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Friday, January 23,2004
-Oregon Daily Emerald
COMMENTARY
Editor in Chief:
Brad Schmidt
Managing Editor:
Jan Tobias Montry
Editorial Editor:
Travis Willse
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Measure 30’s surcharge
is progressive, fair
Be dear when you mark your ballot on Measure 30. A
yes vote will provide temporary funding to sustain pro
grams and services essential to our state's future prosperi
ty. Approval of Measure 30 will ensure that the state's
2003-05 budget, passed by a bipartisan majority of the
Oregon House and Senate, will protect education, public
safety and social services from devastating cuts.
Since the state has the primary responsibility for fund
ing public schools, the League of Women Voters believes
that the state must provide sufficient funds to give each
child an equal, adequate education. Business leaders
across the state have indicated that the recruitment of new
companies and the jobs they bring are being adversely af
fected by the condition of our schools and the uncertain
ty of school funding.
The league supports Measure 30's temporary income
tax surcharge because it is progressive (those who earn
less, pay less), compatible with federal law and is fair.
Measure 30 is responsible because it avoids borrowing
that mortgages Oregon's future prosperity. Oregonians
have been misled by statements that additional cuts and
additional borrowing at premium interest rates are bet
ter than temporary tax increases. Data from the failure
of Measure 28 in January 2003 clearly indicates a crisis
in the court system, human suffering from lack of hous
ing and medications, shortened school years and crowd
ed classrooms.
League members urge you to carefully weigh the bene
fits of Measure 30 as compared to the negative results of
its failure. Vote yes on Ballot Measure 30.
Janet Calvert
president
League of Women Voters of Lane County
Spending on sports center
shoots through the roof
I guess the University of Wisconsin's new (1998) Kohl
Center must be made of cheese. How else could this mul
ti-purpose, $76.4 million facility — which seats 17,142
for basketball, 14,000 for hockey and between 15,000
and 17,000 for concerts, and includes 2,200-square-foot
state-of-the-art locker areas and the Nicholas-Johnson
(practice) Pavilion and Plaza, located in the heart of cam
pus — have been built?
The University wants to be ranked with the "big boys" and
I think Madison is well within those desirable ranks. So, I ask,
why does our arena have to cost the sky and the moon?
At the current projected cost of $ 180 million, the price
tag per seat for one of those 15,000 basketball-only seats
is $ 12,000. Yikes! Outlandish? You bet.
Christine Sundt
visual resources curator
Architecture & Allied Arts Library
Stories focus on Israel,
but ignore conflict
Thank you for expanding the thoughts of University
students with Steven Neuman's recent travelogue from Is
rael ("Visit to Israel reveals opposing images," Jan. 8;
"Playing the tourist" Jan. 15). Any attempt at interesting
students in the world outside their own city, state, or na
tion should be rewarded. These stories are particularly
welcome if they address the human side of an issue, as
Neuman's article did.
Unfortunately, Neuman glazed over any and all issues
regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He exclaims his
shock at how well the Israeli people handle the stress of
attacks. Yet where are his descriptions of the daily life of
Palestinians? How do the Palestinian people deal with
roadblocks, curfews, extraordinary unemployment, a di
vided country, land theft, etc.?
Jared Paben's coverage of the recognition given Lach
Litwer ("An international education," Jan. 16) suffers
the same blind eye. He quotes Litwer, "There's nobody
in Israel who hasn't lost a family member." How about
that there isn't a family in Palestine who hasn't lost a
family member, or had a family member illegally arrest
ed? He shudders at the need for a security wall, yet
where is the grief over Palestinians kept out of Green
Line Israel, where the jobs are, or away from their
homes? How about the tens of millions of Palestinians
who are refuges from their homes?
Jeffrey Stout
Eugene
Shooting down excuses
If you've read my column regularly,
you'd probably recall from my Oct. 31 col
umn that I love a good video game.
I like constructive, pacifistic games — I
like building cities, maybe playing golf
with an anthropomorphic dinosaur and
solving puzzles. But I like violent games,
too. I want to smash a supersonic race car
into my opponents' machines, sending
them spiraling into a smoldering mechan
ical wreck in the city streets below. I want
to shoot big guns and wave pointy swords
around, I long to throw bombs at fellow
go-karters, I yearn to run through big cas
tles and flatten goombas with steel-toed
boots. I want to pander to my id and exer
cise my brain at the same time. But, I just
want to do all of this in a virtual world.
"But Travis," censoring talking heads
wail, "despite your dashing charm and
quick wits, your appreciation of the simu
lation of violent acts, however ethically
you behave in real life, promotes a desensi
tizing culture that tramples the universal
perception of the sanctity of life."
Their responsibility-dissolving leftist
counterparts are no better, charging that
companies who produce violent games ir
revocably compel naive consumers to em
ulate violent acts and conclude those
companies must be held ethically and
legally (and presumably solely) account
able for these acts.
Fortunately, even in a judicial system
that's had considerable difficulty adjusting
to the complicated implications of rapid
technological development in the last
decade, judges have generally found these
absurd, disconnected claims of culpability
by proxy to be just that.
US. District Judge Lewis Babcock dis
missed a suit filed by relatives of a teacher
killed in the 1999 Columbine High School
shootings. The claim purported several
dangerous arguments: that game makers
could have reasonably foreseen that their
product would have caused violence; that
video games should not be protected as
free speech as other media are; and that
specific games are (presumably ethically)
defective, in that the game taught players
how to use an object — namely a gun —
without accurately reflecting the complex
responsibilities and consequences of using
a weapon in real life.
And therein lies the catch: Arguments
that reassign responsibility rely on the no
tion that a video game's players have
enough difficulty distinguishing between
fictional (and generally unrealistic) conse
quences in a fictitious world and actual
consequences in the real world; that they
believe reasonable actions in one parallel
legitimate behavior in the other. This is, of
course, entirely false for that majority of
gamers who are old and sane enough to
make these distinctions.
Unfortunately, some pundits disagree.
Travis Wilise
Rivalless wit
In a 2001 article in Maclean's, Simon Fraser
University's Stephen Kline oblique opines that
"the industry is getting away with murder" —
never mind that the National Institute on Me
dia and the Family, which assesses media for
responsible regulations, hailed the video game
industry "more responsible than the other
media industries."
Judge Danny Boggs sagely agreed, writ
ing in a ruling from a three-judge panel of
the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that
"We find that it is simply too far a leap
from shooting characters on a video screen
to shooting people in a classroom."
Boggs is right: Millions play violent
video games; only a few commit violent
crimes that could even loosely be linked to
those games. An NIMH study suggests
video games that reward aggressive behav
ior stimulate aggressive thoughts immedi
ately following play; similar studies sug
gest the same is true of other media. But
for all but the psychopathic, a fine-tuned
system of social and cultural inhibitions
prevent aggressive thoughts from mani
festing into aggressive, harmful behavior.
Moreover, claims of the gaming industry's
responsibility for violent acts, in conjunc
tion with these rightfully rejected legal
claims, imply a deeper, more problematic
assertion: That video game makers are not
only culpable for others' acts (possibly result
from an inability to distinguish between the
real and the virtual) but that these compa
nies are largely responsible for this schizo
phrenic disconnect in the first place.
Could the violently tragic events that
have prompted protest about video game
violence been rooted in deeper issues? Ac
cording to the Federal Trade Commission,
85 percent of game purchases are mediated
by parents. Could some parents be faulting
in their responsibility to screen content for
age appropriateness — even with the help
of the Entertainment Software Rating
Board's rating system? Or worse, could these
parents simply be guilty of failing to culti
vate an ability to distinguish fact from re
sponsibility, and senses of responsibility
and causation in their children, in the large
majority of the time when those kids aren't
playing games? Could it be that parents,
overzealous activists and some politicians
are looking for a scapegoat for a social ill,
rather than a solution?
The most potent and relevant question in
the debate about violence in video games, it
seems to me, is not whether video games
might catalyze violence, but whether society
will allow people to dissolve themselves illegit
imately of responsibility for their own actions.
Contact the editorial editor
at traviswillse@dailyemerald.com.
His opinions do not necessarily
represent those of the Emerald.