Sometimes I make fun of people who are dependent on Alexa by asking, "Alexa, wipe my ass."

Me too. I had envisioned this whole system where the smell of bacon leads them to their seat on the plane.

"Liberals" in Europe are classical liberals who would be labeled libertarians in the US. This is classical definition of liberalism. These people are social liberals and econonomic liberals (free market). "Liberals" in the US are social liberals in the classical sense who generally have a lot of economic positions close to democratic socialists, such that the right wing conflates "liberalism" with socialism.

elitist museum nerd fight!

... is that it lumps the 22-yr old guy who has consensual sex with a 16-yr old girl in with the child molesters and child rapists. You may find it unsavory and you may not believe that a 16-yr old can "legally" consent (whatever the hell that means), but it's not in the same league as "touching" a child.

How is it that hardline Communism is never characterized as "socialism", but invariably totalitarian state capitalism with myriad social and economic regulations is held up as the gold standard of "free-market" capitalism?

You want to know what is a crime? I'll tell you what is a crime. It's a crime that these large organisations reap the profits from pressed pieces of plastic onto which are recorded hideous noises that sound like gang-warfare in Harlem and Watts, and then use this money to harass families and children for every last red cent so they can line their pockets.

So yeah, copying a CD is not a crime.

No, the crime is that the government subsidizes some imaginary entity called 'intellectual property'. They hold that even when you own a CD or bytes of mIRC on a hard drive, you don't own the data or music... you must abide by the conditions of the 'owner'. Our tax money supports policing the 'theft' of this imaginary property. This is a crime.

People spending their money their way, as they please, no matter how stupid anyone else believes it to be... that's not a crime.