhere close to mainstream progressive thought on the subject and you know it.

The difference of course being that kaepernick signed a contract with his employer thereby agreeing to follow rules listed in things like the game operations manual and the players handbook. Then he violated those rules, went on a self-aggrandizing campaign against his employer, and drove a wedge into his team's cohesiveness.. all while his performance tanked and he blamed it on everyone except himself. It's just such a mystery why current teams won't touch him with a 10 foot pole. So yeah.. almost the same thing

The other reason that intelligent people will go along with the woke narrative is out of fear of retribution. Look at what just happened to Drew Brees for simply saying that he doesn't agree with disrespecting the flag. If you don't parrot the orthodox line 100%, you risk being cast out, and unless you have future hall of fame franchise QB level job security, you might lose your livelihood too. This risk aversion governs a lot of people's actions, especially those who don't follow politics that closely. They see other people getting in trouble and think to themselves "oh I'd better not do that." This is how you get businesses issuing non-committal pandering woke statements and senators kneeling in kente cloth.

I'm just tired of people insisting that every statistical difference between races/genders is automatically linked to structural injustice. As an example: orders of magnitude more men are incarcerated than women. Does this mean courts are violently skewed against men? Does an oppressive matriarchy dominate the justice system?! Or is this indicative of broad behavioral differences between men and women resulting from everything from biology, to evolution, to social norms etc... The problem is that no one wants to talk about behavior.. or the factors that influence people's behavior. It's much easier to blame statistical differences on a nebulous boogeyman like "the patriarchy" or "structural racism."

I think a viable third party candidate would go a long way toward fixing our broken political discourse. The idiotic binary we have going on right now does nothing but entrench people to the point that they can't even talk about ideas they don't like. Maybe a third party could pull us out of this good vs evil dynamic. It's gotten so bad that I feel like the parties have abandoned ideas entirely are just nominating more and more absurd people to spite the opposition.

Valid.

I'd be in support of "changes" if that's what was actually going on. But we are seeing predominantly cuts, not changes. If the priority was to update the training to improve quality, we wouldn't see this sudden decrease in overall events and flight hours. We would see that time put towards teaching other, newer skills. Big blue's priority is to make more pilots.. faster.

Well I'm glad they at least added the nav check back in for 38 bound students.

I agree with you in general terms. Older generations tend to think they had it harder, uphill both ways, new kids just don't get it etc... But many of us have personally observed UPT get watered down in very measurable ways in the last 3-4 years. We're not talking long-term generational bias here. I saw the syllabi get noticeably shorter and less rigorous over the duration of one assignment. Just some T-6 examples since that's what I know: No more ELPs No more formation landings No more advanced aero for T-1 bound students Lower check ride MIF on a multitude of maneuvers 30% fewer sorties overall 50% fewer checkrides 50% fewer solos Now we can debate the pros and cons of each, but I think it's undeniable we are plainly doing less total training time and events. I've always said that if you get enough ADOs in a room who are worried about timeline, they could come up with a reason to waive any sortie in the syllabus. "What's one sortie after all?!" "Is the pattern-only solo really that important?" "Does this T-1 bound kid really need to form solo? Lets just waive it." This thought process is insidious and has resulted in a gradual whittling down of our core training. And it happens in all of the perfectly well-intentioned syllabus rewrite conferences too. Everyone is looking to "improve efficiency" because there isn't an OPR bullet for holding the line and keeping quality training the same. VR training was never intended (by the people developing it) to replace regular UPT events. Or speed up the pipeline. Or fix the pilot shortage. It was intended to improve training by providing an additional resource that was more accessible than standard sims. Having been involved with it from the very beginning, it's incredibly frustrating to watch the air force twist a good thing and pitch it as their silver bullet solution for problems they created.. But I suspect I am very much preaching to the choir. \endrant

... that's the point. The flu runs rampant every year with no global shutdown, yet covid19 killed the equivalent of annual flu numbers in a month even with everything we've done to try to mitigate it. The point is that one is clearly more dangerous than the other. The reaction is more severe because the threat is more severe.

I understand your point, but this is exactly how regular flu deaths are counted as well.. the flu doesn't usually kill young, healthy people either. If you want an apples to apples comparison you can't ignore pre-existing condition cases for covid, while including them in the normal flu death rate. And when you do that comparison you find that covid19 has killed as many Americans in April as a mid range annual flu deaths estimate. Coronavirus: ~35k deaths since the end of March. Flu: annual estimates range from 12k-61k deaths And that's with the entire country being shut down and almost all of our medical capacity converted to combat this one virus.

Exactly. People are far too eager to declare a premature victory over this thing and return to normalcy without any semblance of a structured approach. I think it's partly frustration with the lockdown and partly desensitization. Mortality numbers like we're seeing today would have been unimaginable in January, but when CNN jams them down your throat 24/7, eventually it stops being alarming.

Apologies on the username confusion boys, that was an old account somehow still signed in on my phone. Not trying to Russia troll farm anybody into changing their minds. I'll shack myself accordingly. Now back to our regularly scheduled bitch sesh

No, I said they should be allowed to do that if they want to. On the condition it wouldn't affect other people. It's not religious bigotry. I'll say the same about the throngs of Florida beach goers yesterday, people who throw coronavirus parties, and anyone else who chooses to congregate in large groups during a pandemic. Doing things that increase your probability of death, or an inability to adapt (behaviors in this case) are the drivers of natural selection. I'm sorry that offends some people.

Ruh Roh

If a potential Harvard conflict of interest or lack of credibility is worrying you, I can find other sources on whether gathering in large groups indoors during a pandemic is a good idea. Want to take a guess at what they say? The mosque. Or church. Or synagogue. Hands down.. unless people at your local liquor store spontaneously break into song in close proximity to one another, dunk each other into pools of water, and then share the same snack with hundreds of their closest friends. If you want to talk about history, it is absolutely full of the church being at odds with science.. and ending up wrong. We certainly haven't evolved past government abuses, but apparently we've also not evolved past religions' blatant disregard for medical advice.

Sorry but the F'd up situation is when we have churches convincing their congregations that it's safe to come in person despite all medical guidance pointing to the contrary. https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/02/texas-churches-coronavirus-stay-open/ Harvard University epidemiologist Bill Hanage ticked off examples of virus transmission in houses of worship in London, South Korea, Singapore and the state of Georgia and said exempting religious services from shelter-in-place orders is “an incredibly bad idea.” Also it has never been easier to live stream a worship service to the internet for all to see. This isn't the old days where you have to be a megachurch with tv or radio broadcast infrastructure. You need a cell phone and a youtube account.

These horror stories of police arresting people on the beach or dragging people out of church are way overblown. The media is going to over-report anything that will get views and outrage--similar to how they wayyyyy over-report police shootings of minorities. Regardless, I think this 'gubment better not take my rights' argument is really alarmist and simplistic. The government doesn't want to be arresting solo beach goers just as much as said beach goers don't want to be arrested. And how is this any different from a mandatory hurricane evacuation order? The government tells people what they can and can't do all the time, and once the crisis passes, things return to normal. Acting like this is some kind of slippery slope to a 1984 dystopian hellscape is pretty ridiculous. I'd even argue that the current crisis gives police better justification to arrest people not following the rules than a hurricane does. If you disregard a mandatory evacuation at least the only person you're hurting is yourself. In a pandemic, someone's flagrant disregard of public health guidance endangers other people too. Do others have a constitutional right to not be infected by idiots who refuse to follow the rules? Full disclosure: If it wasn't possible for church goers to infect others, I'd be all for them voluntarily gathering in the largest groups possible. Disregarding public health guidance to worship your imaginary man in the sky is a beautiful example of both constitutional rights and natural selection.

There is a very realistic possibility that this thing will go right back to exponential growth if we lift restrictions too soon. Would you like to do this dick dance shutdown all over again? Why don't we listen to our medical professionals and lift restrictions once the virus has hit R0 and penetration percentages that they deem are good enough to not cause another giant global shit storm.

That suckssss. If it's any consolation I'm "essential personnel" enroute to more training so I'm still cleared to PCS. All I have to do is figure out how to make that happen when no one answers their phones because every base agency is working from home.

Agreed. If the mitigation measures seem like ridiculous overkill, that's because they're working. And we need to keep doing them. It's pretty annoying and very scientifically illiterate that people are talking about lifting restrictions the moment new york has a slight leveling off in infection rate.

Maybe he didn't encrypt it because he knew everyone was working from home and wouldn't have been able to open the email.

I find it very hard to believe that Crozier simply jumped the chain of command including the adm just down the hall without having exhausted other options first. I'd bet most of my money that he tried passing concerns through the appropriate channels to the appropriate people and was met with "press/figure it out/be an athlete.." This is a story we've heard a million times. Leadership won't pay attention to a mid-level problem until A: it becomes so severe they can't ignore it, or B: the mid-level commander forces them to pay attention. Looks like Crozier chose option B to prevent option A. So he decided to send a nuclear bomb of an email that he knew would blow back on him but at least get his crew taken care of. And judging by the crew and big navy's reaction, this seems like the only plausible read of the situation.

Air Force: You are mission essential! You and your job are so critically important we need you to continue to come to work during a pandemic. Also the Air Force: make a face mask out of an ABU sock

Mask fabrication techniques and filtration effectiveness aside, this is just the latest in a laundry list of half-assed mitigation measures put in place by leadership to simply look like they're doing something. Want to hear another one? UPT bases are currently doing two-team alternating day ops with half the IPs/studs flying one day while the other half has the day off. The idea is to mitigate the spread by reducing total pool of people you interact with. Which sounds like a decent idea until you consider the fact that they're all working in the same building, sitting at the same desks, flying the same airplanes, and storing their gear in 6-9 inches from someone else's in a cramped peg room. My buddy's quote referencing this policy: "it's almost like we're doing something.. to look like we're doing something.. while not actually doing anything at all."