Ron Pall

Is it a requirement that the field of Presidential candidates must always include a third-tier wacko?

I speak, of course, about Ron Paul, he who has galvanized a motley procession of internet glibertarians, gold-standard tin-foil-hatters, colloidal silverfish and neo-paleoconservatives.

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There is literally nothing about him that isn't batshit insanity masked by the most reasonable facade. He's a snake oil salesman peddling cyanide. Just go to THOMAS and check out his bill sponsorship.

He wants to repeal the estate tax. He wants to make it so that children born to non-citizens won't be citizens themselves. He wants to put into law that human life begins at conception. He wants to bar the Federal government from putting any funds at all toward family planning, which means Planned Parenthood would be completely gone (instead of just underfunded and gutted, like all social programs after Reagan's rape of The Great Society).

He wants to get the US out of the United Nations, because if there's one thing he learned from Bush's shitty foreign policy it's that the US needs to isolate itself from the world even more. He wants to "restore the second amendment rights of all Americans," which means that he doesn't want the government to distinguish between automatic weapons made for killing lots of people and sports rifles, and he doesn't want laws about child safety locks or safe storage. Oh, and you should be allowed to carry your Gatling gun into National Parks, goddammit. Also, no gun-free school zones; as long as the children are packing heat, they'll be fine.

Jesus, I can go on. He introduced a bill that would've helped out with his Colloidal Silver scam by making it so that if you claim your bullshit cures people then the FDA can't label it a drug unless there is no scientific evidence supporting it. Like you can't find a crackpot doctor to sign off on your bleach-flavored boner pills.

He doesn't want any Federal funds going toward any universal health screening program. Offshore drilling. Canceling fuel taxes when the prices reach a certain amount, thereby "promoting free trade," also known as "kickbacks to Big Oil."

He wants the President to have the authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. If you don't know what that means, he wants the President of the United States to have the authority to pay pirates and mercenaries to capture persons and property affiliated with bin Laden or al Qaeda. I'm guessing the burden of proof wouldn't be on the mercenaries.

Fuck this guy. For every reasonable Puppies Are Cute Act he co-sponsors, there are three of his own pet projects that read like Sean Hannity's dream journal.

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Look, just read this piece from Reason magazine. It concerns newsletters that bore Ron Paul's name and were published with his full knowledge and which he of course disavows. Smart, because the content is no better than the screeds put out by Stormfront.

I know he says he didn't approve the writing. Either he is lying or he's a fucking moron. Maybe both. It's very possible Lew Rockwell, a good buddy of Mr. Paul, actually did the writing, which doesn't make things any better. Lew Rockwell's a sanctimonious little shit, and just the type of guy to still use the term "comsymp" in 1991 (when referring to Martin Luther King, natch).

Vote for who you want. But don't fucking try to convince me that Ron Paul has anything in common with the left-wing just because he's up for legalizing marijuana and doesn't trust the government. He's pretty much a textbook example of a reactionary states-rights Dixiecrat with just a hint of Ayn Rand's anal-fixation philosophy.

To Search Again

If you're really interested in the latest game-violence/real-world violence causation study beyond just skimming the press article, you may as well go to the website of one of the principal authors, Brad J. Bushman.

Dr. Bushman helpfully allows the download of almost all of his peer-reviewed articles. I've snagged three of them that focus on videogames and will do my layman's best to go over them when I have the time.

Homework never stops.

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Before I read these papers, I will mention that one thing I noticed in the studies I've read previously is the disregard for the actual incidence of violence and lack of correlating any increases of violence in specific demographics with other social factors.

For example, in the last six years the gap between rich and poor has widened due to disastrous economic policies. This kind of wealth disparity has been shown to cause an increase in crime, and these crimes are the type that aren't motivated by violence but often result in it - carjackings, home robberies, muggings. And because college is often out of reach and jobs scarce, this type of crime comes from young people - who happen to members of a generation in which almost everyone has played videogames.

In fact, the biggest difficulty in any media violence study is attempting to control for all the variables. Are they correlating with children who played sports? Are they identifying the type of sport, e.g., contact vs. non-contact. What about music choices? What about different kinds of abuse? What were their social groups and the interaction between them? What economic status?

Without a good control group, and with the fact that pretty much everyone from the last three generations has grown up surrounded by videogames, these kinds of studies are nearly impossible. Then there is the difficulty of classifying violence - is Mario violent? "Realism" is often touted as being especially affecting, but what is considered realistic? Mortal Kombat was called realistic, but nowadays it looks cartoony. The goalposts are constantly moving, so how do you even begin to discern a metric for realism?

Media violence doesn't happen in a vacuum. I'm not going to disparage the people who make it their life's work to study it, but I do find that conclusive studies tend to be anything but.