Are, are they serious? Talk about going off the freaking deep end. Blood and gore? Even butchers don't see a lot of blood and gore. Maybe if Cooking Mama had a couple of prequels, like Farming Mama and Slaughtering Mama, you might see some gore.
There's a fantastic episode of Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT about PeTA. It does a good job of sticking it to them.
@ 4th Variety: Being tolerant is not easy. We've had multiple assassinations of important people (e.g. Kennedy, Martin Luther King) and even more assassination attempts. We had the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 (Although, on the 9/11 front, we are doing very poorly and are violating our own ideals with places like Guantanamo Prison. We are not without our own blame and should be ashamed). We still allow the kind of people who perpetrated those crimes to openly discuss and support their ideas.
I also don't think that Germany is doing well with its "Intolerance has limits" creed. It's incorrect to think that by outlawing public discussion of the ideas, you have eliminated the ideas. The intolerant racists are still there. Still plotting to overthrow the government. Still hating Jews, blacks, Gypsies, Catholics, and whoever the hell else they hate. You are fine. If anything, Germany makes Nazism MORE high-profile because of its crusade against it. We have no such crusade in the US, and as such, Nazism is more like a circus side show, where ordinary people marvel at the freaks.
I also disagree that the current Republic does not allow a fall into dictatorship while the old republic did. The old republic fell because Germany was a terrible place to live at the time. The Nazi party promised progress and economic stability. Germany could fall into a totalitarian state again, today, if the environment made that likely.
What makes that unlikely is that people like you exist. Why bother making political parties illegal? They would never get elected. We have multiple racist parties in the US, all trying to get elected. Sure, they get a few votes, but they never get anywhere NEAR being elected. Having a law against them would be redundant.
I also appreciate Germany's position and the magnitude of Holocaust. If the US had had a President Hitler who went on a killing-spree, I appreciate that it would be hard to allow that backwater yokel to continue spewing a message of hate and racism. I can only hope, that if we were in that situation, we would continue to let him spew his hate, because that's the right answer. It's not racism that killed all the black people. It was ignorance, fear, and President Hitler. Not me. Not him. And not his ideas.
It was not the constitution and the government that allowed Nazism, it was the German people. And likewise, it is now the German people that make a fall into Nazism or some other form of extremism very, very unlikely.
On Napoleon: Yeah. What you described sounds like a pretty standard megalomaniac to me. They were all like that.
Oh I agree about video games. German law appears to have little precedent for direct video game censorship, although there are politicians who are trying. Remember, I never attacked Germany for its video game regulation, I only used Germany's repression of anything Nazi as an example to illustrate my dissatisfaction with Japan's laws.
"I don't understand any of it.
It's like Germany and its laughable laws against anything Nazi."
Still, Germany is a good example of indirect censorship with a healthy smattering of attempts at direct censorship. For example, In 2004, the Munich County Court ordered all copies of "Manhunt" to be confiscated.
And by indirect, I mean that under German law, if a video game is denied a rating, it cannot just be only sold to adults, any and ALL exposure to it must be restricted to adults only. This is indirect censorship because if a game is denied a rating, it will not sell. It must be sold under the counter and only offered if directly asked. You make it sound bad that game companies would rather change the game to "sell to children."
No, not to children, to ANYONE. If you are not allowed to even advertise the game in plain sight, it will, 100%, fail. They do not directly censor, but they make it impossible to succeed, thus making the rating system a de facto censorship board.
Tomb Raider Underworld producer Eric Lindstrom talks about Lara Croft’s essential personality traits, and why they’ve helped her survive all these years.
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AaronMC's Comments
Oh Dreamcast. I think of that start-up wistfully even now.
This one is also good.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080620/1324141465.shtml
Big friggin' surprise! East Texas!
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071005/020748.shtml
They say all that I could.
Are, are they serious? Talk about going off the freaking deep end. Blood and gore? Even butchers don't see a lot of blood and gore. Maybe if Cooking Mama had a couple of prequels, like Farming Mama and Slaughtering Mama, you might see some gore.
There's a fantastic episode of Penn & Teller's BULLSHIT about PeTA. It does a good job of sticking it to them.
@ 4th Variety: Being tolerant is not easy. We've had multiple assassinations of important people (e.g. Kennedy, Martin Luther King) and even more assassination attempts. We had the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 (Although, on the 9/11 front, we are doing very poorly and are violating our own ideals with places like Guantanamo Prison. We are not without our own blame and should be ashamed). We still allow the kind of people who perpetrated those crimes to openly discuss and support their ideas.
I also don't think that Germany is doing well with its "Intolerance has limits" creed. It's incorrect to think that by outlawing public discussion of the ideas, you have eliminated the ideas. The intolerant racists are still there. Still plotting to overthrow the government. Still hating Jews, blacks, Gypsies, Catholics, and whoever the hell else they hate. You are fine. If anything, Germany makes Nazism MORE high-profile because of its crusade against it. We have no such crusade in the US, and as such, Nazism is more like a circus side show, where ordinary people marvel at the freaks.
I also disagree that the current Republic does not allow a fall into dictatorship while the old republic did. The old republic fell because Germany was a terrible place to live at the time. The Nazi party promised progress and economic stability. Germany could fall into a totalitarian state again, today, if the environment made that likely.
What makes that unlikely is that people like you exist. Why bother making political parties illegal? They would never get elected. We have multiple racist parties in the US, all trying to get elected. Sure, they get a few votes, but they never get anywhere NEAR being elected. Having a law against them would be redundant.
I also appreciate Germany's position and the magnitude of Holocaust. If the US had had a President Hitler who went on a killing-spree, I appreciate that it would be hard to allow that backwater yokel to continue spewing a message of hate and racism. I can only hope, that if we were in that situation, we would continue to let him spew his hate, because that's the right answer. It's not racism that killed all the black people. It was ignorance, fear, and President Hitler. Not me. Not him. And not his ideas.
It was not the constitution and the government that allowed Nazism, it was the German people. And likewise, it is now the German people that make a fall into Nazism or some other form of extremism very, very unlikely.
On Napoleon: Yeah. What you described sounds like a pretty standard megalomaniac to me. They were all like that.
Oh I agree about video games. German law appears to have little precedent for direct video game censorship, although there are politicians who are trying. Remember, I never attacked Germany for its video game regulation, I only used Germany's repression of anything Nazi as an example to illustrate my dissatisfaction with Japan's laws.
"I don't understand any of it.
It's like Germany and its laughable laws against anything Nazi."
Still, Germany is a good example of indirect censorship with a healthy smattering of attempts at direct censorship. For example, In 2004, the Munich County Court ordered all copies of "Manhunt" to be confiscated.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/08/04/german-video-game-laws-explained
And by indirect, I mean that under German law, if a video game is denied a rating, it cannot just be only sold to adults, any and ALL exposure to it must be restricted to adults only. This is indirect censorship because if a game is denied a rating, it will not sell. It must be sold under the counter and only offered if directly asked. You make it sound bad that game companies would rather change the game to "sell to children."
No, not to children, to ANYONE. If you are not allowed to even advertise the game in plain sight, it will, 100%, fail. They do not directly censor, but they make it impossible to succeed, thus making the rating system a de facto censorship board.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundespr%C3%BCfstelle_f%C3%BCr_jugendgef%C3...
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