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user-inactivated  ·  3126 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Can US Senators Speak English?

Now look what you've made me do.

They really, truly, have a visceral aversion to any kind of coercion they recognize as such. That's not just a justification for being asshole, they're consistent. They don't want to be pushed around, and they don't want you to be pushed around. They have too narrow a sense of what being constitutes being pushed around ("do this or starve" isn't actually a choice), so they fail to apply their principals to the more subtle coercions of the market along with the government, and that (at this point surely wilful) obliviousness makes them unfit to hold office, but "don't fuck with me and I won't fuck with you" is a fine moral principal that I wish was more widely held.