Now before I dig in, let me point out that there is a strong difference between the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross. My understanding form years of news reports is that basically the American version is relatively sane and doesn’t get itself into stupid politics (but, dear reader, feel free to correct me I am wrong), and is truly separate from the international version. And I suggest you bookmark the pages I refer you to and tuck them away to bring up the next time someone talks about the latest International Red Cross Report complaining that we are not being sufficiently nice to terrorists, so you can remind everyone what a bunch of bedwetting ninnies these people really are.
You see the International Red Cross is considering action to protect a group that has been horribly abused for years. And the most horrific thing about it is that the persons committing these gross violations of human rights law are often shockingly young. We are talking sometimes kids as young as three years old committing horrific atrocities.
So what is this poor oppressed group that the IRC is considering intervening on behalf of?
Video game characters.
Now, dear reader, I know what you are thinking: they can’t possibly be that ridiculous. And you would be wrong:
One of the world's largest and most respected humanitarian groups in the world is investigating whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games....The International Committee of the Red Cross is mandated under the Geneva Conventions to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflicts. That includes war wounded, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants. The question they debated this week is whether their mandate should be extended to the virtual victims of video game wars.During this week's 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva, Switzerland, members of the committee held a side event to discuss the influence video games have on public perception and action."While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating IHL," according to the event's description. "Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games. In a side event, participants were asked: 'What should we do, and what is the most effective method?'"While National Societies shared their experiences and opinions, there is clearly no simple answer. There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action."
Well, yes, I can’t tell you of the horrors I have seen. For instance, there is one series of games that has the player imprisoning innocent beings in inhumanely tight living quarters and without any kind of trial...
There is a game featuring a stereotype of an Italian American who goes around stomping innocent creatures to death who were doing nothing more than walking around their kingdom.
And don’t get me started about the atrocities committed by the current President of the United States and the former Governor of Alaska in this clip.
You know, it’s like as if these idiots watched the movie Tron, where the protagonist learned that every time a character died in a video game a being that has real feelings dies inside the computer, and believed it was true. And while I enjoyed the original Tron and the recent reboot, only a moron thinks that there is any science behind any of that.
(Pictured: Niko Bellic, notorious war criminal and gangster. He has been known to pay a prostitute for her services and then run her over with his car so that he can rob her corpse of the money he just spent. The sick bastard.)
And naturally as with most breeds of respect for human rights coming from the international left, this morphs into a call for censorship:
If they agree those standards should be applied, the International Committee of the Red Cross says they may ask developers to adhere to the rules themselves or "encourage" governments to adopt laws to regulate the video game industry.
Look, some day we will almost certainly have to ask the question of when and how human rights will be applied to non-humans. Someday robots and possibly even computer programs might be intelligent enough to be called “self-aware.” And while I don’t believe in UFO sightings, alien abduction and the like, I do believe that somewhere in the stars is intelligent life and it is extremely likely that as we and they expand into the universe, we will eventually meet. But the pixilated empty vessels the currently populate the game worlds are nowhere near that level of sentience.
(Agent 47, serial killer.)
And it is reasonable to ask the question of whether it is good for a child of a certain age to be exposed to some of the more gruesome stuff. And I say that as a fan of the really gruesome stuff, but I have said in the past that any parent who lets a child younger than sixteen play Grand Theft Auto is just being a bad parent. But the answer isn’t censorship, but rather instead parents actually doing their job as parents. Every console, for instance, has parental controls: use them.
Now to be fair to them, they want to make sure that you know they aren’t going to arrest gamers, per se...
Virtual war crimes won't lead to real world prosecution, the International Committee of the Red Cross clarified today.
While the international humanitarian group has discussed whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games it isn't doing so to potentially prosecute gamers. Rather, they say, they hope to use games to raise awareness of the rules of real warfare.
Well, yes, and promote censorship. There is that. And in terms of providing an excuse for this stupidity, they offer the following:
"Part of the ICRC's mandate, conferred on it by States, is to promote respect for international humanitarian law[.]”
And by participating in this stupid fascism, you have actively harmed that cause. Bluntly if I was a donor, I would be canceling my donation. Any organization that has time to worry this much about fictional violence officially has too much time and money on its hands.
(The notorious war criminal, known only as el Butler.)
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