Early Enlightenment-era theorists of liberal democracy didn't have the same knowledge of psychology that we do. Rousseau thought that people were naturally good and reasonable when allowed to be free, and most calls for expanded democracy implicitly feature this as a basic assumption.

The reality, of course, is that people naturally self-segregate into like minded blocs, view outgroups with hate and suspicion, and are prone to groupthink and collective shifts towards extremism. Hence, deliberative democracy rarely works as advertised; what always ends up happening is factionalization and interminable conflict without progress.

Another problem I've noticed is that people often make the mistake of thinking that majoritarian voting democracy is inherently founded in peaceful relations and consensus-building, when the reality is exactly the opposite. The kind of democracy that our government is based in grew out of the implicit threat of military conflict between factions, and is analogous to ritualized agonistic behavior found in the animal kingdom. It is a system where people divide themselves into rival camps, rhetorically "attack" the "opposition", and then in the end perform a vote, which is effectively a display of force in which the losing faction is forced to back down and is often humiliated. If you look at the way we usually describe democracy and debate, it is replete with military metaphors; violence is always a subtext. That isn't the kind of procedure that breeds peaceful relationships and consensus.

If you look at institutions that really are centered around consensus building, like village councils or scientific communities, they do not have voting or democracy at all. They have small groups of people linked together by mutual respect and guided by norms that encourage persuasiveness and objectivity.

Why didn't I get involved in this sooner? "

It's a form of social evolution.

The difference between Bernie Sanders and the other candidates, in this respect, is that Bernie has flat out refused to accept super PAC support. Most of his money is coming directly from people that support him:

"Aides to Mr. Sanders said that since April 30, nearly 400,000 contributions had come into the campaign, with 99 percent of those donations in increments of $250 or less."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/07/02/bernie-sanders-raises-15-million-from-a-wide-donor-base/

Whichever source we choose to believe for the number of donors, you also can't deny his history of accepting contributions either. He has quite the clean record:

https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=Career&type=I&cid=N00000528&newMem=N&recs=20

I have a ton of respect for Bernie Sanders, and I know that if he wins the nomination and the election it will truly be because of popular support rather than clever campaigning and rich contributors.

EDIT: Also for the curious, check out Hillary Clinton's contributors and compare them to Bernie Sanders' donors.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/contrib.php?cycle=2016&id=N00000019&type=f

Same as a lot of people, I decided to look for new sites after Reddit started falling to pieces. Most people said Voat was good, but when I went there it just seemed like a shallow copy of Reddit. Hubski seems a lot better, though. It kind of blends the mechanics of Tumblr and Reddit into something that I could really get into!

I got a chance to go up Pikes when the road was still dirt a Honda XRV 750. Awesome day.

What would be such a divisive issue on Facebook that could get traction on 1.4 billion people? They are the Phillip Morris of social media.

Besides everyone already hates facebook, but they still use it.

I'm sorry you feel that I'm not thoughtful but I don't like being dismissed or disrespected.

Aaron Swartz considered me quite the thoughtful person. You see, I am the Founder & Intellectual Property Representative of Anonymous Operation Blackout (and a dozen others). Remember SOPA? I did that.

You're welcome.

That's who I am. Let's get back to talking who you are. Would you like me to continue systematically dismantling your false accusation of thoughtlessness? I could run circles around you all day.

Aaron said it best - I'm smarter than you and because I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you and you have to listen to me.

TL;DR - Your artlessness has sounded your death knell.

Yes. Click the tag and it will pop up with a list of posts using that tag recently. On the top left, there are two options. Click "follow tag" if you want to see all posts with that tag. Click "filter tag" if you want to hide all posts with that tag.

I might caution you though to be selective with your filtering. You might miss out on some great posts that you'd otherwise might be interested in if you filter too many categories. People here love to multi-tag.

The same can also be done for users. For example, I filter out all spam posters. To do so, you click on a user's profile and to the left will be the option to follow them. On the very bottom left of their profile, you'll see three different filter settings which are pretty self explanatory. Once again, I caution against liberal use of these settings, as you might miss out on some good discussions. Just because you don't always agree with someone, doesn't mean you should remove them completely from your feed.

As an aside, since we're talking tags, you'll also notice sometimes a post will have a third tag, that's a tag suggested by a community member.

Lol