Country, absolutely, has become a generic mess of slop. Or at least, chart country / bro country certainly has. That’s a very specific result of the kind of people who listen to bro country; soulless conservative zombies who will lap up anything that references their preferred cultural touchstones. There’s still amazing country music out there but you definitely have to dig deeper to find it.

But as with everything soulless conservative zombies do, you shouldn’t let it shape your view of the world as a whole. It doesn’t mean that popular music in its entirety, or pop music as a genre, have suddenly become creatively bankrupt. There are artists out there producing incredible tracks. Some of them toil in obscurity, some not only break into the mainstream, but define it.

Saying the good stuff is buried is sort of meaningless, in that its always been true. 90% of anything is crap. That’s exactly the point I was making in my previous comment; it’s easy to look back at the past and find the good stuff because we’ve had time to forget all the trash. The present always arrives unfiltered and undiscovered.

The problem with this comparison is you’re always holding up the absolute best of a decade against what happens to be on the radio top ten right now. Same goes for people who think music hasn’t been good since the seventies, or sixties, or whatever. It’s one half nostalgia for the stuff that shaped and formed your music tastes, one half survivor bias.

There’s plenty of good, new music out there. Some of it is on the radio, some of it is in the streaming top ten, and some of it is in places where you’ll never find it. And by the same token, if you actually went back in a time machine and listened to the average radio station in the eighties, you’d hear some absolute dog-shit garbage. It wasn’t all Queen.

This is the claim I responded to:

It is fully 100% confirmed that every single time you turn the plane on, your plane talks with Lockheed Martin in order to obtain permission to turn on.

That claim is, according to every source I have seen, entirely false. Humanspiral offered an article as a source to back up the claim, and I pulled out several quotes from the article that, rather than supporting the claim, directly refuted it. That’s what we’re discussing in this particular comment chain. Not whatever you’re bringing up.

Yikes. Definitely another good argument for switching to the Gripen, for sure.

Thanks, that helps a lot and definitely recontextualises the whole situation. I can still seem some advantage in forcing the GOP to burn their one CR in January, but that’s definitely a much smaller threat than I had previously assumed.

You’re entirely misunderstanding what I’m saying. The F-35 is an air-to-air plane. In the same way the Gripen, The Eurofighter Typhoon, the F-16 and the F/A-18 are. They are all capable of filling both ground attack and air-to-air roles. And the F-35 fills an air-to-air role incredibly well - better than almost any other plane on Earth - because it has an almost unbeatable advantage over any other air-to-air platform; stealth.

Think of modern air-to-air combat as a sniper duel in the sky. The goal is to remain unobserved by your target while you line up a shot on them. By the time they detect the incoming missile, it’s already too late. And even if they defeat that missile with countermeasures, you haven’t given away your own position and can quickly relocate and fire again while remaining undetected. Eventually, you’ll get the kill. The person who fires first, wins.

You’re mistaking my correcting one common misunderstanding that gets spread about the F-35 for me somehow being a stalwart defender of the entire program. You can check my comment history and see that I’ve repeatedly expressed my feeling that we should kill the deal and get the Gripen instead.

But, as I’ve already laid out in replies to your other comments repeating the same claim, as well as several other comments I’ve made here, there is absolutely zero credible evidence that a “kill switch” exists, and a mountain of evidence for why it would be almost impossible to achieve such a thing without discovery, and for why no one would ever bother in the first place.

From your source:

DND spokesperson Kened Sadiku said no such switch existEd on the aircraft, but he did acknowledge that the U.S. was in charge of both software and hardware upgrades for the planes.

Emphasis mine. Countries can produce their own hardware replacements for the F-35; even without domestic manufacturing, we can source parts from any other country that has the F-35. The issue isn’t maintenance in the sense of keeping planes flying, it’s maintenance in the sense of keeping them relevant. And that’s a very real issue, and very real reason to consider shutting down the deal. But to call that a “kill switch” is to stretch the English language to absurdity.

Countries can make their own parts for the F-35. It’s firmware the US controls, not hardware.

Thanks, that seems to be context I was missing and does change my read on this pretty substantially. Someone else made the same point earlier, but without the specific details about the procedural hows and whys.

That would still force the GOP to burn their one CR for the year in January, which is not nothing, but I can absolutely agree that it’s far less leverage than I’d initially taken it to be.

You’ve hit the nail on the head here.

I don’t know what the right answer is on this one. On balance, I lean towards getting the Gripen as a stopgap and prioritizing access to those European sixth gen projects. Select the one that looks the best suited for our needs and go in hard on collaborating on it.

This is part of why I think the Gripen makes sense; we can build it here, which opens up the possibility of being able to build a sixth gen later, instead of having to wait in line for our order to ship. The F-35 gives us better capabilities now, but doesn’t solve the underlying problems down the road.

There is, I think, a version of events where we sign a deal with Saab to build Gripens in Canada to export to buyers like Ukraine, and then go ahead and take the F-35 order anyway. Most likely, we use this to extract concessions in other areas from the Americans, pointing at our new domestic fighter plane industry as a very credible threat to walk away from the F-35 deal. Then, if we’re smart about this, we continue to build up our ability to domestically produce fighter craft, with an eye on that sixth gen project. This would make a lot of sense in the context of Carney’s stated goal of making Canada a defence supplier to the EU, while still leaving us with an interim platform that can handle anything the Russians throw at us.

It’s not “stealthy” in the same way that am F-35 is, but it’s got a few tricks to minimize its overall emissions profile, mess with enemy detection systems, and generally be harder to pick up than, say, an F-16. I’m not suggesting that this is anything close to the level of stealth that an F-35 or F-22 offer, but it is an advantage over other 4th gen craft.

We already have 12. The question is whether we take shipment of the rest.

That does further complicate things, because the RCAF won’t want to operate two different platforms. If we don’t bother taking the rest of the order then those twelve jets, fully paid for, basically sit in a junkyard somewhere. Or, as you say, get dissected or used for training. Not a total waste, but definitely something the Conservatives will gleefully point to as an example of mismanagement.

Interesting. That’s a procedural detail I wasn’t aware of. Is there somewhere I can read up more on that? Why is it specifically that this vote could be filibustered but that one can’t?

After reading more about the deal, it’s actually starting to look pretty smart.

They’re only funding the government until January.

So all the stuff where the Republicans have to bring votes by December isn’t a punt, because the Dems are keeping a loaded gun on the table. If the GOP fail to uphold their side of the deal, they can just shut the government down again, right away, with a clear and obvious justification.

The reality is, actually getting these ACA subsidies extended was never likely to happen. It has to go through a GOP controlled house, and Trump. But by holding out for an agreement to actually put it to a vote, the Dems have put the issue squarely on the GOP. They’re gonna force them to either shoot down their package in the Senate, shoot it down in the House, or have Trump veto it. It’ll fail in one of those ways, mark my words, not it’ll fail in a way that is very obviously the GOP choosing not to stand up for regular Americans. And by extending the issue with the shutdown there’s been enough time for people to start seeing the 2026 rates and really getting a picture of how this is going to hurt.

I think this is a solid win. The subsidies were always doomed, and I don’t think actually extending them was ever the objective. I think the point was to force the GOP to kill them in a very public and obvious way where its clear who is holding the knife. This deal achieves that.

Edit: Strike the above. After understanding some more of the details, it’s not looking nearly as smart as I’d first assumed. Leaving the original up to not ruin the continuity of the thread.

OK, this is starting to make sense.

The deal says “You have to put the ACA subsidies to a vote by December. In return, we’ll fund the government until January.”

So they’re not giving up their leverage, because if the Republicans fuck around the Dems can just slam the brakes on again right away. Meanwhile it puts the ball squarely in the Republicans court to actually do something about this issue that is raising healthcare prices for people all across America. It puts the focus on the Republican controlled House, and on Trump, letting the public really see who is fighting for them and who isn’t.

I know it’s easy to assume that this is another example of Shumer caving (God only knows, he does it so much I’m starting to think his spine is a paper straw), but looking at the details I’m starting to think this is actually a solid play.

You’re right. It shouldn’t be hard. I shouldn’t be having to repeat myself. But here we are. There’s no point in my saying anything more on this, because I’ve already pulled quotes from the article you cited, as your only source, that directly disprove every single claim you’ve made.

the advanced electronics systems ((ALIS) requires permission every time they are turned on

No. It doesn’t. The article that you cited directly disproves that claim. I pulled several relevant quotes, in the comment you literally just replied to, which you apparently either didn’t read, or lacked the capacity to understand.

I’m happy to have someone disagree with me and show their arguments for why they think I’m wrong, but if you’re going to throw out sources you haven’t read, then refuse to read the relevant parts of those sources when I spoonfeed them to you, we’re past the point of “discussion” or “argument” and well into “I could literally have a more enlightening conversation with my dog.”

From your cited source;

Losing connectivity to ALIS would be a pain, but hardly fatal, the JPO contends. If jets are unable to use ALIS — a ground-based system that provides sustainment and support, but not combat capabilities for the jet — the F-35 is still a usable plane. In fact, the worst case scenario would be that operators would have to track maintenance and manage daily squadron operations manually, just as older jets do.

…

Yes, the F-35 can take off and land without connecting to ALIS; yes, operators can make repairs without the logistics system, Pawlikowski said. But at some point users need to feed that information up to the central ALIS hub, she stressed.

“I don’t need ALIS to put fuel in the plane and fly it, [I can] take a part and replace it if I have the spares there,” Pawlikowski said. “But somewhere along the line I’ve got to tell ALIS that I did it so that the supply chain will now know that that part has got to be replaced.”

(emphasis mine)

In short, the article you’re citing directly refutes your claim.

Every version of this claim that I have ever seen has been flatly refuted or denied by every credible source.

If you’d like to offer a source for this, I’d love to see it.