Who Will Save Our Precious Children from Toon Pixel Soft-Core Simulated Porn?

I was just trying to have a little light-hearted Fun here with the Virtual Simulated Toon Teen Secret Platonic Object Pixel Porn which a 36-year-old Dutch computer geek seems to have discovered hidden in the superpopular ultraviolent videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It also gave me the opportunity to post Vleeptron's first porno images.

(Previously Vleeptron had linked to images of VIRGINS!!! although we have to confess they were in two exquisite Flemish Renaissance tapestries about unicorns. Vleeptron is always screaming VIRGINS!!! to try to synthetically and unethically pump up the Hit Counter on this Blog. We suspect the recent posts about the lightest radioactive chemical element technetium have not been generating huge wild frothing blog mobs.)

One problem is that Vleeptron is on a tight budget and we have never been able to afford to buy and download one of those expensive pornographs, without which it's impossible to view the Hard Nasty Verboten Stuph from Eastern Europe or East Asia and Oceana.

I certainly never intended to morph this thread into anything Serious. And please feel free, when you've finished reading this post (or as much of it as you can stand), to Leave a Comment like

Todd wrote:

thats still not serious u dumb geezer asshat
u really blow dead rats
bite me

But as I followed this strange story of Non-Existent Platonic Objects Resembling Human Females and Males Having Consensual Simulated Virtual Sex allegedly hidden in an ultraviolent nihilistic video game ("The Kind Teenage Boys Like"), it just keeps getting stranger and stranger, or, as the Father of Victorian Photographic Kiddie Porn used to say:

"Curiouser and curiouser."

Let's review:

1. If you have spent huge amounts of (what passes for) your life getting expert at playing ultraviolent videogames, and hanging on unofficial videogame websites, this month you quickly discovered the hottest rumor in Ultraviolent Videogameland: That not only is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas superultraviolent, but it also has secret hidden SEX!!! SEX!!! in it. You download a whole bunch of Numbers and Letters called Hot Coffee, plug them in somehow to your Sony PlayStation 2, and Lo! There are digital cartoons of Mr. Avatar, the violent, armed, sociopathic car thief, merrily visiting dozens of friendly digital non-existent young women throughout Virtual Southern California, who immediately invite him to have Virtual Non-Existent Platonic Object Mindless Sex with them. You can see them wiggling and getting jiggy, and you can hear the voices of Professional Actors and Actresses reciting elaborate, mushy Romantic Dialogue that accompanies the Virtual Simulated Soft-Core Toon Pixel Sex.

2. The high-speed Police vs. Stolen Car chases and fiery car wrecks, accompanied by huge volumes of gang-related Glock and Uzi smallarms fire, had already made the GTA game series wildly popular. Now the Secret Hidden Pixel Porn -- which the manufacturer, Rockstar, initially claimed Isn't Really There, Somebody Else (probably a Dutch Person) is just pretending it's there -- is really making GTA/SA fly off the shelves. (Officially it retails at $50 a pop, but it's common to find it at $45.)

3. A California state legislator, Aseembly Speaker Pro Tempore Leland Yee, fired the first political blast at the Hidden Toon Sex of GTA/SA, but had previously attacked its accessibility to children in an editorial in which he claims an above-ground non-hidden feature of the standard game is: "In Grand Theft Auto, a player can hire a prostitute and then kill her to boost his energy reserves." (In more standard but equally violent videogames, you usually boost your energy by seizing magic gems, that sort of innocent, inocuous gimmick.)

4. Smelling cheap and easy votes on a symbolic, unreal, insubstantial but hot, sexy issue, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has jumped on the Attack GTA/SA's Hidden Toon Pixel Sex Political Bandwagon, and called for public hearings under the ægis of the Federal Trade Commission.

VLEEPTRON BALANCED & FAIR ADVISORY: Vleeptron doesn't want to make itself vulnerable to accusations that we're twisting, skewing, spinning, distorting or sodomizing the positions of these Fine American Public Servants & Dedicated Federal Bureaucrats who are merely trying to Protect Our Precious Children using Our Tax Dollars.

So Vleeptron strongly urges all readers who have followed this post thus far to Cliquez on the Yee, Clinton and FTC links, and read their own statements, editorials and press releases regarding GTA/SA. That's the stuff From the Horse's Mouth, and perhaps differs slightly from the way Vleeptron has been portraying, characterizing and flaying it, and will now continue to do so. Also, we might add, some of those statements, editorials and press releases are Screamingly Funny (though entirely unintentionally -- these are politicians, government lawyers and bureaucrats), if you have Vleeptron's perverse, jaded and warped kind of sense of humor.

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Vleeptron Essay Questions, Worth Much Pizza:

1. What is the difference (if any) between pornographic images of consensual sex acts involving Real Human Beings, and pornographic images of sex acts between Virtual Pixel Platonic Object Sets of Millions of Zeroes and Ones? (Can a non-existent Platonic Object give or withhold consent?)

In other words, you can probably surf and find images of Paris Hilton having sex, and Paris Hilton is a Real Human Being whom you could actually touch and smell in an elevator.

Here is what the sex in GTA/SA not just looks like, but, au fonde, really is:

00101010 10101010 10001000 01111010
00100000 00010101 11111110 10000111
01011000 10000000 00111110 00001000
01100011 10001011 00011001 11011001
00000011 00010111 01110011 01110111
11110011 00100000 00010101 10111011
00111110 01111100 00111110 11010110
00000101 00001101 00100101 10111110

Reductionism is the desire to seek deeper and deeper structures of things. A True Porn Image on the computer of Real Mammals Having Sex, as it is digitally transmitted from one computer to another, also looks exactly like the above string of zeroes and ones. If you convince Homeland Security to seek the deepest structure of what you are convinced is a True Porn Image, and eventually (at ruinous cost) their investigators succeed, they will find, or prove that there once existed, two or three actual living mammals, like Rex the Wonder Horse, Paris Hilton and Colin Farrell.

But if you e-mail Homeland Security (or the Federal Trade Commission) an image of rough nasty sex from GTA/SA, and the Homeland Security krew start Reductioning what you sent them, the Deepest Structure -- where the image all began -- is just millions of Zeroes and Ones. There never was a human male and there never was a human female, there never was a cheap motel room without any curtains. The whole sordid thing just began with numbers, or perhaps with a computer program good (or mediocre, or crude) at generating numbers from cartoons, pieces of art scanned into a computer. Go as deeply as you want, as deeply as you can, and there aren't any real mammals that you could smell and touch in an elevator.

VLEEPTRON NEW WORD of FRENCH ORIGIN du JOUR

frottage: sexual gratification in public,
brushing against someone to get sexual feelings

2. Is it an Important Function of Government and Law Enforcement to do all it can, to take effective measures, to make sure our children (say, younger than 18) never see Numerical Pixel Toons having sex?

Some would argue that the damage pornography does, or is claimed to do, to children is not a function of its being images of things that involved actual people, but rather of its symbolic imagery -- willing actors and actresses, exploited victims, or cartoons, it's all the same toxic damage to developing personalities if the image reflects and reinforces notions of sexual violence against women, hatred or gross disrespect of women, exploitation of women by men. A cartoon of rape, it can be argued, does damage toward steering a developing personality toward positive associations about rape. Likewise, images of rape involving actual human beings, but photographed with consenting actors and actresses, does equivalent damage to developing personalities.

Likewise, it can be argued that all-text fiction inventing such situations can be highly influential and persuasive if a story of sexual violence or predation or exploitation is told well and powerfully -- "Sanctuary" by William Faulkner, for example.

But the text/fiction parallel has a nearly permanent answer broadly accepted at the highest levels of government, politics, academe and intellectuals: Censorship or banning of text, of imaginative literature, has been almost universally rejected in the United States of America. From time to time, government agencies have tried to ban books, theater or movies, but no such ban has ever been successfully sustained; the bans are always hotly contested and condemned, and are always eventually overturned in court challenges. In books alone, not even a voluntary rating system (G, PG, PG-13, M, YA, A, etc.) by the publishing industry has ever been instituted to keep certain books out of the hands of minors, and no legislature has ever tried to impose any such system on books. Public libraries and their professional associations in particular aggressively resist any kinds of voluntary or mandatory age-linked censorship or restriction systems beyond the architectural guidance of an Adult book area and a Children's area.

But when the medium is visual images, we are not so dead-set against censorship and banning. In Oklahoma, a District Attorney raided a big-city Blockbuster, and police began visiting and threatening to arrest customers who had rented the movie version of Gunter Grass' novel "The Tin Drum," because (the DA said) of a scene which showed a young boy trying to have oral sex with an older teenage girl -- thus qualifying the movie, under Oklahoma laws, as child pornography. (Unfortunately, one of the customers the police tried to intimidate turned out to be a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, he declared the kiddie porn raid to be total bullshit totally forbidden by the First Amendment, and a judge failed to support the DA's moral crusade, dismissing all kiddie porn charges against Blockbuster and its customers. Book and movie, "The Tin Drum" is free again in Oklahoma.)

So this new distinction seems blurry -- high-quality literary originals seem to be constitutionally protected from government control, but Assemblyman Yee and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton believe the government should step in and regulate video game images of a sexual nature (albeit the particpants are just strings of zeroes and ones -- only numbers were exploited, degraded or harmed in the making of GTA/SA). Nothing could be more highly praised by literary specialists than "The Tin Drum," and nothing could be literarily or artistically sleazier, more tawdry or more crude than GTA/SA. But the US Constitution says nothing about such distinctions, and if it truly does protect free speech and free expression, it protects the unbelievably talented and the unbelievably talentless alike and equally.

Even if it can be proven that the Toon Sex scenes did indeed originate in Rockstar's development of the game -- so what? says the First Amendment.

VLEEPTRON BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: Rockstar has now officially admitted that the smutty stuff was indeed contained in their authorized, original sold versions of GTA/SA.

They are free to make such crap and the U.S. government can make no law to prevent them from making or selling such crap.

One suggested scenario is that the raunchy sex stuff was part of the original "plot" of GTA/SA, but Rockstar's management lost their nerve at the last minute, fearing just this kind of public and political attack, and blocked access to the Toon Sex parts of the game on the final released version. The Dutch nerd just managed to figure out how to unblock the blocked parts, and shared the Hot Coffee key with the world for free.

Another suggested scenario is that by including the raunchy stuff but technically hiding it from ordinary buyers/players, the manufacturer intentionally knew some third party -- probably a Dutch nerd -- would eventually "unlock" it, and this would increase the game's popularity and sales.

{ [ ( o ) ] }

Is this naughty video game story important, significant, substantive in any way? (Aw, c'mon ... that's a Real Question ... Leave a Comment.)

Vleeptron is thrilled to confess that it gave us our first weeny excuse to post images of Faux Pixel Filth, concealed, camouflaged and disguised as journalism. Our first GTA/SA image -- the topless non-existent Platonic Object woman shown obliquely, no nipples -- was also published in The New York Times. Please advise Vleeptron immediately when The Times confesses they just published the same image to sexually tease and titillate its readership and increase sales.

Vleeptron is written by an American who is usually in America (when not residing, via the Zeta Beam, on Planet Vleeptron), and so posts regarding political censorship issues tend to be written within the framework of the United States Constitution's First Amendment guarantees of free speech and expression.

But other nations and societies which strive to be or which represent themselves as Open Societies have had to consider this question as well. In 1960, the British government attempted to ban the sale of the novel "Lady Chatterly's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence, and the ban was overturned in the court case "Regina vs. Penguin Books Ltd." (Regina is Latin for "queen," and is shorthand for the British government; when the sovereign is male, such documents begin with Rex.)

"Lady Chatterly's Lover" is an overtly sexual novel, and specifically concerns an extramarital sexual affair (of a quite hot and steamy sort) between a married noblewoman and her estate's lusty hunk of a gamekeeper.

In the argument for the defense, Penguin Books' solicitor (lawyer) pointed out that the government's case rested on the claim that if the public was permitted to read the book, this would cause moral decay and damage to hundreds of thousands of readers, damage of a sort which a decent government, concerned for the welfare of its citizens, was bound to oppose and restrict. (The government wasn't trying to restrict sales to minors, but to everybody.)

The solicitor then pointed out that to conduct the trial to the point where the jury could deliberate and reach a verdict, the prosecutors had to read the novel, the judge had to read the novel, all members of the jury had to read the novel, and Penguin's solicitors had to read the novel -- the central piece of evidence in the trial.

But during the trial, no one, noted the defense's solicitor, had once ever claimed that reading "Lady Chatterly's Lover" had done any moral damage to any of these readers. No one claimed the judge had become more perverted in his thinking about sex and sexual mores and conduct. The prosecutor did not confess that after he had read the novel, he himself had become more sexually depraved or immoral. And no one claimed that any of the twelve jurors had become more perverse or sexually depraved from their exposure to Lawrence's fictional story.

It is always somebody else who is vulnerable to becoming perverted and depraved by reading such books, Penguin's solicitor noted. It is never ourselves whose morals could possibly be damaged or degraded by reading a story of a sexual nature.

And the "somebody else" is always anonymous, unable to be specifically identified; the government which wishes to protect this vulnerable person from moral damage can never identify him or her -- which would be the first and most necessary step toward proving the original assumption: That exposure to this kind of depraved literature will indeed cause damage to some individual.

The poor government. In its wisdom and desire to protect the citizens, it knows this damage will be done, it is certain this moral damage is inevitable. But it can never find, identify and prove damage was caused to a single individual. The instant it takes a citizen and chooses him or her for a censorship trial jury, everyone agrees that that randomly selected citizen is now entirely immune from moral damage, sufficient to being asked to read the dangerous book at the center of the trial. It also assumes the judge is immune from moral corruption, and politely assumes the publisher's lawyer is immune from moral corruption. And of course the most immune figure of all is the Queen's Prosecutor, who can read "Lady Chatterly's Lover" from cover to cover without suffering the slightest sexual stimulation of an untoward and inappropriate nature.

By the way, Regina lost, the jury decided that Penguin won. "Lady Chatterly's Lover" is freely for sale in bookstores throughout the United Kingdom.

Vleeptron feels compelled to add a footnote. During the censorship cause celebre, a member of the House of Lords said he wasn't worried that his wife might read "Lady Chatterly's Lover." He supported the ban because he didn't want his gamekeeper to read the book.

{ [ ( o ) ] }

Back to U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her crusade to save America's youth from the moral depravity which they will surely suffer if they are allowed to plug Patrick Wildenborg's Hot Coffee mod into Grand Theft Auto/San Andreas.

It takes a village to use an innocent, vulnerable, easily corruptible child as manipulative bait to hose up a few hundred thousand cheap votes to re-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton to the U.S. Senate from New York State, and Hillary is that Village.

To be Balanced and Fair (for which Vleeptron is renowned throughout the Dwingeloo-2 Galaxy), Hillary did not invent this sleazoid political scam of Public Moral Outrage as bait for votes. Creeps in Congress have been making themselves Vote Parasites off of Hollywood movies, popular music, comic books and television since these technologies were invented. Here, for example, is The Comics Code, adopted in panic by the American comic book industry in 1954 after Congressional hearings of a sensational fever pitch in which a self-appointed Youth Expert, the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, claimed that comic books were turning America's Youth into violent psychopathic sexual perverts. (I will make a guesstimate that I have read about 20,000 comic books in my life, but admittedly most have been sanitized to reflect The Comics Code.)

The Comic Book Hearings were without a scintilla of doubt a Congressional Vote Sucking Circus whose sole purposes were

1. to terrify Americans into thinking a Menace was destroying their children, and

2. to identify certain Congress members as America's only Hope and Savior against the Menace; Vote for the Hope and Savior at the next election, or your Children will all be Doomed.

And now Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a leading Scholar in the History of Congressional Vote-Sucking Irresponsibility Circuses, is doing it all over again. It's not Comic Books this time. It's Video Games. Video Games are destroying our Precious Children. Vote for Hillary. (Not just for Senator -- see MSNBC story at bottom of this post -- the rumor blossoms that Hillary has her sights set on Higher Things.) Hillary will Save Our Precious Children from the Menace of Hidden Virtual Toon Pixel Sex in Video Games.

VLEEPTRON SURVEY

Do you think U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, deep in her heart, truly gives a flying fuck about Our Precious Children? Check one: YES [ ] NO [ ]

Before answering, consider Hillary's Strange New Bedfellow in her New Crusade to Save Our Precious Children from the Menace of Video Game Simulated Soft-Core Pixel Toon Porn: U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania.

There's nothing inherently wrong or bad about merely being Republican; I myself regularly voted for a Republican, the late U.S. Representative Silvio Conte, because each election, he was clearly superior to the string of morons, idiots and vanity candidates the Democrats kept choosing to run against him. Each election found me feeling better and happier to see Conte returned to Congress to represent me; his votes were close enough to my views to please me regularly and often enormously.

Santorum is a somewhat different story. His previous Claim to Fame came during the national Same-Sex Marriage Debate. On 7 April 2003 an Associated Press reporter interviewed Santorum and taped the interview. Rather than characterize Santorum's views, Vleeptron is happy to let the Senator speak for himself:


Associated Press: I mean, should we outlaw homosexuality?

SANTORUM: I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it's not the person, it's the person's actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.

AP: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual,you would argue that they should not have sex?

SANTORUM: We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold -- Griswold was the contraceptive case -- and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you -- this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong, healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality --

And that's whom Hillary Rodham Clinton is partnering with in her new crusade to Save Our Previous Children from Virtual Simulated Soft-Core Non-Existent Pixel Toon Video Game Sex.

Vleeptron is going to give this a rest for the day, and hope for Some Comments before resuming. Perhaps the Comments will guide Vleeptron toward specific directions, aspects and dimensions of this story. If there are No Comments, Vleeptron will sing ABBA's Greatest Hits through your computer speakers for the next month, and you will be unable to shut it off.

* * * * * * *

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8573139/
Updated: 6:20 p.m. ET July 14, 2005

Clinton burnishes hawkish image
Senator calls for bigger Army
and a crackdown on video games

By Tom Curry
MSNBC National affairs writer

WASHINGTON -- In media events Wednesday and Thursday on Capitol Hill, Sen. Hillary Clinton burnished her image as the nation’s leading Democrat who is both tough on national defense abroad and tough on cultural depravity at home.

Clinton called Wednesday for boosting the Army by 80,000 soldiers over four years, and was back in front of television cameras again Thursday calling for a new law to punish video game retailers who sell violent or pornographic games to teenagers and children.

The senator’s legislation would impose a $5,000 penalty on retailers who sell to underage consumers video games that are rated "M" (for mature) or "AO" (adults only) by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, an industry group.
She told reporters that her legislation would not, at least not initially, give federal authorities the power to get an injunction to stop a retailer from selling violent or smutty games to minors.

'A line of defense'

"We need to do everything we can to make sure that parents have a line of defense against graphic and violent video games and other content that goes against the values they’re trying to instill in their children," Clinton said.

She portrayed video games as part of what she called "this overwhelming culture" which assaults children and teenagers with depraved images of violence and sex. She accused violent and pornographic video game makers of "stealing the innocence of our children."

Asked about the difficulty of using federal powers to enforce rules on tens of thousands of retailers across the nation, she said the government could police video game sales "the same way we police cigarette and alcohol sales to children. We don’t get everybody who makes money off of selling harmful products to children, but we send a clear message that to do so, violates the law."

With her stand on video games, Clinton has taken on the mantle of previous Capitol Hill cultural critics such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has long assailed violent rap lyrics and video games; Tipper Gore, who campaigned in the 1980s against obscene and violent rock lyrics; and former Vice President Dan Quayle, who charged that the television show “Murphy Brown” was legitimizing unwed motherhood, to the detriment of the children of those mothers.

On Thursday, Clinton urged the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation of a video game called "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."

Horrified by 'pornographic content'

The New York Democrat said she was struck with "absolute horror" when she read a report that the game had "pornographic content that can be unlocked by following instructions widely available on the Internet."

Last March, Clinton joined Lieberman and conservative Republican senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas in calling for $90 million in federal funds for research on the effect of the Internet, i-Pods, and other electronic media on children.

This week the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics issued a report saying that Clinton led all senators in first-quarter campaign fundraising from 14 out of the top 50 industries ranked by campaign giving.

The report found that Clinton's Senate re-election campaign was the top recipient of donations from the music, television, and entertainment industry, raking in nearly $800,000 from the industry so far in the 2005-2006 cycle.

On Wednesday with her frequent ally Lieberman again at her side, Clinton helped unveil a bill requiring an increase in the size of the Army from its current authorized strength of 502,400 to 582,400 by September 2009.

Lieberman is the principal sponsor of that bill.

"Our army is under unprecedented stress," Clinton said. "When an army unit returns from service in Iraq or Afghanistan, it barely gets a breather before it begins training for its next deployment. This intense operation tempo is not only tough on soldiers and their families -- it also hurts the readiness of our Army and our entire armed forces."

Even as Clinton runs for her second term in the Senate, many reporters and pundits expect her to run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

If Clinton runs for president

If she runs for president, it’s not clear whether she’ll do so as a conservative, pro-military "Lieberman Democrat" -- a strategy which did not work for Lieberman himself in 2004 -- or as a candidate who shatters the usual ideological categories and unites all factions within the party.

The non-partisan National Journal, which compiles ratings of all 10 senators based on 60 roll call votes on social, defense, and economic issues, ranked Clinton as more liberal than 71 percent of all her colleagues in 2004. Lieberman was rated at 69.8, with the most liberal senator being Hawaii Democrat Daniel Akaka at 94. National Journal’s least liberal Democrat is Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, at 51.2.

Asked to comment on Clinton’s announcements this week, Thomas Basile, a spokesman for the Senate exploratory campaign committee of Ed Cox, a Republican who is planning to run against Clinton for the New York senate seat next year, said, "As she focuses less and less on New York, and more and more on running for president in 2008, she is going to be under pressure from her party to change her position and set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. People who believe she is tough on national defense should look a bit deeper."

© 2005 MSNBC Interactive