This entire discussion is completely pointless. The ESRB can keep rating whatever games they want as long as game publishers support them.
And people have forgotten the reason we rate movies, TV, and games with voluntary ratings is that there are 1st amendment issues if the government were to step in, so no one can make the video game people use any rating system at all, and the fact they already have a system would make it much harder to overcome the 1st amendment issues, as the courts tend to find for the 'least restrictive' means.
And, no, a few supposed 'issues' aren't going to cut it, when these 'issues' are, respectively, some sexual content in a game rated for 17 year-olds, and Ken and Barbie nudity in a game for kids. (You know, kids can actually buy Ken and Barbie dolls. With a few mods to the actual dolls, they can be a lot more obscene than The Sims.) If there was massive abuse where hardcore porn was rated E, possibly the courts would allow the government to step in, but there isn't.
It's possible that someone could step in with an extra rating, and either get it on the box or issue labels to stores to put on the box. However...who is going to pay for that? The game publishers already have a system they pay for, they're not getting another.
This whole article is an excersize in mental masturbation. There is no 'hugely lucrative contract' that someone can 'win'. People who make games, of their own free will, send the games off to be rated. No one makes them do that, no one can make them use another service. ESRB doesn't even have to fight these people.
And this idiot who thinks he can use 'differing community standards' to fight them is, well, an idiot. That's obscenity he's thinking of, and that has nothing to do with what kids can be exposed to. That's stuff that is so bad it can just be outlawed, period, and no video game, not even Hot Coffee, would qualify. Almost no hardcore porn qualifies.
If he thinks there is some law that forbids labeling a game for children and putting the word 'shit' in it if the community doesn't approve of that, he's sadly mistaken.
EC should be '0' (Note that means 'okay for a 0 year old to attempt to play', not that they actually have the skills.) and E should be 7 or whatever. (Not that I'm entirely sure what sort of themes a 'toddler' would understand that would be inappropiate for them, but not for a 'child'.)
Actually, '0' is confusing, and that should actually say 'all ages' instead of having an age.
And your list points out the stupidity of having an M and an AO rating. Look, just pick one. The idea that there is a whole range of games that it is okay for 18-year olds to see but not 17-year olds is idiotic.
That is an example of copying the dumbest feature of the movie rating system, the R and the NC-17 ratings,and has resulted in exactly the same thing: AO-rated games are not put on the shelf anywhere, and thus even adults cannot get them.
To hell with that, stand up to Walmart, don't dumb the games aimed at adults down by trying to get M instead of AO. If they're going to censor you, force them to draw the line at 'inappropriate for kids'. Don't make up an imaginary line that's further than that...nothing is inappropriate for adults.
I don't know why you think the original poster throught Apu was Muslim.
He was just assuming that they do not have large quantities of Hindus working convenience stores in Arab areas. As many places that have Arabs and Hindus living side by side seem to be...annoyed by this situtation, it might not be anywhere near as funny.
This is assuming they have things like convenience stores in Arab areas, which I actually seem to remember from somewhere that they do.
And you think Muslims have a problem with root beer? Huh?
Just because it has the word 'beer' in it doesn't make it beer, and just because it has the word beer in it in English doesn't mean it has the word beer in it in Farsi or whatever languange they're translating to.
Re:ITP I fix the typo from the parent post:
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Homer Becomes Omar
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I don't think it makes any sense, anyway.
Is the same stuff that's subversive in America subversive in Arab counties?
There a fine line between offensive and subversive, and you can't just 'move' the line in an already 'filmed' TV show. You'd have to completely cut the subversion, and that's what many people are wrongly afraid of.
But the real problem is that 'subversive' doesn't really make any sense if the cultural context aren't there.
For example, think of the Paul McCarty episode where Lisa becomes a vegatarian. Unlike what some people think, they don't actually have a moral problem with eating pig, it's just 'unclean'. However...do they have vegetarians? And, just as importantly, will they get the 'flying pig' joke?
I know they won't get any of the political jokes, or any of the Christian jokes. (Not even the Arab Christians.) Or Mr. Burns, or Bumblebee Man, or Krusty, or Wiggins...
What, really, is the point? Without the cultural jabs, the Simpsons isn't funny at all. (Which is why it's gotten less and less funny.)
Yeah, but those groups aren't dangerous, because very few people will honestly stand up and say 'adults shouldn't be able to buy games with certain stuff in them'.
They're doing about as well as people trying to put Playboy out of business. Even the most conservative person will hem and haw when asked if Playboy should be completely illegal. They'll talk about selling it only in adult stores or behind the counter or whatever, but will stop short of 'no one should ever be able to buy it'.
Without the 'Won't somebody think of the children?!?!' plea, no one will get on board. Almost everyone who does so is either a) clearly a nutcase, or b) not had game ratings explained to them and are a bit too gullible. And the later people never stick around long when they discover that kids can't, in fact, buy GTA.
Jack, OTOH, is dangerous, because he's a lawyer, and thinks the way to stop violent video games is to sue people who make them, and he's not afraid of lying, like his current attempt at talking about how mods and hacks can fall outside the ratings.
Did he really claim they were all communists? In his speeches, he said that the 205 were security risks, and that he had the names of 57 who were members of or who supported the communist party.
Yes, he occasionally claimed he had a list of 205 communists, despite that fact that some of them had been put on the list by the FBI for, for example, drinking problems or blackmailable reasons. He was actually tried for prejury because of that, later on.
And he constantly harped about how Communists were setting the State Department agenda, which was completely unrelated to the issue of security risks.
See, your interpetation makes sense...if this had been the only time he'd done this. McCarthy screamed communist for political gain repeatedly. He'd done it before, and he did it again later.
At some point in time, he discovered a list of possible security risks working at the State Department, compiled by the FBI. Some of the names were there because of communist connections. He immediately started talking about how communists were shaping policy at the State Department, which was a completely absurd charge, and it went downhill from there.
As for not naming names, you can either think that was because he didn't want to screw up people's lives, except, of course, he did eventually name names. Or you can think he just wanted to make it harder to disprove his list at that time.
And your two of your examples are insane. Philip Jessup was cleared of all charges by State Department's Loyalty Security Board, so even your claims the Tydings Committee was a whitewash leave you with no support of your idea he was actually a security risk. He's one of the few people who actually stayed put and said 'prove it'. John Stewart Service was dismissed as a security risk by the Loyalty Security Board, but sued and was cleared and reinstated.
Owen Lattimore, OTOH, is a prime example of why you never answer questions under oath, as he was cleared of everything by Tydings but arrested for perjury because he'd denied he'd ever promoted communism. (However, he certainly was a security risk, on of the few actual ones.)
It looks like these people, unlike some people in recent memory, actually had good lawyers. And, no matter how you want to think otherwise, refusing to answer questions under oath because they might incriminate you is not solely restricted to the guilty, it's also true of people who are pissed off and people who are worried you're trying to trap them in perjury, both of which would describe this bunch.
And the Senate can grant immunity to people, and force them to testify. It did not.
And none of these people ever got charged with any crime, so it wasn't someone else who 'discovered' them. Let me repeat that for you, as that seems to be the sticking point: None of the people on his list were charged with espionage. None of them were 'spies', or, if they were, we never learned it.
And considering we had a damn list of them, who refused to answer the question, it seems rather unlikely we'd have missed them if they were. Normally, spies have to, you know, operate in secret.
See, that was the thing. McCarthy got a list of POSSIBLE SECURITY RISKS. Not known security risks, not known communists, but possible security risks, which other people had already looked at and decided were okay.
He then hauled them in front of the Senate and ask them if they were spies, when he had no evidence whatsoever of that. They were all found innocent of being spies and real security risks.
At which point the State Department, left with these hot potatos, managed to get rid of many of them.
And, hell, a few of them probably should have been removed. That doesn't justify this whole thing. He went about it in a total political and self-serving way, dragging these people into the spotlight and screwing up their life, ranting about 'Communists shaping policy' when the real issue was 'This person probably should not be trusted with secret info, because they have a drinking problem/links to communist organizations/are gay and can be blackmailed'.
What should he have done? Well, either the Senate had the authority to force the State Department to follow certain standards, and should have actually passed a law doing so, or it didn't have the authority, and they should have stayed away. (I honestly don't know which is true.)
No, I don't have to show that, because only a few of those people were actually 'dismissed' for being security risks. (And I don't know where you go 'innocent' from. None of them were found guilty of anything.)
The rest were, like I said, hounded out of their job by internal investigations that didn't go anywhere.
Children should not be able to directly purchase hyperviolent/sexually charged video games just as they cannot legally directly purchase pornography. If a parent is willing to let their kid play those kinds of games, then let the parent purchase the game. At least that way they have *some* idea of what their kids are up to.
That battle got won, like, five years ago, with video game ratings.
Which is why most of the people left 'the fight' and the sane ones are out there are just promoting awareness of game ratings and the fact that some games are in actual fact complete inappropriate for children, no matter if they ask for them. Occasionally they'll make a few attempts to move highly rated games to a seperate area in a store, or restrict where games can be advertised, but they aren't trying to censor games. They're mostly harmless and well-intentioned people who are convinced nudity and violent is worse for kids than most of us, but they aren't going to harm us or video games.
Jacko, on the other hand, rants and raves about lawsuits and connecting games to any recent violent event. He wants to hold people 'responsible'.
And tries to make the Hot Coffee hack, and, now that he's learned about them, other user hacks to games, infamously The Sims, out to be a way that game designers are cheating the ratings.
OTOH, we need to be nicer to him, because he's thinks that you can see the genitalia of naked characters in The Sims, and I think we can draw from that the logical conclusion of what he sees when he takes off his clothes. Hey, man, we're sorry about your condition. They have support groups for people like you, whether it was an accident or some genetic condition.
List some lives he destroyed. Go on, try to find some names. This is another one of those urban legends about McCarthy. You won't find much.
There are 81 people on his list who were cleared by the Senate's Tydings Committee, who were then hounded out of their job by an internal witchhunt in the State Department that was a direct result of McCarthy's actions. 81.
Many people he questioned were clearly spies, communists, or covering for others who were.
And, apparently, no other member of Congress could see this, because they cleared every single one as not being a security risk.
Look, we all realize that stupid people get him and HUAC mixed up. That doesn't change the fact that his 'list' amounted to nothing, and did, in fact, screw up the lives of quite a few people, who got tainted by the label of 'communist' and got let go or forced to resign from the State Department after being legally cleared.
I don't know where you got your history lesson from.
He did have a list of 205 apparent security risks. (Not all communists, as he claimed occasionally. Only about half were even possibly communists.)
However, none of the people that had been identified as possible communists by him were identified as security risks by the Tydings Committe.
After they were cleared, the State Department started an internal witchhunt called the State Department's Loyalty Security Board and hounded many of them out of a job or dismissed them for made up reasons.
And, yes, after his little attack, more people who were apparent security risks were thrown out. Whether this helped anything or not is debatable.
Anyway, McCarthy's list was completely bogus. Every person was cleared by Congress, every one of them, as non-security risks.
Let's see, you leap to the assumption that I was leaping to assumptions about what you thought and I was incorrectly correcting you, so you decided to 'correct' me?
Is that about it?
You see, I didn't correct you, because you didn't say anything wrong. I just said PA was two people, which is exactly as true as your statement, and you went and actually did what you were accusing me of.
Remember, folks, with sex, you get what you pay for. Don't trust that free sex.
And you're crazy if you think sexual activity among young people has dropped the last decade. Becoming sexually active has been slightly deferred by a year or two over the past decade, with less 15 and 16 year olds but the same amount of 17 and 18 year olds, and the teen pregnancies drop is mainly due to better use and understanding of contraceptives.
And oral sex has skyrocketed, which isn't showing up because many teenagers aren't even counting it as sex. Also contributing to the lack of pregnancies.
The fact that teenagers now have oral sex when 15 and intercourse at 17 instead of just starting off with the intercourse at 15 is probably not the great moral stance you seem to think it is.
This guy is really hurting the people who actually are sane people yet stupidly trying to censor videogames. His ranting can't but help.
BTW, before anyone starts claiming such a position is not stupid...this war was already won. By you guys. We have ratings on game, they are not sold to young children.
And thus the 'movement', at least the hollow shell of idiots it left behind, are reduced to complaining about how stupid parents buy games for kids anyway and all sorts of crap, like how a game for 17 year olds has sex in it if you hack it, and should be for 18 year olds, when of course 17 year olds can rent R-rated movies.
Jack is just at the far end of this, and willing to show up in public and actually sue people over it. He helps expose the whole thing for the idiocy it is.
In exactly what universe does GTA train you for anything?
That made some sense when applied to DOOM. It made even more sense when applied to games like Unreal with stragety. Teaching you how to aim and not get shot and whjen to snipe from, etc.
GTA, OTOH, teachs you nothing. Admittedly, I haven't played it in like four years, so I'm like two games behind, but let's see what it teachs you:
You do not learn how to steal a car, beyond the obvious carjacking, which anyone with a working brain can figure out. You do not lean how to hotwire one or get a locked one open.
You do not learn how to aim and fire guns, unless they've added some FPSing to a recent game. Aiming a gun in the third person is entirely different than actually aiming in real life, and you can take a lot more damage than is realistic.
You do not learn how to flee from the police, unless the game has gotten a lot more realistic. Transposing thirty minutes the sort of crime spree you can do in the game into real life would result in all sorts of hassles. Unlike the game, you can't just duck out of sight and get a new car and keep going after taking out a few cops.
You also cannot get health from hookers to recover. This is just obviously wrong.
You cannot steal vehicles like taxis and firetrucks and just randomly do their job. This is an incredibly stupid idea.
With the Hot Coffee hack, it may teach you to be better in the sack, but I rather doubt it.
GTA doesn't train anyone for anything Whether it encourages all sorts of anti-social behavior is a meaningfull question, but it doesn't show you how to do any of it.
The facts indicate that people born to extremely poor parents are more likely to be criminals than other people. This actually a fairly obvious conclusion, known for millennia.
A way to reduce crime, therefore, is to reduce the people born to extremely poor people. There are ethical and unethical ways to do this.
The ethical way is rather obvious: Stop people from being extremely poor.
However, the entire theory is screwy. Legalized abortion didn't result in less poor people having children, it managed to result in them having more.
And you can't look at the crime rate of X1 year olds in year Y1 and compare it to X1 year olds in year Y2, or X2 year olds in year Y1, and get anything meaningful out of it. Different types of crime went up and down, probably almost completely due to drugs.
Ergo, while the concept 'poor people cause more crime' is sound, the basis for it in the book isn't. Abortion did no such thing, mainly because it didn't actually reduce the amount of poor people.
In fact, you can't reduce them that way. The size of the underclass is completely unrelated to the amount of people born into it, it's due to the structure of society. We could run in and kidnap every poor baby and raise them in a rich family (Surely more ethical than killing them.) and the next higher class would simply shift down a notch when they lost their jobs.
Anything else is akin to trying to save yourself from quicksand by pulling out the leg that's in the deepest. That can't possibly work. The only way to reduce the size of a class of society is to restructure society, or at least shift the structure a bit.
Being poor just means that your children are more likely to fill the job of 'poor' . If they do not, someone else will. (And, thus, they are more likely to be criminals.)
McCarthy didn't know them. He ran around yelling about how he had a list, and it was entirely bogus.
In fact, that probably hindered the whole commie-tracking in the government, which needed doing. (As opposed to the commie-tracking in Hollywood, which was just idiotic.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have not watched the Simpsons in a good two years. (Although I did catch the end of the rerun of the musical clip show the other day.)
This entire discussion is completely pointless. The ESRB can keep rating whatever games they want as long as game publishers support them.
And people have forgotten the reason we rate movies, TV, and games with voluntary ratings is that there are 1st amendment issues if the government were to step in, so no one can make the video game people use any rating system at all, and the fact they already have a system would make it much harder to overcome the 1st amendment issues, as the courts tend to find for the 'least restrictive' means.
And, no, a few supposed 'issues' aren't going to cut it, when these 'issues' are, respectively, some sexual content in a game rated for 17 year-olds, and Ken and Barbie nudity in a game for kids. (You know, kids can actually buy Ken and Barbie dolls. With a few mods to the actual dolls, they can be a lot more obscene than The Sims.) If there was massive abuse where hardcore porn was rated E, possibly the courts would allow the government to step in, but there isn't.
It's possible that someone could step in with an extra rating, and either get it on the box or issue labels to stores to put on the box. However...who is going to pay for that? The game publishers already have a system they pay for, they're not getting another.
This whole article is an excersize in mental masturbation. There is no 'hugely lucrative contract' that someone can 'win'. People who make games, of their own free will, send the games off to be rated. No one makes them do that, no one can make them use another service. ESRB doesn't even have to fight these people.
And this idiot who thinks he can use 'differing community standards' to fight them is, well, an idiot. That's obscenity he's thinking of, and that has nothing to do with what kids can be exposed to. That's stuff that is so bad it can just be outlawed, period, and no video game, not even Hot Coffee, would qualify. Almost no hardcore porn qualifies.
If he thinks there is some law that forbids labeling a game for children and putting the word 'shit' in it if the community doesn't approve of that, he's sadly mistaken.
The ERSB does nothing of the sort, you dumbass.
Honestly, people, is that so difficult? Don't put up with stores that put things behind glass and then get annoyed when you want to look at them.
They can either a) stop putting them behind glass, b) not mind when you ask to see them before giving them money, or c) lose a customer.
EC should be '0' (Note that means 'okay for a 0 year old to attempt to play', not that they actually have the skills.) and E should be 7 or whatever. (Not that I'm entirely sure what sort of themes a 'toddler' would understand that would be inappropiate for them, but not for a 'child'.)
Actually, '0' is confusing, and that should actually say 'all ages' instead of having an age.
And your list points out the stupidity of having an M and an AO rating. Look, just pick one. The idea that there is a whole range of games that it is okay for 18-year olds to see but not 17-year olds is idiotic.
That is an example of copying the dumbest feature of the movie rating system, the R and the NC-17 ratings,and has resulted in exactly the same thing: AO-rated games are not put on the shelf anywhere, and thus even adults cannot get them.
To hell with that, stand up to Walmart, don't dumb the games aimed at adults down by trying to get M instead of AO. If they're going to censor you, force them to draw the line at 'inappropriate for kids'. Don't make up an imaginary line that's further than that...nothing is inappropriate for adults.
And what the hell is RP?
Chief Wiggins?
He was just assuming that they do not have large quantities of Hindus working convenience stores in Arab areas. As many places that have Arabs and Hindus living side by side seem to be...annoyed by this situtation, it might not be anywhere near as funny.
This is assuming they have things like convenience stores in Arab areas, which I actually seem to remember from somewhere that they do.
Just because it has the word 'beer' in it doesn't make it beer, and just because it has the word beer in it in English doesn't mean it has the word beer in it in Farsi or whatever languange they're translating to.
Is the same stuff that's subversive in America subversive in Arab counties?
There a fine line between offensive and subversive, and you can't just 'move' the line in an already 'filmed' TV show. You'd have to completely cut the subversion, and that's what many people are wrongly afraid of.
But the real problem is that 'subversive' doesn't really make any sense if the cultural context aren't there.
For example, think of the Paul McCarty episode where Lisa becomes a vegatarian. Unlike what some people think, they don't actually have a moral problem with eating pig, it's just 'unclean'. However...do they have vegetarians? And, just as importantly, will they get the 'flying pig' joke?
I know they won't get any of the political jokes, or any of the Christian jokes. (Not even the Arab Christians.) Or Mr. Burns, or Bumblebee Man, or Krusty, or Wiggins...
What, really, is the point? Without the cultural jabs, the Simpsons isn't funny at all. (Which is why it's gotten less and less funny.)
They're doing about as well as people trying to put Playboy out of business. Even the most conservative person will hem and haw when asked if Playboy should be completely illegal. They'll talk about selling it only in adult stores or behind the counter or whatever, but will stop short of 'no one should ever be able to buy it'.
Without the 'Won't somebody think of the children?!?!' plea, no one will get on board. Almost everyone who does so is either a) clearly a nutcase, or b) not had game ratings explained to them and are a bit too gullible. And the later people never stick around long when they discover that kids can't, in fact, buy GTA.
Jack, OTOH, is dangerous, because he's a lawyer, and thinks the way to stop violent video games is to sue people who make them, and he's not afraid of lying, like his current attempt at talking about how mods and hacks can fall outside the ratings.
Yes, he occasionally claimed he had a list of 205 communists, despite that fact that some of them had been put on the list by the FBI for, for example, drinking problems or blackmailable reasons. He was actually tried for prejury because of that, later on.
And he constantly harped about how Communists were setting the State Department agenda, which was completely unrelated to the issue of security risks.
See, your interpetation makes sense...if this had been the only time he'd done this. McCarthy screamed communist for political gain repeatedly. He'd done it before, and he did it again later.
At some point in time, he discovered a list of possible security risks working at the State Department, compiled by the FBI. Some of the names were there because of communist connections. He immediately started talking about how communists were shaping policy at the State Department, which was a completely absurd charge, and it went downhill from there.
As for not naming names, you can either think that was because he didn't want to screw up people's lives, except, of course, he did eventually name names. Or you can think he just wanted to make it harder to disprove his list at that time.
And your two of your examples are insane. Philip Jessup was cleared of all charges by State Department's Loyalty Security Board, so even your claims the Tydings Committee was a whitewash leave you with no support of your idea he was actually a security risk. He's one of the few people who actually stayed put and said 'prove it'. John Stewart Service was dismissed as a security risk by the Loyalty Security Board, but sued and was cleared and reinstated.
Owen Lattimore, OTOH, is a prime example of why you never answer questions under oath, as he was cleared of everything by Tydings but arrested for perjury because he'd denied he'd ever promoted communism. (However, he certainly was a security risk, on of the few actual ones.)
And the Senate can grant immunity to people, and force them to testify. It did not.
And none of these people ever got charged with any crime, so it wasn't someone else who 'discovered' them. Let me repeat that for you, as that seems to be the sticking point: None of the people on his list were charged with espionage. None of them were 'spies', or, if they were, we never learned it.
And considering we had a damn list of them, who refused to answer the question, it seems rather unlikely we'd have missed them if they were. Normally, spies have to, you know, operate in secret.
See, that was the thing. McCarthy got a list of POSSIBLE SECURITY RISKS. Not known security risks, not known communists, but possible security risks, which other people had already looked at and decided were okay.
He then hauled them in front of the Senate and ask them if they were spies, when he had no evidence whatsoever of that. They were all found innocent of being spies and real security risks.
At which point the State Department, left with these hot potatos, managed to get rid of many of them.
And, hell, a few of them probably should have been removed. That doesn't justify this whole thing. He went about it in a total political and self-serving way, dragging these people into the spotlight and screwing up their life, ranting about 'Communists shaping policy' when the real issue was 'This person probably should not be trusted with secret info, because they have a drinking problem/links to communist organizations/are gay and can be blackmailed'.
What should he have done? Well, either the Senate had the authority to force the State Department to follow certain standards, and should have actually passed a law doing so, or it didn't have the authority, and they should have stayed away. (I honestly don't know which is true.)
The rest were, like I said, hounded out of their job by internal investigations that didn't go anywhere.
That battle got won, like, five years ago, with video game ratings.
Which is why most of the people left 'the fight' and the sane ones are out there are just promoting awareness of game ratings and the fact that some games are in actual fact complete inappropriate for children, no matter if they ask for them. Occasionally they'll make a few attempts to move highly rated games to a seperate area in a store, or restrict where games can be advertised, but they aren't trying to censor games. They're mostly harmless and well-intentioned people who are convinced nudity and violent is worse for kids than most of us, but they aren't going to harm us or video games.
Jacko, on the other hand, rants and raves about lawsuits and connecting games to any recent violent event. He wants to hold people 'responsible'.
And tries to make the Hot Coffee hack, and, now that he's learned about them, other user hacks to games, infamously The Sims, out to be a way that game designers are cheating the ratings.
OTOH, we need to be nicer to him, because he's thinks that you can see the genitalia of naked characters in The Sims, and I think we can draw from that the logical conclusion of what he sees when he takes off his clothes. Hey, man, we're sorry about your condition. They have support groups for people like you, whether it was an accident or some genetic condition.
Whereas the actual fact that he didn't catch anyone would seem to tip the scales towards the common wisdom that, you know, he didn't catch anyone.
There are 81 people on his list who were cleared by the Senate's Tydings Committee, who were then hounded out of their job by an internal witchhunt in the State Department that was a direct result of McCarthy's actions. 81.
Many people he questioned were clearly spies, communists, or covering for others who were.
And, apparently, no other member of Congress could see this, because they cleared every single one as not being a security risk.
Look, we all realize that stupid people get him and HUAC mixed up. That doesn't change the fact that his 'list' amounted to nothing, and did, in fact, screw up the lives of quite a few people, who got tainted by the label of 'communist' and got let go or forced to resign from the State Department after being legally cleared.
He did have a list of 205 apparent security risks. (Not all communists, as he claimed occasionally. Only about half were even possibly communists.)
However, none of the people that had been identified as possible communists by him were identified as security risks by the Tydings Committe.
After they were cleared, the State Department started an internal witchhunt called the State Department's Loyalty Security Board and hounded many of them out of a job or dismissed them for made up reasons.
And, yes, after his little attack, more people who were apparent security risks were thrown out. Whether this helped anything or not is debatable.
Anyway, McCarthy's list was completely bogus. Every person was cleared by Congress, every one of them, as non-security risks.
Is that about it?
You see, I didn't correct you, because you didn't say anything wrong. I just said PA was two people, which is exactly as true as your statement, and you went and actually did what you were accusing me of.
And you're crazy if you think sexual activity among young people has dropped the last decade. Becoming sexually active has been slightly deferred by a year or two over the past decade, with less 15 and 16 year olds but the same amount of 17 and 18 year olds, and the teen pregnancies drop is mainly due to better use and understanding of contraceptives.
And oral sex has skyrocketed, which isn't showing up because many teenagers aren't even counting it as sex. Also contributing to the lack of pregnancies.
The fact that teenagers now have oral sex when 15 and intercourse at 17 instead of just starting off with the intercourse at 15 is probably not the great moral stance you seem to think it is.
Saying you hate someone is not an ad hominem attack.
This guy is really hurting the people who actually are sane people yet stupidly trying to censor videogames. His ranting can't but help.
BTW, before anyone starts claiming such a position is not stupid...this war was already won. By you guys. We have ratings on game, they are not sold to young children.
And thus the 'movement', at least the hollow shell of idiots it left behind, are reduced to complaining about how stupid parents buy games for kids anyway and all sorts of crap, like how a game for 17 year olds has sex in it if you hack it, and should be for 18 year olds, when of course 17 year olds can rent R-rated movies.
Jack is just at the far end of this, and willing to show up in public and actually sue people over it. He helps expose the whole thing for the idiocy it is.
PA is two people.
That made some sense when applied to DOOM. It made even more sense when applied to games like Unreal with stragety. Teaching you how to aim and not get shot and whjen to snipe from, etc.
GTA, OTOH, teachs you nothing. Admittedly, I haven't played it in like four years, so I'm like two games behind, but let's see what it teachs you:
You do not learn how to steal a car, beyond the obvious carjacking, which anyone with a working brain can figure out. You do not lean how to hotwire one or get a locked one open.
You do not learn how to aim and fire guns, unless they've added some FPSing to a recent game. Aiming a gun in the third person is entirely different than actually aiming in real life, and you can take a lot more damage than is realistic.
You do not learn how to flee from the police, unless the game has gotten a lot more realistic. Transposing thirty minutes the sort of crime spree you can do in the game into real life would result in all sorts of hassles. Unlike the game, you can't just duck out of sight and get a new car and keep going after taking out a few cops.
You also cannot get health from hookers to recover. This is just obviously wrong.
You cannot steal vehicles like taxis and firetrucks and just randomly do their job. This is an incredibly stupid idea.
With the Hot Coffee hack, it may teach you to be better in the sack, but I rather doubt it.
GTA doesn't train anyone for anything Whether it encourages all sorts of anti-social behavior is a meaningfull question, but it doesn't show you how to do any of it.
A way to reduce crime, therefore, is to reduce the people born to extremely poor people. There are ethical and unethical ways to do this.
The ethical way is rather obvious: Stop people from being extremely poor.
However, the entire theory is screwy. Legalized abortion didn't result in less poor people having children, it managed to result in them having more.
And you can't look at the crime rate of X1 year olds in year Y1 and compare it to X1 year olds in year Y2, or X2 year olds in year Y1, and get anything meaningful out of it. Different types of crime went up and down, probably almost completely due to drugs.
Ergo, while the concept 'poor people cause more crime' is sound, the basis for it in the book isn't. Abortion did no such thing, mainly because it didn't actually reduce the amount of poor people.
In fact, you can't reduce them that way. The size of the underclass is completely unrelated to the amount of people born into it, it's due to the structure of society. We could run in and kidnap every poor baby and raise them in a rich family (Surely more ethical than killing them.) and the next higher class would simply shift down a notch when they lost their jobs.
Anything else is akin to trying to save yourself from quicksand by pulling out the leg that's in the deepest. That can't possibly work. The only way to reduce the size of a class of society is to restructure society, or at least shift the structure a bit.
Being poor just means that your children are more likely to fill the job of 'poor' . If they do not, someone else will. (And, thus, they are more likely to be criminals.)
McCarthy didn't know them. He ran around yelling about how he had a list, and it was entirely bogus.
In fact, that probably hindered the whole commie-tracking in the government, which needed doing. (As opposed to the commie-tracking in Hollywood, which was just idiotic.)