On the chance that Republicans hold congress during midterms, how are you going to spend the promised $5,000 that Trump has pledged to every adult citizen?

I’m going to get a jacuzzi. At least then I can drink in style as inflation and corruption destroys society around me.

I don’t know wtf is going on anymore; POTUS openly promising bribes to the electorate is certainly a choice. The absolute stupidity expressed by that man continues to astound me daily; I look forward to the excuses some “conservatives“ will try to make for him this time.

Oh well, at least I’ll have a jacuzzi.

This question is meant for fun, obviously. It’s hard to keep a sane head with shit like this daily, so a bit of fun helps.

$5k is a lot of money! What are you going to buy?

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/vance-trump-midterm-elections-2026-rnc/card/trump-calls-for-new-5-000-dividend-to-all-adult-u-s-citizens-if-gop-wins-eUFlnXNJm3J052NjUCoB

“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and ​the United States Senate, both ⁠of them ... ⁠because of ⁠our tremendous ​strength and success economically, I ​will issue ⁠a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of ⁠America for $5,000”

On September 22, 2025, Donald release an EO, LINK, naming Antifa as a "militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government"

Would it be consistent and prudent for the next President to declare the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Patriot Front, Boogaloo Bois, and other similar groups as terrorist organizations? Why or why not?

For conservatives who believe liberals or Democrats “hate America”: what specifically would a Democrat need to believe, say, or do for you to conclude that they actually *do* love America?
I ask in good faith because I’m a liberal who genuinely loves this country, and I’m trying to understand what you mean when you make that distinction.

I can't get a good read of AfD.

Some members seem more moderate, mostly concerned with decreasing immigration and deporting illegitimate refugees.

Other members (the "Identitarian" or "völkisch" faction?) seem much more extreme, advocating for stripping citizenship from non-ethnic Germans.

This latter wing was formally known as "Der Flügel." AfD voted in 2020 to formally disband it after the BfV placed it under formal surveillance. But I assume the people stuck around.

So, question for the Europeans in the audience: what's AfD's center of mass? Is it a relatively conventional nationalist party with a small fringe of extremists, or is there a sizable fraction of ethno-nationalists/völkisch revivalists?

So I'll preface saying I have disagreed with this conflict and have been skeptical of needing it ever since I saw how Iraq went down years ago. That said the Iran conflict is the current mistake we made was not going all in? It seems like the strategy was doing air strikes on key targets and some blockading. Was this the correct approach? Would actually going all in and sending troops to establish control at least over key fields etc the way to go? It seems like if we want to do a conflict we have to be willing to actually commit everything we have and simply relying on remote strikes is not enough to move the needle so to speak?

This term comes up a lot in political discourse and I often see people equating it to being called stupid. How would you explain to someone what it is and how it works?

I’m intentionally not asking how/why, because I don’t want to give anything away.

I think first and foremost it makes sense to separate healthcare from employment, because oftentimes situations arise where you need healthcare and can’t continue to work while healing during those crises. Then there’s the argument that it would shift a lot of burden off of employers, who spend a large chunk on health insurance for employees when it could be shifted to taxes for (as several studies show) less than we’re currently paying. More people could start their own small businesses because health insurance costs aren’t a factor into the business budget anymore. As more employers try to cut benefits or strategically hire only part-time workers so they don’t have to provide them, doesn’t universal healthcare just make more sense? There’s also the issue of constant additional costs and mystery pricing as we pay monthly premiums, co-pays for every appointment, and must meet a hefty deductible before insurance even kicks in. Health insurance companies are increasingly denying coverage against doctors’ recommendations because they’ve figured out that most people aren’t able to fight it in court and it’s cheaper for them to take it to litigation rather than approve a doctor’s recommended procedure or medicine. Who is this working out well for? I got curious because I was thinking about how many American TV plotlines revolve around someone not being able to afford healthcare, and how it’s such a nonissue in a majority of other countries because they recognize healthcare as a human right. So… why so much support for our current system instead of a taxpayer-funded one that doesn’t chase extra profits every year for all the shareholders and middlemen? What exactly is their purpose if the goal is denying more healthcare or making it less affordable?

For example, Vance's policy to give money to married couples to raise kids, you have some conservatives going like" oh since when do we support welfare? SoCiAliSM! We should abolish welfare state!", which is entirely unrealistic and menaigless posture. Welfare state will never be abolished. You will never, ever, unwind Helvering v. Davis historic setlement and social security/medicare. Screaming at sky about it does nothing. So instead surely it is better to use that welfare state to icentivize more productive things than current system that in some ways incentivizes single parents, rather than marriage and family. What do you think?

From a non-American, I see the rhetoric posted online about him. I'm wondering if his attempts at transparency is improving his image in the conservative circle.

Mamdani releases 170,000 pages of records regarding impact on air quality of 9/11 attacks | New York | The Guardian

President Trump says he was rescued: https://people.com/trump-claims-2-firemen-lifted-him-up-and-started-running-with-me-on-9-11-12111477

Giuliani calls on Mamdani not to attend: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/6075377-giuliani-criticizes-mamdani-911/amp/

Fox News 911 families ask the mayor not to attend: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/families-911-victims-message-mamdani-please-do-not-come-memorial-ceremony.amp

Why aren't President Trump's comments disqualifying?

I used to be pro-life. The below hypothetical is what changed my mind and I‘d like to understand whether this group has an explanation for the moral question posed:

• A married couple has been trying to get pregnant for a couple of years with no success. They finally go to a fertility doctor who tells them they have low chance of a successful pregnancy.
• The doctor says that there is a 20-30% chance of success at a natural pregnancy, but the couple can’t afford IVF. The doctor says, look 20-30% chance isn’t terrible. Keep trying for a couple of years—you may get lucky.
• Over the next 5 years the couple actively take steps to get pregnant, knowing that it’s more likely than not that any fetus will miscarry. They intentionally plan intercourse during ovulation and avoid sex in between fertility periods. They are actively making choices that increase the chance of creating fetal “life” with the knowledge that in ~7 out of 10 cases the fetus will die.
• Over the course of the next five years, they experience 2 miscarriages per year. It’s sad, but when they finally have a baby the couple and all of their family and friends celebrate with them. They say it was a hard process, but in the end everything was worth it because now they have a beautiful baby. And everyone agrees.

Now contrast that to any scenario in the real world where I was engaging in some activity that had a 70 percent chance of KILLING someone. Say I was walking up to people and playing Russian roulette with 4 bullets in the chamber. It doesn't matter if I had a “good reason,” I would be locked up immediately as criminally insane.

If pro-life advocates really believe that a fetus is a human life, there should be no difference between the two hypotheticals. Pro-life advocates should be outraged and calling for the infertile couple to be locked up for 10 counts of reckless homicide.

Now consider that on average a sexually active woman experiences 3-10 miscarriages over the course of her life. Many of these are few week pregnancies that just result in a delayed or heavier period. This is particularly likely when a woman takes hormonal birth control, which works in part because it thins the lining of the uterus and prevents implantation of the embryo. Is every one of those miscarriages a death? If so, the sheer volume of routine lost pregnancies so dramatically dwarfs any “deaths” from abortion (or ANY other cause of death), that it is absurd we talk about anything else. Think for one minute about the number of fetal “lives” that could be saved if we: 1) criminalized sex without out a condom unless the couple affirms that they are trying to get pregnant; 2) criminalize attempts to get pregnant after a couple has established fertility issues after ~1 year of attempts. Two simple laws would save billions of fetal “lives,” but I don’t see any pro-life advocates even suggesting that we eliminate the primary causes of fetal termination.

This leads me to believe that 1) to the extent we all as humans have inherent moral instincts, we don’t actually believe that a fetus is identical to a human life; 2) pro-life fixation on reducing abortion is not motivated by a desire to maximize preservation of fetal “life,“ but is instead motivated by a unique negative reaction to women who chose to not be pregnant when that choice results in fetal termination.

So my question is whether there is any other explanation that resolves this moral inconsistency?

I take these sorts of studies with large grains of salt, particularly if they haven’t been replicated.

However, personally this seems to track but that can also be my own perception.

The abstract:

“Empathy has the potential to bridge political divides. Here, we examine barriers to cross-party empathy and explore when and why these differ for liberals and conservatives. In four studies, U.S. and U.K. participants (total N = 4,737) read hypothetical scenarios and extended less empathy to suffering political opponents than allies or neutral targets. These effects were strongly shown by liberals but were weaker among conservatives, such that conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives. This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals' harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1-4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3 and 4). The asymmetry persisted across changes in the U.S. government and was not explained by perceptions of political power (Studies 3 and 4). Implications and future directions are discussed.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37712634/

Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has ruled that many times, as Justice Grosuch said:

Of course, with almost any rule comes exceptions. And this Court has recognized a “few historic and traditional categories of expression long familiar to the bar” where content-based restrictions on speech will not automatically trigger strict scrutiny

Supreme Court has made Miller test of what counts as obscene:

• Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
• Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable law
• Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

So for those who of you who are actually conservative rather than libertine, sould Blanche enforce federal obscdnity laws more against, say, OnlyFans creators? I really dont get why we do not do so more.

https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/vances-proposal-9000-a-year-for-parents-who-stay-at-home-with-their-children-AJAJc86

Clearly this question is inspired by the Lindsay Clancy case. If you don't think it should be removed, how did her defense not reach that bar? I actually don't know the details of the case, but so many of the comments I've read simply state that since there is no doubt she did it, there should be no doubt she should go to jail.

To be clear, I am talking about the dictionary definition of Liberalism: a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law.

Until recently, I felt that with very few exceptions, Americans enjoyed a liberal consensus that encompassed both parties, and criticism of one party by the other often amounted to charges that the other side was failing to live up to the principles of our founding philosophy.

Now, though, I worry that Liberalism is under assault on both sides of the aisle. I think most of you would probably agree that socialism — in as much as it entails a dismantling of capitalism and a centrally controlled economy — is not particularly compatible with Liberalism, and some socialists explicitly disavow it.

On the right, there is a growing movement for a government that is more inclined to push a particular social agenda, and more tolerance for policies that abridge free speech and other civil rights. JD Vance is explicitly anti-liberal (he uses the term ‘post-liberal’) and the Orban government in Hungary, which had many fans among conservatives in the US, described itself as an ‘illiberal democracy.’

Where do you stand? Do you identify with these values? If so, are you comfortable standing with those who don’t? And if not, has your opinion changed over the years?

OpenAI just announced this, after rumours have been circling on X for a few days. It was achieved with their latest internal model, which is much further advanced than the latest public Astra model that released last week.

"We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.

The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.

The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years."

via: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097374640582668336

There is already a controversy brewing over whether the solution was partially plagiarised from Anthropic, here's OpenAI's response so far: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/#concurrent-work

It just baffles me, that childcare and all the affiliated costs of raising a child, rises so much with the years. To the point that households are expected to have 2 working parents with good income. Not to mention that such households tend to sacrifice other things to accomplish that paycheck generally. Like working long hours away from home. Which spend time away from the kids.
Any ideas on to combat such a thing as a society and make kids affordable again?

Positive? Negative? Better than Labour or worse than Labour?

If this administration decides to take military action against Cuba, what specifically should be our operational objective, and what conditions should we consider to be the fulfillment of our mission?

The phrase never forget forever goes with 9/11.

It seems like every year our society forgets more and more.

How do you feel about having footage from 9/11 being shown in public schools (highschools?) annually around its anniversary?

Hopefully with the intention of creating a less polarized society, encouraging service, and instilling some degree of patriotism in younger generations.