They needed a yes vote from McCain, and abstention wouldn't work.

A large number of Republican senators knew very well that skinny repeal was the worst of both worlds. Likely a deadlocked conference committee would have lead to Ryan jamming it through the house as written, at which point insurance premiums would rise meteorically with the withdrawal of the individual mandate.

McCain probably believes he's saving his party from a political disaster as well as a bad policy, and he isn't the only one. At least ten senators expressed serious reservations about the possibility I outlined above.

One commentator I heard on the radio said, "It was always going to be 49-51, the only question is who would be the 51st no vote." McCain took one for the team.

My wife and I finally got around to watching this last night, or rather we tried. We made it just past this scene and gave up. The weirdo character parts were pretty entertaining, but half the movie was gimmicky and patronizing exposition of things that anyone who was reading the news already knew.

Was it supposed to be ironic? Either way we just couldn't take anymore.

It's probably pretty annoying to hang out with a moralizing vegan if you just don't share their opinions on animal welfare. That makes sense. People who make moral choices only to throw it in the face of those around them are assholes, regardless of the specific issue.

On the other hand, you have to imagine that the reactions a vegan gets from others are pretty disappointing too. If you give up your free time to rescue puppies or orphaned elephants, everyone says that's a nice thing to do. If you sacrifice your wallet, tastebuds and convenience to save a cow or chicken, a significant number of people will fall over themselves to tell you how ineffective, hypocritical, or morally backward you are.

I'm pretty sure that those people are assoles too.

Where does the criticism of the religion end and its followers begin? Most Christians I know think the Crusades were a horrible idea, and don't inform their faith today. The pastor in the church I grew up in wrote off the entire old testament as a highly colored history, whose barbaric morality was replaced by the teachings of Jesus.

There are plenty of muslims where I live now. I see them at picnics, or walking around the neighborhood. The women hear scarves in their hair, but I never hear their husbands mistreat them, and they seem to enjoy all the freedoms of the western world just fine. Are we being fair to these people if we label them as following a hateful oppressive religion? I imagine a day i their mosque wouldn't sound that different than a day in a church in this part of the world.

This guy may have a point, but he stretches credibility when he calls Buhari "very competent" or Boko Haram a "tiny problem." Half the world may have electricity, but many large countries are experiencing longer and longer power cuts as corruption and conflict degrades their infrastructure, including Nigeria.

Looks to me like he's as willing as the media to shamelessly exaggerate to advance his worldview.

If vegans are getting into arguments with you about whether their food is healthier than yours, well, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. I listen to my buddy extolling the benefits of his paleo diet. If he's quick about it, I don't see the harm, whether he's right or not. If he won't shut up about it, or tries to push it on me, he's being a jerk. It sounds like you might have met some vegans who are jerks. So have I.

I also don't think your final question was genuine. You've clearly thought about this long enough to see how avoiding animal products reduces the amount of mistreatment. If you don't think it's important, or you don't think it's worth it, that's fine. The population of dairy cows is large enough that the 1-2million vegans in this country certainly affects how many are bred and subjected to the treatment they receive.

But telling me I shouldn't want meat is just bizarre. It should be pretty clear by now that I'm a vegan because I object to needlessly killing or mistreating animals, and try to reduce that number. I'm not offended by eating meat, just what has to happen to get it on my plate. If Nike used child slave labor to make its shoes, and I didn't approve of child slave labor, would you criticize me for buying another brand of shoes because I "shouldn't want shoes?" Meat tastes great. I don't like killing animals. There is no contradiction between those two sentences.

It sounds like your issue is with the "tells you all the time" part of your analogy, and that's tricky. On the one hand, people who sermonize and try to vilify your decisions are being jerks. On the other hand, if a cause is important enough, it's clearly worth being a jerk. It's a sliding scale. Civil rights campaigners were moralizing jerks too, but in hindsight, we mostly feel they were justified. The inquisition, less so. Some animal activists feel they fall reasonably well on the scale.

There's a long history of people trying to make other lead moral lives. And there's a long history of people getting various degrees of pissed off about it. I would encourage you to tell individuals who actively annoy you to stuff it, and to just relax about the rest of us.

And if you want moralizers to leave you alone, I'd also encourage you not to call their moral choices "stupid" on the internet. Counter-intuitive, I know, but give it a try.

To claim that the collective non-consumption of 3%ish of the country is not taken into account in meat production is a pretty dim outlook of the intelligence of food executives. Of course one vegetarian doesn't make much difference. Neither does one vote or one person's taxes. If you're railing against incremental action, you'll have problems with a lot more than people's dietary choices.

On the other hand, the business about soy consumption is a baffling new argument circulating the internet. I say baffling, because it only takes about 15 seconds of hard thinking to debunk. (Hint: animals eat soy, you eat animals). Almonds, of course, are as optional for vegans as everyone else.

But all of this is a sideshow. The real point is that I make choices that do no one any harm and make me feel better. You on the other hand apparently go sifting through the internet for arguments against my lifestyle, fail to subject those arguments to even cursory critical thinking in your zeal, and parrot them on a video sharing community while proudly declaring your loathing for people like me.

I think this says a lot more about your relationship to eating animals than it does about mine.

Well that was out of left field.

But it's ok. We secretly hate you for what you eat too.

Which is why no one should be bringing evidence from their high school textbook to this debate. However, there are thousands of serious academics who have studied the war in detail, and are quite intelligent enough to tell government propaganda from reliable sources.

The irony of course is that many "I don't trust the government" takes on the civil war, instead put their trust in the public statements of the Confederate government. In reality, the confederates had as much incentive as any other government to lie about their motives. Moreso in fact, since they saw European recognition as central to their survival, and the English disgust with slavery was the primary obstacle to that.

The unaddressed and unanswerable question is, what does the the world look like without a hegemon able to project power? Despots still abuse their citizens. Countries still invade each other. But by historical standards, the world is remarkably peaceful.

No land forcibly changed hands in Europe between 1946 and 2013. Now that some finally has, what are the democracies bordering Russia asking for? American bases.

I don't know if stability is worth $100 billion a year, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it is. What does the global economy look like if shipping isn't safe? How much production is lost when one country invades another, and refugees swarm across the border?

I don't like everything my country has done in the name of protecting world order, but I sure do like living in the most orderly world that has existed since our species evolved. It's natural for anyone under the age of 70 to take this for granted. But taking this for granted makes it impossible to properly weigh the benefits and costs of US military might.

Many (most?) dictionaries suggest that a belief of superiority is necessary for racism, not just noticing differences.

In the end, though, I don't think it's worth arguing too much about the vocabulary. Obviously I'm in the minority with this opinion. See:

1) The internet
2) People paying $40,000/year to define and discuss different forms of injustice at your local elite university

For my money, a little introspection and the golden rule goes a lot farther than labeling for every thought you have and everything you say.

I was simply trying to point out that we all pay for stuff we don't use. I obviously didn't communicate that well.

I do think you might be missing the point of paid maternity leave, though. It is not (in the country at least) to encourage population growth. It is to improve the family situations of those who have kids.

While it's true that childbearing is usually a choice, and that people ought to save money or wait until they are financially secure, the fact is that this just doesn't always happen. There's a parallel argument for public pensions, which would not be necessary if people would just put aside 20% of their paychecks every year.

Given that people are going to have kids, and that they aren't always going to be financially secure, the question is: is there a material or moral benefit in giving those families more time to nurture their children and more time to bond without the stress of trying to navigate financial hardship? What is that worth to society in dollar term?

I don't claim to be smart enough to know the answer.

No cancer, seems kinda unfair to pay health insurance premiums toward someone else's treatment.

Haven't been unemployed. Seems kinda unfair to pay for unemployment insurance.

Don't drive much, seems kinda unfair to pay for all these roads.

My kid is in private school, seems kinda unfair that I have to pay for the public ones too.

See where this reasoning takes us?

Apparently people without the right vocabulary fail this test too. Here's a Radiolab about a deaf community that developed its own sign language and how they fared on the test as the language developed. I found it pretty interesting when I first heard it.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91730-new-words-new-world/

Here's an interesting take on it

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21625662-history-life-universe-may-have-been-governed-frequency