Hadn't you heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard?

But once we have a precise metric of how corrupt, self-serving and unethical they are... what does anyone propose we do about it?

Or... as Rollins put it: "If life gives you lemons say: LEMONS!? Great! I LOOOOOOVE lemons! What else ya got!?"

The whole point of South Park is to be childishly iconoclastic. This pisses people off. But that's a byproduct. As is education or any though stimulated as a result of their efforts.

Wow, this only got modded up to two? Well... just goes to show... (This space left blank for your own conclusions about what it goes to show.)

FTFY

All very well. In fact quite illuminating. But one needs to systematise this to have it accepted by the education system. And even then it faces some horrible opposition from those who don't understand that state education systems for better or worse have little to do with education and everything to do with babysitting the young so mom and pop can go out and work.

The underlying motivation of the system is to free up a greater proportion of the workforce by putting their children somewhere together whilst the workers contribute to society. The idea that children should be idle during this time was abhorrent to those possessed of a strong protestant work ethic but as education was supposed to resolve the issue of child labour some hideous mutant "kill two birds with one stone" attempt to instil high cultural values was put into the system.

Unfortunately society discovered quickly that it was easier to say education than to do it. The current state of affairs is one that should be familiar to anyone who deals with a legacy system. The original system was hacked together by a bunch of arrogant, barely competent monkeys but once it was "done" the client (society under the umbrella of "government") were loath to admit the whole thing was an unscalable mess with little practical value that merely subsitituted one problem space for another. As time has gone on the system has been further hacked and patched in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable system crash which will occasion a radical rebuilding of the entire system from scratch.

Of course it's no surprise that government should produce such abominations on a regular basis as they are the natural progeny of the mother of all messy, unworkable and ultimately doomed abominations, government itself.

They put the price up around November to £13.50 (still roughly the price of two cinema tickets as they put those prices up too) a month. And they charge you a stipend on top if you want to see 3D performances. I haven't been to a 3D performance since they introduced the stipend.

There are vital differences between your anecdote and the punch bag.

In your situation you were releasing anger in a positive act of helping to rebirth a social centre, that is turning a domestic residence into a spiritual centre. You were helping a group of people to do this positive thing. When you went home at the end of the day the house was a little bit more dead and that meant the spiritual centre was a little bit closer to being alive.

What you did was a physical demonstration of how anger energy can be turned into a positive expression that speeds up the natural cycles of life. You were mentally participating in those cycles and the process itself commented upon the fact that death is a part of life and even when a house is derelict life must go on.

The act of renewal, especially when placed in such a spiritual context, can be viewed from a deep and subtle perspective that easily explains why it released so much aggression and refreshed your psyche.

Punching a bag full of sand repetitively by yourself achieves nothing and shows little. If you are mentally in a state where such exercise is about discipline and physical improvement then this is not a problem. Using it as a valve for pent up emotion is unsatisfying and more likely to lead to frustration.

How does this inform the video game violence question? Simple a video game should not be used as a crutch for emotional release. They can clean the mental screen through simple, repetitive, action-reward cycles that may not be available in the wider world. If you sit down with a video game just to relieve the very particular frustration of feeling stuck in a rut, or not getting any where it could be quite therapeutic, but trying to cope with deeper anger issues this way is not appropriate.

A subtlety I doubt is addressed within any report on violent video games as we tend to view all "anger" as the same "anger" irrespective of its source. Its been documented a couple of hundred times how social and psychological experimenters tend to find whatever it is they're looking for in any given study and yet no major collapse or resolution in their questionable methodology is implemented because it would require an academic perspective too radically different from any remembered in the majority of human culture. So I don't expect it to change any time soon.

I give any sociological report the respect it deserves. None. And less than that if it claims to be conclusive.

That's funny, I am a content producer who uses a Print On Demand service to publish books. I use OOo for all our formatting and then merely save out to PDF. I am painfully aware that the one time the publisher had a problem with one of the resultant PDFs it took a month to clear it up. When I finally did manage to get some sort of dialogue out of them it turned out it was a PNG artifact introduced by my image editing software in one of the pictures that was causing the problem, not the PDF or OOo (in fact, if anything, they were guilty of doing their job too well). So I know for a fact that even given the most trivial of problems the POD service are utter rubbish and will just down tools. This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that all my other publications formatted in OOo and then converted to PDF via OOo with a trivial two click operation were just fine and dandy. I can't help but think that this is a case of people making unnecessarily heavy weather out of things.

Someone needs to renew their cynicsm prescription. I've never regarded the former state of law to have expired nor the latter attitude to have stretched as far as the actual legal system.

As a creator of largely neglected works that I believe may, in time, prove to be of some wider value I would like to agree with the following caveat.

The author of a given right should have conferred upon them the right to a token of copyright fiat. That is upon creation a work enters the public domain by default. Then, at such a time as the author chooses, the right of copyright fiat is invoked and runs its term. After it is over the work is once again in the public domain.

This circumvents the inherent unfairness of something neglected during a "from creation" copyright term suddenly becoming popular years after creation. It also means that copyright can be restricted to as few years as necessary for a creator (or their descendants) to benefit from a first flush of popularity. I think five years in such a case might even be a little overlong.

Meet the Peter principle.

Better yet ignore them. Talking to them at all can be seen as suspicious... sad but until large amounts of people decide to make it plain that this is unacceptable it remains true.

To summarise the other replies. And add a side of bluntness because people still don't seem to be getting the message:

Yes, absolutely. I'd rather get my hands bloody in a revolution than help a child in peril while the revolution never comes and will continue to not come while my life is forfeit for the reasons already discussed.