Thanks much for taking our questions! Here’s one — can you list the general qualities and attributes a top tier racing driver must have, and assign your gut feeling of how much better the driver has to be at each one than the average person, expressed as a percentage?

Weird, I was just saying I wish there was a way to make F1 cars look stupider.

still a pretty good ss tho

I wonder how much Trump is paying her to campaign for him.

I saw one of these with the little round lights between the headlights filled in and it looked shockingly awesome.

Of course there are a wide range of factors, and I’m not obsessed with placing blame exclusively on the US. I started responding on this thread, focusing on this particular point, because someone said “ISIS originated in Syria, not Iraq.”

Which, let’s be honest, is just nonsense, and it reeks fairly strongly of the…

1) Did anyone predict, in 2003, that there would be a quasi-state called ISIS? No. Did many predict that Iraq would shatter along sectarian lines, possibly into as many as three separate states? Why yes they did! In fact, active duty US military leadership did, stating that Iraq could “split up,… potentially leading…

1) No, I said read the Wiki on ISIS for background, because the person I responded to apparently didn’t know some basic facts. The Wiki on ISIS is very well sourced, and I invite you cordially to contradict any part of it with equally good sourcing.

Advanced degrees from top universities didn’t stop a lot of arrogant pricks from making horrendous misakes in Iraq.

Yeah I’m not sure if I’m the”Russian troll” you’re referring to, but I am indeed claiming that ISIS originated in Iraq as an insurgent group that was called something else, because that is the truth and it was being misrepresented by a response to OP. Yes, they did take emormous advantage of the Syrian situation. That…

Oh please. Just give it a rest. You know as well as I do that ISIS began with the Iraqi insurgency, and wherever they expanded or fled to subsequently is immaterial. Had there been no Iraq war, there would be no ISIS. There’s no disputing this, so I’m not going to waste any more time doing so.

There is no shame in admitting you’re wrong. Less shame anyway than persisting in defense of a statement like “ISIS originated in Syria, not Iraq.” The opposite is true and it’s not a semantic distinction. The men who became ISIS and continue to run the show, along with the plurality of their fighters, are Iraqi. They…

Go read the Wikipedia for ISIS. It’s an indisputable fact of history that they originated and grew in Iraq as insurgents, as a direct result of the invasion. OP may be over the top, but he’s not wrong.

ISIS originated in Iraq as an outgrowth of AQ in Iraq. They were big players in thr insurgency. Much later, after they Syrian civil war broke out, they exploited the war to gain territory in Syria. ISIS’s leader, al-Baghdadi, is Iraqi. Where did you read that ISIS is Syrian?

Yeah Tyler definitely takes at face value everything he’s told by his sources in the defense community. If they say something is the Greatest Threat to Our Freedoms, that’s reported uncritically. He seems blind to the (honestly not very well) hidden agendas of these types.

“sustainably sourced from hand-selected quarries”

I found this to be a reasonable reply. It still doesn’t clarify the logic behind Tyler’s obvious view that on the one hand, our recent military interventions have been almost uniformly counter-productive, because A) we overestimate our ability to influence the political situation post-war, B) we destabize existing…

Okay, a few points. Not to get into an Obama-Bush pissing contest, but there is no comparison between the two here. The canard about “Obama lost the region because he failed to leave behind x number of troops” is farcical. One, the Iraqi government didn’t want this. Two, the American people didn’t want it. Three, I…

I’m confused, Tyler. You excoriate Obama for not putting more boots into the fight against ISIS, ignoring the question of what comes after we “win”.

All that said, the Camaro always looked better than the Firebird.