Category: reason

The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women’s rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals.

“Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed,” wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than a cowardly retreat from a full-throated defense of the First Amendment. Moving forward, when deciding whether to take a free speech case, the organization will consider “factors such as the (present and historical) context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.”

The memo also makes clear that the ACLU has zero interest in defending First Amendment rights in conjunction with Second Amendment rights. If controversial speakers intend to carry weapons, the ACLU “will generally not represent them.”

The memo’s authors assert that this does not amount to a formal change in policy, and is merely intended as guidelines that will assist ACLU affiliates in deciding which cases to take.

Kaminer, though, sees the memo as yet more evidence that the ACLU “has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates.” As she writes in The Wall Street Journal:

The speech-case guidelines reflect a demotion of free speech in the ACLU’s hierarchy of values. Their vague references to the “serious harm” to “marginalized” people occasioned by speech can easily include the presumed psychological effects of racist or otherwise hateful speech, which is constitutionally protected but contrary to ACLU values. Faced with perceived conflicts between freedom of speech and “progress toward equality,” the ACLU is likely to choose equality. If the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU’s balancing test, it would greatly expand government power to restrict speech.

In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), for example, the ACLU defended the First Amendment rights of a Ku Klux Klan leader prosecuted for addressing a small rally and calling for “revengence” against blacks and Jews. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Clarence Brandenburg’s conviction, narrowly defining incitement to violence as speech both intended and likely to cause imminent illegal action. Brandenburg made an essential distinction between advocacy and action, which progressives who equate hate speech with actual discrimination or violence seek to erase.

The ACLU would be hard pressed to take Brandenburg’s case today, given its new guidelines. The organization hasn’t yet endorsed a ban on hate speech, or a broader definition of incitement. The guidelines affirm that “speakers have a right to advocate violence.” But even if Brandenburg managed to pass the new balancing test for speech cases, some participants at his rally were armed, and, according to the guidelines, “the ACLU generally will not represent protesters who seek to march while armed.”

Kaminer notes that the ACLU is of course free to change its position on free speech—but it should own up to this evolution:

All this is the ACLU’s prerogative. Organizations are entitled to revise their values and missions. But they ought to do so openly. The ACLU leadership had apparently hoped to keep its new guidelines secret, even from ACLU members. They’re contained in an internal document deceptively marked, in all caps, “confidential attorney client work product.” I’m told it was distributed to select ACLU officials and board members, who were instructed not to share it. According to my source, the leadership is now investigating the “leak” of its new case-selection guidelines. President Trump might sympathize.

It seems fairly clear to me what’s happening here. Leadership would probably like the ACLU to remain a pro-First Amendment organization, but they would also like to remain in good standing with their progressive allies. Unfortunately, young progressives are increasingly hostile to free speech, which they view as synonymous with racist hate speech. Speech that impugns marginalized persons is not speech at all, in their view, but violence. This is why a student Black Lives Matter group shut down an ACLU event at the College of William & Mary last year, chanting “liberalism is white supremacy” and “the revolution will not uphold the Constitution.” Campus activism is illiberal, and liberal free speech norms conflict with the broad protection of emotional comfort that the young, modern left demands.

The ACLU’s capitulation to the anti-speech left should serve as a wake up call for true liberals. What has taken place on campus over the last decade does matter, and though the scope of the problem is frequently overstated, we should all be concerned when the nation’s premiere civil liberties organization is increasingly afraid of defending the First Amendment—not because the Trump administration scares them, but because college students do.

Can the president of the United States be sued for damages in a civil proceeding, asks Damon Root in the latest print edition of Reason. A snippet:

The answer depends on the nature of the president’s alleged misconduct. In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president has immunity from civil suits that arise from the performance of his official duties. “In exercising the functions of his office,” the Court said, “the head of an Executive Department, keeping within the limits of his authority, should not be under an apprehension that the motives that control his official conduct may, at any time, become the subject of inquiry in a civil suit for damages.”

The president’s behavior offthe job, however, is a different matter.

View this article.

Brad Martell has been feeding birds in the backyard of his Melbourne, Australia, home for 20 years. Then a new neighbor moved in. The neighbor complained to local officials, who fined Martell $200 for feeding wildlife. Martell reduced the amount he feeds the birds and moved the feedings to his front yard. But a few weeks later, he got a summons for nine more charges. It seems that local officials had been covertly spying on him and caught him continuing to feed the birds.

Stossel on Reason is looking for a full-time editor to work on John Stossel’s online videos.

Requirements:

• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Audition
• Experience shooting and lighting interviews
• Experience shooting B-roll in the field

Responsibilities include:

• Primary editor for Stossel TV’s online videos
• Create eye-catching and informative animations using headlines, charts, etc.
• Find sources for images, B-roll, and sound effects
• Set up three-point lighting and green screen for interviews
• Pitch video ideas

We are a six-person shop based in New York City. Everyone helps out on most tasks. This is primarily an editing job, but candidates would be encouraged to branch out and learn/perfect other skills, such as TV producing, writing, and research. This is a great opportunity to work with and learn from John Stossel.

If you are interested in the position, send a résumé and a sample of your editing work to John@johnstossel.com.

A bill backed by the White House that would have cut a modest $15 billion in federal spending authority fell two votes shy of passage in the Senate on Wednesday.

As I explained when the bill cleared the House two weeks ago, the so-called “rescission” package actually cut just $1.1 billion in federal spending, with those cuts spread over the next 10 years. The rest of the supposed cuts were the result of sweeping up unused budgetary authority from various departments and agencies in the current budget.

The $1.1 billion in spending cuts would have amounted to about 0.08 percent of the $1.3 trillion spending bill passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in March. The federal government spends 40 times as much every year fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan. It spends 100 times as much every year on fraudulent Medicaid claims. In the context of the federal budget, $1.1 billion isn’t just a drop in the bucket; it’s a bucket in an ocean.

In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the bill, the cut in the current fiscal year would have been just $57 million. Most of the cuts would apply to the next three fiscal years, with a not-so-whopping $368 million trimmed from next year’s proposed spending levels being the biggest single year slice.

Even that cut was too much for the Senate to handle.

Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) were the only two Republicans who voted Wendesday against discharging the bill from committee. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) were absent. Collins told The Hill she believed Congress should “comb through” the spending cuts via the appropriations process, while Burr said he voted no because leadership would not commit to letting him amend proposed cuts to the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

That’s a pretty good illustration of why cutting spending in Washington is all but impossible. The rescission bill was little more than “a modest show of good faith to taxpayers,” as Bill Riggs, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, called it. Given the chance to demonstrate a willingness to cut just a modicum of the federal government’s runaway spending, Burr and Collins found reasons to vote against the bill. There are always reasons to oppose cuts, but how can Congress make the tough decisions required to control a $21 billion (and growing) national debt when it can’t make easy decisions like this?

Probably the most politically difficult part of the rescission bill was the inclusion of $7 billion in spending reductions for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) seized on that part of the proposal as an opportunity to blame Trump and the GOP for “going after health care dollars that millions of children rely on, especially during outbreaks of the flu and other deadly illnesses.” But the congressional authorization to spend that money expired in September, and Congress provided a new funding stream for CHIP as part of the budget deal passed earlier this year. Wiping out this spending authority would not have affected CHIP’s ability to provide services to anyone.

If Republicans aren’t going to be serious about fiscal discipline, Democrats are not about to take their place. “I am disappointed by this Congress’ failure to even pretend it takes fiscal responsibility seriously,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in a statement after the vote. “It is time for Congress to grow up and acknowledge that government won’t be able to do anyone any good or fund any politician’s priority when it goes broke.”

Today President Donald Trump signed an executive order that purports to end the separation of migrant families while maintaining his administration’s “zero tolerance” approach to illegal border crossing. “We want security and insist on security for our country,” Trump told reporters at a White House briefing. “At the same time, we have compassion. We want to keep families together. It’s very important. I’ll be signing something in a little while that’s going to do that.”

Some 2,300 children have been separated from their parents and held in cage-like juvenile detention facilities in the last month, thanks to the Trump administration’s policy of criminally prosecuting every adult detained on suspicion of illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Under today’s executive order , those prosecutions will continue, but the defendants with children won’t be automatically separated from them. The order says “it is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”

Until today, the Trump administration had argued both that it had no family separation policy and that the law required it to break up families in order to prosecute the parents. “Congress and the courts created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a press conference on Monday.

Trump’s executive order maintains this argument while backtracking on the policy it was used to defend. “It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law,” says the order, which is titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation.”

Potentially making Trump’s new course of action difficult are a series of court decisions requiring the government to place immigrant children in federal custody with an adult guardian “without unnecessary delay” (typically 20 days) and to keep children who are in federal custody in the “least restrictive conditions” possible. Trump’s executive order instructs Attorney General Jeff Sessions to request an amendment to these decisions allowing the government to hold families in detention together while criminal charges against the parents run their course.

Two legislative proposals in the Senate would make any temporary suspension of family separations more permanent. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would bar the separation of families unless there is clear evidence that children are being abused or trafficked. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is sponsoring similar legislation that would prohibit family separation, expand family detention centers, and provide more immigration judges to adjudicate asylum claims. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said legislation is unnecessary, since the president already has the authority to stop family separation.

Trump’s executive order gives Nielsen the authority to construct new family detention centers as needed, and it instructs Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prioritize the adjudication of immigration cases involving families. The order leaves open the possibility that some family separations could continue. The government will not detain families together when there is “concern that detention of an alien child with the child’s alien parent would pose a risk to the child’s welfare” or when “available resources” do not allow it. The three family detention centers the federal government currently maintains are reportedly filled to near capacity.

There is no mention in Trump’s executive order about whether families that have already been seperated will be reunited.

“OBAMA KEPT THEM IN CAGES,” screams the headline at The Drudge Report. “WRAPPED THEM IN FOIL.” Which seems like an odd way to advertise the virtues of President Donald Trump’s freshly discontinued policy of separating children from parents caught entering the country without permission, although perhaps I’m not the target audience.

The story Drudge links to is even odder. “HERE ARE THE PHOTOS OF OBAMA’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT DETENTION FACILITIES THE MEDIA WON’T SHOW YOU,” The Daily Caller proclaims. “Photos of border detention facilities from the Obama-era, taken during 2014, look nearly identical to the ones taken during the Trump era,” reporter Benny Johnson writes. “You never see them, however. Here they are, taken in 2014 during a media tour of Obama-era detention facilities in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona.” It’s like a Möbius strip of sophomoric right-wing media criticism. THE MSM NEVER SHOWS YOU THESE PHOTOS THAT WERE TAKEN BY THE MSM!

More in that vein from professional Trump booster Ryan Fournier:

The media won’t show you this, but these are photos taken during President Obama’s term of detention facilities in 2014. Why was there no outrage when he was doing it? What is so different now? pic.twitter.com/elyzNtUVV6

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) June 20, 2018

To say that there was “no outrage” about Obama’s detention facilities is to tacitly admit that looking up news articles published in 2014 is just too heavy a lift. The opportunistic-outrage charge gets levied at Reason every time we write about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies. “Children in cages in 2014 was okay because Obama,” one self-described “Classical Liberal” recently tweeted at us.

Yeah, no.

“Obama Is No BFF of Latino Immigrants or Civil Liberties,” says another Reason headline from the time. “How Obama’s War on Drugs Destroys Legal Immigrant Families,” goes another. The search engine is your friend.

To the extent that a through line can be detected within family-separation whataboutism, it’s something like TRUMP GOOD, MEDIA/DEMOCRATS BAD. Fair enough. But today’s most dexterous whataboutists are depriving themselves of a key insight today that may cushion the blow of tomorrow’s disappointments. Yes, yes, it’s true—you can even find it on my Twitter feed and Reason archive!—that some of the politicians criticizing Trump’s policies this past week spent other periods in their lives echoing some of the president’s immigration rhetoric and policy recommendations. Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Bill Clinton; the list is long.

But what do we learn when examining how pols—very much including Donald Trump—have changed their minds or emphases on a given hot-button issue? One perennial lesson is that most politicians are full of dukey and hold their fingers to the winds of public opinion. But if you hate John McCain and Bill Clinton as much as the average Trump enthusiast does, shouldn’t it make you feel less comfortable, not more, that they sounded like immigration hawks precisely when they felt that their re-election chances were threatened (Clinton in 1995-96, McCain in 2010)?

It’s easy to notice when politicians you despise make insincere, absolutist promises they cannot possibly fulfill on issues you care deeply about. But what if the new guy you do like, who only truly came to this issue in the course of trying to win a highly competitive Republican primary, was also pandering? What if it turns out you cannot “seal the border,” can’t get Mexico to pay for a wall, and can’t even build the sucker yourself without bulldozing the whole notion of private property? What if, in the course of pursuing these impossible zero-tolerance dreams, you employ police-state tactics that overwhelming majorities of Americans find abhorrent?

When all that happens (it’s really not an if), it may be time to examine your own assumptions about what is possible, let alone desirable, in immigration policy. Until then, though, TRUMP GOOD, MEDIA/DEMOCRATS BAD.

From the archives:

President Trump announced today that he would sign an executive order ending automatic separation of immigrant families that enter the country illegally, following days of public outrage over the practice.

Not everyone is against these separations, however. A recent poll found that 97 percent of Democrats were against it, as were 68 percent of independents. Just 35 percent of Republicans shared this perspective.

Many conservative opinion-makers and most national Republican politicians are aghast at the routine warehousing of children and babies resulting from the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance approach to illegal immigration. But it seems they may be out of step with conservatives in the heartland, and not for the first time.

The Week’s Matthew Walther has an interesting suggestion about why “Trump country is unfazed by the child separation crisis.” Trump supporters in the rural Midwest, Walther says, routinely interact with soulless government bureaucracies that vindictively break apart families. Take child protective services: Just a few days ago, my colleague Lenore Skenazy wrote about a case in Minnesota where cops came to take away a woman’s 10-month-old baby because they thought the mother wasn’t sufficiently freaked out about the kid’s cough.

Denizens of Trump country, Walther writes, are accustomed to being treated like this:

The women my wife sees enjoying weekly supervised visits with their children at the local public library in our small Michigan town live in childless homes because their toddler fell down once or because a member of their family was convicted of taking or selling drugs. Parenting is something they have learned to conceive of as a kind of privilege rather than as a right.

They are accustomed to other sorts of random cruelties as well. Many of them live every day with the harassment of police officers, the condescension of teachers and social workers and the rest of the educational and public health bureaucracy, the leers of judges, the scolding of doctors and nurses, the incompetence of Veterans Affairs, even the smirks of grocery store clerks who seem to think that a woman who buys a case of beer while her children are in the shopping cart or when she is using food stamps to purchase her other groceries belongs to a lower order of mammals.

Such treatment is often callous, and often unjustified. But why would being mistreated by CPS or Veterans Affairs make people less sympathetic to immigrant families enduring similar cruelty? If anything, one might expect them to be more outraged about family separation.

Many of the disadvantaged people who deal regularly with CPS probably do feel that way. Black families are disproportionately likely to be split up by the government, but this experience has not hardened their hearts against immigrant families. On the contrary, black Americans overwhelmingly oppose the border wall and believe children who came to the country illegally should be able to remain and become citizens. According to a Quinnipiac poll from April, dissatisfaction with Trump’s policies regarding undocumented immigrant children was actually higher among black Americans than among Hispanic Americans.

Why would white Americans with good reason to resent the government for breaking up families nevertheless seem to take ICE’s side in the current controversy, while black Americans in the same situation do not? Maybe Trump country is fazed by immigrant family separations to the exact extent that Trump himself is. Now that Trump seems ready to address the issue, I would expect to see a lot of supporters saying the president is right to keep the families together.

“Deregulate everything,” reads a typical tweet from Cliff Maloney, the avuncular national president of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a student group started by former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) on the heels of his insurgent runs for president in 2008 and 2012.

With chapters on 900 campuses, YAL is fast-growing and increasingly visible. Its mission is to identify and train political activists who can start conversations about limited government and individual freedom in new and interesting ways. (YAL’s giant “free-speech beach balls,” on which people can write anything they want, have caused a commotion on more than a few campuses.) Unlike many other libertarian groups, YAL also endorses candidates for office.

I caught up with Maloney at FEEcon, the annual gathering in Atlanta sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education, to talk about the midterm elections, whether Donald Trump is good or bad for libertarians, and what to expect at YAL’s national convention in July.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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Back in my teen years, I spent hours nearly every single afternoon hovering around the game machines at a local strip mall arcade within walking distance of my home down in Sanford, Florida. If I had nothing else to do, that’s where I spent my time. If I had things to do, well, sometimes I played video games instead of doing those things. Virtually all my free time was absorbed in video games (oh, and Dungeons & Dragons as well).

I was also a deeply depressed, closeted gay teen at the darkest, cruelest point of the AIDS crisis, terrified that if anybody found out I’d get the crap beaten out of me, and if I ever acted on my urges I’d get sick and die.

It’s not difficult to imagine why I might have wanted to distract myself in a candy-colored world of maze-dwelling Pac-people, bug-shaped invading space aliens, and pixelated spy games. I’m not sure if I would have survived my 1980s puberty without video games as an omnipresent distraction.

Under new draft guidelines by the World Health Organization (WHO), I would be classified as having a “gaming disorder,” which they are attempting to present as a standalone psychological addiction. There has been debate for years, decades even, among psychologists and pundits as to whether video game addiction is a real thing. On Monday, WHO took the next step to declare that it is.

This is a tremendously bad idea, designed to scapegoat technology and divert resources. People who have experience with video games—as well as those who understand the complex reasons why people’s lives become consumed with them—should resist the push to separate game addiction into its own special category.

WHO is careful not to define the “disorder” as simply spending a ton of time playing video games. But its definition is still vague and bounded by a desire to fit the diagnosis into a substance abuse template. Here’s their proposed definition, to be published next year, from a Q&A:

Gaming disorder is defined in the draft 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as a pattern of gaming behavior (“digital-gaming” or “video-gaming”) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.

For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.

That was definitely me throughout most of high school. One time, furious at me due to my tendency to prioritize video games over everything else, my dad actually destroyed a home gaming system (an Atari 2600) in front of me with a hammer. It didn’t stop my gaming. Of course it didn’t. The “addiction” wasn’t caused by the existence of the technology. It was caused my desperate need for activities that took up enough mental real estate that I did not spend that time thinking about horrible I felt almost every waking hour of the day.

And that’s one of the reasons many psychology experts have been reluctant to call video game addiction a separate disorder. From The New York Times reporting of WHO’s new designation:

But some mental health professionals insist that gaming disorder is not a stand-alone medical condition. Rather, they see it as a symptom or a side effect of more familiar conditions, such as depression or anxiety.

“We don’t know how to treat gaming disorder,” said Nancy Petry, a psychology professor and addiction expert with the University of Connecticut. “It’s such a new condition and phenomenon.”

But is it really new? One person who founded an online support group for people trying to reduce their own gaming habits says there’s “a massive tsunami coming that we’re not prepared for.”

To this recovered gaming addict, this all sounds exactly the same as it always does. The entirety of the nearly 40-year history of video game culture media coverage is full of this story repeating over and over and over again. People were saying the exact same thing about arcades. Then about home consoles. About online gaming. About every single development in video game entertainment. We should be drowning under this alleged “tsunami” by this point. But we’re not.

Imagine if every time a new television show were a runaway hit, there were fearful news stories that we’re increasingly addicted to television. This is what video game news coverage is like. The latest target is Fortnite, an online battle arena that has taken off massively over the past few months. Yes, people play the game for hours at a time. They used to play League of Legends for hours at a time. And before that, there was World of Warcraft. And before that, there was EverQuest. And you can follow that path all the way back to Space Invaders if you have a mind to. There’s this constant myth that video games were some fringe little hobby that blew up as the internet blew up. The reality is that ever since video games were introduced as a consumer product in America, they’ve been enormously popular. The top video games make more millions more in revenue than the top movies.

The nature of video game panic cycles is eerily similar to the freakout about every single new drug trend that’s going to destroy us all. Every single Halloween now there are fearmongering stories on the local news fretting that somebody’s going to hand out marijuana edible candies to trick-or-treating tots, as though they didn’t run the exact same story the previous year, and nothing of the sort happened.

The new twist on this story now is the money to be made from flogging video game addiction as its own thing. If this “gaming disorder” remains in this manual when it’s published next year, public health agencies in many countries will be encouraged to recognize it. That’s the point. WHO notes in its Q&A that its manual “is used by medical practitioners around the world to diagnose conditions and by researchers to categorize conditions.” There are potential consequences of WHO formally classifying gaming disorder as a separate diagnosis.

One quote in the Times writeup gives away the game: A classification by WHO can be used as justification for redirecting spending. “Experts” on the condition often have a financial stake in having problem gaming formally recognized. They want health insurance companies to be required to cover treatment. They want money for more research.

“It’s going to untie our hands in terms of treatment, in that we’ll be able to treat patients and get reimbursed,” said Dr. Petros Levounis, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “We won’t have to go dancing around the issue, calling it depression or anxiety or some other consequence of the issue but not the issue itself.”

I’m telling the story of my own past because I think it’s profoundly dangerous to look at the kind of behavior I exhibited as a teen this way. I certainly would not have been well served by therapist who believed I was in thrall to some kind of uniquely powerful or dangerous technology, or who thought addressing the underlying questions of why the addiction was happening counted as “dancing around the issue.”

I’m still a hard-core gamer (I’m currently a closed beta tester for Magic: The Gathering Arena), but I don’t suffer from “gaming disorder.” I actually haven’t played any games at all for the last few days—something that would have been unthinkable to me as a teen. What changed? The world changed. My life changed. I don’t have to be afraid of being gay. I don’t to have to live in fear of AIDS. I don’t feel powerless about the world around me. I have control over my own life.

There was nothing about my relationship with games that needed to change. It was my relationship with everything else that needed fixing. There’s an unhelpful bias in the way WHO describes gaming addiction in the assumption that “personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning” are inherently more rewarding than playing video games, and if they’re not, than the problem lies within the gamer. That’s not always the case, particularly for people who feel depressed, alone, and powerless, and that’s exactly why it’s really important to consider that gaming addiction is a symptom, not the cause. If people are turning to video games to “escape reality” as “experts” warn, isn’t the actual most logical step to simply ask, “Is there something about our reality that needs fixing?”

Bonus link: Peter Suderman explained in Reason magazine in 2017 why we shouldn’t panic about young men dropping out of the employment market to find personal fulfillment in playing video games.