My Freedoms

He reminds me of the Tall Man in Phantasm.

I'm not a fan of talk radio. Sports, religious, political or otherwise. But I loves me some free speech, and will support it in even its most despicable and ignorant exercises. and this is a very good article about the latest Imus "scandal", which doesn't qualify as despicable, though maybe ignorant.

In a related note on racism.

I know it's out there. I know it will never really die. But I had thought it was diminished, or diminishing, to a state of innocuousness. And, no, I don't think it's because people are getting smarter. I just think that the God of Commerce is finally binding us together as one common consumer demographic. Meaning, everything is so cross marketed these days it's hard to tell one group of people re-enacting the media pushed stereotypes of another group from the original or the other group re-enacting the stereotypes of the first group, which has got me all bugaboo and is a totally different tangent. I digress. I thought, naively, that racism was something isolated to the aging ignorant and the rural bumpkin. Also, to throw out the curve ball now, I believed that gamers being such a hounded and stereotyped bunch themselves with their tech-savvy and embracing of this quasi-wonderful age of information would be more open minded. Nope. Not really, anyway. Every time I log on to Call of Duty 4, my current fave on Xbox Live, my poor right ear is beleaguered with rants of youths calling everyone in the virtual world nigger, or faggot, or nigger-faggot, nigger lover, fucking fuck faggot nigger fucks, noob faggot... And they are free to say it. My first instinct is to ban them. Which I can do as an Xbox Live member. I can make a couple of clicks and have them banned for in-game speech violations. And I've done it. Not every time, but when I'm playing with a black or gay friend and they want to leave a "game lobby" because of the racial slurs thrown around I do it just to feel like I'm doing something. And it's ultimately nothing. The offending gamer can just log on under a new tag and hurl slurs as he feels they are due. I never get into it with them. There is no point or end to a flaming war, especially one that would not be a debate or any call to reason from both sides. It would go like this:

Awful Gamer: Fucking nigger keeps nading (grenading) me like a noob pussy.

Me: Dude, it's just a game.

Awful Gamer: Nigger lover. I bet you fuck niggers and little nigger boys, faggot.

Me: Wow, let's just play the fucking game, man.

Then he replies with more awfulness. And all of these phrases I have heard. I'm not going to offer up my versions of a cure. I'm just saying it's real disappointing.

Another thing:
I have never heard a female gamer (who get their own share of abuse) engage in any of the above. And I'm glad that femal gamers are growing in numbers.

Jody