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Lol. Liberals love to pretend they cherish your above stated core tenet. But there’s always an anti-freedom catch that forces others to comply. There’s a catch with owning guns, there’s a catch with free speech on campus, there’s a catch with medical care, posting on Facebook, abortion, church services, public schools, election law, immigration, etc. In fact there’s no subject where liberals actually live out your alleged core tenet. They’re just tyrannical hypocrites every time.

This is the single biggest complication with liberal ideology (I'm not saying you are necessarily a liberal). Smart people who have a track record of making responsible choices that lead to successful outcomes look at the people around them, many of whom are in fact not nearly as smart, and despair the bad choices they make that often lead to worse outcomes. It eventually leads (with the best intentions) to restricting, discouraging, or outright banning the behavior. And without fail, the people who were meant to be helped by the ban find new and creative ways to self-destruct. That's just how humans are. For many, many people they only learn successful habits through failure. Even very smart, otherwise rational people. Taking away that failure opportunity only send them in another destructive direction, except now they are exacerbated by the rage of having some well-meaning prick tell them what the "must" do. There is a positive correlation between personal freedoms and national power and wealth. Paradoxically, short term complications lead to long term success.

Because it doesn't matter what percentage isn't in the ICU. What matters is that ICU capacity has been overrun. There's no more room for cancer patients, car accident victims, someone who had a stroke, someone recovering from heart surgery...because people decided that they weren't going to take a vaccine that over a billion other people have already taken for ideological reasons, not for rational or medical reasons.

One of the most important tenets of liberal thought is: you should be able to do what you want unless it impacts someone else A lot of anti vax people think their choice to not get the shot is solely a personal one with little to no ramifications on others. After all, if you're vaccinated why would you worry about getting covid from an unvaxxed person. Except there's a catch. Healthcare is a finite resource and non vaccinated people are taking up almost all of the bandwidth. Across all age groups, the unvaccinated are far more likely to contract severe illness and require hospitalization. When your trash decision puts you in the hospital and you take an ICU bed from someone needing urgent care for something that wasn't preventable, your decision just hurt someone else. I'll say the same for obese people and smokers. Your trash lifestyle and decision making has upped your risk factors and you are negatively impacting others.

Those positions are political appointees, so it's not surprising. A better question would be why are they needed in the first place?

Are there only two groups in the discussion? Unvaxed vs vaxed? How about children? How about previously infected people? How about people sub 40 who are healthy?Isn’t it weird how every issue boils down to one group vs the other— almost like the media is fueling division… The infection fatality ratio for children under 12 is 3500X less than those 65 plus according to CDCs best estimates https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html it just seems a little simplistic to boil it down to two group. Also we know the long term risk of smoking, do we know the long term risk of covid or the vaccine? No.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/blinken-denies-taliban-holding-americans-hostage-us-struggles/story?id=79872338 Because if the Taliban is known for anything in particular, it’s their ceaseless commitment to accurate record keeping and the administrative process of running a major airport… Could we get a better example of the press pool being unwilling to push against this admin the way they overzealous went after the last one over anything. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Dates released for mandatory vax by date. Active and reserves early in November. Guard early December. Court cases have been filed for multiple reasons.

100% on all four. But also, why exercise? That is hard work. Why not just hope that you can rely on others to protect you by them making sacrifices... Sounds a lot like people on extended unemployment and welfare. I miss that concept of personal responsibility.

What. The. Actual. Fuck. We're losing the plot. Perhaps all those musket balls should have been labelled "potentially harmful." Maybe it would have been sufficient warning to the Brits and we could have avoided a lot of akshual harm.

I agree with you except in regards to the framing. That's not a tenet of liberal thought. Maybe it was in terms of what would traditionally be thought of as enlightenment liberalism, but certainly not modern liberalism that we see enacted by modern democrats and the like. That tenet you cite is much more closely aligned to what modern conservatives and libertarians believe than what democrats think. And to your "catch," the imagined conflict evaporates when you actually realize the truth: that healthcare is a resource (as you put it), but your argument actually stems from an assumption that it's a right - which is a tenet of modern liberal thought.

Buddy of mine at Macdill had his neck surgery cancelled twice due to lack of available ICU’s in Florida due to COVID patients.

In the end I think most humans don't like to be told what to do, doesn't matter whether the agenda you are trying to push is good or bad for whoever you are trying to push it on, and it doesn't matter whether they are smart or dumb. Your thought logic is that people should be free to make mistakes and learn the hard way. Totally agree. Problem is on a national "big decision level", some mistakes can only be made once and there are no do overs. We are (for the most part) a majority rules system, and the majority isn't always the smartest half. Is COVID one of those big decisions? I don't think so, those most vulnerable have access to the shot. Those who don't want it most likely will make it if they get COVID, if we lose a few stragglers, oh well.

There is no guarantee we can ever call something a “low threat environment.” That’s the problem with the mindset of some sort of nostalgia/sexy in regards to providing some kind of persistent ISR and Fires capes in the unimproved theatre fight, especially when that nostalgia is single engine. It’s like we completely ignore the repeated lessons of history and the inevitable march of ever cheapening and miniaturizing technology. 50 years ago when the first truly portable Gen I MANPADS SA-7 showed up on a battlefield it effectively ended the reign of the held over WWII/Korea designs like Skyraider. Even with as technologically limited as that system was it would eat the envelope they lived in. We didn’t start making weapons like Hellfire and Maverick because we weren’t effectively killing the bad guys with iron bombs and gun pods, we did it because they started knocking us down at alarming rates with things like Gen I IR SAMs and radar directed AAA. So much has been written about the telephone pole vs strike jet/bomber fight and yet we forget a whole lot of the last 2 years of Vietnam in the low slow ugly aircraft fight we ignore a lot of painfully learned lessons. We live in a world where systems with Verba capes or AHEAD capable systems are very real briefed in country threats. Anybody that remembers early ops a few years ago in Syria remembers how a half dozen systems had everybody in theatre going through all sorts of hoops. That problem only gets worse every day going forward as they proliferate. So to all these companies with 80s era fighter pilot retirees selling us something, yeah show me the crazy/sexy P-51 concept… just do it with 6-9000 lbs of bolt on federated/integrated threat protections like some form of IRCM and a buttload of expendables/jammers because that’s the world it lives in today. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/08/united-airlines-staff-granted-religious-exemptions-to-vaccine-mandate-will-be-put-on-unpaid-leave.html

We agree on almost all of it, to include the fact that the media sucks. …until the consequences of those who get really sick due to no vaccine and flood the hospitals causes a lot of extra work and delays the treatment for cardiac patients, cancer patients, etc. and others that have other potentially life threatening illnesses. I got a text from a buddy today who’s wife is a nurse at a local hospital. 20 COVID in the hospital 18 unvaxxed, 2 vaxxed. 2 of the unvaxxed on ventilators, in their 30s. That sucks. I know crowded hospitals and health care shortages have happened before as you pointed out but I personally feel like severe illness and hospitalization due to COVID is all but avoidable with the shot (in conjunction with exercise, Vitamin D, good sleep hygiene, etc.) and that allows the medical machine to keep moving. I know, big pharma and all but we are where we are. If hospital overcrowding doesn’t happen and everything is running smoothly, I would not care about one’s choices at all….but even now it’s a choice (except mil soon) and all we can do is educate ourselves to what we think are the pros and cons and ORM it. I’m gonna go get a steak.

This video popped on my FB feed and I just can't stop laughing at it. https://fb.watch/7USOdAdx5p/

I honestly didn't realize we agree on this. Mandates are not the way. That's really the crux, isn't it? If you're not going to force me to make the same life decisions as you, we can disagree indefinitely and nothing of consequence happens as we each assume responsibility for our own personal risk assessment. I will concede that things may be far, far worse than I imagined. Someone waited "thousands of minutes" for a rural ER. I'm not laughing at the people waiting, I'm laughing at the media desperation.

Use your GI Bill for yourself and get your ratings. Have your kids join the ANG and get TA and their own GI Bill. Good luck!

He’s a C-5/KC-135 guy. He sucked at flying both. My favorite story was his wife getting drunk one night and posting on the Squadron Facebook page what a small dick he had and how he couldn’t give her kids. It was deleted within a few minutes. When he was the ARS Sq/CC he was punishing people for frat and I informed some friends of mine in his Sq how his wife was an Airman when he met her as an Lt. Rules for thee, not for me.

I should have said it differently. Don't sit and watch cable news and think you're informed. Televised news is designed to appeal to your emotions more so than written articles. I posted a Youtube clip that was embedded in an article of the CDC Director just so you can see and hear the same people that got you worked up over this are now walking back and changing the narrative. It won't be long until all your other narratives get the same treatment. In one sentence, you're "worry free". Immediately following that declaration, there's all this hand-wringing, stress, and frustration over the unvaccinated. You say you're not worried, yet every single thing you post outside of that statement indicates otherwise. "The healthcare shortage is going to make the pilot shortage look like child's play!" "You're gonna wait hours and hours for the ER!" "We're rationing healthcare! The AP says so!" Relax, man. You are going to be fine. Your wife is going to be fine. Did you not read the articles I posted links to from years prior? It's the same exact shit. Rationed healthcare, overflowing ERs, stressed healthcare workers... etc, etc, etc. All of it occurred prior to 2020, and will occur years from now. You can't run a healthcare system or any other industry with huge amounts of excess capacity (military industrial businesses excepted). There are ebbs and flows in demand across every industry.

“Only read the news. Never watch it.” …says the guy who literally posted a news video you have to watch in response to my news link that you have to read. I’m vaccinated since Feb, I do all of your advice above and I’m and worry free amigo. It’s been really nice, thank you. My wife works in healthcare. Her ICU friends are throwing in the towel out of the frustration of watching unvaccinated middle age people show up there, and we aren’t even in a hotspot. Hospitals don’t pay techs very much, Some of them can make about the same amount in retail and not have to wear a spacesuit and watch people die. The healthcare shortage will soon make the AF pilot crisis look like child’s play. It’s coming. There will be signs like the ones at Wendy’s apologizing for being short staffed, except it’ll be while you’re waiting hours for emergency medical care. I believe at some point a week or so ago in one of these ridiculous threads people never thought they would have to ration healthcare. But here we are, in Idaho where the vax rate is really low, the hospitals are really full and they are beginning to ration healthcare according to the Associated Press article I read. But yeah sure, I’m gullible.