It’s like flipping over the ad pages in a magazine. It’s like taking the advertisement brochures out of a newspaper and throwing them into the trash. It’s like leaving the room during halftime break. It’s like taping a show without the commercial breaks. It’s like walking past a poster without reading it. It’s like getting your letters from the mailbox and throwing away the advertising mailers. It’s like going to the cinema and talking during the ads that are playing before the movie. It’s like walking down the sidewalk and ignoring the people trying to sell you merchandise. It’s like switching channels when commercials come on.

But for some reason, people are trying to tell me that I’m ethically and morally in the wrong for blocking fucking YouTube ads.

It really depends on what a Trump reign will look like, right?

Will he be able to round up tens of millions of people and deport them, as he has promised? Will he institute another Muslim ban, as he has promised? Will he stay in office after his next four year term, as he has said he wants to? Will he use the office of the president to persecute political opponents, as he has promised? Will he “root out” all the “vermin” in the United States, as he had promised? And if yes: who will get declared to be “vermin?” How will they be “rooted out?” Will he make torture legal, as he promised? Will he bring back family separation and child detention camps? Will he threaten nuclear war again? And if yes, will some crazy regime take him up on the offer?

And if all of that or even just a fraction of that comes to pass, will you still sleep well, knowing that you might have been able to stop all of that but voting for the lesser of two evils was just beneath you?

Because ultimately, that’s the decision you’re making.

Strong “you can’t let good food go to waste” in the post-war generation, including in my own family. It’s so ingrained even in the next generations that many of us will just “finish their plate” even though there’s no necessity there. Some of us are quite well off now, but attitudes around food haven’t changed. You have to finish your plate. You can’t let good food go to waste. People elsewhere are starving. People worked hard so you could have this food. You don’t know when you’ll be able to have a nice meal like this again.

Like you, I realized the difference when I met people from different, well off, culturally food-secure backgrounds. They’d just stop eating, and throw the uneaten leftovers in the trash. Doesn’t matter how good the food was. Doesn’t matter how expensive the food was. Doesn’t matter that you could eat the leftovers later.

I had a really hard time landing on some reasonable middle ground (you can save leftovers, but you’re allowed to stop eating when you’re full, etc.). Made me realize that it’s so much more cultural than personal. Also raises questions about what we’re going to pass down to the next generations, intentionally or not.

How long are we, as a society, going to allow shit like this in the name of free speech?

It feels that those nations that experienced the Nazi terror of the Third Reich have a much better idea of what constitutes dangerous speech.

Allowing this kind of stochastic terrorism out of some misguided notion of “free speech” is just not a good idea.

Instead of posting a rant about “short sighted leftists,” why don’t you explain precisely why it would be so horrible if users were able to install whatever operating system they wanted to install on the devices they’ve purchased with their own money?

“But it would be bad for my favorite trillion dollar corporation and for their bottom line!!!”

I’ll never understand consumers who insist to take the side of the corporation rather than the side of the customer on these issues.