You're willing to sit on the sidelines while ISIS engages in a campaign of genocide and ethnic/religious cleansing? ...... They're barbarians and they need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

You're against ethnic/religious cleansing but want to "terminate with extreme prejudice" an entire very large group of people largely defined along ethnic and religious lines .........

words fail me

If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance and we'd have just as much (or probably more) squashing of individual liberties, but no longer any accountability to voters.

Isn't that a contradiction? I'd think a libertarian government would not want anyone, owners of large corporations included, to take over governance. That's kind of the definition of libertarianism, I thought.

Additionally, I'm having a hard time recalling the last occasion on which a company squashed my civil liberties. Actually I don't think it ever happened. Companies, even big ones, are typically very simple creatures compared to governments - they have simple needs and simple desires. Even companies that can't be easily reduced down to the profit motive (most obviously Google in this day and age) still have quite simple motivations, in their case "build sci fi stuff".

On the other hand, our awesome western governments routinely kill people for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time or receiving a text message from the "wrong" person (see: signature driven drone strikes).

Whilst these governments aren't quite at the stage of drone striking people who are physically in western countries yet, they certainly are willing to do lots of other nasty things, as residents of gitmo will attest. So given a choice between a government that did very little and mostly let corporations get on with it, or the current state of affairs, it's pretty hard to choose the current state of affairs given the very very low likelyhood of companies deciding to nuke people out of existence of their own accord.

There are many powerful players in society and I'm not one of them. Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?

No, it doesn't make you either of those things. It does mean you have a lot more faith in voting than other people do. This can be described as either very reasonable or perhaps naive, depending on where you live. E.g. in places like America or the UK voting is driven almost entirely by the economy and matters of foreign policy or the justice system have no impact on elections, politicians know that so they do more or less whatever they like. In places like Switzerland where there are referendums four times a year, preferring voting power to market power would make a lot more sense.

Vote this up, folks!

It's arguably obtaining money upon a false pretense, which is criminal. The false pretense is that such a fee is lawful, much like a clause in a contract that says "you agree to spin straw into gold or provide Rumplestiltskin your first-born". Illegal since, well, fairy-tales.

What a bunch of chumps. They should have followed the smart people and put their money into Star Citizen, which totally isn't a cult or Ponzi scheme.

Yes because eyeballs and "social" and disruptive. And data. At least that's what these fast growing startups are being valued for these days.

Rising costs are no surprise. There doesn't appear to be direct collusion between insurers, but there is no real competition either. Do you think an insurer would prefer to charge a €100 monthly premium to cover a €1000 average yearly medical bill, or charge €200 premium for a €2000 bill? And prices are further inflated by empire building, ie. setting up and staffing a bunch of auxiliary functions and services that are not directly related to healthcare (and in practise do not work to benefit health either)

Since everybody has mandatory insurance for a fixed package of health care items, what added value do the insurers actually have? There's a few things that are mentioned from time to time:
- efficiency in operation. State-run schemes are notoriously bureaucratic, but there's no indication that private insurers are any more efficient; on the contrary. Especially since there are multiple companies, each with separate administration and management.
- purchasing savvy. Again, there's no indication that they are better at buying care and medicine than, for instance, the New Zealand govt which managed to get a massive discount on medicine.
- value added services like fitness programmes, health awareness campaigns, etc. this amounts to little more than the aforementioned empire building, and appears to add very little value.
I'd much prefer the Dutch government to handle basic insurance themselves, leaving the insurance companies to handle additional insurance packages (additional dental, homeopathic, acupuncture etc). I'm no commie, but universal health care has clear benefits, and if it's truly universal and socialised, it's better to let the state run it instead of a (in case of Dutch health insurance) dysfunctional market.

That used to be how we built hospitals and paid for road improvements: they're called things like "local business improvement areas".

More correctly, they want to control the news. One man controlled roughly 1/3 of the news at one point, and pushed for his preferred party and leader. The leader face-planted on a seadoo and the party had to do an unfriendly takeover of another party (mine!) to get into power. The newspaper chain in question is barely alive any more.

Odd, all three parties at various times said the CRTC was in bed with the big corporations. The current government genuinely hit them with a clue-stick, mind you!

Right now, the government needs votes, and telecom behaviour has annoyed a large enough minority that they're worth campaigning to. Pitching to minorities has been a priority for the government since they got in, as they previously had been criticised as being composed entirely of white western farmers and oilmen.

He's probably on Rogers, where all of the above is trivially true.

Firstly no one's forced anything on anyone.

I'm sorry, you're right, that's a huge difference. It's like getting mad that some guy is publicly "considering" raping someone. It's not the same as actual rape.

Moving the goalpost? You'd first have to make a counter-argument for that. Unless you're actually asserting that governments never engage in nanny-state boondoggles over trivial issues, which is laughable.

No, the goalposts have stayed put, but I have scored two touchdowns. You conceded that the feminist concerns over sexism in video games are trivial:

This argument is even more trivial than what they're doing and yet here you are.

and now you just implicitly agreed that "forcing" sexism labels on video games is bad thing, by telling me they haven't actually done it yet, as if I were overstating the grievance.

Apparently you're allowed to do pointeless, trivial things yourself but they are not. Hypocrite!

Let me know when a first world government takes up one of my hobbies and forces it on an industry. 'Cause that would be awesome!

I hope it is SETI. Fuckin' Proxmire ruined SETI. We need a tax on sci-fi movies to fund SETI.

Are you basically saying that these people should go out and stop abortion clinics being closed rather than do sociology?

The fact that you believe their whining about video games constitutes a science is not flattering to that science.

I'm saying that all the sexism in all the video games ever made has not hurt women more than the closing of any single abortion clinic where a clinic is needed. How much more explicitly do I need to state it?

And you know it is true. You won't deny it, because you would be a pretty shitty "ally" for feminism if you dismissed actual suffering in favor of internet feels suffering.

And I'm not telling them what they should be doing, I'm demonstrating how vacuous their cause is, how duplicitous their motives are, for focusing on something so utterly trivial in the grand scheme of things. They do not actually care about the plight of women, they care about the promotion of an ideology and an identity that hijacks the plight of women to fuel their ego gratification.

People have a right to make sexist video games. People have a right to play sexist video games. So what do they hope to accomplish by creating a lynch mob mentality over video games? It won't even stop sexist video games from being made. What it does do is give them an excuse to pat themselves on the back, claim credit when some studio or some website is a cajoled into appeasing them. They are petty tyrants looking for power to wield.