Worgen said:
Therumancer said:
This is the problem I have had with fence walkers. I agree with Arnie on a lot of things but he's been a social liberal and hypocrit on subjects like this for a long time. Very quick to jump on the "protect the children" bandwagon and attack free speech, and one of the Repblicans that seems to go consistantly cross party for this kind of thing. This makes him a hypocrit because he obtained his fame and fortune through very violent action movies, and many of those action movies had video game tie ins (albiet usually bad ones). I seriously doubt he ever turned down his share of a video game's sales based on one of his movies because it included violent content.
the protect the children bs is a socially conservative ideology not a liberal one
Incorrect, though to be fair most liberals buy into a lot of party hype and don't know most of what their party stands for, represents, or has done.
Though to be entirely fair, with the way how politics are mixed up and the fact that no one side stays "pure" to it's ideology you have people from both parties supporting any issue you can think of, someone is always crossing the fence somewhere.
The "protect the children" bit is largely a device intended to try and convince people into giving the federal goverment more power, pretty much "please take away our rights to protect us". Most recently the big proponents of this arguement have been people like Hillary Clinton who spearheaded attacks on video games over things like the San Andreas "Hot Coffee" incident.
Likewise it plays heavily into the persecution of hate speech and other contreversial forms of free expression, the basic idea being that the goverment needs to be given increased censorship powers to prevent hate speech and prevent children from hearing it and somehow being tainted.
This is not to say that conservatives have not used that basic logic and similar arguements themselves on various issues. It is fairly easy to confuse the "protect the children" BS with Conservative "family values" BS, and the rhetoric can be pretty similar, though there are substantial differances if you look at it.
Arnie runs on a Conservative platform but is a well known "social liberal" as he's said himself. That doesn't quite mean that he supports minority rights and so on quite the way a lot of people like to try and interpet such things. What it means is that he believes in using big goverment to try and remove or limit people's rights to "protect" those groups. This includes doing things like trying to make it actually illegal to say or express racist or derrogatory things. Leading into the entire idea of the goverment effectively becoming the moral guardian of the people and having the right to take action against people for what amounts to subjective reasons. Meaning that part of this is not just to protect social groups as many people think, but also to morally govern society by doing things like going after video games and other similar things.
Both partys are out for power grabs and cover a lot of the same ground, Conservatives in many cases can be just as bad, albiet Republicans as a general rule tend to support this kind of thing on a state or local level more than anything, rather than supporting the idea of sweeping legislation throughout the entire nation.
Conservatives get the uninformed reputation of both supporting social bigotry, and somehow at the same time oppressing free speech and the abillity to engage in said social bigotry, largely because of how a lot of media networks (run by guys like Ted Turner) report things. Like everything there are exceptions, but for the most part Republicans support the idea of states to set their own policies on things like gay rights, and people's right to say more or less what they want to in public without fear of censure or legal action. This of course means that a lot of people with those "offensive" messages of course gravitate to this party, and in an overall sense Republicans can be seen as obstructing things like gay rights because they stand in the way of sweeping policies dictated overall and believe it should be up to the states to decide what they want their own policies to be (especially seeing as money gets involved in this due to tax breaks for married couples).
No party is a carbon copy of an idea, and exceptions can always be found. The "problem" with Arnie is that a Republican by principle should not be supporting goverment control of speech and expression for something like this. The same principles that have had the party in the past defending the rights of religious expression (ranging from fire and brimstone rants and passing pamphlets by private citizens in public parks and such, to the aforementioned christmas decorations) and even in the past supporting the right of groups like the KKK and Aryan Nation to assemble and speak (and of course leading to the unfortunate patronage of a lot of those people as a result), also apply to things like video games and the expectation for people to police themselves rather than the goverment doing it. The fact that Arnie is the kind of guy who supports goverment action against free speech whether it's thoughts on gays, ethnic minorities, video games, or anything else is what makes him a social liberal. Free speech means taking the good with the bad, and the hate speech with people spreading messages of love and compassion, that is what freedom is about. Of course given some of the whack jobs out there it can be hard to seperate their actual message from the principle, especially when some of those guys have lots of money and go directly into politics themselves.
While it DOES go cross party, stop and consider that what Arnie is doing is very similar to what Hillary did with the "Hot Coffee" incident. In fact the involvement of people like him in issues like this what what MAKES these issues cross party. For the most part you'll see a lot of Republicans badmouthing immorality, and talking about values, but it's pretty bloody rare when you see them trying to take actual action, especially on a federal level. I'm not saying that it hasn't happened (it has), but especially nowadays attacks on media and video games come almost exclusively from left wing leaders, and it's people like Hillary who have been using the "protect the children" battle cry.
A lot of people who are dedicated to the left wing, and have been raised to think of the right wing as satanic evil don't see this because they don't want to see it, but it's there. You'd be surprised at how many people don't even realize that Hillary was one of the major forces on point during the screaming about moral censorship over "Hot Coffee". She wasn't an aberration either, she had a massive following (and arguably still does).
