Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The human-faced lamb and bestiality
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Viata bestiala a magarilor columbieni
They love their burros in Colombia, and nowhere more so than in San Antero, a small town on the Caribbean coast. They love them so much they built a statue to celebrate the "noble beast" and for four days at Easter every year the whole town goes donkey-mad with the world's only Donkey carnival.
"At the beginning people just made fun of me," recalls Cristoval Correa of the first time he proposed the party more than 20 years ago. "But now look," he says proudly surveying the 400 or so donkeys and their owners readying themselves for the donkey stampede which kicks off the annual festivities. A few of the locals have really gone to town this year, dressing up their beasts as soap stars or paramilitary leaders in a bid to win the donkey costume competition.
The original idea of the festival, explains Correa, "Was to protect the donkey;to stop it from going extinct." Oh kaye In any case, by this point Correa's floppy-eared little brainchild has taken on a life of its own. The 20th celebration of the National Festival of the Donkey was marked by the inauguration of the Burrodome, San Antero's own version of Rio de Janeiro's Sambadome. That's right, they built a stadium where man and beast can hang out together, grab a beer, and listen to Colombia's vallenato legends belt it out in competition for "King of the Donkey Festival."
Despite the ready admission of many a Northern Colombian male to occasional (or frequent) dalliances with the brown beast, Correa is not happy with the implication that San Antero celebrates the animal due to collective zoophilia.
"Please, it is a sacred being that has allowed the town of San Antero to be internationally recognised and has become a symbol of our community," he says. "Perhaps there were some indiscretions in the old days when sex was taboo and the kids could not have sex until they were 21, but not today."
Incidentally, while he was carrying on at me attempting to debunk the myth, the mayor of San Antero was right next to us, handing out t-shirts with a donkey on the front surrounded by the words "A good Coste?±o never forgets his first love."
Din pacate, toate acele video pe care intentionam sa le arat au disparut.. Ramane pe alta data :(
Surse / More info: Bestiality and Zoophilia: Sexual Relations with Animals: Anthony L Podberscek,
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Saturday, May 1, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
Farmville infanticide
We do not believe that violent games cause violence anymore than so-called “click-games” the epitome of boredom and addiction on Facebook. As if to prove this assertion in the most vile manner, a Jacksonville Florida mother entered a guilty plea in the death of her son:
Alexandra V. Tobias, 22, was arrested after the January death of 3-month-old Dylan Lee Edmondson. She told investigators she became angry because the baby was crying while she was playing a computer game called FarmVille on the Facebook social-networking website. She told investigators the baby cried loudly as she played the game, which prosecutor Richard Mantei identified as FarmVille, a simulation game in which players raise crops and livestock with the help of Facebook friends.
Furthermore,
Tobias then put the baby on the couch and stepped out for a cigarette to regain her composure, the arrest report says. When she came back in, the family dog knocked the baby off the couch. The crying started again and Tobias shook the baby a second time before calling for an ambulance, the arrest report says. (..) She told the judge she'd graduated from high school. Court papers say she went to Samuel W. Wolfson Senior High School in Jacksonville. The paperwork also said Tobias did not have a job. (..) According to court records, her child abuse arrest violated a six-month probation she began serving just a few weeks before after pleading no contest to a domestic battery charge.
Farmville may have had other, even more counterintuitive effects. A story from just a few days ago in SeattleWeekly suggests that 27 y.o. Gary A. Veldhuizen from Ferndale, FarmVille player, pleaded guilty to raping a goat (i.e., bestiality):
The billy buggering took place at a farm near Enterprise Road at Willeys Lake Road in May. Apparently a family member caught Veldhuizen in mid-shag and called sheriff's deputies who came and arrested him. Veldhuizen's Facebook page shows the pudgy Ferndalian's love of ranch life extends to the virtual world as well, as he is a big fan of the game FarmVille. One of the more recent posts says he wants to "share some grape bushels with you."
Incidentally, Farmville has also other similar “click” games, one involving Mafia and organized crime, but that game has yet to result in someone’s death.
South Korea Online
Sad as it may be, this is not the first time addictive, non-violent games were involved in the death of children. Only a few months earlier, in February-March 2010, a South-Korean couple was arrested for starving their 3-month-old prematurely born daughter.
Once a day, between 12-hour stretches at a neighborhood Internet cafe, they fed their baby. Instead of nurturing their own daughter, they became obsessed with raising a virtual child in the popular role-playing game called Prius Online. The couple were arrested in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul, 5 months after reporting the death of their baby. The baby’s autopsy showed that she’d died due to a long period of malnutrition. (..) This is the dirty underbelly of South Korea’s fast and cheap Internet connections. Over the last ten years, there have been many stories of Internet addiction and compulsive gaming leading to serious consequences and even death. In 2007, South Korea established an Internet addiction camp to help people overcome their addiction to the Internet.
According to PBS, in the more than 20000 Korean “PC Bangs” (i.e., Internet cafes), the more time you spend playing, the less you pay:
- Roughly 50 percent of South Koreans play games regularly, and 75 percent of gamers prefer online games
- Currently, the most played game in Korean "PC bangs" (Internet cafes) is Aion, a massively multiplayer online role playing game. It is due for release in the U.S. in fall 2009.
- In December 2008, the Korean government announced it would invest $237 million in the game industry to help expand gaming exports, which topped $1 billion for the first time in 2008.
- The South Korean online games market is expected to exceed $1.7 billion by the end of 2009
- Korea hosted the first Global Online Game Awards in 2008
- One-third of South Korea's population of 48 million has registered to play the game KartRider at least once
- Video game consoles, such as Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Wii, are less popular than PC games, in part because of widely available broadband Internet and a previous ban on Japanese cultural imports.
In 2005, a 28-year-old Korean man died after playing Starcraft almost non-stop for 50 hours. He inspired (or was he inspired by) the South Park WoW episode. He had just been fired for playing games too much. The government solution is Jump Up Internet Rescue School, a boot camp to cure online gaming addiction. According to New York Times,
South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the “PC bang,” dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner. (..) Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong-hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University in Seoul who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem. (..) To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)
NYT offers even insight into how such addictions get started:
One participant, Lee Chang-hoon, 15, began using the computer to pass the time while his parents were working and he was home alone. He said he quickly came to prefer the virtual world, where he seemed to enjoy more success and popularity than in the real one. He spent 17 hours a day online, mostly looking at Japanese comics and playing a combat role-playing game called Sudden Attack. He played all night, and skipped school two or three times a week to catch up on sleep. When his parents told him he had to go to school, he reacted violently. Desperate, his mother, Kim Soon-yeol, sent him to the camp. “He didn’t seem to be able to control himself,” said Mrs. Kim, a hairdresser. “He used to be so passionate about his favorite subjects” at school. “Now, he gives up easily and gets even more absorbed in his games.” Her son was reluctant at first to give up his pastime. “I don’t have a problem,” Chang-hoon said in an interview three days after starting the camp. “Seventeen hours a day online is fine.” But later that day, he seemed to start changing his mind, if only slightly.
The Supremes
In USA and especially California, addiction is not seen as a problem. The “problem” is solely violent games. Recently, the Governator signed a strict law to control game violence, a law eventually appealed by a Game producers association all the way to the Supreme Court. The hearings were, according to the Hollywood reporter, cause for comedy:
- Justice Alito getting a sly dig at his colleague over "original intent" in the U.S. Constitution: "I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?"
- Justice Kagan, the junior member of the high court, trying to show she's hip: "You think Mortal Kombat is prohibited by this statute? It's a candidate, meaning, a reasonable jury could find that Mortal Kombat, which is an iconic game, which I am sure half of the clerks who work for us spent considerable amount of time in their adolescence playing."
- Justice Breyer creating, excuse the pun, a tortured metaphor about a 13-year-old playing video games depicting violence: "I have tried to take as bad a [scenario] as I could think of, gratuitous torture of children. OK. Now, you can't buy a naked woman, but you can go and buy that, you say to the 13-year-old. Now, what sense is there to that?"
- Justice Scalia muses about whether it would be a good thing to let juries act as censors: "Juries are not controllable. That's the wonderful thing about juries, also the worst thing about juries."
- Just about anything out of the mouth of Justice Sotomayor, including these questions:
- "One of the studies, the Anderson study, says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video. So can the legislature now, because it has that study, say we can outlaw Bugs Bunny?"
- "Could you get rid of rap music? Have you heard some of the lyrics of some of the rap music...?"
- "Would a video game that portrayed a Vulcan as opposed to a human being, being maimed and tortured, would that be covered by the act?"
- "So if the video producer says this is not a human being, it's an android computer simulated person, then all they have to do is put a little artificial feature on the creature and they could sell the video game?"
- "What happens when the character gets maimed, head chopped off and immediately after it happens they spring back to life and they continue their battle? Is that covered by your act?"
It seems to me that Schwarzenegger, though not a big fan of such a law, signed it stating “children must be protected” not because he believes that, but rather because he thinks that reason is unconvincing for parents. All hopes that such ill-conceived legislation will be stopped so that it does not push game development to Asia rest now with the Supreme Court.
Video: PBS: Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, 1 Game Too Many, sp-mlnw, sp-s10e08-inside
Sources / More info: [yt-fv-parody], [yt-fv-tr], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-fv-prblm], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-h8-fv], [Supreme Court], SC-hearing, Jacksonville-mom, jacksonville-sentencing, huff-j, /.-exodus, /.-sc, atlantic-arnold, nxtwb-sk, st-kd, nyt-kbc, gzm-bsy, Kogia-study, wiki-lv,notwc, sw-veldhuizen, fb-veldhuizen, bbc-spanish-piglet
Pasiphae: Peter Huby: Books
Bestiality and Zoophilia: Andrea Beetz: Anthony L. Podberscek, Andrea M. Beetz: Books
Dearest Pet: Midas Dekkers: Paul Vincent: Books
Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950: Jens Rydstrom: Books