Right, so you are on-board with asymmetric morality, it's just a question of line drawing. If a 13-year age difference is 100% wrong at 15/28, then when does it become 100% right? I don't know, but my answer is definitely sometime after age 23. Teenagers (and I'm going beyond statutory rape here, because I…

Wait, so in my example, 15 and 28, you're of the view that a 15-year-old has chosen to be with the 28-year-old the same as the 28-year-old has chosen to be the with 15-year-old? Or do you think that there's just a hard stop to that logic once someone is older than very early 20s? Because to me, it's on the same…

I assume you're on board with asymmetric morality when it's a 15-year-old and a 28-year-old. This is just extending it a bit further. How does one prove otherwise? I don't know. There's no hard-and-fast rule about what is socially acceptable in this arena. I'm not saying I view every man who is dating a woman…

I think you might have misread my post. Bizarro was, I think, arguing that it's wrong to give side-eye to a 36-year-old man paired up with a 23-year-old woman because you can also think of it as a 23-year-old woman who has chosen to be with a 36-year-old man. My point was that one can respect the agency of the…

+/- 5 years? That does feel more right than 1/2*Age + 7. I guess the latter is the outer bound of "might be okay," whereas the former is "doesn't raise an eyebrow."

Does everything have to be symmetrical? I've got to admit, as a man in my early 30s, I would be suspect of a man my age dating a woman thirteen years his junior. I'm not saying it should be illegal or that it's always a bad situation, but there is something deeply weird about it.

Not to be all "oh I'm so going to get laid a lot in college" about this, but doesn't your first clause basically describe how we use soldiers?

I mean, if she were a top tier YouTuber, she'd have made decent money off this, but with her number of subscribers, we're probably talking hundreds of dollars for this video. I'm sure it's a nice windfall, but if she's relying on YouTube for money, it's a hard grind.

Bite your tongue.

Was much of it "hyperbole"? Because my recollection is everyone from time to time noticing that, hey, our President is either a criminal or completely absentee and then a long, pregnant pause followed by a collective shrug of the shoulders.

That's interesting. I think decades of not calling a spade a spade is what allowed the Republican Party to devolve into a neo-fascist, luddite, Christian fundamentalist, white supremacist organization that bears shockingly little resemblance to the Republican Party of even fifty years ago. But you must be right: we…

Yeah, give or take. Trump isn't that far off the Republican mainstream on almost anything at this point, and the stuff he is truly out to lunch on (with the exception of his Russophilia) he probably can't even do. Also, Trump is incompetent enough that one could hope he leaves behind no lasting legacy. On the other…

That's a great example of what I'm talking about. "Party of ideas" and Reagan's "finely honed policies" my ass.

Just fucking with you man, I'm aware there are people stoked about being descended from Vikings and whatnot. We have a ton of them in this country, as a matter of fact. On the real though, no one will take you seriously as long as you've got the Swedes across the Oresund pretending to have potatoes in their mouths.

I mean, who could really get that into being Danish? As far as I can tell, Scandinavia has descended into just giving each other shit about how funny each others' languages sound and joking about how the Finnish are alcoholics. Except in Finnland, where everyone is too busy drinking.

As an American, I've been told by a lot of foreigners that the level we take it to is unusual, as is our demonstrative patriotism (flags everywhere and such).

So, it's a few things. First, the country has always had a strong military tradition and tradition of honoring veterans (in words if not in deeds). The American Revolution left a legacy of tremendous respect for the military, and our first President was the military leader of our revolution. The British also helped…

I'm sure there are a handful of apparently sincere, soul-searching confessions (though I haven't seen any), but there are far more editorials that are still essentially "hold your nose and I'm not going to judge you if you can't bring yourself to vote for Clinton but let's all be clear that I am not personally to…

The Congress and Courts are good at stopping the President from doing stuff, but if all Trump wants to do is run his mouth and steal, it's going to be nearly impossible to monitor him. The President has enormous control of the executive branch (and some sitting Justices have signed on to the idea of the "unitary…

Treason's pretty narrowly defined, as either (i) levying war against the U.S. or (ii) adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Trump hasn't had the balls to actually fight anything ever in his entire life, so (i) is out, and he is pathologically incapable of rendering aid or comfort, or finding anyone…