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Well, the argument goes that it's violent games. I don't know what they're playing in The Netherlands but practically the entire market in South Korea is focused on cute cell phone MMORPGs. They haven't even bothered releasing any of the eighth-generation consoles here yet. Note that it's still not a good argument. The graph indicates that the reason for our high gun violence, whatever it is, is mostly likely a form of American exceptionalism and can't be pinned down on any single arbitrary factor. ...gently caress this is getting off-topic. New question- why did America invent video games, and was there any essentially cultural explanation behind the Great Video Game Crash of 1983? Given what happened with Nintendo it seems rather obvious that the problem was not with the product itself but the way it was being marketed. Bonus alt history prompt- assuming Nintendo didn't think video games were important, who would have taken up the mantle? Were any American companies left ballsy enough to try, or would the modern video game marketplace be completely unrecognizable?
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Mar 15, 2014 05:48
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I taught in the Korean public school system and I heard "head shot" literally 10 times day for about 5 months. Anecdotes are just that, but violent games exist and were well known to Seoul 6th graders in 2009. I'd guess I'd have to see some sort of study that showed American market games feature more guns and opportunity for gun violence.
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Mar 15, 2014 05:59
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Some Guy TT posted:...gently caress this is getting off-topic. New question- why did America invent video games, and was there any essentially cultural explanation behind the Great Video Game Crash of 1983? Given what happened with Nintendo it seems rather obvious that the problem was not with the product itself but the way it was being marketed. Games were invented because computing power suddenly became very cheap and there was a potential for utilizing computing resources for gaming (virtual games had previously been developed as early as the 50s, though there was obviously a barrier to entry). The crash happened because there was a severe lack of quality control. People bought dedicated video game machines with the implicit guarantee that their games would work, and when it didn't consumers didn't see a reason to buy the games or their machines anymore. Nintendo's innovation wasn't marketing, it was quality control. That's not a cultural issue in and of itself but is more a sign of an immature market. quote:Bonus alt history prompt- assuming Nintendo didn't think video games were important, who would have taken up the mantle? Were any American companies left ballsy enough to try, or would the modern video game marketplace be completely unrecognizable? There would always be PC games. Dedicated video game machines seem fairly inevitable, although it's very much possible we skip the whole home console idea and just do mobile devices (at least until phones caught up).
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Mar 15, 2014 06:05
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Some Guy TT posted:why did America invent video games Some dude with a machine thought he'd have a little fun. I know this is the American history thread but come on, the base unit of history is not alway a whole goddamn country. The best explanation for the Great Crash is much more economical than cultural, unless you want to count a disconnect between CEO's and marketers and their markets as a 'cultural' thing.
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Mar 15, 2014 06:07
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menino posted:Video games are a reach: Looks like we need to slightly increase or decrease our video game spending to get off that odd peak in the violence vs. games curve.
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Mar 15, 2014 06:24
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The interesting things about that chart: The Dutch are playing up a storm goddamn!  China I assure you plays a shitload of video games, they just don't pay for them. 
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Mar 15, 2014 07:21
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Some Guy TT posted:Well, the argument goes that it's violent games. I don't know what they're playing in The Netherlands but practically the entire market in South Korea is focused on cute cell phone MMORPGs. They haven't even bothered releasing any of the eighth-generation consoles here yet. Or it could be due to the fact that guns are far more widely available in the US than in any of those other countries, and the US has a far larger poverty-stricken permanent underclass and far less ethnic homogenity than most of those countries? The US looks a lot less "exceptional" if you add countries like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa to the chart.
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Mar 15, 2014 07:59
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menino posted:I taught in the Korean public school system and I heard "head shot" literally 10 times day for about 5 months. Anecdotes are just that, but violent games exist and were well known to Seoul 6th graders in 2009. I'd guess I'd have to see some sort of study that showed American market games feature more guns and opportunity for gun violence. I had kids bring realistic looking toy guns to class and no one batted an eyebrow. Kind of amazing how completely non-threatening that kind of stuff is when there's no way for them to get their hands on real ones. Let's go for that hornet's nest. Why is access to guns such an essential part of American culture, and when did it start? It's common to hear that it's as American as the Wild West, but everything I've been able to find about that era indicates that gun violence wasn't really that big a thing (unless it was an Indian massacre), and that guns were commonly turned into sheriff's offices until whoever owned them was out of town. Where does the cultural shift come from that states the Founding Fathers' divine plan that every man woman and child have infinite access to firearms? Before or after the so-called Wild West, and if after, how soon was the image of the Wild West utilized in promoting the idealism of this vision of history?
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Mar 15, 2014 08:03
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Some Guy TT posted:I had kids bring realistic looking toy guns to class and no one batted an eyebrow. Kind of amazing how completely non-threatening that kind of stuff is when there's no way for them to get their hands on real ones. It came from the frontier nature of the colonies as a whole, going back to before the founding of the US. When you're building a tiny forest village in the middle of a largely-unexplored nowhere on land stolen from angry natives, a gun is essential equipment. Besides, the colonists didn't really have a regular military force (nor could they afford one), and distrusted professional armies anyway since the British Army came to be seen as a symbol of oppression and abuse; the colonies mostly relied on citizen militias raised from the able-bodied gun owners in an area, except for places where British regulars were around to defend areas. With no professional soldiers and a minimal police presence, the only defense most colonial settlements had against immediate danger was shouting for everyone within earshot to grab their gun and come help out. As the US expanded westward in pursuit of manifest destiny, the frontier zone moved westward too until it hit the Pacific Ocean, culminating in the so-called "Wild West". The only thing special about the Wild West was that it was the last frontier, the only place where the natives hadn't yet been subdued and the population density was low enough for bandits to roam free...which made it a prime target for media like books and performances that extensively romanticized and exaggerated the life of cowboys and the West, which sheltered East Coasters who hadn't had to worry about lawlessness or native attacks in a century ate up like crazy. Cowboy-based fiction was enormously popular, from the Wild West Shows where performers would act out heroic and honorable cowboys saving cabins from random savage native attacks, to the Hollywood movies that really served to define "Western" as a fiction genre rather than the name of a region.
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Mar 15, 2014 09:02
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Some Guy TT posted:I had kids bring realistic looking toy guns to class and no one batted an eyebrow. Kind of amazing how completely non-threatening that kind of stuff is when there's no way for them to get their hands on real ones. American history tends to be taught in a very "we solved this problem with guns and grit" kind of way. Taming the wild west? Guns and grit. Starting our nation? Guns and grit. Maintaining our nation against all odds? Guns and grit. Winning every war we've ever been in? (Vietnam doesn't count, it was a CONFLICT, for reals!) Guns and grit. America is an inherently violent culture.
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Mar 15, 2014 09:20
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Some Guy TT posted:
I wasn't making an argument about that, I was discussing the history of moral panics that another poster brought up. Yes, nowadays not even "social guardian" types claim that violent video games will result in a generation of killers, but they did 15-20 years ago. Much like how two decades before, it was movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that were going to result in murderous teenagers. As I said, this type of moral panic about media goes back to at least the 1880s, and it's been nonsense every time. Now, guy with the chart: I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Nobody in their right minds thinks that video games are the cause of the crime drop, just that the dire predictions of violent and aggressive video gamers have been completely unfounded, as with all these panics.
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Mar 15, 2014 09:29
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I assumed the chart suggested no correlation.
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Mar 15, 2014 09:38
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Arglebargle III posted:I assumed the chart suggested no correlation. Yes, that's what I'm saying.
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Mar 15, 2014 10:12
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I mean, the Revolution did sorta start with the British attempting to seize an arms store and then being beaten back. As for the modern OUR GUNZ sort of deal... I'd peg it as a conservative rural vs. liberal urban split that sorta took on a life of its own as bullshit excuses became gospel truth. I think a similar thing sort of happened to the abortion debate.
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Mar 15, 2014 10:56
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We should have ourselves a discussion of the causes of/grievances behind the Boston Tea Party. I'm sick and goddamn tired of people claiming it was because the tea was being taxed too much and they didn't want to pay the taxes. I'm fairly sure that's virtually the opposite of reality.
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Mar 15, 2014 13:53
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FAUXTON posted:We should have ourselves a discussion of the causes of/grievances behind the Boston Tea Party. I'm sick and goddamn tired of people claiming it was because the tea was being taxed too much and they didn't want to pay the taxes. I'm fairly sure that's virtually the opposite of reality. I thought that was fairly accurate, just add in a touch of "there were old laws that were worse but they were never enforced so in practical terms they paid zero taxes for tea".
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Mar 15, 2014 13:58
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Tea had became a symbol of unjust British policy so its not as simple as it being just about the tea tax. There were a number of taxes on things like paper that effected Americans across socioeconomic lines. The Boston Tea Party is actually pretty awesome when you realize how effective it was as an act of sedition without resorting to physical violence against people. Destroying a huge amount of private property is a great way to get the authorities to pay attention. Miltank fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 14:07
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AFAIK the British government had been trying to impose/increase taxes on the American colonists for quite some time even before the Boston Tea Party. Targeted organized dissent kept causing Parliament to back down, but they kept leaving some small new tax behind because they wanted to send the message that just because they were repealing the initial tax they wanted to institute didn't mean that they were renouncing the ability to impose laws on the colonies whenever they wanted to. I guess if you want to be totally accurate it wasn't really about too high a tax on the tea itself, but it was about taxes.
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Mar 15, 2014 14:34
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Yeah but that happened because pretty much everyone knew there was going to be some sort of armed confrontation coming in the spring and there were a few cases of both sides trying to secure gunpowder stores with neither really willing to risk opening a shooting war over it. I think it would be more fun to consider how the American revolution really got started with that proudest of American traditions, the government actually wanting people to pay the taxes they owed complete with a tax decrease coupled with more effective enforcement measures being met with cries of tyranny, injustice and the crippling tax burden Americans faced. Or not, there was clearly more going on with the start of it. Also I on the question of US gun culture, I was of the impression that it's really quite recent in terms of the fear of the government coming to take your weapons and the need to have as many weapons as possible to repel the evil tide of home invaders. Even the link with the right wing is a pretty recent one, Reagan's first big foray into the 2nd Ammendment was to pass some hefty gun control legislation and California's strictish gun control laws are pretty much the direct legacy of Reagan. Of course that was in response to the Black Panthers adopting their second ammendment right and insisting on travelling around everywhere visibly armed with rifles. For some reason groups of militant looking black people with rifles and shotguns required good conservatives to set sensible limitations on the rights granted by the Constitution. The NRA likewise used to be basically a sports association lobbying group looking to keep hunting laws sensible and help people get in touch with other hunters or target shooters. It wasn't until the late 70's that it started to pick up the kind of cultural message and political clout that it did. Like much of the modern US 'conservative' movement, US gun culture is a fairly recent reimagining of the past that seeks to alter society to better fit their picture of how things used to be without any reference to how things actually were. Edmund Burke would spin in his grave to hear these sorts of people taking up his name.
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Mar 15, 2014 15:59
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FAUXTON posted:We should have ourselves a discussion of the causes of/grievances behind the Boston Tea Party. I'm sick and goddamn tired of people claiming it was because the tea was being taxed too much and they didn't want to pay the taxes. I'm fairly sure that's virtually the opposite of reality. The Boston Tea Party happened because the British granted the East India Company the right to export tea to the Americas without paying the considerable import tariffs and duties on tea, granting the East India Company an effective monopoly over American tea sales by allowing them to undercut not only the colonial importers who paid the tariffs to import from Great Britain, but also the smugglers who had been illegally importing cheaper tax-free Dutch tea. This would have effectively put every American tea merchant and smuggler (and there was a lot of smuggling, to the point where Dutch tea was more common in the colonies than British tea) out of business and made a British megacorporation the only source of tea in the Americas.
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Mar 15, 2014 16:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:AFAIK the British government had been trying to impose/increase taxes on the American colonists for quite some time even before the Boston Tea Party. Targeted organized dissent kept causing Parliament to back down, but they kept leaving some small new tax behind because they wanted to send the message that just because they were repealing the initial tax they wanted to institute didn't mean that they were renouncing the ability to impose laws on the colonies whenever they wanted to. The amusing part too was that a sizable chunk of Parliament thought that the American demands were entirely reasonable, and even proposed to accept their demands in 1775. It was shot down by the House of Lords (probably because the proposal also strengthened Commons at the expense of the King and Lords). By the time that faction came to power at the end of the war, too much blood had been spilled to really accept anything less than independence.
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Mar 15, 2014 17:08
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MrNemo posted:Yeah but that happened because pretty much everyone knew there was going to be some sort of armed confrontation coming in the spring and there were a few cases of both sides trying to secure gunpowder stores with neither really willing to risk opening a shooting war over it. I think it would be more fun to consider how the American revolution really got started with that proudest of American traditions, the government actually wanting people to pay the taxes they owed complete with a tax decrease coupled with more effective enforcement measures being met with cries of tyranny, injustice and the crippling tax burden Americans faced. Adam Winker's "Gunfight" is a must read if you're interested in the birth of gun culture or gun politics. This is a good free article on the same topics: http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/
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Mar 15, 2014 17:59
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Some Guy TT posted:Note that it's still not a good argument. The graph indicates that the reason for our high gun violence, whatever it is, is mostly likely a form of American exceptionalism and can't be pinned down on any single arbitrary factor. I disagree. Our high gun violence is due to a high rate of gun ownership. That is the single factor. 
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Mar 15, 2014 18:11
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Yaaaay, a new gun control thread!
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Mar 15, 2014 18:13
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Silver Nitrate posted:I disagree. Our high gun violence is due to a high rate of gun ownership. That is the single factor. It's certainly a factor, but the considerable difference between Germany and Canada on that graph would seem to indicate that, shockingly, there's more than one factor that affects gun violence rates! In reality, and also in history, very few things boil down to one single factor. The general violence rate is also significant; the number of gun owners just determines how much of that violence can be committed with guns rather than with knives, clubs, fists, or other such things. Also, that chart includes suicides in its definition of "gun-related deaths", which skews the graph upward since the US has more than twice as many gun suicides as gun murders, so it's hardly a good measure of gun violence.
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Mar 15, 2014 18:21
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Main Paineframe posted:The Boston Tea Party happened because the British granted the East India Company the right to export tea to the Americas without paying the considerable import tariffs and duties on tea, granting the East India Company an effective monopoly over American tea sales by allowing them to undercut not only the colonial importers who paid the tariffs to import from Great Britain, but also the smugglers who had been illegally importing cheaper tax-free Dutch tea. This would have effectively put every American tea merchant and smuggler (and there was a lot of smuggling, to the point where Dutch tea was more common in the colonies than British tea) out of business and made a British megacorporation the only source of tea in the Americas. Yeah, the Boston Tea Party wasn't about taxes at all. It was about the EIC having waaaaaay too much tea on hand, so they went to London and asked for dispensation to flood the American markets without paying the taxes* (or honestly smuggling like proper Americans did). *Actually how it worked was they'd be able to go to America and off load there, paying the duties for trading in America, but they could do it directly and so avoid paying dues in London first, then have the tea picked up to be taken to America to pay those dues.
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Mar 15, 2014 18:38
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FAUXTON posted:We should have ourselves a discussion of the causes of/grievances behind the Boston Tea Party. I'm sick and goddamn tired of people claiming it was because the tea was being taxed too much and they didn't want to pay the taxes. I'm fairly sure that's virtually the opposite of reality. Yeah, in reality the amount of tax on the tea had absolutely nothing to do with why it was dumped in the harbor (which people have already outlined as being due to undercutting the local tea merchants and general virulent sentiment against all British taxes) The British government actually spent more money collecting the tax than they actually got in revenue from it. The tax was there solely to not let the colonists win on the tax issue, because Parliament and the colonial assemblies were having a giant fight over if Parliament had the right of taxation and over Parliament's rights over the American colonies in general. The British did originally put a tax on the colonies that was meant to raise actual money to help deal with Britain's debt after the 7 Years War, the Stamp Act, but the colonies declared the taxes illegal and responded by having an organized colonial-government-backed boycott of British goods until the British repealed it. This then set off the whole conflict. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 19:01
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Also this myth persists because "The Revolution happened because taxes were too high!" makes for a much more popular right-wing talking point than "the taxes in question were almost non-existent but there was a complicated power-struggle between colonial and imperial politicians."
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Mar 15, 2014 19:17
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Main Paineframe posted:It's certainly a factor, but the considerable difference between Germany and Canada on that graph would seem to indicate that, shockingly, there's more than one factor that affects gun violence rates! In reality, and also in history, very few things boil down to one single factor. The general violence rate is also significant; the number of gun owners just determines how much of that violence can be committed with guns rather than with knives, clubs, fists, or other such things. Also, that chart includes suicides in its definition of "gun-related deaths", which skews the graph upward since the US has more than twice as many gun suicides as gun murders, so it's hardly a good measure of gun violence. I will rephrase what I was saying: Violence has many causes, but sheer number of guns directly impacts the portion of violent acts committed with those firearms.
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Mar 15, 2014 19:34
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Silver Nitrate posted:I will rephrase what I was saying: Violence has many causes, but sheer number of guns directly impacts the portion of violent acts committed with those firearms. Borne out by this graph:  It's not the US is 'more criminal' than other countries (at least they're 90% confident), just that we have the most access to the most lethal ways to commit crimes. Edit: Source menino fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 19:43
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Yeah I've heard that before too. Violent crime is no more common in the US than in Western Europe, but it is much deadlier. This is undeniably due to one thing: the sheer amount of guns.
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Mar 15, 2014 20:18
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Somehow I'm finding it hard to believe that Turkey has the least actual crime while Iceland is a mob valhalla! Could it be that crime reporting varies from country to country (and even what constitutes a crime in the first place), whereas reporting the causes of deaths tends to be fairly accurate everywhere (excepting suicides which can be tabu)?
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Mar 15, 2014 20:31
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Nenonen posted:Somehow I'm finding it hard to believe that Turkey has the least actual crime while Iceland is a mob valhalla! Could it be that crime reporting varies from country to country (and even what constitutes a crime in the first place), whereas reporting the causes of deaths tends to be fairly accurate everywhere (excepting suicides which can be tabu)? Or Turkey just has 255 times as many people and there's a certain baseline amount of crime that a country will have. Seriously, Iceland has like 60% the population of Wyoming.
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Mar 15, 2014 21:23
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So the BTP was less about colonials being pissed about paying taxes and more about Parliament handing out a preferential tax cut to the East India Company which allowed it to undercut, Walmart-style, Colonial tea sellers?
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Mar 15, 2014 22:16
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computer parts posted:Or Turkey just has 255 times as many people and there's a certain baseline amount of crime that a country will have. So how about Sweden, population 9.5 million vs. Greece, population 11.2 million? Can we simply assume that Nordic states have completely different governing and legislative traditions from Balkans? What would a universal baseline for crime be, anyway, when crime is nothing more than what is codified in laws which are not universal? Enforcement levels are not universal either, I wouldn't dare to try and bribe a Nordic police officer, but with the salaries and reputation of a Turkish policeman...
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Mar 15, 2014 22:55
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FAUXTON posted:So the BTP was less about colonials being pissed about paying taxes and more about Parliament handing out a preferential tax cut to the East India Company which allowed it to undercut, Walmart-style, Colonial tea sellers? Kind of. The colonials were pissed off about the taxes long before the price on the tea was dropped. There had been organized tea boycotts going on on and off since 1767 when the tax was first laid on, which may have exacerbated the EIC's unsold tea problem, but poo poo really hit the fan when Parliament tried to compromise by waiving the customs fees for the EIC. Boston wasn't the only place there was a "tea party" in response, similar things happened in a few other American cities, but the Boston one was the largest and got the most press. So overall I'd say a little from column A, a little from column B. And as I said before, it should be noted the actual tax on the tea was virtually non-existant in 1773. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 00:51
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Nenonen posted:So how about Sweden, population 9.5 million vs. Greece, population 11.2 million? Can we simply assume that Nordic states have completely different governing and legislative traditions from Balkans? If you'd like, you can access the data to find that baseline: American Journal of Medicine posted:‡Crime rate data were obtained from the United Nations Surveys of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems.7
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Mar 16, 2014 00:56
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FAUXTON posted:So the BTP was less about colonials being pissed about paying taxes and more about Parliament handing out a preferential tax cut to the East India Company which allowed it to undercut, Walmart-style, Colonial tea sellers? It was a bit of both. A few years prior, Britain had first attempted to directly tax the colonies with the Townshend Act, but had encountered such fierce resistance that most of the taxes were repealed. However, several provisions in the Act were left in place - including the tea tax - because Parliament still asserted the right to tax the Americans and some felt that completely repealing all the taxes would essentially be an admission of defeat. At the time, the colonies were only allowed to buy British tea with considerable markups from taxes and the long trip, which made them mad, both because it was expensive and because they didn't recognize Parliament's authority to tax them at all. So instead, they smuggled in cheaper Dutch tea without paying taxes or tariffs. Now, the East India Company was falling into trouble. Between American boycotts, unrest in India, and owing a ton of money to the British government, they were having serious financial issues. By allowing them to import directly to America without stopping in England first or being charged export tariffs, Parliament thought they'd be solving several problems. First of all, a direct route would incur less tax and had no middlemen, leading to better prices than even the smugglers could manage. Second of all, they thought that making British tea so cheap would induce colonists to drop their boycotts and buy it despite the fact that it was still subject to the Townshend tea tax. Third of all, they figured that American colonists willingly buying stuff subject to the Townshend tax would amount to tacit acceptance of Parliament's taxing authority. Unfortunately, the measure would also seriously threaten American merchants and smugglers by granting the East India Company conditions that no colonial importer could possibly match. Although the taxation issues played a role, the main focus of the controversy was the fact that a British company had been granted exclusive favorable conditions that allowed them to undercut every merchant in the Empire in exporting tea to the Americas. The colonists were mad about the East India Company's monopoly, but they also feared the precedent that the monopoly might set.
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Mar 16, 2014 03:08
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Yeah, in regard to the Townshend Act protesting, the colonists had asserted that Parliament had the right to tax external trade for the colonies but didn't have a right to control internal taxation (basically taxes on anything that's not crossing national boundaries). Their reasoning was, more or less, that since the colonies governed themselves they controlled how their internal economies operated but since they were part of the British Empire, the British government maintained control over the border. In fact the distinction was one that helped them sell their cause generally since independence was still a pretty radical position but it didn't exist in practice. There was a genuine fear that if the British government were able to use taxation to directly fund their governing apparatus (governors, judges, tax collectors, etc.) the Colonists would lose a lot of de facto influence they had (since prevoiously much of that was funded by state conventions allocating funds to them). Also they hated paying taxes generally. The British also thought the EIC tax break would be a general win-win. The only people they were hurting were middle men that pushed up the price of tea, so American consumers would benefit, Parliament would have asserted its right to controlling external taxation (which even the previous protests had conceded was legitimate) and the EIC would be saved. Most British politicians were genuinely shocked at how negatively it ended up being received. In part because they viewed it as an isolated case and in part because many bought the previous arguments regarding the tax control parliament properly had.
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Mar 16, 2014 03:32
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FAUXTON posted:So the BTP was less about colonials being pissed about paying taxes and more about Parliament handing out a preferential tax cut to the East India Company which allowed it to undercut, Walmart-style, Colonial tea sellers? The Boston Tea Party is what the history books harp on to show that the revolution was primarily about taxes. It really wasn't. The colonists at that point were basically a bunch of drunken, lawless assholes. Any sort of attempt to instill any sort of law and order on them, be it taxes or things as simple as "there are people living on that land already you can't have it" were strongly opposed, sometimes violently. You can see this even more if you look at events like The Boston Massacre. It wasn't a massacre at all and the British soldiers were not only hopelessly outnumbered but were specifically ordered to NOT fire and most certainly NOT escalate the situation. But, you know, that doesn't fit our narrative so we'll call it a massacre despite the fact that 11 people getting shot doesn't quite qualify it as "a massacre."
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Mar 16, 2014 14:15
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