I was thinking about another subject for a diary when I ran into this. Oh, Jeebus. This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Sure, I think their testing methodology looks kinda weak and unreliable, but that's not it.

People have known since pretty much the beginning of time that young men can be agressive and sometimes exhibit destructive behaviors. Why do they do this? Well for a number of reasons. There's genetics specifically testosterone. It drives men to be agressive to get what they want because those are the people who tend to get ahead. Not only that, such men can be better hunters/providers for offspring. There's social issues. Boys want to be brave in front of their friends because they want friends and brave in front of girls because they want girls and acts of bravado and fearlessness and such tend to get respect and/or admiration from both sexes. There's developmental issues. It's the agressive boy who grows up into the man who understands that fighting and doing stupid stuff isn't the only way to live and learns when to fight and when not to fight. My point here is "Where is the outlet for young men to be young men?" Well, there's sports. Football, soccer, hockey and a few others can fill a certain niche but most sports go out of their way to avoid even basic contact. Some have taken such non-contact sports to literal extremes to get something out of them approximation satisfaction and fulfillment. Alright, there's certain genres of music that accept and embrace such things. Why do you think Metal and Punk and Rap are so seductive to young men? Apart from those, I'm not thinking of anything a young man can go out and do to scratch that itch that won't get him in real trouble. Why? Because those agressive urges are not as important as they once were and now many people seek to penalize those behaviors instead of reward them or even merely allow them as part of the package. Why am I bothering with all this? Because video games are one of the last "proving grounds". No, they don't involve real violence but they do sublimate a need that many young men feel. They can go in to their game, kill some goblins or blow up some ships or beat that guy's head in with a bat and then go about their way with less of an angry desire. Sure, there will always be a few who take it too far, but there have always been those and will always be those. And I'm certainly not advocating real violence or wife beating or anything horrible like that. Video games (among other things) are a valve for those feelings and these pigfuckers are trying to say that being a young man is wrong. They're trying to kill off one of our last best hopes for keeping young men from turning into emo-bois. And that galls me like you can't believe.

That is all.