I love bees also opened up the genre of Alternate Reality Games to the general public, using Halo 2 as a draw. As a result, it was the biggest game of it's kind yet created. It's story was complex and deeply engaging. It gave thousands of bored office workers a chance to talk to interesting people, and an excuse to do something rewarding and exciting once a week.
If you actually visited the web site, the name Halo 2 never came up once. Although everyone knew what the game was supposed to promote, none of the people running the game and very few of the players even discussed it. It was totally self-contained up till the end, earning ire and wrath from some people who thought they would be getting free Halo 2 demos just for showing up at a GPS location.
It was also a completely free game given as a gift to the players. They even gave out a limited edition DVD, and then told the players to distribute it on bittorrent and give copies to whoever they like. Microsoft giving anything away entirely free is news to me.
I love bees inspired people to become artists and actors, if for a short time. It also encouraged it's players to leave their shitty jobs and go back and get their Masters' degrees. I'm not kidding.
Unfortunately, to understand any of this, you had to have the patience and forbearance to actually play the I love bees game. Since a lot of people never did this, all they heard was "web site" and "Halo 2." Those people missed out big time. A log of the game and the entire radio play are still available, though, for anyone who wants to find out what all the fuss really was about. (Hint: it wasn't Halo 2.)
It's worse than that, man. I actually previewed Halo 2 at the end of I love bees. When one of my friends found out, he immediately asked me, "Was it awesome? Did it totally kick ass?" I told him that it looked like a solid FPS for a modern system. My friend went frantic, asking me all kinds of questions to get me to reveal the "awesome" in the game. He wants so bad for this to be the next big thing that a lack of enthusiasm on my part was painful. When you get people to invest themselves in a game like this, they want their investment to pay off.
It wouldn't be so bad if the game wasn't preceded by one of the best marketing campaigns/pregames ever created. Halo 2 is more like the ugly girl you'll date just to be around her hot sister. And Jan is totally hot. DAAAAAMN!
That's part of the point of doing this through Lulu. They support a system that can be constantly updated. As far as I can tell, when you order a box set, they print out the latest version onto the CD and send it to you. This is what "Print-on-Demand" means. They don't print it till you order it, so if there's been an update, you'll get it. Lulu already has systems like this for books, so it's likely that this is what's going on with the software as well.
Just for the sake of fleshing out the discusion, I give you a catalog of the thoughts of a Bush "hater." I do not assert that everyone thinks along these lines, or even that I have my facts straight. I'm just trying to give you an insight into why someone would inherently dislike Bush.
I've actually been thinking a lot about why I don't like George W. Bush. I don't think he handled 9/11 very well - he issued a lot of vague orders without giving the public much information at the time, and I think that sort of paved the way for further confusion and fear. I think there was no defensible reason to go to war in Iraq. But I didn't like him before all that. I didn't like him as soon as he became president, and I've been trying to understand why.
I think it mainly comes down to how he won the 2000 election. I can remember thinking, Bush knows he lost the popular vote. The results of a few thousand ballots in Florida aren't going to change that. But it didn't stop Bush from trying to split enough hairs to win Florida. I keep thinking that an ethical person, one who cared about the spirit of the law, would have conceded that election. They would have seen that the system wasn't really working and decided to find a way around it that respected the wishes of the American people. It seemed like Bush went the other way instead, milking the letter of the law for all it was worth to him.
Since then, we've seen a lot of babble about Bush being the "morally right" candidate, or at least about Kerry being less so than Bush. Bush stands on the strict side of issues like abortion, gay marriage, and faith-based government spending. But when you look at the way he became president in the first place, can you really look at that and say that this is a morally righteous man? Moreover, can you really trust someone who subverted the system to get into office to serve and protect the system once they're sworn in?
Just something I'd like to point out. I see a lot of people saying that the lesser of two evils is still evil. But we as a country can never produce a candidate who is perfect in every way. Any administration we elect on Tuesday will make mistakes. They will do things we don't want them to, and they will leave people either hurt or abandoned by the system. Don't think that Badnarik or Nader wouldn't make those mistakes if they were elected. In a way, when you choose any candidate, even in an election where the choice is obvious, you are voting for the lesser of two (three, four, five) evils. You're choosing the person you think will screw up the least.
That said, I agree with the people who are talking about votes in terms of strategy. The campaigners, the candidates, and their major supporters all have a strategy. Although they would like us to think that they run on faith and conscience alone, the candidates would not be in the running for President if they did not also have a strategy to further their agenda. Why shouldn't the voters have a strategy as well?
You should vote for the candidate who is most likely to give you the easiest time getting your issues addressed. Although your third party candidate may believe strongly in your issues, there is virtually no chance that he will be able to help on the presidential level. Voting your conscience in this case seems like the right thing to do, but it puts you at a disadvantage. Maybe this is why certain people in this campaign have tried to make this election about faith and principles rather than politics.
But this kind of choice isn't about morally judging the candidates - deciding which is more "evil." It's about choosing a president who will lead the country the way that is most advantageous to you and your causes. I've seen and heard a lot of personal attacks thrown around in this campaign, and I know that those are very effective on some voters. But personally, I don't think my candidate's opponent is the greater evil. I just think my candidate will do a better job.
Of course, this is exactly the strategy major party supporters are trying to get you to use when they tell you you're "throwing away your vote" and you have to vote for "the lesser of two evils." But they're trying to get you to use strategy by feeling bad about it. That's pretty stupid, in my opinion.
My objection was with a societal model which put all women in the literal role of slaves.
I agree that there are societies where all women are treated similarly to slaves. I agree there are societies which hold some women in slavery and treat them very badly. Your article links prove both of these situations to exist. But, that wasn't the developer's assertion in this character. The assertion was a society in which all women were literally slaves - and in which they were all complete nonactors in society. That's what I call B.S. on. Even in the most misogynistic societies, there is a big difference between a member of a suppressed sex and a slave. Actual slaves are used for work, including grocery shopping. Suppressed citizens are kept from society altogether.
If the "merchant from a far-off land" was supposed to represent modern Middle-Eastern people, then I think the people at ATITD have managed to offend two groups with one stone. Not only have they made up a fantasy world of discriminatory exploitation, they attribute it to a real society which is much more varied and complex than they choose to acknowledge. Remember that "modern Middle Eastern attitudes toward women" also includes much more tolerant and friendly points of view, including feminism. That people in the Middle East are outraged over these human rights violations is an indication of that.
Lastly, in the situation of the Taliban, which is the closest thing I see in your examples to to a society like the one this "merchant" came from, your article clearly states that the opressive rules are enforced by military occupation, rather than by the general consensus of the people. Egypt is obviously not putting the "merchant" under this kind of pressure. Of course, the merchant could be a misogynist himself, but that doesn't seem to be the indication. From what I see, he dismissed the female players naturally, as though it were a self-sustaining standard in his culture for all women to be slaves, and there was no coercion involved. Please, show me where such attitudes are upheld without the threat of violence in the real world. Also, even under the Taliban women are not literally considered slaves, and they aren't treated like slaves. They are treated as something altogether different, and arguably worse.
I think this all goes back to ATITD being poorly executed. If the developers wanted to give an accurate portrayal of situations like the Taliban occupation, they could have. They just decided to go on assumption and poor imagination instead of real history and sociology. That's why I find the "it's realistic!" defense so hard to swallow.
Just today I read an article by Pat Robertson in which he admits that Bush and the neoCons are horrible at running the nation, that the war in Iraq was possibly the worst mistake we have ever made, and that we're horribly married to some of the most corrupt big business interests in the country.
It's an endorsement for Bush. No, I'm not kidding.
Why vote for the man even when you think he's done a horrible job and you don't like the way the country is being run under him? Apparently to support the Republican party. Never mind that the party line is something you don't agree with. It might be good someday - you never know.
Yes, he does bring up some objections to Kerry. For example, he calls Kerry a traitor for protesting the Viet Nam war and claims that his health care plan with bankrupt America. Since these are fairly vague and mimic Republican talking points on Kerry, I see this as an extension of his call for Republican solidarity. Apparently Kerry is "wrong" on everything. But he isn't "wrong" in the sense that the Iraq war was "wrong." He's wrong in the moral sense. The ethical sense. The not-party-affiliated sense.
I truly, truly hope that this isn't most people's reasoning for voting Bush.
Wouldn't that be directly counterproductive to an open, reasoned debate? Today we can just brush off anybody and marginalize any opinion by labeling it Conservative or Liberal. Doesn't not knowing a person's bias ahead of time force us to read the actual comment and form an opinion based on the arguments, rather than on the author's "bias"?
First, women are fighting on those issues. Women are angry about the way Islamic fundamentalist groups (not all Muslims, by the way) treat women. They are calling it a human rights violation. They are trying to stop it. Especially, the women who do are working on this are those "feminists" you whine about.
Second, Islam is not inherently sexist. The practice of Islam is not inherently discriminatory. Being an "Arab" does not make you misogynist. Barricading the "Arab embassy" - which doesn't exist because there is more than one "Arab" country (not that I know what you mean by "Arab," but I'm going on people who speak Arabic) - barricading this fictional embassy would not help. But women's rights groups are fighting to get oppressive laws repealed and giving oppressed women the resources to fight for their own rights. As for "Muslim subgroups in the U.S." - an overwhelming number of Muslim pre-meds at my University were - *shock!* - female.
There are fringe Christian groups in the U.S. that consider women to be "property." Women's groups are fighting them, too. This is not just an "Arab thing."
Personally, I think this "merchant from a far-off land" was meant to portray the prejudiced image of Muslims/Arabs that you yourself have just expressed. So, another ten points from ATITD on the sensitivity scale/reality check.
Women are not ignoring real world human rights issues by taking up issues like this one. As you've shown, this kind of thing is indicative of greater problems with a culture that sees abuse as a "practice of religious beliefs," and then goes on to say that either those beliefs should be held sacred and the abuse allowed, or the culture should be destroyed altogether because they are inherently evil. Can't we try to stop the abuse itself, regardless of who does it or where?
In many games, there are differences in character stats based on race (think orc v. elf, not caucasian v. asian), class, and gender, which are determined when you create your character. These bonuses and drawbacks are published ahead of time, and a lot of people therefore cross gender lines to get known advantages.
However, character stats like this don't exist in A Tale in the Desert. Your character can gain levels in certain abilities, but all starting characters are the same as far as I know. At character creation, gender only affects your character's appearance and your marriage options in the game. (Male-female pairs only.)
The irony is, this is in no way historically accurate, for Egypt or anywhere else. No culture in the history of the world has considered all women to be slaves. It's true that in many cultures women were considered to be "owned" by either their father or husband, but they were not "slaves." Daughters and wives could not be bought and sold. They were permanent fixtures of the household, and in every culture I've ever heard of, selling them into slavery was very taboo. A slave would have to be marked as such, and since there isn't a slave trade in the game, I doubt the "merchant" saw any of these marks on the people he insulted. He was going on gender alone, and that is innacurate.
Second of all, even in some remote universe where all women were considered "slaves," merchants would not refuse to barter with them. Why? Because the typical slave owner would send his slaves out to buy the groceries, firewood, lamp oil, etc., not to mention running a hundred other errands. Slaves would make up a large part of the purchasing population for this reason, and any merchant who refused to trade with them would be losing a lot of money. So the "merchant" is wrong on this count too.
This is not a question of whether the devs were willing to create an "uncomfortable" situation for the sake of realism, and whether that artistic move insulted people. They weren't. They invented a stunted, misogynistic worldview that treated the female players as though they did not even exist. When you see a fiction writer creating a no-win, extremely prejudiced situation like this, and you know that it isn't for the sake of historical accuracy, you have to assume that the prejudice comes from the writer himself. That is objectionable, and I think it's the real issue here.
This is the problem I've always had with ATITD, and the reason I quit playing after my first month subscription ran out. The principle of the game is that the players band together to create the laws of the land. Really, the players make suggestions that the developers can nix arbitrarily, and the developers, as usual, have complete control over the system.
Case in point - there is no master/slave construct in the actual game. Therefore referring to independent players as slaves is inappropriate and counter to the principle of players controlling the game's rules.
The first incarnation of ATITD was very poorly designed and implemented. As far as I could see, the devs took player "laws" that got "passed" in-game, put them through a development process, and they were hard coded into the game. The system was not specifically designed to enact changes in the law. This has worked in the past for MUDs that got updated at the whim of the developers. But in ATITD, the players are supposed to have some say in the updates that the game gets, and the only way to really implement that in this system is if the devs are completely pliant to the mandates of the players. The ATITD devs are obviously not pliant. They can't even apologize when they insult the community that's supposed to be "in control" of the game.
And if anyone says this was a question of "historical accuracy," I call BS. No culture in the history of the world considered all women to be slaves. Ever. Also, even in a slaveholding culture, merchants would never refuse to trade with them because masters routinely and sometimes exclusively sent their slaves out to buy things for them. This is not a bitter inclusion for the sake of realism. It is one developer's narrow, fantastic, and immature idea.
Technically, where stolen goods are concerned both the seller and the buyer are liable. The question seems to be whether someone operating in the legal system wants to apply their money and time to prosecuting the buyer. In copyright infringement cases, it seems that the big companies don't choose to pursue individuals because a simple lawsuit or out of court settlement could bankrupt one person. This puts the company in the position of having publically ruined someone's life, which is not a position they want to be in.
The question is, how did copyright values become so inflated that pirating one song could cost you a month's or a year's salary? It seems copyright law has forgotten that little guys hold copyrights, too. In this vein, I would like to see a small, independent artist sue a big company for copyright infringement and win the full damages that the big companies threaten downloaders with. I know it's improbable, but I'd like it.
Any large company that permanently stores your credit card information, especially banks, DON'T send out spam for exactly that reason. When was the last time you got an e-mail from your bank to tell you now is the perfect time to get a home equity loan?
Unless of course by "spam" you mean those solicited e-mails from my bank's tech support. That's where these heinous fiends are getting their templates from! Really they might as well. It's just as easy to rip your template from solicited mail as from "real spam."
The problem is, losing a vital piece of information like an account or credit card number sounds like one of those rare situations in which you might expect your bank to contact you directly. It seems more urgent and is more effective in spurring a rush response if you have very little online contact with your bank - i.e. they are not sending you spam.
It doesn't take an original document for something to look official. Have you even gotten a CitieBanq e-mail? Neither the spam nor their mockup page looks anything like the real CitiBank page. The idea is to make your phishhook look official. You don't need to clone an original e-mail to do that - just cook up something that looks vaguely authoritative. Somehow, I doubt that phishers wait around for some other company to just hand them a template. They just cook up their own e-mail. If it's the only e-mail victims ever get from the bank, which is likely, what other sources will they have to contradict it?
quite a few people actually prefer their news come from a biased source
It's true. I think those same people, though, who want validation from the TV are afraid of being called "biased." They want to be right in the absolute rather than the political sense - thus the rise of faith-based politics in recent years. These people try their best to live in an ideological vaccuum. It is possible, however, to grow a culture of intelligence and rational decision-making in one of these barren wastelands of the mind. Calling them on "bias," and showing them where their bias comes from (i.e. the guy on TeeVee) is a start.
the fair and balanced news source would go out of business in short order
Strangely enough, even among the clearly biased news sources we have today, there are always people protesting to try and "tweak" the liberal or conservative bias of the media to fit their exact worlview - for example, both ends of the opinion spectrum have campaigned to change word usage on television. In those cases, people just pick the media outlet they think they have a better chance to influence. So you get pro-choicers advertising on Air America Radio and not during the Rush Limbaugh show.
But the bald truth of the matter is, every media outlet has a responsibility to all of it's listeners, not just the ones in it's target demographic. We say that life will be made easier if we just ignore the programs and people that annoy us. But, as you pointed out, this is little different from simply sticking your nose in the air, telling yourself you're right and running back to a network that knows it.
My point is that by complaining to the network, being pushy, writing letters, calling in to talk shows and making a scene, we can get rid of the bias that already exists. We shouldn't feel that we don't belong where the bias is against us because even the most liberal media has the responsibility to serve it's conservative listeners, and vice versa. The media has always been regarded as an integral part of soceity, intended to serve the public. We might as well hold them to it - it's a lot easier than founding your own network to spout your beliefs, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
How can someone who votes in the raw commercial interest of the company, supposedly against his own principles, honestly spit out a line about what the company "believes in"? Profit margins have nothing to do with belief. Companies don't have beliefs - they're legal entities with "official positions" and "company policies" instead of "opinions" and "habits". If he voted by what he believed in.... ack! I just popped an absurdity valve!
The inevitable dilemma of a free enterprise media. What do you do when your cause is no longer profitable? We know that we live in a profit-driven media market, and it scares us. We call foul - bias as it were - because we know that once we become unimportant to the media, the stories that matter to us will cease to be stories.
Journalism isn't about information anymore - it's about the survival of one's public voice. If you see indications that your local news, or the national news, might be leaning to support only one group, then you need to call bias to support your own agenda, ideals, and needs. If it works, some other group will be calling bias in a few weeks, and the medium overall hovers around the middle.
Once, a single person could shift the ideology of a news outlet by being passionate. Now that we have bigger news, we're building bigger voices: PACs, advocacy groups, Sierra Clubs, Christian Coalitions. Many times the real issues get lost in the management of campaign monies. Still, a small voice with the right mic turned on can make a big difference.
But not if we just sit there whining about it. It's okay to go up to the people who make the news programs and tell them to stop being biased - which is exactly what Mr. Stewart did. They'll probably tell you to stop watching their news show if you don't like it, but changing the channel and minding your own business is not what readership was meant to be. The press might get their money from a big corporation, but they are accountable to us. We should all hold them to this trust, even if it means calling bias and getting our hands dirty a little - and yes, maybe even some yelling.
It it never a fair debate when one side has a megaphone and the other is forced to whisper.
Sometime, a couple of months ago, a man got caught shuttling immigrants into Texas. One tv station in Dallas ran a story that included "people on the street" reactions, one of which was this crazy, angry-looking guy saying the smuggler ought to be sent to jail for "treason or somethin'". Hmm. I wonder why that comment made it on the show.....
Here's some facts for ya: The Dallas Morning News is the more yellow in their reporting than any other paper I've read. Last month they ran an article claiming that the protesters outside the GOP national convention were mentally deficient. Almost every story they run has a heavy conservative bias.
Second fact: The Dallas Morning News is one of the top papers in America, and not just in sales. They're widely respected in the journalistic community for the quality of their reporting. Scary, huh?
I can't agree more with this. We need to start thinking more critically about the way we handle life-consuming issues like drug abuse.
Right now, we seem to fear drug information as much as we fear the drugs themselves. In fact, we shy away from giving people information on a lot of things - sex, alcohol, gayness - and we're especially squeamish when it comes to our kids. We'd rather make those things completely taboo, the subject not to be breached under any circumstances.
Whether we do this under a mantra of morality or just because "it's against the law," this sort of prohibition doesn't work. People are still going to take drugs, get drunk at frat parties and sleep with that girl who has enough communicable diseases to get her registered as a biological weapon. And when that happens?
No support base. The system falls apart because the taboo is set and we aren't supposed to even think about this sort of thing much less help the dirty heathens who crossed the line of common morality. The nerve! Coming down hard on drug offenders just enforces this, making people feel like addicts "deserve" the downward spiral of a growing addiction compounded with legal trouble and social censure.
I'm not saying that hard drugs like crack need to be legal. I'm just saying if we could teach people how not to die from it, that'd be great.
I wonder how they intend to regulate internet ads, considering most political speech on the internet costs nothing to make and a good deal costs nothing to broadcast (through a free hosting server like Blogger, for instance.) In the print-and-tv world, the costs for distributing an ad are pretty high, more than the average person could just pull out of their pocket. Thus we have campaign finance laws to help manage who gives their money to endorse which candidates. But, even if you paid for bandwidth every month, you're still looking at $200 or less for the entire year leading up to an election. Politically speaking, that's a drop in the bucket to the current system.
Remember, also, that kids go home and hear their parents talking about how the "other side" on a pertinent issue is so blatantly, obviously wrong. Parents of all stripes do this and it's really up to the kid as to how they react to it.
If they take their parents' words to heart, they tend to have made up their minds before they have the chance to discuss the issues in school. The result is that second graders can have a "mock election" and all vote Republican. (Happened to me.) Whenever you get the kids together, you get the liberal kids lined up against the conservative kids, and both of them are throwing out ridiculous arguments that they barely understand because most of them are running on pure faith in their parents.
The teachers stay out of the ideological battle because they don't want to be seen teaching the kids what to believe - but they don't step in and give the kids formal rules for making public arguments, either. So whatever political and religious argument has the majority of the kids seems to be supported by the school. (And the minority ideas get hushed up just from peer pressure.)
And then, of course, teachers feel they can get away with supporting the majority - so they end up saying stupid shit like that "Darwin was an enemy of Christianity" (also happened to me.)
How do we get out of this cycle? Can we adopt a standard to teach kids so that they'll learn to formulate convincing arguments? How would we agree on such a standard? Is it all right for teachers to evaluate the validity of childrens' arguments, or will they get fired for doing so?
Slashdot Mirror
I love bees also opened up the genre of Alternate Reality Games to the general public, using Halo 2 as a draw. As a result, it was the biggest game of it's kind yet created. It's story was complex and deeply engaging. It gave thousands of bored office workers a chance to talk to interesting people, and an excuse to do something rewarding and exciting once a week.
If you actually visited the web site, the name Halo 2 never came up once. Although everyone knew what the game was supposed to promote, none of the people running the game and very few of the players even discussed it. It was totally self-contained up till the end, earning ire and wrath from some people who thought they would be getting free Halo 2 demos just for showing up at a GPS location.
It was also a completely free game given as a gift to the players. They even gave out a limited edition DVD, and then told the players to distribute it on bittorrent and give copies to whoever they like. Microsoft giving anything away entirely free is news to me.
I love bees inspired people to become artists and actors, if for a short time. It also encouraged it's players to leave their shitty jobs and go back and get their Masters' degrees. I'm not kidding.
Unfortunately, to understand any of this, you had to have the patience and forbearance to actually play the I love bees game. Since a lot of people never did this, all they heard was "web site" and "Halo 2." Those people missed out big time. A log of the game and the entire radio play are still available, though, for anyone who wants to find out what all the fuss really was about. (Hint: it wasn't Halo 2.)
It's worse than that, man. I actually previewed Halo 2 at the end of I love bees. When one of my friends found out, he immediately asked me, "Was it awesome? Did it totally kick ass?" I told him that it looked like a solid FPS for a modern system. My friend went frantic, asking me all kinds of questions to get me to reveal the "awesome" in the game. He wants so bad for this to be the next big thing that a lack of enthusiasm on my part was painful. When you get people to invest themselves in a game like this, they want their investment to pay off.
It wouldn't be so bad if the game wasn't preceded by one of the best marketing campaigns/pregames ever created. Halo 2 is more like the ugly girl you'll date just to be around her hot sister. And Jan is totally hot. DAAAAAMN!
That's part of the point of doing this through Lulu. They support a system that can be constantly updated. As far as I can tell, when you order a box set, they print out the latest version onto the CD and send it to you. This is what "Print-on-Demand" means. They don't print it till you order it, so if there's been an update, you'll get it. Lulu already has systems like this for books, so it's likely that this is what's going on with the software as well.
Just for the sake of fleshing out the discusion, I give you a catalog of the thoughts of a Bush "hater." I do not assert that everyone thinks along these lines, or even that I have my facts straight. I'm just trying to give you an insight into why someone would inherently dislike Bush.
I've actually been thinking a lot about why I don't like George W. Bush. I don't think he handled 9/11 very well - he issued a lot of vague orders without giving the public much information at the time, and I think that sort of paved the way for further confusion and fear. I think there was no defensible reason to go to war in Iraq. But I didn't like him before all that. I didn't like him as soon as he became president, and I've been trying to understand why.
I think it mainly comes down to how he won the 2000 election. I can remember thinking, Bush knows he lost the popular vote. The results of a few thousand ballots in Florida aren't going to change that. But it didn't stop Bush from trying to split enough hairs to win Florida. I keep thinking that an ethical person, one who cared about the spirit of the law, would have conceded that election. They would have seen that the system wasn't really working and decided to find a way around it that respected the wishes of the American people. It seemed like Bush went the other way instead, milking the letter of the law for all it was worth to him.
Since then, we've seen a lot of babble about Bush being the "morally right" candidate, or at least about Kerry being less so than Bush. Bush stands on the strict side of issues like abortion, gay marriage, and faith-based government spending. But when you look at the way he became president in the first place, can you really look at that and say that this is a morally righteous man? Moreover, can you really trust someone who subverted the system to get into office to serve and protect the system once they're sworn in?
If I recall, this is how LucasArts started sliding too. Their best composer left just as the games started going downhill...
Just something I'd like to point out. I see a lot of people saying that the lesser of two evils is still evil. But we as a country can never produce a candidate who is perfect in every way. Any administration we elect on Tuesday will make mistakes. They will do things we don't want them to, and they will leave people either hurt or abandoned by the system. Don't think that Badnarik or Nader wouldn't make those mistakes if they were elected. In a way, when you choose any candidate, even in an election where the choice is obvious, you are voting for the lesser of two (three, four, five) evils. You're choosing the person you think will screw up the least.
That said, I agree with the people who are talking about votes in terms of strategy. The campaigners, the candidates, and their major supporters all have a strategy. Although they would like us to think that they run on faith and conscience alone, the candidates would not be in the running for President if they did not also have a strategy to further their agenda. Why shouldn't the voters have a strategy as well?
You should vote for the candidate who is most likely to give you the easiest time getting your issues addressed. Although your third party candidate may believe strongly in your issues, there is virtually no chance that he will be able to help on the presidential level. Voting your conscience in this case seems like the right thing to do, but it puts you at a disadvantage. Maybe this is why certain people in this campaign have tried to make this election about faith and principles rather than politics.
But this kind of choice isn't about morally judging the candidates - deciding which is more "evil." It's about choosing a president who will lead the country the way that is most advantageous to you and your causes. I've seen and heard a lot of personal attacks thrown around in this campaign, and I know that those are very effective on some voters. But personally, I don't think my candidate's opponent is the greater evil. I just think my candidate will do a better job.
Of course, this is exactly the strategy major party supporters are trying to get you to use when they tell you you're "throwing away your vote" and you have to vote for "the lesser of two evils." But they're trying to get you to use strategy by feeling bad about it. That's pretty stupid, in my opinion.
My objection was with a societal model which put all women in the literal role of slaves.
I agree that there are societies where all women are treated similarly to slaves. I agree there are societies which hold some women in slavery and treat them very badly. Your article links prove both of these situations to exist. But, that wasn't the developer's assertion in this character. The assertion was a society in which all women were literally slaves - and in which they were all complete nonactors in society. That's what I call B.S. on. Even in the most misogynistic societies, there is a big difference between a member of a suppressed sex and a slave. Actual slaves are used for work, including grocery shopping. Suppressed citizens are kept from society altogether.
If the "merchant from a far-off land" was supposed to represent modern Middle-Eastern people, then I think the people at ATITD have managed to offend two groups with one stone. Not only have they made up a fantasy world of discriminatory exploitation, they attribute it to a real society which is much more varied and complex than they choose to acknowledge. Remember that "modern Middle Eastern attitudes toward women" also includes much more tolerant and friendly points of view, including feminism. That people in the Middle East are outraged over these human rights violations is an indication of that.
Lastly, in the situation of the Taliban, which is the closest thing I see in your examples to to a society like the one this "merchant" came from, your article clearly states that the opressive rules are enforced by military occupation, rather than by the general consensus of the people. Egypt is obviously not putting the "merchant" under this kind of pressure. Of course, the merchant could be a misogynist himself, but that doesn't seem to be the indication. From what I see, he dismissed the female players naturally, as though it were a self-sustaining standard in his culture for all women to be slaves, and there was no coercion involved. Please, show me where such attitudes are upheld without the threat of violence in the real world. Also, even under the Taliban women are not literally considered slaves, and they aren't treated like slaves. They are treated as something altogether different, and arguably worse.
I think this all goes back to ATITD being poorly executed. If the developers wanted to give an accurate portrayal of situations like the Taliban occupation, they could have. They just decided to go on assumption and poor imagination instead of real history and sociology. That's why I find the "it's realistic!" defense so hard to swallow.
Just today I read an article by Pat Robertson in which he admits that Bush and the neoCons are horrible at running the nation, that the war in Iraq was possibly the worst mistake we have ever made, and that we're horribly married to some of the most corrupt big business interests in the country.
It's an endorsement for Bush. No, I'm not kidding.
Why vote for the man even when you think he's done a horrible job and you don't like the way the country is being run under him? Apparently to support the Republican party. Never mind that the party line is something you don't agree with. It might be good someday - you never know.
Yes, he does bring up some objections to Kerry. For example, he calls Kerry a traitor for protesting the Viet Nam war and claims that his health care plan with bankrupt America. Since these are fairly vague and mimic Republican talking points on Kerry, I see this as an extension of his call for Republican solidarity. Apparently Kerry is "wrong" on everything. But he isn't "wrong" in the sense that the Iraq war was "wrong." He's wrong in the moral sense. The ethical sense. The not-party-affiliated sense.
I truly, truly hope that this isn't most people's reasoning for voting Bush.
Wouldn't that be directly counterproductive to an open, reasoned debate? Today we can just brush off anybody and marginalize any opinion by labeling it Conservative or Liberal. Doesn't not knowing a person's bias ahead of time force us to read the actual comment and form an opinion based on the arguments, rather than on the author's "bias"?
First, women are fighting on those issues. Women are angry about the way Islamic fundamentalist groups (not all Muslims, by the way) treat women. They are calling it a human rights violation. They are trying to stop it. Especially, the women who do are working on this are those "feminists" you whine about.
Second, Islam is not inherently sexist. The practice of Islam is not inherently discriminatory. Being an "Arab" does not make you misogynist. Barricading the "Arab embassy" - which doesn't exist because there is more than one "Arab" country (not that I know what you mean by "Arab," but I'm going on people who speak Arabic) - barricading this fictional embassy would not help. But women's rights groups are fighting to get oppressive laws repealed and giving oppressed women the resources to fight for their own rights. As for "Muslim subgroups in the U.S." - an overwhelming number of Muslim pre-meds at my University were - *shock!* - female.
There are fringe Christian groups in the U.S. that consider women to be "property." Women's groups are fighting them, too. This is not just an "Arab thing."
Personally, I think this "merchant from a far-off land" was meant to portray the prejudiced image of Muslims/Arabs that you yourself have just expressed. So, another ten points from ATITD on the sensitivity scale/reality check.
Women are not ignoring real world human rights issues by taking up issues like this one. As you've shown, this kind of thing is indicative of greater problems with a culture that sees abuse as a "practice of religious beliefs," and then goes on to say that either those beliefs should be held sacred and the abuse allowed, or the culture should be destroyed altogether because they are inherently evil. Can't we try to stop the abuse itself, regardless of who does it or where?
In many games, there are differences in character stats based on race (think orc v. elf, not caucasian v. asian), class, and gender, which are determined when you create your character. These bonuses and drawbacks are published ahead of time, and a lot of people therefore cross gender lines to get known advantages.
However, character stats like this don't exist in A Tale in the Desert. Your character can gain levels in certain abilities, but all starting characters are the same as far as I know. At character creation, gender only affects your character's appearance and your marriage options in the game. (Male-female pairs only.)
The irony is, this is in no way historically accurate, for Egypt or anywhere else. No culture in the history of the world has considered all women to be slaves. It's true that in many cultures women were considered to be "owned" by either their father or husband, but they were not "slaves." Daughters and wives could not be bought and sold. They were permanent fixtures of the household, and in every culture I've ever heard of, selling them into slavery was very taboo. A slave would have to be marked as such, and since there isn't a slave trade in the game, I doubt the "merchant" saw any of these marks on the people he insulted. He was going on gender alone, and that is innacurate.
Second of all, even in some remote universe where all women were considered "slaves," merchants would not refuse to barter with them. Why? Because the typical slave owner would send his slaves out to buy the groceries, firewood, lamp oil, etc., not to mention running a hundred other errands. Slaves would make up a large part of the purchasing population for this reason, and any merchant who refused to trade with them would be losing a lot of money. So the "merchant" is wrong on this count too.
This is not a question of whether the devs were willing to create an "uncomfortable" situation for the sake of realism, and whether that artistic move insulted people. They weren't. They invented a stunted, misogynistic worldview that treated the female players as though they did not even exist. When you see a fiction writer creating a no-win, extremely prejudiced situation like this, and you know that it isn't for the sake of historical accuracy, you have to assume that the prejudice comes from the writer himself. That is objectionable, and I think it's the real issue here.
This is the problem I've always had with ATITD, and the reason I quit playing after my first month subscription ran out. The principle of the game is that the players band together to create the laws of the land. Really, the players make suggestions that the developers can nix arbitrarily, and the developers, as usual, have complete control over the system.
Case in point - there is no master/slave construct in the actual game. Therefore referring to independent players as slaves is inappropriate and counter to the principle of players controlling the game's rules.
The first incarnation of ATITD was very poorly designed and implemented. As far as I could see, the devs took player "laws" that got "passed" in-game, put them through a development process, and they were hard coded into the game. The system was not specifically designed to enact changes in the law. This has worked in the past for MUDs that got updated at the whim of the developers. But in ATITD, the players are supposed to have some say in the updates that the game gets, and the only way to really implement that in this system is if the devs are completely pliant to the mandates of the players. The ATITD devs are obviously not pliant. They can't even apologize when they insult the community that's supposed to be "in control" of the game.
And if anyone says this was a question of "historical accuracy," I call BS. No culture in the history of the world considered all women to be slaves. Ever. Also, even in a slaveholding culture, merchants would never refuse to trade with them because masters routinely and sometimes exclusively sent their slaves out to buy things for them. This is not a bitter inclusion for the sake of realism. It is one developer's narrow, fantastic, and immature idea.
Technically, where stolen goods are concerned both the seller and the buyer are liable. The question seems to be whether someone operating in the legal system wants to apply their money and time to prosecuting the buyer. In copyright infringement cases, it seems that the big companies don't choose to pursue individuals because a simple lawsuit or out of court settlement could bankrupt one person. This puts the company in the position of having publically ruined someone's life, which is not a position they want to be in.
The question is, how did copyright values become so inflated that pirating one song could cost you a month's or a year's salary? It seems copyright law has forgotten that little guys hold copyrights, too. In this vein, I would like to see a small, independent artist sue a big company for copyright infringement and win the full damages that the big companies threaten downloaders with. I know it's improbable, but I'd like it.
I've got a better idea. Let's see 'em before the election.
Any large company that permanently stores your credit card information, especially banks, DON'T send out spam for exactly that reason. When was the last time you got an e-mail from your bank to tell you now is the perfect time to get a home equity loan?
Unless of course by "spam" you mean those solicited e-mails from my bank's tech support. That's where these heinous fiends are getting their templates from! Really they might as well. It's just as easy to rip your template from solicited mail as from "real spam."
The problem is, losing a vital piece of information like an account or credit card number sounds like one of those rare situations in which you might expect your bank to contact you directly. It seems more urgent and is more effective in spurring a rush response if you have very little online contact with your bank - i.e. they are not sending you spam.
It doesn't take an original document for something to look official. Have you even gotten a CitieBanq e-mail? Neither the spam nor their mockup page looks anything like the real CitiBank page. The idea is to make your phishhook look official. You don't need to clone an original e-mail to do that - just cook up something that looks vaguely authoritative. Somehow, I doubt that phishers wait around for some other company to just hand them a template. They just cook up their own e-mail. If it's the only e-mail victims ever get from the bank, which is likely, what other sources will they have to contradict it?
quite a few people actually prefer their news come from a biased source
It's true. I think those same people, though, who want validation from the TV are afraid of being called "biased." They want to be right in the absolute rather than the political sense - thus the rise of faith-based politics in recent years. These people try their best to live in an ideological vaccuum. It is possible, however, to grow a culture of intelligence and rational decision-making in one of these barren wastelands of the mind. Calling them on "bias," and showing them where their bias comes from (i.e. the guy on TeeVee) is a start.
the fair and balanced news source would go out of business in short order
Strangely enough, even among the clearly biased news sources we have today, there are always people protesting to try and "tweak" the liberal or conservative bias of the media to fit their exact worlview - for example, both ends of the opinion spectrum have campaigned to change word usage on television. In those cases, people just pick the media outlet they think they have a better chance to influence. So you get pro-choicers advertising on Air America Radio and not during the Rush Limbaugh show.
But the bald truth of the matter is, every media outlet has a responsibility to all of it's listeners, not just the ones in it's target demographic. We say that life will be made easier if we just ignore the programs and people that annoy us. But, as you pointed out, this is little different from simply sticking your nose in the air, telling yourself you're right and running back to a network that knows it.
My point is that by complaining to the network, being pushy, writing letters, calling in to talk shows and making a scene, we can get rid of the bias that already exists. We shouldn't feel that we don't belong where the bias is against us because even the most liberal media has the responsibility to serve it's conservative listeners, and vice versa. The media has always been regarded as an integral part of soceity, intended to serve the public. We might as well hold them to it - it's a lot easier than founding your own network to spout your beliefs, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
How can someone who votes in the raw commercial interest of the company, supposedly against his own principles, honestly spit out a line about what the company "believes in"? Profit margins have nothing to do with belief. Companies don't have beliefs - they're legal entities with "official positions" and "company policies" instead of "opinions" and "habits". If he voted by what he believed in.... ack! I just popped an absurdity valve!
The inevitable dilemma of a free enterprise media. What do you do when your cause is no longer profitable? We know that we live in a profit-driven media market, and it scares us. We call foul - bias as it were - because we know that once we become unimportant to the media, the stories that matter to us will cease to be stories.
Journalism isn't about information anymore - it's about the survival of one's public voice. If you see indications that your local news, or the national news, might be leaning to support only one group, then you need to call bias to support your own agenda, ideals, and needs. If it works, some other group will be calling bias in a few weeks, and the medium overall hovers around the middle.
Once, a single person could shift the ideology of a news outlet by being passionate. Now that we have bigger news, we're building bigger voices: PACs, advocacy groups, Sierra Clubs, Christian Coalitions. Many times the real issues get lost in the management of campaign monies. Still, a small voice with the right mic turned on can make a big difference.
But not if we just sit there whining about it. It's okay to go up to the people who make the news programs and tell them to stop being biased - which is exactly what Mr. Stewart did. They'll probably tell you to stop watching their news show if you don't like it, but changing the channel and minding your own business is not what readership was meant to be. The press might get their money from a big corporation, but they are accountable to us. We should all hold them to this trust, even if it means calling bias and getting our hands dirty a little - and yes, maybe even some yelling.
It it never a fair debate when one side has a megaphone and the other is forced to whisper.
Sometime, a couple of months ago, a man got caught shuttling immigrants into Texas. One tv station in Dallas ran a story that included "people on the street" reactions, one of which was this crazy, angry-looking guy saying the smuggler ought to be sent to jail for "treason or somethin'". Hmm. I wonder why that comment made it on the show.....
Here's some facts for ya: The Dallas Morning News is the more yellow in their reporting than any other paper I've read. Last month they ran an article claiming that the protesters outside the GOP national convention were mentally deficient. Almost every story they run has a heavy conservative bias.
Second fact: The Dallas Morning News is one of the top papers in America, and not just in sales. They're widely respected in the journalistic community for the quality of their reporting. Scary, huh?
I can't agree more with this. We need to start thinking more critically about the way we handle life-consuming issues like drug abuse.
Right now, we seem to fear drug information as much as we fear the drugs themselves. In fact, we shy away from giving people information on a lot of things - sex, alcohol, gayness - and we're especially squeamish when it comes to our kids. We'd rather make those things completely taboo, the subject not to be breached under any circumstances.
Whether we do this under a mantra of morality or just because "it's against the law," this sort of prohibition doesn't work. People are still going to take drugs, get drunk at frat parties and sleep with that girl who has enough communicable diseases to get her registered as a biological weapon. And when that happens?
No support base. The system falls apart because the taboo is set and we aren't supposed to even think about this sort of thing much less help the dirty heathens who crossed the line of common morality. The nerve! Coming down hard on drug offenders just enforces this, making people feel like addicts "deserve" the downward spiral of a growing addiction compounded with legal trouble and social censure.
I'm not saying that hard drugs like crack need to be legal. I'm just saying if we could teach people how not to die from it, that'd be great.
I wonder how they intend to regulate internet ads, considering most political speech on the internet costs nothing to make and a good deal costs nothing to broadcast (through a free hosting server like Blogger, for instance.) In the print-and-tv world, the costs for distributing an ad are pretty high, more than the average person could just pull out of their pocket. Thus we have campaign finance laws to help manage who gives their money to endorse which candidates. But, even if you paid for bandwidth every month, you're still looking at $200 or less for the entire year leading up to an election. Politically speaking, that's a drop in the bucket to the current system.
*cough* tobacco
How appropriate.
Man, this is gonna suck for Alternate Reality Gamers.
Remember, also, that kids go home and hear their parents talking about how the "other side" on a pertinent issue is so blatantly, obviously wrong. Parents of all stripes do this and it's really up to the kid as to how they react to it.
If they take their parents' words to heart, they tend to have made up their minds before they have the chance to discuss the issues in school. The result is that second graders can have a "mock election" and all vote Republican. (Happened to me.) Whenever you get the kids together, you get the liberal kids lined up against the conservative kids, and both of them are throwing out ridiculous arguments that they barely understand because most of them are running on pure faith in their parents.
The teachers stay out of the ideological battle because they don't want to be seen teaching the kids what to believe - but they don't step in and give the kids formal rules for making public arguments, either. So whatever political and religious argument has the majority of the kids seems to be supported by the school. (And the minority ideas get hushed up just from peer pressure.)
And then, of course, teachers feel they can get away with supporting the majority - so they end up saying stupid shit like that "Darwin was an enemy of Christianity" (also happened to me.)
How do we get out of this cycle? Can we adopt a standard to teach kids so that they'll learn to formulate convincing arguments? How would we agree on such a standard? Is it all right for teachers to evaluate the validity of childrens' arguments, or will they get fired for doing so?