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The list of most active threads over the weekend was heavily dominated by political topics and all of today's topics are from the "Political Discussion" forum. The most active thread of all was the presidential debate thread that I've already discussed. The most active thread after that was titled, "As a Democrat, it all feels hopeless.", and posted, of course, in the "Political Discussion" forum. The original poster says that in light of President Joe Biden's poor debate performance it appears that Republicans will "sweep to victory". But, even if that doesn't happen, the Supreme Court has already severely limited the possibilities of implementing liberal policies. Meaningful gun control is not going to happen, efforts to protect the environment are being set back and will be even more difficult after the reverse of the Chevron ruling. In addition, the boundaries between church and state are being erased. The original poster asks what there is to be happy about. This thread is 43 pages long and, as such, I am unable to read much of it. What I did notice is that almost immediately those responding engaged in two behaviors that I have seen dominating more and more threads in the political forum lately. The first is related to the expression, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." There are a number of posters who seem to respond with their own pet diagnosis, regardless of the specific topic. Early in this thread, for example, posters fixated on age and seemed to blame much of what is happening today on those who are over 60 and suggested things would not improve until those folks were no longer with us. This response is much like the knee-jerk reaction to blame everything bad on "boomers" that we see across DCUM. A second behavior, related in many ways, is to not only bring up a pet issue, but an off-topic pet issue. An example of this was a complaint about the Democratic National Committee not allowing more primary choices. But, with regard to off-topic posts, that was just the beginning. The thread is basically a collection of general gripes and talking points that posters want to share which mostly have no connection to the thread's topic at all. I agree with the original poster that now is a very dismal time to be a liberal Democrat. But to undertand how we got here, I think we need to take a wider view of things than posters in this thread seem to be doing. For instance, I have my own pet issue. One of the most significant changes over the last 20 years or so has been the vastly increased wealth disparity. An ever-increasing amount of the world's wealth is being accumulated into the hands of an increasingly small number of people. This disparity interferes with the proper working of all other systems on which our political and economic systems are based. That disparity has allowed billionaires such as Harlan Crow to essentially purchase multiple Supreme Court justices. It allowed Elon Musk to purchase what was not long ago the World's most influential social media network and turn it into a haven for Nazis. The attitude of billionaire class appears to be to exploit our world for every penny that can be squeezed out of it and then fly off to Mars. People over 60 and the DNC's influence on the primary are small potatoes relative to this. And, yes, the fact that those influencing events have little interest in anyone's well-being other than their own does not inspire much hope.