For the record, I love violent video games! ;)

Decius wrote:
When American politicians use social wedge issues as a foil to draw attention away from their inability to address real problems people here are easily fooled because the solutions to our problems seem intractable to us, and so the foil does not seem so unreasonable.

Is that why? I don't necessarily agree that so many of our problems (certainly not the one cited) and their solutions are that difficult to grasp. I think it has more to do with the fact that citizens, far too often, are willing to have their rights curtailed in exchange for promises of safety and easier lives. However, there is something to what you suggest, in that we often have feasible solutions, but proponents of competing solutions often defeat or water-down each other's proposals, so that nothing constructive gets done. Many citizens find that discouraging, but are that many of them actually being fooled?

Decius wrote:
When the same actions are seen through the prism of a foreign culture their true nature becomes more apparent.

Is that because we're seeing things more clearly from an objective distance, or because we tend to over-simplify when we aren't privy to all of the cultural factors involved?

Decius wrote:
There are ways to make a culture less violent but the road is long and the path is counterintuitive.

Maybe... or maybe we just can't agree on which path(s) to take.

RE: Venezuela bans violent video games: a first-person guest essay - Boing Boing