Joe Lieberman, The Senator Who Tried To Ban Mortal Kombat, Has Passed Away

Looking at the level of realism/violence in games from that era is positively quaint. I wonder what his reaction was after seeing the insanely-detailed body horror of the more recent MK games.

He was a Connecticut senator for four terms and I voted for him twice: first against Weicker and not again until it was him or Ned Lamont, and I don’t regret either vote. I disagreed with him on most issues, but he was sane and decent. If you’re in your 50s and someone shows you a reel of MK fatalities and tells you that’s being marketed to children, you might feel the same as he did. The ESRB seems to have worked out okay.

This seems like a petty reason to celebrate a man’s death.

Trying to ban video games wasn’t even the worst thing he did. He was one of the most rigidly conservative democrats ever and tried to gimp the party at every turn. He firebombed the public option from the affordable care act, for one. He was a shill. Hate to speak ill of the dead but as far as his politics, f that guy.

@KidRisky no one is celebrating, just stating fact, but there are better reasons. His politics were abhorrent. He’s one of the big reasons the affordable care act lost the public option. He almost ran as John McCains running mate instead of Sarah palin. As a human being, I do not judge; as a politician, you had to vote for the lesser of two evils, and he may have been the lesser. I don’t judge your vote either. But his politics were awful. And he was about as pro-war as they come. His decisions led to lives lost and destroyed, more fatalities than mortal kombat ever had.

@Andee yeah in his defense (not that I’m defending him), the modern MK games are disgusting. So is their gameplay bankruptcy

I was also not especially fond of him for the same reasons as other people have already done a good job in listing. I have to say, that congressional hearing on game violence was laughably stupid, despite there being real stakes there. Nintendo's representative there shamelessly tried to use it as a way to market against Sega in a cynical way, but that's another matter. That lieberman said he would ban those games constitutionally sure says a lot, considering there was nothing unconstituitional about them and the required amendment would be difficult to write.

He was a mainstream Democrat. That’s just a fact. This isn’t the forum for political debates, so I won’t try to provide context for the above criticisms (which I understand) but I’ll point out that if you’re determined to hate everyone who held Lieberman’s views you won’t have much bandwidth left for anything else.