> And finally, I hate how people have the gall to say that they'd rather shut their ears and avoid politics altogether, even when it's affecting everyone around them in drastic ways.

I mean, it's kind of explicitly the idea of this forum to not

(Which is not to say they don't get discussed here anyway.)

> It bothers me that such an intelligent community is often seemingly devoid of deeply-held values. People here aren't nearly angry enough about the political clusterfuck going on in the US. People here want to make nice and are unwilling to burn bridges to stand up for what's right.

I'm not in the US. But, there's a lot to be said for calming down - it seems to me that a big part of the problem today is exactly that too many people are too emotional/angry about everything, without necessarily having a reason to be. The reason there's a political clusterfuck, to me at least, seems to be exactly because

And btw, as to your "deeply held values" thing - this is a technical/business forum. It makes sense that the forum as a whole doesn't have "values" - it's made up of a very diverse group of people (well, not very diverse actually, but that's another problem). A diverse group of people getting together to talk about e.g. sports, wouldn't necessarily be expected to have more shared values than just people in general have.

> I hate how politically ambivalent and "both sides are the same" people here are, despite it being shown again and again that this is simply not the case.

Look, it's not that I disagree with all of your post or something, I thought it was well written and interesting. But you seem to be operating under the assumption that your view of things is clearly right, and other's views are wrong, which is why it makes you angry that others don't buy in wholesale to your views or values. For example, you write "It bothers me that such an intelligent community is often seemingly devoid of deeply-held values.", but also write "I hate how free speech is unduly prioritized over everything else, even when it marginalizes people and whittles away at our separation of powers.". Some people's deeply held values are that free speech is prioritized over (almost) everything else. You might not agree with that deeply held value, but it is one that supposedly the community here values (I don't know if that's actually true).