Sure, many people are vaguely superstitious, or don’t have realistic ideas about the probability of winning at gambling. But this idea that people who aren’t fundamentalists feel *actual fear for their souls* when someone they know describes themselves a “witch” in regards to their religious beliefs... it’s absolutely…

I became an evangelical for a while as a teen, and after I left that, Wicca was one of the things I considered, too, along with Buddhism. But I found I couldn’t take a big leap of faith like that anymore and really commit to an unprovable belief.

Many people also have a deep fear of athiests, feminists, socialists, etc, but the answer isn’t to change those names to something less “scary” - its for people to get over their irrational fear.

My fiance was subjected to excorcisms as a kid, too. He grew up in the kind of culty Pentacostal church where people let poisonous snakes bite them so they can brag about how holy they are that they survived. Real out there stuff. We’re both atheists now, but he’s got Strong Feelings about religion that’s definitely…

Well, no worries then - you’d pay much less under the British socialist system. The NHS costs, per capita, less than half of what the American patchwork system costs, while covering every citizen and providing better results. And that was before “Obamacare”.

Well, to be fair, the US does have the worst and most inefficient health care system in the developed world. We could learn a lot from the socialist systems used in Europe that provide better results at much, much lower cost.

In the first case, I hope somebody calls the fire marshal on them. Locking all the exits in a business is illegal because fire hazard.

Yes, this, 100%.

American-style democracy only works if we all agree to honor the outcome of our elections and respect the seperation of powers granted by the Constitution. Most countries that have tried our style of democracy have ended up with it turning into a dictatorship when the president decides to crack down on the media,…

They can’t impeach her before she becomes president...

The only way that all the Republicans and 18+ Democrats in the Senate are going to vote to convict her of treason is if she was forwarding state secrets to Osama bin Laden.

Yeah, but uf they waited until after the election to announce anything, and it was discovered they had already been investigating for a couple weeks and kept quiet about it, people would understanably be furious. It would make the FBI, and possibly the Obama administration by extension, look really bad. I think…

Impeachment alone does nothing other than stir up some shit and pass the ball to the Senate. The House will probably stay red, but the Senate probably won’t, and even if it does, it’s less prone to extreme partisanship.

Right, if, I dunno, Hillary and Kaine were in Air Force One and it crashed, Ryan would become President.

I had a lot of liberal friends with the same confusion during Bush’s second term - and I kept having to remind him, if Bush is impeached for war crimes, *Dick Cheney* will be President, which is like out of the frying pan into the fire....

Can the state of Oregon sue him to recoup their costs, even though the criminal charges didn’t stick?

It’s an amazing series, look forward to it!!

Yeah, Link really doesn’t need to be a guy. When I was a kid, I played the SNES & Game Boy Zelda games a ton, and I always played as my (female) name and identified with the character. And other than giggling at the occasional “[girl’s name] is such a nice boy!” type comments from NPCs, it was never a thing.

By “do this” do you mean “become a shut-in living in their mom’s basement” or “attack women on Twitter”? Depression and anxiety can definitely cause the former, especially if you’re young and haven’t developed s lot of coping skills yet. The latter, on the other hand, is caused by being an asshole.

I think sometimes they also feel othered by all the “cool girls” who weren’t interested in them in high school, and are acting out their resentment on the (probably completely different) women that they feel are suddenly entering “their” space.