stupidity is a crime

By jp 23 Apr 2001

this pisses me off, a great deal.

okay, given that maybe there’s some moral barrier some people may lack, given that everyone wants insta-fix scapegoats for the modern age, given that parents who are too entirely detached and incabable to raise children are still allowed to breed, there’s still such a piss-poor reasoning for tossing the blame around like this.

this angers me most, because as someone who has had plenty of exposure to the agent of corruption at hand and many people who are in theory corrupted by the same great satan, neither I nor they resemble the irrational violent phenotype in any way. I’ll pick on myself:

I’ve never been in a fight, though I love to play the most hideously grotesque fighting sims. Matter of fact, I’ve actively ducked my way out of several fights and never looked back without giving it second thought. I play some seriously tweaked shoot-em-up games, and have never even had the urge to hunt. Wasting a thousand million pawns of some evil empire is all in a quarter’s play, but I don’t think I’d even want to nail a teeney weeney bunny wabbit. It’s just not appealing.

I just don’t understand how parents who are so starved for an explanation of why can reasonably launch such a large scale effort to tackle something they a) know shit about and b) have no rationale for proving it’s the catalyst.

why do people honestly believe that humans are so weak in spirit to take any image or idea presented to them and follow it as if it were their destiny? it’s not that simple. if someone is so tweaked that they’ll crack and use mimicry so easily, there was plenty more going on before. you want a scapegoat, go after their parents. people are only open to suggestion if they’ve got no moral barriers to begin with — those are usually a product of upbringing, which defines their presence, integrity and limits.

it’s just what it sounds like people, entertainment. does this mean I can sue Electronic Arts if little Billy grows up to be a hockey player rather than the academic I always wanted him to be? It’s the same thing as what these folks are saying, and it’s an equal load of bunk.

You want something that makes people do evil things, go after the Church or any organized religion. That’s brainwashing. You want a way to peddle away some hours between classes or unwind for a bit in the evening, try Sega. That’s recreation. You want to blame video games for causing people to snap, try blaming yourself. If people really can’t distinguish between reality and a simulated reality, than there’s something way upstream that we need to be tackling.

And you know behind it all these fucks just want to get rich from the loss of their children. Ah Amurdermerica.