The Right to Violence and Cynicism

On Monday, the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. has struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to children.

The Californian law defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive,” appealed to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

The Supreme Court, presided by Justice Antonin Scalia, argued that “Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection."

He also pointed out that "depictions of violence have never been subject to government regulation".

True.
This argument is somewhat disingenuous and exasperating in its willful short-sightedness, but it is in compliance with the existing (clearly inadequate) legislation.


Furthermore, in the right hands it could be used to pose the very questions about the inadequacy of relevant legislation, therefore used for the good of society - for the good of a society that does not want every single value relativised and deconstructed into an obsolete word, a risible label. To protect the right NOT to be exposed to gratuitous violence.

But the argument of some commentators are just plain stupid - albeit criminally so. Here is a particularly irritating example.

It is Perverse, but It Is Also Pretend

The author, who conducted "a study" at Harvard, claims that the California state case was "built on assumptions — that violent games cause children psychological or neurological harm and make them more aggressive and likely to harm other people — that are not supported by evidence. "   

First of all, what evidence, and who is interpreting it?

By way of "evidence", this article presents us with a statement of a 13-year-old who said: “With video games, you know it’s fake.”  


The people interpreting this "evidence" are, like the author, clearly a priori of the opinion that the ill effects of violence are merely an assumption. (Tell that to social workers around the world!)

But the author then goes on to say: "In the end, the case serves only to highlight how little we know about this medium and its effects on our children."
 

??!

If you know so little, then why the hell are you talking about this, and backing your assumptions with Harvard studies, to boot?  


Anyway, I would say that having to have security guards regularly inspect and disarm school-children - who are, by the way, increasingly in need of psychological help and are being drugged en masse by OTC "medicines" - I would say that constitutes pretty reliable "evidence" that something is seriously amiss. Because such things were practically unheard of until the 1990s.(There were scandalous isolated cases, of course; and they were scandalous because they were isolated cases.)


Now think: which is the one factor that separates earlier incarnations of our Western culture from ours today?

The media. Television. The internet. All prodigious inventions that could have brought the light to billions - and, up to a point, they have - but were abused, in a typically human fashion, and perverted into ultra-fast catering to the basest of human impulses - the kind of impulses that spread the fastest, like - literally - the plague. 
And all, TO PERVERT PEOPLE INTO SPINELESS CONSUMERS, not only of material goods, but of ideologies.

That's the bottom line.  


Or has humankind "evolved", all by itself, as if living in a vacuum, into a degenerate race of blood-thirsty, crazy toddlers? How did this happen? Where are the studies explaining that?  


Notice the deviously isolated subject of this study: "... that violent games [my emphasis] cause children psychological or neurological harm and make them more aggressive..."  


Violence is violence. The mind does not recognise differences between virtual and non-virtual violence, or indeed, among kinds of violence. The intellect does; but the wider conglomerate of sense-based cognition that drives our experience of the world - starting by the limbic system - does not. Violence is a destructive force, pure and simple. It takes impure and willfully perverse (or hopelessly obtuse) reasoning to twist this basic reality into "anything-goes" sophistry.

You shouldn't need a PhD to figure that one out.  


EVERYTHING starts as an impulse in the mind, as an image, as a fleeting fantasy. And everyone - certainly a Harvard study-conductor - should know that image equals example. And like breeds like. Violence breeds more violence.


The ultimate argument of such brave defenders of liberty is, inevitably, the claim that restrictions open the door to arbitrary censorship.

It's as a vacuous argument, as is the rest of the arguments of the defenders of the uglier "liberties". (Yes, I am using quotation marks because lax values, if any, do not constitute freedom. In fact, they lead to slavery, to spineless acquiescence.)  


If you prohibit one thing on the basis of certain criteria, it does not follow automatically that this would foster increasingly arbitrary decisions in the future. As long as we keep using our intellect, we CAN decide what is acceptable and what not as we go, can't we?

The actual reasoning behind the least sinister (but no less harmful) arguments amounts to: "Who are we to decide what is 'good' and what 'bad', and who are we to impose either on anyone?"  


Yes, indeed. If you're talking sub specie aeternitatis, then you can easily reduce Cheops' pyramid into a molehill. (And Stalin into a misguided but ultimately not-bad Uncle Joe.)
 
But our daily lives are not fashioned in the light of eternity, and the question is: what kind of society do we want to live in?

And how about the right NOT to be exposed to violence and oversexualisation?

Who is fighting for those?

California was; and it was defeated.

"Rights" also imply an ability to choose. But how can a person who has been practically indoctrinated from the day s/he was born choose anything that is not what s/he is familiar with?

One thing I definitely agree about with the author of the "study" above and the supporters of this line of thought: it IS perverse, and it IS pretend.

Only, I am not talking about video games.

To end this on a positive, constructive note, here's a suggestion: how about conducting a study on WHAT exactly does cause the surge of mindless violence among the very young that has started in the 1990s and shows no signs of dying down?

I would suspect that most thinking and sentient human beings already have an idea of what is causing it. But if Harvard & Co. need to be convinced of it, so be it.

Only, it would have to be conducted and the results assessed by a panel of truly independent-thinking people who prefer the truth to the sound of their own voice and the sight of their name in the New York Times.



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