Slashdot Mirror
Looking at Video Games and Violence
rootrider writes "Mark Rahner of the Seattle Times has written a great article discussing the recent trend here in the US to outlaw the purchase of violent video games by minors. I'm sure articles have been written in the past that refute the idea that video games lead to violence, but this is the first mainstream article I've seen that details the issue and does it well." The trend isn't really that new. In the past, Ozzy Osbourne and Dungeons and Dragons have been favorite scapegoats, and when I was in high school it was gangsta rap music. I can't wait until we can attribute violence to the nightly news.
Here is a simple illustration. Let us take a shoemaker who owned a tiny workshop, but who, unable to with stand the competition of the big manufacturers, closed his workshop and took a job, say, at Adelkhanov's shoe factory in Tiflis. He went to work at Adelkhanov's factory not with the view to becoming a permanent wage-worker, but with the object of saving up some money, of accumulating a little capital to enable him to reopen his workshop. As you see, the position of this shoemaker is already proletarian, but his consciousness is still non-proletarian, it is thoroughly petty-bourgeois. In other words, this shoemaker has already lost his petty-bourgeois position, it has gone, but his petty-bourgeois consciousness has not yet gone, it has lagged behind his actual position.
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Clearly, here too, in social life, first the external conditions change, first the conditions of men change and then their consciousness changes accordingly.
But let us return to our shoemaker. As we already know, he intends to save up some money and then reopen his workshop. This proletarianised shoemaker goes on working, but finds that it is a very difficult matter to save money, because what he earns barely suffices to maintain an existence. Moreover, he realises that the opening of a private workshop is after all not so alluring: the rent he will have to pay for the premises, the caprices of customers, shortage of money, the competition of the big manufacturers and similar worries -- such are the many troubles that torment the private workshop owner. On the other hand, the proletarian is relatively freer from such cares; he is not troubled by customers, or by having to pay rent for premises. He goes to the factory every morning, "calmly " goes home in the evening, and as calmly pockets his "pay" on Saturdays. Here, for the first time, the wings of our shoemaker's petty-bourgeois dreams are clipped; here for the first time proletarian strivings awaken in his soul.
Time passes and our shoemaker sees that he has not enough money to satisfy his most essential needs, that what he needs very badly is a rise in wages. At the same time, he hears his fellow-workers talking about unions and strikes. Here our shoemaker realises that in order to improve his conditions he must fight the masters and not open a workshop of his own. He joins the union, enters the strike movement, and soon becomes imbued with socialist ideas. . .
Thus, in the long run, the change in the shoemaker's material conditions was followed by a change in his consciousness: first his material conditions changed, and then, after a time, his consciousness changed accordingly.
Well, it's not the oil!
For another, we have long demonstrated that as long as we get our oil, we could care less about the people. Three of the top five nations the United States currently imports its oil from are Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria. All have either major environmental problems from oil, political turmoil, or both.
Nigeria has exported $300 billion in oil since 1975. But the Niger River delta has been fouled with slicks, acid rain, and leaking pipes that have caught fire, exploded, and killed hundreds of people. Human rights activists have been killed, mothers have held protests, and the people in the delta remain so poor that they sneak around to collect leaking oil in buckets. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds, if not at least 2,000, people have been killed by the Nigerian military in a combination of ethnic strife and repression in the delta over the last three years.
This week, in the wake of another month of fighting, Human Rights Watch wrote Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo to urge him to stop the violence. The organization also wrote to the Nigerian officials of Shell and Chevron, asking them to protect their workers. Others have long asked them to improve working conditions. But life for the people of the delta still moves at a crawl while our auto racers roar into the pit stop for another guzzle. While spectators at race tracks bask in the sun, the per capita income of Nigeria has fallen by two-thirds in the last quarter century.
A 2002 report on the impact of oil development by Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment cited the Mexican state of Tabasco for generating $130 billion in oil revenues over 20 years yet remaining the ninth-poorest state in the country. ''Unregulated oil extraction has escalated living costs, skewed income distribution, forced relocations, and led to hazardous living conditions,'' the report said. ''The release of toxic substances and disruption of water supplies have damaged crops and depleted fish populations. Studies performed in the area . . . indicate that cancer and leukemia are increasing in all age groups in Tabasco, with the highest leukemia incidences reported in areas immediately surrounding petroleum production sites.''
Even if you were for the war, there is no guarantee that the US victory will mean anything for the people of Iraq unless President Bush, having gone this far, is prepared to do the very nation-building that he said he was not going to do as a candidate. All the prowar experts say it's no problem, that Iraq sits on so much oil that it will eventually be a very wealthy country. But when Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Meyers all say the same thing while not asking Americans to change our behavior, the question remains dangerously open. Is Iraq's oil for the Iraqi people or is it really for our interstates and the Indianapolis 500?
(the USA being the only country in the world that has been convicted of terrorism by an international court of law)
it's in my head