Your second paragraph is especially true.

to  play our own character and do our own thing.

You know what Marceline will say: fall in lockstep with party leadership no matter what and when that fails, blame everything on sabotage by progressives.

Ah yes, the nebulous ‘they’, at once powerless and hence useless, and yet also an existential threat to the true blooded Democrats.

Are you going to criticize the Republicans into backing off? The only functional way to oppose them is to have the Democratic Party aligned against them. THAT’S what this is about.

Marceline is the Democrat version of the Republican base described in this article. Blind adherence to a specific power structure, and everything else is the enemy. 

Fuck that. Unless you’re role-playing a devout conservative Muslim, they can wear a hijab and show whatever skin they like.

Those empires weren’t centered on Arabia, crucially. The Persians are modern Iran, the Ottomans are modern Turkey. Even the first Caliphate became relevant after expanding out from Arabia and conquering Sassanian Persia.

Oh damn that picture

I know it's played out, but IMAGINE Obama/Clinton/Bernie/AOC doing this. 

Im still sad about my greying over on io9. 

Those two have a lot in common, right down to weird Christian backgrounds. 

Ted Cruz is definitely stupid.

I regret engaging that person. In the end, everything he’s saying is just apologism. Absolutely nothing he’s brought up is any sort of justification for this official’s behaviour. As if his disdain for people stuck in a literal natural disaster zone is connected to urban populace’s misplaced conceptions of rural…

I am really not inclined to give you any benefit of the doubt, given both the tenor and substance of your arguments so far, but...even if you were right, tribalism is so far back in the list of reasons for this man to act as he did, it is virtually irrelevant to the matter at hand. He isn’t a rural mayor lashing out…

...Tribalism has nothing to do with this man's blatant disregard for basic humanity. That's the key issue here. There is no justification here for this rant, certainly not by invoking 'tribalistic attitudes foster this kind of animosity!' type of apologism. 

100% co-signed. And at the rate things are changing, they'll need a proper demographic collapse to really have the necessary shifts in cultural attitude. 

Wooooow.

Put that way, it’s insidious. 

Where did the 41st and 42nd President go?