Oklahoma Politician Wants To Tax Violent Video Games 312
dotarray writes "According to an Oklahoma politician, video games help cause many problems affecting the youth of today, but they can also help solve those same problems. Representative William Fourkiller, a Democrat, has proposed a 1% tax on every video game sold which has a Teen, Mature or Adults Only rating. He explains that half of the money would go towards helping to get kids playing outside, while the other half would be placed into a bullying prevention fund."
New tax (Score:5, Interesting)
1% of total politician networth every time they say something stupid. The deficit would turn to a surplus in a week, especially now during campaign season.
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, before we do that, we need to decide that we are not going to support the current bullying system.
I can think of dozens of different people who have all been punished for eventually standing up for themselves after getting bullied for months. Myself included. I had a bully sitting behind me in 9th grade who would hurl insults at me all the time, thump me in the back of the head, punch me from behind, and generally make me miserable all year long. Finally one day toward the end of the year, after he had done something again I turned around and told him to lay off. He hit me in the eye with a pencil. That was the last straw. I jumped out of my seat and started hitting him. He probably was a foot taller than me and outweighed me by half, but I didn't concern myself with that. The teacher came running it and broke us up. I was sent to the principal's office, my mother was called. She told them how I had been coming home with stories every day about how this kid was picking on me and that she was glad I finally stood up for myself. They gave me swats and sent me back to class where I had to put up with his crap, still sitting right behind me, for the rest of the year.
But I learned a valuable lesson. The authority is on the side of the bullies, so just let them walk all over you, or you will be punished.
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:5, Interesting)
But I learned a valuable lesson. The authority is on the side of the bullies, so just let them walk all over you, or you will be punished.
Actually, you learned the lesson most kids (including myself long ago) learn about the school system: the authorities don't give a crap what goes on so long as they don't have to do anything about it.
I had a situation with much the same problem as you - I was "in a fight" and didn't even throw a punch, just backed against a wall and tried to keep my face covered. The result was that we both got the mandatory 3-day inschool suspension for "fighting." The difference? The kid who bullied me spent more time in suspension than he did in class. He regularly targeted the kids with the best grades, because he knew being in class actually mattered to us. I got left out of the advanced honors science class the next year, because the asshole teacher who ran it had a "no kid allowed in my advanced class who has a fighting demerit on their record" policy.
I learned the hard way too what schools really are, and any respect I have for teachers (or worse, school administrators, and even worse, the sort of right wing retards who came up with "zero tolerance and mandatory punishment" policies) has been tempered by that experience ever since.
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:4, Interesting)
Cities all over the country have "thrown" money into free, supervised, municipal skate parks that just happened to be outside. The kids didn't need convincing.
Building infrastructure is (alomost) always a good thing for government to do. Pity that's such a tiny percentage of what governements do these days.
But when a given governemnt's spending is 10% infrastructure, 90% buying votes, any notion that a new tax is going to actually help out is, well, 90% wrong. No new tax is needed fo stuff like this - doubling the infrastructure spending would rarely be a significant increase in overall spending. And yet many cities today can't even keep the streetlights on (despite that being a really small % of their revenue).
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:2, Interesting)
Sad to say it, but the only thing you did wrong there was that you didn't hit the guy hard enough. I had the same problem as a kid - when I was in grade two (yes, grade two, I was 7), I was given the strap as punishment for getting beat up by a paid of kids in grade eight, because one of them thought it would be funny to see how much of his hand he could cram down my throat while the other one was kicking me, and it left tooth marks around his hand. (All of the way around, making it obvious that his whole damn hand had been in my mouth...) The bullies of course, were given gentle pats on the shoulder, and a promise that the violent little thug (me) would be punished to the fullest extent possible. He taught me that as long as people like him were in charge, any trouble I was involved in would result in me being the only one punished, even if I was not the one who started it, and that meant it was my responsibility to make sure that anyone who started something with me regretted it sufficiently that they would never try that again.
Once my parents found out, the Vice Principle in question was suspended for the rest of the year, and forced to change schools. Of course, he didn't bother to record who it was that had attacked me, so they got away anonymously. (This also factored into the suspension.)
Then of course, the school I went to was condemned (really old building), closed down, and turned into a Retirement Home, (true story. Hopefully they at least repaired it first.), so I had to change schools too - to that VP's eternal regret, it was to the one he'd moved to, and he made the mistake of trying to intimidate me on the first day. (It went poorly, I wasn't in grade two anymore, and I'd been shown how to deal with him. It was loud, and involved threats of lawyers, and demands that the police be called unless he removed his claws from my shoulders.) Then came the inevitable day when the school bullies decided I was a good target (small, skinny, and not standing in the middle of a large group because I was chasing down the ball), and when I put them both out of commission, we were all hauled down to that VP's office. The bullies in question both agreed with me that they'd been punished enough already, and would never even think about doing that again, and were sent to the nurses office and home for the rest of the day, and amazingly, despite having a reputation for picking on anyone they thought would be a good target, I completely cured them of that habit - every time they looked at someone small and alone, they remembered what happened last time, and decided to do something else. The VP started out trying to assign me detention for the rest of the school year, but by the time I was done yelling at him (so that the secretarial staff and anyone walking down the hall could hear clearly, and know exactly what I thought of him - I wasn't a subtle kid) I actually managed to get out of it with nothing more than a "please don't do this again". Also, he retired at the end of that year, a month and a half later...
The real lesson is that you can either let the bullies (and their palls in administration) walk all over you, or you can come down on them and their supporters so hard they don't have the ability to respond.
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:2, Interesting)
I have the exactly opposite experience. Back in grade 13, some guy tried to pick a fight with me all year. One day, he ripped the hood ornament off my car and smashed it against a wall, leaving it on my desk (yes, back in those days, cars had metal impalers attached to their very long hoods). In payment for this, I broke his jaw, blacked his eyes, and generally made him look like a piece of road kill before the teacher pulled me off him. We were both escorted to the principal's office, and because I was polite and reasonable, I was given a slap on the wrist suspension for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, he got a week off, and had to buy me a new hood ornament before he was allowed to resume classes. Teachers came up to me afterwards, telling me how this kid deserved it, and that they hoped I made him bleed.
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:4, Interesting)
But I learned a valuable lesson. The authority is on the side of the bullies, so just let them walk all over you, or you will be punished.
Then you learned the wrong lesson. What you should have learned is that the culture of coddling bullies and refusing to allow students to stand up for themselves, and forcing the administration to find out what actually caused this to come to the front is a serious issue.
Let's look at the administration, and the policies that have been forced on the school system right? That violence is never the answer, that the social aspect is always correct, that 'feelings' and 'bullies' are misunderstood, and all the rest. There's a whole pile of touchy-feely-and all the other rot that goes on along with bury your head in the sand, that schools do. Because they're instructed to do it. I don't trust the left-leaning establishments ideas of everyone needs a hug, and everyone needs to be punished over something like this. That is where it came from. Rather, I'd like to see that teachers and principals are fired when these issues have already been brought to light, and they've done nothing.
I'm with you on this. I was bullied myself, until I snapped and broke the other kids nose. If you have kids, you should support them if they stand up against bullies, especially if you've been bullied yourself and you trust your kid. Learning to stand up for yourself is important. The lesson that's been taught for the last 30 years is, standing up for yourself is bad.
Re:Sounds completely logical (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite correct. The progressive solution to a fight is avoid punishment all together. Sit the involved children down, spend some time to find out what really happened in a calm non-confrontational manner. Attempt to find the root cause of the problem and threat the problem not punish the result of the problem.
So for school bullies, find whether the problem is as a result of parental abuse or an inherent psychological defect. In either case that child needs to be placed under greater supervision and their opportunities to act out against other students limited.
So rather the the victims requiring closer parent\ guardian supervision, being picked up and dropped off to school by a parent and remaining close to teachers during meal times, the opposite should be true. Troubled offenders should be forced to remain close to adult supervision during meal times and picked up and dropped off to school by a responsible adult.
All in all, of course video games remain the safest form of entertainment for children. Need exercise buy them a Wii http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/2011/45337.html [nintendo.co.uk] or the various other more exercise bound games and monitor their scores. Of course parents could also join in. Want them outside, point the TV screen out the back patio door (at least the screen will be protected from flying nunchuks).