Peegee
is a blitzball legend
Your very own Pikachu!
Banned

Mostly just you and Kishi and sometimes MILF.

I might have my free Disneyland sign-ins by November!

American politics is getting so ridiculously stupid that this is looking like an increasingly pleasant idea

I'm not being an asshole! You're being a creeper.

November?? I have no idea if I'll even be alive in November.

Taking after The Leviathan, of course, government - perhaps society itself, more properly - is essentially supposed to be a system where you give up certain rights in exchange for the protection/provision of others. I can't sell you refined uranium, but I do get treatment if I get cancer, for example. This runs into problems because it tends to make the presumption of agreement on the part of those born into a given society, and given that we don't have global free movement and open borders there's not much alternative if you don't, but fundamentally that's the principle here. Of course given laws all have their own nuances and stuff so blanket statements are of only limited use!

I don't think a government can grant a freedom in the sense of creating a legitimate thing you can do that didn't exist before. Obviously if they rescind laws preventing something being done then they're 'granting' a freedom, but many would consider it restoring one which was unjustly suppressed before. Of course that relates to negative freedoms. When it comes to positive rights it's a bit trickier, because they are a more contested idea in the first place, and they are much more difficult to actually implement - Don't imprison people for saying stuff vs. Providing healthcare to all, for example.

Oh god, and you're actually commenting on all their trout. Just when I thought you had reached max creepy level.

I like how most of those are "How Not to Immediately Flip Your trout When Your Kid is smurfing Around."

*way more things about most of the English-speaking governments bother me than about certain non-English speaking governments, mainly in northern Europe.

I think it varies country to country. Some countries in EU have completely government health care (UK is one I think), some countries have mostly private (France is one). I think others are somewhat in between. My dad had to visit the hospital while we were in Belgium and it was awesome, way better health care than we get here and for much less.

I kind of want to leave this country once and for all because even paying into the U.S. war machine bothers me (even if my taxes after refunds make up a drop in the bucket) but it's where my family and most of my friends are, and moving to another country where I may not even know the language* scares me. Occupy is a step in the right direction as far as people starting to stand up to the government-industrial complex but it has its flaws as well, and I'm not even sure it'll be enough. There is too much money trying to turn this country into a police state.

Would be nice if people didn't need smurfing cars in the first place but this is the U.S., apparently we can't have a decent train system because freedom.

Depends on the proposal but usually. I would have it replace almost everything except things like health care where the price is unpredictable, unevenly distributed, and not accountable to personal merit. Those things would be subsidised separately by taxes along the lines of the French model, which is free market but subsidised by taxes. I can't think of anything else that would go along those lines except maybe education, but there might be something that I haven't thought of.