History repeats itself, and with the plummeting attention span of Generation ADD, it's repeating itself more and more frequently. Every few months you can count on somebody trying to get Creationism taught in science classes, censor pop music or get videogames banned for teaching kids how to kill. And then the media wheels into a frenzy trotting out the same arguments from the same sources on both sides of the issue. Well, I'm not one to miss out on a frenzy.

Back in the halcyon days of paper-and-ink journalism, columnists would pull out an old editorial on the subject, change a few names and run it again. After all, the issue doesn't change so why should their opinion on it? And without Google caching and email, they didn't have to worry about instantly being buried under an ePile of finger-wagging gotcha letters.

Sadly, Jibble's damnably well-implemented search feature prevents me from following in their pioneering footsteps. All I can do is link my previous frothing diatribe and hope a few people will click and enjoy the references to combat-trained super zombies and kids' crappy pathfinding.

This time around it's Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, bless his black and bleeding liberal heart, who wants to ban the cops-and-robbers game 25 to Life. Quoth Schumer, "25 to Life makes Grand Theft Auto look like Romper Room." Of course, if it turns out 25 to Life sucks and nobody bothers to kill any hookers, he can always claim he was misquoted and actually compared GTA[3] to Romper Stomper.

Now, it's possible Schumer really is concerned about the violence, and really does worry about its effect on impressionable and increasingly parentless children. He's a Democrat after all; they're the good guys. And you can't really blame him for fighting this at the government and corporate level, since parents already ignore game ratings. And in some cases, videogames really do kill babies. Though in fairness, the cybercafe should've had mesh bags in the coat room where parents can safely hang their child with no risk of it suffocating while they go off and kill orcs.

Good intentions aside, there are other people involved in this push for stricter controls on videogames who aren't really concerned with violence, in as much as they support bombing ragheads, and don't seem overly enthusiastic about actually saving the children who need saving--ie the ones without XBoxes. The things they say are a means, not an end. What they really hate, deep down in the empty cave where their soul used to be, is fun.

The American Puritan movement is rooted in the Book of Job. The moral of the Book of Job is that God is a sick bastard who likes to watch people suffer. Some people, when confronted by this truth, say "God wants me to suffer? Fuck God." Puritans say "How can I make my neighbours suffer more, that I might please God? Especially my Jewish neighbour, whose Lexus is hardly the sign of a pious life."

Puritans don't hate videogames because they're violent, they hate them because they're fun. Just like sex, drugs and rock and roll. The goal of the Puritan is not to make themselves more happy, it's to make everyone else miserable. Even if they manage to regress society to the point where going to (Protestant Christian) church every day is mandatory, gay people are stoned to death and music must be plain chant with no words and no tritones (the Devil's interval), they still won't be happy. Because there will always be something bringing joy to their neighbours. Even blind eunuchs dying of cancer can find something to smile about.

And of course, since all Puritans are fundamentally hypocrites, they only want to make their neighbours miserable. For themselves it's all anal, all the time.

Thus I implore you, send me your filler art. It will all be posted no matter how sucky (today is proof of that).