The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a story about allegations of a 25 year old man, Tyrone Spellman, killing a 17 month old girl after the man believed that the toddler had broken his Xbox game console.

"'She pulled the cord and the whole game console fell over,' Spellman said in his statement, read by Homicide Detective John Cummings. 'I thought it was broken. I popped her in the face. I picked her up and tossed her in a chair.'"

That nutty lawyer from Florida is planning his public mass media gloating I am sure.

So video games really don't promote violence. Its the video game consoles that do that. *shrugs*

He is obviously a prisoner in his materialistic world. It is of course not about a broken Xbox console or video games promoting violence. It is the dictatorship of owning, being a boss in your material, artificial background. And you see yourself having the right to harm any real person who traspesses it! And here you have a child-abuse in this case.

And I think this case is also related to the "dumbing down" of the culture and how people do not connect with life, do not read books and who are probably used to flick, flick, flick just like this man that "snapped". Doris Lessing wrote a great article about it years ago:

http://www.dorislessing.org/partisan.html

The murder of his 17-month-old toddler had nothing to do with "video game violence". It's because he's a psycho who can't control his anger. He probably would've murdered her anyway if she broke a similar piece of expensive equipment, like his TV. If my toddler broke a piece of equipment, regardless of how expensive it is, I would not murder someone over something silly like that. I mean, these toddlers don't really know what they're doing, and they don't deserve such a horrible death since it's not really their fault. I might be a bit angry that I lost an expensive piece of equipment, but I should deal with it until I get a replacement Xbox or TV or whatever.

Nice article. Somewhat subjective...a little too subjective, but that is the point of writing anyways. Like the part indicating "Educated Barbarians". Kinda reminds me of my country :)

Although must say I agree with the concept we're getting more stupid the further we advance, but this is subjective option, thus I do not agree that the next generation is "lesser" than the one before as each generation says the same thing (including our forefathers to our generation).