I have at least a nodding acquaintance with that work and while I think it’s worth considering and talking about, I don’t find it to be at all the most convincing explanation for conservatism and am far more persuaded by conservatism as being motivated by a desire for the preservation of hierarchy that manifests itself through said psychological traits, but that is the ultimate prior that informs them. Otherwise we would expect to see liberalism and conservatism more evenly distributed throughout our population, as with other psychological traits, but we don’t, to the contrary, they are very geographically dependent.

So while I don’t think that psychology has nothing to say about the issue, I definitely don’t think that its the most important factor.

Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.

You’ll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can’t do anything right, and it’s like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.

Social safety net programs? Not so much.

My father in law doesn’t like music. He doesn’t dislike it either, he’s just indifferent. Apart from that he’s just your garden variety somewhat-curmudgeonly 80-year-old dude.

I’m pretty happy with Google Fi. I realize it’s Google, which isn’t great, but at least they deliver exactly what they say they will and the price is always exactly as advertised.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they are taking a loss on it just to gain market share. They can afford it.

Scarcely. Read the majority opinion. It specifically carves out an exception for “creative works” (or whatever the exact term is, I honestly don’t remember) which in effect says that you cannot be forced by law to create something that espouses a position or creed with which you disagree.

As of right now I don’t have a strong opinion on the ruling either way, but I think it’s worth getting what it says right before we condemn it.

I lean towards thinking that it makes distinctions with which I agree, but I’m going to withhold judgement until I learn more about the arguments and we have a better sense of how it’s going to play out in practice.