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All Video Games Cause Aggressive Behavior, Say Two US Congressmen
Fluffeh writes with news that U.S. Congressmen Baca (D-CA) and Wolf (R-VA) have proposed a bill that would require most video games to have a warning label decrying their "potential damaging" long-term effects on children.
"Under the one-page Violence in Video Games Labeling Act (PDF), packaging for all video games except those rated 'EC' for Early Childhood would be required to prominently display a message reading: 'WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.' The proposed label would be required even if the video game in question is not violent."
I was thinking something close to this at least...more along the lines of "morons that hold public office has been linked to aggressive behavior"
Seriously, when you consider just how outrageously fucked up the USA & world are right now...this is the dumbest shit to be wasting time on I can almost think of. Hopefully the voters in their districts see it the same way. Not fucking likely, but I could hope.
Of course this is bipartisan douchebaggery too. Morons.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
No matter how many sings you put up, the general public WILL NOT READ THEM. You have "No Solicitor" signs, yet you still get people trying to sell you stuff. You put up "No Outside Food Or Drink", yet you still get people bringing it in. You put health warnings on Cigarettes yet people still buy them (because they don't care). These signs won't do anything that the ESRB labeling system hasn't done already. These Congressmen are trying to score political points by doing nothing.
WARNING: Exposure to X has been linked to aggressive behavior.'
x ==
movies
TV
playgrounds
school
religious texts
alcohol
relationships
capitalism
life
No kidding! Cause we ALL know that video games caused all the atrocities of World War I and World War II, right? ... OH WAIT. SOME people are inherently violent -- the "medium" they use to express that is irrelevant !
Don't you love how every generation just has to blame X for what it doesn't understand?
e.g.
'40 Dancing
'50 Soul Music
'60 Rock N Roll
'70 Drugs
'80 DnD
'90 Video Games
'00 Guns / Homosexuality
Obviously the list isn't 100 accurate, but you get the point.
What a bunch of fuck tards.
These two bozos are Congressmen, which means they stand for election this year just like every other Congressman. But instead of standing up for a real issue, they're playing it safe and grandstanding for the voters. Do they really believe this bullshit? Probably not. Do they really care? Not about this, they don't. If it goes through, they get to stand up and say 'Hey, I DID something on The Hill besides taking campaign contributions from *AA! I made a DIFFERENCE!' If this bill tanks, they get to stand up and say 'Hey, I TRIED, but those damned politicians voted me down. Vote for me again this year so I can go back to The Hill and try again. Think of the children! Think of my paycheck!! I don't wanna get a real job!!'
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
And let's not forget sports. When are one of these clowns going to ask for a ban on high school football? College football? Never? Of course not, despite the towering mass of evidence that demonstrates that this is a major source of violence in our society. This is not about violence, this is about being a demagogue, which means pounding upon minorities for the benefit of majorities. And who gives a fuck about nerds, right? Jocks rule the world, still, so football gets a pass.
This is all bullshit.
It is also important to gauge this as a per capita rate.
Eg, if you have a 1% rate, you have a 1% chance that any given student will go apeshit and shoot people.
If you have 100 students, the chance it will happen is now statistically very relevent, as at least one of them will go apeshit by the numbers.
If you cram 1000 in, you now have 10 shooters.
Other contributory factors that are not accounted for: degree of student disciplinary action over time. Degree of broken family life as percentage of student population. Degree of truancy enforcement. Degree of personal libery violation of students over time.
I do believe that you will see a statistical rise in the basic rate of becoming a shooter over time, when adjusted for increased population sizes.
I believe you will also find correlations between disciplinary activity (including the use of metal detectors, drug dogs, etc.) of the school and the schools which produced shooters, vs the schools that didn't; between the truancy enforcement of the same; and against home income and homelife quality of the student populations of the same.
Correlation does not prove causation. That is what experimentation is for.
Find schools with a high shooter rate, do the unthinkable and remove the dogs, the metal detectors, and the draconian zero tolerance rules, and see if there is a net reduction of school shooting statistics.
It is my personal hypothesis that shooters resort to shooting when other methods of resolving violent problems cannot be explored. (Eg, you get mugged for lunch money by a bully? In the 40s and 50s, you manned up and broke the bully's nose. He stopped trying to shake you down for lunch money after that. These days, doing so will land you in juvenile detention. The only avenue provided is the completely impotent 'tell a teacher' option. The teachers are afraid to take action, should poor, misunderstood snowflake bully boy get punished and feel bad. As such, they say they need proof that bully boy is shaking you down for lunch money. They forbid the use of electronic monitoring and recording devices, except for their own, so that isn't an option. It is impossible to prove that the bully is taking your money, and that you aren't abusing the system to bully the poor misunderstood snowflake, and so you have no choice but to simply take it. Add insult to injury, you get screened daily for contraband and have armed retacops in the hallway as morale deteriorates and people start snapping. Eventually, you can't take it anymore. You would have just punched the little bitch years ago, but the thought of going to jail was undesirable. Now you don't care. In for a penny, in for a pound, you bring a gun to school to end the problem permanently. The penalty is the same as if you punched him: jail time.)
Basically, I would say american schools are throwing petrol on the fire by trying to "enforce" safety through threat of violence (what else does an armed security guard represent?), through the threat of severe recrimination for petty offenses (suspension for drawing a man with a gun? Really?), and through complete and total beurocratic inaction that repeatedly screws over and endangers students (gotta protect the school from those sue happy parents of joey the bully! He's a snowflake!).
If anything, simulated violence in a safe venue like video games is thereputic, and not deleterious.
If you widen your statistical comparison to include the same set of comparisons I suggested above to include sample sets from other countries, (human children are human children, regardless of nation) I suspect the correlation between extreme student violence and extreme school imposed penalties and hightened school security would really stand out prominently.
From my post:
Cigarette warning labels (displayed on an actually harmful product) are not effective
From your link:
knowledge of warning labels on cigarette packages and advertisements is not associated with reduced smoking
We should elect officials and representatives through a system like how we do juries. Picking randomly from the populace would make it nigh impossible to lock down a large enough portion of the government through corruption. It would make surveillance of officials easier. Which makes me think that another easy thing would be to put all of congress and the pres on 24/7 surveillance.
Take the Red Pill.
Actually the platform he proposed is essentially socialist libertarianism. Except without the government-by-consensus model (which no politician would support since it would put them out of a job).
But that you see some parallels is not surprising. Socialist and capitalist libertarianism (a version of it that does not exist anywhere outside the US and is less than a century old so really "libertarian" ought to imply the 500 year old socialist version) only really differ on one aspect.
That said - my problem with right libertarians (or American Libertarians rather) is more deep. In theory we completely agree on civil liberties. The American libertarian party is on record as saying "we support the Republican party on economic matters but the democratic party on civil matters."
So why the fuck do American libertarians keep voting republican ? Surely civil liberties is MORE important than economic liberty ? Regardless of which definition of economic liberty you subscribe to ? Surely then American libertarians - having decided that at the ballot you can only vote for half of what you want, are consistently choosing the less important half ? Voting for the party that's pro-censorship, pro-war and pro-religion-in-government because you agree with their tax-plan is, as far as I'm concerned, not libertarian AT ALL nor compatible with ANY variant there-off.
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So say we all