Damaging the property of other people for your own financial benefit needs a police response. Legal action should not be necessary.

The source code is available, so the only reason fixes won't be available there is not enough people being interested. Plus it's something people generally choose to download for free and install by themselves, rather than being an essential part of a thing people pay money for to buy from a shop.

The main difference is that versions of Windows following Windows 95 were actual upgrades, whereas certainly since 7 and arguably since XP, a newer Windows version is now a downgrade. Not wanting to downgrade to something worse is perfectly sensible.

It's fascists who have made a direct answer to "what is a woman" controversial. There was no controversy about it until this virulent wave of transphobia erupted, and suddenly you have to decide whether to show intelligence and risk angering the people whom the fascists have convinced. I'm not sure what the radical left have to do with the attempt by transphobes to eliminate trans people from society though. The radical left are characterised chiefly by wanting to change labour relations and production from the one in which workers sell their labour for to rich people for less than its value so the rich people become richer, and the rich people decide what gets made, to something more equal and democratic, the details depending on what flavour of radical leftist you're talking about.

That's why the fascists have got you to hate the radical left, by the way.

Depends quite a bit on what kind of porn it is, of course. I've always thought government should provide unregulated porn of loving sex with condoms and good consent practices. Then when children first come across something like near-rape porn, their reaction becomes "this is weird" rather than "so this is what sex is like?"

I'm ultra-liberal and so are most of my friends, I've never even heard of this objection. The only pushback I've ever seen against synthetic meat has been from right-wingers. Are you perhaps being deceived by a bunch of illiberals who will find a few crazies online and present what they say as the opinions of the entire group?

It is outright illegal, at least where I am. The problem is that the police don't investigate these kinds of crimes. In a capitalist state, the police first and foremost serve the interests of capital.

Making property less useful, and so certainly making somebody's television non-functional is definitely criminal damage under UK law, and there's no way any of the potential lawful excuses apply, I'm sure it's similarly illegal under the law of many other countries. It shouldn't be the responsibility of users to sue or anything like that, it should be the responsibility of police and prosecutors to put the perpetrators of thousands or millions of cases of vandalism behind bars. Working for a corporation is no excuse.

It's the ability to pay taxes with it which is at the root of currency value, normally. The initial idea basically went - Empire gives coins to soldiers. Empire demands taxes from farmers. Farmers have to feed empire's soldiers in order to get the coins.

Cultural Marxism is an antisemitic conspiracy theory, a modernised version of Nazi "Cultural Bolshevism". If you're not a fascist, you need to forget everything you've been told by people who use the term. Real Marxism is economic, an analysis of capitalism, a cultural version of it makes no sense.

"Woke" is actually a term from black culture, something along the lines of being alert to people who profess to support black liberation but are actually working against it, though as a white person, I might be off there. Anyone who uses it as a general term for people they dislike is either a scoundrel, or has been deceived by scoundrels. I hope you are the latter.

"Socially useful labour" is the notion which I'm most familiar with. Unpaid care work or voluntary work is real work, a tyrant making a good thing illegal doesn't stop it being real work.

So I think this would depend on whether he's actually helping people out with some real psychological need (or boredom issues), or whether he's playing on addiction responses or providing a system-breaking mechanism (unless it's a bad system which it's socially useful to break).

It's not actually stupid to share a joke between friends who understand the joke. The expense was caused by having a system which monitors electronic communications for privately said things like that and scrambles fighter planes based on such little evidence. You can argue about whether operating a system which does this is stupid, or whether it's a reasonable cost to pay for the possibility that it might one day do some actual good, but you have to accept that such a system is going to have sudden large expenses from time to time, and you can't rely on every single traveller knowing what to do and implementing that 100% reliably to keep it cheap. Especially when you're not even telling them.

What does "hard drugs" even mean? Tobacco and alcohol are physically addictive. Many commonly prohibited drugs are not. And most of the problems associated with prohibited drugs are caused by the prohibition, rather than the drug itself.

The idea of a computer in your pocket, 30 years ago, was in the realm of science fiction.

Still is science fiction for me. The computer I am typing this on is a computer, it does whatever I tell it to do. Although I choose to trust code written by other people since I generally want it to do things too complex or too much bother for me to program on my own, it's still working according to this basic principle. "My" smartphone is not a computer, it is a device. It does what Google and Motorola want it to do. Sometimes they will allow me to choose a thing which I want, but not all the time, and generally using it as I'd like to use it is a constant uphill battle. I know there exist things like jailbreaking and custom mobile phones with other operating systems, but it's not really worth the time, effort and money when I can just come home to my real computer which also has a lovely big monitor, proper keyboard and mouse etc. So in practice, what I can have is a portable phone/map/shopping list/flashcard set/music player/etc which is handy, but stops well short of being a computer and constantly annoys me.

Yes, it's absolutely true that big tech have successfully found ways to engage us in addictive behaviours, but like any addiction, you can beat it with some mindfulness.

What you mean is you have beaten it, and so you're going to scorn anyone who is less good at resisting psychological manipulation techniques. It is quite evident that a lot of people cannot, in fact, beat it with some mindfulness, otherwise they would have done so. Nobody chooses to be brainwashed.

No, just anyone who was remotely related to the user and opted to share their data with anyone remotely related to them. Which you probably shouldn't do if you're worried about strangers getting hold of it.