I'm really surprised the Democrats want her to run. She's got the charisma of a lobster.

Unfortunately I can't think of a democrat (besides Obama) with more charisma.. I could see her pulling off the "awkwardly funny mom" routine. In a perfect world, Russ Feingold would come out of nowhere and go for it

If Hilary had won in 2008, America would have proper universal health care.

That's not true at all.

One can only hope. Neither her WalMart fortune nor her right-of-Dubya position on war and the police-state will cost her election, that's for sure.

Hooker - yeah, we'd have a centrally monopolized health care system (presumably run by someone else with ties to the Waltons). That'd be great. Snowden would also be dead, we'd have Australian-esque censorship laws, and we'd be in our third year of war with China. That'd be not so great.

So her close ties to Walmart would have put the kibosh on her biggest issue throughout her entire political career but not done anything about going to war with China, which is Walmart's production facility?

Hillarycare 2008:

"It is imperative that we have plans, as both John and I do, that from the very beginning say, “You know what? Everybody has got to be covered.” There’s only three ways of doing it. You can have a single-payer system, you can require employers, or you can have individual responsibility. My plan combines employers and individual responsibility, while maintaining Medicare and Medicaid."

In other words, MF'n Obamacare.

Here's an incredibly stupid speech she gave last year where she said we don't need "one size fits all healthcare", and quoting de Tocqueville, describing him as a writer from the 1920s(!) What a goddamn heartless buffoon.

ehh it's down there now

You know, like, before we had games like GTA, and there were the kids who would pull the wings off of flies or set ants on fire with magnifying glasses? Those are probably the same kids who methodically hog-tie prostitutes and place them on train tracks in Red Dead Redemption or shoot up 200 people in GTA. And I knew kids who did that, and they're doctors, lawyers, and surprise they're not in jail. Might as well just have a ban on summertime.

And the statistics are fucked up. Even when I was a kid I had to get someone older to buy Mortal Kombat 2. I don't think this study accounts for parents who are at the store with their kids, who give it the OK. I'll bet the statistics of kids getting their hands on R-rated DVDs at Best Buys are the same, vs. actually going to a movie.

Plus, you know, the only difference between, for example, Saw and 24 are ideological nuances, a couple of swears and the fact that 24 was more brutal and explicitly pro-torture.

The American Id is absolutely terrifying.

If you're going to worry about media psychologically harming children you'd be better off going after Baby Bratz.

And also wrt alcohol, different states are different but at least in Wisconsin it's perfectly legal to get your underage son or daughter a beer at a bar, at least last time I checked. And if you want to buy your kid cigarettes, that's perfectly fine too.

The 1993 hearings on video-game violence rapidly became a way for Nintendo to scapegoat Sega, but I don't know who might've pushed this one.

The timing would be right for it to have something to do with the early days of the shift from physical media to downloads.

>> The timing would be right for it to have something to do with the early days of the shift from physical media to downloads.

OZ, it's certainly possible, but I doubt it's the main reason. More likely, it was simply Hillary and her allies doing what they love to do, what they've never made either secret of, or apology for, loving to to do - using paternalism as a way to leverage their class privilege and "guide" the plebs.

There are a lot of people who honestly do think that video games, like movies, rock music, or even co-educational dancing, are social ills that need to be controlled, altered, perhaps even destroyed, all for the good of society. You don't have to posit some sinister corporate conspiracy to explain the actions of every Thompson, Anita, or Savonarola; whilst corporate interests certainly do factor into the regulatory schemes of paternalists (either right from the start, or later, as the result of lobbyist meddling and industry opportunism), they need not be the sole, nor even the most dominant motivating factor behind such actions.

For example, within leftist/libertarian circles, there's a lot of talk about how drug prohibition was "primarily" motivated by the interests of the prison-industrial complex. That's certainly an important factor, no doubt about it, but I think we have to remember that there ARE actually quite a lot of people, particularly in a historical context, who buy into the hype that substance use is the ruin of Western society, and that punitive regulation is a valid method (both morally and functionally) by which to engineer social change.

The economic interests of the state-directed prison-industrial complex, as well as the economic interests of the fantastically profitable, CIA-connected drug monopolies, help to explain why the war on drugs has persisted, despite its obvious failures and blatant immortality. Yet neither the prison-industrial complex nor the international drug cartels got the way they are until AFTER the prohibition era began; they were opportunists and leeches, men who saw ways to make the coercive moral crusades of intolerant idealists change course and work for them. They were not, or at least, there is little to no evidence to suggest that they were, working in the shadows to orchestrate said crusades right from the start.