🤣🤣🤣

Hey, thanks! I thought it an appropriate metaphor.

I always enjoy when people quibble with me for no good reason. Have a nice day.

Nah, there’s no need for spectacle.

Invest it all and forget about it for a few years.

Bill’s a super nice guy. I made a video this week about the project, if anyone wants to learn more.

My favorite thing about these super-specific gun laws is how we’re 50 fiefdoms where none of it is ultimately enforceable.

Americans do not give a fuck. We’re a violent people and if your kid gets hurt so we can have our toys, it’s a-okay.

It was a ritual I made up myself. Basically, baptism is done by water, so I de-baptized myself by fire.

I pricked my finger and made an X on my Bible with it, told God he could intervene if he wanted, and when (of course) nothing happened, I burned it.

I’d love to see some sort of general strike

Same. That’s part of why we’re 50 fiefdoms instead of a single country. Makes it way harder to organize as a people and much easier to divide.

Luckily I’ve kicked soda before, so kicking it when prices ratchet up wasn’t hard. It’s just a matter of halving your consumption for two weeks straight, after which point you don’t have any withdrawal symptoms and if it’s not in your house there’s no real temptation to drink it.

I’m in Missouri, but in a major city here, so there’s a big mix.

The inner-city is strongly liberal, as in we support our own taxation because we like the services liberal and even have a free commuter train line. The suburbs are deep, deep red, and they think they should dictate policy to us because they commute into the city often.

American ally-ship increasingly loses value as the Donald Administration progresses.

I wonder what the next president will do to try and win it back.

Christianity.

I was raised in the Methodist and Baptist churches and had a series of experiences in my teenage years that made me question it, then once I went to college, getting to experience the wider world convinced me that what I’d been taught was bullshit. I actually named my YouTube channel ‘Sacrilegious Heathen’ because I once asked a televangelist about how god could allow certain things to happen to kids and he told me “That’s sacrilege. You’re talking like a heathen.”

That said, they’re very, very good at programming young people and I had an ingrained fear of spiritual warfare that took me two years to get over. I even de-baptized myself because ritualizing my deconversion helped me put that period of my life behind me.

I still begrudge my parents for it, TBH. There was a wealth of experience I missed out on as a child and a young man because I was afraid of angering god, and I’ll never get to the opportunity to have that again.

Pisses me off.

I’m sure they thought it wasn’t a big deal because I’ve been athletic my whole life, but I had a serious weight problem as an adult and lost 150 pounds. Probably wouldn’t have ended up that way if I didn’t have a taste for fast food.

You make a really good point.

leave it up to the parents, make the parents responsible for it

Just like how leaving recycling up to the individual has absolutely solved the problem of pollution and waste and abstinence-only education solved the issue of abortion.

Respectfully, I disagree. It’s good to educate young people, even if it’s not 100% effective.

The real failing regarding drugs in this country was criminalizing marijuana so a handful of people could get vulgarly rich running private prisons and selling slave labor.

Same. In hindsight, my parents raising me on McDonald’s was a terrible parenting choice.

Gotcha. Thank you for clarifying.

And boy are they cute. Poppy’s my fave.

Again, I am glad I never procreated.

As I understand it, any and all “audits” and “guardrails” are all entirely internal to Flock and law enforcement themselves, and therefore, absolutely useless.

Like social media itself, it’s going to be up to the judiciary and civil lawsuits to fix this shit. (Though the widespread vigilantism is heartening.) I don’t think there will be any meaningful regulation until some cop somewhere deletes his entire family after using Flock to stalk and hunt them down. (And let’s be honest, here in the US even that might not be enough.)