I'll admit I more based it on the older games in the series as I didn't play much of Absolution. The trailer was certainly sexualised but it hardly depicts women in some kind of subjugated or helpless role (yes, they die but that's not the point). I'd compare it to something you would see in a Tarantino movie. It was the comments she made about it (she referred to a section where apparently you're incentivised to kill hookers, which is not true).

Yes, she's great at pointing that out.

What's the solution?

Quota's of protagonists sex? Replacing "damsel" with "prince" in distress? Getting rid of chainmail bikinis?

Oh, and how do we propagate that to the entire entertainment industry?

There is nothing wrong with playing a prince and rescuing a princess. There is nothing wrong with the princess being helpless. There is nothing wrong with Femmeshep kicking the shit out of the reapers and saving every being in the known universe, one of the most badass female protagonists around. More female protagonists = great, bring it on, but that's no reason to throw out a trope as old as time (incidentally, a trope enjoyed by a great many women who like to watch sappy romances where the charming fellow rescues the woman from her crappy life...).

Her series predicates on the concept that players are too fucking dumb to understand the difference between real life and the game. That if you play Duke Nukem, you'll walk around slapping girls tits and saying the most inappropriate things you can think of.

It's exactly the same tripe that Jack Thompson was peddling back in the day, games change how you think. And, for most people (ie. the mentally stable...), it was wrong then and it's wrong now. Your upbringing and parental guidance, and the relationship your male role models have with women, are far more likely to determine whether or not a man is likely to be sexist/misogynist than a few games with scantily clad girls needing a big strong man to save them... Society has changed to become more accepting of race, creed, sexual orientation and, of course, women, and it will continue to become so even if the old trope of the princess is in another castle hangs around. It may take generations before inequality dies out, if it ever does. It's not something you can fix by complaining about games.

The idea that an armored knight was helpless if he fell is a common myth, but no more than that. There might have been a few specialized cases of jousting armor that were actually that heavy, but nobody would go armored if all it took to beat them was to knock them over.

True, I think the intention behind the two covers is very different, even if the results are similar. In the Spider-man cover, he looks like a spider who has already wrapped up his helpless terrified prey. And if you know about spiders you know what happens next, it's pretty nasty. The real spider in the lower right corner helps drive home the impression.

Where as with the Spider-woman cover I don't have any real doubt that Milo Manara was trying to make her sexy; that's kind of his thing. He's best known as an erotic artist and his artwork ranges from pinup girl to pretty hardcore porn (which I enjoyed as a young man). Check out his Wikipedia page and the first thing you'll see is that that pose is not one he's new at drawing.

I think where critics go wrong is the idea that sexiness implies sexism. If she were both drawn as sexy and being degraded or made fun of that would qualify as sexism. But there's got to be some room for sensuality without automatically feeling it's a personal insult to all women.

But you yourself have said that everyone is suspect and considered armed and dangerous until proven otherwise...so who is this 'everyone else'?
Small town cops also can be much more difficult to get along with, as they develop the 'us VS them' mentality faster and to a greater severity, being more isolated. That's why they think it's OK to do things like swab pepper spray into the eyes of helpless, immobilized, peaceful protestors.
It sounds like a better idea would be for cops to have to walk in the shoes of a 'suspect' a few times a year...as in having SWAT or other police (not the force that particular cop is part of) called on them and have them and their families treated like the violent armed suspect they treat everyone else as...then perhaps you and they might see the error of your ways (once they've been visited on you and yours, I doubt you would support the violence and angry escalations).

It's the epitome of ignorance to jump to the conclusion that because one sees one side being far worse than the other, that person must be promoting the 'lesser evil'.
It's just as ignorant to jump to the conclusion that empathy for the Palestinian civilians trapped in the giant concentration camp that is Gaza is tantamount to all out support for Hamas and it's tactics. That's a total straw man argument made by those that can't answer the actual issues of an expansionist Israel flexing it's significant military muscles against a trapped, helpless, completely defenseless population that has already been ghettoized into the stone age without qualm, using the blatantly ridiculous excuse of 'defense' for a purely offensive military campaign against a civilian 'quasi-refugee' population. It seems to me that people who make that argument have made the ignant (a stubborn kind of ignorance that can't be cured by education) decision to buy into the (quite well produced, I must admit) Israeli propaganda machine and ignore the indisputable facts.
Both sides are at fault, wrong, bloodthirsty, and bad, one side IS FAR MORE at fault, wrong, bad, and bloodthirsty...or if not more bloodthirsty then at least far better at blood lust sating without conscience.

@mram wasn't arguing for border control in the states. (s)he was saying that gun control in a specific area is meaningless if you can trivially circumvent it by driving for half an hour.

To be honest, I really don't know what the solution is. I genuinely think the problem in the USA is not so much guns, but your attitude to them.

In the developed world, plenty of other countries have lots of guns, but only in the states does this cowboy attitude with guns prevail. I have plenty of friends with guns, but none of them have them for "home defense". The very idea that I'd need a gun to protect myself is alien to me. It's the 21st century, not the wild west.

Possibly the genie is out of the bottle in the US. The argument of "gun control just means that only criminals have guns" might well be true. But if that is the case, how is it that countries like Ireland or New Zealand where even the police force don't carry guns* have lower firearm homicide rates (~1/10th the rate of the US). Surely we should have been overrun by lawless gangs of armed criminals while the police stand helplessly by?

*NZ Police do have access to firearms, but they don't carry them as a rule.

''Teabagger wannabes"-your tired, scripted labels son, an insipid bag of programmed newspeak designed for one simple purpose: To keep you and the minions like yourself as ineffectual and powerless as possible in order to continue feeding human fuel to the power plant as dutiful, helpless Energizer bunnies.

Climate change-The hot-topic for a new age of ineffectuals...something for the insects to rally-around and discuss which produces nay but fodder for the same passive-aggressive types who are being seduced by their desire to trade practical action (whatever that could be) for polemic intercourse with themselves and others like them on the internet....

....people who are passionate to a fault and use forums like this to espouse their anger and frustration with tomes of keystrokes AT and not WITH others they deem unworthy, those ignorant and simpering few with opinions or observations dissimilar to theirs (and lower than 130 I.Q.'s....*cough), who know they are helpless to act to stop the high-speed train of planet-fucking (wage-slave-required and dutifully induced through the programming by adepts of semantic mind-fucking).This delusional empowerment, with all the invisible superpowers of new 'information' gives them the license and ability to do absolutely nothing to correct or marginally disrupt the pace of the so-labeled change while becomming better dicks in doing-so.

This fan-driven subject of climate change they use not only to deride those with any dissenting opinion and doubt regarding the mechanics and unfolding of what our big, blue marble is handing the creatures onnit, but also and most evidently obvious, to bolster their own superiority and self-satisfaction in their ability to process the distraction of disinformation/information/datum-ad-nauseum, and then condense it into how clever they can be in being complete assholes without breaking rules of accepted decorum so they can hear themselves bark, howl, and foment.

Smug, helpless, and irritatingly predictable in their helplessness to do anything more effectual than to add more used motor oil to the bonfire of their own vanity.

I would ask these irritating bugs what ARE you prepared to do to alter the course of the 'changes' in the 'terminal climate' described above? Recycle and drive a hybrid? Sacrifice anything but another trip to a polling-station? Oh I know, sit at your computer keyboard and grow more incensed while going-on with your business of spouting and shouting from a mountain of trash that you add-to daily by converting oxygen to more life-giving C02 and buying shit you don't need with paper you are forced to trade for 'bads and disservices??'

Thought so.

Fuck global warming in it's ass and let the planet shake and quiver with change as humans and/or their own slave-like actions continue to feed the earth-furnace. The bigger fish to fry and serve head-on have you by the short and curlies and we're all bio-fuel for future generations

Yep.

Part of that is laziness/selfishness/greed, etc. but I bet that part of it is also a sense of helplessness or of being overwhelmed at the scale of the problem.

I don't sign internet petitions for anything anymore, because I believe them to be utterly useless as a means to affect change (see also "slacktivist" and "hashtagactivist" for equally useless activities)

Meaningful change is slow.

In some cases (like poverty) that's incredibly detrimental to those affected, but over time things will (hopefully) improve. Certainly humans are generally better off today than they were 100 years ago.

In other cases (like climate change), it's fucking catastrophic.

What's the solution? Damned if I know....

"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

-O'Brien to Winston, Room 101

Payday loans EDB, in the United States: Fast-money strip-center locations have been popping-up all over in every city now like warts on a leper, for the past 25 years, operating in a regulatory blind spot. They loan you money at an exorbitant, unfair interest rate fully expecting and banking on the person loaned not being able to pay back the loan according to contract then penalize with fines when the debt can't be repaid. Criminal organizations have relied upon USURY as a means of extracting money from helpless or uneducated and desperate people for centuries. Mafia organizations the world over have relied on this practice since they began. I don't expect the federal government to do anything much different as much of their activity has been criminal for quite some time.

Inhumane, predatory, sick.

SO it looks perfectly reasonable at face value??I call bullshit when I see it before it happens usually... Cenk here sees it as a wonderful way to create revenue out of thin air by taking the model of the payday loan places that already exist over, not unlike a mafia organization takes over territory of another criminal's organization.

If you think I'm skeptical you are correct, if you think I am wrong that is your prerogative. If you choose to block my comments or 'ignore' them, I don't care at all-It simply proves the point I make continually here, that those who chose to place their hands over their ears, or their heads in a sand-bucket are minion, and the few dissenting opinions are met with torch and pitchfork, either because of the language used to do so is too caustic, or perhaps that the truths in my babble that are too horrible and painful to consider are much easier to deride and deny or to even consider, to damaged sensibilities combined with an ego the size of Asia.

I also consider that your stance on guns and gun ownership as equally skewed, as is much of your political rhetoric. But hey, there are a lot of folks here who think the way you do. I happen to be one of the other people.

And again, Cenk, yer a pompous git whose ego is also bloated beyond fat, and your smarmy, smug delivery makes me want to hack-up my lunch.

He's right in that Democrats think everyone (except themselves, the elitists) are helpless and can only make it with the help of the gov't.
Huckabee is just making the point that women don't need help from the gov't.
Actually, Democrats don't really believe women are helpless, they just want women to think they are helpless w/o the gov't to help them. It makes them more likely to vote Democrat, and this empowers that one political party, which is the ultimate prize for politicians.

1) Don't be confused, and think that I've decided the casting of ant colonies for art is justified. I'm pointing out that the issue is more complex than many, including yourself, may realize. I find the video disturbing... and unlike our resident @ant have not voted for it.
2) Please look up Godwin's law. Using Nazi analogies generally undermines your argument.. it just makes it hard for people to accept that you have thought things through.
3) But hey, assuming that you have thought things through, let's continue with your analogy:
Perhaps the holocaust analogy does work, but to be sure the fire ants are not the Gypsies, they are the Germans. Fire ants are rapidly spreading across the world, drastically reducing both the abundance and diversity of native species. This includes native ant species, as well as a huge range of arthropod prey, potentially plants (through seed consumption), and even small vertebrates (e.g. lizards and ground nesting birds).
If you are arguing from a pacifistic stance, that violence against another creature is never justified, even if it is in the defense of others more helpless or in self-defense, I thoroughly respect that position. Although any violence turns my stomach; I cannot say that I agree.. for sure, the next time I get an infection, I will take antibiotics; the next time I see purple loosestrife, I will tear it from its roots.