Lord Ratner

Yes, and you called an entire segment of the population hypocrites on an issue they find deeply meaningful. I'm not fond of blatant insults, but I'm not find of subtle ones either. And if "useless" is an insult then clearly "hypocrite" is too. Probably "fervent" too, since "silly" sets a pretty low bar. So I guess you started it 😂🤣.

Do you answer questions that are posed in the safe space? Besides, it is clear that whatever the fuck triggering is, it works quite well on both of us. You reduced an incredibly complicated issue down to a barely cogent comparison, while clearly not realizing that your comparison is irrelevant in the vast, vast majority of IUD cases. You then fell back on the well it's not 100% argument which is a nearly useless rebuttal. And despite all of that, I even addressed the (silly) comparison by pointing out that both the use of iuds and abortion should be decided through our constitutionally directed system of voting and representational democracy. And through all of it, your primary concern seems to be the divisive nature of the topic, in which case I really don't see how telling people who are using iuds, specifically to avoid the necessity of an abortion, that they are hypocrites based on a very shallow logic, somehow addresses the issue decisiveness rather than stoking it.

And where exactly are these traditional IUDs being prescribed? They are quite rare, but sure, I guess with your twisted logic we can ban those, if the voters so decide. The technology advanced to meet your hypothetical. Great news for everyone. Further, my logical line regards the point at which life begins, not when a person should no longer have the ability to prevent/end a pregnancy. Since we don't yet have the tech to fully prevent crossing "my" logical line, more allowances are justified. Further further, the 100% standard isn't used anywhere, so why bring it up here? Further further further, you are still avoiding the topic of the constitutionality of abortion. You are arguing that despite the complete absence of any constitutional basis for Roe, despite the wild variation in voter opinions, despite your own beliefs on abortion, despite the position of the rest of the developed world... That Roe should stand because of the mid term elections? Yikes. This is exactly why Ron needed to be overturned. You are twisting yourself into knots trying to come up with some sort of excuse to bypass the American system of governance. We do not rule through judicial decree. "To have neither force nor will, but only judgement." Which is an excellent way of bringing us back to the actual topic at hand. Should the right to abortion be through judicial decree, or should it be through the will of the people? There are no constitutional arguments for abortion, and there is no shortage of liberal scholars, rooting the justices that wrote roe in the first place, who will point this out. Have you read the ruling? I don't really care what your position on IUDs is in relation to abortion, because the rest of America is not required to conform their moral positioning around your logic. Is abortion a right? Why?

No, I have not. Personally I think fertilization is the logical point. But I recognize the limits of the technology we have. As I said, I'd like a better way, but we don't have it. That's doesn't change the distinction between an abortion and an IUD, which is obvious. We hold the same position on abortion, except I believe the people get to decide, not just me, just just the court. I follow the constitution wherever I can. And someone can take care of a baby delivered after viability that isn't the mother. Just like someone else is required to perform most abortions. Semantics. Once in (and always inserted before pregnancy), you do nothing to enable the function of an IUD. Again, if you can't see the difference you are being intentionally obtuse. Also, you're forgetting that overwhelmingly IUDs prevent ovulation in the first place, as well as prevention sperm from reaching the egg. The comparison falls apart even more. Plan B is a middle ground insofar as you don't actually know if you're pregnant (and can't be at the time of taking it). Go figure, another shade of gray in an issue everyone wishes was black and white. And where exactly is that "freedom" provided for? Once again, by what basis do you make this statement? There's nothing in any of our founding documents that protect someone from consequences. The logical extrapolation of this unenumerated right is extreme. Do I have a right to keep my house if I gamble away all of my money and can no longer afford the payments? I have always been in favor of abortions for rape cases, so that only leaves voluntary associations made between a man and a woman that result in pregnancy. I really can't see how the obvious outcome of such associations is somehow anathema to the foundation of freedom in our country.. So... Just another Tuesday. It's been 50 years in the debate surrounding this subject hasn't cooled off one iota. If anything it's gotten worse. Our system is by design meant to resolve those issues at the ballot box. Perhaps. I suspect a lot of Republicans would argue that taking control of the legislature is meaningless if you can't pass legislation that is most important to you. You pose a catch 22 that the Republican party has been grappling with since the Bush years. I suppose you'll completely step back from this argument once you realize that IUDs do in fact stop fertilization? Honestly I think it's absurd even without that technicality, but it is fully invalid with it.

You guys are drawing distinctions at a different location, then complaining that people draw distinctions somewhere else. Is it or is it not okay to murder a 1-year-old? How about 6 months? How about 2 days after birth? Why? Is it merely the encapsulation of the body inside another body? The transfer of nutrients and blood through the umbilical cord? The one month old is still completely reliant on its mother for survival as it is post-viability, so why do we draw the line at birth? Because life isn't black and white, and you have to draw lines somewhere. I'm not religious, so I can't speak for Catholics who are against birth control or condoms, or anybody else with different views. But I believe there is a fairly obvious difference between an IUD, which is a passive measure that must be undertaken before conception, and abortion, which is an active measure taken after the life is created. Is it perfect? Obviously not. I would much rather a bulletproof method of contraceptives that can be given once via handshake, has 100% effectiveness, prevents the discharge of an egg from the ovary until a reversing drug is taken, and makes my dick bigger during sex. The primary difference here is I am not acting as though your position is unreasonable or illogical, though your characterization of the opposition is. I simply disagree and have a differing view of the various factors, and the point of this whole thread the Roe ruling rather than the morality, which is clearly one of the most constitutionally unfounded Supreme Court rulings in American history. I do not consider your position absurd, nor do I view you as immoral for holding it, though I do believe the sanctity of life is a moral issue. That's why I disagree with (most) abortion, which is separate from disagreeing with the train-wreck-rulings that are Roe and Casey. But it is getting tiring hearing a bunch of people act like a biological function, in fact the primary biological function, is somehow a massive imposition on the species. Billions of women living in much harsher times have endured the rigors of childbirth just fine, while the medical risks have been enormously reduced and the non-abortion options to avoid pregnancy have multiplied in both methods and access. It's never, ever been easier to be a woman (or man) of any class. The hysteria over the supposed suffering to be endured by women as a result of the banning of abortion is simply overblown. If a state bans IUDs I will oppose it, for fuck's sake I'm not even in favor of banning first trimester abortions, but I will not subvert our entire system of governance for this issue. Contested social issues are decided by votes, not judges. IUDs and abortions are not immune from such considerations. If it's a matter of human rights, add it to the constitution; there's a process for that too. We the people, not we the people who agree with my position and not the other ones.

1. Because context matters. Unless you're making a religious argument, which overwhelmingly the pro-choice crowd is not, then you have to base morality off some sort of societal context. Since the rest of the world has a much lower tolerance for third term trimesters (much, much lower), you have to make a counter-argument for how such abortions are a moral "right." 2. This is another false equivalence. It also wildly overstates the costs of birth in the US. If you're poor and pregnant, you can have the child, surrender it, and live a normal life. Everything you listed, like abortion, is an issue to be decided by the voters, not the court. The premise that abortion can only be illegal if you make a bunch of other stuff that I want legal is not how it works. You may not like it, but it is perfectly rational for someone to believe that you are not allowed to kill a fetus, and also not allowed to rely on the government to provide for your every need. 3. According to polling, correct. But I'm not sure what you mean by "what's being debated." Once again, are we talking about the supreme Court ruling, or are we talking about the morality of abortion? Overturning Roe does not make abortion illegal. Full stop. Read. The. Ruling. 4. This is a rather ironic statement, considering the Roe and Casey rulings were foisted upon the American people at a time when 49 or 50 states had some sort of restrictions on abortion more restrictive than the viability precedent set by Roe. No one voted on it, and no one legislated it. That is by definition the actions of a ruling class. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vUlNWMjM0NzE0Mjg4MQ/episode/OTAwYWNlNjItNjI3MC0xMWVjLWFmNzctNTdhMTc3ODNmMmJj?ep=14 Once again, Bari Weiss saves the Day. This is a Democrat interviewing a Democrat about why Alito's ruling is correct and constitutional.

There is a lot of intentional, and frankly ignorant, binary comparisons being made where they are not appropriate. If someone breaks into your house and you shoot them, is that okay? If you leave a trail of $20 bills from the sidewalk into your house, then shoot the person who walks in picking them up, is that okay? In both cases you're shooting an intruder. Of course the pro-life crowd can do the exact same thing. If it's okay to kill a fetus, why isn't it okay to kill a 2-year-old? It's your kid, what's the difference? Either side can come up with an endless list of comparisons that are provocative on their surface but clearly absurd. That's all fine and well in a good faith philosophical exploration, but that's not what's happening here. There are two very different concepts being argued, the court-imposed "right" to abortion that is being overturned vs the morality of abortion, and the pro-choice side is frantically avoiding the former. I haven't yet seen a single constitutional or logically consistent argument for supporting Roe/Casey. The pro-choice crowd seems quite aware that they performed and end-run around our entire governmental system with those rulings. It's easy to look the other way when the violation favors your position. But it's bad for the country to do things that way. The pro-choice crowd is also going to have to realize at some point that they are simply not the majority of the human species. Take a quick look at the European laws and you'll see that the American system of abortion until this ruling has been wildly permissive and arguably barbaric in comparison Most people simply don't agree with third trimester abortions, and even the second term is questionable to many. I think the biggest fear of the ruling class is that this issue is actually going to die down with the overturning of Roe. Lots of money, and lots of votes in that fight. But the states are going to come to solutions that satisfy the majority of their citizens, meaning the majority of Americans are finally going to be relatively satisfied with whatever The New Normal becomes. Of course, the pro-choice crowd would do well to consider what the now-firmly-conservative supreme court would do if given the same power to create rights out of thin air that the 1973 SCOTUS felt entitled to...

You're not normally an idiot. What's going on?

😂🤣 True, but not the one we are paying to see in theaters.

Fantastic Beasts 3 was... Meh There's no central storyline and protagonist. They started (and are stuck with) the fantastic Beasts thing when what it really should be is the Dumbledore series. So now they have to shoe horn random magical animals into the story, which it suffers from. Goes to show what happens when a story is cooked up by a bunch of Hollywood writers instead of someone who's immersed in their fantasy world.

Love her podcast. Their "Friday special" covered the ruling, and they were very fair about the realities of the division and the point of having States decide.

And in fact when you put extreme limits on it, as done in Texas, the outrage fizzles pretty fast.

It's almost like the country is divided on the topic and localizing the issue allows for a more flexible and tailored solution.

And those rights all have a basis in common law. The ruling clearly shows that not to be the case with abortion. It's getting easy to tell who has and hasn't read the ruling.

Y'all are seriously struggling with the concept of representative democracy and a republic. What states are enacting laws that aren't supported by the population? How? All of these (mostly) stupid hypotheticals and comparisons, which I know you guys are smart enough to know the difference, are exactly what the legislature is supposed to decide. Miscarriage vs Abortion? Write the law. Confused about the line between preventing conception and aborting a fetus? Debate it and legislate. If you think the issue is so huge that a country-wide rule must be enacted... Guess what? There's a process for that too! If the issue was as obvious and settled as some of you are implying, we wouldn't still be fighting over it 50 years after Roe was decided. And if it's so important that it needs constitutional protection... Holy shit! There's a process for that too! Sometimes I wonder what constitution you guys pledged to defend.

I don't agree with it, but it's hardly absurd. It's always curious to me when people outright dismiss something that millions/billions of other humans believe.

Yep, you have to be pants-on-head retarded to think that conservatism or liberalism are somehow inversely connected to fascism. There are no shortage of both liberal and conservative authoritarian regimes. "Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation." It takes no effort whatsoever to find the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in that definition.

In this case, if you haven't read the 50ish pages of the actual ruling, you are arguing without context. It's quite clear that many in this thread haven't read the ruling. Sure, this might have major political consequences for the Republicans, but I doubt it. Abortion is a popular issue in America precisely because it doesn't actually affect most people. Anyone notice that? The most divisive long-term issues are the ones that aren't a part of daily life? Yes, the abortion activists are going to lose their minds. And yes, some republican women are going to be upset with the ruling. But overwhelmingly those people weren't and aren't going to get an abortion. They are going to buy gas. They are going to watch their 401K and home value plummet. They do have kids in school. What people post on facebook and what they vote for are not the same. If you believe in the sanctity of the Supreme Court, Roe and Casey had to be overruled. Again, reading Scalia's ruling spells it out clearly. You want nationwide abortion? Pass a fucking law. 50 years after Roe and the country is still bitterly divided, if that's not an issue best left to the actual machinery of democracy, what is? Since Roe the progressives have dedicated the bulk of their energy to trick-fucking the government into regulating and adjudicating their agenda into reality instead of legislating it into existence. It's wrong, and as someone pointed out, when you force a bunch of unpopular stuff onto the population against their will (as exercised through voting on legislation and electing representatives to write legislation), they tend to react unpredictably and violently. Roe was an assault on our entire system, and the 50-year experiment proved that it doesn't even work. This is a good ruling. I hope to see the process work as intended once again. Relevant disclaimers: Personal view: Abortion should only be allowed for cases of rape or dire risk to the mother's health. Human life must be valued at a base level if we are to form any sort of consistent morality to abide by. Political view: Tie goes to the citizen. Abortion should be legal until either viability (as determined by the medical outcomes in the lowest 25% of the country) or through the second trimester. After that, only dire health risks. Views: Atheist, somewhere between conservative and libertarian. Here are some quotes from the ruling, but you need to read the fucking thing. The formatting is a mess. Read it. Seriously.

I'm not sure what your point here is, but the Bundy standoff in 2014 is one of the best examples of why the second amendment matters in modern history (the second being Waco). In the Bundy standoffs, BLM nonsense and executive rulemaking were challenged with the threat of violence. Had there been no guns everyone knows the Bundy's would have been rounded up in one day and the issue would have never made the spotlight. Instead. the constitutional right to have weapons offset the power of the government and introduced a limiting principal to the random rulemaking power of the BLM: are we willing to hurt people to enforce this rule. The government should always have to perform this calculus before making a rule or law. This was a case of the 2nd Amendment limiting the government without bloodshed. In the case of Waco, government overreach and zeal resulted in a horrifying loss of life. But the aftermath changed the way the government operates. This was a case of the 2nd Amendment limiting the government with bloodshed. In both cases, only the 2nd Amendment allowed for important limitations on government intervention. As far as Bundy, in 2016 he was arrested and charged, which curiously ended with this little nugget: So I'm not sure you're making the point you wish to make about Bundy. Jan 6th, however, was a mess. Inspired (though not legally incited) by Trump. If you're wondering why Republicans are so reluctant to care about it, you'd have to appreciate the years of double-standard-outrage the left has imposed on the right. A year earlier the left was literally cheering on rioters.

I'm actually skeptical. A lot of the people who give a shit about this issue live in states that are absolutely not going to change abortion access. There's also a 0% chance that abortion takes a meaningful position on the list of Americans concerns when the economy is doing poorly. Again, they didn't make abortion illegal, though some states certainly will, and the people in those states are already used to living in an abortion-hostile environment. While it may have been politically risky, it was absolutely the right thing to do legally. If you haven't taken the time to read the draft ruling, it's only about 40 to 50 pages of actual text, and Scalia did an excellent job laying out the sheer lunacy of both the Roe and Casey rulings. We need a greater return to states rights. The ideological differences in this country are growing, and you don't solve ideological differences by forcing one side to do what the other wants. That goes for both the left and the right.

Got to push back on you here. When the FED tried raising the interest rates back in 2017-2018, Trump lost his mind and was publicly excoriating Powell everyday as the stock market slid. I don't think there's a chance in hell that he would suddenly find God on sound fiscal policy, which was always a weakness for him. It is certainly possible that the inflation factor would change Trump's calculus, but we certainly have no evidence to suggest that. I also think Trump would have pushed for more stimulus, though not as much as the democrats. One of the biggest drivers of inflation in this economy was the direct payments to consumers from the government, and that part of stimulus I think Trump would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Agree on energy policy, agree on covid policy.

No. I rarely interact with them. Unlike the flight attendants, we don't need to be on the plane before they board / after they deplane. I was most surprised by how easy the entire airport process is. You almost never wait in line for security, passengers dive out of the way when they see you coming, and the cockpit door filters out most of the nonsense. Definitely something I didn't appreciate until working at a passenger carrier. But boxes are obviously much, much, much less hassle. The advantage of the pax carriers is volume of flying. More planes and more pilots and more flights means more permutations for schedule construction and manipulation. We also have dramatically less night flying. My first choice was UPS and my second choice was FedEx. I was already in training at American Airlines when UPS called, and by that time it had been clear that both my job and my wife's job we're going to take us to Dallas. That was enough for me to turn down the interviews and stick with American, because as I believed then (and know for sure now), my strategy only works well when you live in base. You really have to figure out what type of person you are, and that's going to determine what type of flying your best suited for. There are mission hackers, crew dogs, sightseers, people pleasers, authoritarians, loopholers, managers, unionists, teachers, etc. Each airline offers different opportunities for those types of people. I spend a lot of time at my airline teaching people my method (maximum ratio of pay:hours flown). It's a process and it takes time, and in many cases by the time I'm done explaining it, they are so put off from the idea that they seem pathologically compelled to explain to me why my system isn't actually that good. It's a curious response, but a lot of these guys unknowingly weight any work that isn't sitting in the cockpit as many, many times more onerous than actually flying. So while I usually only fly between 30 to 50% of what a regular line pilot flies in a month, because I spend 10 to 15 hours per month (in 1-5 minute blocks) working the various trading platforms, they view that 15 hours as much worse than the additional 50 hours they spend flying. And usually I'm making somewhere between 15-40% more pay. I mention all that to highlight the concept. Their personality is to do the job they're told to do, not spend years learning the nuances of their contract so that they can exploit it. So what type of military pilot were you? You can probably use that information as the third criteria in selecting an airline 1. Who offered you a job 2. Where can you live without commuting 3. What flying job fits your personality?

Cool, another French crew with very different opinions on which direction the plane should be moving...

It's 99% Boeing's fault. They sell the plane to foreign countries the same way Airbus does. Gear up auto pilot on. It's not the training and proficiency, it's the idiosyncracy of specific pilot groups who hand fly well beyond what is necessary that just happened to apply a software-based malfunction for a system that wasn't even taught to the pilots in a meaningful way. This wasn't just runaway trim, and there was no way prior to the crash to train for an malfunction we weren't taught about. My thoughts only.