And that’s why we call them the Parasite Class.

Because no-one accumulates that much wealth without parasitizing off of the working class.

Imagine being dumb enough to invest into the military industrial complex of a country that’s actively threatening to invade you.

And to buy defensive weapons that can be summarily and remotely shut down by that invading country.

That would be the most moronic decision possible.

The Gripen may not be a 1:1 match with the F-35, but neither was the Sherman a 1:1 match with the Nazi Tiger tank. It took an average of 8 Shermans being KO’d to take out a single Tiger. But when 10, 20, or even more Shermans could be fielded for every Tiger that hit the field, victory came down to numbers, not technological superiority. As has been copiously demonstrated across nearly every conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And instead of 88 F-35 aircraft, that exact same dollar value could buy us 420 Gripen aircraft, at even less on-going maintenance costs on an overall basis.

True, even with 420 Gripens we don’t stand any chance of defending ourselves. But effective defense is not the goal… the goal is to make any invasion as prohibitively expensive for America as possible. And 420 Gripens that cannot be remotely shut down is that answer.

Okay, so I was not specific enough. Let me rephrase:

“Name me any popular media that centres around a husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend dynamic, where the man isn’t a moron…”

There we go. Happy?

And notice the term “likely” in my prior comment. Don’t ask me to pick grains of sand off of a beach when you have the entire beach in the first place. I’ve got better things to do with my life than working through Brandolini’s Law; gesturing to that beach is as far as I am going to go.

Aside from distressingly rare well-written examples of healthy relationships such as Babylon 5, the “foolish husband, responsible wife” trope is almost everywhere. It even figures prominently in a majority of advertising that features couples interacting with each other.

• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FoolishHusbandResponsibleWife
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentingTheHusband
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HenpeckedHusband

And this is far from an exhaustive list. But it’s telling that this is a widely-known and ubiquitous trope, whereas its flip-side opposite is pretty much nonexistent.

In fact, the only references I could find were on the “foolish husband” tropes:

• https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210615-why-tvs-most-toxic-stereotype-endures
• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/retire-the-bumbling-husband_b_5602054
• https://feministing.com/2012/08/24/the-doofy-husband-trope/

And Star Trek should not be on your list:

• OS did not include explicit relationships between main characters
• TNG series had only two historical relationships, neither of which were “active”.
• DS9 had Rom (last season), O’Bryan, and (in the early seasons as a bumbling romantic) Bashir. To a certain extent the trope even existed between Quark and his mother, in terms of her being financially successful and smart in ways Quark never was, although this was shown in just a handful of episodes and so doesn’t really count.
• Voyager had Paris, Neelix, and - to a painfully awkward extent - Kim. Plus, poor dude spent the entire voyage home as a f**king ensign.
• Technically Enterprise had Trip, who as a human was very emotionally foolish next to T’Pol.

Plus, the argument can be made that a few of your other choices don’t have a husband/wife relationship as a central/recurring feature between main characters, and as such are also ineligible.

The only solid mark that I see in your favour is Babylon 5, with Sheraton’s relationship with Delenne and Ivanova’s tragic relationship with Cole being exemplary examples that are shockingly rare in media.

Racists gonna be racist. All they need is the colour of a person’s skin.

Finland facepalms furiously in the corner, gesturing vehemently at the homeless solutions it has proven as being wildly successful and undeniably effective

What a great way of identifying racists and other societal undesirables.

Nationalize healthcare. Build a web of regulations that set regional funding on population metrics, prevent government interference, and lock in funding in ways that are impossible to politically interfere with. Use efficiencies of scale to trim the fat at the top even more.

Also make it illegal for any healthcare org to charge the consumer for any essential service, and make it illegal to discriminate where consumers come from. They can only triage based on medically-basedl rules.

Affordability is inverse to employability.

Places are affordable because they generally don’t have well paying jobs or good careers.

Conversely, places where it is easy to pick up a good career or earn a lot without much experience tend to be quite unaffordable.

The best flex is to have a job that allows you to work from anywhere. This allows you to pick and choose that environment that gives the best affordability level for you, personally, while earning as much as possible from a location-independent job.

Unfortunately, middle manglement desperate to justify their paycheques, and upper manglement who are over-invested in business real estate, seem hell-bent on rescinding the WFH opportunities that made employees so much happier and productive. They would rather have miserable, underperforming employees than change the way they do things.

Society is even worse.

Name me a single TV show where the man isn’t a moron, and where the woman is not the only functional adult in the relationship, and I could likely show you 100 shows where the man is portrayed as a moron and where the woman is the only functional adult.

Colour me naïve, but this narrative has got to be seriously f**king with gender relations, and how women are now overwhelmingly disrespecting men and what they bring to the table.

And this brainwashing starts in childhood, with shows like Peppa Pig laying the foundation for that life-long disrespect.

It also shows men how little they are actually valued long before they can bring anything of value to the table. It’s certainly been a factor of why other men around me have been disengaging from society and going their own way. Why bother if you are the pre-ordained baddie, and have zero ability to counter that messaging without being called a misogynist?

Back in the mid-80s: CHUD. Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers.

Being on the spectrum, this really messed me up, even though the special effects were cheesy even for that era. And I mean heck, I was also 15 at the time, and had never seen any kind of a horror movie before…

Just learned a short while ago that the term has been co-opted to describe conservatives in general, and white conservative men specifically. I now find myself in awe at how well-applied that term is.

Honourable mention to The Last Unicorn completely tearing me up with its ending, and throwing me into a two-month existential crisis bender that I don’t think I ever fully recovered from.

The fact that clock noon is actually within a half hour of solar noon, and not a whole hour and a bit off.

Kelowna varies from being less than 2 minutes off of solar noon to about 11 minutes off at the most. Now it’s going to be permanently an entire hour-plus off.

Why call it noon if it isn’t actually noon?

It’s always “Pacific”, regardless if it is ST or DST.

The real fuckery is that the referendum gave us only two choices, not three:

• Stay on flip-flopping time changes.
• Go to permanent DST.

There was no option for permanent Standard Time, so everyone chose the least-worst option instead of the much better one that wasn’t even provided.

You know, I’m seeing such levels of thought-terminating clichés, reality denialism, and outright brainwashing from you that all I am going to do is punt you a wonderful little piece of copypasta from GirlWritesWhat:

So what you’re saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists… they are not “real feminists”.

That’s not just “no true Scotsman”. That’s delusional self deception.

Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don’t care. I’ve been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they’ve done under the banner of feminism, maybe you’d stop calling yourself one.

But I want you to know. You don’t matter. You’re not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: “Well, that’s just a clean-up word for wife-beating,” and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, “we know it’s not girls beating up boys, it’s boys beating up girls.”

You’re not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta’s Network of Women’s Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.

You’re not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were “ambivalent about their sexual desires” (if you don’t know what that means, it’s that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC’s research because it’s inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.

You’re not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.

You’re not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.

You’re not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.

You’re not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.

You’re not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.

You’re not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman’s history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it’s “part of her sexual history.”

You’re not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman’s mouth is “not a crime” in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You’re not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there’s a “legal” way to rape them.

And you’re none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.

You’re the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.

Fuck right off, misogynist, can’t even acknowledge the boot comes from above, no, got to “other” women instead

Men are the vast majority under that boot. Read the f**king article, ya dingus.

Across Canada, the number of missing and murdered Aboriginal men is almost 5× that of aboriginal women. And yet, where are the nation-wide initiatives to solve aboriginal men’s murders and disappearances?

Suicides of men are over 5× that of women. Yet where is the pearl-clutching over those deaths?

Homelessness is almost ¾ men. And yet, homeless shelters for only women outnumber those for only men, and men’s shelters frequently have to empty out completely if there is any overflow from women’s shelters at all.

Workplace deaths of men are more than 9× that of women. And headlines only occur when it is women who suffer.

Plus, of all the jobs that aren’t at parity between men and women, the only ones women ever clamour to target are those with air conditioning and great lumbar support. Where are all the female lumberjacks? Where are the female crabbers? The coal miners and oil rig workers and the framers and plumbers and roofers?

crickets

Yyyyyup. Thought so.

You look at pretty much any personal calamity except those which are purely gender-specific, and if men aren’t neck-and-neck with women, they’re nearly always the majority of victims.

And yet, it is only those solutions that address women which are not “misogynistic”. Hell, it took nearly 40 years for “men’s mental health month” to gain traction against exactly those accusations of misogyny.

So fuck right off back, you flaming gender bigot.

Feminism ≠ misandry.

Strange, because that is 100% the source of all misandry, like how any attempt to bring political attention to men’s issues is painted as “misogyny”, simply because it’s men who are being paid attention to.

Such as domestic violence. Did you know that if you look at only non-reciprocal physical violence - as in, only one person is doing the physical striking - 71% of victims are men?

And yet, who is protesting the most loudly when people try to open up DV shelters for battered men using the same public funding that women’s shelters enjoy? Small clue: they invariably identify with the term you mentioned.

71%. You’d think there would be more shelters for a 71% proportion of physically-assaulted victims. And yet, while North America has tens of thousands of shelters for the other 29%, it has only three for the 71%.

Three. In all of North America. Because public funding for it is lethally radioactive to political careers.

You are fueling the gender war.

So true equality is “fuelling the gender war”, eh?

Why call feminism “equality”, then, if it is nothing of the sort?

Removed by mod

F-35 dominated the Gripen in terms of military capabilities.

…And?

In WWII, the German Tiger absolutely dominated the American Sherman. To the point where an average of 8 Shermans were needed to reliably take out a Tiger. There were frequent reports of Sherman ordinance just bouncing off of the Tiger’s armament like rubber balls, and it took a precise hit in just a handful of hard to target places in order to disable a Tiger, much less destroy it. Shermans needed to get stupidly close - frequently just a few tank lengths away - to make those shots count. Which means most were destroyed just trying to get close enough to actually be useful in the first place, or as distractions for other tanks to slip in.

And yet, America helped win that war. Because when 10, 20, or even more Shermans came boiling out of the woodwork for every Tiger that was fielded, the tide turned very quickly.

Canada’s initial quote for 88 F-35 fighter aircraft could obtain about 420 Gripen aircraft at current market prices.

Combine the gratuitous F-35 cost overruns, the maintenance that costs many multiples of what Gripen maintenance costs, and the massive cost savings inherent in building Gripens domestically, and we could conceivably field 7× or 8× as many Gripens as we could F-35 aircraft for the exact same cost.

Plus, Gripens can be fielded from many more places in Northern Canada than F-35 aircraft can. Sometimes as little as a straight section of highway.

And numbers win wars. Always.

There are many, many other jobs where you can openly display your religions and no-one will give a shit.

So a government job prevents you from doing so. Boo hoo. Find a different job, then. Religion isn’t a “disability” that needs protecting other than demonstrating a wholesale lack of effective bullshit detection skills.