Category: Politics

Kids, Video Games and Violence

Games Revolution has an article up by Duke Ferris in regards to the recent up-surge in news items and proposed legislation to fight the so-called epidemic of youth violence in America being caused by violent video games.

The core point of the article, however, is: “There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.”

Despite the increasing number of hyped news articles and opinion pieces over the “worth” of video games that contain violence, the statistics coming in from the federal government is that violence, and crime in general, is down among young people. In fact, it’s at it’s lowest point in twenty years, as many independent studies have shown.

Something to keep in mind the next time you see a breathless television journalist keeping their ratings high by interviewing yet another politician who talks long and hard about how they’re going to “protect the children” with proposed laws that never make it out of congressional sub-committees, all while the hard decisions are conveniently never made.

Tiananmen Square Anniversary

The Unknown Rebel

Today marks the 16th anniversary of the infamous two days of violence in China’s Tiananmen Square, when the People’s Liberation Army ended months of pro-democracy protesting by moving in and confronting the protesters with military force on June 3rd and 4th, 1989.

The images from those events are powerful, even today. There are few people who aren’t immediately struck by the photo above, known as “The Unknown Rebel“, in which a single man stood out in front of a rolling column of Chinese tanks moving in on the protesters.

The video footage of this small, unarmed man is equally captivating, as he holds the tanks at bay for nearly a half-hour, stepping in front of them every time they try to turn and move around him. Eventually, he even crawls onto the lead tank and talks to the driver, though no one knows for sure what he said. Soon after that, nervous bystanders pulled him off the tank and into the crowd.

Though his identity and eventual fate were never completely confirmed, the “Unknown Rebel” was named in Time Magazine’s 1989 list of “the 100 most influential people of the 20th century“.

News Media Deep Throats Headlines

Bush Deep Throat Headline

If you’ve been following the news this week, you’ve no doubt heard that the identity of Deep Throat, the secret informant who provided the Washington Post with information about the Watergate Scandal in the 1970s that resulted in Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

The side-effect of this news story, however, is the unintentional comedy of headlines involving the “Deep Throat” pseudonym, which was based on the name of a very successful 1972 pornographic movie of the time.

Like the ABC News story above, one has to wonder if news writers really are that oblivious to the connections made by the more puerile members of the public, or are they equally giddy over the ability to publicly resort to a bit of subtle, though immature, humor like the rest of us.

More Junk Faxes on the Way?

Senator Gordon H Smith (R-OR) has introduced a bill to the US Senate that proposed to amend section 227 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 227), which currently prohibits unsolicited junk faxes.

The Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005 (S.714) proposed by the Senator is for the most part similar to the existing laws against junk faxes, but makes one important change.

The new bill will amend the existing law to allow exceptions to be made for unsolicited advertisements “from a sender with an established business relationship with the recipient”. As other laws designed to prevent spam emails or junk faxes in the past have shown, the vague definition of an “established business relationship” allows far too many exceptions to be useful.

One potential clue as to why this bill’s been proposed: 527 groups will be exempt under the amendment in the same way that unsolicited political group emails are exempt under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

San Francisco’s Proposed Blog Law

The Personal Democracy Forum is reporting that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be voting on a local law that requires “local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.”

The author of the piece claims that the city ordinance will require all online pages “that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits.”

However, not everyone agrees that this vote is as anti-blogger as it first sounds. Chris Nolan believes that while the law is poorly written, the core idea is sound that bloggers who receive money from a local candidate to write about them on their site should be compelled to openly disclose those payments to the local election board, and that they should be treated like any other commercial outlet receiving money to promote a candidate, rather than simply free press.

From reading these sites, it certainly appears to be a nasty little mess brought on by recent elections in which blogs and other online forums played a key role in the results. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially since national politics made good use of similar blogs in the last presidential election and how little regulation there is separating the honest protection of freedom of speech from paid-for online political mouthpieces.