Burgerville is pretty good if you live in the PNW. It’s downsides are that it’s overpriced for what you get and it’s had some labor issues that don’t put ownership in a good light.
I think my old man had much the same, or at least somewhat similar thoughts, when he came home from Vietnam. He was a UH1 door-gunner/crew-chief with the 4th ID in the Central Highlands, survived being shot down, was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, a purple heart, a fistful of air medals and came home with a giant chip on his shoulder.
Well, I’m in my 50s and I still haven’t figured it all out. That said, I’m pretty content, so I must be doing something at least somewhat right.
I have at least a nodding acquaintance with that work and while I think it’s worth considering and talking about, I don’t find it to be at all the most convincing explanation for conservatism and am far more persuaded by conservatism as being motivated by a desire for the preservation of hierarchy that manifests itself through said psychological traits, but that is the ultimate prior that informs them. Otherwise we would expect to see liberalism and conservatism more evenly distributed throughout our population, as with other psychological traits, but we don’t, to the contrary, they are very geographically dependent.
So while I don’t think that psychology has nothing to say about the issue, I definitely don’t think that its the most important factor.
Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.
You’ll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can’t do anything right, and it’s like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.
Social safety net programs? Not so much.
There’s a relevant and oft’ cited Churchill quote to the effect that while democracy isn’t great, it’s better than any other governing system we know of.
In other words, leave us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
As for why democracy is the best system, it’s simple; in theory democracy gives everyone a stake in governance. While it rarely if ever works out that way, Churchill was correct that it’s better than any other system we know of.
It’s a common lie. The reality is that red states score much lower on every objective quality of life metric, while having much higher rates of things like violent crime, addiction and suicide than any blue state let alone any of the US’s peer nations in the rest of the developed world. It’s not even remotely close. With very few exceptions, the social pathologies we see throughout the US are concentrated in red states. Blue states have problems too, but they tend to be related to the fact that they are highly desirable places to live.
My father in law doesn’t like music. He doesn’t dislike it either, he’s just indifferent. Apart from that he’s just your garden variety somewhat-curmudgeonly 80-year-old dude.
I’m not attacking you personally. Personally, I wish you nothing but the best.
What I’m attacking is the phony mythology that has thousands of fatbodies imagining that being heavily armed is somehow a valid and necessary counter to the possibility of government overreach.
It’s an objectively absurd and laughable proposition.
My dad served with the 4th ID in Vietnam, my grandfather fought from Guadalcanal to Okinawa where his war ended, and then he went on to fight in Korea and survived the clusterfuck that was the Chosin Reservoir.
My point is only that such men still exist in the US armed forces, and there is no universe in which “Fatbody Joe McGee” and his airsoft buddies stand a chance against them, no matter how heavily armed they think they are.
What’s funny is you getting defensive about it. Sounds like you might have a fitness issue yourself.
I’m not saying that you necessarily are a “disgusting fatbody,” (to quote Gny. Sgt. Hartman,) but if you were, that’s exactly how you would react to the fact that every competent military on the planet demands high levels of physical fitness of their combat troops.
It’s just a fact, my dude; you don’t last long in real combat if you’re heaving and gassed within the first 15 minutes.
That’s only one relatively minor factor among many. Anyone who points to it without also mentioning the much more significant impacts of things like global supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine is either ignorant, or is trying to spin a particular narrative while being intellectually dishonest about their priors.
Especially since those guys are pretty much all lard-asses. There’s a reason why every competent military on the planet emphasizes physical fitness before anything else; it’s because real combat --as opposed to playing paintball with your fatbody friends-- is one of the most physically and psychologically punishing activities known to man.
This is a phony bullshit talking point. The possibility of a cooling climate was briefly raised and entertained in mainstream media for about a year in the 1970s. It was never even remotely a scientific consensus view. Contrast that with human caused warming which has been settled science for decades. There is no comparison. As I said, it’s a bullshit talking point.
Also Marty Stouffer. I’m not sure how to do it, but can we please find a way to fit Marty Stouffer into this equation? Is that asking too much? I just don’t want to neglect the great American that is Marty Stouffer.
I’m gonna name my next cat “Marty Stouffer.” It will fit right in with my current cat, “Nancy Reagan,” who doesn’t like you.
I am a union member so this isn’t a thing that happens. If management does something unacceptable, we do a strike authorization vote which, if passed by the membership, starts a clock ticking down to strike time and management knows that they are on notice and need to start negotiations.
All of which is just to say that unions are good for workers, regardless of what kind of bullshit you may have been led to believe.
I’m pretty happy with Google Fi. I realize it’s Google, which isn’t great, but at least they deliver exactly what they say they will and the price is always exactly as advertised.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they are taking a loss on it just to gain market share. They can afford it.
My work-around was to never read replies to my comments unless I had good reason to think they would be intelligent. Ultimately this meant that I only really read replies to comments made in niche subs.
It’s also the case that several things can be true at once. Like, maybe you are part of the reddit mob-mentality, but on certain issues you have opinions that very much go against the grain.
That’s totally fair. Although I’m not sure how you figure that the Portland area isn’t a big part of the PNW.