“Lego sets have become increasingly violent over time,” laments Rebecca Givens Rolland at WBUR’s “Cognoscenti” webpage, claiming that “promoting a hyped-up, battle-scarred society, we’re actually laying the foundation for a generation of kids to act these fantasies out.”
Citing a “study” published by the San Francisco-based so-called Public Library of Science’s “PLOS One” website, which “accepts scientifically rigorous research, regardless of novelty”—and apparently regardless of relevance or utility—Rolland wrings her hands that, “When we play with those Lego sets ... we are practicing war.”
Yet as Greg Camp writes at Guns.com, “Surely she’s aware that in fantasy play among boys, competition and a desire to dominate are normal, not something to panic over or to medicate away.” Indeed, instead of trying to silence, smother or annihilate the competitive spirit and need for self-preservation that are inborn traits of all living things, maybe Rolland should reflect on the fact that those evolutionary instincts, over millions of years, are why she exists in the first place—and leave her kids’ Legos alone.
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