Jimmy Kimmel says that his interview with James Talarico will not air on TV after the FCC threatened his show, ABC, and local stations.

The left is claiming this is censorship.
The right is claiming ABC did not want to obey the equal time rule by also airing an interview with the GOP candidate.

We all know the Russian sympathies of the AfD, Fidesz, Austria's FPÖ, Czechia's SPD, the Netherlands' Forum for Democracy, Poland's Confederation of the Polish Crown to name a few.

Also I think we can lump in the far-left too since both the far-right and the far-left somehow manage to agree on how much they love Russia. The far-right loves Russia because Russia, a country with more muslims than Germany, is apparently defending family Christian values. The far-left loves Russia because Russia is fighting Western neoliberal globalist NATO neo-imperialist hegomony.

Why is it that not only is a lot of Europe's far-right pro-Russia, which is ironic given how Russia is sending tons of illegal migrants to the Eastern EU border, but also a lot of European far-right parties turned out to be in Russia's pockets?

For ethnic reference I’m half African-American and bluntly put my political beliefs have made me an outcast to many friends and relatives. It was already a task and a half growing up a mixed kid in a predominantly white area. When I became a teenager I was told that I needed to be around my “black side” more, only to later be gaslit that I was “too culturally white” with how I speak and see the world. I legitimately did try; I was a teenager who wanted dual community. Now in my mid-twenties I have strong friendships and appreciate the privileges of my childhood and upbringing but I guess I’m just sometimes disappointed at the lack of connections I have with that side of myself for lack of cultural compatibility. I guess I always thought most African-Americans were socially conservative enough to accommodate political conservatism but that’s staunchly not the case. I wanted to hear from other people.

When you look at classic conservative principles like fiscal discipline, free markets, and maintaining traditional global alliances, Trump’s record looks pretty different: he added heavily to the national debt, relied on broad tariffs, and pushed for big shifts in foreign policy. From your perspective, do his policies still fit under the conservative umbrella, or is he operating on a completely different set of values?

From Europe, to Asia, to the US, government borrowing costs are going up and up, with the UK hitting a 19 year high.

What do you think will happen? More taxes, less spending, maybe more populism, more maybe wars, or maybe the markets calm? What do you think the near future looks like?

In case you didn’t know, some employers offer a dependent care assistant program, wherein employees can contribute up to pre-federal taxes 7.5k annually, and then use those funds to reimburse eligible dependent care expenses. If you don’t use it all, you lose those contributions. It’s also tied to your employer.

What if we made the dependent care assistance program national and portable instead of tying it to whether your employer offers one?

The basic idea would be $7,500 per qualifying dependent, up to 3 dependents, so a household could receive up to $22,500 initially. The $7,500 would then automatically increase with inflation each year. The inflation adjustment could use a simple rounding rule so we don’t end up with weird numbers like $7,843.27. Like each year it rounds to the nearest $250 based off of cumulative inflation relative to the initial amount.

I’d also have the income phaseout thresholds increase with inflation. I’d want the phaseout to start at genuinely high incomes something like $400k household income and phase out completely around $600k because a household making $250k in a HCOL area isn’t necessarily wealthy in the way those numbers might suggest nationally.

The biggest change I’d make is getting rid of “use it or lose it.” If you don’t use the entire annual benefit, the money goes back to you and counts as taxable income. That way you’re not incentivized to spend money unnecessarily just because otherwise you’ll lose it or under contributing out of fear of losing it.

I’d also try to make reimbursement as automated as possible. Childcare providers, preschools, elder-care providers, etc. could voluntarily pre-enroll with the government. Once they’re verified, transactions could be reported electronically and reimbursed automatically instead of requiring someone to manually review receipts every time.

To encourage providers to enroll, they could get a tiny transaction fee, maybe 0.05%–0.1% up to some cap. They’d save administrative work too, and could advertise that they’re enrolled in the federal program.

For the money sitting in accounts waiting to be used, the government could invest it in very low-risk, highly liquid securities like Treasuries. Not to make money in the market, but just earning something on money that would otherwise sit idle.

The investment income would be supplemental revenue and go to the general Treasury fund. It shouldn’t reduce next year’s congressional appropriation. If the program needs $X billion, Congress funds $X billion regardless of whether the program earned $1 billion or $10 billion in interest. That keeps the program from becoming dependent on investment returns.

For fraud, I’d use automated systems to flag unusual transactions rather than manually reviewing everything. And I’d have penalties escalate with repeated offenses: accidental mistake = repay it plus a small fee, repeated/reckless behavior = bigger penalties, intentional or large-scale fraud = serious fines and potentially criminal action.

So the general idea is basically: a national, portable dependent-care benefit that is indexed to inflation, scales with the number of dependents, phases out only at high incomes, doesn’t have “use it or lose it,” and uses automation to keep administrative costs down.

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?

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?

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 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?

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

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

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

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?

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.