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Friday, November 23, 2012

The Good Wife

    There was a line on Waiting for the Knock, an episode of The Good Wife that aired about a month ago. It has stuck with me. I'm gonna let David Sims on the A.V. Club describe it:
Will hopes to use this as an opportunity to poach that $20 million-a-year chunk, although he expresses reservations to Clarke about the risk factor. But Clarke tells him to go for it, even though it’d put further stink on the firm. “Money respects money,” he muses, perfectly wisely. They already are corrupted by representing Bishop, why worry what side of his affairs they cover?
    People are basically animals. People with money are perhaps a little more cold blooded than people without money. People without money have nothing to lose and so can be stampeded into all kinds of foolishness, like war, or cult religions, or building pyramids.
    Rumor has it that there has been a marked decline in violent crime in the United States over the last umpteen years. One theory promoted by supporters of Law & Order is that more effective enforcement techniques and harsher prison sentences are the cause. Another theory, from Freakanomics, is that unwanted children grow up to become criminals, and therefor legalising abortion reduced the number of unwanted children and so the number of criminals.
    I have another theory: it's the proliferation of video games. People need something to do, and if nobody gives them something to do, they will find something on their own, and on their own it is just as likely to be criminal as not. Give the people video games and suddenly they have something to do. If they have something to do, they aren't out making trouble.
    Therefor, by logical extension (insert Latin phrase that means the same thing), all the trouble in the Middle East could be solved by giving them video games.
    This is how Pharaohs ancient civilization in Egypt survived for so long, they gave the people something to do: building pyramids.

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