Everything you wrote sounds really good in theory - it passes the smell test for me, and I believed it for a long time because it seemed perfectly logical. It all just Made Sense to me in an intuitive manner.
But there's pretty universal agreement that avoidant behavior isn't a good thing. There's a difference between the awful idea of trying to self-manage exposure therapy or forcing exposure and allowing yourself to be exposed to things in the manner that matches the 'real world.' If someone wants to put 'Dead Dove' on their ao3 and provide a a trigger warning because the fic is based around that thing, then yeah, that's one thing. I wouldn't recommend someone go watch Hostel if their trauma is at all related to that either. But most media that has triggering content aren't anywhere near those extremes. And obviously, if the trauma just occurred, it's a whole different thing. But if the studies that show an increase in avoidant behavior from trigger warnings are right, it's increasing a bad thing. If the studies that show a 'forbidden fruit' effect are right, then it's a negative for the proposed benefit from trigger warning proponents.
But most studies show no increase or negligible increase in avoidance for the study participants, including trauma groups. So if that's the case, they aren't doing what proponents are saying is their core benefit, either.
Meanwhile quite a few show an increase in anxiety from the warning itself, which is obviously a negative.
I'm open to the idea that there might be some effective way to do trigger warnings - more specific warnings up to spoilers, or something couching it in context of how this relates to recovery and how to manage it, etc. etc. - something along those lines. There's certainly plenty of precedent for a general idea being right and the initial implementations of it being bad. But proving that is going to come down to someone figuring it out and getting studies that show positive impact.
Legalized drug sales and prostitution among adults have _fewer_ victims but that doesn't mean no victims. Legalization is better but it isn't a panacea.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
Well, if actual harm to people and children is what we want to reduce, then perhaps decriminalizing an innocuous (as in no victims) form of it may actually reduce the harm to actual people.
Just like the cases for decriminalizing prostitution and drugs: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
I don’t know how one would go about doing that research. Anecdotally I figured out the parental lock code on a cable box when I was 12, watched one of the porn channels, I was more excited that I was able to guess the code than anything else. The porn itself didn’t really have any impact on me.
My school also showed us Holocaust documentary footage around the same age. People getting shot in the head, piles and piles of dead bodies, etc. That plus gory movies like Hostel and scenes where people are chopped up and stuffed into a suitcase fucked me up WAY more than any of the porn I happened to come across at that age.
Hmm. I am torn for several different reasons including the topics I would want to address, but I feel I should focus on one thing.
<< I want to make informed choices about the media I consume and how I consume it.
That is a reasonable statement and even expectation on the surface. I might accept it as rationale for graphic movies and so on, but your example is visual novel, where you choose your own adventure - a form of media that is almost guaranteed to put you in unusual and unexpected situations? Unless you play a game built around satire of everyday life ( say.. Stanley Parable ), is it not expected to expect unexpected including some questionable predicaments?
But more to my real point, should art imitate life or should it be a 'safified' version of it? I can absolutely relate to seeing something you should not see ( my buddy dared/forced me to watch "Hostel" with him and it was not a pleasant experience and have stumbled onto some real bad stuff on the 90s net - I completely buy it can mess you up if you are not mentally prepared ).
In your example, how would you know this could have been the outcome without having gone through it? It seems like catch 22. Trigger warning would give you only a very general idea.
Wow, 20% of images being misclassified as CP would be terrifying. I never thought I'd say it but my next phone will definitely not be an iPhone or any device that is uploading my information to another server without my permission for any reason.
Is there even any evidence that arresting people with the wrong bit pattern on the computer helps stop child rape/trafficking? If so, why aren't we also going after people who go to gore websites? There's tons of awful material out there easily accessible of people getting stabbed, shot, murdered, butchered, etc. Do we not want to find people who are keeping collections of this material on their computers? And if so, what about people who really like graphic horror movies like Saw or Hostel? Obviously it's not real violence, but it's definitely close enough, and if you like watching that stuff, maybe you should be on a list? If your neighbor to the left of you has videos of naked children, and your neighbor to the right has videos of people getting stabbed and tortured to death, only one should be arrested and put on a list?
This is all not even taking into account that someone might not even realize they are in possession of CP because someone else put it on their device. I've heard there's tons of services marketing on the dark net where you pay someone $X00 in bitcoin and they remotely upload CP to any target's computer.
It seems like we are going down a very scary and dangerous path.
It's a very well crafted piece of cinema that intelligently deals with the idea of detectives chasing down a psychopath. The characters are well defined and well acted, and the plot isn't really 'guessable'. It's Brad Pitt's best movie.
As others have said though, it is definitely a bit gratuitously sickening in places but not in a way that's out of step with the plot of the film. It almost crosses into the horror genre in places (in a Hostel or Saw franchise sort of way). If you're squeamish it's probably best to stay away.
I instantly think of Hostel, where they kidnap tourists for their underground torture business. Unironically, the first Client is a failed Doctor due to his unsteady hands, & has a sick fetish of performing meaningless surgeries on his victims. Even though it's just a movie, I believe there is a very big audience when it comes these morbid subjects like Torturing. It was sport back then and still is today in some 3rd world countries.
And when I say "back then", pretty much just 200 to 300 years ago! It's still an undocumented tradition in other countries.
Article mentions how one might of turn sadistic by being fascinated for the first time seeing someone get amputated, an unexplainable enjoyment which leads them down to a sicker path if uncontrolled. Something to think about when you've got confused or especially younglings seeing things they shouldn't be seeing. Taboo subjects often leave a permanent seed
24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene, if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like Saw and Hostel.
Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a Russian/Middle eastern person.
Pay to play gets backlash from gamers with enough sophistication and experience to notice and care, which if sales figures are to be believed, until recently represented a small minority. Something like Manhunt or a serial killer sim outrages all sorts of people, fed by the media and congressional hearings, and game publishers would like to avoid that. It’s a different type and magnitude of backlash, and for what? You’re never going to make CoD or GTA money from a serial killer sim, so why take the heat? A serial killer sim also runs into the issue of just what a serial killer is, and why they do what they do. Serial killings unlike spree killings and mass killings are typically sexually motivated, and that’s pretty dark territory for a mainstream company to wade into. “Click X to masturbate on the corpse” is something that is probably a moral line for a lot of people, as would, “Rotate right stick to remove nipple, try to max scream meter!”
Games like GTA and Mortal Kombat have done edgy stuff, but they’re also really great games and technical achievements. Manhunt for example, was just boring and technically mediocre, which made it harder to defend and easier to hate. It’s the difference between a masterpiece of the horror genre or something like Nabokov’s Lolita, and a movie like Hostel or cp fanfics. How many developers and publishers will have great ideas that require shocking subjects, and then execute it so well that it’s defensible? Most publishers aren’t even taking risks with things aren’t divisive, they just want money and sequels and DLC. Serial killer or gore sims?... nah.
Reread what I actually said. I didn't say violent video games weren't popular.
I said very few people derive direct pleasure from simulating murder in eg a video game. When you stomp on a bad guy in Mario, you are not feeling the serial killer equivalent to some kind of sweet orgasmic reaction high to murdering a fellow human with a butcher knife in real life. There is no connection at all.
To put it into movie terms: a lot of people enjoy action movies (which include violence), the latest flick by The Rock etc, they're exciting. A dramatically smaller share of the population enjoys watching highly graphic, gruesome, murder movies like Hostel or Saw. And that's not the person simulating murder, that's second hand, watching the simulation of it, and the drop off in popularity is extreme.
People are not having fun in GTA because they get off on actually murdering people and their sole physical outlet for it is relegated to a video game. All of those players aren't actually lusting after wanting to slaughter their fellow humans.
You can simulate sex in VR, or watch porn, and then go have sex, jerk off all day, etc. There's a direct connection.
Very, very, very few people murder or actually want to murder; some extremely high percentage of the population wants sex, has sex, jerks off, etc.
> Even some Dr Who and Star Trek had material some of you would consider to be a bit 'iffy' to show kids
No, people are arguing against films like Saw or their 1980s equivalents.
> Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.
What life lessons is a child going to learn from watching "Hostel"?
As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
I wrote a blog post about this back in 2005, when Hostel was coming out. It seems that's right about our fascination with torture on TV has started. While I cringe at my writing from 9 years ago, it seems like things have only gotten worse since then.
> With seemingly inevitable theatrical success of 'Hostel' and recent mainstream movies such as 'Passion of the Christ' and 'Sin City' reveling in accurately depicting violence and torture, I started thinking what does that say about our society and what horrors are next in line for the viewers, hungry for more blood and suffering. And then it dawned on me - almost this exact situation was already predicted, in a dystopian 1966 sci-fi story by Robert Silverberg called 'The Pain Peddlers'.
> 'The Pain Peddlers' depicts a scary, bleak and sarcastic view of the future - in the early 00's, television is king. And what brings most money to TV networks is live surgery. In the story, the main character is a TV producer who got a very promising prospect - an old man suffering from gangrene and a family, too broke to take care of the hospital bill. The old man needs to have his leg amputated, and the family agreed to do it on live TV. It's the producer's job to convince the family to have the amputation without anesthesia - for more money, of course. Nothing brings in the viewers quite like real human agony.
> Remembering this story, which I read long time ago, was a very scary experience for me, because... in 1966, when it was written, it was pure fantasy - the notion of something like that actually happening never occurred to Silverberg or his contemporaries. But does it sound that incredible now? With TV viewers getting tired of same-old reality shows and public's growing hunger for violence, how long until a new reality show depicting real surgery appears on, say, HBO? Probably not right away. But I can definitely see something like that happening, not too far away in the future.
Agreed. I definitely watched star wars in its entirety including the entire cantina scene at least by the age of six. The dark parts were disturbing but I don't think they were a problem.
There's an important early lesson these helicopter parents are losing by not exposing kids to a little PG movie violence, that my parents explained to me well - its fantasy movie violence for entertainment and not real. God forbid one of these kids goes over to a friends house who has less supervision and they pop in a DVD of Hostel or something. With all the violence and gore in modern movies its probably a pretty good idea to prepare them for all the crap they're going to get exposed to later in life
> This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some.
No homeowner's insurance will cover an Airbnb rental. Hell, finding a lease which permits an Airbnb rental would be tough, let alone finding someone to insure an apartment where strangers show up and pay you for it. You must know this, because it's been discussed to death all over this issue.
> Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge.
This logic is incredibly faulty. This is the same as saying "you might get ripped off meeting a stranger on craigslist. It is just as likely however that it may happen at a Best Buy." The structure of airbnb lends itself toward antisocial behavior far, far more than a hotel. That kind of comparison is just deceitful.
In fact, to turn your "point" around, I find it more likely you're an airbnb employee/pg fanboy shilling than EJ being out to destroy airbnb. You've demonstrated complete disregard for logic and facts to defend airbnb in this situation. She's just told a story.
As of today, July 28, I have received no confirmation from either the San Francisco Police Department or the District Attorney that any culprit is in custody for my case.
I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases[sic] with me, as the investigation was ongoing.
Too much about this case remains unknown and unresolved, and according to both the District Attorneys and the police, it could be many more months before the criminal investigation moves forward.
Edit: This is clearly a problem with a thief, with society, with criminal behavior. This woman wants to throw her story and passive aggressive attitude around to destroy Airbnb, and it is blatantly obvious. Come on people.
I have been robbed. I have been a victim. I didn't flee to the internet to write a story about the gas station parking lot where it took place. Why? I would have gotten no attention for it, no sympathy, and the gas station would have not been to blame at all and everyone knows that.
Not to be insensitive, but this is reminiscent of the type of people that sue McDonalds for spilling hot coffee all over themselves. Not entirely the same, but it feels oddly familiar.
Airbnb tries to offer a good service. That doesn't mean they can keep the murderers out of Disneyland. She made a good point that craigslist makes warnings of scams more obvious on their website than Airbnb. She should have honestly just left it at that. Because at this point she is just doing more damage on the perpetrator's behalf and I think she knows it.
The knee-jerk reaction to this story is showing itself to be very far from this, so go ahead and downvote me, but nonetheless my opinion here is valid. Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge. It doesn't matter that it was Airbnb.
I understand that she feels the reaction piece to her initial post was disingenuous, but with writing like this, it is clear she is just out to watch Airbnb burn. She should go hire a private detective and find the guy if she is so hell bent on revenge. She is after the wrong people. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This woman has no target and her anger is entirely misdirected.
This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some. Be happy for what didn't go wrong and could have. She should be happy she didn't get raped when she got back to her apartment, as she obviously crossed tracks with a very bad person. Seriously. Shit happens in life. Everyone in this world has to deal with deceit, robberies, theft, and lies. She is no different, nor are you. She is playing out the sympathy excuse far too well. Her reaction is more similar to that of the McDonald's hot coffee victim than that of a robbery victim at this point. And like I said previously, I'm pretty sure she knows it.
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
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Everything you wrote sounds really good in theory - it passes the smell test for me, and I believed it for a long time because it seemed perfectly logical. It all just Made Sense to me in an intuitive manner.
But there's pretty universal agreement that avoidant behavior isn't a good thing. There's a difference between the awful idea of trying to self-manage exposure therapy or forcing exposure and allowing yourself to be exposed to things in the manner that matches the 'real world.' If someone wants to put 'Dead Dove' on their ao3 and provide a a trigger warning because the fic is based around that thing, then yeah, that's one thing. I wouldn't recommend someone go watch Hostel if their trauma is at all related to that either. But most media that has triggering content aren't anywhere near those extremes. And obviously, if the trauma just occurred, it's a whole different thing. But if the studies that show an increase in avoidant behavior from trigger warnings are right, it's increasing a bad thing. If the studies that show a 'forbidden fruit' effect are right, then it's a negative for the proposed benefit from trigger warning proponents.
But most studies show no increase or negligible increase in avoidance for the study participants, including trauma groups. So if that's the case, they aren't doing what proponents are saying is their core benefit, either.
Meanwhile quite a few show an increase in anxiety from the warning itself, which is obviously a negative.
I'm open to the idea that there might be some effective way to do trigger warnings - more specific warnings up to spoilers, or something couching it in context of how this relates to recovery and how to manage it, etc. etc. - something along those lines. There's certainly plenty of precedent for a general idea being right and the initial implementations of it being bad. But proving that is going to come down to someone figuring it out and getting studies that show positive impact.
Legalized drug sales and prostitution among adults have _fewer_ victims but that doesn't mean no victims. Legalization is better but it isn't a panacea.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
Well, if actual harm to people and children is what we want to reduce, then perhaps decriminalizing an innocuous (as in no victims) form of it may actually reduce the harm to actual people.
Just like the cases for decriminalizing prostitution and drugs: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
I don’t know how one would go about doing that research. Anecdotally I figured out the parental lock code on a cable box when I was 12, watched one of the porn channels, I was more excited that I was able to guess the code than anything else. The porn itself didn’t really have any impact on me.
My school also showed us Holocaust documentary footage around the same age. People getting shot in the head, piles and piles of dead bodies, etc. That plus gory movies like Hostel and scenes where people are chopped up and stuffed into a suitcase fucked me up WAY more than any of the porn I happened to come across at that age.
Hmm. I am torn for several different reasons including the topics I would want to address, but I feel I should focus on one thing.
<< I want to make informed choices about the media I consume and how I consume it.
That is a reasonable statement and even expectation on the surface. I might accept it as rationale for graphic movies and so on, but your example is visual novel, where you choose your own adventure - a form of media that is almost guaranteed to put you in unusual and unexpected situations? Unless you play a game built around satire of everyday life ( say.. Stanley Parable ), is it not expected to expect unexpected including some questionable predicaments?
But more to my real point, should art imitate life or should it be a 'safified' version of it? I can absolutely relate to seeing something you should not see ( my buddy dared/forced me to watch "Hostel" with him and it was not a pleasant experience and have stumbled onto some real bad stuff on the 90s net - I completely buy it can mess you up if you are not mentally prepared ).
In your example, how would you know this could have been the outcome without having gone through it? It seems like catch 22. Trigger warning would give you only a very general idea.
Wow, 20% of images being misclassified as CP would be terrifying. I never thought I'd say it but my next phone will definitely not be an iPhone or any device that is uploading my information to another server without my permission for any reason.
Is there even any evidence that arresting people with the wrong bit pattern on the computer helps stop child rape/trafficking? If so, why aren't we also going after people who go to gore websites? There's tons of awful material out there easily accessible of people getting stabbed, shot, murdered, butchered, etc. Do we not want to find people who are keeping collections of this material on their computers? And if so, what about people who really like graphic horror movies like Saw or Hostel? Obviously it's not real violence, but it's definitely close enough, and if you like watching that stuff, maybe you should be on a list? If your neighbor to the left of you has videos of naked children, and your neighbor to the right has videos of people getting stabbed and tortured to death, only one should be arrested and put on a list?
This is all not even taking into account that someone might not even realize they are in possession of CP because someone else put it on their device. I've heard there's tons of services marketing on the dark net where you pay someone $X00 in bitcoin and they remotely upload CP to any target's computer.
It seems like we are going down a very scary and dangerous path.
It's a very well crafted piece of cinema that intelligently deals with the idea of detectives chasing down a psychopath. The characters are well defined and well acted, and the plot isn't really 'guessable'. It's Brad Pitt's best movie.
As others have said though, it is definitely a bit gratuitously sickening in places but not in a way that's out of step with the plot of the film. It almost crosses into the horror genre in places (in a Hostel or Saw franchise sort of way). If you're squeamish it's probably best to stay away.
I instantly think of Hostel, where they kidnap tourists for their underground torture business. Unironically, the first Client is a failed Doctor due to his unsteady hands, & has a sick fetish of performing meaningless surgeries on his victims. Even though it's just a movie, I believe there is a very big audience when it comes these morbid subjects like Torturing. It was sport back then and still is today in some 3rd world countries. And when I say "back then", pretty much just 200 to 300 years ago! It's still an undocumented tradition in other countries.
Article mentions how one might of turn sadistic by being fascinated for the first time seeing someone get amputated, an unexplainable enjoyment which leads them down to a sicker path if uncontrolled. Something to think about when you've got confused or especially younglings seeing things they shouldn't be seeing. Taboo subjects often leave a permanent seed
24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene, if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like Saw and Hostel.
Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a Russian/Middle eastern person.
Pay to play gets backlash from gamers with enough sophistication and experience to notice and care, which if sales figures are to be believed, until recently represented a small minority. Something like Manhunt or a serial killer sim outrages all sorts of people, fed by the media and congressional hearings, and game publishers would like to avoid that. It’s a different type and magnitude of backlash, and for what? You’re never going to make CoD or GTA money from a serial killer sim, so why take the heat? A serial killer sim also runs into the issue of just what a serial killer is, and why they do what they do. Serial killings unlike spree killings and mass killings are typically sexually motivated, and that’s pretty dark territory for a mainstream company to wade into. “Click X to masturbate on the corpse” is something that is probably a moral line for a lot of people, as would, “Rotate right stick to remove nipple, try to max scream meter!”
Games like GTA and Mortal Kombat have done edgy stuff, but they’re also really great games and technical achievements. Manhunt for example, was just boring and technically mediocre, which made it harder to defend and easier to hate. It’s the difference between a masterpiece of the horror genre or something like Nabokov’s Lolita, and a movie like Hostel or cp fanfics. How many developers and publishers will have great ideas that require shocking subjects, and then execute it so well that it’s defensible? Most publishers aren’t even taking risks with things aren’t divisive, they just want money and sequels and DLC. Serial killer or gore sims?... nah.
Reread what I actually said. I didn't say violent video games weren't popular.
I said very few people derive direct pleasure from simulating murder in eg a video game. When you stomp on a bad guy in Mario, you are not feeling the serial killer equivalent to some kind of sweet orgasmic reaction high to murdering a fellow human with a butcher knife in real life. There is no connection at all.
To put it into movie terms: a lot of people enjoy action movies (which include violence), the latest flick by The Rock etc, they're exciting. A dramatically smaller share of the population enjoys watching highly graphic, gruesome, murder movies like Hostel or Saw. And that's not the person simulating murder, that's second hand, watching the simulation of it, and the drop off in popularity is extreme.
People are not having fun in GTA because they get off on actually murdering people and their sole physical outlet for it is relegated to a video game. All of those players aren't actually lusting after wanting to slaughter their fellow humans.
You can simulate sex in VR, or watch porn, and then go have sex, jerk off all day, etc. There's a direct connection.
Very, very, very few people murder or actually want to murder; some extremely high percentage of the population wants sex, has sex, jerks off, etc.
Torture is much worse than molestation in my opinion, yet as a society we don't seem to have a problem with movies like Saw and Hostel.
> Even some Dr Who and Star Trek had material some of you would consider to be a bit 'iffy' to show kids
No, people are arguing against films like Saw or their 1980s equivalents.
> Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.
What life lessons is a child going to learn from watching "Hostel"?
Also, "limp wristed"? FFS.
As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
I wrote a blog post about this back in 2005, when Hostel was coming out. It seems that's right about our fascination with torture on TV has started. While I cringe at my writing from 9 years ago, it seems like things have only gotten worse since then.
> With seemingly inevitable theatrical success of 'Hostel' and recent mainstream movies such as 'Passion of the Christ' and 'Sin City' reveling in accurately depicting violence and torture, I started thinking what does that say about our society and what horrors are next in line for the viewers, hungry for more blood and suffering. And then it dawned on me - almost this exact situation was already predicted, in a dystopian 1966 sci-fi story by Robert Silverberg called 'The Pain Peddlers'.
> 'The Pain Peddlers' depicts a scary, bleak and sarcastic view of the future - in the early 00's, television is king. And what brings most money to TV networks is live surgery. In the story, the main character is a TV producer who got a very promising prospect - an old man suffering from gangrene and a family, too broke to take care of the hospital bill. The old man needs to have his leg amputated, and the family agreed to do it on live TV. It's the producer's job to convince the family to have the amputation without anesthesia - for more money, of course. Nothing brings in the viewers quite like real human agony.
> Remembering this story, which I read long time ago, was a very scary experience for me, because... in 1966, when it was written, it was pure fantasy - the notion of something like that actually happening never occurred to Silverberg or his contemporaries. But does it sound that incredible now? With TV viewers getting tired of same-old reality shows and public's growing hunger for violence, how long until a new reality show depicting real surgery appears on, say, HBO? Probably not right away. But I can definitely see something like that happening, not too far away in the future.
Agreed. I definitely watched star wars in its entirety including the entire cantina scene at least by the age of six. The dark parts were disturbing but I don't think they were a problem.
There's an important early lesson these helicopter parents are losing by not exposing kids to a little PG movie violence, that my parents explained to me well - its fantasy movie violence for entertainment and not real. God forbid one of these kids goes over to a friends house who has less supervision and they pop in a DVD of Hostel or something. With all the violence and gore in modern movies its probably a pretty good idea to prepare them for all the crap they're going to get exposed to later in life
> This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some.
No homeowner's insurance will cover an Airbnb rental. Hell, finding a lease which permits an Airbnb rental would be tough, let alone finding someone to insure an apartment where strangers show up and pay you for it. You must know this, because it's been discussed to death all over this issue.
> Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge.
This logic is incredibly faulty. This is the same as saying "you might get ripped off meeting a stranger on craigslist. It is just as likely however that it may happen at a Best Buy." The structure of airbnb lends itself toward antisocial behavior far, far more than a hotel. That kind of comparison is just deceitful.
In fact, to turn your "point" around, I find it more likely you're an airbnb employee/pg fanboy shilling than EJ being out to destroy airbnb. You've demonstrated complete disregard for logic and facts to defend airbnb in this situation. She's just told a story.
A summary:
As of today, July 28, I have received no confirmation from either the San Francisco Police Department or the District Attorney that any culprit is in custody for my case.
I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases[sic] with me, as the investigation was ongoing.
Too much about this case remains unknown and unresolved, and according to both the District Attorneys and the police, it could be many more months before the criminal investigation moves forward.
Edit: This is clearly a problem with a thief, with society, with criminal behavior. This woman wants to throw her story and passive aggressive attitude around to destroy Airbnb, and it is blatantly obvious. Come on people.
I have been robbed. I have been a victim. I didn't flee to the internet to write a story about the gas station parking lot where it took place. Why? I would have gotten no attention for it, no sympathy, and the gas station would have not been to blame at all and everyone knows that.
Not to be insensitive, but this is reminiscent of the type of people that sue McDonalds for spilling hot coffee all over themselves. Not entirely the same, but it feels oddly familiar.
Airbnb tries to offer a good service. That doesn't mean they can keep the murderers out of Disneyland. She made a good point that craigslist makes warnings of scams more obvious on their website than Airbnb. She should have honestly just left it at that. Because at this point she is just doing more damage on the perpetrator's behalf and I think she knows it.
The knee-jerk reaction to this story is showing itself to be very far from this, so go ahead and downvote me, but nonetheless my opinion here is valid. Your next stay at Airbnb may very well be a scene out of the movie Hostel. It is just as likely however that it may happen at the next apartment you rent, the next hotel you stay at, or the next ski lodge. It doesn't matter that it was Airbnb.
I understand that she feels the reaction piece to her initial post was disingenuous, but with writing like this, it is clear she is just out to watch Airbnb burn. She should go hire a private detective and find the guy if she is so hell bent on revenge. She is after the wrong people. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This woman has no target and her anger is entirely misdirected.
This is what insurance in our society is for. Get some. Be happy for what didn't go wrong and could have. She should be happy she didn't get raped when she got back to her apartment, as she obviously crossed tracks with a very bad person. Seriously. Shit happens in life. Everyone in this world has to deal with deceit, robberies, theft, and lies. She is no different, nor are you. She is playing out the sympathy excuse far too well. Her reaction is more similar to that of the McDonald's hot coffee victim than that of a robbery victim at this point. And like I said previously, I'm pretty sure she knows it.
Good luck Airbnb.
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?