vgh

"Shibboleth"? Cultural appropriation!

This is the exact us-vs-them mentality that we should avoid.

"Republicans [...] hate gay people" "[If you're not on my side you're on theirs]"

Yeah, the hospital visitation rights and death benefits are good points. I'm not sure why those are so restrictive at all? Why even require a documented relationship? Just let people choose who can visit them, or get their death benefits. Is that a crazy stance?

Neither of the two major presidential candidates last election came anywhere near halfway matching my stances on issues. Yet there was a third party (I guess sort of a fourth) whom I agreed with on quite a few things, as did many others. But those votes got drowned out by the "wasted vote" crowd.

I'm curious if any nation has experimented with a hybrid of direct and representative democracies: people choose their stances on actual issues, and the candidate most matching the spirit of society is elected.

I think this is still a false dichotomy. Some of us just don't want the government subsidizing marriage at all. Why should any dual-income pair get tax benefits? I say this as a married person.

The thought I'm guessing at the time was to encourage new families to build up society, but not even all straight, married couples are doing that. Why not just take the government out of the equation and let anyone declare any kind of relationship status they want. It's not like I have to take part in it.

One cannot even seem to have 'conservative' stances on one thing and 'liberal' stances on others. And, no, I'm not libertarian either. The US had a great opportunity to elect a third party last time around, yet decided to dig in its heels more on candidates that were unpopular and take out their spite against 'the other side'.

So you can't even debate an issue. You have to take a 'side' on an issue.

Maybe people shouldn't use metaphors. And stairs. Metaphors and stairs are my least favorite things.

Other than the idioms, that's a pretty good literal translation. Definitely understandable. I agree machine translation is weaker than human translation, but I don't understand your mockery of this example.

Sure. That's at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/

If you're unfamiliar, this isn't particular to any distro necessarily, although yes it is largely. It's just a fantastic resource for documentation on all kinds of packages and system configuration.