January 3, 2013
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Violent media poisoning nation’s soul, says moron
There’s no comment section I can find on Seattle PI, so, here’s what I emailed in response to the imbecile who wrote this pathetic claptrap:
If violent media is “poisoning the nation’s soul”, then why is violent crime roughly half what it was in 1991? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time )
Games and movies and TV are more violent now than in 1991, we agree — and violent crime is *dramatically* lower, despite the economic problems that often cause an increase in crime.
It’s funny you don’t mention this, but you DO mention Dave Grossman. Let’s see, 14 years ago, we had a homicide rate between 6.8 and 5.7, as the 1998 figures aren’t in the chart I’m referencing. In 2010, as you see, we have a homicide rate of 4.8. This means Mr. Grossman’s predictions are proven wrong, and it takes <1 minute to find this out — but you fail to mention this inconvenient truth. Why is that?
Comments (3)
Yeah, definitely a moron. But to indulge my Devil’s Advocate impulse (or Moron’s Advocate in this case, and I’m really having to force myself) crime could have gone down despite the violence, for other reasons (vastly more widespread availability of concealed carry permits, for instance).
Now that I’ve gotten that over with: does this guy not understand the difference between depicting and advocating? Or did we see totally-different versions of Dark Knight Rises? I saw heroic individuals refusing to be cowed by violence, good resisting evil, and a condemnation of mob rule. I wonder, if this guy were to watch Ten Commandments, would he say Cecil B. DeMille was inciting people to enslave Jews to make bricks?
Obviously, there are many factors that drive crime up or down, and barring multiple parallel universes we can play with, we can’t easily isolate all factors. An aging population and fewer unwanted children due to easier access to contraceptives are obviously likely factors, among many others, and everyone has their own biases to toss into the mix. But there is virtually no real correlation, never mind causation, between the violence and sex in a culture’s entertainment and the violence in that society. (Hell, the nations with the largest murder rates — literally an order of magnitude more than America’s — have effectively no real local media or culture at all.) Japan is rightly known for its extreme violence and pornography, and it has a nearly negligible crime rate. Meanwhile, over in India, the prudery of the media is well known… and what’s the big news story out of India these days? (Obviously, that’s an anecdote, not a statistic. Doing some actual research, which takes no time, it seems India’s murder rate is comparable to the United States — 5.5/100,000 in 2004 vs. 5.9 for the US in 2004.)
Movies and videogames as a cause for crime are a particularly moronic scapegoat, because since nearly 100% of the population under 30 has played video games and watches violent movies (and it is the young who commit the most crimes, esp. violent crimes; us old farts prefer to embezzle), you’re always going to get a positive response. You might as well ask, “Did you drink milk?” or “Have you ever seen a dog?”, for all the utility you will get.
I absolutely enjoy watching the most hideous, gore-filled, slaughter-fests imaginable. (My wife doesn’t, so I save them for when she’s out of town. Some guys watch porn under those circumstances, I watch “Teenage Cheerleader Chainsaw Massacre XI”.) This has in no way inured me to real violence. I get seriously squicked watching any kind of actual injury, surgery, or so on. There’s an infamous 1970s gorefest, “Cannibal Holocaust”, I think, it was released under many names, that included actual footage of animals being slaughtered. I couldn’t watch it. The fake gore, performed with special effects on human actors, did not cause a visceral emotional reaction, but the real thing, which I instantly knew was real — you can tell, especially with older movies — repulsed me absolutely. Hell, I dread the day one of my cats manages to catch a mouse; dealing with the leftovers really bothers me. (Neither of the current two has managed this feat, but other cats I’ve had, have, and usually want to show off their skill to Daddy.)
I have been watching violent movies since I was old enough to get away with it, I’ve been playing video games since the dawn of the pixel, and the total number of violent crimes I’ve committed is 0. That’s also the number of fist fights I’ve been in, the number of times I’ve abused a child or an animal, etc.
Hey, somebody had to at least try to argue the guy’s case intelligently. He obviously can’t do it for himself.
But on re-reading and noting the guy’s politics, it does reflect something that I’ve noticed for a while: today’s liberals (like this guy) aren’t liberals as the word used to mean. No, I don’t mean that they’re not 19th-century classical liberals. I mean that they’re not even Baby Boomer liberals. Those that call themselves liberal or progressive now are, for the most part, actually communitarians. Here we have a progressive from the San Francisco Chronicle advocating a return to Hays Code Lite.