Way of the Mind

I’m not American, so why do I care?

Because America influences the rest of the world, like it or not. And Lieberman’s loss may finally mean that things are changing for the better over there.

Funnily enough, I’ve long disagreed with Lieberman, before the Iraq war, before even the Bush administration. Because I remember: Joe Lieberman is an advocate of censorship.

He’s the kind of sleazy politician who promotes censorship and other controls of media like video games, without really knowing anything about them, just to show soccer moms and conservatives how much “a guardian of moral values” he is. In other words, he despises the first amendment, individual choice, and freedom.

People, censorship is wrong. Always. And in this particular case it’s even worse, because it’s not censorship based on something that is actually there, but on a lie repeated so often that people accept it as true without even checking. The lie that “there are video games where you are rewarded for raping and beating up women”. I’m a gamer, and I tell you, there is no such thing in mainstream video games, no matter what Lieberman, or Hillary Clinton, or one of the most disgusting creeps in the world, say.

Video games are just like comic books in the 50s, or rock music in the 60s: they’re unknown to older, scared people, and dishonest politicians take advantage of that, promoting such entertainment as “deviant” and “dangerous”, and attempting to appear as guardians of morality. And people keep falling for it.

But Joe Lieberman is even worse. Let’s take one of his more recent comments, about the war in Iraq:

“In matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

(source)

Excuse me?!? Isn’t that the same as saying “if we’re at war, the president is our supreme leader and cannot be questioned”? What kind of absurdity is that? Isn’t he, in effect, saying that any president can start a war, and is then allowed to do whatever he wants, that he actually becomes above the law? Clever, then: start a generic “war on terror”, without a defined end.

And that man had the nerve to call himself a “democrat”. Last time I looked, “democracy” didn’t exactly go for supreme leaders…

Good thing he lost. I hope he loses again, when he runs as an independent.