Transdude1996 said:
You pointed out about how there's an issue in a state in the US about turning away customers due to the owner having a religuous belief against homosexuality. Well, that's their own fucking right. Owners should have the right to turn away whoever the hell they want. It may not cause their business to do well, but that's the point. America is supposed to be a place where people can say, do, or believe whatever they want and not get attacked for it.
Now I don't live in the United States of America but I can say with some confidence that you cannot, in America, do whatever you want. For example, I am fairly certain you cannot drive on the left side of the road on a highway in New York. You can believe whatever you want and you can say most things you want in America (I imagine you have laws to do with slander, inciting crime, etc.) but your actions can and are bound by laws from various political institutions. This is sometimes to protect the rights of others and sometimes, as in the case of the choice to outlaw driving on the left side of road, to have society function in a more efficient way. In fact if you could do whatever you want anarchy would result and America as a country would cease to be so America is obviously not a place where everyone is supposed to be able to do whatever they want and I don't understand why anyone would want it to.
Transdude1996 said:
We can't force people to believe something because we disagree with them, all we can do is not support the company or the person. The minute we start telling people how their supposed to think, we become no better than Germany and the Nazis in WW2.
Now Jim didn't say anything about forcing other people to believe as we do. As regards telling other people what to believe. There is a rather big difference between telling somebody that their opinions are stupid, wrong, immoral or whatever and trying to force them to believe as we do. I could assume you were speaking about the latter because obviously I have the right to tell somebody that their opinions are wrong. However, you also say that the only thing we can do is to support or not support a person or company. It really isn't. We can try to persuade them and other people through argument. We can try, even if we would probably fail, to get the not just to do what we want but to understand why we want it. Your solution to dealing with somebody who doesn't agree with you is to try and coërce them into saying and doing as you do by not supporting them. I would prefer to try to get them to agree with me by means of reasoned argument.
Now your comparison with the nazi's is just weird to me. Most people I speak to seem to think the most important reason why the nazi's were bad was the genocide against the jews, the homosexuals, the slavish peoples and various other groups. Some people might mention their cruel experimentation on living human beings or things of that nature. The nazi's also violated freedom of speech and to some degree tried to tell people what to think but when it came to people who weren't considered 'Arian' they didn't tell them what to think, they wanted to murder them. A comparison with the spanish inquisition or stalinism might have been more relevant. However, as I said, there is a rather large difference between forcing people to think a certain way, forcing them to speak a certain way and forcing them to act a certain way and you were speaking about the third category here so any comparison to totalitarian regimes seems out of place here.
Now I would like to say something about Jims video. I agree with Jim that the notion that nintendo wasn't trying to make a political statement is not a very good defense but I don't agree with the reasons Jim gives here. The main reason Jim seems to give is that including gay people is not political because most 'normal, well adjusted, modernized' human beings don't think homosexuality is a big deal. Now first of all it isn't entirely clear whether this is a descriptive or a normative statement. The word 'Normal' can be interpreted as both, the word modern might be but honestly 'well adjusted' can't, I think, be interpreted in anything but a normative way. However, if Jim just wanted to say that we ought not make a big deal of including gay people in video games then I don't believe it follows that it isn't a political concern whether or not a company does so. Media influences the way people think which is why we think it is so important to have them portray gay people to begin with. We want to reach people with a certain message. Clearly then, this is a political matter. If however Jim intented to say that most people don't believe homosexuality isn't a big deal and that therefore it isn't a political matter, and I believe that was what he intented to say, I disagree in several ways. Firstly, it flatout isn't the case that the people who believe homosexuality is normal make up the vast majority of people. They make up a large portion of people in certain parts of the world and a smaller portion in other parts but there is hardly any country in the world where there aren't political parties and candidates openly against homosexuality in general. Secondly, even if everybody agreed that homosexuality is completely normal and not a big deal at all this still wouldn't make it an apolitical issue. It would just make it the status quo. To make a comparison, Homer, or the several people who probably wrote the Odessey, was probably not trying to write political commentary about the place of man and women in society with the Odessey. However, the Odessey clearly portrays women and their virtues in a very different light than it does men and their virtues. It clearly is politically relevant in that sense even if it wasn't intended that way and merely represents the opinions, norms and practices that were the status quo at the time. I would argue, against Jim and Nintendo that the choice to include gay people in your game about love (or whatever this game is supposed to be about) is a political decision in any case. You can't simply decide to not think about the politics of it once this has been made clear to you. You might decide that other concerns override the political ones or that you don't think gays are equal to heterosexuals (I would disagree with that but that isn't the issue now). What isn't a defence is that you don't want to be political. You are making a political choice either way. 'Not being political' just means doing what is the status quo because you are too cowardly to do otherwise. This has political consequences.
