I honestly think we were spoiled by post-WWII American prosperity, because if you look at American history pre-1945, it starts to look an awful lot like now—religion included. The “prosperity gospel” emerged from the New Thought movement of the 1880s, and combine that with the economic inequality and labor exploitation…

but risks alienating the tenured democrats that built this party into what it is today

And that’s basically what people are advocating. “Socialism” is a misuse of terminology, as Scandinavia is a mixed economy—capitalism with a strong welfare state. Of course, the United States is technically a mixed economy too, so what people are really talking about is taking our mixed economy and strengthening…

iOS 11.4 did indeed drain my battery very hard. 11.4.1 seems to be a substantial improvement thus far, so if you’re on 11.4 already, I’d say you’ll probably want to do this upgrade.

The impression I’ve got—and someone can correct me if I’m wrong—is that the “Queen’s English” (Received Pronunciation) is essentially a learned, non-native accent for most speakers, and so it was somewhat inevitable that Meghan Markle would be taught to shed her “regional dialect” and instead speak in this “proper…

I get it, but I’ve always found this to be a weird thing for people to get worked up about. Words, very frequently, change meaning over time, not only within the same language, but especially when it comes to loan words. I mean, let’s take the word “idiot” that you’ve mentioned here. It comes from Greek (ιδιώτης/idiote…

I admit I’m kind of using global terminology here, rather than American, which sort of muddies things somewhat. “Liberal,” outside of the U.S. and Canada, refers to economic liberalism (free markets, privatization and deregulation), which, in North America, is a conservative position (and why “classical liberals” are…

Your description of Dreher tends to tell me that he’s a full-blown conservative: conservative in social matters and also conservative in economics. It’s an unusual combination in North America, as conservative Republicans tend to be social conservatives and economic liberals, while progressive Democrats are social…

A countervoice: we’ve been nominating safe, milquetoast centrists for years now. Remember Al Gore and John Kerry? Both very safe choices who lost—in fact, I felt Hillary Clinton was replaying an awful lot of Kerry’s failed campaign playbook (“Vote for me, because my opponent is a laughable buffoon”), so I wasn’t…

But, again, you are expecting humans to act contrary to expectations. Words are very much used to direct and compel actions, and most people are simply going to fall in line.

This assumes that humans are 100% rational beings with complete free will. If they were, then things like advertising/marketing, propaganda, trend forecasts and psychology would all be meaningless. The fact is that words do matter, and people, as a group, tend to act exactly as expected in predictable patterns—see…

Republicans have a majority of the Senate and the Nuclear Option. What do any of us expect Democrats to do?

Not going to disagree with that; just wanted to fill out the historical background further.

Nope...it’s Nixon, the architect of the Southern Strategy, that started this mess.  Reagan just furthered it.

You’re “left” when it comes to the culture wars, and that’s great, but what you’re witnessing is that picking the right side in the culture wars is no longer enough—it’s time for some action on economics too.

Not to mention a bit of icing on the cake—his name was never “Jesus.” In Hebrew, it translates most directly to “Joshua,” but was corrupted through Greek and Latin before making its way to English.

You would quite enjoy living in Toronto then...heh.

It probably isn’t “active” fraud on the part of the Russian government, but might very well be on the part of this woman and her family, furthered by the fact that there’s no definitive documentation to prove her claim. These governments just tend to go along with it out of national pride.

Most of these are reciprocal arrangements. That is, there are likely few Americans clamoring to travel to places like Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but since citizens of those countries have to apply for visas to travel to the U.S., they’re generally not going to extend visa-free travel to Americans out of principle.

I suspect you’re right, if only because I have an acquaintance who thought quite similarly. Roseanne Barr, as late as 2012, was trying to run for president under the Green Party, coming in second place to Jill Stein. Barr, in this case, doesn’t seem like your garden variety “conservative” as much as someone who…