An excellent illustration of folks' mistaken understanding of what is private information and what is public.

Speaking of lawyers, nice try in smokescreenism, but:
1) Obama had been a sitting US senator, thus had experience in government
2) Therefore your erroneous reference to "...no experience..." is at best mistaken
3) Since Obama had experience he could not (by definition) claim to be superior to McCain because he had no experience (like POTUS 45 did)
4) You do bring up an interesting separate issue: many insiders, like George W Bush, claim outsider status. I agree it is psychologically interesting, perhaps we can start another thread on that topic.

Jut so you know there is a movement on the Pro circuit to have let serves go (just like during a rally), though to be fair it is out of an interest to shorten matches.

Perhaps you didn't read my posts correctly. My issue is not a comparo of one level of experience vs another, it is the idea that having no experience at all is a selling point for a candidate. As you already know, Obama didn't sell himself as superior to McCain because he had served in the Senate for a shorter time period.

I don't have a problem with the arithmetic, rather with the central premise. That is, while many label human experiences as suffering and joy, and seek to eliminate the suffering, statistically one could just as easily label the sum total of the negative and the positive over a lifetime as "average" or normal. After all suffering and joy are relative not absolute terms. One person's agony is another's below average day. And just as the unrealistic kids in Lake Wobegon are all above average, it is an error to lament the shape of a bell curve.

Identifying a negative facet to a complex situation is not sufficient to label it as negative. IRL essentially all complex issues have negative as well as positive attributes. Decision making is based on weighing relative risks, not trying to find a risk-free path.

Is spaying a bad thing? Is euthanizing unwanted dogs a bad thing? If the OP had proposed vasectomies instead of castration, that would be an interesting discussion, but spaying, yes or no has pretty much been resolved.

I have to hand it to you, your logic is internally consistent. Though whether a cloud fairy is this or that has almost no practical application.

Vulnerable means: can get the disease. Invulnerable is synonymous with immune, the vaccinated plus the recovered. Since those among the vulnerable who will require a hospital bed and those won't is unpredictable, your immune system description while fun to muse about, has no practical application.

Social distancing is a crutch while we wait for the vaccine to solve the problem, so neither of us thinks it is the solution.

Several things: first, we don't need to "kill" viruses, we just need to deprive them of hosts. Thus viruses don't need to be "attack"ed. That's the value of social distancing. Your first statement is self-contradictory, since the "vulnerable" population IS the "healthy" population. The invulnerable population is a combo of the vaccinated and those who have recovered.

I agree with term limits for the executive branch for two reasons, to prevent a monarchy and because in our system, until recently, presidential candidates had a lot of government experience. No, my beef is less on term limit statutes and more with the erroneous belief that a lack of experience is a plus for performing the job of legislator, unlike every other job.

The competition between sportsmanship and winning is as entertaining as any other (artificial) dichotomy. As opposed to the OP, both are actually lionized in pro sports, though one loudly and the other wistfully.

It is an error to propose that he alternative for a domesticated animal is to be wild (since they're not wild animals) rather it is to not exist.

If you address a "subjective" issue like aesthetics, statistically, psychologically and neurologically, there are clearly objective aspects to it. However since a portion of the mix is based on life experience and those are quite varied, it will appear almost random and thus resemble a wholely subjective entity.

Another unrelated complication is that there is the phenomenon of painful stimuli triggering a positive response, which though quantifiable, makes the final analysis appear random as it cancels out tradition evaluation.

The lesson (came to fruition in the early 21st century) is that the balance inherent in democracy, that is that the top of the pyramid has fewer votes than the bottom, can be gotten around since the rabble can be fooled into voting against their own best economic interest.

Twitter effectively deposed him awhile back.

Oh, I'm sorry, not trying to be cagey. POTUS 45 is the most obvious recent example, (for those who follow news).

No I don't have any information on the OPC, apparently it was hacked awhile back so maybe it's getting repaired?

Unfortunately other than age trends, it is difficult to categorize immune system strength before illness. I agree with you about the recovered and the vaccinated, scientifically, but psychologically it would lead to a two tiered system in a situation that is already tribalistic, so I agree that it is more practical to continue as we are doing until hospitalization numbers drop.

I have an example worse than the current Congress...

A couple of things. First the current mutations are covered quite nicely by the vaccines. Secondly, the difference in hospitalization rate between those over 80 and those between 40 and 79 is about 3 to 1. So younger folks are not as "immune" as your analogies (?) imply. At the same time, the total number of those 40 to 79 is much higher (140 million vs 10 million).

Basically we are going to get to herd immunity. You get there through a combo of exposure to illness and vaccination. The higher percentage of illness, the higher the deaths. In 11 months the US has 24 million known illness exposures and in one month 12 million vaccinated. Obviously we can vaccinate way, way faster than the virus spreads with halfa55sd attempts at containing it. The US has the 12th highest death rate, so most countries are going to get to herd immunity with fewer relative deaths than the US. Sad, really.

If you (like I do) feel that factory farming is immoral you won't support it. This is separate from the issue of random employees of a factory farm abusing animals, which is not a practice of legitimate farming of any kind.

Yeah that's the standard line. Unfortunately, governing (like every other activity) benefits from experience. Those without it just aren't as good at it. Let me know if you need an example of a government leader without governing experience who was really bad at it.

Dude, you only addressed half of your proposal (letting gramma die), you left out the don't social distance and close businesses part. That's what's going to overwhelm the open beds that the dead over 80s will free up.

I think you answered your own question.

So, you believe it is the intent that matters as opposed to the consequences? — Down The Rabbit Hole

Absolutely. Changing to an electric car after the Exxon Valdiz catastrophe is logical, buying gas from Shell and boycotting ExxonMobil is not.

Wow, where to start? Firstly, the hospitalization rate of adults between 40 and 79 is about one third of those over 80. So letting the virus run rampant and closing hospitals to those over 80 would, of course kill tons of those over 80, but it would also have overwhelmed hospitals with younger COVID patients so regular sick folks (without COVID) would be crowded out and death rates for everything else would have jumped.

Lastly it is an error in my opinion to lay the current epidemiologically based plan at the feet of theism. Statistics would be a more likely driver.

You do get that there are way, way more folks under 80 than over, right?

While true, that is also true of almost every experience.

Right now? Term limits were big news from 1992-1994 and the 22nd amendment passed in 1951. Old news...

Firstly, congrats on the baby. Luckily for me I had 6 weeks of paternity leave and I commonly worked nights so getting up in the middle of the night wasn't a big deal for me . Clearly your baby is getting way, way more than 3 hours of sleep a day, so sleep when the baby sleeps.

Politics is the one area where acquiring work experience is considered to lead to a lesser work product. Completely illogical. Imagine using the same thought process to pick a surgeon. "Oh, you've hardly performed this procedure before, I'll pick you to cut me open." Ridiculous.

A couple of things. Firstly I wouldn't classify either as a lie since their audience didn't deserve the truth, ie it is an inappropriate question. Not that it shouldn't be asked, just that one shouldn't expect an answer. As to the relative nature of the two answers, Diana likely was being deceptive out of fear while James likely was being deceptive our of braggadocio. Thus I would be more sympathetic to Diana, though it would be an overstatement for me to describe James negatively.

I get what you are trying to accomplish, I am more practically minded, thus I commonly take the issue of consciousness the next step or two, to the practical implications of such a change. That's more me than you.

No need to invoke the Interweb, this sort of "dilemma" could have been made when agriculture was invented. Did every town dweller understand what went into the food they ate? Likely not. But that isn't the point. Tools free up time for folks to think about things other than sustenance, such as art, culture etc.

One's interest in change is inversely proportional to the level of advantage one wields.

Not necessarily altruistic, but giving or thoughtful, yes. You bring up a good point that it is very possible that helping someone to experience something you found great, may be a mediocre or worse experience for another. And where's the value in that?

The OP brings up several semi-unrelated issues. Namely, abuse of factory farmed animals is by definition not the intention of the business. Thus it is rightly condemned but it is reasonable to purchase products from the business since it is not the intent of the business owner. Separately, it is also reasonable to boycott factory farm products because small farm animals experience a better life, though one could forgo the boycott if the plight of factory raised animals was not of importance to you. Lastly while it is completely reasonable (on many fronts) to be a vegetarian, it is illogical to prohibit the culling of domesticated animals, since that is the purpose of animal domestication.

Artists can do anything, but IMO artists should either reflect life as it is, that is giving voice to an underappreciated opinion, or to display a facet of popular opinion that brings it's audience to a deeper appreciation of an opinion they already have, but didn't know they had. It is very rare that art actually changes opinions.