François Hollande wins in France

Do not overwhelm you with 0 data? That makes no sense, its data, but you call it 0. Now if it did overwhelm you I hope your head did not actually explode, that might be bad.

It does he is saying that the fact there was no actual data in the video overwhelmed him.

Just reform Nordic style and it'll all be alright...

That's a rubbish definition of freedom. It'd mean a kidnap victim locked in a basement somewhere is free.

All this just comes down to "herpderp, big guvmint." Doesn't it.

The definition I used is actually the one for civil liberty, but then I don't think that the amorphous conceptual definition of freedom was ever in doubt. LeninCat would no doubt try to subvert the meaning of freedom in a political context (which boils down to civil rights and liberties) and replace it with the horrible "equality of result" bogus "freedom" that socialists love to harp about. At the end of the day, you're free if you aren't restricted by the will of another, be it the state, individual, ideology, etc. For practical, tangible purposes, that means that you aren't under any legal obligation to do or not do something.

It's just bullshit wordplay. I love how you throw "legal" into the sentence, thus absolving private industry of any conflict with civil liberty, regardless of whether or not it's actually the case just to suit your point. I don't care if it's codified in some dumb document in America that lack of legal obligation = civil liberty, because that's just an appeal to authority on your part. A logical fallacy.

Guh. Look I really can't be bothered.

Arguing with you liberal nutters is like playing chess with a pigeon; no matter how good you are at playing at chess the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it's victorious. Case in point - the Ronald Raygun video.

Bottom line, Hollande won, and it's upset the conservative applecart. Excuse me while I batten down the hatches and wait out the storm of bullshit doomsday predictions that always surface whenever someone even slightly to the left of Margaret fucking Thatcher gets elected.

Yes there was, I threw up a video didn't I?

Name something. Chances are that it's either not a civil liberty issue, or it's been sent to the courts. Private companies cannot force you to do anything. Any agreements you make with a private company are voluntary and consensual. That's not true in the case of the government.

Are you really going to dispute that definition? Are you trying to say that the absence of legal obligation is not freedom? Maybe freedom isn't wholly defined by it, but I don't think you can rationally deny that (barring obvious criminal cases where physical force is used to compel you into action) the absence of legal obligation is freedom.

No, an individual company cannot force you to do anything. People like to trumpet this, but ignore the issue that's really being raised - the effects of the collective will of the market - thousands of companies and industries operating independently but with very similar motives, that together pretty much make up the fabric of modern consumer society. There's a market for everything, pencils, hamburgers, video games, pork pies, pneumatic drills, but the most important of all is the market for labour - the real focus of the whole issue. While a market for labour exists, with its accompanying fetishisations, bigotry and fallacies go on, you're not free at all. You're about as free as a box of matches, or a tin of beans. Only difference is a tin of beans doesn't have to worry about the crazy norms propagated by the market that compel people to splurge cash on useless frivolities every day. You know, when I still had work to go to, my boss had more power over me than the Queen. Hell, I'd go as far as to say she had more power over me than the bloody prime minister. David Cameron, after all, can't make me work overtime under a thinly veiled threat of a "reassessment of our employee-employer relationship", or mess with my pay, or hell, just make up a bunch of bogus discrepancies and lay me off within a month. Or better yet a combination of the above, secure in the knowledge they can get you to do almost anything they tell you to because fuck knows when you'll see work again if they do fire you. For instance, ask anyone working in eduction in England that's over 40 years old. They'll tell you the same. They have it even worse than most.

That's circumvented, of course, by this talk of "legal obligation", because legal obligation doesn't begin to cover anything beyond the crude and obvious, which suits the status quo beautifully. After all it doesn't recognise compulsion, which is really just a different, cuddlier way of forcing someone to do something you want, and for the love of all that's holy, god forbid it actually looks at ANYTHING within context - most of it is abstract nonsense for a reason after all. All this of course is compounded by the government, but the problem is most people see government as something entirely seperate from the market - even an enemy of it (a ludicrous thought). It's through the government that the major UK banking groups for example, robbed the British people so thorougly. Sure, each one of them was simply a "private enterprise" with no means to "legally obligate" you to do anything like give them your tax money for instance, but they still got my tax money regardless, didn't they? People compartmentalise these things too often, when the real world just clearly doesn't work that way. You get individuals (usually Americans, I've noticed) who stand up defending the rights of large corporate heads to keep the wealth they earn from the greedy hands of big, meddling government, while seemingly not realising that in actuality, the corporate heads like government. They love it to bits, and sure as hell don't want it to go away. It's under the auspices of the UK government for instance that the banking groups and manufacturers like BAE are able to supply terrorist groups with finances and equipment to turn a greater profit. It was under the watch of the Colombian government that Coca Cola was able to hire paramilitaries to make troublesome Union members "disappear."

So to round this back to your original question - I'm not really trying to say that the absence of legal obligation is not freedom - what I AM saying is that it's compartmentalising the issue squarely away from any larger context.

Okay, your true colors have been revealed. Anti-materialist anti-consumerist "enlightened" leftist. You're not bringing anything new to the table, and it's precisely because you look at the world as a singular entity, instead of countless sub-communities and situations, that you'll never do anything to effect real change. We don't need an overhaul of the fundamentals of society. Society works. People are able to live, work, and die in relative prosperity and in happiness. We are able to advance scientifically, culturally, economically, etc. within the framework of the current world order.

You want to throw that all away on the hunch that you've got this shit figured out, and that you can see the whole system for what it really is. Never mind the opinions of your uneducated lessers, or of the established academia, because their minds have been corrupted by corporate propaganda. Truly, you are our savior, and you can set the world on the right path.

Well, fuck that noise. Fuck trying to address "systemic flaws". That's just another way of saying "I don't like the way things are done". Fact is that the world as it is now is pretty damn good. We are moving forward and will continue to move in that direction, despite all of your proclamations of "exploitation" and "corporate oligarchy". Instead of trying to "fix" the entire fucking world, we can elect a government who will address the problems that exist within the system in which we actually live. We can tangibly affect the day-to-day lives of our fellows for the better, without throwing the entire world order aside. And hell, if you can actually get enough people on your side, you can make the ridiculous changes that you want. Despite the lamentations of leftists who claim that "bourgeois democracy" is no different than dictatorship, the fact remains that at the end of the day, the only thing preventing your candidate from success is the lack of votes.

So go on and bitch about how horrible things are and how stupid all of us worker bees are for ignoring the way in which we're being exploited by our corporate overlords. See how much good you do anyone.

The moral of the story is, YOU CAN"T TRUST THE SYSTEM!
MAAAAAN!!

That's how I picture LeninCat to look like.

He has a picture posted up somewhere. Or maybe I'm just remembering his stream.

Oh my, for a moment I thought this thread was still on topic. I nearly pass out!

You look like a pussy boy.

Calm down, Dick Barton.

When did I say any of that? You're one to talk about straw men. All I was pointing out was that your idea of freedom is full of holes. I get that you had this nice packaged rant ready to unleash at the earliest opportunity, and it's a good rant to be honest. Back when I used to hang around with the CPB (god forgive me - I was young and impressionable) I used to try and drill a similar message into their thick skulls that I'm not quite convinced were even aware the cold war was over, and that they'd lost. Look there's a difference between me pointing out the shitty way the world works and wanting to burn down parliament, waving red flags all over the place. Since, after all, like you said, what's the point if the alternative is to throw it away for North Korean levels of derpitude. It's just like Churchill once intimated - experience shows that private property is the worst system there is, but that there isn't another that could be better.

Really, you should've found a Maoist to try this out on. Or better yet, one of these crackheads. Would've worked better.

And you're such a pidgeon.