This entire debacle should be a reminder to the world why a secular society isn't just a lark or some unbearable burden on religious people who want to nose around in their employees' sex lives. A subset of religious people will always claim that their faith requires them to silence dissent and impose their values on others through government force, but we cannot be afraid to stand up to them, no matter how loudly they squall about having their feelings hurt. The Pussy Riot travesty is the logical end result of giving special legal consideration and privileges to religion.

Ultimately this is a question of what means more right now: The shoulder-shrug of indifference or the clarion announcement. Both have their value, but in the famous person/regular person conversation, we'd argue that the script has been incorrectly flipped. For many (lucky) young people (and older) the case may be that they can just be gay and, whatever, nobody really cares. And good for them. In high schools all across America that is probably the case, that's all that it takes. But for many people that is not the case. And those are the kids (and older) who most need to see examples of gay champions beaming down at them from the hallowed halls of celebrity Valhalla. The brighter the flash from above, the more light might get down to them. There is no right way to come out — you do you, Anderson — but there are ways that are more beneficial, more productive than others. We're happy to hear the news from Mr. Cooper. We just wish he'd said it a little louder. And a lot sooner.

We need not give in to sorrow, or feel disgust, or take action, because our brave clown princes have the tonic for what ails the national spirit. Their clever brand of pseudo-subversion guarantees a jolt of righteous mirth to the viewer, a feeling that evaporates the moment their shows end. At which point we return to our given role as citizens: consuming whatever the quacks serve up next.

2,546 votes and 863 comments so far on Reddit

Charitable spending in the United States has taken on the protective coloration of American business culture. At every level, charitable grants have come more and more to resemble investment projects, with a specific, measurable return on equity in mind.

While I’m loathe to discuss the presidential race or the existence of God with strangers or even close friends and family members, I’ll gladly enter into conversations about whether it’s plausible that Joan did what she did with the dude from Jaguar in that recent episode of Mad Men, or why my beloved Packers will return to the Super Bowl this year. And I’ll do this even if I think the other person disagrees. If we end up jousting verbally for a few hours, it’s still fairly certain that we’ll be friends at the end of the night. I wouldn’t be as confident over a difference in party affiliation or spiritual beliefs.

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

The prison-industrial complex is huge and filled with criminal injustice. It is a blight on America and needs to be destroyed. Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.

‘It’s great to suggest that every student should be equipped with a laptop or given 24/7 access to Wi-Fi, but shouldn’t our federal bureaucrats figure out how to stem the tidal wave of layoffs in the teaching ranks and unrelenting cutbacks in school programs and maintenance budgets first? School districts can’t afford to buy enough textbooks for their pupils, but they’re supposed to equip every one of them with a $500 iPad?’

‘Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.’

Correct but impossible -- this is starting too large. ‘So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.’

‘The Republican position on inequality rests on five statements, all false.’

Many of my best posts in 2011 went largely unread, probably because they were massively long text posts that went up somewhere around 1:00 am when everybody was asleep. I routinely break my own rules for writing a blog people might read. Here’s a list of twelve of my favorite posts (one from each month) that went mostly under the radar. They’re a bit longer and a bit more thougtful than the usual fare. Some months were awfully difficult to narrow down to a single post. (For other months, it was tricky to find a single post worth rereading.)

‘I do not mean to be unsympathetic here. It is regrettable to find ourselves in this untenable space, where all our politicians cower and we are bereft of suitable standard-bearers. I would like nothing more than to join my friends in support of Ron Paul and exhilarate in a morality unweighted by the ugly facts of governance and democracy. But the drug war is not magic. It is legislation passed by actual politicians, themselves elected by actual by Americans. Unbinding that war demands the same. The fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a redeemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pablum of horse-races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet onto the people, who will be better than the people themselves.’

A suburban dad. A fictional television blowhard. And now a political money launderer. How one funny guy became three.

‘It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them. Let's do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn't.’

‘So it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.’

About our current political situation.

‘A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.’

‘once something seizes the public imagination, stuff can happen way faster than you would expect or completely unanticipated things can change everybody’s perception of the situation. So I think what it has the functionality to be is a catalyst for changes we can’t even imagine right now.’

‘Today corporations are becoming the single most powerful force shaping our societies and governments. While corporations have great potential to benefit society and even governments, they are entirely selfish entities – they have no accountability to the public, and no responsibility to ensure the public good. A government that is influenced by corporations can easily become a government that caters to corporations, a government that is effectively run by corporations. Such a government is not representative of its people anymore. It is therefore not a democracy.’

‘She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).’

‘…in two years Obama has done more to enact a liberal agenda than George Bush did for the conservative agenda in eight. That's not bad, folks. All things considered, I'd say Obama is the most effective politician of the Obama era. And the Bush era too.’

‘news coverage that treats politics as an insiders’ game invites the public to become “cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement.”’

Apple is run by a hippie and it's the most valuable company in the world. Those who think liberal values are anti-business need to look at that closely.

“The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.”

With a chart that shows what actually happened. “In future decades, when rising health costs with an aging population hit the budget in full force, deficits are projected to be far deeper than they are now. Effective health care reform, and a willingness to pay more taxes, will be the biggest factors in controlling those deficits.”

The political process that made this happen. Fascinating, inspiring, and moving.

A skewering of the non-politics of those members of Generations X and Y who would likely attend John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, based around a paragraph-by-paragraph deconstruction of a viral ‘Breakup Letter to The Left’.