The teacher is the one who's confused here. The kid is entirely correct.

I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I've ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I'm also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But... just sayin'. There's more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I've almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I've ever consumed. Never. And I still don't.

I make no apology for this: it's theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM'ed, force shit I don't want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I'm a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors... It's just like that. I want writers to get paid.

Nah, no way. Their scam has been working great for over two millenia. Why would they give it up?

The Catholic church will elect another magical thinker in chief and he'll carry on peddling magical thinking. What else could happen?

I can well believe that.

Whoever it was, it wasn't Dubya, anymore than any of the shit Trump is doing was his idea: both are much too dumb to come up with any of this.

I left the US 24 years ago. I saw all this coming when Dubya shat out the USA Patriot Act.

The US has been a fascist country for decades. Just ask any Gitmo detainee... Now it's official.

Except he doesn't give a fuck. Haven't you noticed?

I would do it, but I now refuse to post anything political or historical in any tankie instance / community that contradicts the tankies’ alternative reality. If you so much as hint that you’re not fully onboard with their mad theories, you’re very quickly banned, and I’d rather retain the ability to post in non-controversial communities I’m interested in that are unfortunately hosted on tankie instances.

It would be more entertaining if you posted that on the tankie instances.

Agreed. I wish I could transfer my SDF communities over here but it's not possible, sadly.

In fairness, what meaningful review of the Gulf of Mexico can there be realistically? "I visited it and it's wet with a slight aftertaste of crude oil. Would not recommend..."

You mean New America, surely.