Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

Interrobang said:
Everybody knows that?s bullshit
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Don't forget it's Bavaria we're talking about; our version of e.g. South Carolina. Xenophobia, jingoism and knuckle-dragging conservatism are alive and very well in that part of Germany, so of course he'll get points for his "suggestion".
 
Interrobang said:
Well, german "voting season" is in full effect with general election in one and a half months and the bavarian federal election in one month. So it was time to up the bullshit quota in the news these last few days ...

The current Bavarian Ministerpresident (campaining for reelection) says he want?s to make the Autobahn toll-rountes - for foreigners. Only. Everybody knows that?s bullshit as that would be against several laws (EU and domestic) and the only way would be to make them a toll-rounte for all - but he gets huge airtime for that no less and analysts say that this will help him gain voters - despide it will obviously never going to happen (or only for everyone, wich would be very unpopular). This sort of stuff makes me really angry when politicians treat their voters like idots ... and get away with it (he will most prob get reelected, Bavaria is not really a changing state here, the strong Party has the rule since 1957).
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What gets me about this is that he claims that he will not sign a coalition agreement without the autobahn tolls being in it. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but he will sign it, and the toll won't be in it, and he will not be held accountable in the least. He'll lose less voters by being dishonest than he wins now be saying something popular.
 
So there goes my respect for one athlete (and I can see the terrified faces of trademark managers at Nike and other sponsors)

ABC said:
Pole vault great Yelena Isinbayeva condemned homosexuality Thursday after criticizing fellow competitors who painted their fingernails in rainbow colors to support gays and lesbians in the face of a new anti-gay law in Russia.

The Russian, who won her third world title Tuesday in front of a boisterous home crowd, came out in favor of the law which has drawn sharp criticism and led Western activists to call for a boycott of next year's Winter Olympics in the Russian resort of Sochi.

"If we allow to promote and do all this stuff on the street, we are very afraid about our nation because we consider ourselves like normal, standard people," Isinbayeva, a two-time Olympic champion, said in English. "We just live with boys with woman, woman with boys.

"Everything must be fine. It comes from history. We never had any problems, these problems in Russia, and we don't want to have any in the future."

At least two Swedish athletes competed Thursday with their fingernails painted in rainbow colors at Luzhniki Stadium, the venue that also hosted the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

"It's unrespectful to our country. It's unrespectful to our citizens, because we are Russians. Maybe we are different from European people and other people from different lands," Isinbayeva told reporters.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/athletes-worlds-sport-rainbow-fingernails-19966078
 
calvinhobbes said:
Don't forget it's Bavaria we're talking about; our version of e.g. South Carolina. Xenophobia, jingoism and knuckle-dragging conservatism are alive and very well in that part of Germany, so of course he'll get points for his "suggestion".
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(NFSM) - Normal for Shepton Mallet.
 
Interrobang said:
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/20/world/europe/greenwald-partner-detained/

So, Mr. Miranda got held without his Miranda-rights ... basically*. Wich is Ironic ... when you?re Alanis Morisette ...

* - yeah in the UK they don?t call them that.
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Governments like oppressive laws and controls - all this anti-terrorist type laws are also used to clamp down on information getting out to the inter web which shows: culpability, negligence, incompetence and all around stupidity.

To misquote a film. ...

The truth, you do not deserve the truth!
 
Couldn't figure out the best thread for this, so seeing as how this deals with guns, video games, and parenting I figured I'd put this here.

Last week, an eight-year-old boy picked up a loaded gun and shot his grandmother in the head a few minutes after playing Grand Theft Auto IV. You'll never guess which part of that sentence has become a talking point for pundits and media analysts over the past couple of days.

On Thursday, just after 5pm, the child shot and killed his grandmother in their trailer park home in Slaughter, Louisiana. Police said the kid was playing Grand Theft Auto just before the incident, and the headlines were written accordingly, with major media outlets like CNN and the New York Daily News emphasizing the ludic connection.

Somehow, an eight-year-old kid had access to a firearm, yet this weekend's debate question has not been "how the hell did that happen?" The media is not befuddled as to why a gun was lying around in this mobile home. Psychiatrists are not taking to television to ask why the boy's grandmother wasn't watching him more closely so he couldn't pick up a gun. Instead, cops and reporters are going down a familiar path: Are games too violent? Do they encourage kids to shoot people? Did Grand Theft Auto IV cause this?

Here's CNN:

While the motive is unclear, the sheriff's department implied the child's activities in a violent virtual world may have led to the killing.

"Although a motive for the shooting is unknown at this time investigators have learned that the juvenile suspect was playing a video game on the Play Station III 'Grand Theft Auto IV,' a realistic game that has been associated with encouraging violence and awards points to players for killing people, just minutes before the homicide occurred."
Fox News had their own unique spin, pulling in an expert witness to point out that video games are good practice for murder.

"From a behavior therapy perspective, I would say that's practicing," Kristopher Kaliebe, a LSU Health Sciences Center child psychologist told Fox8live.com.

"So if you have a video game where someone shoots at a target, that's sort of practicing shooting at a target. When you have a video game that is shooting at a human being, that is practicing shooting at a human being," Kaliebe said.
And then the pundits took to TV to start the discussion: just how bad are video games? Is violent media as bad as... heroin?

CNN's pundit points out that the correlation between the child playing Grand Theft Auto IV and the crime "cannot be overlooked."

Here's MSNBC talking about virtual reality:

And so forth and so forth. The cycle continues as it does. Video games are an easy target, a sexy issue, and a subject that many reporters find it OK to discuss without properly fact-checking?you don't get "points" for killing people in Grand Theft Auto IV, despite what the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff Department says. This has become as regular a routine for video games as inane local media broadcasts.P

This blame game has become so ubiquitous that when a U.S. senator?an actual U.S. senator?declares that video games are a bigger problem than guns, everyone just kind of accepts it. When Louisiana police imply a direct connection between a horrific tragedy and an M-rated video game, that's what drives the conversation. The headline is not "Louisiana boy shoots grandmother after picking up loaded gun"?it is "Louisiana boy shoots grandmother after playing Grand Theft Auto IV." Catchy.

That's not to say we shouldn't be asking questions about what games do to our minds: here at Kotaku, we've spent a great deal of time researching and discussing the psychological effects of violent games. As with most questions that try to pinpoint how our brains function, there are no straightforward answers. Scientists are divided. There's consensus that more research needs to be done on the subject. P

But there's one issue that needs no research: eight-year-olds should not have unsupervised access to loaded guns. Period. End of discussion. This debate over video game violence needs to be secondary to the debate over real violence. When Louisiana police imply that Grand Theft Auto IV caused this tragedy?and when the news amplifies that conversation with hyperbolic analogies and catchy soundbites?it distracts from the terrifying reality that an eight-year-old was able to pick up and fire a handgun.P

Do video games make kids more aggressive? Maybe. Should an eight-year-old be playing a game as violent as Grand Theft Auto IV? Probably not. Did the game rile this kid up and make him shoot his grandma? I have no idea.P

The more important question?the question CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and all the other pundits and analysts should really be asking?is this: How was an eight-year-old able to shoot his grandmother in the first place? He sure didn't use a video game.P

http://kotaku.com/grand-theft-auto-blamed-after-eight-year-old-shoots-gra-1201375715
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In my opinion this is nothing more than bad parenting. An 8 year old probably should not be playing GTA IV, but defiantly not one who clearly doesn't have proper parental guidance. While I never played anything as open and "realistic" as GTA when I was 8, I did play Doom with my dad, but with a proper upbringing I never ended up chainsawing anyone to death. That and the whole gun laying out in the open thing boggles the mind.

Also the name of the town is oddly appropriate.

And this better not delay GTA V.
 
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CrazyRussian540 said:
Couldn't figure out the best thread for this, so seeing as how this deals with guns, video games, and parenting I figured I'd put this here.



In my opinion this is nothing more than bad parenting. An 8 year old probably should not be playing GTA IV, but defiantly not one who clearly doesn't have proper parental guidance. While I never played anything as open and "realistic" as GTA when I was 8, I did play Doom with my dad, but with a proper upbringing I never ended up chainsawing anyone to death. That and the whole gun laying out in the open thing boggles the mind.

Also the name of the town is oddly appropriate.

And this better not delay GTA V.
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Just FYI, while Louisiana does not have a 'safe storage' law, it is still subject to Federal law on the subject. 18 USC 922 says it is illegal for a juvenile to possess a handgun as well as giving, selling, etc a handgun to said juvenile. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly where he got that pistol from (at least not that I have read) so that's kind of a dead end at the moment.

Here's an example of a 'safe storage' law (Texas' of course since I am familiar with it.)

Code: 
(b)  A person commits an offense if a child gains access to a 
readily dischargeable firearm and the person with criminal 
negligence:
(1)  failed to secure the firearm;  or                                        
(2)  left the firearm in a place to which the person 
knew or should have known the child would gain access.
(c)  It is an affirmative defense to prosecution under this 
section that the child's access to the firearm:
(1)  was supervised by a person older than 18 years of 
age and was for hunting, sporting, or other lawful purposes;
(2)  consisted of lawful defense by the child of people 
or property;        
(3)  was gained by entering property in violation of 
this code;  or         
(4)  occurred during a time when the actor was engaged 
in an agricultural enterprise.

This sort of law means that if you have children around, you must secure your arms in such a way that children cannot reasonably get access to them (no guns left on tables or lying around in nightstands) but does not penalize persons who have no rug rats running around. At least 18 states have state laws that are of this level or stricter that I am aware of. I'll come back to that in a moment.

The problem here, though, isn't actually the laws or any lack thereof. Knowing Louisiana reasonably well, there's every chance that even if Louisiana had had far more draconian storage laws, they probably would have ignored them anyway. That's the culture for a *lot* of the state. And it (again) comes back to bad parenting and stupid people. Remember those 18 states that have safe storage laws? Yeah, that's not really cut down much on this sort of incident in those states because stupid people and bad parenting are everywhere. (Though Louisiana, along with much of Appalachia have greatly elevated levels of both compared to most of the country.)
 
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Is it possible that, regardless of safe storage laws, child endangerment laws (and related) would make it illegal to have guns around minors that aren't locked up or supervised properly?

And it is disgusting how the media is only taking about Grand Theft Auto in this story, not about how an 8-year-old got his hands on a gun when being "watched".
 
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SpitfireMK461 said:
Is it possible that, regardless of safe storage laws, child endangerment laws (and related) would make it illegal to have guns around minors that aren't locked up or supervised properly?

And it is disgusting how the media is only taking about Grand Theft Auto in this story, not about how an 8-year-old got his hands on a gun when being "watched".
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In the first part: unfortunately for the majority of cases, no. The laws are not usually written in such a way that they could. And honestly, you probably wouldn't want them to be that loosely written (where they could be so interpreted) or you'd have parents going to jail because Junior learned that stoves or fireplaces are hot the hard way.

All the laws in the world won't help, though, when we have 'the highly trained people who are the only ones who should be allowed to have guns', the police, doing stupid crap like this: http://gunssavelives.net/blog/polic...ar-old-son-who-was-allowed-access-to-firearm/

Enrique Chavez, who was working for the LAPD, was accidentally shot and paralyzed by his 3 year old son. The officer left his service weapon, un-holstered, under the seat of his truck and then allowed his 3 year old son to ride in the truck without a car seat. Ten minutes into the drive the unrestrained toddler picked up the unsecured gun and accidentally shot his father in the back, paralyzing him.
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CA has a fairly nasty 'safe storage' law, a pretty explicit child endangerment law, and the guy was a police officer who should be expected to know and obey the law. So, yeah, about that... Far from the only such incident on record, too - there used to be at least two videos on YouTube of cops having their young kids sneakily pulling the gun out of their parent's holster *while the parent is wearing it* and discharging the weapon - one of the videos had it into the parent's leg.

For the second part - it wasn't the gun or the video game that was the direct cause (there are other incidents where the little kid used a knife he got from the kitchen after seeing something similarly mature-rated and acting it out to lethal result) but the bad parenting and I am going to assume lack of supervision.

Edit: Forgot to mention - few parents in these situations are *ever* charged for their violations and only a tiny fraction if a percent that are charged are even mentioned in the media in any way.
 
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In the first part: unfortunately for the majority of cases, no. The laws are not usually written in such a way that they could. And honestly, you probably wouldn't want them to be that loosely written (where they could be so interpreted) or you'd have parents going to jail because Junior learned that stoves or fireplaces are hot the hard way.
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I don't think it would be hard to have laws written/interpreted in a way that held the availability of weapons in a household to a higher standard than regular everyday items that could be dangerous, but I do understand and agree with this point.

For the second part - it wasn't the gun or the video game that was the direct cause (there are other incidents where the little kid used a knife he got from the kitchen after seeing something similarly mature-rated and acting it out to lethal result) but the bad parenting and I am going to assume lack of supervision.
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Absolutely it was about the bad parenting and lack of supervision. Letting an 8-year-old play a game like GTA alone is bad parenting, so is keeping a loaded gun within reach of said 8-year-old. I also believe the latter is far worse than the former (but would also apply to any dangerous object).
 
Why do you think we don't have a choice? Do you really believe nobody could do it better than Angie? Even the Muppets could come up with a better government...
 
Am I thee only one that sees the looming threat of attacks on Syria as a new shit storm ready to hit the fan?
 
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