It’s super effective!
Though this is not explicitly a gaming publication, I have no concern about my readership’s familiarity with Pokémon Go — Nintendo’s augmented-reality monster-catching phenomenon is redefining what it means to be a hit mobile game, having long since drawn a larger user base than previous efforts such as Candy Crush Saga, Twitter, and Google Maps, while bringing in so much revenue that one has to suspect the Bernank himself is giving Nintendo advice on how to print money. Indeed, Pokémon Go has been such a runaway success that New York City assemblyman Felix Ortiz has decided that the game now requires his personal oversight:
"Like any new technology, it has its advantages and disadvantages, and like any new technology, it has to be looked at very, very carefully. Everything comes down to people’s responsibility as well as corporate responsibility," Ortiz said Tuesday. "Every single one of us who might want to play this game have to be very cautious. Who’s sending what, and what is the follow up? Everyone should be cautious to make sure that no intruders will be able to tap into this and have people think they’re going to the park when in reality they’re going to a be targeted by some rapist. People could think they’re going to the bank, but in reality, someone is waiting to take their money."
Apparently, the City never sleeps because it’s up all night quaking in terror. Assemblyman Ortiz, having previously attempted to nanny his fellow New Yorkers out of their ability to enjoy soft drinks, salt, and hoverboards, presents a compelling case for government action: upon reading this paean, your humble narrator is now firmly convinced that something must be done to curb this scourge of elected officials with no grasp of English sentence structure. Set aside the impenetrable prose for a moment, however, and one can locate an even deeper vein of stupidity here: Ortiz’s proposal is to hold an unspecified "the company" liable for anything and everything bad that happens to anybody who plays its game. Players who wander into dangerous neighborhoods trying to catch ’em all and get attacked? People who wander into traffic because they’re looking at their phones? Those people are not responsible for their own actions — "the company" is to blame.
Of course, it’s no shortage of charming to hear a politician pretend to worry about people using the banks as a lure so they can steal other people’s money. Why, what kind of perfidious scoundrel would do such a thing?
The party of principle
I kind of feel like a bully picking on them like this, but, if they keep up this hilarious trend of issuing utterly disastrous press releases, the complete nonlibertarians staffing the modern Libertarian Party will give me no choice. This time around, directly underneath a masthead that still, to my eye, reads "Minimum Government • Maximum Freedom," I am compelled to note that I observe a word slurry about how great Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney are.
It takes great courage for someone who has spent so many years serving the Republican Party to consider voting for a different party’s candidate for president. We applaud Gov. Bush’s and Gov. Romney’s courage. They don’t have to agree with us on every issue to see that our presidential and vice-presidential candidates are clearly the best choices in this race.
One might think the Libertarian Party brass would eventually notice that the party has become nothing more than an outhouse for failed Republican politicians. Indeed, rather than rejoicing that establishment goons are using the LP in a weird attempt to squeeze concessions out of their actual, for-reals political party, wouldn’t it be a better move to use this moment to emphasize all the ways in which the Libertarian Party isn’t part of the Bush-Romney axis of stupid? Assuming there are any left, anyhow. I guess all those vaunted "principles" don’t amount to much in the face of potential celebrity endorsements.
The press release even has the audacity to close with the line "the Libertarian Party is the only political party in America devoted to protecting all rights, of all human beings, all the time." Someone may wish to inform the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate of this alleged fact, so maybe he can stop trying to ban clothing he doesn’t like and spy on people he finds suspicious.
Last Week in Hate
Proving once again that the social justice war is a war on reality, the English county of Nottinghamshire, famous for its history of corrupt law enforcement, has now declared asking someone out on a date to be a hate crime.
Nottinghamshire Police has been working hard to understand exactly what hate crime means to the people of Nottinghamshire and has a clear definition in place. A hate crime is simply any incident, which may or may not be deemed as a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hatred.
Misogyny hate crime, in addition to the general hate crime definition, may be understood as incidents against women that are motivated by an attitude of a man towards a woman, and includes behaviour targeted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman.
Examples of this may include unwanted or uninvited sexual advances; physical or verbal assault; unwanted or uninvited physical or verbal contact or engagement; use of mobile devices to send unwanted or uninvited messages or take photographs without consent or permission.
It’s hard to find a more charmingly blunt explanation than that: for something to be classified as a hate crime, it is not necessary for it to be a crime. The especially clever part about this new definition is that it also removes hate as an element of the equation — "unwanted or uninvited sexual advances" are not often motivated by hate, after all, to say nothing of, like, texting your ex-girlfriend after she dumps you. These things, despite not being hate and not being crime, will now be considered hate crimes, thus officially bringing to a close the period of human history during which words could be relied upon to mean anything at all.
On a lighter note
Half of the government employees in the town of Boscotrecase, Italy have been arrested for fraud, evidently for punching in and then leaving, or for not showing up in the first place and simply having friends punch them in:
The mayor of a small town outside Naples had to shut down most municipal offices after police arrested 23 of his staff in the latest revelations of absenteeism in Italy’s public sector.
Staff were filmed clocking in and then leaving to go about their personal business or using multiple swipe cards to register absent colleagues, police said, in scenes that have become familiar after numerous similar scandals.
A police video showed one man trying to tamper with a security camera and then putting a cardboard box over his head to hide his identity before swiping two cards.
I’m always in favor of government scumbags preying on each other, of course, but one question: we’re told that, as a consequence of the arrests, "there are not enough people to run the town. Services are shut down." If what these creeps got arrested for was absenteeism, though, how has anything actually changed? There should be exactly as many people actually engaged in the worthless pursuit of "running the town" as there ever were.