Can't argue with any of your points -- I can only commiserate with the way you feel as I share a lot of the same sentiments. I appreciate the open candor and willingness to have a dialogue about this!

Yeah, but the right only agree that indoctrination exists when it's colleges indoctrinating people into free-thought which they call being woke. Say that word to them and they'll be like "rubber, glue, you" because that's about as many syllables as the average right-winger can muster, and about as intelligent a complete thought as I expect from them as well.

Worse is a subjective term. Alcohol causes more deaths per year (140,000+) than all other drug overdose deaths combined (~103,000). Alcohol also has significant long term health impact for even light users. I think what's truly the worst is how normalized alcohol use and abuse is in American society.

Wait, you're telling me that this is a one-sided law made in bad faith to illegalize behavior that's 100% constitutionally protected but that negatively impacts the conservative right while still allowing actions that negatively impact the left? Say it ain't so.

These laws never seem to backfire because for them to backfire, the left would have to start using all of the loopholes that the right have put in place, and for some reason the left continues to act like they're "better than that" as the entire country devolves into fascism. I hope they sleep well at night when they say "well we may have lost our country to fascist dictators, but we didn't break a single rule on the way!"

Just look at the gerrymandering in this country and how it wholly benefits the conservatives and you'll realize the democrats are wholly incapable of even stressing against the rules, even to save our country from people who are actively working to destroy our freedom and our rights. We're never going to beat the opposition when the opposition cheats at every turn and we obey all the rules. It's a losing game and there's no ethical silver bullet that we can say we upheld when our country is overtaken by immoral and deceitful thieves.

Same experience here -- I started a seasonal character and gave up at level 12 because while the malignant hearts were a neat concept, everything else was ridiculously trite and stupid.

You are correct about it being shot on a cell phone -- at present the top comment on the video is from @RickAstleyYT and says:

My wife Lene and I shot this video on a phone in Denmark, in a forest beside a beautiful beach. The song in essence is about how there is so much technology out there pulling and pushing us in our daily lives, that we need to remain human in this fast moving world. The idea of making a video simply, somewhere beautiful and real like this resonates with me, and I hope it does with you too! Rick x

^ Exactly this. I was an Apple fanboy (perhaps even shill) until the iPhone 5S when my device had a bad NAND chip causing it to randomly and sporadically blue screen and reboot (as a PC user, the blue screen irony was not lost on me) and Apple jerked me around for 3 months until the phone was out of warranty and then told me I should have bought Apple Care on the phone even though the issue started before the 1 year warranty had expired.

I didn't find this acceptable as I had written proof I'd taken the phone in to the shop multiple times during the warranty period, ended up calling their corporate office of the president where they worked with me to generate logs from the device and send them to Apple techs who would review it, at which point they came back and said "yeah it looks like the NAND chip is bad" and "but it's out of warranty". When I told the person from Apple this was ridiculous because I'd been an Apple customer for decades and I'd had umpteen Macs and Macbook laptops and iPhones and I'd never had this problem with any other Apple device (the whole point being the devices are 30% more expensive because they're high quality and don't have these types of problems), she cut me off and said "Apple doesn't have a customer loyalty program, sir." and dead-ended the entire conversation right there.

I took the 5S out to my driveway and smashed it with a hammer and went and bought a $200 HTC One E8 and I've been an Android user ever since and will never give Apple a penny if I can avoid it. The products were fine, the software was good, but the service/company is rotten.

In a world where Steve Huffman has called reddit's data "his data to sell", it has become abundantly clear that he has absolutely no respect for the fact that it is his users and moderators that create the community -- all that he and the admins do is create a system whereby the community can create and curate content. Without users, he has a big expensive and empty server.

It's not "his data", it's the community's data. The fact that he's acting like he owns all of it pretty much sums up why I overwrote and deleted all of my content on reddit, and it is precisely why I will never provide free content for that website ever again.