Douchebag doesn't do it justice...piece of shit fucking prick is more like it...

From Forbes.com http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/01/21/ralph-nader-calls-violent-video-games-electronic-child-molesters/

Ralph Nader Calls Violent Video Games 'Electronic Child Molesters'

Former Green Party presidential candidate and long-time consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, likened video games to child molestation last night at the annual Busboys and Poets’ Peace Ball.

Speaking of today’s presidential inauguration, Nader let loose on President Obama and threw a wild punch at video games while he was at it.

“Tomorrow I’ll watch another rendition of political bullsh-t by the newly reelected president, full of promises that he intends to break just like he did in 2009,” Nader said. “He promised he’d be tough on Wall Street, and not one of these crooks have gone to jail—they got some inside trading people, but that’s peripheral.

“We are in the peak of [violence in entertainment]. Television program violence? Unbelievable. Video game violence? Unprecedented,” Nader said. “I’m not saying he wants to censor this, I think he should sensitize people that they should protect their children family by family from these kinds of electronic child molesters.”

Nader joins the ranks of many other elder statesmen in condemning violent video games, connecting our digital experiences with real-life tragedies. His words are eerily similar to the tweets of former GOP primary contender Donald Trump, who said after the Sandy Hook shooting “Video game violence & glorification must be stopped — it is creating monsters!”

In other words, the millions of people who play violent video games across the world each day are basically being preyed upon by “electronic child molesters” and are subsequently being turned into “monsters.”

Truly, we are in end times, folks. First it was jazz and then it was rock and roll, followed by the scourge of satanism brought on by Dungeons & Dragons and comic books; fast-forward a few years and it’ heavy metal and The Matrix. Now it’s video games and their “unprecedented” violence.

This is why millions of video game players go on shooting rampages every year. Or something.

Of course, the violence in our culture has nothing at all to do with our foreign policy, or with America’s use of drone strikes responsible for the deaths of at least 178 children on foreign soil, or our foreign wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere, or our military adventures in Somalia, South America, and Eastern Europe, or our near-trillion-dollar yearly defense budget.

Actually, to be fair, I have no idea whether our violent foreign policy creates a more violent domestic populace. The connection is likely tenuous at best, and likely just as difficult to accurately blame as video games. But it is interesting and a little sad that men like Ralph Nader, so-called consumer activists, can pin the violence of individual gunmen with serious mental issues on widespread consumer products that millions of well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens consume on a regular basis.

It’s sad that Nader, who has done some good in the past, should sound so much like Donald Trump. Then again, this is a man who recently penned a book titled “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us” so maybe it’s not really all that surprising.

Of course, Nader and Trump are hardly alone in this latest moral-outrage-crusade. The president has called for research into the effects of violent video games, and numerous politicians are proposing various censorship measures, taxes, and so forth in a concerted effort to curtail free speech—something government officials are often only too happy to attempt. Pundits like Joe Scarborough are calling for “regulations” as though “regulating” free speech somehow skirts the First Amendment.

As Aaron Carroll writes, “I understand why some people don’t like violent video games. I also understand why some people don’t like violent movies or TV shows. But before you start talking about censorship, I want to see some proof. I worry that if you decide (with no good evidence) that you don’t like my video games, and want them gone, then next you’ll come for my movies. Then, maybe, you’ll decide you need to come for my books. That will not do.”

No. No it will not.

I've played violent video games my whole life.
Never wanted to hurt anyone.

_________________
"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

I have been violent my whole life. I have never wanted to play video games.

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Another article from Sunday's Tribune.
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/- ... -74076303/

Going to school on video game violence

Christopher Borrelli
4:17 pm, January 18, 2013

The students filtered in.

They smelled of cigarettes and cold. They dropped their backpacks and peeled off their Gore-Tex. Then Lisa Buscani, one of the five instructors who teaches Ethics in Computer Games and Cinema at DePaul University, after asking her 30 or so students what they did last weekend — concerts, movies, "Dr. Who," "got drunk and hooked up" — asked if they were aware of what was going on in Washington. That "once again a few politicians are trying to lay blame for violence in the real world at the feet of the gaming world."

She asked what politicians hoped to accomplish. Several hands went up.

A guy in the back said matter-of-factly: "Create a scapegoat."

Heads nodded. She nodded. I nodded.

And yet: Don't video games have some responsibility to not contribute to an already violent culture?

The other night, at the end of my umpteenth game of "Battlefield 1943," an alarming statistic flashed across my TV screen: In the four years or so that I had been playing "Battlefield 1943," I had killed 43,291 people. I had bombed them and hit them with Jeeps, run over them with tanks, mowed them down from planes and plowed into them with boats. But primarily I shot them. Intrigued by that statistic, I popped in an old "Call of Duty" game that I once played a few times a week: Over many hours of play, I had killed 21,008 people.

To recap: I had killed — mostly shot with an assault rifle — 64,299 digital soldiers.

And how did I feel about this?

Not sociopathic. Conflicted.

I killed, virtually, so often that the groans of pain from digital soldiers became the white noise of computer war and often went unnoticed. As did the reflexive, Bourne-like way I reloaded a spent rifle. Did this desensitize me, leave me less emphatic, more prone to aggression? After particularly immersive matches, it would take a moment to break the spell. (Not unlike the way that your head readjusts after an especially absorbing movie.) I occasionally flung my game controller in frustration. That's arguably violent. Generally, though, I regarded first-person shooters as a kind of post-childhood cops and robbers, or very aggressive checkers, albeit played while looking down the barrel of a digital gun.

And yet.

I would be lying if I said those 64,299 digital kills did not weigh on me. As Buscani said, after the school massacre last month in Newtown, Conn., the familiar debate about a supposed correlation between violent culture and real shootings returned with a vengeance. Vice President Joe Biden met with representatives of the motion picture and video game industry as part of a White House offensive on gun violence; the National Rifle Association denounced video games; and during an interview with London's Channel 4 TV station, Quentin Tarantino refused to answer ("I'm not your slave, and you're not my master," he said) the inevitable question vaguely linking real violence to extremely violent movies, such as his Oscar-nominated "Django Unchained."

At a recent press conference, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said exposure to violent culture "numbs people to the cost of life," which sounds reasonable, though studies on the subject tend to be wildly contradictory and inconclusive. Even Biden told game-makers, "I come to this meeting with no judgment, but you all know the judgment other people have made."

Facts are less important than assumptions. At a GameStop in Evanston, a clerk told me that before Christmas, parents told him they didn't want to buy the first-person shooters their kids asked for (then asked for less violent alternatives). And in Algonquin, owners of the No Limit video arcade — yes, such places still exist — mothballed shooters like "The House of the Dead."

To ease their consciences.

"I never thought my action by itself would actually cure anything," co-owner Kevin Slota told me last week, "but when (mass shootings) like this happen, everyone points a finger elsewhere, and I might not know the solution, but I know I run this arcade, and I have to wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror."

Which sounds admirable. He didn't want to be part of the problem. The problem is — what is the problem?

And, wait, am I part of it?

Questions like those are what led me to DePaul, where its Department of Computing and Digital Media has been offering Ethics in Computer Games and Cinema since 2008. It's become one of the most popular courses in the university's game-development program. What began as a couple of tentative classes on the subject has grown to eight classes and almost 300 enrolled students. (All but one class is entirely full.) I attended a couple of classes.

I took a seat in the back of one of Buscani's late-afternoon classes last week. The debate was scattered but telling. A student said, "If someone is going to kill, I don't think it matters if they are playing 'Halo 4' or a 'Hello Kitty' game." Another, wearing a ski hat printed with images of daggers and switchblades, said, "It seems simplistic to look at the size of the issue and decide that only entertainment is the cause." Another said he worried excessive regulation would lead to, say, gamers in Utah having to follow Utah traffic laws when they played "Grand Theft Auto" in Utah. A fascinating idea that, like several of the points raised, deflected blame from the games themselves.

Buscani broke in:

"I'm inclined to disagree with all of you," she said. "Artists have to take responsibility for what they create."

Buscani, who has been teaching the course for a few years, told me later she doesn't personally feel there's a serious danger from violent games, but "the torrent," harmless or not, adds to a coarsening cultural crush. That's one reason DePaul created the course.

Charles Wilcox, a former Bell Labs spokesman who has taught communications at DePaul for 25 years, said he developed it at the request of university President Dennis Holtschneider, who had asked him that "the kids in the game-development program, the future industry professionals, start thinking of how to conduct themselves as artists, designers and programmers."

The class works like this: The first half of the semester lays a groundwork of classic philosophy. Half the time is spent discussing ideas such as "cultural relativism," the sort of philosophical framework that tends to sound familiar in cultural debates in which stridently opposing sides often claim to be morally right because they feel morally right. The second half of the semester is spent studying games such as "Grand Theft Auto," the ways in which media influences society, how moral theories apply to massive open-world games like "World of Warcraft."

Nearly every class, said DePaul instructor Kim Clark, who occasionally teaches the course, "begins with the majority of the students dismissing you outright on the idea that game violence is a problem or should even be considered one. They roll their eyes almost unanimously at you."

Students often begin the course feeling that video games carry no larger responsibility than entertainment, Wilcox said. "By the end, many come around to the idea that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, even in a game."

When I attended Wilcox's class, it was just the second week of the course. Wilcox, who comes off like a cheerful combination of Charles Nelson Reilly and Mr. Garrison from "South Park," asked aloud if being skilled at shooting a digital gun would actually translate into skill with an actual weapon. A young woman slouched over the desk, raised her hand languidly and said her cousin is a sniper in the military, and she plays him in "Call of Duty" all the time, and, "I pretty much whomp him every single time."

To be fair, she looked tired.

But that posture, it spoke to me loudly of how seriously she took the traditional arguments about video game violence. No wonder: These students zero in on obvious contradictions and cheap assumptions, and they suspect instinctively that those who hold press conferences and go on Sunday news shows to bemoan violence in video games tend to be the same people who have no experience actually playing video games.

On the other hand, they were not — at least not yet — the best proponents: They never mentioned that that first-person shooters are just one game genre or that gaming trends favor stealth over aggression.

Also, when Wilcox asked how many felt "that games have any responsibility to the broader culture?" no one said a word.

And a question of responsibility, not questionable studies or finding a copy of a hugely popular game in a murderer's bedroom — is where this debate is headed.

Not that everyone thinks that's where it should be headed. Dmitri Williams, who lectures on video games and community at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, balked when I brought it up. He said such a call for responsibility is predicated on the assumption that video games do cause some harm. And as a researcher eight years ago at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he published a widely quoted study asserting no significant correlation between video games and aggression.

"But then again," he said, "if politicians generally cited research about the things that actually harmed us, we would be worried about very different things in this country."

I said the video game violence debate sounds eerily similar to the comic book and rock 'n' roll scares of the '50s. Williams said: "Except, once again, the problem with this country ain't rock 'n' roll. And it never was."

_________________

I played Pac Man and I want to rip someone's face off just about every moment of every day.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

He's probably mad that in Grand Theft Auto you don't wear seat belts.

pong probably sucked for you teenagers

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I doubt I hate people because of PacMan; maybe my eating all the time perhaps. I admit rage issues while playing Madden from time to time, but who amongst us can't relate to that.

More notably, I think it's at least nice that the article was written to show sweeping-generalization idiots for what they are, and yes I'm aware that statement is a sweeping generalization; so shoot me.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

That's funny.

_________________
Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I will only because of my playing violent video games

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

There always has to be a scapegoat and right now violence in video games seems to be the main one. Violence in the news, movies and music? Not as bad as video games I guess. Violence in entertainment doesn't create extreme people, society does. The reason violence exists in video games and such is because there is a market for it. I'm sure it can desensitize people towards violence but to call it an "electronic child molester" is absolutely moronic.

Right now? That chubby censorer Tipper Gore was scapegoating that stuff when I was a kid.

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Twisted Sister vs. Tipper I was right there. 12 inch lp's should be wrapped in brown paper covers.

_________________
Elections have consequences.

It's always been a scapegoat, sure. But the media seems to find one particular scapegoat and run with it. The main one switches from time to time. Was metal, then rap, then Marylin Manson, then video games, etc.

Lip and Others, that's an awfully narrow view you guys have of the situation.

Facts are that playing the games for hours on end does desensitize people. Not just kids. I dont think it makes them shoot people, but the thought of rampaging a school and shooting them seems so easy to do and the desire becomes so strong...in part to a video game....that it happens, without the ramifications being thought out.

The video games these days (No matter what they are) have the same effect that sounds, lights, etc do in a casino, it just keeps you awake and going (No, Oxygen is not pumped into casinos, Einsteins), which leads to lack of sleep and bad choices.

Of course it is a small small % of kids that can't draw the line, but the fact is that it influences them.

I am not sure what to do. I mean you cant stop selling video games and realism of the guns, with the controller effects is out of the box, so you can't go back and make anyone tone that down.

But to try and tell me there is no contributing factors, when the kids from Columbine played all the time and told others they wanted to shoot people just like in____, is kinda naive.

_________________
"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

Duck Hunt .... two words.

_________________
Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Long story short i do love you man. But this is bullshit. Sorry.

_________________
"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

You'll have to take my games from my cold, dead hands.

_________________
Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I like to think you wouldn't actually fall for such simpleton figuring.

There's actually no scientific, controlled, long-term studies that support any of this shit. It's specious reasoning at it's zenith, except perhaps to "terrorism zomg!!!!".

But to say a fucking video game has anything contributory to a person being psychologically damaged to the point that they want to kill - who gives a flying fuck how - is just plain bullshit, as my pal Darkside said.

_________________
Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Well, the only opinion I contributed thus far is that Nader is a douchebag for equating violent video games to child molestation...if that's a narrow viewpoint, so be it.

If only the Taliban hadn't played all those video games. Thanks to the internet I've seen video of people beheaded, shot, impaled, and lying there bleeding out holding their internal in their own hands. I've seen smears of people from crashed cars as well as a suicide bomber blowing themselves up. I see this society that fucking loves guns so much they can't even envision a world where they can't shoot someone multiple times with their own assault rifles in the name of defense. I'm pretty desensitized to violence and video games are a minor part of it.

Interesting

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2018
#ExtendLafleur
10 More Wins

sunovabich

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2018
#ExtendLafleur
10 More Wins

I don't believe that. Usually they have like ESPN or NFL Network on. Why would they have Oprah's network pumped in?

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I know you are all very good friends with Doctors, but there is plenty of support.

I am not talking about the violent content of the game, as now you are getting into pyschological evaluations, but to tell me that video games, strobe lights, etc have no effect on anyone is just wrong.

While computer displays in general present very little risk of producing seizures in PSE patients (much less risk than that presented by television sets), video games with rapidly changing images or highly regular patterns can produce seizures, and video games have increased in importance as triggers as they have become more common

What it triggers is varied, and THIS IS NOT VERY COMMON and I dont think a kid watches a video game and goes to shoot anyone, but there are tons of studies that support video games effects on the brain. Especially when played for hours on end.

_________________
"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

I am withholding judgement until I hear from the plumber of chus.

_________________
My Mother was a witch...she was burned alive
Thankless little bitch, for the tears I cried
Take her down now, don't wanna see her face.
All blistered and burnt, can't hide my disgrace.
Am I evil? Yes. I am.

Come on, you have never seen The Simpson or Family Guy joke about Seizures from watching TV? I think one of them had a whole episode on it...it is the same effect....maybe doesnt result in a seizure, but plenty of other negative effects.

I love though that Lipid is ready to defend the entire gaming industry.

I love playing Call of Duty. So much that I dont own it, I dont own a video game system, they are just addicting...never really sure why gamers cant admit that? When I visit my sisters, I can play for 4 to 5 hours with no problem..I ma sure kids play for 10+ hours 5 days a week with no problem.

Just the time alone, cant be good

_________________
"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

I felt the same way until I discovered that the wife gave my son a bluetooth so he could play & talk with friends while playing for hours on end. Then I actually realized they (kids) could do more than text in their unintelligible language, and playing together online differed not all that much from some of what we did as kids. Go play ball for 3-4 hours and then video games for hours on end after that.

I actually worried the general same way about violent video games (for my own sons) as Biggie, but then lo and behold, my oldest grew out of the games by 13 (and the youngest is approaching that same arc) & are probably both better adjusted than I was at that age.

But that was a low bar to meet.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.