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Violence For Christmas?

The USA has a lot more than mindless video games to worry about

Allan Milne Lees
7 min readSep 4, 2020
Image credit: New York Times

Across the USA, Christmas is a time of gift-giving. In recent years many of those gifts have been violent video games in which the player slaughters nameless opponents in order to score points and secure tiny dopamine jolts. Much debate has occurred over the issue of whether or not such mindless violence encourages real-world violence. Game proponents argue it’s all harmless good fun; more thoughtful people argue that everything we do has some residual effect and spending hours per day on brain-dead slaughter is hardly conducive to developing humane norms of behavior.

The violent video game debate, however, is a sideshow compared to our present experiment in destroying humane social norms.

Today we have an infantile moron in the White House proclaiming to his forty-three million equally mindless followers that the forthcoming election will be, unless he wins, fraudulent and illegitimate. Amusingly, the orange cretin is pretending that “foreign powers” (e.g. predominantly Russia) are going to undermine the 2020 election, while being careful to avoid any reference to the fact that all the evidence points to Russia continuing to promote Trump in order to keep the total destruction of the USA on track.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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