Yes

The involvement of actuaries is a dead giveaway.

Thank you.

I’m not saying it’s a fair system, I am just saying they are a valid military target.

But I’d like to think that I wouldn’t kill innocent people even if someone pointed a gun at my head. Of course no one knows how far they’ll go to survive until they’re put in dire circumstance.

It’s actually a pretty clever scheme by drug companies to foist the cost of medicine development AND supplying uninsured people onto insurance companies (and from there, the cost is passed on to people with insurance). I just don’t understand how it’s legal, or why the insurance companies - who are supposed to have such great collective bargaining power - accept this status quo.

I have noticed that it only seems to happen with very expensive, very recently developed drugs which are not yet part of the insurance companies recommended therapies, and they typically require a prior authorization (special approval based on the doctor stating there is a medical necessity for this, and only this, drug).

No, they side with Neo because he’s relatable, they’re on his side long before the Matrix is revealed, much less the philosophical suppositions put forth by the series.

I have a medicine that is $1650 with insurance, copay is $60. Or, rung without insurance and the discount card, it’s $0.

Medicine pricing is utterly a scam.

If I’m going to have such brain rot that I’ll be supporting Hamas after 8 months here I should probably just leave now.

That’s not an absolute system. It’s a system where a person’s culpability is determined by their actions.

I don’t think that’s an organized movement.

In the Americas? Shouldn’t people in the Americas be returning the land to the indigenous Americans and returning to the homes of our European ancestors?

By the way, the last place my grandmother lived in Scotland was turned into a Tesco. Should I bomb it since I have an indigenous right to my homeland?

The Palestinian struggle would get more sympathy if Hamas wasn’t involved. Hamas is delighted with the high civilian death toll because of the backlash against Israel from people who place far more value on human lives than they do.

No, the Empire only recently gained the ability to blow up planets. No one joined under threat of their planet being blown up.

And yes, conscripts are fair game. Unless they A) rebel against their commanders and/or B) immediately surrender. As long as they keep running the death machine, they are culpable.

They are serving in the Empire’s Army, so yes. Despite the fact that they were conscripted. If they didn’t want to be killed, they should have organized a massive uprising against their leaders and surrendered the Death Star to the rebel scum.

Hamas isn’t “the resistance.” They’ve been in power in Gaza for almost twenty years. They murdered their political opposition and became a single party Islamic dictatorship.

Furthermore, they committed a massacre to provoke Israel into a war, in hopes that Israel’s response would lead to the brutal deaths of a lot of Palestinian civilians and lead the world to naively become sympathetic to their cause (destroying the state of Israel, instituting an Islamic dictatorship with Sharia law in Palestine, and eliminating all Jews, Christians, atheists, Hindu, and Shia Muslims from the region).

Hamas is cartoonishly evil. Much like Netanyahu.

What state-sponsored media? RT? Al Jazeera? NPR? BBC? Be specific!

Nobody sided with the military in Ender’s Game once they understood what was really going on. That’s the whole point of the story.

People side with Batman because he wears a cool costume, has cool gadgets, and delivers funny one-liners while he beats up cartoonishly evil bad guys. Not because he’s a millionaire.

That’s not what the definition of liberalism is at all.

Liberalism is a political and social philosophy that believes in individual rights, equality, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. Liberals do support revolutions when the system that is being overthrown is illiberal, such as a monarchy or dictatorship.

Liberals simply don’t support the Marxist idea of a “permanent revolution.” Revolution always gets a lot of people killed, so they should be few and far between. Furthermore, revolutions - especially idealogical revolutions - run a very high risk of being coopted by brutal opportunists who cynically exploit the idealistic revolutionaries to gain or retain permanent dictatorial power for themselves.

Right now, there’s no guarantee that a revolution would result in something better. History shows there’s a very good chance that revolution will kill a lot of people and lead to something much worse.

Furthermore, our current system has a successful track record for slow yet steady improvement. But it’s always two steps forward, one step back - at best. Sometimes there is backsliding more than one step. But history shows that the current system can be used to move forward again… So there’s no reason to throw it all away, risking a much worse replacement.

Which resistance are we talking about? “The Resistance” movement in response to Trump’s election in 2016? Or “the resistance” which tried to overthrow the election on January 6, 2021? Sorry for being myopically American, but being American, I assume that’s what we’re always talking about.