ViperMan

Yeah, in our system, money-making is inherently tied to everything. That's just something we need to get over. My overall and most fundamental problem, if I could state it clearly, is the externalization of cost (consequence). This always involves three parties. Two of them are engaged in the actual transaction (healthcare / patient), the third party is a bystander, which is usually you - the taxpayer. This is ultimately why I think there should be fundamental and emergency medical care widely and instantly available, but when we get into things that are services designed to remedy the consequences of a long life of poor decisions, I fall off the wagon. Student loans (school / student) Healthcare (hospital / patient) Homelessness (CDC / renters) It's everywhere. If we could remove the third party from the transaction, we'd actually get people to put their skin back in the game (which is a decent book) and a lot of this would work itself out, since people tend to be the best judges of what risk they're willing to accept. In a lot of these cases this means pulling the government out of the equation. In some, it means keeping them involved, but changing their function.

My entire response to you was about stare decisis. I'm here to discuss ideas, not to argue with internet lawyers about who's got a bigger legal case.

You hit me with so many rhetorical questions I lost focus. I take the theme of your argument to be that trade-offs are required when presented with situations where demand exceeds supply. I agree with that. And honestly, I think trade-offs are being made in hospitals and the healthcare system all the time. Also, this was true before COVID hit (gasp!). It just so happens they were done made in insurance board rooms and on actuary spreadsheets. Perhaps we should outlaw insurance company advertising, since it takes away from the amount of care your insurance can ultimately provide. The bottom line is that no person has lived a perfect life, and doctors, nurses, and hospitals make decisions all the time regarding who gets what care. At some level, every decision you have ever made has resulted in your current health outcomes. Should a young person who voluntarily smokes weed get treatment before someone who has never imbibed anything? Because just today, we learned that among young people, smoking weed doubles your chance of having a heart attack (https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/health/cannabis-heart-attack-young-adult-study-wellness/index.html). Should someone who voluntarily consumed this substance (legally) be put in front of someone who (legally) chose not to vaccinate? These people's choices are in conflict with one another. Doctors do a pretty good job determining who the best candidates are to receive care. Other peoples' choices do affect you. This will always be true. My point is that we need to be careful about becoming too authoritarian. People can make their own choices, and they can be responsible for them. No, healthcare is not a right. If it was, as a corollary, you would have the right to force someone else into medical school. And I know you don't have that right. I don't have a contrary opinion to the decision rendered in that case. But that's only surface-level. I didn't read it and don't really care to because it ultimately doesn't matter. If your point is that you think our government can mandate whatever it wants because there's previously decided case law, that's a weak position from which to argue. And frankly, only dumb people will continue down a path, or justify continuing down a path that they know is wrong just because they started in that direction. Personally, I don't hold out all that much respect for the legal concept of "precedent" in and of itself. People get stuff wrong all the time, including those on the supreme court (newsflash), and we shouldn't be handcuffed to poorly decided cases - which let's be honest, there is plenty of in our country. Now, the motivation behind precedent is good: let's not be so arbitrary in our law-making that we lose collective faith in our laws. Flip side of that is we keep doing dumb shit - it is literally the sunk-cost fallacy permanently embedded into the foundation of our legal system. The more we build upon a rickety foundations, the more likely it is to all come crashing down. The democrats would have us believe that overturning any legal decision is a mortal sin. I think they know they've gotten lucky a few times. If you're saying that since they've already trampled your rights in the past then it's cool they continue trampling them in the future, yours isn't a world I want to live in.

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.

You live in America dude. That means there are people who are going to do things you don't like and can't control, for reasons that are wrong, and you don't agree with. Some of those things are going to have actual, real, negative consequences on you and/or people you love. As awful as that reality is, it's not an excuse to trample on people's rights. It's a reality check that you need to take care of yourself and be responsible for your actions. Note also, that if you lived under any other system, people would still be doing things you don't like or agree with. There is not a single nation on this planet that COVID isn't "ravaging." So no matter where you live or under what system you (a human) are stuck with, your experience of this situation won't be different, so try to keep perspective on that. Let's not destroy America, or lose our conception of what freedom means.

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.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but yes, to answer your question. Had Fauci stood up at the beginning and told everyone not to buy masks because the people who need them more than you would not be able to get them, then yeah, I would trust him more, and so would a lot of other people. For many people, trusting the government in a situation like this probably figures pretty heavily in their decision matrix. Instead, he lied to us. It was a "noble" lie, but it was a lie none-the-less. At the end of the day it's hard to trust someone who secretly thinks you're stupid, but is also simultaneously and constantly stepping all over their own dick. For me it's about not one more fucking inch. Vaccine passports in NYC? Get fucked.

Dude, Polio is significantly worse than COVID - significantly. Like, your chances of dying or being maimed by Polio do make it a non-starter. Consequences matter. And seat belts have no adverse, or potentially adverse affect on you. Vaccines do. It's not more complicated than that, so don't try to make it so. Leaving aside the fact that Sam Harris is a total pseudo-intellectual, hell yeah, the vaccine is going to diminish your symptoms and the chances you wind up in the ER substantially, so there really is no question from a risk perspective which you should do. Consideration of long-term affects are unknown for both the disease itself and the vaccine, so arguments that rest on that distinction are null. We don't know in either case, and there is no reason to think one would be worse than the other. All these numbers. A couple things. One, as precise as that "total" number looks and feels, the total number of infections is unknown and we have good reason to think it is MUCH higher - note that many infections are asymptomatic. Note that there was a recent study that found the presence of COVID antibodies to be 2x as prevalent than expected. 2X is huge. That's the denominator. For the numerator, plenty of context is missing - what % of these people had 1, 2, 3, or more underlying conditions? What percent were obese? COVID has been way more dangerous and detrimental to our politics, economy, and society than Fauci would have us believe.

Point of order. Just because they've been out of their lane for 10 years doesn't mean it's not a power grab. It is. They clicked the burner on way back then and now the temperature is being turned up. Organizations exercising authority outside of their mission statement is abusing power. Now we can argue whether or not all those things should fall under the umbrella of the CDC. Some would say yes, others (me) would say no. In fact, I think the very attempt to classify these things as "diseases" is overloading our language and is meant to be able to create an avenue to exercise power where there is no other clear means to do so. That, I would say, is the definition of "power grab."

Yep. We need to very narrowly define victory and then effing stick to it. Cheaper, and more effective militarily and strategically. Since when has the US military been an armed version of habitat for humanity???

Yeah. Choke yourself.

You are officially off the reservation.

"Closed" field? What did they roll the concrete runway up? F that. It's his home station. He had an EP. He landed safely. That the OG even brought him into his office is out of line.

#merica! Last guy made a great point - how are we seriously talking about health when 78% of the people admitted to ICUs are obese or overweight? We're having an incomplete conversation about all of this. That is a major part of the frustration.

The Soviets lacked the technology and were also fighting us, albeit through a three-letter. Could they have won had they not been facing Stinger missiles? Maybe. It sure made it more difficult for them to make any headway, though. Maybe China is a clown show. Time will tell. I don't think they hold any illusions about civilizing AFG, though - like we did. Bottom line - "victory" depends on how you define it. China's definition of victory, and therefore their objectives, won't be like ours.

It won't be like ours. Our experience was handicapped by a restrictive ROE built on the Western concept of morality as well as a false-notion that these people want to be like us, which led to us attempting to nation build. China holds no such illusions and therefore won't be constrained by any self-imposed rules. They'll crush whoever stands in their way and won't think twice.

What AFG needs is a bunch of remote controlled blimps with .50 cals and sensors attached to them. We can float them there for about 1000 years and just snipe Taliban and AQ from 15-20K feet. I bet we could get the cost of a terrorist down to about $1 - $2 USD. We could even make a new AFSC for it and give big puffy wings to the operators. Also, *announce* that we don't care about their government or their values. We're just there to kick ass, permanently. Don't saddle victory with any unachievable goals (schools, muh rights, "governing"). We need to look at this a long term tax we have to pay to keep the primitive world at bay. Let it develop on its own timeline and via its own accord.

I would love to be at the ceremony for the DFCs handed out for flying that many passengers out on a C-17 or130. It'd be awesome to here those citations juxtaposed with some of the OPR bullets that "laud" praise on how well the war is going - just take some of the heaviest hitters from the last 5-8 years. That'd make for comedic gold.

Let's be honest. This end-state for AFG was inevitable and was/is/has been a foregone conclusion. The notion that we were going to install a democracy there was absurd from day one. Period. Root cause = we defined success to be an unachievable goal from "go" - hence failure. It really is that simple. It's not Biden's fault we lost. It's not Trump's fault we lost. It's not Obama's fault we lost. It is Biden's fault we are losing in such an embarrassingly avoidable manner, however. That *is* his fault. We should be losing more gracefully.

Ehhhh, this is what happens when you make exceptions to rules. You get people who play games. Don't give one shit that his beliefs are "sincerely" held - as if it was up to a Chaplain to make that determination in the first place. Also, it's BS that M.E. countries don't have to shave to wear an O2 mask, but I do. But whatever, this is much ado about nothing. Just glad I'm not having to see this paperwork cross my desk. The military is full of arbitrary rules - those are the only ones that should be eligible for "exception." If it's safety, good order/discipline, combat, etc, you follow the rules. No exceptions. Don't like it? Go sit in Leavenworth for the rest of your commitment, your choice. Oh, and the section of the bible that deals with masking and non-masking is right underneath the one that exempts Weapons' officers from SOF...

*If* your standard is 100% prevention of COVID, then yeah, you're right. Here is a study that quite convincingly demonstrates that masks diminish the amount and distance COVID will spread. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0015044 Will you get it hanging out in a room with a COVID+ person for a couple hours face-to-face? Probably. The point isn't that it's a silver bullet. The point is that it reduces the probability that you catch the bug. So in that sense, yes it slows the spread. *Also* there will never be any 100% definitive proof, because we don't have two separate universes that we're testing masks vs no masks in an open planet. You either believe the common sense argument that it reduces the energy of your breath thereby reducing how far COVID can go, or you don't. Which it does, because it's hard to breath through. Note: I'm in the camp that thinks masking up is ridiculous at this point. That said, I can still admit that masks have some positive effect. BL: Get the vaccine or don't. Take your own chances. Everyone at this point has had the opportunity to get it if they so choose. I'm vaxxed and am going back to normal now.

I agree that masks slow the spread, but comparing death rates across these countries is fraught with difficulty. For starters, Japan's obesity rate is ~4%. In the US, not one state has less than 20% obesity. Stated differently, our skinniest folks are 5x fatter than Japan - some states approach or exceed 10x! So what amount of the difference is due to their mask adherence vs. them just being much, much healthier in general? I don't know, but I think I'd rather have a BMI < 30 and not wear a mask than rely on a cloth mask to save me. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html

To be totally clear, I don't think it was an intentional release, though I am firmly in the camp that it was an accidental leak. Thaaaaaat said, there are plenty of viable, and reasonable answers to all these questions. Ruling it out is premature. I think the most important thing to look at is how China maneuvers in a post-COVID world. How does the world become re-aligned, or how do things take shape in their favor (or against ours) in the near term future. Those questions will be far more illuminating than ever hoping for some smoking gun to be reported in the NYT or WSJ. 1. How about deniability? Worst case, is now "ooops, sorry everyone". 2. To create chaos and throw the world into turmoil. How about it doesn't need to be Captain Tripps/End of days. It just needs to fuck everything up economically. War by other means, and such...

So now Pizzagate, Qanon, and microchipped vaccines are akin to wanting a secure border? Or wanting the people who are here to be American, want them to be American, and be actual participants in our system...not just here for a handout from the greatest civilization on Earth? Do you seriously not think there are legitimate problems being identified by the right in this country? Or is everything racist? GTFOH.

We're currently pushing it to the CAF...