You must not have been around for very long. It gets much more authoritarian than that.

Why does this facile and 'truthy' sentiment get reliably upvoted whenever someone posts it? It's neither insightful nor particularly original, and what's worse, it's demonstrably false as a matter of empirical psychology.

"Wants to murder someone" is not a simple, binary, on-or-off property of anyone's mental state, and the man-with-a-mission loading rounds into his gun with cool, icy determination which this argument brings to mind, does not characterize the vast majority of violent crime. In real life, people are subject to psychological influences from myriad sources, and people who are in a state of seriously wanting to kill someone, tend to be in an even more unstable, influenceable state of mind than normal. People's car-buying desisions are demonstrably affected by such minutiae as the physical layout of the showroom, and the order in which the salesperson decides to present them.

What kind of alien to human psychology would you have to be, to imagine that the ready availability of tools to kill someone from far away, without any eye contact or physical proximity, wouldn't make murder psychologically easier to go through with?

In Soviet Hypertext, Laws enforce Judge!

Whoa whoa whoa, back the truck up. "It helps more than it hurts" is a awfully low bar of justification to set for a constitutional law. Here, have a hypothetical:

You have 3 suspects in custody. For some highly contrived reason too pedantic to relate here, you know for a certainty that two of them are guilty of a crime punishable by death, and one of them is absolutely innocent of any crime, but you haven't any clues as to which one is the innocent one.

By the symmetry argument you'll have to do the same thing to all three of them. If you do anything other than execute them, you "disproportionately favour the guilty". But our justice system needs to adhere to a higher standard than that, because that way despotism lay.

well there's this guy

and then there's these guys

Then why does it always seem to be the weakest-minded people who are the ones complaining about "political correctness"?

No no no! I learned from a very special episode of Family Matters that racism is what it's called when an individual treats another individual with racial prejudice, and that is all. There is no such thing as systemic or institutional oppression, and there is no such thing as "society" or "culture" which forms rough consensus on all sorts of things including the relative worth of different kinds of people, and which shapes the individual opinions of thousands or millions of people at once. To talk about society, or institutions, or anything collective at all, means thinking about people in terms of groups instead of individuals, which is the very definition of racism!

Sorry, I pooped myself a little bit. What were you saying again?

In other news, Madagascar has shut down all ports.

Feminism gone MAD! Yargle bargle!

Is it better if I append a winking smiley to dick;)?

Well played.

Dick.

Given the way power makes people act, it is really hard to speak truth to them politely. There aren't many nice ways to tell someone they're a dick.

And, if you don't like Scumbag EA memes and blog posts which lambaste microtransactions as a shitty business model, don't click them. Blogging exists as an open, participatory model - a "free market", if you will. And you're welcome to spend your time reading opinions from any niche you like, or refrain from spending that time.

The meme I would use to describe Cliff Blezinski right now: old man yells at cloud

You don't want to know about the core-dump phase.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09D8hAcUzms