bucy wrote:

Decius wrote:

A new front in the political wars over sex and violence in video games opened Tuesday when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman called for a new crackdown on the industry by the federal government.

Remember that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more of this kind of stuff. You know, children who are never exposed to reality and never have to make their own choices about right and wrong do a real good job of taking care of themselves when they go to college.

I guess it isn't really surprising that the whole Parents Music Resource Center flap with Tipper Gore and Jello Biafra from 20 years ago is playing itsself out again in the context of video games...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

Everything old is new again.

RE: Senators target 'graphic' video games | CNET News.com

Decius wrote:

A new front in the political wars over sex and violence in video games opened Tuesday when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman called for a new crackdown on the industry by the federal government.

Remember that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more of this kind of stuff. You know, children who are never exposed to reality and never have to make their own choices about right and wrong do a real good job of taking care of themselves when they go to college.

I guess it isn't really surprising that the whole Parents Music Resource Center flap with Tipper Gore and Jello Biafra from 20 years ago is playing itsself out again in the context of video games...

RE: Senators target 'graphic' video games | CNET News.com

A new front in the political wars over sex and violence in video games opened Tuesday when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman called for a new crackdown on the industry by the federal government.

Remember that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more of this kind of stuff. You know, children who are never exposed to reality and never have to make their own choices about right and wrong do a real good job of taking care of themselves when they go to college.

Senators target 'graphic' video games | CNET News.com

Clinton asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the origins of a downloadable modification that allows simulated sex in the personal computer version of one of the most popular and controversial video games in history.

"We should all be deeply disturbed that a game which now permits the simulation of lewd sexual acts in an interactive format with highly realistic graphics has fallen into the hands of young people across the country," Clinton wrote in a letter to the head of the Federal Trade Commission. (Emphasis mine)

Ok, this bullshit has got to stop. Where are all the "young people" who have received this game?

M games are rated for 17+. At age 18, I can go buy the most violent of hardcore pornography. I can buy lottery tickets, cigerettes, vote for pandering half-asses like Sen Clinton, and get my head blown off in the army.

At 18, our laws don't recognize you as a "young person," but as a fully functional and participating member of our country.

So what are we talking about here? The only young people that would get this game are people in the 1 year gap between 17 and 18, or younger kids whose parents foolish bought a Mature game for them.

The only argument people can make is the game was misleadingly labeled, causing them to purchase something more extreme then they thought. The argument is so flawed. What are these people who are pissed about being "deceived" so mad about? That they are cool giving their kids a game where they can decapiate people with a sword, shoot cops, take drugs, and bang hookers, but no no no, being able to see 2 animated characters have sexing is just too much! That is as hypocritical as it is horrible parenting.

This is utterly a waste of my governments time.

CNN.com - Clinton seeks video game sex scene probe

Sen. Hillary Clinton, that weathervane of modern Democratic Party politics, complained about video games in March: "Probably one of the biggest complaints I've heard is about some of the video games, particularly 'Grand Theft Auto,' which has so many demeaning messages about women and so encourages violent imagination and activities and it scares parents."

It's no surprise, then, that Clinton and other like-minded senators (Democrat Joe Lieberman, Republican Rick Santorum) are behind a bill to spend $90 million in tax dollars on a study looking at the "impact" of video games and other "electronic media" on minors.

I just don't understand what the hell the Democratic party's "position" on the First Amendment is. On the one hand, they handily defend the National Endowment for the Arts when they use my money to make publically available works that some people find offensive, and yet on the other hand they stand opposed to allowing ME to use my money to consume something they find offensive in the privacy of my own home! When prominent Dems like Clinton line up with the fundamentalists on the wrong side of the first amendment they provide a clear counterpoint to those who think Democrats are good guys. If you support big government and legislated morality you're not a liberal, you're an authoritarian.

But, of course, it sure works politically. People in this country don't beleive in freedom. They vote to take things away from other people, not because they want to be left alone. They vote to prevent gay people from getting married or to prevent poor people from owning guns or to prevent teenagers from playing video games. We talk a lot about freedom in this country but we don't actually care for it.

What's behind the video game witch hunt? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

[Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton] has clearly staked out her positions on [digital-era privacy], and they're sending electronic civil libertarians' hearts a twitter.

Speaking as an electronic civil libertarian it is simply not possible for any position taken by the video game censorship candidate to send my "heart a twitter." If Clinton was interested in reaching people like me she wouldn't have been so vocal in attacking our culture over the past few years. What is, however, interesting is that Clinton is picking up this issue because it resonates with the people she is interested in reaching, mainstream Democrats. If mainstream Democrats care about privacy thats a good thing for privacy, regardless of who wins the Presidency.

Wired News: Hillary: The Privacy Candidate?

For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people’s lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we’ve seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we’ve seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount.

This is Kos, at Cato, talking about libertarian democrats. Its an interesting read. The responses are, I think, more interesting. They fall into several categories:

1. The liberal hater: I hate Kos because he is a popular liberal blogger. Liberals are responsibile for everything that is wrong with the world.

2. The wannabe libertarian: I am a partisan Republican (often, a social conservative) who would vote for a Republican no matter what, but I tell my friends I'm a libertarian because I think it sounds cool, so Kos must be wrong because clearly I am a libertarian but I'd never vote for a Democrat.

3. The anarcho-capitalist: Kos fails to address the idea that the only reason corporations can be coercive is the power governments grant them, ergo, Kos is wrong.

(This one is confusing. Apparently these people are unaware that Republicans also regulate markets. Democrats might have traditionally regulated markets more than Republicans, but there is more to his point than this...)

4. The disillusioned libertarian.

This is the response that I think is interesting. The disillusioned libertarians get something that the anarcho-capitalists are missing:

The Republican Party has become corrupted by power.

I'm not talking about Jack Abramoff. I'm talking about NSA surveillance, unlawful enemy combatants, and national security letters.

Republicans have spent years arguing, rightly, that government is a dangerous, coercive thing that ought to be contained, and yet the moment they gain control of both houses of Congress, the Whitehouse, and the Court (whether they beleive it or not) they have decided, instead, that there is absolutely no problem with big government as long as they are running it.

There is absolutely no assumption of unchecked executive power which is so dangerous or far-reaching that today's Republicans won't embrace it and fight for it.

Their's is a fantasy land in which everyone accused of terrorism is guilty and government officials never commit crimes or abuse their authority. Perhaps some are not so stupid, but they don't care, because they figure they'll never personally be the victim of such abuse. Either way, they don't seem to beleive in checks and balances, nor do they seem to believe that there ought be a limit to their ever expanding coercive power.

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Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » The Case for the Libertarian Democrat

Tycho of Penny Arcade made a pretty sizable ruckus the other day (http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php?date=2005-07-21) pertaining to the distinction the ESRB makes between their "M" (Mature, 17+) rating, and their "AO" (Adults Only, theoretically 18+) rating for video games. Apparently their written distinction is that it's the _length_ of the scenes of violence and/or sex that determine what rating the game gets, and he doesn't like it. Neither do I really, I think it's too vague to be useful as a determination, and can lend itself too easily to circus antics to swing the "offical rating" one way or the other.

For a rating system to be useful, it *must* be applied equally to all the things it's supposed to rate, and in this instance, the circus antics of Senator Clinton and the various video-game haters of America have clearly swung the rating. I present to you a blatant evasion of the smoking gun by Patricia Vance (president of the ESRB) as posted in a Gamespot article today...

From: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/07/21/news_6129557.html?part=rss&tag=gs_news&subj=6129557

GameSpot: Arguably [Sony Computer Entertainment's] God of War has similar levels of violence and even more graphic portrayal of sexual activity. Rockstar could argue that its Grand Theft Auto has been singled out...

Patricia Vance: I'm certainly familiar with the materials that were submitted to us, and it was rated, you know, as a relatively high M, with a number of content descriptors that indicate the game is inappropriate for anybody under the age of 17. Our action [on San Andreas] was really as a result of determining that the content--the sexual depictions--were the result of the developer creating those depictions and leaving them on the disc, coded not to be accessed by the player. Nevertheless, once they were made available and made accessible, we had no choice but to change the rating.

What this boils down to is that Sony managed to get God Of War (which is by and far more graphically violent than GTA:SA) to market without making too many ripples so that no one would have a chance to make a stink over it, so it got to keep the "M" rating. Manhunt (which is another Rockstar North title BTW) which also has an "M" rating, practically redefines "extended duration" for scenes of graphic violence, since the whole point of the game is to make the violence as sadistic and malicious as possible. In Manhunt, you are being forced to make a snuff flick for pete's sake.

Now, I'm not particularly against graphic and adult-oriented games in the least. Personally, I like playing something with more bite than a damp spongebat when I play a video game, but this business of giving Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas an "AO" rating because a third-party modification drew attention to it is complete and utter bullshit. Rockstar *is* being singled-out because there's been a big media stink, even though there are multiple other titles that the ESRB has failed to rate as "AO" which contain even more graphic content than this.

BTW, if anyone's still stocking the "AO" version of the game, let me know. I won't wait for the price drop--I'd rather buy it without the taint of politics.

I'm with Tycho on this one, ESRB is bullshit.