Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

nicely put thejeff, just what I meant to say http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

hypocrytes *****in about minor issues while they let the world crumble to dust as long as all gays are cured http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

/me not understanding this

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

The problem with science becoming more of a religion and less of a tool, is that we can all be scientists, by using the scientific method(s), but not enough of us have a deep enough understanding of the myriad scientific disciplines, or can (which are becoming more and more specialized, constantly), to be able to separate out what is a scientific, proven fact, and what's a theory based on bad evidence by some crackpot with a degree, that happens to have been accepted by the scientific community for a hundred years. Take dinosaurs-how many times, in just the past 30 years, have our accepted cultural views of dinosaurs changed?

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

well that is a bit of a problem maybe... but since nothing about faith can be proven I think the same problem is bigger there http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif, let's accept science as the lesser of 2 evils (ow this is nice religion as the greater evil.. how ironic http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif)

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

And on your last line... maybe the problem with religion is that the tend to have views that hardly change at all... maybe better to change for the better than stay behind an out dated concept http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif (and IMHO even old views of dino's are more accurate than the views of most religions)

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I never understood, other than the actual historical reasons for it, namely Constantine getting fed up, why they didn't continue writing the Bible. Maybe not edited it, but continued adding to it, as each generation came and went and left their mark. The Bible as it is, although admittedly one of the literary cornerstones of Western Civilization, is in it's current form a handicap to Christianity. So much is ambiguous or taken out of context, or just plain unfriendly to modern eyes. In a way (along with the "Render unto Caesar...") it's a real credit to the Abrahamic religions that they've kept their books as close to the original text as they have.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

? HoneyBadger, the Bible is believed by the Christians to having been *directly* inspired by God - the Word of God itself. The Holy Spirit or anyway some kind of Divine Inspiration descending on the Evangelists and the Old Testament writers and guiding their hands into writing the Bible the way that God wants. While opening a lot of problems (like the fact that God is supposed to be perfect and so not self-contradictory but still goes through a massive change of personality from the Old Testament to the New, and Him being some kind of a all-hating all-forbidding slavery-supporting genocidal giving death penalty to everybody, in the Old Testament), this also implies that you cannot wake up one day and say "Hey, I want to leave a track of my society in the Bible too". Writing what? The only way to do a similar thing are the Papal bull and Encyclicals, both prerogative of the Pope. And none of them have ever been very "modern society's values" inspired yet http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smirk.gif

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

It amuses me terribly that there seems to be some sort of a Christian moratorium on prophets. I mean, there used to be a whole lot of prophets running around, some false, and some true - how did we tell the difference then?

You would think it would be a big wake up call for people to think how "easy" it is to tell a false prophet now. I mean, gee, if the people 2000 years ago were a bit more educated, would they have believed even half of that stuff? "God" is supposed to be all powerful, yes, but is supposedly fighting this war with the Devil, who spreads lies and deceit. It seems not only silly, but incredibly foolish, IF you believe in these myths, to pick up a book that plainly says "The Word of God", and not wonder if maybe it's a trick!!

Really, we just need to lower our criteria for prophets. Just lower the bar until we can agree to bestow the title on John Lennon, and we can refine it from there. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I don't think it's because of Christian Prophets that much of the concern lies, but rather because of Muslim sensitivities, as concerns the Prophet Muhammed, and the restriction against displaying images thereof.

I won't bother pointing out that this restriction is only against Muslims creating or displaying images of the Prophet, according to Islam, because it still seems to become a sensitive issue, even when it's non-Muslims doing it.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Well it just seems to me that there hasn't really been a religion that has had a recognized prophet in over 1000 years. And no, I don't count Joseph Smith. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

I'm actually a bit partial to the portrayal of the concept in The Life of Brian - where it was illustrated that at one time there were an awful lot of people vying for the title, most of whom were ignored if they were lucky, or otherwise stoned to death. Only a few managed to get anyone to listen to them, and I hardly can bring myself to imagine that by virtue of their ability to convince some ragged and uneducated peasants that they are somehow indisputably trustworthy. I mean, most of them arose before there even was "Christianity", so the people who adopted them were unhindered by a faith and value system that was built to protect them from impure influences. Oh but wait, you say that after they adopted that faith system we call "Christianity", there were virtually no more actual prophets, ever? Isn't that unexpected..... I wonder what it means? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I dunno, living in Utah has given me a certain amount of respect, atleast for modern day Mormons. I've never personally had any problems with them, and overall, they seem like nice people. Living in Utah has actually been a very good experience for me, much better than living in some other areas-that's not to say the Mormon church is totally or necessarily responsible for that, but the Mormons haven't done anything too dramatic, to make matters worse for me. They've also got all the other trappings of a fairly major religion, everything from some very pretty temples, to customs that definitely do affect their lives on a day-to-day basis, and I think in generally good ways, from what I've seen. So while it's not a religion I would personally subscribe to (but neither is Christianity), I am willing to grant them legitimacy, in my own head (if that counts for anything, anywhere).

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

The point about the “render unto Caesar” is not that any of the various Christian splinters followed it before the Enlightenment. The point is that the idea gives an intellectual space for some Christians to accept a separation of church and state. As Tifone points out, it is not universally accepted by all Christians, but it is accepted by many. More important for this discussion, such a separation is accepted as a real possibility by many liberal believers and non-believers.

Many other faiths do not have this concept and some explicitly state the contrary. This does lead to a communications gap for many Westerners trying to understand politics and religion in other parts of the world.

It also explains why some people may be offended by various things in the game while others shake their heads. Some people don’t or can’t separate religion and the rest of their life and may be offended. Others see a massive separation and can not comprehend how another could be offended.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

"Accepted by many" you say, and I read "accepted by the surely many reasonable Christians, which understand that not everybody can be forced to follow their 2000 years old values, even if they personally have the right to do so".

In that, we can agree.
But just think about the many religious leaders crying out and blasting against "the secularism" (which is nothing more than "rendering unto Caesar") and the "cultural relativism" (which is a MODERN RECOGNISED VALUE to every lay State, as they don't accept /one/ religious culture to impose itself on the others).
You see every day on TV what I mean. Those preachers drive masses of millions, which vote what their beloved priest wants, often imposing at the present time, religious values on lay States and to people which have the right not to share them.

So maybe "rendering unto Caesar" isn't something the Christian religion is so good doing in the present. Not that the other main religions are better in this. I just think about Christianity because many see it as "the reasonable religion", while in fact it possesses unnumbered brainwashing and "past-adjusting" media and often fights to deprive the people of the "Gift of Reason" ( http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif ) the Enlightenment bequeathed to us.

Peace

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Quite possibly the single greatest failure of universal Democracy.....

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Yes Jim I agree it is. Expecially because democracy, as all the modern Constituions and the many Charters of Fundamental Rights say, doesn't absolutely mean that "the majority wins". This is "dictatorship of the majority", an abjection of the democracy known even by the ancient Greeks, and is the way some modern countrys work, mine often included.
The real democracy safeguards the minorities and doesn't impose -by violence or by aggressive creation of laws- the values of one culture on the others, expecially on the "grey areas of morality".
So yes, it is a great failure of democracy that the referendums and the "public opinion" are used by the aggressive religious majority to impose its will and culture on everybody in a nation.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

No more prophets are needed for Christianity. The prophets foretold stuff relating to the return of the messiah. The messiah arrived, which means the next stop is Armageddon, and the ticket to travel is already printed.

* * *

In a real democracy, the people rule. Whether the majority wish to be tyrannical is neither here nor there. Arguably, states which safeguard against such behaviour are less democratic than those that don't.

What separation of church and state means is that there is no direct interference by the government on the church or by the church on the government. It does not mean that those with religious authority can't indirectly influence government by persuading adherents to do certain things.

If a religious majority wishes to impose it's will, in a general sense it should be allowed. After all, a capitalist majority can impose low taxation on a socialist minority. A punitive majority can keep the death penalty. A prudish majority can impose strict censorship of pornography or bad language on a permissive minority. There's no justification under democracy per se to second-guess the motivation of people just because it is religious.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Sure. "If a religious majority wishes to impose it's will, in a general sense it should be allowed"! Yeah,! If a woman is raped in a Muslim fundamentalist country, SHE is condemned to death! But they have the right to do so! It's right! The majority decides, not the human rights!

"A punitive majority can keep the death penalty". If the majority approves torture, here we go! And if the death penalty is applied to girls which lose their virginity before marriage, or to "heretics", or "witches"? Oh, that's true, a punitive majority has the right to do so!

"A prudish majority can impose strict censorship of pornography or bad language on a permissive minority" The best one! Next step: censorship on art, on intellectual thinking, because just the "prudish" bigot majority has the right to decide what you can say or show!

This kind of fascist way of thinking made all my young brown hair, totally white. Oh but wait, you wait for Armageddon, so that all Christians go to Heaven and all the others, good people even non-believing, burn in hell for eternity... yeah, that pretty much explains everything

P.S. If you think this way, don't live in a free country. you would be deluded. Learn what a democracy is, please, before living into one.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I find it very disturbing to think that Agema is in fact a Christian. All this time spent being cautious, and polite, avoiding stereotypes, and making comments about how many good people out there are highly religous.

And then, one nice big slap in the face, "It's okay for me to do whatever I want to you, because I am going to heaven, and you are not!".

If that is truly your belief, I have nothing but sorrow. For you. And for this world that is being torn to pieces by people who hold similar beliefs.

Your comments only serve to illustrate my point (especially with Tifone's masterful clarifications), that Democracy is failed by the masses.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I didn't get that out of his post at all. The "no more prophets" stuff could just as easily be an outside description of Christian belief as his own opinion.

Nor did he comment on your own state of salvation or his, for that matter, much less "It's okay for me to do whatever I want to you"?
So, unless that's your opinion of all Christians, I can't see why you think it applies to Agema.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

> Well it just seems to me that there hasn't really been a religion that has had a recognized prophet in over 1000 years.

There are plenty, and lots more than that. What do you mean by recognized BTW? Recognized by the movements own followers, or by at least one other religion or by an encyclopedia ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

BTW, religion is a western concept. In other cultures there are rarely words for the concept we call religion. It is so closely connected to society and the world at whole that it is not meaningful to talk about.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Because Jeff, of all of the Americans that I know (which is a lot! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif), the only ones who think there is absolutely no problem with Democracy allowing Christians to run roughshod over the beliefs and ideals of the rest of the population - are Christians themselves.

To everyone else it amounts to nothing short of government facilitated conversion.


I will admit, I got a bit ahead of myself, as I feel very passionate about humankind plotting a course that is unfettered and unhindered by superstition and mythology. Do I believe that is all that religion is? Of course not, but it's the only part that gets forced upon others. You can't enforce true faith, you can't enforce virtue and harmony - you can only enforce dogmatic behavior.


And again, I will stop to clarify. I don't have a problem with religious people in general, and I think the majority of people who live their lives according to the tenets of a religious teaching, are decent people.

What I do have a problem with, a growing problem, probably because of the US involvement in the Middle East - is the people who think there really is some sort of war for souls going on in the world - who think that they are following the one true faith, and that all others are being misled by satanic forces. These people may be in the minority, but they are the problem, and they have enough sway in the world to still make terrible things happen, even in this modern age.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I am not a Christian, and did not say I was.

What I dispute is Jimi and Tifone talking about things like "real democracy" in terms of actually restricting or denying popular mandate, as to do so is patently anti-democratic. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, far from it.

Modern Western democracies can impose cultural values. The French and Turkish constitutions for instance are aggressively secular and restrict aspects of religious observance in ways the UK and US certainly don't. But you wouldn't call them less democratic countries (although Turkey is politically unstable and has periodic blips). A nation may wish to have an overarching *religious* constitution, rather than one based on secular views as is generally the case in the West. But why should that make them less democratic, if they use a free and fair system of voting just like the US or UK?

I'm just saying that frequently people in the West erroneously conflate a lot of our general secular Enlightenment values into "democracy", which actually have little or nothing to with democracy itself.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I think Agema was just talking about the concept of true democracy, i.e. a state where everything is decided by a majority. Obviously in such a state, distasteful things can happen. I think that was his point.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Even in a democracy there are a are recognized rights that all members of the society have that can't be violated by the majority.

A good counter example is if the majority wanted to dictate that the minority had no right to vote, well, denying that popular mandate certainly would be a lot more pro-democratic than allowing it to pass, wouldn't it?

If there are no restrictions on the power of the majority it's an ochlocracy not a democracy.

However, I think Agema is right in that you can still be a democratic state and mix religion and government.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Er, imagine my post came before Agema's. We must have been typing at the same time.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Don't tell me what to imagine, thought police!

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Imagine this, punk!

*clubs Sombre with baton*

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

And it took you over 2 hours to type yours? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif


I only made the guess that I did, because generally people tend to be more profuse with their examples in a case where they are illustrating their own point of view.


Now just to clarify further, I never said that the form of Democracy that we practice in America is -not- true, but rather the opposite, that in developing a form of true universal Democracy in this country, we are bringing to the forefront the failure of such a system.

That failure being that ultimately, the course of the nation (and the world to some extent, we are quite influential and all that) is being decided largely by uninformed and unqualified people. Not only that, but we are illustrating a certain constant, that "the larger the government gets, the less it should do". That is to say, while it may be perfectly alright for a town or community to mandate that there be no strip clubs in that community, it is a failing of modern universal Democracy that they can have ANY say one way or the other about whether or not strip clubs can exist in another town 3000 miles away.

Not that I am a huge fan of strip clubs. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif I am just saying, people should not have a vote on the restriction of other people's freedoms. Obviously if I say if one community votes against certain behaviors, a non-universal system allows people who disagree to move to another community - someone can argue that if under this system, 51% outlaw certain things, I can just move to another country if I disagree. However, one of the concepts that this nation was founded on, was that we all live differently, think differently, and believe differently - and impeding liberty and the pursuit of happiness is unacceptable.

So we need to retrace our steps, and define "liberty" in clear terms. Then we can determine what laws are even constitutional or feasible. I think most people on the right, and the left, would like a smaller government, especially if the fundamentalists realized that as large as they are, they are still another minority, and so if they create an environment of censure and oppression, they can prepare for that to come around to them eventually as well.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Largely I agree with you with a couple of caveats.

The trade-off made for decentralisation is one of cohesion. If too much room is left within a political entity for localised people to apply differing laws, it can cause atomisation, people start to wonder about the relevance of the whole and increasingly fail to identify with others. To me, the US seems to have a pretty good balance of the federal state imposing several standards from the top, but leaving decent room for individual states to manoeuver under that.

It can be beneficial to restrict liberty. I agree it is appropriate to define liberty in order to make appropriate judgements. But society as a whole may have the rights to choose on something that affects all, like gun ownership/control, whereas something based around the individuals concerned like pornography can be better left to individual control.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I think Dominions developers wont have any serious problems with raging mobs until they finally make a muslim-inspired nation http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Someone a while back took offense at the glyph pretender. The glyph is based on the Muslim declaration of faith, and he found it's inclusion in the game offensive and possiblt blasphemous. But it was huge no deal and he dropped the subject after a few emails, there certainly were no mobs involved. And a Hindu gentlemen was concerned about the Deva, since he found it disrespectful that people would be hitting and killing an image of a divinity. To the best of our knowledge no one rioted because of that either.

Most people are reasonable even when offended.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Well, no, but that's primarily because you still haven't added peasant infantry armed with torches and pitchforks to the game.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

But there are!

Thralls! Vampire Counts generate them. Armed with pitchforks and all.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I'm going to have to disagree entirely on you there.

Gun control is a great subject for you to bring up, because it is such a hard issue. The best answer that I can offer you, is that twice as many people die in motor vehicle accidents, as die from violence in all forms (in the US itself). We do not ban motor vehicles, because we believe we can teach people to be better drivers, and regulate where and how they drive in ways to keep them from becoming dangerous. The same can apply to the use and ownership of firearms. A wise man once stated "laws don't keep guns away from criminals". Which is true, and can be extrapolated to the point of prohibition - as illustrated with our prohibition of alcohol in the last century, as well as the current "war on drugs" which is about as effective as our "war on terror" - we see that much misery comes from the oppression of people.

As long as populations continue to develop and exploit interconnectivity through the internet, and other forms of interactive media, we will continue to only grow closer to other people, not farther apart. Implementing superfluous or detrimental laws which restrict personal freedoms, will in fact be what continues to drive people apart, this schism between those who willingly follow unjust laws, and those who refuse to and thus are forced to live as criminals in "the land of the free".

<3

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Zeldor, I just wanted to take a moment to respond to this statement because I found it pretty confusing. To contextualize my opinions for everyone reading this, I was brought up as a reform Jew, and as the joke goes, that means in practice I'm an atheist http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smirk.gif In any case, the statement that Jews and Muslims are most easily offended by trivial things is just a little ridiculous. I'm certainly in no way offended by the name Adolph, or the fact that you said people from my religion are apparently petty and offended by absolutely nothing.

In any case, I don't think there is anyone involved in this discussion who doesn't realize that people on television are generally completely insane. Political commentators are frequently drawn from the extreme left and the extreme right with little regard for any middle ground. Similarly, when individuals are on television railing about insults to their religion, those people are quite simply religious fanatics who represent the smallest portion of the smallest constituencies of any major religion. In specifically addressing your comment, maybe its my tendency to ignore the irrational arguments and sensitivities of religious zealots, but I don't think I have ever seen a Jew on television screaming about being offended over nothing in particular. Likewise, the only Muslims I've ever seen ranting on television are the clips the American mainstream media loves to play of bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda operatives in an effort to convince people that Muslim's are irrational and want to kill us because of cartoons. When you consider that an estimated 1.8 billion people in the world are Muslims from a world population of approximately six and a half billion and less than one percent of those 1.8 billion are considered "radical adherents of Islam," what probably pisses off and offends Muslims most is 99.9% of them being lumped together with radicals because the media in the United States and throughout the "developed world" has a completely one-sided portrayal of Muslims that fails to mention anything about the constant denunciations of extremist Islamic groups by the majority of Islamic countries, groups, and people throughout the world. And as for Jews, we are by far the most liberal demographic in the United States, and being liberals, Jews generally are not very offended when someone makes either a profoundly uninformed or just outright incorrect statement.

Being as I am from the United States, if you want to talk about religious nutcases on television getting easily offended about absolutely nothing, you might want to pay a little more attention to evangelical Christians and the Republican party who somehow think that homosexuals existing and living in this country, where tolerance and freedom of expression is a right, is offensive to G-d. The American media is crammed full of hate-mongers who bask in finding offense in everything and nothing and speak for and represent millions of like-minded fundamentalist Christians, like George Bush "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.", James Dobson "Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth," Jerry Falwell (currently in Hell learning that hating people probably wasn't what Jesus wanted him to spend his life teaching people) "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being," and Pat Robertson "The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening." So I hope I'm not offending you Zeldor, but these are the guys with millions of followers in the US and they are on TV, or organizing politically, or running the government, and they are on TV everyday spouting their hate and bigotry and when it comes down to it, these are the groups who can't stop *****ing about violence in video games, violence and profanity in movies, pornography, and a host of other issues that would honestly not be offensive if not for the fact that these people want to impose their social views, their religious beliefs, or their bigoted judgment and puritanical standards on people who think differently.

Since it is almost inevitable that someone will say that I am bashing Christianity (because they are easily offended and won't actually read my arguments or my justification for my statements) I'm not suggesting that only Christians do that, but in the United States Christian fundamentalist groups are by far the largest radical religious groups in the country. To argue the other side, there are certainly Jews and Muslims that are also offended by violence and whatnot, Senator Lieberman is a prominent example of hating the video game industry and getting outraged and offended for political purposes, and he is quite frankly ridiculous and a douche bag who is in no way representative of any Jew that I know. Anyways, the possibility certainly exists that I'm wrong and maybe there is some satellite television channel of Jews and Muslims giving "I'm offended by X" diatribes that I'm not aware of, please feel free to inform and correct me.

Oh and aside from responding to Zeldor's comment, if it wasn't clear from the previous paragraph, I'm obviously coming down on the side of PC not really needing to be an issue for dominions. PC is a strange concept, and I generally believe that it really shouldn't exist because its the thought and attitude behind words that matters rather than the actual words themselves. Dominions 3 is a video game. It is meant for entertainment purposes only. There is honestly nothing as petty and wasteful as getting angry and offended over something that does not have any impact or importance to issues that exist in the real world. As people have already said in this thread, people who get offended by something from a video game should probably examine more closely what it is about themselves that is causing their reaction rather than what it is about the video game that 99.9% of people have no problem with whatsoever.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I'm impressed, that was quite well expressed. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif I was a little daunted by the general lack of breaks in the text. A couple of paragraphs would do wonders for getting people to read what you have to say. <3

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Haha, Yeah I tend to write in pretty solid blocks. I need to work on that. Thanks for the comment though, I'll see if I can find some logical places to break that first paragraph up...

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Don't feel bad-they yelled at me about that too.

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But perhaps not on the Dominions 3 forums? Nothing good ever comes of gun control debates, I've found. (Now, if only Illwinter would add rabid, demon-possessed wilderbeest to the game, and the spells to control them, we could have on-topic debates about gnu control.)

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Personally, I'm deeply and griveously offended by your hatred for paragraph breaks.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

To borrow from Family Guy, I can't help it. Paragraph breaks killed my father... and raped my mother.

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I would prefer not to debate gun control.

However, if I can continue it's use in relation to liberty. To take your car example, you need a licence to drive, because cars are dangerous. In that sense, you do not have liberty to just drive a car, it is restricted by the state. If you apply similar principles of adequate training to own and use guns, you are supporting a form of gun control.

When liberty potentially endangers others or denies them their own liberty, it is reasonable to restrict it to some degree. There is a balance that needs to be found.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Great rant, Atreides.

I'd like to suggest that most of those ranting on TV aren't really insane. They're actually canny politicians. They may or may not actually be offended by whatever they're ranting about, but they know they'll gain audience and thus money or votes and thus power by ranting about.

There are people who are offended by trivial things, but I'd look closely at anyone who's getting paid or holds any kind of public position or is pushing an agenda. Are they really offended or is this just another chance to boost their standing or shut down debate.

One example of this from the Jewish side, since you seem to have covered the Christian side, would be the political groups that scream Antisemitism at any suggestion that Israel is anything but an innocent victim in it's dealings with Palestine. Another can of worms, like gun control, probably better not dug into here, so I'll just note that there's more open debate in Israel itself than in the mainstream US media.

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That's a total bull**** comparison, IMHO. Car accidents are an unwanted byproduct of public transportation. "Violence in all forms" sounds like a very active act compared to that. People aren't shooting bullets just to kill time or say hello to each other, or are they? To get a fair comparison you'd have to compare fatal car accidents with fatal accidents involving firearms, where the death toll from car accidents are probably a lot higher because of its continuous use unless maybe you factor in the total amount of time that people are driving versus aiming and firing, too, but to be able to be really comparable lots of people would have to be facing each other and shoot at the same time. Or you'd have to compare the death toll from people consciously running over / crashing into people with a car to kill them versus shooting them with a gun, where the guns will trump the stats by far, with the utmost probability.

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Ich, you're a moderator. You might want to avoid calling people's arguments bull****. And possibly just avoid the incipient gun control flame war entirely? Until it's time to shut it down.

Gun control has been brought up. A flame war is probably inevitable, but I'd think the moderators should avoiding fanning the flames.

To All: Going further down this path is a bad idea. We've all been through it before. There are places far more appropriate and it'll just get shut down here.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

So maybe "bad comparison" would have been more politically correct. That's just syntax, but not semantics.

I certainly don't plan to discuss gun control here and my post didn't mean to encourage that. As far as I'm concerned, I haven't been discussing it so far, anyway, what I did was point out a nonsense comparison of apples and oranges. That's what was really itching me, not the actual subject.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Well this is a fair assertion, sir. But I was Googling around for a comparison of "death rates", and the first well compiled list that I found did not go to the extreme detail of listing "fatal gunshot wounds", whether accidental or not. I actually thought it was useful to show the relationship in numbers that I found, to illustrate how big a "menace" cars are to innocent people. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif




To be honest, my intent was not to derail this train onto a a Gun Control debate. It was brought up, and I do think it is a perfect example for the larger discussion of civil liberty.

I hardly think that education and licensing are considered by many to be a form of "car control". When the US government uses the word "control" in relation to anything, it implies severe limitation, or partial or total banning. For example, drugs in general are referred to as "controlled substances".

It is becoming increasingly obvious as time passes, that government intervention in personal lives, on the level of "control", is a failure to the common good, and causes more strife on many levels, than a lack of control would cause.

Imagine this: if we maintained the same level of police protection that we "enjoy" now, but decriminalized most things that are difficult to enforce at best - then those police could focus on the one thing that everyone should agree is the worst problem of society - violent crime.

Perhaps if we directed our resources towards making sure that all of our citizens were safe, then we would find that peripheral concepts like gun control would become much more manageable. Chasing after guns, or drugs, or pornography - these are all emotionally charged persecutions that are heavy-handedly executed, causing untold amounts of misery among the people, many of whom are basically innocent - and would remain "more innocent" were they not persecuted unfairly.

To um all of this up, my point was that if you want to live in a 100% gun free neighborhood, for example - then you should be able to mandate that if you and all of your neghbors wish it to be so. However, you and your neighbors should not have any say whatsoever about whether the people in my neighborhood own guns, or what kind of guns, or how we regulate them - that should be for us to decide. The only impact that has on someone from this community, would be if they were traveling, but what kind of idiot travels with a gun without checking on the appropriate local laws? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

I hardly doubt that Oregon, as a separate entity, would ever get designs on "invading" one of its neighboring states. I'm reasonably certain that if we focus on making ourselves better people, rather than telling other people how to live their lives, that it won't come to that, either. <3

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

"Power flows from the mouth of a gun". Mao

Part of the responsibility in a democracy, are the acts required to maintain that democracy.

Our forefathers, having experienced restrictions to the right to bear arms under the Sedition Acts [?], and knowing the problems in overthrowing the british, decided that one of those reponsibilities was that the right to bear arms.

So, no, while you may elect to be gun free, and live with like minded individuals, you cannot mandate that none bear arms.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

But that "100% gun free neighborhood" argument breaks down. If it can be mandated only if everyone agrees, then that's no mandate, that's just no one living there owning a gun. If one person wants to move in and have a gun then suddenly all the neighbors don't agree and it's no longer 100% gun free.
From a more legal point of view, nothing in US law (or any other country I know of) requires 100% approval. So every law imposes on someone.

And it doesn't scale. Neighborhood is vaguely defined. If you define a large enough area then you'll never find one where everyone wants to be gun-free. If you use a small enough scale everyone who wants to lives in a gun-free area, even if it's just their own house.
And easy access to guns in one area, makes it easier for criminals to get weapons for use in the gun-free area.

More largely, you can't divorce gun control from violent crime. Those pro-control will say violent crime often uses guns and thus reducing access is a way to reduce violent crime. Those opposed to gun control often say armed citizens reduce violent crime.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

I'm not talking about 100% agreement per se - but jurisdiction. Very few things should be regulated beyond city limits - even fewer across state lines.

If your city decides to be firearm free, then so be it, I won't try to stop you. If I owned a gun (and I likely never will, personally), then obviously I wouldn't want to live there, and if I DID choose to live there, I'd willingly give up my weapon, or I'd be moving to a jail cell instead of that nice condo I had my eye on.


As it stands, since we try to homogenize freedom, we instead dilute and adulterate it with conflicting points of view. If we truly want to prosper, then we need to let people grow up, on their own terms, and make their own rules. As long as they aren't hurting people, then what is the problem? What they do is not the business of someone 1000 miles away, so long as no one's liberties are threatened. That's the thing, any form of overarching "control" on a national level, is merely a pre-emptive restriction of civil liberty. And unfortunately, bringing it back to the gun control point (since Chris went there http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif), quite possibly an attempt to control people, more than any little thing that is made the issue.

Re: Real-world sensitivities and game names
 

Well, by quoting you, I illustrate that I have read your statements; and I am not easily offended. Having done that, I will now opine that you *are* bashing Christianity.
Your biases - while politically correct in the circles you probably run in, are none-the-less fairly strong.

For example - calling Christian fundamental groups 'radical' in the same vein as muslim terrorists. Or calling Lieberman a douche bag - because he holds beliefs contrary to yours.

It may be my misreading, yet I would opine that when the original poster was commenting about jews and muslims being the most easily offended that there is enough evidence to support the utterance of the statement, if not support or prove it.

I believe he was referring to the world wide muslim response to things like - the danish cartoon, the film in the netherlands where muslims responded by killing the producer, or even the reactions to 9-11.

On the jewish side, I think the case much less strong, although the actions of the israeli state, the constant tit for tat middle east violence; and perhaps even the actions of the antidefamation league might support his case.

Regardless; I don't support his position. In this area I happen to believe that all peoples are to greater or lesser extents capable of violence. And to argue who is most qualified is bootless.

But your whole rant about hate-mongering, gay hating christians right wingers etc etc. is exactly that. Bashing