ddq5 said:
There certainly is a double standard in the media. When an Arabic person perpetrates an act of terrorism, everyone jumps on Islam's tits. When a white person commits a violent act of similar magnitude, they immediately attack video games. I guess they'd rather demonize games than Christian Conservativism.
Roughly right, but I think it's more a case of:
"Well I know our culture is all right since I grew up in it and I'm fine, if there is evil in our society then it must have been corrupted by an outside influence"
Everything that is familiar is given a free pass. If your brother killed a man, you wouldn't say it is because your brother is bad, but because of circumstance. Something made him go crazy.
See Muslims in Afghanistan are considered much more foreign than Norwegians, and all most people ever hear about them is how weird they are so when mass murderers come from there they automatically assume it is something intrinsic to their culture.
But when their neighbour turns evil, who had the same upbringing as them, they can't consider their own upbringing as a factor so they search for alien factors.
Video games are alien, they are made by what SEEM like a weird underclass of geeks and it has a lot off connections with Japan, another "weird" country. Last time the western media looked at a killing spree in Japan they focused on the essential elements of Japanese life to find blame.
The factors that lead people to do these terrorist-attack like Brevik or Al Qaeda are more complex and can't be pinned down to broad cultural elements or popular but less than mainstream activities. Most likely with all it is a combination of severe but unacknowledged issues.
But most importantly is it takes a certain sick/evil mind. Brevik is clearly very twisted, and Al Qaeda the twistedness comes from the leaders who corrupt their religion to serve their political cause. It's interesting that Al Qaeda has not been able to "infect" other islamic populations outside the Middle East, the most they can do is corrupt individuals (by distorting their issues into theological issues) not export the ideology wholesale, like Russia did with Communism.
