67 thoughts on “Is Jack Chick doing oppo research on Colleen Lachowicz?”

      1. This is why we do not vote for Republicans. Not because of their barbarism, their inability to understand their own ideas — or think them through, not because their policies would hurt the people who vote for them.
        But because they would choke off what makes America great –science itself.

        America’s never had the world’s greatest engineers — full title there goes to Japan and Germany.
        What we do well is science.Report

  3. I’d only seen some headlines on the subject. I had actually assumed that this was a part of the US Senate campaign up there, wherein the Maine Republicans were trying to boost the Democrat in order to draw votes away from Angus King. It didn’t even occur to me that this was considered a legitimate avenue of attack (and I’ve lived in red states for most of my life).

    Ya learn something new every day.Report

  5. Some thoughts and theories:

    1. Yes, tens of millions of people play games including some people who are older than Generation X (Let’s just say that this is the firs true video game generation). However, this means that tens of million of people do not play video games.

    2. How many of these non-players only have very hazy notions of advancement of videogames? How many just remember their children or grandchildren playing 8-bit Mario Brothers and nothing beyond. This is probably the general demographic of cable news.

    3. One thing that I have discovered but it is probably hard to quantify is the extent that Christian Fundamentalists seem to have developed their own shadow culture. It roughly mimics pop culture in terms of genre and feel but the stories are all Christian. This is a culture that can produce hits and best-sellers that we have never heard about. There are a few crossovers every now and then like the Narnia books or something that is so big that it cannot be ignored like the Left Behind series. However, most of it is not known to us. I wonder how many people grow up in this shadow culture and are generally aware of the wider world but very hazy on the specifics. After all, there are people who still take Chic tracks on face value.

    In short, I can think of a group who is attack is aimed at. Perhaps these people would not have voted Democratic anyway but maybe they are more likely to come out and vote for Tom Martin. This is just my hunch.

    4. That being said, I think concern about violent video games is goes across both parties. The violent video game law that the Supreme Court struck down last term was written by a state Senator from San Francisco. His training is in child psychology. Now this was not a law that attempted to mock people for playing video games but did seek to give extra-aid to parents in making sure that their kids did not get their hands on violent video games.Report

      1. The DoT disease that was..maneuvered…out of a raid boss was better. It was interesting enough data that actual scientists took a gander at it.

        Basic story: There is a raid boss — big bad monster at the end of a dungeon designed for 10+ players to tackle at once, in this case 20 to 25 — who had an attack that gave you a disease. It did damage over time (DoT) to anyone infected, and could spread to anyone nearby. The damage was…sizeable.

        In terms of play, everyone (at the time — this was years ago) was max level, had high-end gear — and it wsa designed to make players have to seperate and have healers cure disease and heal them before they died. You died if people kept reinfecting everyone, as healers would run out of power. So it was a disease aimed at top-end players. When you beat the boss (or left the dungeon) you were cured.

        Unless your pet got it. (There were combat pets for one class). You could dismiss your pet, leave, then resummon him. With the contagious disease. One that would kill anyone not max level in a single tick or two.

        Sumone resummoned a pet in the Capital City. It infected players, NPCs, everyone. Most NPCs were too tough and regenerated too quickly to die from it, but they’d infect people passing by. Most of whom weren’t top-level and died quickly.

        It spread just like a real epidemic. Until Blizzard nuked the servers and hot-fixed it out.Report

    1. What is interesting about Fredric Wertham was that he was also a crusader against Jim Crow and segregation. He seemed to be sincerely concerned about violence and how it worked on child psychiatry and development. He was almost certainly wrong but I think his heart was in the right place.Report

        1. *snerk* Tom and Jerry was a really bad idea. No idea what the censors were thinking. Senseless violence made “fun” is probably not for kids below the age of 8 or so (maybe ten)…
          That said, Japan’s a real peacenik country, and their children’s entertainment features a LOT of violence. It’s just got morals too.Report

          2. Also, there are plenty of right-wingers in Japan who want to revive the old martial and pre-WWII spirit. A prime example is the governor of Tokyo.Report

    2. The reason why we don’t see stuff like that is because Americans self-censor games.
      This is a GOOD thing, occasionally.
      Who really wants a party with a child molestor (right out of NAMBLA) AND a child-eater (really!) who constantly argue over who gets the child in the party???Report

  7. Okay, having read the original link, it’s only partially about being a WoW player, per se. Or at least that’s how it comes across to me. As much as anything, it looks like they’re suggesting she is immature (or unintelligent) and lacks worth ethic. The fact that she is in WoW plays into the first, but also her attitude towards the game and the tone of the comments excerpted are… extremely informal. It reminds me a bit of people attacking Sarah Palin for the overall tone of her emails (“This is not how intelligent people communicate” as one person I know put it). Not very senatorish, or even state senatorish.

    If I lived in this district, would any of it make me less inclined to vote for her? Maybe, in an open primary, wherein I have multiple candidates espousing my point of view. In an election where ideology is at stake? I doubt it would have much effect if any.

    Beyond that, she reminds me of a number of people I have on my Facebook feed.Report

    1. I ended any possible future political career long ago. “Honestly, Chris, I just thought it was funny that RPG means three different things. Dressing up as orcs and blowing up IBM headquarters wasn’t a serious suggestion.”Report

      1. “I swear, future constituents, my having dressed up as Fuyutsuki from Neon Genesis Evangelion at one anime convention is not indicative of my support for wielding to transnational overlords at SEELE or the UN! And my dressing as Gateau from Sorcerer Hunters at the next one is primarily indicative of my having looked like the part in an ensemble costoom cast – I never actually watched the whole series.”Report

      1. Thx for the facts, WillT. Yah, Tod, I think it makes her look like a bigtime slacker and a petty little shithead, so she has that going for her. I mean, I prefer my Democrats to slack off instead of writing more rules and regulations, so I guess she could get my vote on some given Tuesday. 😉Report

      2. Depends on which tidbit, Tod. Some of them are about nothing but work ethic. The overarching criticism appears to be that she is fundamentally unserious and immature. The WoW being a thematic part of that argument, but only some of the excerpts actually involve WoW.

        It was really not what I was expecting as it was and has been described.Report

        1. Oh, I’m not talking about tidbits. Like I say, I agree with you about the criticism – and think it might even be a valid one.

          I’m saying that mailers aren’t made to be op-ed articles, they’re meant to strike a very specific chord in between the time you take it out of your mailbox, and when you throw it in the trash.

          When I look at this, I don’t see an ad firm trying to make that chord about work ethic. I see it trying so say, What a weirdo!Report

          1. I haven’t seen the mailer. I just perused the tidbits on the site. I think it is trying to say “What a weirdo” but I think it goes beyond the fact that she plays WoW. More that she’s a womanchild, living up to particular stereotypes of immaturity and goof-offism.

            I do get an undercurrent of “She would spend her time playing WoW rather than serving her constituents” from both the “About page” (which Nob links to) and the general page itself.Report

        2. To be clear, I’m talking about the ColleensWorld’s main page. The specific page that Nob links to is most specifically about WoW. That’s the “about” page. Go to the main page, and it’s mostly highlighted things that she’s posted on dKos. Some of them have to do with the enjoyment of stabbing. One of which jokes about violence towards Grover Norquist. References to Teabaggers. Slams at Republicans. Talking about spending all day on WoW and/or a workday calling her congresswoman.

          Honestly, my biggest problem is that they’re cherrypicking from posts spanning years. In their defense, they offer a link so that you can look over them all.Report

  8. The Dem should just give a press conference of her own…

    “I have it from good sources that my GOP opponent likes to play Monopoly, where he plays as an evil land baron (daa daa DAAAAAHHHHH). He’s also rumored to play Go Fish with his kids, where he TAKES CARDS AWAY FROM HIS CHILDREN (daa daa DAAAAAHHHHH). AND – when he was in high school playing baseball he would STEAL BASES!!! (daa daa DAAAAAHHHHH).Report

  9. You never know who’s going to love video games. Back around 1998, I was coordinating a batch of technology demos (at the direction of the CEO, in the hallway outside the conference rooms) for a large group of telephone company executives at a retreat. Among the broadband demos we were running was a triangular table with three PCs running multiplayer Doom. We roped one of the senior marketing executives (a woman, as it happens) into playing during a break. I will always remember, at some point much later in the afternoon, her assistant tugging at her sleeve, telling her that she’d already missed one session, and it was important that she be at the next one, and her pushing him away and saying, “One more game… this time I’ll get him.”

    I found out some weeks later that that session had converted her from someone who doubted that there was any future in high-speed data, into someone who believed HSD was critical to the future of the company.Report

          1. You want surreality? Leave the radio built in to your PIP-BOY on in Fallout: New Vegas and go pick a fight with some monster out in the desert. Cheery 1950’s style country music playing utterly incongruously with shooting bolt-action rifles at mutated lizards trying to bite your face off.Report

        2. The more I think about it, the more I think it was Quake. We used it to drive home a couple of different points. One of them was why broadband was going to succeed — your teenager wants to play this for hours, and with broadband, the rest of the family can still reach the Internet. The other was as a segue into the voice-over-IP section of the demos — all you had to do was listen to the players at the three game stations we had trash talk each other, and it was obvious that real-time audio was going to be a major selling point for multiplayer games in the future.Report

  10. I refuse to vote for anyone who plays D&D or who collects anything, or who goes to Star Trek conventions (seeing a few episodes is okay, as long as you didn’t like it too much.). All are signs of mental illness and loserdom.

    But being a baseball fan is the essence of virtue.

    Also, being involved in law and finance, especially finance, is evidence of human greatness (all those Wall Street folks are so wonderful and competent in their lives).Report

  11. If you made a list of all the things that candidates believe should disqualify their opponents from holding public office, we’d only be able to elect newborn babies.

    Flipside: newborn babies might not do a worse job.Report

  13. “How would you handle Leroy Jenkins?” would be an excellent debate question to elicit leadership style and temperament.Report

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