Cramer changed!

Now that’s some atonement.

Says AIG, “We’ll give half back.”

“Okay,” says America, “we’ll only beat you half to death.”

Have these people no shame?

With that aside out of the way, I noted a weird confluence of gamer diatribes about race, what with Ben Croshaw’s social commentary on 50 Cent’s second computer game, and Shamus Young’s refutation that Resident Evil 5 has racial overtones. Both have sort of a hard-hitting tell-all motif that immediately become muddled by their tittering comments boards’ nervous glee at having landed a blow on overzealous political correctness.

Why nervous? Because they’re all one-upping each other about why X or Y is providing a good or bad model for Blacks or why A or B is or isn’t offensive to Blacks, but they’re not really getting any Black input. The online gamer demographic is largely white and middle class, and so the rather voluminous debates take on a vaguely scandalous tone, as if they’re getting away with something. In a sense, they are: They’re confirming their convictions through repeating one another. But that, still, muddles the topic at hand. Read the rest of this entry »