| (Thanks for the tip, I use Safari at home 90% of the time, I'll look for something like that because that'd be a great improvement.) Ok, I think I mostly agree with you. I realized in my umpteenth draft that I'd missed an important detail: violence is obviously criminal behavior, authority figures (in particular) should also be held accountable (potentially criminally) for the violence committed by those they are responsible for, specifically in instances where they are able to but neglect to curtail it early on. On this we absolutely agree. I wasn't intending to restrict my anti-violence position to one of just targeting culture, and some of my earlier replies may have implied that. In the case of the editorial that started this thread, this is where my "fix the culture" thing really comes into play. Gaming culture (as perceived by the author, I'm so far outside that group that I'm really only familiar with a caricature of it so can't personally comment) is transphobic. But this isn't resulting in real world violence yet (? unless I've missed other articles and reports on the subject, which is possible). My view is this, if a culture tacitly endorses violence but no member has yet committed violence, it's just a matter of time. Some moronic 15 year old is going to decide that he needs to show his peers he's a "big man" and go out and beat the crap out of someone. Or a group of them will. By challenging this culture at this stage we may be able to prevent the violence altogether. Your approach is sound, and I agree with it, but it's not going to work on its own (IMO). I'll liken this to another problem I once faced. Ants in my family's apartment kitchen, lay down poison and they left. To our neighbor's kitchen. Who laid down poison, and they left. To our kitchen. Only when attacked from both fronts did we drive them out (or perhaps finally killed them, they didn't come back over the next year we lived there). Violence is like that. It can be somewhat cyclic, moving from real world, physical violence to words and emotional abuse and back again. While your approach may work for curtailing the physical violence (or reducing the number of qualified principals), it doesn't, on its own, deal with the underlying culture that the authority figure either ignored or enabled. So recognizing that violence can develop from cultures where prejudice and discrimination are considered acceptable, we need to find a way (and yes, this is long term, generations possibly) to change those cultures or discourage their discriminatory attitudes from rising to the level where real physical violence occurs. TL;DR: Do both. Create real penalties for authorities and leaders who ignore or permit violence. Target the cultures where prejudice and discrimination and violence are tacitly endorsed, but real violence may not yet have occurred, to try and redirect it before real violence breaks out, and not just harsh words in a video game (in this case). |