Lord Ratner

It's called a club. There are millions of them. Pick an interest and go. The problem isn't finding a group, the problem is showing up. Religion has always had the advantage of threatening you with eternal damnation if you don't go, and the social pressure from other parishioners if you skip out. Conversely, you don't get the same judgement or shame if you miss the pickleball meeting on Tuesday night. You gotta show up. That's all it takes. Put the same group of people in proximity to each other repeatedly and regularly, and the community and all the associated bonds will form. But you have to miss other things. TV shows, concerts, other parties, rest at home, etc. The internet has let us form more homogeneous groups, which is bad for diversity (mental, not skin color), and all the biological forces that build community are negated because they only work in person. Our brains need it. This is why impoverished cultures don't have the same suicide rates that the West is contending with. We are hyper-connected, yet all alone.

This is where your ignorance shows. Just because *you* don't know the academic basis for the policies being pushed, you assume they must be reasonable, because you feel like a reasonable person. But reading the works of the people who have been publicly embraced by the mainstream left, such as Biden, give a very different picture. Robin Diangelo. Ibram Kendi. Kimberle Crenshaw. This stuff is bat shit crazy, and will necessitate a civil war if it was actually enacted. Remember when reparations was just a conservative fever dream? You say the conversations have changed, but they haven't that much. What exactly are they against now that they weren't 30 years ago? Chemical castration for children? Illegal immigration? Reparations? Gun rights? The only difference is that 30 years ago no one was in favor of cutting the tits off a confused teenager. If the Republicans were inviting David Duke, or the proud boys, or any other right wing lunatic to the White House and espousing their theories to the masses, you would have a point. But they aren't. The difference has always been that the left embraces their lunatics. Saying that Joe Biden is a moderate is meaningless if the people he empowers to enact and develop his policy are radicals. And they are. I have no love for the Republicans in Washington. Just a bunch of assholes there to enrich their families. But they aren't trying to flip over the underpinnings of American society while they do it, so it's immoral, but not dangerous. The people steering the ideological soul of the left today fundamentally disagree with the American system, and their preferred replacement is a time-tested failure. Klobuchar is great, as is Gabbard. Even Ro Khanna (sp?) has reasonable things to say. But they aren't leading the party.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-considers-asking-black-americans-on-census-if-they-are-slave-descendants-f9b5eb09?mod=hp_lead_pos5 I'm not sure there is a "mainstream" Democratic party right now. I think there are (D) voters who believe their party is mainstream, but this is coming from the Biden admin. If Biden isn't a "moderate" Democrat, who is? Reparations for the distant relatives of slaves are about as far-left as you can get.

Except for the part that incentives nuclear power. That's the one silver lining

Not for the ones that love him. Thoroughly disappointing for those of us who feel he has gone way too far in his nonsense political maneuvering since losing to undo his rather (and surprisingly) effective policy moves. But I'm not so sure he wins the primary. Watching the attacks against DeSantis and how awkward it made the audience, he might be running out of whatever weird mojo put him in the oval office.

I really thought they couldn't be this stupid, but that's the sad part... The people running this country really are.

Homelessness has nothing to do with homebuilding and everything to do with drug use. You'd accomplish precisely nothing by putting addicts in the suburbs, except for maybe freaking out a lot of soccer moms.

I said it before, men really are better at everything, including being a woman.

Maybe your best post ever. Bravo

We'd have a lot fewer commander removals if we had the French disposition towards cheating

If you need the lounge access, its pretty hard to beat amex. The new chase lounges are supposed to be very competitive, but there are fewer of them. I just couldn't justify $700 when I don't have weekly opportunities to use the lounge. We recently just switched over to the 2% Wells Fargo credit card. All of the hotel and airlines are going through another devaluation process for their points and miles, so we're just going to take the cash back for now. And Costco. 3% back on restaurants and travel, and 4% back on gas is pretty excellent. Everything else will go on the Wells Fargo card

I wish you were joking

Not very familiar with antifa are you? Extremes are extreme on both sides. Try not to be so partisan and for once *think* about the other side. Why would so many people be "wish casting" a civil war? If you really think tens or millions of people are so vastly inferior to you and your side, you are a narcissist and a fool.

Missing the point. When lots of people want to do it but only a few can, you start operating on the tails of normal distribution curves, which will result in huge disparities despite small statistical differences. I know the idea of a popular job is foreign to a nav, but use your imagination. 😝

That's because statistics work oddly at the extremes. The aggression gap between men and women is only tilted 60/40, yet violent criminals are overwhelming men. Same with the Olympics. All men aren't stronger/faster/better than all women, yet 100% of physical sports would be won by men at the Olympic level of not for the gender split. Think of pilot like the Olympics of jobs.

False. Research in the Nordic countries has shown that as a society gets more gender equal, the disparity in job selection increases. Women and men are different biologically, with different interests. People vs Things, for example. High risk, plus being away from home, plus things-vs-people, and it's not surprising women don't seek the job like men do. Now there's no biological reason for black underrepresentation, but until our society is ready to tackle the cultural and socioeconomic problems of the poor, which is disproportionally black in the US, we aren't getting anywhere. Just look at San Francisco which is moving closer to dooming black people forever, if this insane reparations scheme comes to pass. Progressives never want to address the root cause. They want the immediate fix, and it doesn't exist.

Woke thread

It's not nonexistent, because that word has a meaning. The Atlas example makes it existent. You can argue it's small, but you didn't. And considering how few crashes there are now, a single 767 is a very statistically relevant change. You don't like that because you believe the opposite, that diversity helps, but you have zero examples of it helping and the Atlas crash is a major example of it hurting. The increase in safety is obviously attributable to technological advances and human factors training. It borders on absurd to think that a procedural job like flying a plane is benefiting from whatever unique background a pilot would have from being a racial minority.

This is bullshit. You asked for some evidence, got it, now you're moving the goalposts.

My fear is that the Roth promise will not be honored. Millionaires will not find much sympathy when we finally have to address the national debt.

And a dump truck...

Really? You're an educated adult and you have a hard time believing that verbal de-escalation is a real thing? I got it, the left sucks and has completely mischaracterized the entire event. Totally agree. But being intentionally stupid just doesn't seem like a logical solution to this problem. It's quite clear that a lot of people in this thread have never been afraid for their physical safety.

If ”those” = a few people, sure. If "those" = a mob, then no, probably not. I don't know the specifics of the Capitol police structure, but I would be shocked if it is regularly staffed to the level required to stop a violent mob. Let's also not forget, Democratic leadership had intentionally reduced the capital police footprint because the expectation from everyone in Washington was that it was more likely for there to be leftist rioting, and they didn't like the optics from the George Floyd rioting. Because there was no "accordingly." The situation escalated beyond what was planned, and the officers there were left to deal with it in whatever way they thought was best for the overall outcome. It's a shitty situation they were put in, so some became tour guides while others shot violent trespassers. I would hardly blame the police for acting in a less than perfect manner, in retrospect, given the situation they faced.

I agree with the decrying of polarization, but this is revisionist history. Identity politics can be traced back to the 60's and 70's and have been incubated by far left (Marxist and progressive circles) for decades. Clinton was the last Democratic president who could be considered "liberal" instead of "progressive," whereas the Obamas were completely and proudly progressive. Joe isn't anything but an idiot, but his staff are all loyal Obama adherents. The "far right" identarians would be the white nationalists I guess, but the difference is the establishment right, Republicans, have never embraced the theories or promoters of white nationalism, whereas the left, Democrats, still heroize the grifters of critical race theory and their new scam, "equity." What you are seeing on the right is the response to unfairness. Fear, rage, and a retreat to tribalism. The tribe can be anything, but since the attacks from the left have been focused on race, the tribe of being white is seeing a resurgence. That should have been obvious when Obama said Trayvon Martin could have been his son. The Right's last unrighteous cause was the restrictions against gay couples. That fight is over, the Republicans lost, though curiously the most alarmist claims about the gay rights movement targeting children seems to have come true, if you accept that the trans movement is a branch of the gay rights movement. Either way, Republicans have not made an explicit claim that we are not, in fact, equal. Democrats have, and we are paying for it more each day.

Individual/small group actors. There are riot police, and they look quite different. I don't think it would be reasonable to expect a handful of cops to take on a mob. I'm on the "this was a riot, not an insurrection" side of the debate. Usually I like Tucker's view on domestic issues, but on this one I think his rage at the hypocrisy and double standard of the left is giving him a huge confirmation bias. I've said it before, but the appearance of fairness/unfairness has always and will always overcome any rules, laws, or customs in a society. Our system was unique and successful specifically because of the intense focus on fairness. Sure, there were always violations of that principal, but it was always treated as an aberration. Now we have an entire political philosophy being based on the explicit abandonment of fairness, and the Democrats are embracing it because their entire strategy for electoral success is the coalition-of-minority-groups plan, based solely on their grievances against the majority. This will end badly. Either for the aforementioned minority groups who have been promised things that cannot be allowed to happen, or for everyone.