I am skeptical that gay marriage is part of a process of social breakdown, but lots of people disagree with me. We have differing theories. I accept that I might be wrong, or at minimum wrong for some times or places. It seems to me that the best way to answer this question is not to yell at each other, or even to see who can write the most elegant and persuasive books, but to let different groups of people voluntarily try different approaches and see what actually happens. Americans have a healthy aversion to telling other people how to live. Only about 30 percent of Americans support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Why don’t we try letting people live how they want to live, and let others try to impose uniform national rules on a heterogeneous population of 300 million people?
Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, “I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I’m a better person. And because I’m the better person, I have the right to boss you around.”
Get a pair of bolt cutters and liberate that tree.
2.
All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I’d be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I’ve got three kids and three dogs in my family. We’d be eating Froot Loops and rotten meat.
3.
Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.
He then compares the game to, of all things, polio. “Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio. We now have vaccines for that virus… The ‘vaccine’ that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this. If you doubt me, look at the aforementioned streaming audio/video. It will make you sick.”This is where the story takes a turn, because Jack Thompson provides a link to a video, put together by the gaming news site IGN, called “Ladies of Liberty City.” Be careful clicking on that link; there is absolutely nothing there that is safe for work.
Polio. Really? If only polio was as fun as GTA IV. By the way, I grabbed a copy. Katy, Mark and I got pretty drunk at Mission Bar last night (Mission Bar is right next door to the Gamespot) waiting for the line to go down, played for about an hour and then passed out.
…on top of that Central Asian weirdness is all this Richard-Gere do-gooder nonsense about the peace-loving Tibetans assaulted by the ruthless Red Chinese. Both parts of that story are wrong, wrong, wrong. The Tibetans were never peaceful people at all. They were one of the most warlike peoples in Central Asia and even conquered the Chinese capital, Chang’An, in their heyday.
