I can’t help but notice that the controversy over Resident Evil 5 has resurfaced. Gamepolitics and Pandagon have covered it, although the only real discussion on GP is in the comments section and, well, to be honest I wouldn’t recommend reading it (but suit yourself if you wish to). For those unfamiliar, here is the source of controversy:
What you see above is a white guy (Chris Redfield, a longtime protagonist of the series) shooting up a bunch of zombified black dudes in an African looking village. For some, this invokes white colonialist imagery and warrants a chorus of condemnatory finger-wagging. I have to dissent on two basic levels.
Number one, many seem to be operating on the idea that games are somehow required to yield to their sensibilities in the specific form of “imagery” they depict. In the past, those with the loudest voices condemned what they saw as “degenerate” and “depraved” depictions in the media consisting of sex, violence, profanity and other sins. Nowadays those on the other side of the aisle have developed a mirror sense of some right not to be offended by “insensitive” or “derogatory” imagery. While the specific content of both reactions is different, they both represent an attempt to bully content creators into conforming to their idea of what constitutes “proper” art and entertainment, and thus annoy me equally.
Number two is the idea that anything with plausible racial overtones is rightly labeled “racist”. Racism is a legitimate evil when it refers to notions of racial superiority or unexamined prejudice or bigotry. When it comes to refer to anything with a subtext that some very sensitive people may read as racist, well, you’ve defined the term a bit too broadly. I somehow doubt that the mere depiction of a white guy fending off hordes of black zombies is going to do much to legitimize the genuinely evil stuff. I also don’t remember a very high profile clutching of the pearls when Resident Evil 4 depicted a Caucasian American mowing down hordes of buzzed out Spanish peasants in a countryside village. (There is this column from 2007, over two years after the release of RE4, which looks more like an attempt to retrofit a racist angle given the RE5 controversy than anything. Also, it’s apparent claim that it represents anti-Hispanic racism is transparently stupid, given that the villagers are Indo-European.)
In general, I think people just need to cool it and enjoy the game. Life is too short to find demons around every corner.
The roar of outrage going through the Donk blogosphere over the Donk’s capitulation on FISA is kind of interesting. By now, you’d think that these people would wake up to the reality that the Democrats are simply the more craven and cowardly wing of the USEmpire, and offer no deliverance from our continuing decay. Now that the consensus opinion in Washington is that constitutional checks, balances and civil liberties are purely discretionary, the republic is officially dead, and you all just got a whiff of its rotting corpse.
UPDATE:
But I see no alternative to documenting what’s going on and trying to leverage the political system, rewarding those who stand up and punishing those who promise to do the right thing and then go back on their word. If you’ve got a better idea, please share it. (We talked a lot about “bringing down the state” 40 years ago and it wasn’t all that successful, so we probably need to think twice about whether that’s going to work any better this time.) If all you want to do is sit around and carp about how there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, and complain that this is all pollyanna nonsense because the Big Boyz are in it together, have at it. But nobody’s listening. It’s white noise.”
Thanks Digs, my irony meter needed a good torture test. Now that I know it has survived being told “no one is listening” by a major representative of the Donk blogosphere, which has basically failed to accomplish anything despite the most ferocious keyboard bashing, I feel safe using it in even the harshest rhetorical environment. IOZ says it best:
“As for me, I’m proud to be a whiner, and it is the nature of the whiner to be proudly ineffectual. On the other hand, to claim status as an activist while failing in virtually every political endeavor is to put on the clown hat and become purposefully, almost majestically ridiculous.”
For once I’d like to see Hollywood balance out their portrayal of America’s totally justified acts of ethnic cleansing by noting that, at one time, our so-called “victims” did it to each other.
Put another way, as of last week, the Supreme Court – and more specifically, Justice Kennedy – has declared itself the final authority on making war, incarcerating enemy combatants, and, indeed, on the American people’s right to self-government.
……
Until he is disabused of this notion by a Congress with the guts to assert itself, the following not only may happen, but will, and very quickly:
- Captured terrorists will refuse to answer any questions without access to a lawyer;
- Captured terrorists will demand the public disclosure of the military’s evidence against them, thus exposing the means and methods employed by our intelligence community to gather such evidence;
- Captured terrorists will demand to confront their accusers, who will be soldiers on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, in open court back here in the states; and,
- Captured terrorists will go venue shopping, filing their habeas claims in dozens of courts in hopes of getting the most liberal activist judge they can find.
It’s kind of sad to once again be confronted with the fact that someone can serve as majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives without being familiar with Marburry vs. Madison, or the fact that habeas corpus is only the legal right to challenge your detention in court once it happens. But aside from that, there is the interesting use of the phrase “captured terrorist”. The proper phrase should be “terrorism suspect”, since terrorism is the crime they are charged with and one goes through the legal proceedings to find out if they are, in fact, a terrorist. Unless, of course, Delay is employing the term in a way specific to the Busheviks, i.e., as a substitute for “fucking sand nigger”.
I also have to love the Orwellian phraseology in Delay’s title. Apparently, defending civil liberties against government abuse counts as “judicial tyranny”. Freedom is slavery, my friends.
I haven’t really been reading the propaganda clearinghouse of the Discoverup Institute lately, primarily because I stopped finding anything funny there amidst the repetitive plugs for bullshit “academic freedom” legislation. But eventually I knew something would pop up, given that the low-rent apparatchiks who write on that steaming turd can’t resist attempting to say something intelligent once in a while (and failing). Lo and behold, Logan Gage to the rescue:
First, Altschuler amazingly makes a historical reference to the French revolution, noting that the great chemist Lavoisier was beheaded at a judge’s order. He then tells us, “Although scientists fared much better in the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of people remain uneasy with or hostile to them.” Yet this frame of reference loses all its historical content. It was not the religious or the anti-evolution crowd that led the French revolution but rather a materialist ideology of man and his place in the world stemming from Rousseau and other thinkers. Thus Altschuler gets it exactly backwards. Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, judges haven’t exactly been on our side lately either.
Anyone familiar with the philosophes may be scratching their heads right this moment, trying to come up with a way that Gage has managed to avoid some very basic historical details of the French Revolution. Number one, that Rousseau, as well as Diderot and Voltaire, were proponents of de-anthropomorphized creationism, i.e., what Gage and his cohorts have repackaged as “Intelligent Design”. Number two, that the execution of Lavoisier was ordered by proto-cdesign proponentsist and anti-atheist reactionary Maximilien Robespierre during the Reign of Terror. Or that Lavoisier’s execution had basically nothing to do with the science versus religion but had everything to do with the fact that he was a French aristocrat and tax-collector who came to be seen as a counter-revolutionary traitor (a mistake that was, in all fairness, instantiated by the writer excoriated by Gage). It’s hard to believe that you can get so much wrong in one little paragraph. Nay, one little sentence within said paragraph.
I may end up having to acknowledge an error in my estimation of mid-east politics. I never thought that there was a significant feasibility to the idea that Iraq could be united under one banner, but it appears that America may make such happen, even if only temporarily. Not due to any deliberate act of altruism, of course, but rather due to a backlash triggered by our incessant need to be a lot of royal colonialist douche-nozzles:
BAGHDAD, June 10 — High-level negotiations over the future role of the U.S. military in Iraq have turned into an increasingly acrimonious public debate, with Iraqi politicians denouncing what they say are U.S. demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely.
……
“The Americans are making demands that would lead to the colonization of Iraq,” said Sami al-Askari, a senior Shiite politician on parliament’s foreign relations committee who is close to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “If we can’t reach a fair agreement, many people think we should say, ‘Goodbye, U.S. troops. We don’t need you here anymore.’ “
There are two things that I make out of this. Number one, it’s kinda sad that the Pro-American parties in the Iraqi puppet state are putting up more resistance than our own domestic “opposition party” here in super-free, mega-democratic America. Number two, it’s interesting that Iraq may have found a strong enough cause to unite the country. Namely, making sure we get the fuck out, which happens to be precisely what we should be doing. Convergence of priorities, I lovez me em’.
A newer story on this particular debacle contained a rather curious proclamation:
The latest draft of the new bilateral agreement offered by the Americans made some significant concessions but in several important areas did not move close enough to Iraqi demands, according to several participants in the Iraqi committee that is meeting regularly to discuss the pact….
……
The Americans have said they will allow civilian contractors to be held accountable under Iraqi law, said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Political Council for National Security. He said they had also agreed to hand over to the Iraqis people captured by American soldiers and accused of crimes. Such detainees are now held in American facilities. They will also transfer suspects already held in American detention centers to the Iraqis, Mr. Othman said.
Oh, how nice of them. Such generous concessions as being allowed to prosecute foreign contractors who’ve made a habit out of brutalizing your people, and you’re still not on board? INGRATES!!!
No one knows more than me what it truly means to be a true Scotsman Christian, and not even the most prolonged stretch of this Scotsman’s Christian’s imagination would admit Obama as a true Scotsman Christian.
“So he joins the seamy company of countless pornographers and pedophiles, led by Larry “Hustler” Flynt, the paraplegic promoter of “pink” slime, and 80-year-old Hugh “Playboy” Hefner, the poster boy for chemical prosthetics and geriatric depravity. These latter-day pimps – men who market women’s bodies for men’s sexual pleasure – all try to present themselves as defenders of free speech, not the abusers and defamers of freedom that they really are.”
Again we come to realize that, for social conservatives, the opposition to pornography is motivated by similar misogynistic tendencies to those they find in the industry’s promoters. And it’s not just because of the infortuitous slip on the part of Boone in the first sentence, where he reveals just how thoroughly repulsed he is by slimy and icky vaginas. It takes only a moments reflection to see that his real problem is not that women’s bodies are being “marketed” per se, but that they are being marketed to too broad of an audience. Instead of being the private property of a singular man, properly enslaved into the dual role of a reproductive factory and a homemaker, the women in pornography become a commons for the enjoyment of many men. On one level of another, sex is always icky and “immoral” when it lacks the authoritarian direction of upstanding, white, Christian and (preferably) rich males like Boone.
(EDIT: Reading this afterwards has given me the feeling that many people could get the wrong impression from the above, namely that I’m endorsing what I describe pornography as doing. In fact, I’m more neutral on the matter. I don’t see pornography as being any more exploitative or degrading than any other occupation in our authoritarian corporatist social structure, but then again, it’s hardly the blameless enterprise that many of its defenders would argue it is. That is all.)
And it’s funny, because Boone later-on misses the tremendous irony in quoting one individual to support an anti-sex, anti-pornography position:
“Only a moral and virtuous people are capable of freedom; the more corrupt and vicious a society becomes, the more it has need of masters.
Benjamin Franklin
One can understand the affinity Boone feels with a lot of aristocratic males from the 18th. century, who designed a republic specifically to edify an oligarchic structure which would overwhelmingly favor people like them, but someone should probably take him aside and make a serious attempt at communicating the following: Ben Franklin was among the biggest philandering jackasses of the era. Quoting him as an authority here is probably not very advisable.
Blake linked to this story in a previous comment thread, but I’m ashamed to say that I just didn’t muster the motivation to write a thorough post on it (or Dustin’s story, sorry to you both). So with that in mind, I’m glad to report that the incomparable Stephen Colbert has thoroughly ridiculed this nonsense in my stead. If I had to list my all time favorite “Word” segments thus far, this would be in the top ten, and is almost guaranteed to be a classic further down the road.
Some old posts of mine are archived in several spaces. First there is Tyler and Foxy's Scientific and Mathematical Adventure Land, a blog I used to co-occupy with friend Foxy. Older PowerUp posts are archived here. For outside contact, fire off an email to tylerofmanyminds AT gmail dot com.
