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Appeals Court Strikes Down California's Violent Game Ban
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has struck down as unconstitutional a California statute purporting to ban the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. In a 30-page decision (PDF), in Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger, the federal appeals court ruled that 'the Act, as a presumptively invalid content based restriction on speech, is subject to strict scrutiny and not the 'variable obscenity' standard from Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968). Applying strict scrutiny, we hold that the Act violates rights protected by the First Amendment because the State has not demonstrated a compelling interest, has not tailored the restriction to its alleged compelling interest, and there exist less-restrictive means that would further the State's expressed interests. Additionally, we hold that the Act's labeling requirement is unconstitutionally compelled speech under the First Amendment because it does not require the disclosure of purely factual information; but compels the carrying of the State's controversial opinion.'"
This was a really good ruling. Leave censorship to the parents. There has been yet to prove a direct corollation between violent behvior and video games. Some studies have shown that operrant conditioning is happening where video game players may overcome the natural inhibition to kill. However, this theory fails to explain why most people that play violent video games do not go out and act like that in the real world. Behavioral science, while fascinating, is inexact at best. Legislating people's actions based on an inexact science is never a very good idea.
I don't think the GP was arguing that the lifting of the ban is bad, it's just a curious double standard. I've never understood the US (and increasingly UK) regulators' belief that violence is good and sex is bad. I have far more sympathy for the continental European tendency to view sex as good and violence as bad (even if -- or perhaps because -- it does lead to the French tendency when confronted with a war to say "f*** it...").
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
And you both could not be more wrong. While many states at the time of the American Revolution relied on slavery for their economy, many of the founding fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson) sought to abolish it. They were certainly aware that blacks could be the intellectual and educational equals of whites, because they met some such people in business and from African nations.
Some of the founding fathers would be delighted at how far Mr. Obama has come, and see it as a vindication of their dreams of liberty and justice for all.
It's amusing how naive and anachronistic people can be about the thoughts and feelings of people over 200 years ago, especially given that the issues of race and slavery have been so conflated by modern interpretations of history.
Slavery had virtually nothing to do with race in antiquity, Aristotle considered it to be nothing more than the bottom tier of a meritocracy. The Bible spoke of slavery as a social position to be endured rather than reformed (an attitude that the South latched onto with both hands of course) with no mention of race. The Romans were probably the slavin'-est bitches around, having no qualms about putting every ethnicity they could find under the yoke, including their own. Funny how all the honkies the Romans enslaved didn't whine about being victims for centuries. Instead, when the Roman empire showed weakness they kicked the shit out of it and moved on with their lives. (Albeit into the darkest period of recorded history, but that's neither here nor there.)
All of this is important because the founding fathers were obsessed with antiquity, both directly and through the rehashing of other thinkers from the Renaissance and Enlightenment (if anybody is interested the topic is well covered in Morton White's Philosophy of the American Revolution). Anyway, point is slavery has a history before racism and is not inherently racist. Racism itself is a completely modern abstraction. Every culture on earth has some history of ethnocentrism, only through comparison and synthesis can values be assigned to decide which culture might actually deserve to feel superior. But from the inside of a culture looking out, another culture is almost invariably 'the barbarians and/or heathens'. Only in the West is there enough white guilt to have significantly mitigated that impulse. It sure as hell is alive and well in Asia. I would wager it's harder for a non-Korean to marry into a Korean family than it is for a black person to marry into a white family in the US. (Speaking from experience on the latter.)
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit