Hegar

A vast patchwork of incredibly different lifeways that you can flee to whenever then taxman and his goons come round.

This experiment with democracy

I agree with the thrust of your comment, but I think it’s an overstatement to say the US was ever a democracy.

Our country is an imperial power that was built ontop of a genocide, by slaves, to support white male property owners. It was always designed as an oligarchy with features like the electoral college to make sure the will of the people could never compete with the will of the powerful. Policy outcomes haven’t reflected public opinion on any major issues since the 70s.

I’d say what’s going on is moving from a broad oligarchy to a narrower more centralized oligarchy. Which is still moving in the wrong direction and will definitely make life worse for most Americans.

It’s important to remember that Republicans are committed to ending democracy because the majority of people do not support their brutal white supremacist vision for the country.

If they had majority support they wouldn’t be illegally seizing and destroying the institutions of governance.

Free will.

It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.