The US was losing in Vietnam. It didn't matter whether South Vietnam was winning, or North Vietnam was winning, but the US was losing.

No; AC said "online communities", not "leftist online communities".

When I was young, people got their news from a relatively small number of sources, the most influential of which at least tried for balanced reporting (as they saw it). This had obvious problems, but it meant we were generally arguing from something of the same basis. The news would report an antiwar demonstration, and some of us would be thinking that was great and others that that was disgraceful, but we all had some source attempting to be reasonably objective about the facts. Editorial pages published opinions from a variety of viewpoints, which is how I got to like reading William Buckley, Jr., although I almost never agreed with him.

Currently, it's possible to get all the news you want from whatever biased source you want, whatever your political views. In such an environment, you get news that supports your prejudices and confirms what you already think. There's no check on what people claim as news, no way to know if what you're getting is true (aside from going out and searching for sources that might disagree with you). I see lots of ridiculous claims going unchecked and believed by a frightening number of people. When a person of party A meets a person of party B, and they've both been in self-centered echo chambers of news, each will believe the other is spinning lies and ridiculous fabrications (which will be actually true some of the time). There's no common ground for discussion and actual learning.

I don't believe that "free speech zones" were invented by millennials. Hecklers existed even when I was young. There were subjects people in general just didn't talk about.

Perhaps you should spend a bit more time looking at how comparatively messed up various generations were. Currently, you seem to be complaining about "kids these days".

A LONG time ago, I read a Scientific American article about why the needs of the elderly tend to be prioritized over the needs of the children.

Children don't vote. The elderly do, in large numbers.

People are going to become elderly eventually (or so they hope). They're not going to become children eventually.

People on the average spend more time as children of elderly parents than they do as parents of underage children.

You know, if I had all the FICA money that went to the Feds on my account over the years, either with interest applied or inflation-adjusted with a reasonable real interest rate added, my personal savings would be even healthier than they are.

The reason people like me don't want to have Social Security and Medicare stripped is that we have been forced to pay for these all of our working lives, and we think we deserve at least something of what we paid for.

I have some problems with your position.

First, I reject the idea of entirely abandoning one's own judgment. A person is always responsible for his or her own actions, no matter what.

Second, and more practically, your attitude would allow any secret organization to do what it pleased without accountability. The NSA has lied to Congress, so Congress cannot hold the NSA to account. I doubt they're more honest to the President (they certainly don't have to be). If nobody inside the NSA can reveal what's going on, nobody's going to know.

I agree that revealing classified information is illegal, and that there are good reasons for that. I don't agree that it's always immoral, and sometimes breaking the law is the morally correct thing to do. I consider much of what Snowden revealed (not all of it) to be worth breaking the law, it being a considerable service to his country.

Having lived through the 60s (although rather young for much of it), I was very disappointed in how some things went afterwards. For example, I would have bet very heavily that marijuana would be legal in the US today.

Still waiting for a statement on the alleged classified alleged information she allegedly leaked, or for that matter a law that she may have broken. (Using a private email server was SOP until Kerry, at which point it became illegal.)

We know that Snowden and Petraeus both leaked classified material, but I'm inclined to say that someone of high rank and responsibility should be punished more than a contract sysadmin for doing the same thing.

Petraeus has pled guilty to leaking classified material, and we all know Snowden did. I've seen no indications that Clinton did anything on the same scale, or a mention of any law she appears to have broken. (Other secretaries of state have used private email for official purposes; it was only made illegal a year after Clinton left).

Global warming is happening. (Guess I must not be one of the nuttiest.) It's causing climate change that has probably caused a good deal of damage already* and is going to get worse. Read what the scientists have to say, not what the right-wing loudmouths have to say. (I shouldn't have to say this, but I will note that left-wing loudmouths exist, they just blather about different things.)

*No individual problem can be blamed directly on global warming, except perhaps those arising from the creeping up of the sea level.

First, your reasoning is simplistic to the point of ridiculousness.

Second, the Tea Party position of no public support for health care would result in disastrous public health in the USA, as opposed to the mediocre results we have now.

The National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) got its name in the 1920s, when it had nationalists and socialists working more or less together. At that point, your description wasn't that bad.

The nationalists purged the socialists in the mid-30s, sometimes by killing them. By then, they'd become inconvenient, since the Nazis wanted to work more closely with German industrialists.

The problem with the market is that there are externalities that aren't accounted for. Burning gasoline makes the planet warmer. Heavier vehicles tend to do a lot more road damage than lighter ones, and this is not nearly proportional with the taxes on the gas they use. This means that people buying heavy gas-guzzling vehicles are getting a subsidy from the rest of us who are buying lighter vehicles with better mileage. If everybody was paying for all the costs of their vehicles, I wouldn't worry about it.

One of the big roles for the government in the market is to compensate for market externalities.

When you derive benefit from a commercial product, such as a song, without payment, that is theft, pure and simple.

So, if I listen to a song on the radio while going home, I'm stealing it? If somebody else has a radio on outside and I listen? Some or all iTunes users got a free U2 album in their library without paying for it, so anybody listening to it is a thief? Most of my music I paid for once, and continued to listen to some of it over and over without further payment. Am I a thief?

In some fields, people have experimented with giving out free copies of their art, and found that their total sales went up. You can't know that free distribution of something is going to result in lower sales.

Consider computer games. If I were an avid gamer, it would be to my benefit to try out games before I bought them, since it's hard to tell how good a game is (and the demo can be misleading). If I do that, and buy the games I like, I'm probably putting more money into the game business than I would otherwise. Suppose I have $100 I want to spend on $50 games, and have ten candidates, five good and five bad. I copy them and play them, and pay for the two best. If I don't, there's a good chance I'm going to waste $50. Now, since I know I can get another game I like, I am more likely to decide to pay another $50, since the value to me of buying a game has gone up. If I pay the gaming industry $150 rather than $100, aren't they better off?

Some gamers do that, not all. However, from what I've been able to tell, the gamers who never buy games they can pirate tend to be lower income, and wouldn't be giving the industry all that much money anyway. Is the effect of being able to get free pirate copies going to sell fewer games or more games? I don't know and neither do you.

You seem to be thinking of some sort of compulsory licensing, which is hardly universal. To give one example that springs to mind, ever see "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" It included Disney and Warner Brothers characters (including a piano duel between Daffy Duck and Donald Duck), because they could get agreements to use those characters. The film makers thought it would be even better with other characters, such as Popeye, but they couldn't get a license.