brenden2

I appreciate anyone who has the courage to do this. I've done it before, and it's definitely hard. Congrats and I wish more people would stand up for themselves and others.

It's always better to receive downvotes and do the right thing, than merely sit by and go along with the hive. Especially when you know in your gut the hive is wrong.

What people say in debates is irrelevant. The only thing that matters are their actions. People keep falling into the trap of listening to the speeches, but ignoring the actual policies, policy implementation details, and the whole bureaucratic side of things. People are hyper focused on the TV version of reality, and completely ignore the day to day humdrum action.

I think part of the problem today is the TV-ification of politics. For example, Trump is obsessed with "ratings" and Twitter likes, rather than actually doing anything meaningful. What's incredibly bizarre is how many other politicians have started copying him by focusing on grandstanding, Twitter likes, and getting more news airtime, rather than actually getting work done.

TIL RealNetworks still exists.

Wealth of Nations is such a good book, I implore everyone to read it. I think a lot of people misunderstand what Adam Smith was about, and it's good to go back to the early ideas of what capitalism was meant to be, and how far we have diverged from it.

I just checked and my actual words were "basically changed nothing", which to me means "made some changes, but they were inadequate".

I appreciate your passion, but Obama still didn't follow through with his promises, and whatever change he enacted wasn't enough.

Police accountability, inequality, corporate welfare, domestic surveillance, ... the list goes on.

Just FYI, I was agreeing with the parent (and I agree with you). QE is free money for rich people, and a big slap in the face to the poor.

This is great, thanks for sharing.

I would like to point out that it's still cherry picking, and ignores the cases where Democrats voted against sensible legislation. They supported the Patriot Act for example, and recently supported bailouts for large companies that didn't need free money from the government but still got it, all while keeping it difficult for people to access unemployment benefits.

And yet the gulag is still there. It's a binary thing: either he closed it or he didn't. Clearly he did not.

You can go through the voting records an various bills and see how they voted, it's all public data. I challenge you to do it one day, and you can see the difference between what they say in their speeches and what they actually do policy wise.

You can also cross that data with polling from the respective senators or representatives on individual policies and see how they line up. You can see quickly that they do not represent their constituents if you take the time to do it (I've done it myself).

The Federal Reserve injected trillions of free money into the markets, so naturally they went up.

So what, we're supposed to wait 100 years for sensible policy? What are you advocating? Why can't we fix things now?