I have a low tolerance for stupidity*, and yet, for some reason, despite the glacier-like speed at which they load on dialup, I often find myself running around on various sites that I know aren’t good for my blood pressure. Since I was introduced to it, I can’t stop myself from periodically glancing at the Blue and Gold News Politics and Religion forum. As bad as that place is, the Xbox forums are often worse. The worst of the bunch, though, is Slashdot. Slashdot is particularly bad because of the extremes. There are a lot of smart posters there, but the dumb ones are horribly dumb.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about (paraphrased because I’m lazy and don’t feel up to looking for a comment I read last night just so I can criticize it). In a thread about the upcoming Superman movie, someone over at /. wrote that it was going to be bad because it contradicted “the Superman story.” Specifically, it contradicted Smallville.

I like Smallville. I really do, but it’s about as far from the definitive Superman as it’s possible to get. It contradicts practically everything that we’ve ever known about the Man of Steel. Worse, while we’ve come to accept the (monumentally stupid) idea that Superman can hide his identity by wearing glasses, they give us a version of Clark who doesn’t even wear glasses. He won’t even have the sham of the glasses disguise, and we’re supposed to believe he’s going to be able to hide his identity later on? Obviously, Smallville is little more than an Elseworlds tale. I’m fine with that; it doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of it.

Returns isn’t out for a while, and so I can’t comment on what actually happens in it. It could contradict Smallville in everything but the main character’s name, and I’d be okay with that (I’m not really a Superman fan, though). There’s at least one contradiction in the trailer that’s blatantly obvious — Jor-El’s attitude toward humanity.

Dismissing Superman Returns because it contradicts Smallville isn’t the most impressive of criticisms to begin with, but that’s not the stupid part of the comment. See, this is the contradiction this rocket scientist found: In Smallville, Clark Kent can’t fly as a teenager. In the Returns trailer, we see him jumping large distances.

Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t catch it. In Smallville, Clark Kent can’t fly. In the trailer for Returns, we see him not flying as a teenager, and that’s a contradiction that will make Returns unwatchable.

I could make the argument that there’s a quick flash of a scene that supports teen Clark flying, but I won’t, because that’s not what this guy was talking about. He specifically mentioned Clark jumping and how that contradicts Clark’s inability to fly in Smallville.

That much stupidity sends me into fits. Sometimes of laughter, sometimes of rage, and sometimes they’re nice, twitchy fits of frustration. I have to say, though, I’m almost glad to see people that stupid posting on Slashdot. At least while they’re there, I can be reasonably certain they’re not breeding**.

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* By “stupidity” in a forum, I don’t refer to people who disagree with me. There are many smart people that I respect who disagree with me. Most of the commenters on Peter David’s blog fall into that category.

** That’s a joke, son.

The title of the article is: “XXX-Mas: Sex and Blood Video Games Just in Time for Jr.’s New Xbox“. Now, before you click the link, what do you think it’s going to be about? If you guessed mature video games for the X-box 360, you’d be wrong. The article doesn’t mention the new X-box. It doesn’t mention any games for the new X-box. Apparently, Human Events Online just thought it’d be fun to take a nice potshot at the new system in their headline even if it didn’t have anything to do with the X-box. The new X-box does have violent games (see: Condemned: Criminal Origins; if you’re going to mention it in the headline, why not mention those gams?

That quibble aside, the article is, as you might expect from any article on sex and violence in video games, blaming retailers for failing to properly police sales of mature games to minors:

He said stores are failing to police children when they try to buy violent video games. Children are often able to purchase M-rated games, Walsh said, based on the results of a “secret shopper” survey his group conducted. It found boys as young as 9 could buy M-rated games 42% of the time and girls succeed 46% of the time.

One exception: the retailer Best Buy had a perfect record for keeping violent games away from children, based on Walsh’s survey.

On the plus side, at least they do manage to place some blame where it belongs:

Parents, meanwhile, are simply not paying enough attention, Walsh said. A mere 26% of those polled have had a parent stop them buying a game because of its rating, according to the survey. And more than half of children surveyed purchased an M-rated game with a parent present.

That’s bad. I’m not too worried about violent games, and even I think that’s bad. Uninvolved parents are never good for kids. Wonder what they plan to do?

David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, said the video game industry, which established the ratings, is to blame. Walsh and Lieberman want the ratings system scrapped and a new one created.

…

Without action, Walsh and Lieberman said, society will encounter a young population addicted to video games—neglecting exercise, family time and religion.

Let’s see… parents are completely ignoring the current rating system, so obviously, the fault lies with the rating system. Why do I get the feeling that the new rating system and “action” they have in mind won’t be voluntary moves on the part of the industry, or pressure on parents to, say, parent?

Dave Peyton explores the idea of democracy, and wonders why we don’t have a “true” democracy.

There are many, many reasons why true democracy wouldn’t work to provide a country of this size with a government that had any power. This is true for three reasons:

1. It’s unmanageable.

Dave says:

Democracy in its purest form would be unmanageable, or so they say. At the time the country was founded that might have been true. But no more. The vast majorityof Americans could go to the polls every day via one medium or the other and vote on issues that affect them.

On some theoretical level, I suppose this is true. We do have technology that would allow everyone to vote on issues that would have an effect on them. The idea of a pure democracy in a country the size of the United States is much less unmanageable than it was even thirty years ago. That doesn’t make it manageable now. Here are a few of the reasons it’s still unmanageable.

First, there are security issues. How often have you seen an internet poll that you’re confident wasn’t cheated on? How many votes did it get? A while back, Wizbang hosted some blogging awards. This was just a little fun “game” of a thing. Winners got a little award from a webpage, an award that gives you nothing but the right to say, “You like me! You really like me!” They got 63,000 votes. You’d have to give me a lot of evidence before I’d believe the actual number of voters was even half that. This is what happened.

I want you to understand: I appreciate and respect the guys at Wizbang and what they were trying to do with the Weblog Awards. But, they weren’t important. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that there really were 63,000 voters, not votes. The United States has more than 290 million people. A national vote on, say, abortion, would get well more than 63 million voters (even with half the turnout of the 2004 Presidential elections), and the results of that vote would matter to all of those people. To at least half of those people, the results of that vote would matter a lot. Wizbang came up with a decent way to stop cheating, but if it’d been something that mattered as much as a vote on abortion, you can be damned sure someone would’ve found a way to beat it. Maybe they’d vote multiple times, or prevent people who wanted to vote a certain way from being able to do so, or they’d allow foreigners to vote in American elections, or they’d cheat in one of a million other ways that I can’t think of.

So, no internet polling. You might set up polling stations, extend voting to a full 24 hours, and rely on the same systems we have now to reduce (not eliminate) cheating. Disregarding the number of trees that would be killed for every single vote, do you remember the 2000 Presidential elections? Every vote on a controversial election would turn create a brand new “Hanging Chad” fiasco. They’d take days to count, and more days to recount, and still more days to re-recount. Who decides when an election is accepted? Elected officials? Or just self-selected “elite” who are somehow immune to being corrupted by the fact that they’ve just been given more power than any single person in our curent government?

Besides that, who decides what gets voted on? Do you have to get names on a petition to get a bill on the ballot? Or do we simply maintain a systme like we have now, except we replace the Executive Branch with the Communist Community Branch, letting the people vote to confirm or veto laws? Wouldn’t the representatives chosen to decide what laws get considered (and how to word those laws) have just as much (if not more) power than they have now?

In the end, a pure democracy in a country of this size will almost inevitably be completely chaotic, or a complete sham, with the true rulers being those who decide what goes on the ballot or those who count the ballots.

2. Too much noise, too little signal

The second major issue that I think of when I consider a pure democracy of 290 million people is actually a corollary to one of my Guiding Principles of Life, “People are idiots.”

Right now, we have a relative handful of people (<1000) who make it their full time jobs to write national laws and vote on them. If they’re doing their jobs well, they (or their staff) will do research in libraries, consult experts, and otherwise study every issue that comes up for a vote. This is what they do (or what they should be doing), because not one of them is an expert in every area they’ll be asked to legislate.

The general populace doesn’t have time for that. Most of us don’t get to make a full time job of doing research and studying this stuff, and even if we did, most of us wouldn’t. Oh, most of us would probably research some stuff, the stuff that most strongly affected us or the stuff that intrigued us, but for the most part, we wouldn’t bother. We’d go with our gut instincts. We wouldn’t read the laws we were voting on; we’d read summaries written by other people, and make decisions about laws we hadn’t even looked at.

Even if the number of people who cared about your pet issue was huge, you might get 25% of the voting public to be both involved and informed enough to make an intelligent decision. 75% of the public might as well be flipping a coin. Unless you could force people to be informed, there’s simply going to be too much noise to get a signal through*.

3. Tyranny of the Majority

In the comments, Dave is faced with the “tyranny of the majority” concept, and he replies, simply, that tyranny of the majority is “[b]etter in every way than the tyranny of the minority.”

I disagree. It’s like comparing that ten thousand dead homosexuals to ten thousand dead heterosexuals. Both are very, very bad, and to compare the “value” of the two is simply ludicrous. Tyranny is bad. Period. No matter whose side it’s on.

What happens if New York, California, and Florida decide that they want to provide their citizens with power by building nuclear power plants… in West Virginia? Certainly, that’d be good for a lot of people — they’d get cheap power that’s completely safe — to them. Those of us in less populous areas are just screwed.

What if white people suddenly decided that people with darker skin weren’t truly human after all? What if they decided to re-institute slavery?

Those are, admittedly, extreme examples, so what about this? What if we decided to outlaw cigarettes completely?

It’s been said that democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. While that’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one, and it’s partially the reason our founding fathers decided not to go with a pure democratic system.

I’m the first to admit that our current system isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad, and it was designed specifically to balance the will of the majority vs. the rights of the minority. It’s done a decent job of maintaining that balance (though the government has slowly drawn more and more power to itself, and the balancing act has gotten harder and harder as we get more and more top heavy); certainly better than any other system that’s been tried (that’s why so many other free nations have moved to a government that resembles our democratic republic).

Imagining pure democracy to be a good system of government is like expecting communism to be a good economic system. It looks good on paper, but you have to completely ignore the one factor that’s present in every single human endeavour: the human factor.

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* [UPDATE: After considering it some more, I imagine that the most likely result is that we'd organize with other people who share our basic political views, and vote along with the organization in order to have an easier time of making decisions. An organization that cares a lot about stopping abortion might find another group that cares a lot about some other issue and reach a compromise. The other group would vote against abortion in exchange for the pro-life group voting for their issue. Enough of these groups would eventually band together that you'd either get a single monolithic organization or two "superpowers" that go head-to-head a lot. Come to think of it, they might even call themselves Democrats and Republicans.]

Acidman is back, after spending a few weeks in rehab for his alcoholism. I’m glad to see him return.

Clive Thompson asks why we’re apparently okay with extremely violent games when the violent protagonist is working for the government in his article, “The Bad Lieutenant.”

Consider our gaming history. In Doom, the game that began it all, you were a Marine. Then came a ceaseless parade of patriotic, heart-in-hand World War II games, in which you merrily blow the skulls off Japanese and German soldiers under the explicit authority of the U.S. of A. Yet anti-gaming critics didn’t really explode with indignation until Grand Theft Auto 3 came along — the first massively popular modern game where the tables turned, and you finally played as a cop-killing thug.

Why weren’t these detractors equally up in arms about, say, the Rainbow Six series? Because games lay bare the conservative logic that governs brutal acts. Violence — even horrible, war-crimes-level stuff — is perfectly fine as long as you commit it under the aegis of the state. If you’re fighting creepy Arabs and urban criminals, go ahead — dual-wield those Uzis, equip your frag grenades and let fly. Nobody will get much upset.

It’s an interesting article, even if he’s completely wrong. The reason that violence in Doom was more acceptable than violence in Grand Theft Auto wasn’t that the protagonist was a Marine. It’s because the targets of that violence were demons from hell.

Rainbow Six, as I understand it, puts the player against hostage takers and other terrorists in an attempt to save innocent lives. World War II games put defenders of freedom against totalitarian empires. Does Thompson really believe that there’s no difference between killing Nazis in a WWII simulation and killing random people on the street in Grand Theft Auto except that the person doing the killing is a soldier in the first example?

Does he really think that if Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas starred a cop instead of a thug, Hillary Clinton (widely known for her “conservative logic”) would have completely overlooked it when she decided to go on a campaign against gamers? Does he think that the anti-gaming zealots would overlook True Crime because the character’s a cop? Does he forget that there was, indeed, a huge outcry about Doom‘s violence even before 1999, when it hit the news again after the Columbine shootings?

As I think I’ve made clear on this blog in the past, I’m not big on bashing violent video games in the first place. I don’t necessarily think it’s a great idea for impressionable kids to play them, but I think that monitoring the games kids play and making sure the kids can adequately differentiate between simulated violence and real violence is the job of parents, not the gaming industry or the government.

That said, I think it’s ludicrous to imply that the psychological impact of killing demons from hell, Nazis, terrorists, or alien parasites is somehow equivalent to the kinds of rampages against innocent civilians or police officers that occurred in Grand Theft Auto, especially when used simply to take a pot shot at conservatives.