One of the downsides to the internet is the troll. It's just way too easy to troll a website. It's too easy to claim to be anyone or anything. It's also easy for a faker to blow their own cover.

Go ahead and read all of those responses; read the responses of those who posted multiple times in particular. You can read the degeneration of the words written by several of these "life-long Democrats" into conservative talking points, demagoguery, and paranoia. I don't think that they can help it; their lies will out!

Let's face it, Limbaugh's call for Republicans to vote for Hillary in the primary involved them getting out of their houses and performing their treachery in the open. I doubt if many would do that with others watching them and even if they did, it would be only one vote. Online, however, the bar to entry is a click that no one else sees and one poisonous person can seem to be many.

Morality is a tricky thing and whenever you look at only one aspect of it you end up with absurdities. Perhaps it isn't right to hoard land as Risse cryptically implies the US does, but doesn't the same set of values say it is also wrong to overpopulate?

BTW,

"the United States is severely underusing its chunk of three-dimensional, commonly owned space."

"three-dimensional"? are we supposed to float people in the sky now? Also, "commonly owned"? That's a pretty big assumption right there. Plus, I really don't think that we are underusing our land.

Has any state actually tried to form a well-regulated militia? You know, monthly meetings, regular safety and maintenance training, target practice and that sort of thing. Require gun owners join one; it could be like an auxiliary corp to the national guard. They could have fun and barbecue venison after the meetings.

The advantage would be to draw out the twitchy loners and gang bangers. People don't act the same when they have to show themselves in public.

The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops ...

I doubt that this is true any longer. The US military is exceedingly well armed. US police forces and the FBI are also very well armed. There are exceedingly few private guns owners who are comparably armed. In Webster's day the army and private persons had nearly identical armaments as there was no standing army or police force and the army's guns were supplied largely by the soldiers themselves. To level the playing field now, we'd have to let people have their own tanks and nukes.

Anyway, it seems like the premise here is that we would be in a situation where violent uprising would be reasonable. This deeply troubles me.

When I was a little kid, people used to ask me things like "who are your heros?". Since I knew they wanted an answer, I usually made something up but I really had no answer to that. I don't seem to think about people that way. It's not that I'm not impressed by the accomplishments of some people; I just seem to consider the accomplishment more than I consider the person. It doesn't even matter about the nature of the accomplishment; it's the same for scientific, political, or athletic achievements.

Perhaps this speaks to the nature of my own interests (I'm a mathematician) and if those interests were more in the social sphere I'd be different. Perhaps it is a dominance thing - it would certainly make being a follower a lot more pleasant if you really like your leader. I don't know.

By the way, there are at least two more possibilities for "platonic" relationships of this nature. (BTW, I really hate that term; you all do know what Plato was doing to young boys, right?) What about man-crushes on women and girl-crushes on men?

Conservatives are not the ones who have invested in clean energy; liberals are. Generally, conservatives have invested in fossil fuels and fossil fuels have invested in them. So should we be surprised at the current impasse?

(Note: I really mean that "generally". If you look at Democrats from coal and oil states you see the same thing.)

In the end, profits will determine our fate. That is why we need to make clean energy and cheap energy synonymous.

If I ever committed a murder, I'd love to have some of these posters in the jury box. Their standards of allowable doubt are so incredibly narrow that I'd be able to leave a confession note on the body and still get away scott-free.

This unreasonable doubt will be impossible to satisfy. I think that it will not be worthwhile to try - there will always be a "but". I say this as a mathematician; it happens even in a place where we can actually provide rigorous proofs and theorems. Take a look at lists like this: http://www.crank.net/maths.html You'll see what I mean.

but I won't lease one.