Maybe the secret ingredient is human empathy. Not that crazies are unique to the right by any means, but the organized effort to dehumanize and attack segments of the population has gone disproportionately mainstream on that side of the spectrum. So many talking points involve a vaguely-defined "enemy" of some kind. It's unfortunate that people get sucked into it, but you can't really blame the individuals when the leaders they look up to are actively working to mobilize them in that way as a political strategy.

I guess the ideological space the left fills at the moment just isn't one that requires that type of anger to support. There are certainly issues to get angry about, but in general it's just taking that low-hanging fruit of giving your fellow humans the same respect you would want for yourself and your loved ones, even if they seem different or weird to you.

As true as it all may be, these guys seem to absolutely thrive on their own hypocrisy. I don't think they would let the fact that they stink ten times as bad stop them from going after anyone else.

I kind of wish everyone who set foot in that room was fitted with a device that electrically zaps them every time they say some disingenuous bullshit. It's always so uncomfortable to watch, and they know exactly what they're doing.

Absolutely. Taking healthcare costs off our backs would go a long way. The birth of my first kid absolutely wiped out the savings I had built up since getting out of school, and that was WITH insurance coverage. Six years of careful planning and saving just flushed down the toilet in an instant. There's just no financially-responsible way to manage the risk of a hospital bill that could range from hundreds to hundreds of thousands depending on what does or doesn't go according to plan, not to mention the following 18+ years of unknowns. It's kind of a wonder that people are still having as many kids as they are these days.

Tell us about the infrastructure programs next.

Congressional republicans really hung the entire country out to dry when they chose to cross that line with him. That's what it all comes back to. These questions should never be riding on individual judges; it's why the legislative branch was defined as its own thing and not just another arm of the president. But they signaled to everyone that his actions were just fine within the framework of the gov.

I mean the whole point of this country was to NOT have power consolidated in one office, and these clowns are just going full-steam ahead on sending us back there again, and dumping all of their resources into convincing the public it's a good thing. Some days I just don't know what kind of backward mirror world we fell into.

With constitutional originalism being all the rage nowadays, a person could certainly ask what sort of arms existed at the time of writing.

So why is political representation so skewed that the "left" party needs to confine itself to the middle of the spectrum? That sounds like something to discuss.

It's frustrating because so many of the older city and town centers actually have decent walkability, even if growth made things a little more complicated. It's mostly the later development surrounding the cities where the only thought during planning was how the cars get from point A to point B and then park, and now the barriers to fix that situation are enormous. Some of them will update their ordinances to require sidewalk construction during new development, but it's not all that helpful when you end up with sidewalk stubs connected to nothing. It also doesn't fix the existing arrangement of buildings and drives that makes everything so hostile to pedestrians.

I almost had this half-baked thought about the northwestern moose population being separated from the ones in the northeast, but then I remembered that they don't need passports to get into Canada.

Agreed! I think it comes at the cost of character development to some extent, since if you watch straight through, it feels like some of the characters just "reset" after enduring enormous, life-changing events, but it really is constructed in a way that makes it watchable from any point (except maybe the 2-parters.) New series have very much moved away from that style.

I'm always tempted to tell people to skip the first season and revisit it later as well, but I guess it introduces some interesting things that the series periodically circles back to, so who knows. I watched it after many random episodes, so I still think of it as a sort of wonky prequel.

The theme here is that he doesn't even care enough to create the illusion of caring. The community was never given "democratic" solutions to dysfunctional mod situations until this business reason arose. There's no community liaison trying to do damage control or make the users feel heard right now -- just the CEO himself telling everyone in the plainest terms that nothing they say has any impact because he does not care. People should take all of this at face value.