Violence in entertainment.

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There seems to be a lot of violence in entertainment these days. What is your opinion about it?

One word:

"Battlebots"!

Bring back the Battlebots show on Comedy Central, and you will get your fill of violence- all guilt-free!

Reality is much worse. They don't show half of it on the news.

That show was awesome

Biohazard, Son Of Whyachi

but ya, there doesn't need to be censorship in media of sex or violence imo

that's the responsibility of parents, not government

I stopped watching GoT because it was so sociopathic.

Violence in the name of good isn't disturbing (see WW2 or Noble Knights in a movie)

but cruel violence as shown in GoT or Walking Dead is quite disturbing.

"Good" is just another way of saying "our side".

Violence is natural for humans. You stand here before us stand upon a pile of death. If one is to shame violence it is to shame human nature.

So?

Don't like it, don't watch it. But please don't impose your views and the way you want entertainment on other who like a good violent show or movie.
I personally like violent shows, movies, games and I don't want anyone telling me it's wrong to watch it, plus I've never hurt anyone in my life, I've never even hurt a fly, and when for example I see a spider in my home I don't smash it like others do, I take on a piece of paper and blow it outside, just to say, violent entertainment doesn't influence others to commit violent acts.
And last time I checked I've never butchered an innocent women with an Axe or a Chainsaw, and I've seen a load of horror and violent movies, just like I've never taken part in a major orgy with 100's of weird sexual positions and practices, and I've seen a lot of porn when I was a teen.

Censorship is worse than fictional violence.

I voted 'fictional violence doesn't inspire real violence to any degree sufficient to worry about'.

I quoted your intro because you said 'these days' but actually this has been a hot controversy for almost 100 years. In the late 1920's Hollywood came under fire for pro- crime violence (and pro-sex and drugs) movies. At the time, their only limitations about what appeared on screen were what they could accomplish with primitive special effects. They pushed the envelope as far as they could within the limits of the available technology. Under public scrutiny, the Hays Code was created with a long list of rules for Hollywood to follow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Pic ... ction_Code

It was abandoned at the end of the 1960's, giving us the fabulously gritty and violent films of the 1970's.

It wasn't just movies. Violent comics came under fire in the 1940's and 1950's. Violent and sexual music came under fire in the 1980's leading to the warning stickers still on today's CDs. More recently violent video games have come under fire.

There have been countless studies trying to link these media influences to actual crime. As far as I know, they have only been able to come up with correlation- violent people tend to like violent media and may even copycat methods. But there is no evidence that non-violent people can get "turned" by such exposure. The (somewhat violent) heavy metal band Judas Priest even got hauled into court on the charge that they had inserted subliminal lyrics into a song that inspired two boys to shoot themselves. But the case was (eventually) dismissed. Violent people can get inspiration from pretty much anything, as the Beatles discovered when Charles Manson latched onto their song Helter Skelter. It isn't the piece of entertainment's fault.

I am all for stomping down hard on actual violence that gets filmed: snuff films, child pornography, those horrific beheading videos. But it's the actual violence that is the problem, not the fact that it got filmed. After all, news footage inevitably shows some pretty gruesome images.

I don't consume this type of media myself (with a few exceptions like GoT) because it gives me nightmares and I can't shake the images. But for people who do like it, I won't get in the way of their consumption of it. I ask only that it be properly labeled (as it is) so that I am not caught unawares. I am well warned to never watch The Serbian Movie or The Human Centipede but there is no reason other people shouldn't. The internet makes it easy to screen out such things so I don't inadvertedly invite them into my home.

I'm far more concerned about things like the news giving people a distorted view of reality, such as our crime rates, or people becoming normalized to abuse of authority because they see the crusading cop break the rules to get the "bad" guy so often on TV than I am about violent content. Not that I'd mandate doing anything about it, other than wanting to see better shows.

This has been a hot issue for about 100 years and there still is no statistical connection between violent entertainment and violence at all. Ergo, it doesn't actually cause violence. The percentage of violent people is low enough to establish that it is merely incidental.

So for 100 years the argument against violence in entertainment has been running on steam, it's just opinionated repression. Prohibition isn't much different. You can't effectively police the morals of a country. The concept of policing morals is outdated and repressive. Hopefully we grow out of it and concern ourselves more with upholding basic rights, like rights over property and life.



This resonates with me especially when it comes to our distorted view of every authority figure. What this kind of media does, is it feeds our irrational nature of taking anecdotal evidence to be gospel truth.

Trust me, any veteran can tell you that "noble" violence is just as disturbing.

It's seemed to me for a while that TV news lately is nothing but violence and death.

Since most newspapers & TV channels have dropped photojournalism and investigative reporting
they've gone to only picking up stories about death and killing from the news services.

Watching the news is now like driving down a highway full of deadly accidents
that you're forced to watch as you pass. And they play the same bloody clips
over and over.

This can't be good for peoples psyches.

By GoT you don't mean Game of Thrones do you....lol there are sociopath characters, but I have a hard time seeing the show in its enitrity as being sociopathic. Since there are lots of characters that aren't really....yeah it wouldn't really be game of thrones if they took out all the nasty characters.