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Because, even in that first day*, the topic was not "Is it right for a journalist to sleep with a game developer"? Frankly, even if that was the topic, it's meaningless. Any real journalist might be in a relationship with could end up being someone or involved in something they eventually write about. It's journalistic ethics to step back and say "I can't write about this, I'm too close." If that is truly a complaint, state it for the entire profession and stop targeting the women who might be linked to the journalists. It isn't the journalist's SO that has the ethical issue.

At no point was that the actual discussion being held in the vast majority of subr or 4chan boards. It was a panic of "a woman developer slept with a guy, she must have done it for trade for good reviews." No proof was offered, it was assumed that "if a shitty game" (to quote others) "could get green lit on steam, it had to have inside help."

*The second problem is that this wasn't the first day of "gamer gate". The storm over Depression Quest getting green lit on Steam was already rolling before then. The trolls had been threatening Anna Sarkisian for over a year about her documentary about "misogyny in video games". The "five guy" blog post was what many of the others latched on to in order to make their trolling seem "more appropriate" . . . as if any game developer's sexual habits are grounds to send them death threats, publish their home addresses and the addresses of the people someone claims they slept with, or any of the other harassment that followed.

And if the GGers tactics were not so egregious, driving women from their homes and threatening their safety and life, I could agree with you that ignoring them is the best policy. But, let's look at the actions: Chris Klewe, a male gamer, posts some rather disparaging remarks about "GGers" . . . nothing happened. Felicia Day, a female gamer, posts that this had scared her even though she isn't linked to it, and isn't a game developer; and since "how dare she speak about us" is apparently how GG rolls, her private information, address, phone number, etc, is all published publicly for other to harass her.

If this weren't an attempt to silence the voice of women in video games, they would have a much better time convincing the world of their real complaints if they stopped harassing just women. Feminists (not in quotes because there is real post-gender and post-3rd-wave feminism that is not "white women over white men" in this discussion) don't take kindly to being told "You have no place in this discussion, guys are talking about guy issues; gaming is obviously a guy only issue because we make up 99% of gamers". The feminist response, prior to GG, was simply "And we are trying to develop games that women will like as well, so the community of gamers expands." . . . which lead to GG's response of "Evil women are trying to destroy male-dominating games by . . . . making games women will play? No, that's not a good reason, oh look, someone might have used sex to get something. Since we haven't gotten to do the same, let's slut-shame everyone!" and devolved into race-baiting caricatures based on NeoNazi agitprop and actual Nazi propaganda.

hey, /., just because I used the word 'troll' doesn't mean the lameness filter needs to be involved. I'm referring to those in the GG movement who the rest of the movement sees as the extremists. Doesn't mean I don't think they are the actual core of the GG movement, but since some otherwise rational people think that way the word is a valid term to describe the difference.

More caricature than reality? You're living the caricature right in this post. You say you're performing a "service for society" and "shaping the future of culture", with no hint of irony whatsoever. No offense, mate, but if you don't understand why saying those things makes someone a dick, you'll never understand why people think hipsters are dicks. It's not because they're assholes in the sense of being rude or offensive, it's because they intrinsically embody an over-inflated sense of their own importance compared to everybody else in the culture. You just proved the fucking point with your own post.

i'm a hipster, and i don't hate you.

the things you ascribe to hipsters - those are more caricature than reality. if being a hipster is really about liking things before it's cool, you can see us as cultural forecasters. we perform a service for society akin to that peformed by record or film studio executives - we watch shitty movies and listen to shitty music, so you don't have to. you may call it peacocking, but if you think there's value in predicting the future of the culture - and shaping it - i'd suggest that hipsters play a useful role in society. no need to hate us.

yes there are hipsters who are assholes - but that's not cool. everyone seems to agree that hipsters are interested in being cool, so i'd suggest that those hipsters who are dicks about it - they're just not that great at being hipsters, either.

As with another poster, I have learned a whole new meaning to rote memorization. Even in courses in the U.S. that are "just memorization and regurgitation" it is typically not literally word-for-word memorization and regurgitation. I thought that people meant that the tests would be the same problems as the homework, but I didn't imagine it could get to the point where the test was just memorizing and re-writing the solutions, with little regard for correctness. It's like a Brazil-esque caricature of the educational process.

I taught myself BASIC in a matter of weeks during high school. In a sense, I "could program", and I had a great deal of fun making little computer games, "password protection" programs, and stuff like that. Then I went to college and learned how little I knew. Then I went to work and found out how much I still had to learn.

With the right drive, anyone can learn to program. Similarly, anyone can learn how to draw. There are places for simple carnival caricature artists in the world, and there are places for coders who get a start in a 3 month program. I'm very grateful to them, since they help make places for people like me, fixing the problems caused by copy+paste coders that don't understand some of the details that I do.

Some transsexuals are extremely transphobic. They are so fearful of anyone knowing that they go out of their way to put down anyone trans-related who doesn't measure up to their "standards of purity." Being open about the fact that you're trans is a huge no-no to them - "real women wouldn't act that way" and all that garbage. To them women like Lynn Conway are not "real women." They won't be seen in public with another trans because they're afraid that someone will speculate. They make public pronouncements that nobody would expect a transsexual to make, to further obfuscate the truth. Rather than just being themselves, they do everything to be a caricature of what they see women as - which brings us back to the portrayal of women on her game website; the characters look like they were designed for horny teenage boys, by horny teenage boys.

So it's kind of ironic to see you write:

identifying common themes in video games that might be problematic to women

Ms. Wu's actions in trying to develop and market a game which reinforces those "common themes in video games that might be problematic to women" makes her part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The counter-argument, "well, we need to cater to what the market wants" is giving license to unrealistic portrayals of women's bodies that even the major fashion magazines have had to rein in. Ironic for someone who claims to be a victim of misogamy, perpetuating the same stereotypes. But hey, throw out your principles if it means maybe making a buck, because you can't actually design a game the masses want otherwise (even though plenty of others have).

But it gets whackier still. In this interview, Ms. Wu claims that before becoming a game developer, she was a journalist who also studied law. Failed at that too, btw, if you care to do any research. And she makes the crazy claim that web sites are responsible for the content users post. So why doesn't she go after Twitter? Oh, because (as the admin of 8chan pointed out) the Communications Decency Act, section 230, provides immunity from prosecution for user-posted content. It's called barking up the wrong tree for a reason. That dog just don't hunt.

while Wu does seem to have a hostile edge to her - albeit it's difficult to find out what she was like before the abuse started.

Seek and you shall find. The truth is out there (cue x-files music :-)

If you can't call a group made up of people who abuse women, and people who support such abusers, without being told you're criticizing "anyone" who "disagrees" with SJWs, then what hope is there?

There are tens of millions of gamers. Half of them are women. The problem now is the exact reverse - criticize any of the main players by pointing out their wrongs and their lies and you become the target. The SJWs and their White Knights need to do a hard reset. There are creeps on both sides - Wu on one side, the threateners on the other. They kind of deserve each other, because at this point it appears both sides need the other. Typical dysfunctional co-dependent relationship, where each gets something they need from the other party.

And people are listening to her about sexism in gaming.

If she were talking about sexism in gaming ... but she's not. And her acts speak louder than words - the artwork on her website and game promote sexist tropes.

Now if the bounty were being promoted by someone with more credibility, or even a corporate sponsor, sure, why not? But Ms. Wu?

Today Gamergate is not about sexism in the gaming industry. It's also not about misogamy. Or journalism. It's about hype, page views, pot-stirring, and in the instant case getting as much attention as possible to self-pr

Environmentalists usually choose animal habitats and wilderness for wilderness' sake over what's best for people.

No, caricatures of environmentalists do that.

Only to a point. Cleaner is better until you get to clean enough.

Going beyond the "clean enough" point is the least of our worries; we're in no danger of even coming close to it any time soon.

What should be evident is that if the law doesn't pass, it really isn't that necessary and not favored heavily enough by enough people.

In fantasy, sure. In reality, there are political forces much greater than what people favor. There are countless polls, not only about particular issues where the public and the Congress are tragically out of step, but where voters say they don't think either party represents them. (Happy to provide links if you care and doubt it... I have done a ton of research on this, but I won't bother unless the conversation remains relatively engaging.) Voters simply don't have much leverage.

If a congressman refuses to vote in favor of a thing that his or her electorate feels is critical, he will be removed upon the next election.

Even in fantasy, this would be unlikely. Voters often compromise on things they consider critical, in order to protect other things they consider critical.

If his electorate is so intellectually bankrupt (as oh so many Americans are), then they will leave that person in Congress to continue failing to do things that are critical. The former is a check on the system; those failing to represent those who elected him is removed. The latter is not a symptom of dysfunction in Congress. It's a symptom of the dysfunction of the voters.

This is cartoonishly simplistic. Suppose, for example, a person finds climate change critical. The vast majority of voters have no credible option available to express this, even if they were willing to compromise other critical issues. Organizing credible options is a task beyond the vast majority of citizens' means; organizing it over time requires far more political acumen than your "if you don't like it vote differently" picture, but rather a world class marketing effort with essentially no misstep. This is beyond the reach of the voting public as a whole. And even if it could be mustered, it would almost certainly come at the cost of other critical issues.

We were never supposed to have a government that built an ever-growing catalogue of all things we citizens cannot do. They were never intended to prevent us from being offended, or uncomfortable. They were meant to defend our borders, settle disputes between states, and very little else. They (and the plethora of activists) have taken it upon themselves to try to govern how we think, act, drive, read, are entertained, eat, sleep, breath... They have changed the foundation of our system from innocent until proven guilty at which time you'll be punished, to attempting to prevent us from ever becoming guilty by forcing the behavior they desire.

I tried to respond to the previous bits in good faith, despite realizing this was coming. I hope you'll agree that I made a reasonable effort there. But this... most of what you're describing is first a caricature of the Constitution and second a caricature of liberalism. Your efforts to describe a constitutional ideal are undermined by this. There is real over-regulation, but it is mostly a product of powerful business interests.

There is an actual need for regulation, though. I need to be sure that my drinking water isn't dangerous. I need to be sure I can make an educated decision about my nutrition and health. I need to be sure that if a neighbor in my apartment building starts a fire, I have an otherwise unobstructed path out of the building. I need to be sure that my employer will actually produce a valid check for the amount I was promised in exchange for my labor. Quoth the Constitution: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." I considered adding emphasis, but I would have emphasized nearly the entire quote.

This is why we have a representative Oligarchy now and not a republic like the founders designed.

What should be evident is that if the law doesn't pass, it really isn't that necessary and not favored heavily enough by enough people.

In fantasy, sure. In reality, there are political forces much greater than what people favor. There are countless polls, not only about particular issues where the public and the Congress are tragically out of step, but where voters say they don't think either party represents them. (Happy to provide links if you care and doubt it... I have done a ton of research on this, but I won't bother unless the conversation remains relatively engaging.) Voters simply don't have much leverage.

If a congressman refuses to vote in favor of a thing that his or her electorate feels is critical, he will be removed upon the next election.

Even in fantasy, this would be unlikely. Voters often compromise on things they consider critical, in order to protect other things they consider critical.

If his electorate is so intellectually bankrupt (as oh so many Americans are), then they will leave that person in Congress to continue failing to do things that are critical. The former is a check on the system; those failing to represent those who elected him is removed. The latter is not a symptom of dysfunction in Congress. It's a symptom of the dysfunction of the voters.

This is cartoonishly simplistic. Suppose, for example, a person finds climate change critical. The vast majority of voters have no credible option available to express this, even if they were willing to compromise other critical issues. Organizing credible options is a task beyond the vast majority of citizens' means; organizing it over time requires far more political acumen than your "if you don't like it vote differently" picture, but rather a world class marketing effort with essentially no misstep. This is beyond the reach of the voting public as a whole. And even if it could be mustered, it would almost certainly come at the cost of other critical issues.

We were never supposed to have a government that built an ever-growing catalogue of all things we citizens cannot do. They were never intended to prevent us from being offended, or uncomfortable. They were meant to defend our borders, settle disputes between states, and very little else. They (and the plethora of activists) have taken it upon themselves to try to govern how we think, act, drive, read, are entertained, eat, sleep, breath... They have changed the foundation of our system from innocent until proven guilty at which time you'll be punished, to attempting to prevent us from ever becoming guilty by forcing the behavior they desire.

I tried to respond to the previous bits in good faith, despite realizing this was coming. I hope you'll agree that I made a reasonable effort there. But this... most of what you're describing is first a caricature of the Constitution and second a caricature of liberalism. Your efforts to describe a constitutional ideal are undermined by this. There is real over-regulation, but it is mostly a product of powerful business interests.

There is an actual need for regulation, though. I need to be sure that my drinking water isn't dangerous. I need to be sure I can make an educated decision about my nutrition and health. I need to be sure that if a neighbor in my apartment building starts a fire, I have an otherwise unobstructed path out of the building. I need to be sure that my employer will actually produce a valid check for the amount I was promised in exchange for my labor. Quoth the Constitution: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." I considered adding emphasis, but I would have emphasized nearly the entire quote.

One thing first. "I find your boogeyman treatment of art and artists to be highly distasteful. Whatever caricature you've dreamt up is not representative of the majority of people receiving food stamps." I have no problem with art and artists, I have a problem with the particular people documented in the Salon article "Hipsters on food stamps: They're young, they're broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?" and people like them. They are an example of exactly the kind of people who paint the program with an ugly brush--I think pretty much everyone is down with the idea that we need to be sure no one starves and that the foodstamp program has worthy aspects--with their unmitigated sense of entitlement display when they host gourmet dinner parties (with wine tasting) paid for by their foodstamps.

On the other hand, if you're a graduate student in poetry, you had to know going in that the chances of you making a living off your poetry are slim. You chose a singularly unpractical major, spent years and probably 10's of thousands of taxpayer subsidized dollars going to school and essentially planned to depend on welfare. And I'm supposed to respect you for that?

Your argument for foodstamps supporting the very foundation of our economy can be made for military spending as well (even when we're not fighting a war). When we spend $700B annually on defense spending, we're paying wages to military personnel (about $150B), and many enlisted personnel learn a viable trade for life after the military (e.g. motor pool, so it's a jobs training program too) and those wages get spent in the economy to buy food and other stuff. We create high-paying engineering jobs to develop technologies that reduce the risk to our personnel in a fire-fight, developments in aircraft, radar systems, communications networks (ever heard of DARPA?), the folks who really invented the internet), etc. all flow down in the civilian world--and many of those jobs are restricted to US citizens (can't be outsourced to China!). Those engineers and their managers and the investors who receive dividends from their shares all buy stuff in the economy too. The military spends about $3B annually just on family housing and about $70B on military construction. The $135B spent on procurement of aircraft, tanks, guns, ... are all providing good, high-paying manufacturing jobs too. The military spends about $200B in operations, buying stuff like fuel, electricity, food, materials and materiel. All that flows back into the economy too.

It's a fair question to ask: are we getting what we need from that military spending? Could we spend less and get the same results? Do we need everything we're spending on? Should some military programs be cut? Are the secondary and nth-order effects worth what we're spending for directly?

Why should I be excoriated for wondering the same things about the $1T of anti-poverty spending in general and foodstamp program in particular?

I find your boogeyman treatment of art and artists to be highly distasteful. Whatever caricature you've dreamt up is not representative of the majority of people receiving food stamps. Furthermore, funding those truly in need while preventing the kind of excess you're afraid of would take more government bureaucracy, resulting in more wasted taxpayer money. The beauty of the food stamps program is that it is cheap to administer while still mostly affecting only the people that really need it.

We as one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist have more than enough food to feed everyone. Do you have a problem with people studying the arts? Do you think it's wasteful to learn how to design pleasant visuals and work/living spaces? Is it wrong for people to want to learn how to make a difference to socially disadvantaged people? Are the arts not our only lasting message as a culture, our greatest means to reveal the realities of our own humanity and our generation in a way that informs the future and hopefully allows them to build on our successes and failures?

But even more than the fact that we can and should support those people who want to spend their lives carrying on our culture for the future is the fact that food stamps don't just benefit the people who receive them. When the government buys somebody food, that person gets food, and the food seller/maker gets paid. Agriculture is the foundation of every society and it becomes more and more difficult for our farmers to maintain their lifestyle with every passing year. Food stamps are one way that the government supports farmers by making sure that when tough times come, they don't lose huge parts of their market. It's not just about the starving children that we hope to feed (and the other hungry mouths we feed along the way). It's about the food in our markets that would otherwise waste away and be thrown away. It's about the hard working farmers and ranchers and even factory workers who depend on that food being sold. It's about the truckers and the retailers. It's about the small town communities that depend on farmers to bring capital out of the city so that they can run schools, court houses, cafes, small stores, and churches.

What I'm saying is that every government handout affects a multitude of people. The money that pays for poor people to have opportunity is the money that keeps the wide foundations of our entire economy stable. No matter how much you personally feel the beneficiaries didn't deserve it, if you take away that money, you are taking away our foundation.

Maybe you don't want welfare to be part of the foundations of our society. I don't particularly like it either. It hasn't always been this way. But the foundations we had have disappeared due to wage stagnation and the unequal distribution of the benefits of technology and automation. A lot of that foundation has also been shipped abroad, where it is slowly building the societies of places like China and Bangladesh. We've been left with no advantage but our own prosperity, and if that prosperity should falter - if our poorest people were forced to drop out of the consumer market completely - the bottom will drop out of our society and everyone will suffer. Especially the hard-working middle class, when our employers faced with dwindling markets and therefore shrinking revenues.

Let's advance the conversation beyond the righteous anger many people feel about government handouts. Clearly there are outliers to be angry about, whether or not they are representative of beneficiaries or would be worth throwing out of the programs. But what is our solution? How do we build a society where our poorest people can still find a job that keeps them from needing government handouts? We have to look into our past. We have to look at what brought our poverty down from 30% to 15%, as you said. What happened in that time? A number of things: we had a high minimum wage (relative to now); we funded millions of WWII vet

The peak of Affirmative Action was in the 90s, when arguments over Affirmative Action were made, when Family Guy was mocking reparations, when fears over quotas of how many black people to hire were coming out of the woodwork, when such quotas or similar systems of selecting X from the black/women pool and the rest from the general pool were actively done so as to avoid potential "you have an awful lot of white guys working here..." EEO litigation, and so on.

I got my liberal Democrats from high school. Had a friend whose mom baked the class Democrat Cookies with asses on them; the kid campaigned in the middle of class for a gubernatorial election, and also told us that one of our classmates got into a good college because she was black. Said black chick had a better SAT score than me, initially, by 20 points; but I retook the test because my statistics teacher scored 1330 on his SATs, and he was similarly fucking head-up-ass politically retarded, and went on 40 minute rants about how gay marriage would lead to people marrying tables and animals, and then was fired after 3 months for gross incompetence. I scored a 1340 on my second round, 10 points higher than black chick who "got into a good college because she's black", so my response to that argument is an enormous middle finger.

Amusingly, the anti-gay-marriage ranting teacher was a firm Democrat, and would rant about bush a lot, too. The guy campaigning for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend also used to comment that Shirley Temple was a bright actress because she was a Democrat, while talking about how fucked up gays are and how they all carry diseases and HIV. Never have I experienced such a confused mixture of politics and social vitriol as I had in the presence of these people. How they managed to hold a firm stance against gay marriage and yet a firm stance against all things conservative politics I will never quite understand, considering the way partisan politics are held as a fashion statement here in the United States.

The more conservatives I was surrounded by did not seem to care much. We had such people as William Donald Schaffer once, a moderate Democrat whose behavior was more becoming, and who speaks to me of what the country should be more like; alas, in my time, he had taken a more minor governmental office and was no longer governor. The modern Conservative has disappeared, as well, in favor of the right-wing radical: some politicians appear as caricatures of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. These are such sad times, but familiar to me: it is as when the Tori of the English cut down the center of Parliament to bring progressive politics in where there was only the barren wasteland between the Liberal and the Radical politicians, and I hope soon we shall see similar senses brought among the House of Representatives and the Senate of our nation.

How convenient, he's only infallible on things that can't be proven.

That's just as ignorant a comment as the original comment that started it all. Papal infallibility refers specifically to Catholic Dogma; a Pope's comments on the particular interpretation of their belief system is considered a part of the dogma. In addition, his declaration of certain comments by others as heretical excludes certain principles of Catholic dogma. The Pope cannot declare that the Earth is flat because that has nothing to do with Catholic dogma, it only deals specifically with the morality and the nature of Christ and God within the Catholic belief system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility#Instances_of_infallible_declarations

Seriously, the understanding of anti-religious people of the nature of religion and how it works is pretty piss poor. If you have something against a particular group/organization/belief system, it's better to base it on a true understanding of how they work and not on some stereotype or ridiculous caricature of that group; that's bigotry just as bad as racism.

How the fuck is this modded insightful? Even at 0? This is the type of shit that gives SJW ammunition in claiming that IT culture is hostile to women. I like to believe the words that come out of my mouth when I argue that point.

You know, I just put together now that "SJW" is intended to be an acronym for "Social Justice Warrior" (which is in turn intended to be a derogatory phrase meaning, as far as I can tell, "uppity feminist"). For some weeks now, I have been pondering what the internet has against straight (or single) Jewish women. Now it makes a lot more sense.

That the "reasonable" faction of the male IT world - that the parent poster would like to think he represents - seems to believe that the SJW caricature represents a non-trivial force that is conspiring against him is troubling. That the acronym SJW exists and is presumably widely understood in his circles is rather more revealing about (his part of) "IT culture" than he probably thinks.

Don't get me wrong, the parent poster is better than the grandparent asshole who believes all rapes are imaginary--but just being better than the anonymous trolling asshole isn't setting a high bar.

I know someone will now point out that a lot of Chinese can't distinguish between r and l, so learning Chinese first is not any better. But I want to point out that's because they were taught incorrectly and they think it's the correct pronunciation. Both the r and l sounds exist in mandarin so there is really no reason to get them wrong except if they weren't taught correctly.

Thank you. Someone who actually knows. I've always been extremely annoyed and insulted when people use the tired old joke of "Herro. I rike you velly much." in performing a caricature of a Chinese person, entirely ignorant of the fact that Chinese has a clear distinction between the r and l sounds.

Factoid: It is the Japanese whose language cannot properly distinguish between r's and l's.

Little of what you stated was factual.
When has he ever tried to work with Congress you ask? TRY EVERY TIME.
From the begining, he has tried to work with Congress.
From the begining, the GOP has been dedicated to complete and total opposition to everything the Prez says.

The idea that he wont work with the GOP is a farce. Yes, he has sabotaged his own agenda...in order to try and make a compromise with the other side.
But every time he offer an olive branch they petulently slap it away, because to them the definition of compromise is "we get everything we want, or else."

Stimulus:

Before he took office, Obama began outlining the contours of the federal stimulus package he wanted to get passed, reached out to Republican leaders (then in the minority in both houses of Congress) for their ideas, and threw in a bunch of tax cuts to draw in GOP support for the legislation. “I think he’s already been listening to the suggestions we’ve made,” Mitch McConnell said after initial talks. [..] while Obama did have the stronger hand, he was willing to make concessions to gain passage of the bill, and ended up having to do exactly that. To earn the bare minimum of Republican support needed to get the bill past a Senate filibuster, the White House had to swallow steep cuts to state education programs and other liberal priorities.

The Republicans, meanwhile, were negotiating in bad faith. No matter what Obama threw at them, the House GOP leadership had already decided to oppose him. As NBC noted in its piece, the strategy they adopted from before the beginning of the Obama administration was to fight Obama on everything and work to retake Congress in 2010. Then-Minority Whip Eric Cantor successfully corralled every single member of the House Republican caucus into voting against the stimulus package. “We’re not here to cut deals and get crumbs and stay in the minority for another 40 years,” Cantor said at the time. Only three Senate Republicans – moderates all, one of whom officially became a Democrat months later – voted for the stimulus.

Healthcare:

Largely absent from the discussion of the Affordable Care Act is the fact that this “big government socialist takeover of the health care industry” is actually a pretty conservative piece of legislation. And even less remarked upon is the degree to which Obama sought out Republican input for his healthcare proposals.

The road from vague notions of “healthcare reform” to the concrete reality of the Affordable Care Act was marked by disappointment after disappointment by the White House’s progressive allies, who swallowed hard as pie-in-the-sky dreams of single-payer dissolved into the tepid hope of a “public option,” which dissolved further into grudging acceptance of a healthcare law that has a long GOP pedigree and was pioneered by the former Republican governor of Massachusetts. That pedigree is the reason why the law was studded with Republican healthcare reform ideas – something Republicans refuse to admit as they claim that the law was drafted without their input. That’s also part of the reason why the Republicans, as yet, have not coalesced around an alternative to the Affordable Care Act – everything they come up with ends up looking like Obamacare.

President Obama sought out the Republicans and asked them for ideas during the drafting process. “I believe they’re making an honest and overt effort to deal with Republicans,” Rep. Mike Castle said at the time. (Castle would go on to lose the 2010 Delaware Senate primary to living Tea Party caricature Christine O’Donnell.) Over and over, again and again, Obama tried to bring Republicans to the table and offered compromises on healthcare. And each time he was met with the same answer: no.

“What they want isn’t a bill that incorporates their ideas,” Ezra Klei

"Instead of paying interest, money should have an expiration date. Use it or lose it."
"So people never get to retire?"
Money currently has a depreciation rate, called inflation, which is canny and engineered. I am reading Hogeland's book on the Whiskey Rebellion that details why Hamilton and his friends benefited from the currency system that exists in caricatured form today. And, since this system has been imprudently over-grazed for maximum profits, we may one day spiral into hyperinflation, with some other currency replacing our own, the original redeemed in fractional form for the new.
And that is the expiration date that you seek. Flood's "Hitler, The Path To Power", has a chapter devoted to the terrifying loss of the function of domestic currency between the world wars, and provides vivid pictures of what terror comes to the common people of such an engineered tragedy (Schickelgruber made hay by scapegoating an ethnicity, obscuring the darkness that resides in the hearts of every stripe of mankind that powerful men are able to act upon). The very rich at the highest altitudes see the changes in the weather that sweep away the meager bounty of the lowlanders while they are still far off, and their hoards tend to emerge relatively unscathed.

I disagree. I think Bennett is trying to speak words of empowerment to women (vaguely = "feminism"), but the ironic thing is that he's denigrating other women at the same time. And denigrating them in a particularly offensive way, by caricaturing religious, modest dressing females as "morons".

Pilot episode was unwatchable. Characters were annoying caricature of "nerds". I wanted to punch people at CBS after about 15 minutes.

Thanks for helping out. This thread was running low on stereotypical caricatures of uneducated Americans.