So, the age-old question. Do violent video games negatively affect kids, make them more likely to be mass-murderers or amoral killers?
My usual response would be, "Hell no!" But a couple of days ago I started thinking about it again. Thinking about people who lived in North America in, say, the 18th century, when quite a lot of things that are no longer acceptable (e.g. slavery) were acceptable, and quite a lot of things that are now acceptable (women wearing miniskirts) would not have been.
Someone who was born in 1798 and lived until 1844, for example, might quite possibly have been of the opinion that it was perfectly acceptable to own another human being as property. Would we, nowadays, blame that person, say he was an evil, immoral bastard? We'd most likely say that he was a product of his times. Granted there were people who, by our modern standards were more "forward-thinking" than that, but certainly not an overwhelming majority, like today.
So why did our hypothetical pro-slavery guy believe what he did? He was subject to it as he grew up; it was part of the culture he lived in. Say he lived in the deep South, e.g. Georgia, in a culture whose livelihood much depended on slave labor. We could hardly blame him.
Imagine another hypothetical person, growing up in a hypothetical place and time, where the use of violence as a problem-solver was as prevalent as the Southern use of slave labor was in the early 19th century. Again, would we blame someone who lived in that time for resorting to violence to solve problems? Probably not. He'd be considered a product of his times.
But now we come to the early 21st century, and we have a burning question: do violent media affect the likelihood that young people will be violent? On one side, we have people (like me) who say that, no, of course not, just look at me and my friends. When we were young, we all played horrifically violent video games that involve murder, genocide, and things being bloodily hacked to pieces; but none of us are violent. We don't go out and kill people. People who believe this, let's call them the Unaffected.
The other side says, ah, but look at all these cases of young people who have played lots of games like this, and subsequently gone out and killed people. Or scientific studies that have concluded that exposure to violent media (not just games, but movies and TV as well) impel teenagers to be more violent. People on this side, let's call them the Influenced.
So who's right? I'm beginning to think that neither side is on the money. I realize that this isn't scientific, but it's become intuitive to me that anything we experience can influence who we are. The key word there is can. Not everything we experience influences us to the same degree, or even, necessarily, to any measurable degree. It seems intuitive that certain people are more easily influenced into committing violence than others; or rather, that some people, when seeing violence, think that it might be a good idea to mimic that violence.
The continuing explanation from the Unaffected is that proper parental guidance will (generally) teach children that the violence they see in TV and movies and video games is not real, and using such violence to solve problems is not an acceptable way of going about things. The Unaffected believe that whatever current epidemic of media-induced violence there may be, is due to a lack of proper parenting.
Meanwhile, the more hard-line of the Influenced claim that children can be corrupted by exposure to such violent media, regardless of how good their parenting is.
This last bit is unambiguously false. At the very least, some non-zero number of children can be exposed to vast amounts of violence and be none the worse for wear. I'm certainly living proof. I saw countless violent movies and played countless hours of violent video games as a child -- but my parents, especially my father, were always sure to reinforce the idea that violence
Around here, gin and git are both pronounced with a hard g (same as j, rendered by phonemologists as dzh or somesuch, an alveolar voiced stop followed by an aspirated voiced sibilant), but gimp (and so presumably also Gimp) is pronounced with a soft g as in frog and graphics.
I was under the impression that the "g" used in words like "gimp" and "give" (and "go" and "gate") is called a *hard* g, and "gin" and "gip" use what's called a *soft* g. (I've always heard "git" with the same "g" used in "go" -- a hard g.) The dictionary.com entry for "hard" has:
18. Linguistics. Velar, as in c in cake or g in log, as opposed to palatal or soft.
and
15 Linguistics. a. Sibilant rather than guttural, as c in certain and g in gem.
The (hard) "g" in "log" is the same "g" in "gimp" and "give." The "g" in "gem" and "gin" is the soft "g".
Well, maybe this is a simplistic explanation, but the U.S.'s current majority population (WASPs) had its roots in Puritan strictness. Profanity and vulgarity are, even in this day and age, still viewed with honest-to-goodness horror and dismay. I mean, there are people who are actually taken aback when they hear such words. They really can't believe someone would say such things!
Granted, there are a metric fuckload of people (like me;)) who don't particularly object. I'm not especially fond of gratuitous profanity (e.g. saying "fuckin'" as an adjective in front of every noun), but profanity has its valid uses. E.g., there is no other phrase in English which quite brings the connotations and emotional weight as "HOLY SHIT!" Regardless, we still have a sizable population (found mostly in the Midwest) who object to such words being used in front of children, as if it'll "corrupt" them somehow. In my view, as long as we teach children what the words are for, what they mean, when they are to be properly used, and how not to offend the overly-sensitive types, we'll be fine. My parents swore all the time in front of me, but somehow I ended up with a substantial command of English and a sizable vocabulary.:)
I've wondered this too: how would American broadcast TV networks (other than PBS Kids) handle a series about sailors?
Do you mean a reality-style show, or a fictional drama? JAG and Navy NCIS are both about sailors (sort of; they're about highly-trained professional officers, not about enlisted swags), but of course being prime-time dramas, they don't feature a whole lot of swearing. If you mean a reality show, well, there'd probably be a lot of beeping out, if the situation wasn't avoided in the first place by simply not using the segments where the sailors were swearing a lot (or by simply instructing or asking the sailors not to swear).
You've heard "shit," "piss," "motherfucker," and "tits" on prime-time network TV? I really doubt that, unless it was an accident. "Piss" I can imagine being used in the sense of "That pisses me off," but not in the urological sense, not on prime time broadcasts. There's always the case of a missed bleeping in a rebroadcast movie, or the censors failing to keep up with live TV or a sporting event, but besides that... Can you provide specific examples? And are these endemic, or are they exceptions that happen once in a while?
So you're saying that most of Hoover Dam's power goes to L.A.... which is not even remotely the same as saying that most of L.A.'s power comes from the Hoover Dam.:)
It could be, theoretically, the same way that obscenity restrictions can be enforced on the broadcast networks by the FCC, but can't be enforced on (say) HBO or other cable channels that don't broadcast. You can't say motherfucker on NBC, but you can say it on HBO, for the very reason that NBC is making use of a public resource (the broadcast airwaves) and must answer to the public's standards for that use.
Of course, there's also the contention that technological advances in the last century have rendered moot the need for individual ownership of specific broadcast frequencies. If this were the case, would such regulation of the frequencies be necessary? (Search on Google for more info...)
But we're talking about produce placement in entertainment, not in shows "presented as fact, opinion, view, or endorsement". In theory, people watching the show aren't taking it as fact -- they know it's fiction, made up, a story, and so normal rules of business ethics don't (and probably shouldn't) apply to the content.
I think I heard that almost all of those words are allowed now.
Hm. Ignorant AND credulous. There's a winning combo.
FYI, the seven words are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. (George Carlin actually made up that list; there's quite a lot of others you couldn't say then and still can't say now.) At any rate, none of those words are allowable on American broadcast television, even now, in late 2003. You'll hear them on (some) cable channels, but not on the networks. (There may have been occasional exceptions, but I doubt many.)
There's not a lot of cussing on broadcast TV, which is presumably what you're referring to. At worst, it's the low-level swear words: damn, hell, ass. You think words like that are offensive? Or that they're any more prevalent than they are in real life? God* help you.
According to this page on the LA DWP's site, only 10% of the DWP's power comes from "large hydroelectric" sources. Even if Hoover Dam is the only such source, that's nothing like "Most of DWP's power".
Well, the obvious distinction is that child pornography is not generally recognized as political speech. You can't reasonably use the same response to both situations.
The Firestone tire incident was over two years ago! What has the media done since then that has actually caused a large corporation to lose significant money? And how often does the media do so? I'd say it's relatively rare. The Firestone tire incident is the last such incident I can think of that really qualifies.
(First things first, I generally agree with you on this topic, so don't think I'm being hostile;))
The first thing that comes to mind upon reading this is that in the Firestone situation, people were getting killed. I don't know whether that makes much of a difference (although I imagine it does; stories that involve lots of people dying will virtually all get reported, but stories that don't will not all get reported). I mean, the whole Enron thing was news up the wazoo for half a year, but nobody died.
I think in general, the media can only really focus on a couple big stories at a time. After all, there really are only a finite number of media outlets and reporters out there; they can only write a finite number of column inches. And it's not coincidence when a large portion of the media all decide that a given story is worth covering. Some of those decisions are based on "Wow, this sounds important, let's cover it" and some are based on, "Hmm, CNN is covering it, we'd better cover it too!" and I'm sure no small amount are based on, "Our ratings our down when we cover this story, let's try something else."
And the crux of this whole conversation is that the decisions are sometimes based on, "It's against our corporate interests to report this story, so we're just not going to." The solution to this problem is thorny at best, but the simple fact remains that this is a major problem and needs to be resolved.
I sometimes hang awake at nights dreaming of having a window and a door.
Luxury. When I was a lad, nine of us shared a windowsill outside a butcher shop. We woke up in the morning when the butcher would pour three gallons of boiling pig's blood out the window over us.
Intended? By who? Is there some authority which dictates how I'm allowed to go about writing? (And if there is such an authority, what makes you think I give a rat's ass what they think?)
So you're entirely, completely, and totally motivated by your own selfishness? At least that's clear. So the whole "I hate the rich/consumer/SUV-driving suburbanite" is pretty much completely hypocrisy then?
My "selfishness" recognizes that making the world a better place for everyone will also make the world a better place for me. You apparently have never thought things far enough out to encounter that concept.
Why not change the envrionmentalist signs to say it more honestly:
Changing the signs, as you humorously (?) suggest, would in reality make them say, "Stop the pollution so we can all be more comfortable -- including you!"
Why should we care about *your* comfort?
Because I AM you. We're both, I wager, middle-class, technically-oriented, automobile-driving, landfill-generating, American males. Reducing pollution is going to benefit us both.
Did it ever occur to you that despite our differences, we might have generally compatible goals? I don't identify myself as an environmentalist -- which is why I referred to environmentalists as "they" in my original post -- and like all rational people, I understand that in this particular debate, the clouds of heated invective boiling forth from both sides contain some nuggets of truth, but for the most part are unconsidered dogma. (The "sides" are the zealots, not the scientists who have legitimate scientific questions about the validity of conclusions drawn from the data.)
I don't really know whether humans are contributing significantly to global warming -- if we are at all -- but based on the past history of mankind's ability to cause localized ecological devastation, it seems wise to try to minimize our impact on the global environment. The real debate should be, what does that minimization entail?
Nonetheless, my original post was stating what I believe the environmentalists' motive to be. I was pissed because I was responding to the fifth such post I'd seen ("Pfft, why do environmentalists bitch? We can't do any long-term damage to the planet anyway!"), which is a strawman (environmentalists and not bitching about long-term damage as much as they are about short-term damage that will affect us when we get older, and our direct descendants over the next few generations).
We could pave the Earth, light up two or threee thousand nuclear warheads, all drive SUV's until the oil is gone, even smoke unfiltered cigarettes and kill ourselves off and you know what? In about a million years, the Earth will look much like it did about a million years ago.
Dickhead, the environmentalists don't give a fuck what happens a million years from now -- they whine about the environment because they don't want to live in a world that sits under a gray pall of atmospheric pollution, where the plants are all dead and we have to live in domes because we fucked the planet up too much. Yeah, no matter how bad we make it, it'll recover in a few million years... which is long after we'll all be dead, which doesn't do us any fucking good.
The whole point is that fucking up the planet NOW will mean it's still fucked up in twenty or fifty years, when we're still around to enjoy it. I don't want the planet to be fucked up then, because I plan to still be here!
There *is* an easy solution: use Gaim. It's GPL, free, and supports ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Jabber, IRC, Gabu-Gabu and Zephyr. You can be logged on with multiple accounts to each of those protocols, all at the same time.
Gaim's the only client I use now, even though I have friends on numerous disparate IM services.
The First Amendment should stand strong even if 70 million wrote these form letters asking for this.
Ah, so the First Amendment should be completely inviolable in all situations, right? So it should be perfectly legal for me to slander or libel people. Or to go into a crowded theater and shout, "FIRE! THERE'S A FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" when there's no fire. Or to try to incite people to riot -- after all, it's just speech. Or to call someone a bunch of really offensive names in public, so that he gets angry and hits me.
But wait! All those things are illegal. How do we reconcile that fact with the First Amendment, which begins, "Congress shall make no law..."? The reason is that the Supreme Court has determined, multiple times over the years, that there must be certain exceptions to the First Amendment. These exceptions are made in the belief that without them, the First Amendment would be useless -- anarchy would reign. These exceptions are *so important* that the SCOTUS has said, yes, there are exceptions. It would be more destructive to society to allow these things than it would be to restrict the Constitution.
Finite broadcast resources are another case like this. The dissemination of multiple viewpoints, of truthful news, is such a critically important thing to a democracy, that having one source monopolize control of the airwaves is a really, really bad idea.
1. Most existing media/news sources would be taken over, thus forcing a change in management and direction. Good to shake up the old dinosaur media types.
No, what would happen is that many existing SMALLER media sources would be taken over by the already established, dinosaur-like LARGE media sources. Their perspectives would simply be replaced by Fox/CNN/NBC/whoever, and those media sources ALREADY have far more exposure than they should have. This isn't going to shake anyone up, except the people who lose their jobs when their companies get bought up.
2. As consolidation takes hold, many smaller stations/news sources would be able grow. This means more competition.
As consolidation takes hold, the smaller stations/news sources will all be *BOUGHT* by the bigger sources! This is inevitably what happens with consolidation. It's what the friggin' word "consolidation" means. And it's what happened after Reagan had the media industry deregulated in the 80s.
Most of the opponents of consolidation falsely warn us that diversity of opinion would be lost. This simply is not true since the available sources of news/media have grown exponentially in the last 30 years.
The number of ways you can get your news has increased, but your news still all comes from the same companies. Diversity of opinion has not increased in any medium except the Internet, but the Internet is not where most people get their news.
As far as I recall, Watterson said he didn't want to run the strip into the ground before he ran out of ideas, nor did he want to keep doing the same thing forever and ever. I never heard that he was so upset by the copyright infringement that it caused him to stop doing C&H. Watterson's own words don't seem to mention this at all.
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So, the age-old question. Do violent video games negatively affect kids, make them more likely to be mass-murderers or amoral killers?
My usual response would be, "Hell no!" But a couple of days ago I started thinking about it again. Thinking about people who lived in North America in, say, the 18th century, when quite a lot of things that are no longer acceptable (e.g. slavery) were acceptable, and quite a lot of things that are now acceptable (women wearing miniskirts) would not have been.
Someone who was born in 1798 and lived until 1844, for example, might quite possibly have been of the opinion that it was perfectly acceptable to own another human being as property. Would we, nowadays, blame that person, say he was an evil, immoral bastard? We'd most likely say that he was a product of his times. Granted there were people who, by our modern standards were more "forward-thinking" than that, but certainly not an overwhelming majority, like today.
So why did our hypothetical pro-slavery guy believe what he did? He was subject to it as he grew up; it was part of the culture he lived in. Say he lived in the deep South, e.g. Georgia, in a culture whose livelihood much depended on slave labor. We could hardly blame him.
Imagine another hypothetical person, growing up in a hypothetical place and time, where the use of violence as a problem-solver was as prevalent as the Southern use of slave labor was in the early 19th century. Again, would we blame someone who lived in that time for resorting to violence to solve problems? Probably not. He'd be considered a product of his times.
But now we come to the early 21st century, and we have a burning question: do violent media affect the likelihood that young people will be violent? On one side, we have people (like me) who say that, no, of course not, just look at me and my friends. When we were young, we all played horrifically violent video games that involve murder, genocide, and things being bloodily hacked to pieces; but none of us are violent. We don't go out and kill people. People who believe this, let's call them the Unaffected.
The other side says, ah, but look at all these cases of young people who have played lots of games like this, and subsequently gone out and killed people. Or scientific studies that have concluded that exposure to violent media (not just games, but movies and TV as well) impel teenagers to be more violent. People on this side, let's call them the Influenced.
So who's right? I'm beginning to think that neither side is on the money. I realize that this isn't scientific, but it's become intuitive to me that anything we experience can influence who we are. The key word there is can. Not everything we experience influences us to the same degree, or even, necessarily, to any measurable degree. It seems intuitive that certain people are more easily influenced into committing violence than others; or rather, that some people, when seeing violence, think that it might be a good idea to mimic that violence.
The continuing explanation from the Unaffected is that proper parental guidance will (generally) teach children that the violence they see in TV and movies and video games is not real, and using such violence to solve problems is not an acceptable way of going about things. The Unaffected believe that whatever current epidemic of media-induced violence there may be, is due to a lack of proper parenting.
Meanwhile, the more hard-line of the Influenced claim that children can be corrupted by exposure to such violent media, regardless of how good their parenting is.
This last bit is unambiguously false. At the very least, some non-zero number of children can be exposed to vast amounts of violence and be none the worse for wear. I'm certainly living proof. I saw countless violent movies and played countless hours of violent video games as a child -- but my parents, especially my father, were always sure to reinforce the idea that violence
18. Linguistics. Velar, as in c in cake or g in log, as opposed to palatal or soft.
and
15 Linguistics. a. Sibilant rather than guttural, as c in certain and g in gem.
The (hard) "g" in "log" is the same "g" in "gimp" and "give." The "g" in "gem" and "gin" is the soft "g".
Well, maybe this is a simplistic explanation, but the U.S.'s current majority population (WASPs) had its roots in Puritan strictness. Profanity and vulgarity are, even in this day and age, still viewed with honest-to-goodness horror and dismay. I mean, there are people who are actually taken aback when they hear such words. They really can't believe someone would say such things!
;)) who don't particularly object. I'm not especially fond of gratuitous profanity (e.g. saying "fuckin'" as an adjective in front of every noun), but profanity has its valid uses. E.g., there is no other phrase in English which quite brings the connotations and emotional weight as "HOLY SHIT!" Regardless, we still have a sizable population (found mostly in the Midwest) who object to such words being used in front of children, as if it'll "corrupt" them somehow. In my view, as long as we teach children what the words are for, what they mean, when they are to be properly used, and how not to offend the overly-sensitive types, we'll be fine. My parents swore all the time in front of me, but somehow I ended up with a substantial command of English and a sizable vocabulary. :)
Granted, there are a metric fuckload of people (like me
You've heard "shit," "piss," "motherfucker," and "tits" on prime-time network TV? I really doubt that, unless it was an accident. "Piss" I can imagine being used in the sense of "That pisses me off," but not in the urological sense, not on prime time broadcasts. There's always the case of a missed bleeping in a rebroadcast movie, or the censors failing to keep up with live TV or a sporting event, but besides that... Can you provide specific examples? And are these endemic, or are they exceptions that happen once in a while?
So you're saying that most of Hoover Dam's power goes to L.A.... which is not even remotely the same as saying that most of L.A.'s power comes from the Hoover Dam. :)
It could be, theoretically, the same way that obscenity restrictions can be enforced on the broadcast networks by the FCC, but can't be enforced on (say) HBO or other cable channels that don't broadcast. You can't say motherfucker on NBC, but you can say it on HBO, for the very reason that NBC is making use of a public resource (the broadcast airwaves) and must answer to the public's standards for that use.
Of course, there's also the contention that technological advances in the last century have rendered moot the need for individual ownership of specific broadcast frequencies. If this were the case, would such regulation of the frequencies be necessary? (Search on Google for more info...)
But we're talking about produce placement in entertainment, not in shows "presented as fact, opinion, view, or endorsement". In theory, people watching the show aren't taking it as fact -- they know it's fiction, made up, a story, and so normal rules of business ethics don't (and probably shouldn't) apply to the content.
FYI, the seven words are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. (George Carlin actually made up that list; there's quite a lot of others you couldn't say then and still can't say now.) At any rate, none of those words are allowable on American broadcast television, even now, in late 2003. You'll hear them on (some) cable channels, but not on the networks. (There may have been occasional exceptions, but I doubt many.)
There's not a lot of cussing on broadcast TV, which is presumably what you're referring to. At worst, it's the low-level swear words: damn, hell, ass. You think words like that are offensive? Or that they're any more prevalent than they are in real life? God* help you.
* There is no God.
According to this page on the LA DWP's site, only 10% of the DWP's power comes from "large hydroelectric" sources. Even if Hoover Dam is the only such source, that's nothing like "Most of DWP's power".
Well, the obvious distinction is that child pornography is not generally recognized as political speech. You can't reasonably use the same response to both situations.
The first thing that comes to mind upon reading this is that in the Firestone situation, people were getting killed. I don't know whether that makes much of a difference (although I imagine it does; stories that involve lots of people dying will virtually all get reported, but stories that don't will not all get reported). I mean, the whole Enron thing was news up the wazoo for half a year, but nobody died.
I think in general, the media can only really focus on a couple big stories at a time. After all, there really are only a finite number of media outlets and reporters out there; they can only write a finite number of column inches. And it's not coincidence when a large portion of the media all decide that a given story is worth covering. Some of those decisions are based on "Wow, this sounds important, let's cover it" and some are based on, "Hmm, CNN is covering it, we'd better cover it too!" and I'm sure no small amount are based on, "Our ratings our down when we cover this story, let's try something else."
And the crux of this whole conversation is that the decisions are sometimes based on, "It's against our corporate interests to report this story, so we're just not going to." The solution to this problem is thorny at best, but the simple fact remains that this is a major problem and needs to be resolved.
Ah, but those were the days.
Intended? By who? Is there some authority which dictates how I'm allowed to go about writing? (And if there is such an authority, what makes you think I give a rat's ass what they think?)
Did it ever occur to you that despite our differences, we might have generally compatible goals? I don't identify myself as an environmentalist -- which is why I referred to environmentalists as "they" in my original post -- and like all rational people, I understand that in this particular debate, the clouds of heated invective boiling forth from both sides contain some nuggets of truth, but for the most part are unconsidered dogma. (The "sides" are the zealots, not the scientists who have legitimate scientific questions about the validity of conclusions drawn from the data.)
I don't really know whether humans are contributing significantly to global warming -- if we are at all -- but based on the past history of mankind's ability to cause localized ecological devastation, it seems wise to try to minimize our impact on the global environment. The real debate should be, what does that minimization entail?
Nonetheless, my original post was stating what I believe the environmentalists' motive to be. I was pissed because I was responding to the fifth such post I'd seen ("Pfft, why do environmentalists bitch? We can't do any long-term damage to the planet anyway!"), which is a strawman (environmentalists and not bitching about long-term damage as much as they are about short-term damage that will affect us when we get older, and our direct descendants over the next few generations).
The whole point is that fucking up the planet NOW will mean it's still fucked up in twenty or fifty years, when we're still around to enjoy it. I don't want the planet to be fucked up then, because I plan to still be here!
There's gaim for windows, too. But your points are noted. But hey, if you want the bugs fixed... it IS open source. :)
Smart geeks would say, "Are we talking 'kilo' as in 2^10 or 'kilo' as in 10^3?" if the context was unclear.
There *is* an easy solution: use Gaim. It's GPL, free, and supports ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Jabber, IRC, Gabu-Gabu and Zephyr. You can be logged on with multiple accounts to each of those protocols, all at the same time.
Gaim's the only client I use now, even though I have friends on numerous disparate IM services.
But wait! All those things are illegal. How do we reconcile that fact with the First Amendment, which begins, "Congress shall make no law..."? The reason is that the Supreme Court has determined, multiple times over the years, that there must be certain exceptions to the First Amendment. These exceptions are made in the belief that without them, the First Amendment would be useless -- anarchy would reign. These exceptions are *so important* that the SCOTUS has said, yes, there are exceptions. It would be more destructive to society to allow these things than it would be to restrict the Constitution.
Finite broadcast resources are another case like this. The dissemination of multiple viewpoints, of truthful news, is such a critically important thing to a democracy, that having one source monopolize control of the airwaves is a really, really bad idea.
As far as I recall, Watterson said he didn't want to run the strip into the ground before he ran out of ideas, nor did he want to keep doing the same thing forever and ever. I never heard that he was so upset by the copyright infringement that it caused him to stop doing C&H. Watterson's own words don't seem to mention this at all.