Slashdot Mirror
Chinese "Web Addicts" Get Boot Camp, Therapy
itwbennett writes "A large number of Chinese parents are finding their teenagers to be exhibiting such psychological symptoms as depression, antisocial behavior, and slipping grades. The cause: Internet addiction. World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike rank beside Chinese role-playing games as those that hook the most patients, says Tao Ran, the founder of a youth rehabilitation center on a Beijing army base. Online chat programs more often hook girls, who make up a handful of Tao's current 70 patients. The teens are subjected to a 'strict regimen of military drills, martial arts training, lectures and sessions with psychiatrists.' And, most importantly: no Internet."
Why am I surprised that such a banal comment got posted to Slashdot?
The addiction is hurting their intellectual and social progress. Is that their choice? Not while they are dependents.
How? I'd imagine that a ton more people are more severely addicted to TV, sports, books and activities considered "normal" than are "addicted" to MMOs. I'd imagine the guy who spends 6 hours a day playing WoW is better off then the guy who goes to the gym for 6 hours a day. As for social progress, its a lot more social to fire up a game of WoW and chat than it is to go to the gym. And intellectual? With WoW you are constantly reading and writing and doing math.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Spending 6 hours a day doing something does not make it an addiction. Suffering from depression because you aren't spending 6 hours a day doing something makes it an addiction (outside of sleeping and autonomous functions)
Spending time talking to people in Azeroth is not as socially healthy as talking to people face to face.
How many people can actually though on a daily basis talk to a good amount of friends face to face? Very few. There are a good deal of friends who either have strange schedules where we can't really meet (like one has a job a night so he has off when I'm working and when I'm done with work he is at work) so we use e-mail/social networking to communicate. Others simply live too far away to see on a regular basis. Aside from students who see a bunch of people they can really be friends with on a daily basis, most people have very few friends they can really meet face to face and so they communicate either via e-mail, texting or phone calls. Or is it just "unhealthy" to talk to people you haven't physically met?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You sound fat.
"That's because "rights" are an idea from western civilization, and most other cultures had different notions about justice and social harmony. Considering that over 40 million Chinese died during the "Great Leap Forward," and countless more before that in previous wars and revolutions, we don't have the same perspective on stability that they do."
The slashdot crowd draws hypercapitalist americans and their sympathizers, of course anything communist/china related anything that infringes on their own sense of cultural/ideological superiority is going to get their pants in a twist. Many slashdotters get tired of these idealogues who border on the fringe of nutterhood, immaturity, lack of life experience or all of the above.
The fact is slashdot draws a highly americanized crowd and americans and western people in general tend to have a puffed up image of themselves since most of them have no sense of their own bloody history, nor can they smell their own stench of taking any principle to the extremes (i.e. freedom vs recent economic meltdown). All people (even nerds sadly) tend to cling to simple ideologies because it takes a lot of hard slog and life experience and the school of hard knocks to see that the world is not an ideology, and due to the complexity and difficulty of accessing more difficult truths, and those truths take a lifetime or more to hammer out. But every ideologue is in a rush saying ".. we have the answer follow me!"
Sounds like something a fatty would say.
Jesus fucking Christ on a fucking pogo stick, I'm a troll for explaining that World of Warcraft is a video game and not a substitute for real life? What the fuck.