Giggling at small-town cops having to deal with pictures of nearly nekkid flesh this afternoon.  OMG its obscene!  The store manager didn’t follow our blatently unconstitutional demand to remove the material.  It’s an Abercrombie and Fitch store in a mall – what do you expect?  I take it they don’t have Victoria’s Secret down there. 

[The police spokesman] confirmed that one [of the photos] depicts three shirtless young men from the back, walking through a field. The man in the lead appears to be about to pull up his jeans, which have slipped down enough to reveal his upper buttocks.
The same image is displayed on the Abercrombie Web site.
The other image is of a woman who is topless and whose “breast is displayed with her hand covering just the nipple portion,” Bernstein said. “You could still pretty much see the rest of the breast.”

The full article at the Virginian-Pilot’s site includes the allegedly obscene photo [quite safe for work].  I wonder what they’re going to do now that the local newspaper has posted one of the seized photographs online.  Stop the intertubes.  No more nekkididity in ‘merika. 

“[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.”

That piece of #$% jurisprudence is from a federal judge’s ruling last month that video games aren’t entitled to First Amendment protection, as reported at Salon.com [via Ernie the Attorney] and CNN.com. Fortunately, this idea is already in conflict with a previous ruling from the Seventh Circuit and thus, hopefully, dead on arrival.

I suppose the question I should be asking is why people get so hung up on the medium rather than the contents of the message? The case at hand involved graphically violent video games. I prefer a game called Civilization: Call to Power (and I loved its predecessor, Civilization, on my old Amiga, and later on the Mac). The goal of the game is to lead your civilization to global domination. Among other strategic actions, players must weigh the benefits of internal vs. international trade; weigh industrialization vs. environmental damage; budget for the competing concerns of scientific research and military hardware; and evaluate which government structure is best for their goals (despotism, fascism, democracy, communism, etc, all have strengths AND weaknesses to be evaluated and reevaluated as situtations change). If people got together face-to-face and discussed these issues, even in the context (or pretext) of a game, the conversations would have to be entitled to the highest level of First Amendment protection. Why should the standard be any different because the medium is new?