Cynical skeptic said:
Yea... hes really only saying that because it would greatly impact activision's most successful properties.
Speaking of, thats a pretty loaded week. ACTA on the 30th, defacto game banning on the 2nd.
I didn't think 1984 would come so suddenly!
I did, I was posting mainly on www.palladiumbooks.com (Sound Off Forum) back during the last election when it came to politics. Though I said some things here as well. I saw this coming if Obama was elected. He's only a tiny piece of it though. See, you have to understand that in order to win the last election The Democrats instituted some rather draconian policies to force everyone into line under one banner and end dissent over big issues. The biggest compromise was the one made to give Hillary a big-bad cabinet position in return for her ceasing to contest Obama as the party's presidential cantidate and bring her "Clintonistas" in fully behind him. Video game censorship being one of Hillary's *BIG* issues which many people might remember going back to the whole "Hot Coffee" scandal.
See, the entire issue goes cross party. In both parties there are people who despite their label lean far to the other wing. The problem here is that with the Democratic party being told to close ranks irregardless of personal beliefs, or get out, it means that the only REAL opposition has been the Republicans who were against this kind of thing. It's the Republicans in favor AND the Democrats acting in a degree of forced consert doing this.
This is largely because the last election became a grudge match, The Democrats ceased to be concerned about right and wrong, and only with getting people in power. That might seem like politics as usual, but it isn't because Politicians fight each other constantly, and one of the big issues with the Democratic party and it's big "excuse" during both of the very close "Bush" elections was that it was too fragmented and spent too much time bickering about petty things like what the goverment should actually be doing.
As a result what was another crazy boogieman to blame bigger problems on, became a national issue on this level despite the fact that it seems crazy given the current track record. It's also noteworthy that what makes this scary is that especially on the federal side of things that there are so many politicials working on concert over an issue like this, it's almost unprecedented. It's because in a polarized country a full half of our political system is being forced to play "follow the leader" or risk getting booted. Dissent within the party happens, but not like it has before, which has made things very unhealthy.
It should also be noted that getting it's hooks into our free speech rights has been a big deal with Democrats who want a powerful federal goverment for a long time. Where they start the snowball rolling is more or less irrelevent, once they snag their hook and get the acknowlegement that the goverment CAN directly regulate free speech and the media in any context, they can work to applying it to other things. Typically this battle has been fought over things like "Hate Speech" with moves being made to have say using certain racial slurs or expressing certain politicial or racial sentiments to be criminal acts in of themselves, rather than damage (directly trying to get people to attack each other) needing to be proven. While perhaps well intentioned by many of the people involved, I have never been naive enough to think that the people pushing for such things are unaware of the power involved or what they could wind up using it for.
I mention multi-pronged attacks with some frequency. ACTA, the current case (despite being started by a Republican... albiet one married into a massive democratic dynasty and professed social liberal), hate speech, and Obama's bit about tying the media (especially video games) into health problems among the youth and saying it should be regulated for that reason (I'm not kidding, look it up, I think The Escapist covered it too). They all basically go to the same place: give the goverment the power to control information and limit free speech. Anyone who was following this should have seen it coming with the way things were playing out. All they need is for one of these seemingly unrelated shots to hit, and bringing the others in become easier, and they can gradually adapt the power to anything they want through precedent over a period of time.
Win or lose here, I expect we'll keep seeing the same issues return in some way as long as the political climate stays the same.
Right now, we need to see the current attacks stopped. We also need to get the Democrats out of power until their party gets it's act back together. Right now what any paticular Democrat might think is more or less irrelevent since he's going to be pulled into line with the "faces" of the party. Dissent happens, but it is very difficult compared to what it has been.
When the current policies stop, and the Democrats get back into a more balanced "business as usual" way of acting with various points of view throughout the party, then people can relax a bit.
Despite being by and large right wing, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of whack jobs on that side too who should be avoided. While I mostly vote "right" I have gone cross party for specific politicians in the past. However, right now I think the only people that can be safely voted for are ironically Republican, or if the Republican is psycho, a third party cantidate. You can have the greatest and most pro-free speech Democrat in the world right now and it's unlikely what he thinks is going to matter because he's going to be forced by his own people to do what he's told or get out of politics.
Apologies for the lengthy political rant, in short the whole point of this is that I saw this coming (honestly), and to solve the problem is going to be difficult.
See, for all of my various sentiments, I typically tell people to vote the person and not the party. Joining a political party is mostly useful to vote in primary elections among the side you think will have more people who generally agree with you (and thus you usually wind up voting mostly for that side to begin with). The problem is that right now it's been made so that you can't do that for all practical purposes.
