Republican voters agree with you. They're sick of the leadership of the Republican congress refusing to fight Obama by using the power-of-the-purse that the Constitution gave them. That's why their so anti-establishment this election season. The sad part is that so many turned to that liberal Trump instead of the conservative Cruz.

Ironically it is the do-nothing-so-we-can't-be-blamed-and-can-win-more-seats attitude that is costing Republicans so dearly this cycle. People sent Republicans to office to lower spending and increase freedom. They didn't do it and go blown out in the 2006 elections when many Republican voters stayed home rather than vote for the big-spending Republicans. Obama's socialist promises scared them back to the voting booth and a lot of tea-partiers (the low spending pro-freedom kind of that time, not the weirdo flaking kind that has taken over the movement) provided the momentum for the party - only to find themselves by blocked by party leaders like McConnell and Boehner who didn't want to do anything that the press wouldn't like but instead wanted to show they could "govern". So we've had year after year of the Republican refusing to fight for any budget changes conservatives want and even sniping at conservative Republicans who are willing to do so (like Cruz, who Boehner recently compared to Lucifer). Now there are so many conservatives sick of the establishment and so unwilling to believe their promises that a shyster called Trump is wrecking the Rupublican Party.

If Republicans had done like you suggest and fought for laws rolling back the scope of government they would be more hated by the Democrats and their media, but they would be in a lot better shape to win this election.

Breed them with nukes from space. It's the only way to be sure.

Other than that I got nothin'.

The worst part is when they compromise. The High Tax High Spending guys get together with the Low Tax Low Spending guys have Low Taxes and High spending with is the recipe for loss of freedom and economic disaster.

They didn't waste near as much as would have been wasted had a few more bills been passed. It's probably a good thing they used their time on investigations rather than on legislating or worse yet - compromising.

A compromise in DC is when the Tax and Spend crowd gets together with the Don't Tax and Don't Spend crowd and they agree to Don't Tax but Spend Anyway. I would rather have no compromise than that compromise.

bicker - v. argue about petty and trivial matters.

What bickering. By agreeing on a national mammal it seems they demonstrate they are perfectly capable of agreeing on petty and trivial matters. It's the big stuff - whether the budget should grow a little to fast or way to fast, whether our freedoms should be nearly eliminated or merely greatly reduced, whether we should become like Mexico through native stupidity or by importing large numbers of Mexicans (and later giving them the vote) etc. that they argue over. Those aren't trivial matters.

I remember as a kid attending a business meeting at our church (which was independent - that is it was owned by the members not by some external organization). When a person professed their faith and were baptized they generally became a member of the church. I was surprised then when during the business meeting they voted on whether to admit some recently baptized person as a member. Wasn't their a conversion a matter between them and God? Yes it was, but my dad explained that they weren't voting on whether the person was a Christian, they were voting on whether the person would have the same control over the budget and church building as the people who were already members. I understood. What if, for example, a large biker gang decided they wanted a meeting hall so they all joined the church and voted to turn it into a clubhouse? That wouldn't be fair to all the people who had donated to build the church.

A political party has similar concerns. The Republican Party has assets. It has salaried employees. It has a recognized brand. These have been built up over 150 years by donations of money and time from people who believe in ideals like freedom and rule-of-law.

What Donald Trump is doing is using the rules to perform a hostile take-over and use the assets, brand name, and employees to accomplish goals that are the opposite of what most of the people who built the party believed in (of course it is arguable that Mitch McConnell has been doing the same thing). The party has a right to defend itself and that's why the rules have built-in protections. Let's hope they are enough.

"No they don't, because you don't know the likelihood that such a simulation is possible, or that someone would want to pay for such a simulation or even that their are alien races."

Valid points. I did say in the ancestor post, "if you assume that life has a high enough probability of arising that there are a lot of aliens out there..", because I agree that the trendy assumption that their must be other intelligent life somewhere in our universe has some flaws. If you do make those common assumptions - that there is likely to be a lot of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe capable of reaching an advanced society, and if you make a reasonable assumption that a non-insignificant fraction of them can create highly advanced large scale simulations, then the argument holds up.

And regardless of whether the argument about simulations holds wait, the argument presented in the comic is clearly not applicable because we have enough information about the simulation argument to investigate the merits of it.

You're vastly underestimating the amount of processing power available to the creatures who are simulating our universe. Why did they simulat a universe that gives us so little processing power and so little ability to move around due to the distance between clumps of matter? I don't know.

No. It isn't science. It is logic, or maybe philosophy. Not everything that is interesting or true is science.

Again, this is one of his more reasonable philosophical statements.

You're vastly underestimating the amount of processing power available to the creatures who are simulating our universe. Why did they simulat a universe that gives us so little processing power and so little ability to move around due to the distance between clumps of matter? I don't know.

The difference is that the argument in the comic book has more information than simply the fact that it is an argument. If I were put together a random argument, place it in a black box, and hand it to you then you would be correct to assume based on statistics that the argument is most likely wrong. But once I tell you what the argument is then you can evaluate the merits of the arguments and the statistics are no longer useful. Since we don't know of anyway to distinguish whether our universe is a simulation simply by looking at it, the best we have is statistics and the statistics tell us we're probably a simulation.

But as I said before, if you keep your smoke in your own house or place of business then you should have the freedom to smoke all you want. Or burn rubber tires, or fart, or whatever.

I didn't say we should ban cigarette smoke. I said when we decide what to do with a shared resource like the air around us, we need to give more weight to majority preferences. If asbestos smelled like grilled steak I think most people would still prefer to not allow burning it due to health concerns.

"It's okay to curtail someone ELSE's freedom/rights/privileges as long as the majority agrees -and my freedoms are not hindered."

The old saying is that my freedom to swing my arm ends where your nose begins. In the case of the air around us, when I'm outside every bit of smoke, every fart, every spoiled piece of food, every burp, every failure to use deodorant, every use of deodorant, every use of perfume or cologne, ends up in your nose. Would you ban all of that simply because there is at least one person who objects to each of them? Would you put no limitations on the use of the air - people can burn rubber tires, release asbestos into the air from factories, drive cars that don't have inspections for pollution, and piss and poop anywhere they want?

Somewhere between those two extremes is a balance that tries to please more people than it displeases, that makes people generally happier than unhappy. This isn't an issue where a simple rule or simple philosophy can make every decision.