Nov 20
I find the man entertaining, but I can’t take him seriously. Have you read this? On video games he says:
The problem with this stuff is that some people can deal with it constructively… but other people get addicted to it, just like opium, just like drugs and alcohol… So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country.
Oh boy. Let the mud fly.
well….its true….some people get addicted to entertainment and other let it completly block out reality. I dont think he was really specifically bashing the iPod or video games. But our addiction to entertainment and its horrible effect of keeping us uninformed and oblivious to the world.
It has habit forming properties (most notably: fun). Man’s a genius, if he has people who write for them, they should get a raise. NEXT!
He is partially correct. People get addicted to video games and their lives are negatively impacted because of it. But I don’t totally agree with his conclusion. As of right now I don’t see how video games are going to “change every single thing in this country.”
Well it wasnt just games, its all the entertainment we can get 24/7/365 alot of people shoose to shut out life completly for it. If you watch the news or read a paper each day you are at least making an effort to live in reality and make informed decisions. But there are MANY MANY people who wouldnt know if we went to war with China tomorrow. They never read a paper or watch the news, or swing by a news website. I live with one of em. They wake up, get in the car and turn on the ipod, go to work while listening to the ipod come home and get on WoW till they get tired and go to sleep. Mix in some crappy reality TV or 24 and you have their whole life.
I guess what he was trying to say is “These days we can completly shut out reality with machines, and this is a bad thing that will change us as a people because we have no idea what is going on” well duh! Whats so controversial about that?
I love the pic
Why do people listen to this turd?
It’s certainly true that video games are becoming increasingly violent and have sex etc, which is fine if you can tell what’s right and wrong, the difference between fantasy and reality. But some people are not like this and are assholes. But I guess they were violent assholes before video games. Some people are also obsessed, but then I think the whole OCD culture is taking over the world in many areas.
Don’t imagine for a minute either that peoples obsession with games has escaped the attention of the man behind the curtain, in terms of getting over the “right” (in their eyes) message and conditioning behaviour of the dumb masses. These people are simply experts at this kind of stuff and the game medium is just too good a method for a bit of phschological conditioning, much like the hidden messages in supermarkets that we hear about.
This is a bit “out there” probably.
O RLY?
Keep in mind he’s from the genaration that thought pet rocks were “swell”.
I do like that he considers anyone under 45 to be young people. Guess that makes me at 32 to be young. …swell.
i love this line – “In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…”
remembe those good old days when people shot black-tar heroine from a spent needle to forget about their crummy life; well now their playing gears of war. shame on you america!
He thinks that poverty in the US is growing because people play to many video games and iPods? Well, at least he’s a little more up to date than some of the nutcases who are still blaming heavy metal, D&D and a heliocentric view of the universe…
Still, it’s interesting to watch the system turn in on itself- when capitalism clashes with conservatism, it always gives me some hope that maybe the two will destroy each other, and we can revert to that little-known system called “not being an asshole”.
Bill O’Reilly is a man ranting and raving about a world he doesn’t understand and is afraid of. Technology scares him so much that he compares it to the worst things his mind can relate to; War and drug abuse. Part of me wants to call him names and say stuff like he was molested by a pong machine as a child, but the other part just feels sorry for him. He must be very lost and lonely. I think he needs a hug from Donkey Kong.
Who the frack is this guy?
i care so little about what this guy has to say i… well… just can’t be bothered to care
Until a child is 18, parents should be liable for everything that kid does (or does not do), whether it concerns video games, porn, drugs, food, money, religion, politics, etc. After 18, that adult is responsible for his/her own actions.
But until then, parents need to stop blaming the influence of other people or other things and blame the lack of their influence in their children’s lives. To paraphrase the term ‘cowboy up’, “Parent up”. Be a real mom/dad and stop blaming everyone else. If the Amish can sacrifice without city life to avoid the “devil’s temptations”, you can spend 10 minutes a day to teach your kids right and wrong.
Stupid parents are just trying to write the proverbial book “If I Could Blame My Bad Kid on Anything Else Other Than My Bad Parenting, Here’s How I Dood It” and hoping the general public will buy it. It didn’t work for OJ, and it ain’t working for them either. Bill O’Reilly is just a media whore like most people on TV. Give the viewer a reason to blame someone else for their problems. Whatever gets the bills paid, you know.
I like O’Reily.
He might be overreactionary regarding video games, but he’s spot on on many other issues.
He helped can OJ’s stupid “confessionary” deal. To that I say, job well done.
Wait, hold on, you think O’Reilly’s little “I have nothing to do with this, there is nothing I can do about this, it’s disgusting, but I’m not going to call one of my famously stupid boycotts on it because I clearly cannot because Murdoch controls my paycheck” was… what canned the OJ confession book?
Wow.
I suppose you also believe he left the French economy in shambles with his grand boycott of French goods?
The main reason the OJ schmuck was cancelled was simple: it wasn’t selling. For whatever reason, this particular pile of turd book crossed some line that separates sales-generating sensationalism from plain bad taste. It’s a funny line, of course, since tabloids are apparently in the former group.
O’Reilly is almost always wrong about most everything, from Malmedy to this newfound idea that videogame players are the ones who will grow up to be indigent bums. Nevermind that one of our few remaining export industries is high-tech, which is driven heavily by chaps who used to play videogames.
Some old men fear being replaced by younger ones. Makes them neophobes.
If Americans are getting dumber, it’s probably partially because of the “dumbing down” of everything. So I think, we can blame Bill as well.
Wow, i love how half the criticism arent even founded in any truth about the matter. I heard the rant live, it wasnt about video games. It was about people being stupid and not living in reality, about blocking out the truth about the world and living in one provided to them by entertainment. You may not like the guy for his stance on things, but this is ridiculous, why not actually get the whole truth about what he said instead of some cherry picking from game politics? Your only proving his point.
He’s just wrong. That doesn’t necessarily make him a turd or a jerk or anything else, he’s just ignorant where videogames are concerned.
Everybody is ignorant about something, the trick is learning not to talk about something when you don’t really understand the subject.
“did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them?”
I have a hard time trying to understand someone’s view point when they attack me personally.
The first step in fighting the addiction is admitting you have it, so… please help me, I’ve had enough pixels bombarding me on a daily basis, I need abstinence, total and complete abstinence, no more for me… maybe just a quick round Fifa 07, noone will ever know and after that I’m through with it, for good.
schragnasher, most of us read only the link Scott provided. If you’re willing to provide a link to the whole text, I’m willing to read the whole thing and probably change my opinion. Judging from what you wrote though, O’Reilly still is a hypocrite: He IS part of the entertainment and certainly filtering reality.
And, imo, anyone who claims to know truth and reality has to be taken with a ton of salt…
That Leprechaun (Leper’con) is only right occasionally. I really don’t like him that much, but I have friends who are WoW-whores. They are married to one another and fight and neglect their child. It may as well be black-tar heroin to them.
i listen to him about everyday and i have to say i agree with him, if you put too much attention on anything its bad. say if you go buy a ps3, xbox360 or wii with money your family needs for food than you have a problem with video games.
I agree with him sometimes, I don’t agree with him other times. I don’t watch or read enough of his stuff to say “I agree a lot of the time” but it seems to be that way.
However, this is one time where it feels like he’s just another old man who can’t understand the benefits of the new direction that the world is moving in. Yes, games and computers CAN BE addictive and can incite many hours of bodily lethargy (and I think that we should admit this freely, as it is absolutely true). However, it fails to consider the enhancement of hand-eye coordination (and, further on, of laproscopics), technology’s ability to make our lives easier and more confortable, the information access, and tons of other stuff. But I guess it’s just not easy for some old guys to let go of the good old days of inch-thick foot callouses, walking seven miles in the snow, and ice cream socials.
he didnt say everything about video games and computers where bad, he said that these can cause problems just like anything else.