No wonder so many people I know stopped playing in bands, because they didn't want to entertain kids like you.

The vast majority of authors and musicians can barely make a living, they have to job at fast food chains and department stores to afford being able to write novels or making records. For example, it is estimated that only around 300 of book authors in Germany can make a living off their writing. As another example, one of my friend is a highly skilled and trained artist. She has to create her pictures in her spare time at night while grinding away her daytime in front of photoshop in a marketing company making shitty illustrations for some megacorporation in the plastics industry.

Now predatory companies like Amazon want to scratch every penny from artists and sell their works 99 cents maximum or stream them for fractions of a penny, and as the icing of the cake guys like you want to get everything for free. That makes me personally rather sad, especially since I was hoping to be able to make at least part of my future income from the Science Fiction and Fantasy novels I write in every minute of my spare time (6 so far), after my official contract at university will have run out. From all I've seen by now, working as a cashier at the local supermarket will be more lucractive.

Write a few novels or make some music or artwork before talking about abandoning copyright. Make the copyright nontransferable and 25 years or even less, that'll do. But eliminating it? Crazy and sad. Sorry for the rant, but you need to think about the people who create things, too. They are already being exploited enough.

But socialists were at the forefront of movements for individual rights during the 19th, and modern social democratic parties certainly continue this tradition by defending human rights, worker's rights and individual rights in general. That's not really a matter of opinion, it's in their party programs. But of course you can disagree with the methods from a liberal perspective and it's true that socialism partly evolved out of a critique of the heavily property-oriented individualism of early liberals and utilitarians. Democratic socialism is more collectivist, because it is based on the idea of solidarity, which is fairly alien to the principles of original liberalism. As I said, social democracy and liberalism have partly overlapping goals - but really just partly.

The rest of what you've stated is what communists later called socialism and that's an unfortunate equivocation that needs to be avoided. Lenin, Trotsky, Che (I believe, not sure about him), Stalin, and Mao were communists in various forms, not socialists, and even purportedly socialist countries like the GDR were in reality communist. Socialism is older than communism and evolved out of the "social question", the same question that was also addressed by liberals such as John Stuart Mill. If it helps, it has become customary to label democratic socialism "social democracy" in many countries to distinguish it from the ill-conceived undemocratic socialism of the East Bloc during Cold War.

Anyway, maybe we can agree that all these labels have been watered down and are hardly recognizable sometimes nowadays.

That's certainly true if you take the positions "ideally". However, left-wing liberals have had partly overlapping goals with democratic socialists in many countries which is why liberal parties have often formed coalitions with social democrats. Classical goals of both socialists and social democrats have always been the strengthening of worker's right and human rights in general, which is compatible with the left-wing liberal idea of freedom and protection of citizens from the state. As for right-wing liberalism, there is not much of an overlap.

About 26% percent of all eligible voters and less than 20% percent of the whole population voted for Trump, so I don't see a real problem except that more people should vote.

I suppose honest people do.

There are both literally and metaphorically no white and black people, they exist in all shades from pale white to dark black. At least that's how it is where I live.

This is a horrible idea. The vast majority of results in cryptography are not based on hard proofs but on the assumption that someone hasn't made some mathematical breakthrough. But these breakthroughs happen from time to time.

From a more practical perspective, endpoint security is not high enough and will never be high enough. Banks can and do deal with occasional breaches by insurance, their own money and by swiping them under the carpet, for a democracy such breaches would be unacceptable and much more is at stake than just a few bank accounts.

I believe Trump got a huge boost from white males who don't necessarily admit that they've voted for him, because of the extremely personal campaign that the Democrats ran against him. They basically only portrayed him as a racist misogynist monster who is completely unfit for being a president. They turned the whole campaign into a silly men vs. women fight rather than addressing any of the voters' real concerns. Especially the "bus tape" probably helped Trump a lot, since virtually every man has talked this way at one day or another in his life -- although most of them not at that age but rather when they were around 16. Women are familiar with this kind of talking, too. They are not stupid.

Not only was this strategy bound to backfire, because Clinton lacks popularity, many voters also got fed up with the underlying hypocrisy of running a campaign like that. In other words, Democrats did what Mark Twain told them not to do when he stated: "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

(I'm not saying Trump is stupid, you have to translate this a bit. You get what I mean.)

They are already planning an Asian trade partnership under their leadership. (Forgot its name, look it up yourself.)

Yes, that New York Times. You've linked to an opinion piece written by a professor from Rutgers School of Law. What's the problem with it? Like I've said, someone with a brain shouldn't have a problem with biased news sources as long as they are news sources, and it also helps if you can distinguish between editorials and news, and between invited guest journalists and journals, of course.

This might come as a surprise to you, but you don't have to blindly believe everything you read and you don't have to agree with every opinion column you read either. What's important is that the news section contains actual news, though, as it is delivered by press agencies and investigative journalists.

Protecting representative democracy. A republic without democracy is just another word for an authoritarian regime, it turns into a swamp of corruption or even a dictatorship within 1-2 generations. Basic democracy is also bullshit, of course, and traditionally only demanded by undemocatic authoritarians outside of Switzerland.

No communists, no fascism, no cults incompatible with democracy. Sounds good to me.

That's a brilliant idea, because that would also have the added benefit that clunky German Siemens phones would suddenly become attractive again.

I also think that the UK should hurry up with the Brexit, and so do the officials from all EU countries except the UK. The UK's totalitarian disregard for basic civil rights is completely incompatible with the EU constitution. For the rest of you demented post: Please piss off sooner than later!