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I used to be that rebellious, but with the way society has become here with "zero tolerance" policies for everything has really made it undoable. Not a big loss with the inner lawyer having been awakened, no need to fight the system when you can twist the system against itself. And yes, I would rather drag out a court case for years and thousands of dollars than be a happy little sheep.

I read what was a comedy article on animal behaviors mentioning ants. Basically, a single or handful of ants is hopelessly retarded, but when you get hundreds of thousands or millions together, they collectively act intelligently. And they basically made the point that we're the complete opposite, a single person can make intelligent decisions, but the more people there are, the more retarded they act. One person probably came up with an idea to prevent some kind of fraud getting spread in political commentary and groupthink took over from there.

Don't remind me! I've adjusted to a whole aisle in best buy. Well PC games are just as healthy as always, it's just playstayshun gets so much attention that it looks dead in comparison. I've noticed lately, PC games have started getting equal attention from publishers again. Now we're back to simultaneous releases for PC/console games instead of waiting a year for console first games.

Yes, order tends to be a skill of totalitarian regimes. But before the enlightenment period, everyone was basically a brutal monarchy.

Didn't I already admit peaceful was a goof? As I said, the region wasn't totally f***ed up until after WW1, before that they remained a funcioning empire that kept order in the region, which was what I was aiming at.

Don't the latter F-100s in SF2 have RWR?

Those were the moops (Seinfeld ) whole different story. Ok, peaceful wouldn't be the word to use, but the point is it wasn't totally f&*ked up until WW1.

Not very familiar with history eh? The muslim world was peaceful compared to europe for a long time under the Ottoman empire for a good 500 or so years. WW1 saw the end of them and the british and french carved it up for themselves after they'd made promises to the arabs of independance if they helped against the ottoman turks. The british and french and US have played games with the entire region and screwing people we acted as friends towards the entire 20th century. Basically ever since petroleum products became so vital. Which then harkens back to the discussion on energy and security, get off of oil and onto domestic renewable sources, we don't give any money to these regimes or need any interest in that area of the world and we can watch it collapse as the wells run dry. Or poppy seed bagels. Another excellent way. Use their only resource for legitimate needs instead of heroin, taliban and drug trade in asia collapse. Idealistic method FTW!

WTF does Israel have to do with anything?

Well bribing them is smarter than a prolonged land war in the graveyard of superpowers. Most of the tribal people don't give a sh*t who's around, they just shoot at anyone who's not their tribe, Taliban, us and karzai alike, so alot of them aren't really jihadists or aligned with the taliban.

More is**t to buy. Whatever happened to the iRack and iRan anyway? As an electronic portfolio or something like that may be useful for the business world, for product demonstrations, advertisements and graphic design work etc. But for the average consumer, I don't see that great a use.

I hope he was an airplane! fan and took the opportunity to use every possible quote he could remember.

Come to think of it, he hasn't stopped by at all lately to jihad on BLT.

Four death sentances What do they do, get some epinephrine and defribrillators and kill him again 3 more times?

I honestly have no idea, F12 is mapped to my TrackIR. If I want to see what's going on during a flight, I usually just cycle through the aircraft external views with F6.

You're making very quick assumptions and broad generalizations that are unshakable. I can't even begin to describe how flat out wrong you are. Apparently to you, the slightest bit of help to anyone for anything sounds as if its as evil as mass murder. As alien as it may sound, there is a whole world in between "f*** everyone but myself" and mindless clones being exactly the same. The world is not inside a computer where boiled down to the most fundamental level, its either a 1 or a 0. No, failure isn't a virtue and not everybody can be successful, to think otherwise is utterly wrong, I've never said anything to that affect. But people deserve some kind of stability or protection from being completely and utterly f***ed and their life entirely left to chance and chance alone. Otherwise, why have any laws, a judicial system or anything? Are you as harsh in real life, or is this just rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric. Do you have a family? Do you charge your kids for their dinner or make them hunt/gather every meal? If you don't, that's either a communist handout for freeloading parasites, or a middle ground is actually a reasonable position. Contrary to your assumptions, I'm not against competition or markets in the slightest, but there has to be some semblance of rules, constraint and greater good than oneself. The most predatory lion still has a concern for their pride, even plants and single celled organisms communicate with others of its kind, conveying chemical signals as warnings of threats or where food is. To not do so is not natural for anything living. Sorry if I sound a bit harsh, its nigh impossible to counter-point an extreme without being extreme.

You speak of personal responsibility and moral relativism. I beg to differ on both. What kind of community do you live in? How do you not see the people suffering? It's easy to just discount people who need help as lazy parasites if you're not paying attention to them. Look at my father, hes as adamant about personal responsibility as you are. He put himself through school and did just fine as an IT manager, we saved for a rainy day (more like decade) and did everything right, people who worked for him loved him, they were productive and things went well. Then someone gets the idea that it's a good idea to close everything down and gets a bunch of Indians in mumbai to do the work at a quarter of the cost, and quality. Then you have an entire department looking for work. My father, with a master's degree and 20 years of experience, can't find a single professional position. An HR department would see he's in his 50's and don't even look at the resume or bother calling for an interview, now he's in his 60s and prospects for finding anything are worse by the day. The best he's been able to do is sporadic web design or work doing things a high school diploma isn't even required for, and this is a person who worked on the hubble telescope! Now for moral relativism, what on earth is more relative than the hyper individualism of pure unchecked markets you're advocating? How can there be any solid right or wrong when there's only self interest and benefit? Any wrong can be justified then. Yes, people are responsible for what they do, but to think that everyone who doesn't have a job is because it's entirely their own damn fault is naieve and cold hearted to the extreme. People don't exist in a vacuum where our actions and decisions only affect us, and others only affect themselves. You must have heard the saying "No man is an island"? And what about the discussion we had on Haiti? Shall we just leave them to die and not bother helping because everything we're doing for them is a hand out? who can possibly argue that? So how is it any different for people in our own country? Lexx has it nailed, ever since we got off the gold standard, it's been bubble after bubble and the economy has become more volatile and manipulatable. It's become an unbelievably corrupt casino, where you can make bets depending on other people's money and pocket the winnings. And if you make a bad bet and you lose that money, you still get to take home the jackpot. If you love personal responsibility, well where is it here? Because risk, responsibility and reward, action and consequence have been completely disconnected.

Andrew Ryan, is that you? No seriously, you really sounded exactly like the broadcasts you hear all through BioShock. Do you not care what happens to others around you?

Indoctrination isn't something we do, especially not in public schools. Unless of course you're arguing against the teaching of maintstream science and history. If anything, public school history and civics have been so sterilized from controversiality to the point of people being unable to critically think and analyze on their own. And quite frankly, that's complete and utter fantasy. I've never met anyone who wants everything handed to them. The only ones who seem to expect they deserve everything are the wall street giants who think their ass is only deserving of solid gold toilets. Nobody wants "handouts" people want to work and earn it. But as our economic system stands, it doesn't matter how hard you work, how well educated or smart you are, it's how well connected you are. Right now I'm sitting across from someone who is suffering from Paterson's budget cuts to childcare services and may not be able to keep working because someone has to take care of her kids. But she wants to keep working, her husband wants to work, but nobody wants to hire him. I am no more happy with obama or clinton right now than dubya or reagan. But there wasn't economic growth, only the appearance of it, it was all fake. Built on fantasy worth that wasn't really there. And the only benefits of that time have gone to a select few. There really hasn't been any recovery from the dot come boom-bust. People, myself and family included have been living the same since then. The financial crisis really hadn't changed anything unless you were along for the ride of their housing bubble. And no, it's not everyone deserves everything and even if they're incompetant they deserve success, it's a whole other fallacy conservatives hold of liberal principles. It's that people should have a chance to get back up and sustain themselves, not to be kicked when they're down and kept there. It's not laziness or some desire to be a freeloader. There are a few, but more likely than not they've become that way not because they were unwilling to work, but that nobody upon nobody even gave them the chance and they've simply given up. And then there's any sense of any measurable equity. Is John Thune or Lloyd Blankfein that much more intelligent or hardworking to deserve making more in an hour than I do in an entire year? They clearly aren't that much more competant at their jobs because if they were, we wouldn't be in this mess. Or even look at NBC (yeah I know everyone despises them already) and the connan, leno drama. It didn't take a psychic to tell that they'd both flop in ratings after giving the tonight show to connan and moving leno earlier. I could have told them that when they were writing the contracts. Local governments, state and local are more responsible for high taxes than the federal government. And simply put, there has to be something bigger to take care of problems that are too big for any one locality to handle. You are talking about the constitution and not the articles of confederation right? The whole arguement for the constitution was to make the federal government more functional. And yes, it tends to be very easy to get hateful when you're constantly demonized as everything from a fascist, to communist at the same time, when a group organizes their whole existance around destroying your every effort when you want to help people.

I seriously doubt that. First of all, don't so closely asociate "left" with "democrat". I've had it with the spineless pandering democrats. But that doesn't mean I'll ever shift rightwards or support the republicans, who are as despicable as they come. Us progressive reformers are just stuck with the spineless creatures, any movement for a third party would just guarantee the republicans even more power. People are angry with wall street and unemployment. What will republicans possibly do? It's like a tape recording one size fits all solution "lower taxes" and more deregulation. We did that for the past ten years, there's been no economic growth, no increase in standard of living or wages. Big government? Seriously, start to think about it. The USA has 300 million people, it's thousands of miles across in any direction. Government has to be a sufficient size to even begin to manage it, let alone even begin to be a major player on the world stage. Security, that takes alot of people and money. That means taxes. How else will any government raise revenue to function? So would you be in favor of giving acess to medicare to people who need access to insurance and can't buy it?

Gorgeous perfection! Hopefully this will mean more detailed carrier ops, radio comms and maybe some semblance of a RIO (Come on Mav do some of that pilot s**t!) For the next generation, I wonder if TK would be bold enough to do a full globe like MSFS. And the titles would have detail added for the specific areas (and we'd be able to fill in targets. bases et al. on our own) Think of the glory that would be possible. It would be expensive, but so worth it.

It's something people (especially me) have been asking for. 2 things the game still lacks and it would otherwise be perfect: 1. quick mission builder and 2.being able to switch to other seats for multi crew planes.

I think I've found my new wallpaper!

Or you could just toss all your mods into a mega install, or divide them up by game. Ex only Israeli and red planes in SF2I, Nato and Red in SF2E, WW2 planes in one, jets in another, or however you like.

Wait a sec... you almost sounded like a disenchanted liberal like myself. Obama actually admits it's essentially impossible not to be beholden to every special interest (mostly wall street) in his book. I put a lot of blame on his advisors, Rahm Emmanuel, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner. All scumbags in my book, and I have a good sense for people who shouldn't be trusted. They're all establishment, so SSDD is no surprise. It's like day 1 his primary concern was not rocking the boat too much. The media actually is quite mixed. MSNBC is left, Fox is on the right and CNN is just a laughing stock that panders to everyone. As for Haiti and healthcare, helping Haiti is easy to do because outside of a few clowns, everyone can agree on what to do. I'm sure they're looking at the political gain from it, but actually getting it done isn't nearly as politicized as anything domestic. If you don't want healthcare, you're damn lucky. If it wasn't for NY extending coverage under a parent's policy until 29, I'd be incomparably f**ked right now. And when it comes to taxes, him and the federal government actually lowered them for most, the states were the ones who went and raised them. Nevermind that nobody lowers taxes, just shifts them around to different groups.