[shadowfyr]

1. Depends.. Its possible to make "small" strides and gain ground, since the number of wackos is small. However, you could run into the BS nonsense you get with video games. AO games are rarely made because, "No one buys them". only **they are rarely made, so there are few good ones to buy**. Not a huge problem, except that those small groups have a lot of people in power right now (they have been pushing to get them in since long before the 1950s, when the whole BS about nuclear families got shoved onto the TV), so because those games are "interactive" they get an AO rating for content that, if it was in a movie, would be NC-17.

2. We have been "picking our battles" all along, at least as a nation. Some have fought hard against the downward spiral, unlike the silent majority, but most of the time its not been the game maker who just wants to add realism to a game or big companies that wants to kiss the ass of everyone, so they can maybe get a few thousand more copies sold. No, the people choosing to fight this trend have often been ones like Rockstar Games, which none of us, if we had the guts ourselves to do something, would want on *leading* side. Not because they are wrong per say, though they kind of do go overboard, but simply because, when the game industry is in the Elvis stage, and lots of morons are calling it devil games (just like they called rock devil music), you don't intentionally dig up a Marilon Manson look alike to represent your concerns.

The problem is, if *you* don't pick the fight, then who will? Well... They will, they have been picking the same fight since the days when a women showing her ankles at the beach was pornographic and punishable by law in some places. They have mostly been losing, because society as a whole has moved away from their idiocies. But we have lost out courage. We would rather, "wait until its the right time to do something", and blog about it, than go out in the real world and do the equivalent of burning bras. They however never have, and never will, stop fighting the battles we won't, with 180 degree opposite goal in mind from what we think is reasonable. You don't win a war by retreating from every battle. And make no mistake, these people and their thinking, has been with us for centuries, and while the battle lines have shifted, they have *never* once stopped long enough to smell a flower or look at a painting, without, in the back of their minds, thinking of some way they might use the existence of flowers or the content of the painting to wage war on people who don't believe as they do.

We are very tolerant, even those of us that are also strident and loud about our opinions. They **literally** think that tolerance means, "We won't actually make it illegal for you to think that we are wrong, but if you don't **act** like you agree with us 100%, you are not being tolerant of us, and we will cry persecution." How is, "picking your battles", going to do anything? They are already lobbing grenades at the wall, and you want us to what, pick a wall that has fewer holes in it? Forgive me if, while I do agree taking the extreme path to fighting the battle is not a good thing, that doing nothing, because they *might* personally take notice of you, instead of attacking the fools that are fighting, is an unsound and dangerously stupid tactical choice when *they* are the ones picking the battles and the battle fields.