Unsought Input

The Virginia Tech murders got plenty of coverage in the press and on the Internet, but none of the writers here at Unsought Input weighed in on the subject. Really, there wasn’t anything left to say that hadn’t already been said a hundred times on a hundred channels already.

But now there is something interesting going on that isn’t getting enough coverage. Did you know that there are two more casualties to add to the list of 32 people killed by Seung-Hui Cho? In addition to murdering and wounding all those people, Cho somehow managed to kill common sense and reason in thousands of commentators and high school principals across the country.

(more…)

We can agree to disagree about the political messages in the movie 300, whether it was propaganda or gay-bashing.  But I think everyone who saw the movie will agree it was quite violent.

But was the violence excessive or gratuitous?  The only empirical way I can think of to find out is to remove the violence from the epic:

What do you do When you find out you are wrong?

Not just wrong about one thing, or a little bit wrong. What do you do when you find out you are very wrong, and consistently wrong, and there are really big consequences?

President Bush, after three years, seems to finally realize he has been wrong. Well, not really. But he has finally acknowledged the big consequences part. Part of the problem has been that he has only gotten advice from those willing to tell him what he wants to hear. So the formation of the Iraq Study Group was a good thing, right? Finally, some independent experts would weight in, and tell the President some things he wouldn’t like to hear.

Except they weren’t really experts. And their advice has little to do with Iraq. And Bush isn’t really listening anyway.

So how do we win the war in Iraq? Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to ask the real experts - the military people actually in Iraq. In fact, one of our troops has given us a PowerPoint presentation. That’s right, it’s even in the preferred format of upper management everywhere. Seriously, go there right now and watch the presentation, it’s only 18 slides.

(more…)

The video game industry covers a wide range of genres, but some of the most popular games allow players to engage in serious simulated violence. At the same time, your local evening news broadcast is filled with reports on violence in schools and gang violence.

But are video games (and rap music, and Elvis Presley, and Jazz, and, uhh… flappers?) really to blame for violence among our youths? Culture warrior Bill O’Reilly thinks so, as he told Oprah recently. He has a whole book on this and many other subjects which he ties together under the umbrella of the “Culture War” - basically, traditionalists defending America versus secular-progressives who want drastic changes through undemocratic means.

(more…)