The recent massacred by the son of one of the directors of the Hunger Games points to the need to reign in Hollywood violence. The killer attacked his victims with knives, guns and a BMW. Clearly, the tools are irrelevant to how the man committed his foul deeds.
The fact is, he was encouraged in his attack by the pervasive culture of Hollywood violence.
I propose that we tax violent movies at 20% of gross ticket sales and use the profits to pay for mental health treatments. We should also impose a 20% surcharge tax on the salaries of anyone associated with the production or distribution of such movies. Such a tax would not just provide a windfall for treatment of mental health issues in the general population, it would also go far to redress the income inequality problem that so many of the Hollywood elite express concern about.
Just as with the cigarette tax, wherein tobacco producers are forced to pay for the health of their customers, so too Hollywood should be forced to pay for the violence it promotes. I look forward to a widespread embrace of this initiative by everyone who works in the film industry.
11 comments:
The Hollywood culture may have encouraged his twisted worldview, but it didn't cause it. This punk was a psychopath, plain and simple. These creatures are perverse from the womb. It doesn't matter if they come from a decent family or a rotten one, studies done over the years show creeps like this start going bad very early in life. And no matter what the families try to do to help them, they successfully manipulate and maneuver to get their own way in life. They don't have a conscience, so there's no way to reason with them about what's right or wrong. All the psychiatric help in the world can't help people like this young man, because they aren't mentally ill, they're morally depraved.
"These creatures are perverse from the womb."
That's some insight you must have. I suppose if you could see which creatures were "perverse from the womb", then you would volunteer to abort those creatures and save the world from future massacres?
Steve is right, especially when you consider a case in which the Hollywood culture is the sole food with which a person is being fed and there exists nothing else in that person's life to contradict it with the light of truth and love.
And it's not just the "level" of violence in movies. It's the way in which the movies get the viewer to participate or share in its execution, via the usually "morally neutral" narrative.
Paul, have you ever dealt with a psychopath? I have, twice. The history of the ones I knew and the ones I read about are the same. Regardless of the family environment they grew up in, they were evil from their earliest days. These twisted individuals know right from wrong, they just don't give a damn about it. They have no moral compass from the time they are born.
You make the statement that I should volunteer to abort these creatures. I'm not a psychopath, so that's not an option for me. But these dangerous persons should be isolated from normal, decent society to prevent them from harming other people. We pen up dangerous animals, so I see no reason why we can't do the same for dangerous people who have shown signs of extremely dangerous behavior even as a child. To do something like this to a child may sound heartless, but if the child is heartless, cruel, and physically dangerous to his siblings, family pets, neighborhood children, and others, it would be heartless to allow such a individual the freedom to walk among us. There is no known treatment or cure for those who have the disorder known as psychopathy. This is the only way it can be handled until we know more. For further information on psychopathy, read "Without Conscience" by Robert O. Hare
Read here, here, and here. Psychopathic brain structure doesn't necessarily always lead to socially damaging behaviour.
Great, hello Minority Report. Lock people up for future crimes. Wonderful. Except that we won't have weird psychics predicting a future event; we'll just have panels of psychiatrists and whatnot to assess children and decide whether they should be locked up.
Steve, psychopaths are notorious for lying. This guy is reporting on himself, I don't see any kind of fact checking being done by anyone else on his research. I suspect this man is doing what some homosexual activists do when they do so-called 'research'. Based on my own interactions with Tribe Psychopath, I think it's reasonable to believe this fellow isn't being honest about the scope of his behavior.
Paul, we lock up mentally ill people who haven't committed "future crimes" all the time if their behaviors make them a danger to themselves or others. Psychopaths aren't mentally ill in the classic sense of the term, (they don't have hallucinations) but the lack of a moral compass from early childhood makes them morally insane, and a menace to others long before they appear on a police blotter. Read up on psychopaths in books like "Without Conscience" and you will have a better understanding of why I think the way that I do on this subject.
Steve Dalton, here you go:
http://wdtprs.com/blog/2014/06/creepy-attempted-murder-by-pre-teens-prompts-a-serious-question/
"The pre-teens attempted murder, they told police, to pay homage to a fictional character who they believed was real after reading about him on a website devoted to horror stories."
Paul, I read the story about these girls in the Milwaukee paper. In reading the story, it became clear, the would be killers were already messed up before they got onto that website. One of them said she had no feeling of remorse about the murder attempt. Lack of remorse, one of the main attributes of a psychopath. All the website did was to give them an idea on how to express their depravity.
I also believe these sad girls already have some sort of pre-existing psychosis, as well as psychopathy. They both believed Slender Man was a real person. A psychopath without a psychosis would not be so gullible to believe in his existence.
Both of these little monsters need to be locked away for life. It's a crying shame Wisconsin doesn't have the death penalty, for both of these girls deserve to die for what they did. If they're old and sane enough to understand they were killing somebody, they're old enough to die.
I see now.
You are afraid that if one were to say the culture of violence/gore/brutality is a cause of violence/gore/brutality, then that would remove all responsibility from the perpetrators (which it doesn't). So you go to the other extreme by way of compensation and make them out to be purely demons - which, as it turns out, also removes responsibility from the perpetrators.
Are you an advocate for torture, by the way?
Paul, I hold these girls to be responsible for their crimes. They know what they did was wrong, they just don't have any remorse about it.
Unchecked human nature is responsible for the rotten culture we have now. You argument that society made me do it is pure liberalism. These girls chosed to act on their own free will in attempting to kill their friend. All the Slender Man crap did was to give them an excuse for their crime.
"Purely demons". If I said this (which I didn't) I fail to see if that would remove responsibility for their crimes.
"Advocate for torture"? Read Mark Shea much? He's a real bleeding heart for dangerous criminals like these girl.
Post a Comment