Ever read The Catcher and the Rye? It's interesting how they localized it, and why. "The challenges generally begin with Holden's frequent use of vulgar language, with other reasons including sexual references, blasphemy, undermining of family values and moral codes, Holden's being a poor role model, encouragement of rebellion, and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity." via wikipedia
I get that Japan is into some stuff that we (at least I) find unappealing (underage girls etc.). It's a totally different culture, and I get it. I just don't think being ethnocentric is something we shouldn't be proud of, or force others to do. It almost feels like cultural appropriation.
I really like Ta-Nehisi and his take on political correctness.
It's about practicing Tolerance. It's about attempting to understand people who are radically different from you, and saying to them you want their voice in the process. Tolerance isn't just a value you hold, so much as it's something you do repeatedly. It's uncomfortable. You fuck up. You go to parties where they play music that you don't know how to dance to. You go to restaurants where the food is difference. You go to neighborhoods, where no one speaks English. The whole time people on the outside are laughing at you. The people you're trying to understand get pissed at you, and call you racist, homophobe, bigot, sexist etc.
Liberal Tolerance is the long war, it's the long game. It's Barack Obama, at his core. Liberal tolerance--not Jesse Helms--argued for interracial unions. Liberal tolerance is what allowed Obama to neutralize Rev. Wright, and make his race speech. Liberal tolerance is what allowed him to go to Notre Dame and talk with empathy about abortion. Liberal tolerance bets on the future. It presages that world (the world of today) that the GOP has spent very little time preparing for.
I really enjoyed the loop of XCOM Enemy Unknown/ Enemy Within. It was Mission->Management-> Mission as the world became worse and worse. You had to make tough choices that were really about just staying afloat. Maybe that's why I enjoyed This War of Mine, Cart Life, Xenonauts and Papers, Please as well. You're facing overwhelming odds and just attempting to survive. You're not the bald, white, genetically modified, space marine demigod; and that's kind of refreshing.
The whole thing with Kotaku is strange. The gaming media is a very close and closed community. It seems like publishers would be taking a huge risk by not giving the game (and NDA) to Kotaku. How hard would it be for another reviewer let someone from Kotaku play their game, and publish a review well before the other sites who are under a NDA?
This happens with outlets that cover politicians too. It was like Trump threatening to blacklist a CNN reporter. Everyone is fighting to control information and get their best foot forward (also fuck Trump). In Hollywood, actors and actress are often blacklisted.
As Austin pointed out, those stories probably aren't going to keep Kotaku afloat, but when your revenue is based on ads, you have to wonder if that wasn't some consideration. Remember when Patrick broke the story on the reversal of the Xbox DRM reversal? That was a huge story for Giant Bomb, and brought a ton of views. I wonder if Microsoft threatened to blacklist them?
Publishers need to pump the brakes on blacklisting. Telling us that there is going to be a new Assassins Creed game is like saying their is going to be a sunrise tomorrow... Given, the timing (2 Dec 14) was bad for Ubi who was trying to fix Unity and maybe hurt sells of the game, but that's hard to prove(that game was already in trouble). If they were just hit pieces, with false and/or slanderous information, i would understand it better... but they weren't. Maybe something else was going on?
The whole corporate media calling out corporations... pot meet kettle.
Peter Oborne, chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph, is no raving leftie. But as a political conservative, he had some astute observations to make to Leveson on the corrupt state of politics and media in this country.
Oborne said that when he arrived on the political reporting ‘scene’ he was ‘staggered’ by the closeness of politicians and journalists:
‘It was ceasing to be a conversation between activists and politicians but between the media and the politicians. The News International annual party at the Tory and Labour conference was an extraordinary power event to which people were excluded. Unfortunately I never got in, but you got the entire cabinet and all the influence brokers and the senior members of the media class, and it was a very important statement I felt about how Britain was being governed.’
He continued:
‘And then you got the astonishing business of the senior News International people sitting just behind the Cabinet. They were the VIPs in the chamber, I believe really important media types were there as well, they were brought into the inner sanctum. I felt this was a perversion of our democracy, it was starting to become a private conversation between elite groups rather than a proper popular engagement.’
He described the politico-journalism collusion as a ‘conspiracy against their [newspapers’] readers’. When challenged by Leveson to justify such a blunt assertion, Oborne responded:
‘That's exactly what was going on. [...] In order to report during that time you had to get close to the people who ran new Labour, there were very few of them. [...] People who tried to report objectively and fairly were bullied and victimised and not given access to information.People who were part of the circle were favoured and of course there was a price for that. Very hard to be an independent observer, to keep your integrity in those circumstances.’
Political reporting, he said, had become ‘private deals, private arrangements, between media and politicians.’ Collusion between politicians and the media helped to explain why the public was so ‘grievously misinformed’ about Iraq in the run-up to war. And we would add that it also helps explain why the public has been grievously misinformed about the post-invasion death toll in Iraq which likely exceeds one million, with four million refugees, in a country that has been utterly devastated
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