Indignant Desert Birds
Class Warfare and Video Games
Simple law of averages suggests that a few of the people currently withering in Gitmo are innocent of all but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now that we’re allowing them trials, they should be found “not guilty”, and presumably sent back where they came from.
How many of those people are going to go Rambo style and start looking for vengeance? Fear of that sort of retribution is certainly not a bad argument for indefinite detention.
I don’t know which emotion is stronger: Happiness that it’s back, or anger that it was ever gone.
Before today, the President reserved to himself the right to declare an individual an “Enemy Combatant”, and for those classes of people, he opined that they could be held– forever– without charges being filed.
The court today held that a plain reading of “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” means that Congress must find that either a state is seceding, or has been invaded, or else Habeas Corpus cannot be suspended.
Let’s be clear: if we think someone is a terrorist, we can still hold them long enough to put them on trial, and if they are convicted we can treat them– fairly harshly under military law. If they’re innocent, however, we’ll let them go.
It’s only just.
For the Girl Friend, who loves penguins.
I tried to laugh at this article Crazy Religious Person Calls for Burning of Video Games, but as I kept reading I ended up at this “youth program”:
“For young ladies, we have a ministry called Vessels of Honor. It’s about life skills for young women. We try to be more proactive than reactive, so we do counseling to prevent teen pregnancy, and even if you do become a teen parent ,you can still succeed. We have a youth service every second Friday of each month.”
Oh no he didn’t. He did NOT just say that. He did NOT just use a word which has been used to belittle and oppress women for centuries in the name of religion. I’m sorry, Mr. Pastor, you have lost all credibility. I am more than just a Vessel. I, too, can apply for jobs and do more than push out babies.
And besides that, the term “vessel” used to describe a woman’s role in reproduction is damaging and misleading. Now we have science that tells us that women do MORE than just carry the child of a man. We actually CONTRIBUTE to the entire process. Half of that child’s genes are from the mother. I understand the desire to live in the dark ages (well, sort of), but this sort of language is really not appropriate.
You’ll notice the lack of any career-based programs for young women. This is even more appalling because it is important, if not necessary in our society right now to have women in the workforce, both individually and for the economy as a whole, but I suppose he wants us in our place.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that crazy religious people are sexist and destructive, but I always am.
After searching every video rental store in the surrounding area (which is not many, let me tell you), and failing to find either Ninja Gaiden II or Lego Indiana Jones, my boyfriend and I settled down for a nice weekend of Adventure Gaming. We bought the Adventure Collection (Volume 1!) from the Adventure Company (probably most well known for Syberia), which included five games of dubious quality:
Keepsake: I’ve played this game almost all the way through before. It is not terrible puzzle-wise, though the main character is about as dull and obnoxious as they come. It stars a girl who is going to her first day at some school of magic. I would call it Harry Potter-esque, but I know this is not a new concept, and the magic school seemed more obsessed with dragons than it did anything else. Anyway, she finds that the school is empty and has to solve a number of puzzles to traverse the school and figure out why everyone is gone.
Return to Mysterious Island: Based on the Jules Verne novel The Mysterious Island, and to some extent, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (which is a book you should never. read. Nothing ever happens for 200+ pages other than repetitive monologues about how amazing coral is. I thought there was a giant squid? Well, maybe for one page, but nothing ever happens with it.) This game, despite bad voice acting, a fairly unimpressive (though occasionally surprising) storyline, a few annoying chracters, and an incredible lack of length, is a model for how adventure games should be. The gimmick for this game, I suppose, is that every puzzle can be solved in multiple ways. However, this is an amazing thing for adventure games, because we do not have to rely on trying to read the mind of the developers. Not to mention most of the puzzles, however you solve them, tend to require actual thought and real situations rather than ESP.
Nibiru: Age of Secrets: We really didn’t make it far through this one, because the puzzles make absolutely no sense, and moving through the storyline often requires the stupid main character to talk to 4 stupid people 5 stupid times for no reason. Not to mention, the solutions to the puzzles do not really make sense, at least in the conventional way (maybe they make crazy sense).
Dead Reefs: This wouldn’t even work on my computer. Pbbth.
And the last one, Secret Files: Tunguska, we never had time quite to try.
One thing that caught my eye (but is not very surprising for adventure games) is that 3 out of the 5 games had female main characters. Syberia, as well had a female main character. This is even more surprising because all of these characters are fully clothed, and have fairly drab, gender-neutral outfits (with the exception of Keepsake). I am not sure of whether this is because they are trying to market these games to a mainly female market, or because many (or at least some) of the developers are female.
In the book “World war Z”, Max Brooks has the US come up with the “resource to kill ratio”; basically “how much of what resources do you need to kill one zombie?” In this world, the Airforce was basically grounded.
Obviously, in the real world you don’t have targets and enemies with nearly the sameness as zombies. How many infantry soldiers, exactly, are worth a tank? Yet there is much to the idea that we should have a military capable of carrying out the missions we assign them, yet scaled so that we can afford other national priories.
Towards that end, I have been reading a good many stories recently about the nature of the Air Force’s mission, specifically calling into question its raison d’etre as an independent branch of the military. here is a good one, it almost has me convinced: if we fold the Air Force into the Navy and Army, how much more effective might our military be?
I was listening to this song by the floblots, and had never heard of Anne Braden. Naturally wikipedia was able to help…
If this is accurate, an American was thrown in jail for selling his house to another American. Power was used to maintain injustice. I am always and forever terrified of being on the wrong side of power– and so for that reason I’ve always been _very_ supportive of free speech.
The problem comes when people who have no interest in discussion seek to drown out the voices of those who do. Speech is then used against itself to the edification of no one. For a free-speech fetishist like myself, this presents a problem: how do I keep a conversation moving when the trolls show up– without destroying the right of a troll to speak. After all: the person may not be a troll, but merely have (true) ideas I find repugnant. What if I am on the wrong side of history?
One solution which presents itself is disemvoweling. “Offending” comments are still there, and if there is truth, it will shine through. But no one will struggle to read asshole comments. I think it’s a good compromise. If there is a better idea, please let me know in the comments…
(updated within 30min. of posting. For clarity)
The overwhelming majority of Americans are not Communists. In general, we believe that a free-ish market is a better way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services than government departments. But an awful lot of Americans seem to want government-run health care. Why? What makes health care so different from the rest of the economy that many of us want to turn it over to the people who brought us the Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles?
Is it because health care is a necessity? Food is a necessity, but no mainstream politicians are pushing plans for tax-funded universal distribution of cheezburgers.
Is it because health care is expensive? Housing is expensive, and it’s a necessity, so why is nobody promising me socialized apartments?
Is it because we’re not happy with the health care the market is providing us with? I doubt that, too. I work for Microsoft, and everybody’s got tons of complaints about our products, but nobody wants to replace us with Federal Windows and Federal Internet Explorer.
Is it because other first-world countries have socialized medicine? If Canada jumped off a bridge, would you jump off, too? Besides which, other first-world countries really don’t have socialized medicine. Britain and Canada may have true socialized medicine, but Switzerland and the Netherlands only have mandatory private insurance programs, and France and Germany have health care systems which are more market-oriented than America’s current health care system (which includes Medicare, Medicaid, and a tax system which heavily subsidizes full-service employer-provided health insurance).
