That's an optimistic take. If someone wants to engage in terrorism against North Korean government officials, the U.S. may be funding them, training them, supplying them. It's all about good-guy, bad-guy mentality. If the "good guy" can talk candidly about the prospect of political assassinations and still consider himself to be the good guy, what does that say about our alienation from any kind of non-relative moral structure, and complete inability to evaluate ourselves by the same standards we use to judge others?
Not that this adds legitimacy in any way to the act of deporting a man to a country other than that in which he lives, but the possible R.C.M.P. link to this chain is yet to be uncovered.
Now, now. The U.S. deports a Canadian citizen to Syria for security reasons I'm confident the administration wouldn't object to us sending a few Americans there for the same reason. Maybe we should try it.
That's what I was thinkin, in a kind of twisted way. Is he now somehow charged with defence of the realm when it is in peril?
Or is this actually a corporate take-over of the monarchy, and the first thing he's doing is having himself knighted? I guess one way to be sure -- listen for that MS theme music when Her Majesty makes appearances.
Reminds me of the old Dungeons and Dragons days. Everybody wanted to be chaotic evil. Why? Well, it's more fun of course. Thing is, the other players were all people I knew, and even if they weren't consenting adults, if someone felt abused they could just get up and leave, and that would be fun for no one. Not to mention, anything really injurious (uninvited martial arts practice comes to mind) wouldn't be anonymous. Not so online, and we all know from mob psychology that anonymity is the key.
You say the game is supposed to be provide an escape from reality, but clearly this is not the case. You want to escape reality, sit in your abode and play the off-line version. As soon as you interact in this way, you simply move from one kind of society to another, and that means you are still responsible for your acts.
What's more, the anonymity now functions both ways. That other player you might be screaming obscenities at could be a ten year old girl. You don't know. The thing is rated "t" for "teenager" but at any rating, it's obvious that some would circumvent the safeguards.
Frankly, I see real-world versions of this in both Canada and the U.S. that concern me far more. The shopping mall has, in many places, replaced many societal functions of the town hall of old, but as privately owned (though public) property, freedom of speech and assembly is limited, because property rights often trump other kinds of rights. Similarly so with public spaces in company towns. Let's spend more time and energy on these kinds of problems, and then move on to worrying about "free speech" in video games.
Remember the days where pages simply asked you to "take a moment and click on one of our sponsors"? How many of you did that?
When one advertising regime fails (as is happening with the crumbling sense of denial in the tv industry towards channel-surfing), another rises to take its place.
I agree that pop-ups/unders are vile. But I'm not looking forward to what they will replace it with.
You speak the truth. When it comes to changing employee behaviour, taking him to task is the way.
Unfortunate double-bind for the female shopper, though. Whether she snaps at him or takes it to his boss, she's just a "bitch". A guy calls the man out and he's standing up for himself.
I was one of the horde of people who had their PS modded so as to be able to play copied games, and what an experience that was (apart from visiting the drug-den-like home of the modder -- velvet covered walls and a persian cat -- meow). I end up with 50 games and quickly realize that 45 of them are not worth my time. Sure, this appraisal was affected by my ability to compare so many at once (NEVER get your kids more than one game at the same time), but it staggered me how much I would have had to spend on each in the store, only to figure out it was pure trash -- and I'm not just talking about taste, here. Bad design, bad graphics, bad gameplay, bad, bad, bad.
If you'd been quicker, you might have gotten on the play-and-trade treadmill and gotten more than your $20 for the lot, but that isn't much fun, either. When I got on, it was with Super NES. Buy a game for $90 (Cdn); trade it in (you'd get less for cash) for $40 in two months' time (if you picked a hit), so you can get the next $90 game. At the end of a run like this, you have almost no games, a whole lot less money, and the distinct feeling that you have permitted yourself to be royally screwed.
I remember going back to my home town and visiting what I remembered to be a great old shop. It had been replaced, to my surprise, with a Microplay (this is maybe 10 years ago). I went in and asked around, and it turned out that the previous place, which had rented games as well as sold them, had to go as NAFTA came into force. They had to meet anti-pirating standards, and that meant no more renting floppy-based games. So the owners bought into the franchise and went all-console.
It's like you say, one side builds new protections, the other breaks them down. It's always been like this. Look at the history of radar traps (and detectors, and detector detectors, and so on)...
Man, you brought back memories. I hated those "what is the last word" manuals. The code-wheel I made for one was cute but sloppy -- often easily digging up the wrong word. Precious "cracked" copies of these games were hard to come by and highly valued.
if I saw any video game on the shelf that required a monthly subscription fee, no physical media, and gigabytes of downloading to play, I'd leave it there without a second thought
Bingo. This guy seems to think that "the next big hit" will force people's hand, without seriously considering that not many people are going to pick up something this restrictive. The future is customizability, not rigidly enforced programming and safeguards, and anyone who has been paying attention to the game market in the last 5 years will see this to be true.
Man, I HAVE mod points right now, and if I hadn't gotten sucked into this thread, I would have modded you up.
The smart manager will know when it is worth exercising new measures of control and when a little advantage-taking isn't mean spirited and works toward morale, the same way a good parent knows that a hundred innocuous little rules can feel like a prison for a young person. Some times it's just better to cut some slack and call it the cost of business.
Natch, the smart manager will know when that is not the case, too, and he or she really is being taken for a ride. I'd say that smart government would know that, too, but government is made up of a horde of individual politicians each forwarding their own little piece of what they believe needs to be the plan, with precious little big-picture coherence from term to term. And each little piece usually means a new law.
Make any generalization and I'll probably be able to provide counter-examples. That proves... what, exactly? Possibly that the generalization was too broad. So I'll help out the above poster, since you seem incapable of simply refining his/her point.
Low pay, or more importantly, the perception of being paid too little, is one cause of employee dissatisfaction. I would argue it is a common one.
Employee dissatisfaction is a major contributor to employee disloyalty, of which theft is but one example, and of course is modified by individual traits (although the personality psychologists seem to be losing out to the social psychologists these days in terms of research results prediction).
For the record, I find a whole lot of people talking out of their collective ass through the use of examples/experience, of the type: my uncle used to own a Volkswagon and it was great so Volkswagons are great.
Care to counter with some data beyond your own experiences or evidence, or are you just talking out of your ass? (I'm afraid I cannot resist being arrogant toward the arrogant)
Guaranteed the same arguments were levelled against punch cards: Don't you trust us?
The fact is, a few spoil it for the many. Why are there warnings on everything? Because someone got burned in a lawsuit and they'll be damned if it's going to happen to them again. Punch cards? Either just cynical, or had the same kind of thing happen. Hand scanners? People punching other people's cards.
It's true that when you trust your employees less, they are less likely to want to earn your trust! But we all know that underpaid workers (for starters) are more likely to resent their workplace and laugh at employer trust rather than be moved by it. Broad generalization, there, but employee dissatisfaction, and disloyalty, are not solely the products of measures used to determine whether or not they are in fact at work while they're being paid to be there.
Ack. Someone I know recently argued that it was indefensible for police to be videotaping protest marches because it was an invasion of "privacy".
So: 1) ok for protestors to tape police because i) they can catch illegal behaviour, and ii) discourage it in the first place, but not ok for police to do the same for the same reasons, and 2) not only are protestors in a public place, but they are there to be on record -- that is the whole point of protesting. Hello! Look at me! I object to x, but please, don't quote me on that! A little different if we lived in a police state where dissenters had a habit of disappearing, but the said can't be said here.
Wouldn't it be nice if people recognized that rights are not given and therefore can't legitimately be taken away, and at the same time, priveleges are not rights .
Re:Most things not politically correct.
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Well, now you're actually getting to the root of the Iraq invasion -- self-defence. It took awhile, but you're there. Except that pre-emptive self defence is well-circumscribed in international law. I can recommend a thorough paper that I wrote on this very subject.
Afghanistan. Group of terrorists attacks. Self-defence/reprisal have to do with hitting back at the group. Issue: can this be imputed to the country that sponsors them? Maybe. Must draw line to ruling power (similar to Arafat). Trusting the word of one brutal rebel faction over another, however, and singling dissidents (to that faction's eye) for Guantanamo without corroboration -- not to mention allowing them to take the capital (the U.S. resisted this at first, admirably, but then folded) is all very, very questionable (to put it lightly).
Iraq -- argument: if you produce/have weapons and are of a certain political bent, then we can attack you in self-defence, not because you have ever attacked us (indeed, only invading Kuwait with implied consent of the U.S. through an ambassadorial gaffe), but because you could, concievably, supply weapons to people who would. Forget that Islamic fundamentalism was the root of 9/11 and Iraq was a wholly secularist regime (one of the few in the Middle East -- which is one reason why the U.S. supported Hussein in the first place -- a secularist -- someone they figured they could deal with).
Pre-emptive use of force to Action in accordance with (former) U.N. resolutions to Weapons of mass destruction = direct threat to Freeing those poor suffering people.
Keep your eye on the ball. Justification in this game is a moving target.
Until you start at least correctly identifying the issues, mesocyclone, don't bother throwing a bunch of arguments my way. You seem to be saying that I'm coming at this in a one-sided fashion, but there's only one person doing that here. As I point out above, the U.S. had some decent lines of argument in some of these issues. In others, they were on very tenuous ground, and perhaps no ground at all legally.
Your "no international cop" is an oft-made point, and not a bad one. But we do not build an international regime, that cop, by striking out on our own whenever we feel like it. How hypocritical is it to say that there is insufficient respect for international law to rely upon it, if as the most powerful country in the world, you do not endorse that law yourself?
The founding principle of the U.N. was that no country, no matter how powerful, could stand up to the combined will of the rest. The problems began as soon as individual countries would not lend their troops for a rapid response force under international (U.N.) control, which would have actually given them some muscle. The reason? No government wanted to explain to its citizenry that it was losing lives under a foreign leader, no matter how well respected or within operational expectations. So the U.N. was a flawed organization from nearly the beginning, though much better than its predecessor, the League of Nations.
Another reason why the U.N. didn't work was the 5 member security council apparatus, due to the veto power. The theory here was that equality (as espoused in the League of Nations) was not so important as stability. We can argue that without resolution, I'm sure. I'm not really committed to one or the other, since I think the evidence is all theoretical -- what might have been under a different system. The result, however, was decades of veto back and forth between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.. It wasn't expected at the time the system was set up and it locked them from that point on.
Why is all this important? To address your international cop/vigilante issue. Major, incredibly important change as of Iraq (the second time): while the security council system has been a broken machine for a long, long time, and has only recently re-emerged as a working apparatus since the end of the Cold War, what occurred with Iraq has never happened before, an
Re:Most things not politically correct.
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Wow, great argument. I always like it when a thief says I could have stolen a lot more, a murderer says I could have killed more, and a mass murderer says they weren't mein fuhrer.
Don't play the philanthropist with me. Using the word "free" doesn't change the invasion and re-installation of government. Those nasty and evil people are the same ones you used in other battles against nasty and evil people, and you friggin armed them!
Under your logic, vigilantes provide a valuable neighbourhood service, too, with nary a thing wrong. You don't believe in self-determination (America has a long and continuing history of supporting despots that support America rather than risk delicate new democracies abroad), you don't believe in international law (any covenant that sacrifices a bit of national good for international good instead has an unsurprising U.S. absence), and even a bit of critical thinking and observation will find that you don't contribute to less worldwide terror, you contribute to it.
Afghanistan - 9/11. Check. Iraq - oil. Don't give me freedom. Certainly don't tell me it was legal under international law. And don't tell me that there are now fewer terrorists as a result. If you are unable to grasp even a few simple truths, we really don't have much to talk about.
And back to Israel -- I'm sure this has nothing to do with racism -- backing a people that look and sound and believe things a lot more like us than their opponents. America racist? Never.
Funny. The previous poster was talking about how intentions matter. Did you catch each new "intention" as the administration changed its tune, its justification, over time, or did you just sail along from one to the other without looking back? It wasn't about human rights, you may or may not recall.
Great story about Skinner I remember from undergrad, that is probably apocryphal (this among a not-unsympathetic psychology honours group) Skinner gets up to defend his thesis and is hit squarely with a criticism that his methodology cannot withstand. What have you done to account for the thoughts or feelings of your subjects, Mr. Skinner? Skinner pauses, then replies: well, nothing, of course. They have no thoughts or feelings in the way you mean; it's all just brain functions. And so began behaviourism.
Anyway. Only two issues as I see it.
1) as the above poster noted: is this kept out of kids' hands or not? No use being naive about the amount of control parents actually rather than ideally have, and to whom these things are marketed. Rather, this should be argued sensibly. I think both sides have some weight here, but I don't see this as an insurmountable problem.
2) the degree to which video games might be different from other types of violent media. I think most of us would agree that it's not the raw amount of violence in a movie that would concern us (though that would be a factor in desensitization -- but good luck remaining sensitized and watching the daily news), but how that violence is portrayed -- in a glib light, or worse, heroic? Is the villain the hero of the story? Thing is, dark stories are fun and we know it. Hell, in the old days of Dungeons and Dragons, everyone wanted to be chaotic evil. Go drink your apple juice, paladin. I'll have a flagon of ale. So again, how do video games differ? The research is inconclusive and endlessly arguable, so I'd rather not go there. But I don't think it's a nonsense argument (if you aren't wholly close-minded to the issue) that an interactive game that rewards villainy may rub off a little on Johnny or Jane in a way that non-instructive, non-interactive media may not. No, not pick up an AK and start gunning. I agree -- those kids would have been set off by something else, anyway. But we take such pride in our free will it's almost ridiculous.
Ask people: would you believe that other people are influenced by commercials subconsciously -- stastically we do see a rise in product sales? Many would say yes (and it's true). Ask if it likely affects them and they'll say no way!
So the whole "video games don't determine my behaviour" is a straw man. I like many out there was raised on video games and I'm not a psycho killer. The question isn't whether it determines behaviour but negatively affects it. My favorite bit from the far less visually spectacular but still addictive GTA2 were the time-limited kill-crazy rampages you go on with various weapons/vehicles. The part that struck me as hilariously grim was where the clock is counting down: 10... 9... 8... and you've got your flamethrower (actually, that one was easy) and you're like "c'mon... c'mon... just three more people and I'll be ok..." cause if you actually kill your quota in time, the police bugger off and you're fine. Heh.
Anyone who's even played something pacific like Sim City for 10 hours straight can testify that they go outside and walk around and suddenly it's like: hmm... residential... parkland, parkland, industrial... It definitely worms its way in there. A little while later it's gone... or is it?
Great example of how we make excuses for our own behaviour. Let's say you're one of the vast majority of people in at least the middling ground of hypnotizability. I hypnotize you and tell you that the next time I say the word "ketchup", you'll take off your right sock and scratch your foot. End session. So I was putting some ketchup on my hotdog the other day... Now, as the supremely rational and self-aware beings that you/.'s are out there -- what would you answer when I ask you why you're doing that? It should be a startled: wow -- good question! My foot's not itchy! Nice try, but wrong answer. That is never the case. People when faced with such a gap always come up with something seemingly reasonable, and
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That's an optimistic take. If someone wants to engage in terrorism against North Korean government officials, the U.S. may be funding them, training them, supplying them. It's all about good-guy, bad-guy mentality. If the "good guy" can talk candidly about the prospect of political assassinations and still consider himself to be the good guy, what does that say about our alienation from any kind of non-relative moral structure, and complete inability to evaluate ourselves by the same standards we use to judge others?
(without so much as consulting on it with Canada)
Not that this adds legitimacy in any way to the act of deporting a man to a country other than that in which he lives, but the possible R.C.M.P. link to this chain is yet to be uncovered.
With certainly no comfort derived from their recent raid on a member of the press in connection with info that may have been leaked about Arar.
Now, now. The U.S. deports a Canadian citizen to Syria for security reasons I'm confident the administration wouldn't object to us sending a few Americans there for the same reason. Maybe we should try it.
Bingo. Consumer reports regularly rate the Escort as a nightmare on wheels.
As for the Fiero, I love the look; it's just too bad there isn't anything else good I can say about it.
That's what I was thinkin, in a kind of twisted way. Is he now somehow charged with defence of the realm when it is in peril?
Or is this actually a corporate take-over of the monarchy, and the first thing he's doing is having himself knighted? I guess one way to be sure -- listen for that MS theme music when Her Majesty makes appearances.
is give peas a chance.
(uh. that hurt.)
Reminds me of the old Dungeons and Dragons days. Everybody wanted to be chaotic evil. Why? Well, it's more fun of course. Thing is, the other players were all people I knew, and even if they weren't consenting adults, if someone felt abused they could just get up and leave, and that would be fun for no one. Not to mention, anything really injurious (uninvited martial arts practice comes to mind) wouldn't be anonymous. Not so online, and we all know from mob psychology that anonymity is the key.
You say the game is supposed to be provide an escape from reality, but clearly this is not the case. You want to escape reality, sit in your abode and play the off-line version. As soon as you interact in this way, you simply move from one kind of society to another, and that means you are still responsible for your acts.
What's more, the anonymity now functions both ways. That other player you might be screaming obscenities at could be a ten year old girl. You don't know. The thing is rated "t" for "teenager" but at any rating, it's obvious that some would circumvent the safeguards.
Frankly, I see real-world versions of this in both Canada and the U.S. that concern me far more. The shopping mall has, in many places, replaced many societal functions of the town hall of old, but as privately owned (though public) property, freedom of speech and assembly is limited, because property rights often trump other kinds of rights. Similarly so with public spaces in company towns. Let's spend more time and energy on these kinds of problems, and then move on to worrying about "free speech" in video games.
but it certainly is effective.
Remember the days where pages simply asked you to "take a moment and click on one of our sponsors"? How many of you did that?
When one advertising regime fails (as is happening with the crumbling sense of denial in the tv industry towards channel-surfing), another rises to take its place.
I agree that pop-ups/unders are vile. But I'm not looking forward to what they will replace it with.
You speak the truth. When it comes to changing employee behaviour, taking him to task is the way.
Unfortunate double-bind for the female shopper, though. Whether she snaps at him or takes it to his boss, she's just a "bitch". A guy calls the man out and he's standing up for himself.
Jeez. Yeah, way to earn some respect by calling over a superior. Exactly what a man would do.
She had the right instinct. She should go with it.
The stereotypes may be plain wrong, but still take a while to change.
That's if they're wrong. Exceptions don't disprove stereotypes -- they are noteworthy because they are exceptional.
Ditto on both fx -- the girl and the beard.
Oh, and in other news, two tracks on my latest RHCP CD won't load into my multimedia library, regardless of the software I use.
Perhaps it's time we took this fight to them. The courts await...
If you don't buy CD's, the terrorists have won!
But don't worry, us Canucks will keep footing our share of the bill. Next step: just include it in our taxes, in case we even think about filesharing.
I was one of the horde of people who had their PS modded so as to be able to play copied games, and what an experience that was (apart from visiting the drug-den-like home of the modder -- velvet covered walls and a persian cat -- meow). I end up with 50 games and quickly realize that 45 of them are not worth my time. Sure, this appraisal was affected by my ability to compare so many at once (NEVER get your kids more than one game at the same time), but it staggered me how much I would have had to spend on each in the store, only to figure out it was pure trash -- and I'm not just talking about taste, here. Bad design, bad graphics, bad gameplay, bad, bad, bad.
If you'd been quicker, you might have gotten on the play-and-trade treadmill and gotten more than your $20 for the lot, but that isn't much fun, either. When I got on, it was with Super NES. Buy a game for $90 (Cdn); trade it in (you'd get less for cash) for $40 in two months' time (if you picked a hit), so you can get the next $90 game. At the end of a run like this, you have almost no games, a whole lot less money, and the distinct feeling that you have permitted yourself to be royally screwed.
I remember going back to my home town and visiting what I remembered to be a great old shop. It had been replaced, to my surprise, with a Microplay (this is maybe 10 years ago). I went in and asked around, and it turned out that the previous place, which had rented games as well as sold them, had to go as NAFTA came into force. They had to meet anti-pirating standards, and that meant no more renting floppy-based games. So the owners bought into the franchise and went all-console.
It's like you say, one side builds new protections, the other breaks them down. It's always been like this. Look at the history of radar traps (and detectors, and detector detectors, and so on)...
Man, you brought back memories. I hated those "what is the last word" manuals. The code-wheel I made for one was cute but sloppy -- often easily digging up the wrong word. Precious "cracked" copies of these games were hard to come by and highly valued.
if I saw any video game on the shelf that required a monthly subscription fee, no physical media, and gigabytes of downloading to play, I'd leave it there without a second thought
Bingo. This guy seems to think that "the next big hit" will force people's hand, without seriously considering that not many people are going to pick up something this restrictive. The future is customizability, not rigidly enforced programming and safeguards, and anyone who has been paying attention to the game market in the last 5 years will see this to be true.
Man, I HAVE mod points right now, and if I hadn't gotten sucked into this thread, I would have modded you up.
The smart manager will know when it is worth exercising new measures of control and when a little advantage-taking isn't mean spirited and works toward morale, the same way a good parent knows that a hundred innocuous little rules can feel like a prison for a young person. Some times it's just better to cut some slack and call it the cost of business.
Natch, the smart manager will know when that is not the case, too, and he or she really is being taken for a ride. I'd say that smart government would know that, too, but government is made up of a horde of individual politicians each forwarding their own little piece of what they believe needs to be the plan, with precious little big-picture coherence from term to term. And each little piece usually means a new law.
Make any generalization and I'll probably be able to provide counter-examples. That proves... what, exactly? Possibly that the generalization was too broad. So I'll help out the above poster, since you seem incapable of simply refining his/her point.
Low pay, or more importantly, the perception of being paid too little, is one cause of employee dissatisfaction. I would argue it is a common one.
Employee dissatisfaction is a major contributor to employee disloyalty, of which theft is but one example, and of course is modified by individual traits (although the personality psychologists seem to be losing out to the social psychologists these days in terms of research results prediction).
For the record, I find a whole lot of people talking out of their collective ass through the use of examples/experience, of the type: my uncle used to own a Volkswagon and it was great so Volkswagons are great.
Care to counter with some data beyond your own experiences or evidence, or are you just talking out of your ass? (I'm afraid I cannot resist being arrogant toward the arrogant)
Guaranteed the same arguments were levelled against punch cards: Don't you trust us?
The fact is, a few spoil it for the many. Why are there warnings on everything? Because someone got burned in a lawsuit and they'll be damned if it's going to happen to them again. Punch cards? Either just cynical, or had the same kind of thing happen. Hand scanners? People punching other people's cards.
It's true that when you trust your employees less, they are less likely to want to earn your trust! But we all know that underpaid workers (for starters) are more likely to resent their workplace and laugh at employer trust rather than be moved by it. Broad generalization, there, but employee dissatisfaction, and disloyalty, are not solely the products of measures used to determine whether or not they are in fact at work while they're being paid to be there.
Trust is earned. New employees are strangers.
same can't be said here. Jeez, I even previewed.
Ack. Someone I know recently argued that it was indefensible for police to be videotaping protest marches because it was an invasion of "privacy".
So:
1) ok for protestors to tape police because i) they can catch illegal behaviour, and ii) discourage it in the first place, but not ok for police to do the same for the same reasons, and
2) not only are protestors in a public place, but they are there to be on record -- that is the whole point of protesting. Hello! Look at me! I object to x, but please, don't quote me on that! A little different if we lived in a police state where dissenters had a habit of disappearing, but the said can't be said here.
Wouldn't it be nice if people recognized that rights are not given and therefore can't legitimately be taken away, and at the same time, priveleges are not rights .
Well, now you're actually getting to the root of the Iraq invasion -- self-defence. It took awhile, but you're there. Except that pre-emptive self defence is well-circumscribed in international law. I can recommend a thorough paper that I wrote on this very subject.
Afghanistan. Group of terrorists attacks. Self-defence/reprisal have to do with hitting back at the group. Issue: can this be imputed to the country that sponsors them? Maybe. Must draw line to ruling power (similar to Arafat). Trusting the word of one brutal rebel faction over another, however, and singling dissidents (to that faction's eye) for Guantanamo without corroboration -- not to mention allowing them to take the capital (the U.S. resisted this at first, admirably, but then folded) is all very, very questionable (to put it lightly).
Iraq -- argument: if you produce/have weapons and are of a certain political bent, then we can attack you in self-defence, not because you have ever attacked us (indeed, only invading Kuwait with implied consent of the U.S. through an ambassadorial gaffe), but because you could, concievably, supply weapons to people who would. Forget that Islamic fundamentalism was the root of 9/11 and Iraq was a wholly secularist regime (one of the few in the Middle East -- which is one reason why the U.S. supported Hussein in the first place -- a secularist -- someone they figured they could deal with).
Pre-emptive use of force to
Action in accordance with (former) U.N. resolutions to
Weapons of mass destruction = direct threat to
Freeing those poor suffering people.
Keep your eye on the ball. Justification in this game is a moving target.
Until you start at least correctly identifying the issues, mesocyclone, don't bother throwing a bunch of arguments my way. You seem to be saying that I'm coming at this in a one-sided fashion, but there's only one person doing that here. As I point out above, the U.S. had some decent lines of argument in some of these issues. In others, they were on very tenuous ground, and perhaps no ground at all legally.
Your "no international cop" is an oft-made point, and not a bad one. But we do not build an international regime, that cop, by striking out on our own whenever we feel like it. How hypocritical is it to say that there is insufficient respect for international law to rely upon it, if as the most powerful country in the world, you do not endorse that law yourself?
The founding principle of the U.N. was that no country, no matter how powerful, could stand up to the combined will of the rest. The problems began as soon as individual countries would not lend their troops for a rapid response force under international (U.N.) control, which would have actually given them some muscle. The reason? No government wanted to explain to its citizenry that it was losing lives under a foreign leader, no matter how well respected or within operational expectations. So the U.N. was a flawed organization from nearly the beginning, though much better than its predecessor, the League of Nations.
Another reason why the U.N. didn't work was the 5 member security council apparatus, due to the veto power. The theory here was that equality (as espoused in the League of Nations) was not so important as stability. We can argue that without resolution, I'm sure. I'm not really committed to one or the other, since I think the evidence is all theoretical -- what might have been under a different system. The result, however, was decades of veto back and forth between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.. It wasn't expected at the time the system was set up and it locked them from that point on.
Why is all this important? To address your international cop/vigilante issue. Major, incredibly important change as of Iraq (the second time): while the security council system has been a broken machine for a long, long time, and has only recently re-emerged as a working apparatus since the end of the Cold War, what occurred with Iraq has never happened before, an
Wow, great argument. I always like it when a thief says I could have stolen a lot more, a murderer says I could have killed more, and a mass murderer says they weren't mein fuhrer.
Don't play the philanthropist with me. Using the word "free" doesn't change the invasion and re-installation of government. Those nasty and evil people are the same ones you used in other battles against nasty and evil people, and you friggin armed them!
Under your logic, vigilantes provide a valuable neighbourhood service, too, with nary a thing wrong. You don't believe in self-determination (America has a long and continuing history of supporting despots that support America rather than risk delicate new democracies abroad), you don't believe in international law (any covenant that sacrifices a bit of national good for international good instead has an unsurprising U.S. absence), and even a bit of critical thinking and observation will find that you don't contribute to less worldwide terror, you contribute to it.
Afghanistan - 9/11. Check.
Iraq - oil. Don't give me freedom. Certainly don't tell me it was legal under international law. And don't tell me that there are now fewer terrorists as a result. If you are unable to grasp even a few simple truths, we really don't have much to talk about.
And back to Israel -- I'm sure this has nothing to do with racism -- backing a people that look and sound and believe things a lot more like us than their opponents. America racist? Never.
Funny. The previous poster was talking about how intentions matter. Did you catch each new "intention" as the administration changed its tune, its justification, over time, or did you just sail along from one to the other without looking back? It wasn't about human rights, you may or may not recall.
Great story about Skinner I remember from undergrad, that is probably apocryphal (this among a not-unsympathetic psychology honours group) Skinner gets up to defend his thesis and is hit squarely with a criticism that his methodology cannot withstand. What have you done to account for the thoughts or feelings of your subjects, Mr. Skinner? Skinner pauses, then replies: well, nothing, of course. They have no thoughts or feelings in the way you mean; it's all just brain functions. And so began behaviourism.
/.'s are out there -- what would you answer when I ask you why you're doing that? It should be a startled: wow -- good question! My foot's not itchy! Nice try, but wrong answer. That is never the case. People when faced with such a gap always come up with something seemingly reasonable, and
Anyway. Only two issues as I see it.
1) as the above poster noted: is this kept out of kids' hands or not? No use being naive about the amount of control parents actually rather than ideally have, and to whom these things are marketed. Rather, this should be argued sensibly. I think both sides have some weight here, but I don't see this as an insurmountable problem.
2) the degree to which video games might be different from other types of violent media. I think most of us would agree that it's not the raw amount of violence in a movie that would concern us (though that would be a factor in desensitization -- but good luck remaining sensitized and watching the daily news), but how that violence is portrayed -- in a glib light, or worse, heroic? Is the villain the hero of the story? Thing is, dark stories are fun and we know it. Hell, in the old days of Dungeons and Dragons, everyone wanted to be chaotic evil. Go drink your apple juice, paladin. I'll have a flagon of ale. So again, how do video games differ? The research is inconclusive and endlessly arguable, so I'd rather not go there. But I don't think it's a nonsense argument (if you aren't wholly close-minded to the issue) that an interactive game that rewards villainy may rub off a little on Johnny or Jane in a way that non-instructive, non-interactive media may not. No, not pick up an AK and start gunning. I agree -- those kids would have been set off by something else, anyway. But we take such pride in our free will it's almost ridiculous.
Ask people: would you believe that other people are influenced by commercials subconsciously -- stastically we do see a rise in product sales? Many would say yes (and it's true). Ask if it likely affects them and they'll say no way!
So the whole "video games don't determine my behaviour" is a straw man. I like many out there was raised on video games and I'm not a psycho killer. The question isn't whether it determines behaviour but negatively affects it. My favorite bit from the far less visually spectacular but still addictive GTA2 were the time-limited kill-crazy rampages you go on with various weapons/vehicles. The part that struck me as hilariously grim was where the clock is counting down: 10... 9... 8... and you've got your flamethrower (actually, that one was easy) and you're like "c'mon... c'mon... just three more people and I'll be ok..." cause if you actually kill your quota in time, the police bugger off and you're fine. Heh.
Anyone who's even played something pacific like Sim City for 10 hours straight can testify that they go outside and walk around and suddenly it's like: hmm... residential... parkland, parkland, industrial... It definitely worms its way in there. A little while later it's gone... or is it?
Great example of how we make excuses for our own behaviour. Let's say you're one of the vast majority of people in at least the middling ground of hypnotizability. I hypnotize you and tell you that the next time I say the word "ketchup", you'll take off your right sock and scratch your foot. End session. So I was putting some ketchup on my hotdog the other day... Now, as the supremely rational and self-aware beings that you