Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

How stupid are these people?

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Let me file that under fuck it.

The revolution will be supervised.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

No one could have predicted…

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

This blog will pay for itself.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / ‘Ethics in Gaming’ Open Thread: Another Trumpshow of Farce

‘Ethics in Gaming’ Open Thread: Another Trumpshow of Farce

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The Verge reports:

Today, President Trump brought together top executives of the gaming industry, parents groups and members of Congress for a meeting to discuss violence in video games. Announced last week as part of President Trump’s response to the Parkland shooting, the meeting was hastily assembled and has been criticized as a purposeful distraction from more concrete gun-control measures.

The proceedings were closed to the press, but by all accounts, the meeting was a strange one. The President opened the meeting by showing a supercut of hyperviolent gameplay scenes apparently compiled from online streamers — a compilation that was later posted to the White House’s official YouTube account…

Attendees said there was little serious talk of government restrictions on content (which would present significant legal challenges), and the conversation focused on more robust age restrictions or voluntary measures that could be undertaken by the industry itself. “The president encouraged [game developers] to explore things they can do on their own to make things healthier in society,” said Media Research Center President Brent Bozell, “and that’s where it was left.”

In part, that may be a result of who was in attendance. None of the three conservative critics in attendance have any particular focus on video games, and each is better known for their work in other areas. Parents TV Council member Melissa Henson writes primarily about liberal values in Hollywood, while fellow attendee Lt. Col Dave Grossman specializes in teaching military tactics to police officers. (He was quoted telling officers “It’s your job to put a piece of steel in your fist and kill those sons of bitches when they come to kill our kids,” in a recent profile in Men’s Journal.) Bozell himself has most recently focused on raising awareness about allegedly anti-Christian bigotry on ABC’s The View…

No doubt it will be explained that it is very triggering for wanna-be Nazis to see their idols treated as the bad guys in games like WOLFENSTEIN. Why can’t we think of the poor lil’ Nazi snowflakes!

Reader Interactions

127Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    Balko provides the goods on one of the nutters that was invited:

    And before anyone asks, as far as I know I’ve never met this guy.

  2. 2.

    Emma

    I hate watching the news. I hate reading the news. I am thinking of an anchorite lifestyle. Maybe that way I can ignore the farce our government has become.

  3. 3.

    lgerard

    Are you sure Bozell didn’t send a stand in instead? He’s famous for “delegating”.

    I’m sure he has some great insights about kids today. I’d love to see him even try to play a game other then solitaire.

  4. 4.

    PPCLI

    Dear Media:
    Every story about this must include the fact that every f*cking country in the world has the same f*cking video games but only one has an epidemic of mass shootings. This is not complicated

  5. 5.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Emma:

    I am thinking of an anchorite lifestyle.

    All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

  9. 9.

    Mnemosyne

    One of the ways that Facebook and Twitter feeds my misanthropy is by revealing that there are assholes out there across the entire political spectrum who think the kids at MSD high school deserved to be murdered because school bullying exists. If we could just stop all bullying, then pathetically insecure adults could keep their Emotional Support Rifles!

  12. 12.

    fuckwit

    any desperate excuse to avoid facing the obvious fact that racism is what animates our gun addiction and our gun violence

  13. 13.

    khead

    I used to play a lot of Burnout Paradise and one of the GTA’s on the Xbox “back in the day” to relieve stress after the commute. Now, I ain’t gonna lie. I occasionally DID have a moment during the commute where I wanted to pull out of traffic, drive over some people and light posts without hurting the car and then doing a couple of drive bys……. but then I would remember life is not a video game.

  15. 15.

    Dr. Ronnie James, D.O.

    @satby: Bingo. Between this, the steel tariffs, the hangup on trade deficits, it’s all like a rehash of “stupid red meat shit Republicans stopped caring about in 1990.” And all these things are driven by his gut, totally outside what policy process currently exists in the White House. It’s like his political id formed in the late ’80s and then went into a coma. Maybe it plays well with the Gran Torino crowd… expect him to call for a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning next.

  17. 17.

    Obvious Russian Troll

    I’m personally just amused to see his Gamergate supporters defend this.

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    And if kids respected their elders like they did back in my day!

    The funniest part of that is that it’s mostly Boomers and Silents saying it. The rebellious “turn on, tune in, drop out” generation is now upset that Kids These Days don’t trust anyone over 30.

  20. 20.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    I wonder if his younger fans are in full meltdown over this.

  21. 21.

    khead

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    Bonus points if they also complain about “too much sin” nowadays after having sinned their way through high school with you. Of course, maybe that’s just the folks on my feed.

  22. 22.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    “Trump: The Videogame” could be a topseller. You gain “Media Cred Points” for banging vapid golddiggers, the occasional young teen that resembles your daughter and an assortment of bar chicks. Money comes from being “tough” and ripping off vendors, investors and banks.

  23. 23.

    Feebog

    I keep running up against this argument in almost every gun control argument I see on the internet. It is so bogus and stupid it hardly merits rebuttal. But I have yet to have anyone explain how other countries who also have exposure to video games manage to avoid mass murders.

  24. 24.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Open thread? I really wanna see this fucking door, I hope it’s more impressive than Carson’s $30,000 table, cause that was kinda basic (am I using that right, fellow kids?)

    Interior Secretary reportedly bought a $139,000 door with taxpayer money
    Zinke also wants to cut the agency’s workforce by 4,000.

    This fucker may be the biggest grifter in the cabinet. I hope someday more people notice.

  26. 26.

    Citizen_X

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Grossman is a police trainer that tells cops…that after killing a man, they’ll have the best sex of their lives.

    I want gun control legislation that disarms this psycho, because if that doesn’t describe a person who should never have access to a firearm, I don’t know what is.

  27. 27.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)

    When the fuck does this shitty movie end? Do we really need to sit through both reels? Fuck, we know how this shit ends. Mueller really needs to break into the projector booth and yank this thing right off the projector already.

  32. 32.

    efgoldman

    Kefauver and comic books in the 1950s
    Drugs and free love in the 60s
    Disco in the 70s
    Tipper Gore and Parents Resource Music Center in the ’90s

    It’s fucking amazing that any of our kids, including mine, grew up to be useful, functioning adults.
    While it is true that a certain number of them grew up to be mouth breathing, knuckle dragging flying monkeys, too.

  34. 34.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    ‘We’re going to burn down your store!’: Trump supporters caught on camera threatening California book shop

    A pair of Trump supporters were caught on camera this past weekend issuing unhinged threats to a left-wing bookstore in Berkeley, California.

    The video, which was posted on YouTube by Berkeley’s Revolution Books, shows the Trump supporters coming into the store and confronting people working there.

    The video begins with a woman Trump supporter asking a store staff member if she really thinks “I’m racist because I support our president?”

    “Yes, basically, yes,” the staff member replies.

    A male Trump supporter, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, called the staffer “commie scum” and told her that “we’re going to burn down your bookstore.”

    The staffer informed them that she had video of them threatening to burn down the store and told them to “please leave” the premises.

    “This is America, f*ck you!” the man shouted at her.

    Later in the video, the man can be seen telling people outside the store that “Trump is going to get rid of all you pieces of sh*t.”

    He also called the woman who worked at the book store an “anti-white racist piece of sh*t” and said that the only people who shopped at the store were “Antifa pieces of sh*t.”

  35. 35.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mnemosyne:

    Or to put it a less generationally divisive way:

    The people talking about the “good old days” when teenagers respected their elders and didn’t waste their time protesting about social issues need to let me know when those days were, because I’m pretty sure that the protests against the Vietnam War started before I was born, and I turn 50 next year. ?

  37. 37.

    joel hanes

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Interior Secretary reportedly bought a $139,000 door

    But of course he did. It’s a _security_ door, I’ll bet, and a damned good one. His vault.
    To protect him from us.

    This should tell us almost everything we need to know about what he intends to do while in office.

  38. 38.

    sdhays

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:

    I wonder if his younger fans are in full meltdown over this.

    You mean just like how the gun-humpers didn’t go ape-shit insane when he said that we should “take guns first, then have due process”? They know he’s full of shit. They know that he’s not all right in the head. They know that he’s incredibly corrupt and stupid. They just believe that it won’t hurt them – it will hurt other, “more deserving” people.

    And so far, it has.

  40. 40.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Mnemosyne:
    That was after the Supreme Court did evil stuff like allowing coloreds into schools and taking god out of them. That was the first sin, in their minds.

  41. 41.

    trollhattan

    @joel hanes:
    Jealous of Pruitt’s cone of silence, no doubt. These people are a plague upon the earth, can we move on to frogs now?

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:

    And yet like half the people saying it were born after that happened. So it’s not even like they remember the “good old days” before Brown v Board of Education. It’s a completely mythical time for them, and yet they claim that’s what their childhoods were like.

    It’s like, The 1970s — it was a more innocent time. Really, some people actually say that.

  43. 43.

    Citizen_X

    @trollhattan: Zinke, Pruitt…You have to wonder when the people who demand the highest-level security are the guys at Interior and the EPA.

  44. 44.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Mnemosyne:
    I’m sure in their bubbles, it was. My mother, who was born in 1960, wishes she lived in the 1950s. And I always I tell her no, you actually wouldn’t.

  45. 45.

    NotMax

    Repeating this as it seemed to get lost in the shuffle the other day. Indicative in a small way of the morass evident throughout this woebegone administration.

    Gives a whole new meaning to ‘secret service’ (emphasis added).

    The government’s personnel agency is hiding information about federal employees’ bonuses, overtime and cost of living adjustments. A powerful House committee wants to know why.

    Open the Books, a government watchdog group, has for the past 11 years sought the names, titles, agencies, salaries and bonus information for all federal employees. It has received much of the data it sought and then has posted the information publicly. This year, it was denied salary information on more than 250,000 employees.
    [snip]
    While the government traditionally hides some employee information — about 3,500 positions in the 2016 request — the new redactions represent one out of every eight federal employees.
    [snip]
    The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury had the most redactions, at about 138,000, 75,000 and 19,000, respectively.

    Other agencies with many missing salaries include the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of the Interior and OPM itself.

    Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy at Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization promoting government accountability, said OPM needs to be more forthcoming about its decision to keep this information secret. He called the jump “jarring.”

    “Why is it now hundreds of thousands more, what’s behind that sudden change?” Spaulding said. “This information isn’t to harass federal employees, this is so taxpayers know how their money is being spent.” Source

  46. 46.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @sdhays:

    And so far, it has.

    We’ll see how long that lasts with the new tariffs in place. Either the WTO slaps us down and we leave, becoming a pariah state, or the WTO gets blown up and a full blown global trade war starts. Americans as a whole have become far too soft and privlidged. They have no idea how lucky they are to live here and the position that America has enjoyed is a temporary one. It’s being torn down by stupid idiots. Trump supporters are the ones who should be deported; they wouldn’t last a day in a work torn country.

    Just today I saw some scumbag’ s truck back window said in vinyl lettering, “Veterans Before Refugees”. I tried flipping him off but he was looking in another direction. Like we can’t look after both at the same time.

  52. 52.

    Arclite

    My son is 10, and no stranger to first person shooters (FPS). He and I were trolling through youtube the other day, and came upon this video of a soldier in a firefight with the Taliban. Since the guy strapped his GoPro to his helmet for this encounter, it’s basically a real-life FPS. My son instantly had a reaction that I’ve never seen him have playing games: “That’s really scary!” and “Why is it taking so long to reload! He’s going to get shot!” expressing genuine concern for the soldier in the battle.

    Even a 10 year old can distinguish between fantasy and reality.

  55. 55.

    Arclite

    The truth is, over the past three decades, as gaming has gained in popularity, violent crime has plummeted. Honestly, I’m surprised there haven’t been any studies on this, as the correlation is quite clear, and the premise is obvious: with young men engaged in playing video games for hours a day, they’re not on the streets, bored, with nothing to do. And just like even poor households have a TV, a console is even cheaper, and games can be shared among people, so the hobby isn’t very expensive.

  56. 56.

    Amir Khalid

    Trump believes that President He can overrule by decree not only federal law but also the facts of science. Now that’s what I call a powerful leader. //

    Since it’s open thread, I’d appreciate some input from los guitarristas de Balloon Juice. Should I lust after the Fender Champion 100 amplifier, or the Marshall Code 100 combo? Both are priced the same in Malaysia: RM1,800. (Higher than the US price in both cases, the Fender by a whopping 33%, but that’s another story.) The Marshall has more features but is complex to set up and use, and might be overkill for a bedroom guitarist.

  60. 60.

    khead

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I once got into a fist fight while playing M.U.L.E. (greatest game ever, btw) on an Atari 800 in college – but, yeah, I never killed anyone. Plus, I think we fought because we always played Friday afternoon during happy hour. Also, I have that Kerbal game on my wishlist on Steam. Might have to get it.

  62. 62.

    Suzanne

    Gin & Tacos brings the truth:

    “Trump voters see having sex with an adult film star as a huge plus. They think it’s awesome. Donald Trump is the aspirational brand of every trash-ass white person who dreams of being able to yell racial slurs and hate immigrants and flout the law and cheat on their spouse with a cartoon-looking porn star and not get in trouble for any of it.

    They are garbage humans and he is their avatar.”

    So true. Trash, trash, trash.

  64. 64.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Major Major Major Major:
    I got into that game in October 2015, after watching Scott Manley’s channel. It was so frustrating at first until I got Mechjeb, which did things like automated landings and ascents for me. I gradually got better and could do without it, but it was more convenient. I haven’t played in over a year, but it was fun. One complaint I have is that it was too easy to mine for science to unlock the tech tree. I got the entire thing unlocked just in the Kerbin system alone. The furthest I ever got was Duna in science mode.

  66. 66.

    Arclite

    @Major Major Major Major: Absolutely, I’m not saying it’s a single factor. I know about the studies on lead as well. But I think that games as a time sink that keep kids off the streets should also be looked at. When I was a adolescent and teen in the eighties, my buddies and I were always outside and getting into trouble. Air rifles, explosives, throwing rocks and snowballs at cars: we were bored little terrorists. Now all of my daughter’s friends are either playing Let’s Dance together in front of the TV, or they’re at home playing League of Legends with each other. If my friends and I had that shit when we were young, we’d have done that than freeze our asses off in the snow shooting at each other with bb guns.

  69. 69.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Mnemosyne:
    I thought so. I never got that impression just from interacting with him here. Anonymity probably has alot to do with that

  70. 70.

    ??‍? Martin

    Say what you will about how video games lead to violence, I am seriously looking forward to wasting some white American religious nutters in Farcry 5 later this month.

  76. 76.

    Feathers

    @Mnemosyne: I just tried counting how many I’ve had. Pretty sure it was seven before I found my ChiaoGoos and settled down. I did pass my old ones on to folks who were learning to knit. And I’ve kept a set of bamboos, because sometimes that’s what the yarn needs

    I’m going to binge the new season of Jessica Jones and bang out a Carbeth cardigan this weekend.

  79. 79.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Mnemosyne: Oh. That’s good that they’re not the same person as the commenter here.

    His website has real, genuine Berniebros infesting it, crying about the DCCC and calling Hillary a “war sow”. Ugh.

  96. 96.

    different-church-lady

    I remember very well all the Atari cartridge spree muderers of the 80s…

  101. 101.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Bozell can go fuck himself. The problem isn’t bigotry against Christians, it’s deplorables who call themselves “Christians” but actually worship Mammon and Moloch, like Bozell.

  102. 102.

    different-church-lady

    There was no good music created in the 80s.

    N-O-N-E.

    Your entire debate is pointless.

  107. 107.

    Raven Onthill

    Finished Ohler’s Blitzed! a few days ago. Damn! Didn’t realize the Nazis were meth-heads, but it explains a lot. (And Hitler turns out to be a lot more like Trump than I knew. Bah!)

  111. 111.

    Steve in the SFO

    @Yutsano: REM. Replacements. Smithereens. I could go on for hours. But Prince was a strong start to the list.

  114. 114.

    Sm*t Cl*de

    Wolfenstein? I asked my parents and relatives from the old country how they felt about video games that desensitise the player to the concept of killing Nazis (I keep them running in emulation mode in otherwise-unused corners of my brain), and they only wished that there were more of them available 80 years ago.

  119. 119.

    frosty

    @Mnemosyne: I’m well beyond your 49+ and I don’t recall any teenagers respecting their elders. Even my older cousins, for that matter. Probably my grandparents too, but they’re not around to ask any more.

  120. 120.

    frosty

    @Amir Khalid: I’d go for simpler and less features for now. But then, I use a Deluxe Reverb with reverb, tremelo, and an overdrive pedal, which is as simple as it gets. Friends of mine have more than one pedal and programmable amps. It boggles my mind. Keep it simpler and work on learning to pick the notes you want for now. Almost 50 years since I picked up a guitar and I’m still struggling with that.

  121. 121.

    frosty

    @different-church-lady: Go-Gos. Bangles. I rest my case. I lived through the 70s while all the 60s Weird got recycled. These two bands, among others, were New Weird and were refreshing to hear. Plus, girl bass players, woo hoo!

  126. 126.

    Matt

    @Sm*t Cl*de: My favorite was the reply from the makers of Wolfenstein: pretty much, “we aren’t ‘doing politics’ with this release, we’ve been about shooting Nazis for 20+ years.”

  127. 127.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Feathers: hehhehheh, I have at least five sets of circulars (Knitpicks interchangeable in both metal and the square wood, then a personalized set from Louet’s needle of the month 2017, then a set from Addi, and a cheap set of bamboo for plane trips) and I’m contemplating getting a set from Signature as well.

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