itch.io

Well, hiding bad influences from children is all good and well. I would not want an impressionable youth to see someone starting a fire for fun.

Making a social media campaign to ban things, is not gonna achieve that.

Especially, if the thing is already something labeld as not for minors. Or "adults only".

I suspect it is about followers and power. If you have an angry mob at your disposal, that makes the instigators of that mob happy. It trains their skills at manipulating those mobs. It makes the mob more acceptible for agenda. It gives identity. "We are the people that are morally superior, since we not only ignore that disgusting thing, we fight it!". And you eventually have a dumbed down mob, that listens to everything you say, if you say it emotionally.

Some of those people are genuinly in it, because they believe they are doing something important. And this important thing would justify their means. So they accept having means like lying and fabricating false evidence. Using flimsy studies and even making biased studies, while the scientific consens says, that there is nothing.

I saw similar things happen during the pandemic. People were against masks. So they fabricated false evidence to scare people. Because their stance of masks = no freedom just was not enough to justify risking other people's health.

And I see similar things in politics and ideology, where very loud people say lies, more lies and rile you up, so you stop thinking and start following.

This is not a thing specific to left, right, liberal, conservative, social justice or my country first. Emotion over fact. Push some triggers in your followers and get what you want. Push some triggers in non followers and maybe gain more followers.

So much of what is argued is just not true. Outright lies often. You can look at just about every topic where people get emotional. Or rather, where they start emotional. Defending your "identity" is such a thing. Be it your religious identity, gender identity, national idenitiy, identity as a moral superior being and so on. As long as it is your core beliefs.

So of course you can rile up a mob consisting of religious motivated people or people with high morals, or people not understanding video games and so on. Just give them an easy target.

That the religious types are involved is especially ironic, since a lot of sexual things were viewed vastly different a few thousand years ago. What we now call rape myths was accepted social norm back in the day. A raped women would have been put to death when raped inside a city, because she apparantly did not scream loud enough, so that would mean she wanted it and therefore was guilty of adultery. Even incest seems to not have been a problem there, if you read episodes like that of Lot. In context, the angels just nuked Sodom for being depraved. But Lot offering his virgin daughters up for gang rape or the daughters later drug raping her father for the purpose of having incest children ... nope, the angels did not have a problem with that. It was not even written in a way to show what the survivors of Sodom did, was bad. What's the teaching there? It's ok to fill your relative up with alcohol to have sex, so you can have children? Hmm. Actually, that would make sense according to the ends justify the means principle.

Oh and to clarify, that principle has a tiny kernel of merit in some situations. But if you apply it in a situation where you only think you are right, and justify faking evidence, because you could not find actual evidence, that is not merit. That is fallacious. More than that. It is in my eyes more evil than the evil those activists claim to fight. At this point I want to stress again, that it is fiction we talk about.

People created videos and spoke with great conviction about things that weren't in it, which showed that they hadn't even launched the game. Some did such extensive "research" that they presented graphics from a completely different game