The "westward expansion" was not "the founding of this nation."
Not denying there were dark things that happened alongside the great things. But I won't have the founding and its principles sullied by inaccurate attempts to lay blame for things not part nor parcel to it.
Can we quit and as a nation get over this doey eyed jingoistic exceptionalism where we can pretend nothing bad ever happened, nothing bad still happens, or if we acknowledge it, it didn't 'count' because the ends (for you) justified the means (to them)?
And just.. acknowledge that, no matter how good things are now, we as a people busted a lot of eggs to make that omelet? Maybe show a bit of humility towards the sacrifice others made for us against their will to help make this country what it is today?
I'm not asking for you to be ashamed of what you have now, really. The past is done with, and we should be more concerned with working towards the future. But that said, if we can't even acknowledge problems within our past so we can whitewash it to make ourselves feel better about it with the intention of pretending we were always perfect (and when we weren't it was aberrant), you pretty much guarantee that we're going to do something terrible today or in the future.
The country was founded with slavery as a major concession to keep it together. Yes, later, other people decided that was bad and stopped it, and yes later, other people still decided that the treatment of minorities afterwards was bad and have worked and are still working to fix it. So yes, good things came out of it in the end, I suppose, but that doesn't erase the history.
You trying to ignore the history to pretend that everything was perfect from day one belittles the hard work that ended up making this country what it is today, and like I said, guarantees that it's going to relapse. It belittles those still working working today to get fair treatment.
I don't see how you expect us as a people to improve if you pretend that we're already perfect and always have been.
But tying in slavery with the topic and addiction, some would say that addiction is some form of slavery even though the ideal is that everyone is free to come and go. A point of a game, and the great part of any game is it's addictive quality or else you would not have people coming back again over and over for years on end. I think eventually game addiction will get classified as an official psychological problem and if asked ten twelve years ago if this was an abstract idea I would probably have said yes. But now, we even have dog psychologist, and given that games are on the rise, especially ones that allow people to never even have to be next to a person to converse, it will get to the point where it will be officially classified as an addiction. Remember at one point, Cocaine addiction was something that was said to be overblown. Even Coca-Cola said back in the day that their drinks was safe and not addicting in anyway (back when it contained cocaine, although in relatively small amounts and was an elixir to decrease the appetite and increase awareness, like cocaine was supposed to do.) Now it's considered crazy to say that cocaine and other drugs are not addicting. Games will soon get to that point but more on the level of coffee addiction or food addiction I say.
Again, I don't find that games, done properly or fairly are in and of themselves inherently bad. I don't find gambling or most vices in moderation to be. Nobody wants to shut down the State Fair or Chuck-E-Cheeses even though with tickets and prizes they're
basically children's casinos with rides or ball pits. It takes somebody already predisposed towards compulsion and obsession (for various reasons) to get 'addicted' to things, at which point I find that one should treat the compulsion, no the object of the compulsion.
Because almost anything can be the focus of compulsion disorders. The focus itself is immaterial. That's why I started my posts in this thread with an almost knee jerk defense of video games.
But that's not what we're dealing with here. We're not dealing with 'ordinary games'. We're dealing with games, designed by medical doctors,
specifically to make them unhealthy,
specifically to trap people with disorders and
specifically to help bring out disorders in people who have a predisposition towards, but no manifestation of said. That is a
very big difference. And it honestly crosses the line to becoming an unethical one.
This isn't somebody getting you to come back to their soda or food because it tastes good and fills you up, with the tragic side effect that some people predisposed towards compulsion latching onto the food and getting unhealthy. This is closer to the situation of them getting a medical team or a scientific team together to chemically engineer the food to make people who are otherwise healthy addicted.
