Posted on 07/20/2012 1:29:19 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Making things up and then issuing accusations, is that how you entertain yourself?
What exactly did I make up & exactly what accusation did I make? I simply asked your opinion.
You wanted to know if there were spree killing before video games and rock and roll, that list shows there are. As for quantity, as populations grow the number of nutters does too, also as bureaucracy grows how well recorded these things are grows. There were lots of bad people doing things before Jack the Ripper but he usually gets called the first serial killer because he was the first one to make the papers.
You do know you’re wasting your time right?
According to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, “James Holmes said he was the Joker, enemy of Batman.” But according to your theory, he would have been equally likely to have unloaded on the crowds attending Magic Mike or Moonrise Kingdom. Your problem is you’re tasking science with proving a 100% causal relationship between environment and behaviour, something which is impossible. If that’s your standard, you might as well open the floodgates for free enterprise to market all the drugs, porn and violent conditioning from infancy to adulthood. But we don’t do that. Why? Because where science is useless, a little God-given thing called common sense is supposed to operate.
Here’s some of the completely neutral but really entertaining scenes from the Dark Knight. Joker stuffs a bomb into a wounded bank employee’s mouth; A man’s face is filleted by a knife; another’s is burned half off; a man’s eye is slammed into a pencil; A bomb is crudely stitched inside another man’s stomach, which subsequently explodes; a trussed-up man is bound to a chair and set alight atop a pile of banknotes; a child is terrorized at gunpoint by a man with a melted face. I see no point in viewing torture porn. It’s neither uplifting, nor redeeming, nor entertaining, nor even interesting.
You are incorrect regarding most of your suppositions about me and likely about this killer. If you’ve ever read my FR posts in the past, you forgot them and forgot me. So, on what do you base your insults to me? Not knowledge.
Had there been one or two people carrying, this might have been more like the West Virginia incident where such a massacre was prevented.
You also, as did another poster, ignored the point of my post and argued against something I neither think nor wrote.
Why are so many women I see nowadays on the street dressed all in black, sunshades on at all hours rain or shine? Did they each come up with the idea on their own? How is behaviour influenced, or is it not influenced at all by anything, as some here (presumably fans of comic book films) assert. Is it unchanging, human behaviour, since after all Jack the Ripper was not much different from this fellow?
The fact is, noted by many better thinkers than the fans, authors and filmmakers of comic books, the Western culture has been slouching toward Gomorrah. Do you deny it?
(No usual lame Bible quotes in reply, please!)
It’s not a theory it’s reality. Nutters pick random stuff to go off on all the time. One nutter tries to imitate the assassination that fails in Taxi Driver doesn’t mean it’s the movie’s fault, Hinckley is nuts. Last year in Tucson we had a whacky shooter people tried to blame on all kinds of stuff, mostly conservative media figures, kind of all fell apart when it was revealed the Loughner didn’t watch TV. Everybody wanted to blame Doom for Columbine, completely ignoring the fact that there’s no bombs in Doom and high school kids don’t really look much like the demons you kill in Doom.
Science has already proven why these people go off: because they’re insane. Psychotic people tend to be obsessive. Which means they tend to be super fans of something, but if that thing didn’t exist they’d be a super fan of something else, because obsessive people will always find something to obsess on.
Common sense says that hundreds of millions of people have watched these movies without killing anybody, so blaming the movie for the behavior of ONE person gets a little sketchy.
You don’t actually see most of those things happen, it’s mostly off camera and implied. It’s not torture porn, it’s dramatic tension. Bad guys need to be bad guys.
I brought abortion & doctor killing into the thread because on those rare occasions a doctor or clinic worker are attacked or killed the left demands that controversial pro-life websites (such as the Nuremburg Files) be shut down.
It's a legitimate free speech controversy that's even made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
So, I'm trying to see whether you think such pro-life websites and literature should be shut down. Or at least whether or not they cause such behavior in even a tiny amount of followers, since you proscribe the same to movies & other entertainment you do not like.
And I notice you still have not answered those questions.
You're stating a half-truth in asserting crazy people have and will be among us, and missing the larger point. I don't think anyone is asserting Batman made this guy crazy or was solely responsible for his actions. That shifts the subject, really. This particular nut immersed himself in these dark and violent fantasies spawned for the edification of the masses. But within that population we know, as you point out, will be certain people who will get caught up in the fantasy and becomes real to them (as they're nutz). I don't know what action if any should be undertaken, but it is what it is. Maybe an acceptable risk, maybe not. I'd assume those who produce this crap cannot do better and are putting forth the most consumable product they can, but it appeals to and influences most profoundly the LCD ultimately. To deny these violent, dark fantasy epics-- subcultures to some-- are not influential is naive and dangerous. They are in fact so influential that they induce a tiny percentage of people, unable for a discreet amount of time, to distinguish betwixt fantasy and reality, and then to act out. We just saw this play last night.
Ah, at last a reason to feel superior. Well, here's my well thought out answer: I don't know, and I don't care.
Well stated, thank you.
But there’s always been and always going to be dark and violent fantasies for the wrong people to obsess on the wrong way. Ever read the un-Disneyfied versions of Grimms Fairy Tales? There’s some messed up junk in them. It would be just as easy for a whack job to obsess on Snow White and start cutting out hearts.
I don’t think they are influential to the masses. Look at that murder rate chart I posted earlier. As violent video games (and violent movies along with them) come out and get more and more popular the violent crime rate drops. Now we all know that correlation is not cause, so I’m not saying the games and movies are why the crime rate dropped, BUT with that rate dropping constantly while these games and movies gain popularity it makes a hard sell that the opposite is true, if they’re making people violent then where’s all the violence? People who go nuts are nuts to start with, we know from all the different things people obsess on (basically everything) that it’s not the thing, it’s the person. The question isn’t will this person with the bad tendencies obsess, it’s what are they going to obsess on. Jarold Laughner managed to get himself violently obsessed without watching movies and TV, some people are just screwed up that way.
I am planning on seeing it Sunday in a huge Imax theatre. I can’t wait!
ROFL, yeah, a total overreaction.
But I do bet theaters start a policy of not letting people in wearing comstumes to ANY movie.
But I also read this guy got in from an exit door that someone opened for him.
This is an important point. I believe it actually is to large swaths of adolescents with their developing cognition/emotions and others with deranged minds. To regular stable adults, not at all, since they can view a film production for what it is. The former groups not so much, so they are more fully impacted by it.
Another, even more malignant manifestation of this problem, is the gansta rap subculture. Would you also deny its immense influence on certain groups? Both the direct effects of those who subscribe to it and the indirect consequences to larger society? Surely not. It compels some to lives of lawlessness and hedonism while promoting racial hatred and misogyny.
I doubt you'd deny the latter but I would anticipate you'd say it's a jump too far to conclude that a movie franchise could be complicit in a mass shooting. Unfortunately it isn't so.
Just like that time I took my little girl to see Pokemon: The Movie, and then spent the next several days chasing down total strangers and attempting to squeeze them into tiny metal balls.
(... and you don't even wanna know what happened after that one time I watched Caligula...) ;)
But again the violent crime rates are going down. Doom, the video game that generally is used to start the age of “popular violent entertainment” turns 20 next year, we have an entire generation that has now been brought up in that era, that know no pre-Doom world, and the violent crime rate is down. So if there’s a large swath of adolescents being effected by this entertainment where’s the crimes?
The dirty secret of gangsta rap is that their primary consumer is, and has been for a long time, middle class and higher suburban white kids. And again if there’s a large group “compelled” to lawlessness and hedonism by it where are the crimes?
It’s actually 3 or 4 jumps too far to conclude a movie franchise is complicit in a mass shooting. It’s so many jumps too far as to frankly be a stupid thing to say. Hundreds of millions of people have watched these movies, and 1 of them turned into a nut spree killer, and he didn’t even dye his hair the right color. He didn’t kill ANYBODY because of some movies, he killed because he’s insane. His look and timing might have been inspired by a movie, but somebody that nuts is born, not made, he was gonna snap at some point.
I didn't really mind having to tap dance everywhere, for the next few years afterwards... but following Debbie Reynolds around, every place she went, was bloody murder. ;)
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