You do have the ability to suffer a little ribbing at America's expense and address the content of the conversation. We aren't the hottest shit in the rest of the world. We've been kind of crappy to them. We're currently arguing that PRISM is cool because we're spying on non-Americans, for instance. We're kind of…

He thinks if we give people the "freedom" to misbehave, more people will misbehave. I think he's ignoring the fact that we make many many many things illegal that aren't elsewhere, and the penalties are stiffer.

I'm sorry to say it, but if America has become a joke to foreigners I think we've probably earned that several times over by now. Especially since we can't deal if someone mocks us since it goes against our weird need to say we're a unique and blessed country etc.

He is pretty correct, though. The American prison system is shameful.

I understand that acceptable targets of violence have historically been classes of people who people have arbitrarily decided aren't actually people. You have vividly illustrated you're not any better than that.

Local candidates don't do so hot if nobody cares about the platform you're running on. :-/

Yeah, but Texas really does objectively have worse prisons than most of the rest of the country. Higher incarceration rate, worse funding, overcrowding, worse treatment of minorities, worse violence, and worse guard on prisoner abuse, and a climate of unusually aggressive privatization (even for the US) on top of all…

It's a good thing there's a class of people it's OK to rape. Without people like you, what would rapists do?

You're talking about the fall of DOMA, but several states in the past year have legalized gay marriage in their states through legislative means. And without other kinds of lobbying, we wouldn't have justices aware that being gay is acceptable at all.

Voting is one of a number of things you can do. Since it's sometimes the only thing people do, it's the least I can ask of people.

I've worked for a Texas charity involved with the criminal justice system.

Welcome to the American prison system.

He's not being singled out. Minority kids get their lives ruined for this petty shit all the time. When that happens it doesn't make the news.

Even if he did something awful, it is appalling we've set up the criminal justice system the way we have. When we sentence people to prison, we do not sentence them to be beaten and raped. Other countries with other systems do not have this problem to nearly the extent we do.

Uh, well, I worked for several months at a criminal justice charity and wrote their website, including the studies linked. We did advocacy for imprisoned people, and some of that involved publicizing comparative studies on world prison systems.

That's not technically true. Canada and the UK are as or a little more quick to imprison people over threats like this.

It doesn't matter, there will always be silly people who over react. Hell, if US prisons and DAs were sane, a little fine or a couple months in the joint isn't super crazy.

This is really typical for an American prison. Typically nobody cares.

Fashion isn't art, it's business. A model's job is to highlight the clothes, not the other way around. They make the clothes first, then pick the model to wear it. They tend not to fit a model into a sample until right before a show, and it's expected you fit into a size 0-2 sample with as few alterations as…

I cannot imagine $200 a head being anywhere near "normal." I only did (nice) finger foods and cake and (NICE) booze, and that was $14ish a head. Mine was on the inexpensive side, but I intentionally planned my wedding to feed everyone and not go into any debt.