The American Spectator

HIS GOOSE IS COOKED
Re: Bill Croke’s Thrill Killing:

Thanks for Bill Croke’s article. I would make an exception for the Canada geese though. There are way too many Canada geese and they are pests. They ruin public parks and sporting fields with their rapid fire defecating. Whoever shot the geese Bill mentions in his article get my thanks and I would gladly compensate them for their spent ammo.
— Dave Taylor

I am writing you to request that you remove the recent article “Thrill Killing,” published on 12.11.08 under your “The Nation’s Pulse” column. This article contains several generalizations and non-factual statements, a large number of logical fallacies, and in general exhibits a discriminatory, nonsensical and insulting attitude towards two significant sectors of the population: Those who play video games, and those who are between the ages of 15 and 22. There is a bare minimum of citation in this article, and very little of it is related to your contributor’s “logical” argument, which is that video games and young people are at fault for these senseless killings in general.

Your contributor then goes on to make a dubious and completely unsupported claim, which is that somehow this senseless slaughter will migrate to murder. Frankly, this qualifies as defamation of character, seemingly implying that somehow playing video games leads directly to murder.

The final claim in the article, that “Video games are mindless, as are the parents who let their kids play them”… As you may note, this claim like all the others in this article is provided with a distinct lack of evidence, and may easily be disproved. It furthers the idea that this is an un-researched, opinionated and bigoted article, and I would hope that such an article falls well below your standards of publication.

I sincerely hope you wouldn’t publish an article that attacks blacks, or Hispanics, or any of the other obvious ethnic groups in the world. Gamers may be a minority, but they do represent a significant portion of the population, and contrary to your author’s beliefs we are simply a representative group of the whole of society. I will be the first to admit that there have been evils perpetrated in the world by people who play games, but such a statement does not logically imply that all evils in the world are perpetrated by gamers. Seeking to blame any given ill of society on a particular group, be they distinguished by the color of their skin or by the activities they choose to partake in, leads to bigotry, segregation and intolerance.

I would like to believe that you are not the sort of publication that desires to support those ideals, and so I am asking you to do the right thing: Remove this article from publication, and consider carefully before publishing a similarly bigoted, biased and intolerant article in the future.

Thank you,
— Christopher Weigel

Mr. Bill Croke’s column underestimates the potential danger of such persons (who are NOT “hunters”) to human beings. Abuse of animals (as opposed to the clean killing sought by real hunters) is one of the behaviors commonly found in  persons who go on to abuse and kill human beings, especially the most defenseless among us.
— James Pawlak

Bill Croke wrote that the cause of random animal deaths MUST be the result of people who play violent video games.  He further implied that the people who play violent video games are eventually going to start targeting human beings in murderous rampages.  Forget the fact that video game connections to violent rampages are actually quite rare, to imply that everyone who plays a violent video game is going to eventually commit murder is irresponsible at best.  At worst it’s simply ignorant.

I don’t condone the practice of children playing violent games, and I feel that the rating system already in place is simply not strong enough.  The one point on which I agree with Mr. Croke is that parents who allow their children to play violent games truly are mindless. As to the argument that video games themselves are mindless, that is a common stereotype perpetuated by those who don’t play video games and wouldn’t try them under any circumstance. A classic case of fear-mongering with the new media “bad guy.” It has never changed and will never change, since the days when Elvis’ thrusting hips were seen as scandalous, when comic books and movies each had their turn being demonized… with the turn of the 21st century it stands to reason that the newest forms of mass entertainment will have their turn as well.  People who don’t want to (and specifically refuse to) understand the media in question just make wild accusations and spurious claims.

It’s not like Mr. Croke genuinely believes that every person who plays a violent video game is evil and one small step away from committing actual murder… one of the most violent games this year — Gears of War 2 — has currently sold over 3 million copies world wide. He certainly doesn’t believe that 3 million people across Europe and North America are just days away from engaging in violent rampages… so it led me to send this e-mail and ask, what sort of journalistic integrity exists at your publication?  How is Mr. Croke allowed to make such bizarre and merit-less claims?

Then I noticed something specific which addressed my concerns entirely.  As I prepared to write the e-mail I saw the ad on your site for T-Shirts with President Elect Obama’s face and “OBEY” underneath…and the graphic of Obama and Karl Marx standing side-by-side like old friends.

It was then that I realized exactly what kind of journalistic integrity is present at The American Spectator: none whatsoever. Just another far-right, reactionary, fear-mongering website promoting “conservative” values (at least within the bounds of the recently perverted definition of the term “conservative” in America). 

Despite the knowledge that this e-mail, and the effort in writing it was — essentially — completely pointless, I thought I’d go through with it anyway, maybe as a cathartic exercise or…perhaps…it would actually reach a rational person, one of the few who may work for The American Spectator.